Big Seminar
Los Angeles 2005
Joe Polish
Armand
Morin:Now, ladies and gentlemen, what I want to do right now is introduce you to our next speaker.
Now in 1990 he was a dead-broke carpet cleaner; dead-broke carpet cleaner literally living off credit cards.
In 1994, he made his first million selling marketing and information products to other carpet cleaners.
In the year 2004, he actually became a multi-millionaire, released his product from Nightingale Conant out to the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to put your hands together and welcome Joe Polish to the stage!
Joe Polish:Thank you, sir. Let me tell you an interesting story before I introduce myself.
Hello, I’m Joe Polish.
Do you know that Johnny Carson at least once a week for his entire career threw up before he went out on stage? He never got over it. But the lesson is that in spite of things that might frighten you, that might be hard for you to do, if you always push the limits, if you always take risks, those are the things that will really help you be successful.
That certainly is what I spent a lot of my life doing. There was a time where speaking in front of an audience was so absolutely nerve-racking.
I asked earlier and I want to ask again, there are lights here and it’s hard to see sometimes, but I want to see a show of hands. How many of you are completely, 100% on-line marketers? Show of hands?
How many of you are off-line marketers?A combination of both? How many of you sell just strictly information products; ebooks, manuals, courses and things like that?
Okay, how many of you run service businesses? Great, great, excellent, so a lot of things I’ll share with you will be very useful.
All right, the Joe Polish story, in case anyone would like to know. And that is my real name, although I sell things to carpet and upholstery cleaners.My entire childhood I was ridiculed for the name Polish.
Now that I’m in the cleaning business, people constantly ask, “Did you change your name?” Whatever. You’ve got to deal with the cards that you’re dealt, you know?
So here’s my life history because I know a lot of you don’t know me. Usually I don’t do a lot of public speaking. The majority of the speaking that I do is to people who are already members of Piranha Marketing, which is my company.
I never, ever intended on getting into the speaking business or how-to business or ever thinking I would sell manuals and courses and put on boot camps and all the things that I do these days.
I am literally a convert of my own system, so I’m going to kind of walk you through just so you have an idea of who this person is who is up here talking to you and why, if there’s any reason, you might want to listen to me.
So in 1990 I was a dead-broke carpet cleaner. I had a buddy from high school who came to me and said, “Joe, I’m working for this carpet cleaning company in Mesa, Arizona. The guy who owns the company is an alcoholic, he’s in his 60’s, and he’s making $600,000 a year.
“I totally know how to make this business work. If you put up the money for the chemicals and equipment, we’ll be in business.”
To me it sounded like a good idea. I’d never had my carpets cleaned in my entire life. I was also young.
Here’s a real quick background on my family. My mother passed away when I was four-years-old. She was a great woman. She wrote books on teaching children how to read using the phonetic method.
Millions of her books are still in publication throughout elementary schools and throughout the country. She’s taught millions of children how to read.
Nonetheless, she passed away when I was four-years-old from cancer. This was very tormenting to my father. He was a locksmith and every two years he would move. He would go and start a business in a new community, a new city, and just as soon as it started working he would up and move. It was some sort of sabotage mechanism.
But even thinking about it, maybe he just moved because he didn’t know what to do with the dirty carpets after two years. I don’t really know.
But nonetheless, I never had my carpets cleaned. Got it? I went into a business I knew absolutely nothing about; had no technical knowledge. A buddy of mine said, “You put up the money and, you know, all of a sudden we’ll be in business.”
So overnight, I invested $1,500, bought some really cheap equipment, some chemicals, and got some business cards printed up. The name of my first company was Superior Carpet Care. Overnight I was a professional carpet cleaner.
I won’t go through the whole painful story. I just spent two years begging jobs from friends and family and really not knowing what the heck I was doing; getting accounts with apartment complexes; lugging portable equipment up three-stories; and just working ten to twelve hour days just sweating my butt off.
It was very hard, and it is very difficult work.
Started out as a dead-broke carpet cleaner, and had it not been for credit cards, I probably would have gotten out of it a lot quicker than I anticipated.
Now, in 1992 I attended my first marketing seminar. To give you just a real quick story, I was looking for something else to do because I thought the reason that I was not successful was because I just picked the wrong business.
How you doing, man? Yeah! See you everywhere. This guy’s all over the place. You see him on TV one day with his own show.
Anyway, so I went to my first marketing seminar. But the thing that got me on the path of pursuing knowledge was that I was in the middle of going to classes to get my Series 7 and my Series 63 license to be a stock broker.
I had a buddy from high school. I used to actually hang out with friends from high school. I don’t hang out with anyone from high school anymore. Nonetheless, I went jet skiing because the guy who owned these jet skis was a multi-million dollar real estate investor.
I thought that this was an opportunity for me to actually talk to somebody who’s wealthy and maybe he could tell me what business I needed to get into so I could make some money.
So I went jet skiing and the only purpose, again, was to talk to this guy. Once I had an opportunity to sit down on the tailgate of this guy’s truck and just chat with him, the first thing I asked him was, “I hear you do really well. I have a carpet cleaning company. I’ve been certified and I’ve been doing it for a couple of years.
“I don’t run bait-and-switch advertising. I do really good work. It’s just a hard business and it’s the wrong business. Do you have any recommendations of what kind of business I could go into to be successful because I’m really entrepreneurial.”
He said to me, “Well, is there anyone in your business that’s making money that’s good money to you?”
I said, “Well, yeah, there’re a couple companies in Phoenix which is where I’m from. I’m from Tempe, Arizona.” That’s where I was living at the time.
I said, “There are a couple companies in the Phoenix area that do over a million dollars a year in sales.”
I said, “To me that’s a lot of money.”
He said, “Well, if there’re other people making a lot of money doing what you’re doing and you’re not, there’s nothing wrong with the business. There’s something wrong with you.”
I was like, “No, I’ve gotten training; I’m really skilled. In the beginning I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’ve been doing this for two years. I’m really good at cleaning carpets,” still believing that if you build a better mouse-trap and business will come.
He said, “Well, you’re like most people. You think the grass is always greener on the other side and that you’re going to go into some other opportunity and you’re going to make all kinds of money.”
He said, “You don’t really have a business. You have a job, and what you need to learn how to do, young man, is to learn fundamental business rules.
“What’s going to happen, if you go into another opportunity, you’re going to spend another six months, another year, another two years learning the technical side of another business so you can go out and repeat the same bad business habits that have caused you to fail from this business.”
That was not what I wanted to hear, it really wasn’t. That was the first, I would say, real impactful, defining moment in my entrepreneurial career that got me to change directions.
He didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. He didn’t even give me the solution to my problem. My real problem was I didn’t know how to market myself.
The glop, the carpet cleaning that I had was good. No matter what it is you sell, just try to think of it, as I present today, as glop.
I’ve only got a limited amount of time and I can’t give you ten years of experience in 90 minutes.I’m going to do my best, though, so all of you walk out of here with some really valuable, useful tools that you can immediately implement and make money. That’s, at least, my promise to you and I’ll do my best to fulfill that.
Anyway, he did not give me any solutions to my marketing problems, but what he did do is make me think as I was driving home from this jet ski trip, crispy and sunburned, “You know, he’s right. If I don’t figure out how to make this work and just go into something else, I’m just going to carry the same habits with me.”
That got me on the path to thinking that I needed to buy books; I need to read; I needed to learn how other people who’ve had success in business are doing it.
We live in a wonderful country. You’re all coming here to this seminar to actually learn and you’re learning through the experiences of other people.
Prior to having a conversation with this individual, I tried to figure everything out on my own.I didn’t want to spend any money on a book. I didn’t want to go to a seminar. I didn’t want to do any of that stuff.
So I started pursuing knowledge. I started looking for the experiences of other people and one of the first books that I read at the time that had a great impact on me was The E-Myth by Michael Gerber.
How many of you have ever read that book? It’s a good book; great book. It talks about systemization.
I mean, I’ve interviewed Michael for my Genius Network series. Michael’s hired me for consulting, so most of my mentors are now buddies of mine.
But what I got out of The E-Myth, because it’s not a marketing book, was that he talks about how you systemize things.
And I started thinking if there’s any area of business that really could be systemized, what’s the most important area of business to systemize? It’s the selling; it’s the thing that brings in the money. If you can automate that, then that’s really good.
So I started pursuing information and that’s how I came across a newsletter by this totally insane but brilliant copy writer by the name of Gary Halbert.
Do any of you know Gary? Have you ever been in a room with him? It’s kind of scary.
I read my first Gary Halbert Newsletter and, of course, Gary’s a great pitch man so I started buying videos. My first seminar was called The Atom Bomb Seminar on VHS tapes and they were $2,000. That was the first thing that I bought from Gary.
So I started going to seminars and in a nutshell, I took a $2,100 a month business and started generating $12,000 a month out of this business just by changing the message.
I didn’t get different equipment. I didn’t have more knowledge about how to clean. I just knew how to communicate more effectively. I went to seminars and I did some things.
I’m going to show you some examples of the ads that I did later on in the presentation. I just want to give you a quick overview right now.
I turned my situation around and, in the process; I shared the knowledge that I had with a couple of other carpet cleaning companies.Within a year’s time, by the end of 1993, one of the companies off one of my campaigns using a 24-hour free recorded message actually generated $62,000 in business out of the Yellow Pages in the Denver phonebook.
I took him from a half-page phonebook ad down to an ad smaller than the size of a business card and he quadrupled the response he was getting out of the Yellow Pages and cut his advertising budget in half.
I’ll show you a sample of that free recorded message.
It wasn’t about being in the Yellow Pages. It was about the effectiveness of the ad.
This also applies to Internet and I will talk about that in a moment.
So I conceived Piranha Marketing. I was driving down the street one day and I heard a song that had the name “piranha” in it. I started thinking Piranha Marketing, but I thought, “Aw, that sounds stupid,” and then it just stuck with me for a couple of days and so I got it.
Now I think it’s a pretty killer name; kind of vicious and, anyway.
In 1996 I launched my Genius Network. My Genius Network is my interview series.
Where’s Alex Mandossian? I am blind. I’m telling you it’s the lights.
You’re right here. Now they think I’m really stupid.
This guy is a genius. How many of you know Alex? Genius; great guy; high integrity; class act all the way. Those of you who don’t have any association with him yet, Alex is a stud. He’s a good looking fellow too.
Anyway, what was my point of bringing you up?
Okay, he’s very much in the Socratic method of selling. I was lazy one month and I publish a newsletter called The Piranha Marketing Letter which goes out as part of my information products to my clients.
I just didn’t want to write a newsletter one month, so I actually called up one of my marketing friends and I interviewed this individual. I sent it out as an interview, just me asking questions.
So the point is to ask questions. I just asked questions of this bright individual that I wanted to know the answers to and I recorded it and sent it out to my clients.
I got so many people saying, “That was great. Can you do more?” And I actually created a product by accident. I’m not joking. So much of what I do and what I sell now is, literally, like an accident. There was not an enormous amount of strategy involved in some of the things that I did.
But there is a strategy in making it work for you and I’ll tie all of this together as I talk with you all.
So I launched this Genius Network interview series and it is, literally, a series of asking questions, packaging it, and distributing it. Everyone here is capable of doing that.
It’s become a huge business. I’ve interviewed Brian Tracy, Robert Kiyosaki, Mark Victor Hansen, Bill Phillips, Ted Nicholas, Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman; I mean, everybody.
The cool thing about it is that if you start doing that, you become really good friends with all these people and then you can name drop and people, for some bizarre reason, think it’s fascinating that you know famous people. I’m bragging.
You’re right, man, if you don’t know an audience really well they won’t laugh at your jokes yet.
You know, I was telling you one thing about Johnny Carson in the beginning, how before he went on stage at least once a week for his entire career he would throw up.
Also, there is another statistic that 10% of an audience can’t stand you, no matter what. You remind them of someone they went to high school with or an abusive older brother or something.
So I have to sit up here under these bright lights where I can’t really see all that well trying to figure out who is the 10% of the audience that just can’t stand me. No matter what I say, it doesn’t matter; you don’t like me.
So, in 1998 I started my Mastermind Coaching. After selling information products and training, I realized that defined the game, but it doesn’t necessarily teach people how to play the game.
This is where I started really connecting and bonding with my clients. By starting a coaching program, instead of just selling a course or a how-to kit or some sort of service, I started putting people into programs. Every month we would have a continuity sale. Now it’s a great business.
Between 1998 and 2001, I started my Platinum Plus program. How many of you are familiar with Bill Phillips at EAS Sports Supplements, Muscle-Media magazine? He wrote Body for Life.
He hired me back in 1996 to help him promote a market, these physique transformation contests that he was doing. In the process I learned a lot about doing contests.
I actually started a contest in 2001 for entrepreneurs where I give away cars. Bill Phillips had given me a Jaguar convertible as a gift for helping him make millions of dollars.
It got a couple years old and I figured I needed to do something with this so I’d better turn it into some promotional campaign. So a week before one of my seminars I just dreamed up this contest called Platinum Plus and this Better Your Best contest.