Everywhere where I crunched the numbers that twenty percent of what I was doing was producing eighty percent of the action. Well, the big epiphany that I had was that there was an eighty twenty inside every eighty twenty, so that twenty percent of the people have eighty percent of wealth. But guess what, twenty percent of the twenty percent have eighty percent of the eighty percent. And that's once again, it's true of the grocery store aisles, or the support tickets,
or the complaints or the product defects. And so my brain set on fire. I'm like, oh my word, there's all these levers in my life, in my business that I never noticed before, and I can start pulling them.
Welcome to How I Work, a show about the tactics used by the world's most successful people to get so much out of the day. I'm your host, doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist, the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium, and I'm obsessed with finding ways to optimize my work.
Date.
Before we get into today's show, I just wanted to say a big thank you to the many listeners that have been writing to me with listener questions. I'm going to be digging into those throughout summer and you can look forward to hearing the answers to some of those in twenty twenty one. And also a big shout out to the people that have been leaving reviews for how I work. I read every single one and I'm deeply appreciative of everyone that does take the time to pen
a few words, So thank you so much. Now on to today's guest, who is Perry Marshall. Perry is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs use his eighty twenty curve as a productivity tool.
That's pretty cool, I think being used by NASA.
His reinvention of the pereto principle is published in Harvard Business Review, and he also founded the ten million dollar Evolution two point zero Prize with judges from Harvard, Oxford and MIT, which is the world's largest science research award. And where you might have heard of Perry, and this is where I've come across his work is through his book The Ultimate Guide to Google Ads, which is actually
the world's best selling book on Internet advertising. Perry's latest book is called Detox, Dclatter Dominate, and.
I was very excited to have Perry on the show.
I'd consumed a fair bit of his work over the years in the world of digital marketing, and I know a lot of folk in the industry who really swear by the stuff that he has written about. He's got a lot of really good practical ideas, and we delve into a lot of i would say, very pactical and actionable strategies around how to be more productive but also how to use your time in a more valuable way.
So I personally learned a lot of stuff in this chat with Perry, and it got me thinking differently about quite a few different things. So on that note, let's head to Perry to hear about how he works.
Perry, Welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me on. It's an honor.
Now I want to start with something that you're very well known for, which is your application of the eighty twenty rule. And perhaps for listeners that are not familiar with that principle, maybe we describe what that principle is first, and then how you think about that in the context of your work.
So I think most people have probably heard somewhere that twenty percent of the people have eighty percent of the money and the other eighty percent of the people only have twenty percent of the money, and that maybe that applies to customers. I remember I had heard something like that a long time ago. In fact, I was a sales manager at a software company, and I was like,
is that right? And I printed out a quick books report and I literally went through with a calculator, and after a few minutes I was like, well, I'll be darned, I guess it is true. And I didn't really see the significance of it. But a few years later I was reading a book by Richard Kash and he made this almost throw away remark, and it sent me down a rabbit hole, and I suddenly realized, Hey, wait a minute,
this isn't just some business rule of thumb. This is everywhere, and it might be the most important thing that I ever learned about cause and effect. So the eighty twenty rule started with a guy named Pareto in Italy who was an economist, and he figured out it didn't matter which country he looked in, twenty percent of the people seemed to have eighty percent of the wealth. The interesting thing is is. This isn't just like real estate or something.
This is eighty percent of the dirt is on twenty percent of your carpet, and eighty percent of the water flows through twenty percent of the rivers, and eighty percent of the traffic is on twenty percent of the roads. And so here's the kicker. It applies to your time, it applies to your web traffic. It's your best customers, it's your worst customers, it's your support tickets, it's your warranty returns. It's all over the place. And when I
saw this for what it was, I flipped out. In fact, I was in the middle of reading this book and I was so overcome with my epiphany that I jumped up from the coffee shop where I was. I drove home, and I at the time, I was about a year and a half into a brand new business, and I sprawled out on the living room floor and I had all these papers and reports, and I had a calculator. I'm like, is this really true? And I saw everywhere where I crunched the numbers that twenty percent of what
I was doing was producing eighty percent of the action. Well, the big epiphany that I had was that there was an eighty twenty inside every eighty twenty, so that twenty percent of the people have eighty percent of wealth. But guess what, twenty percent of the twenty percent have eighty percent of the eighty percent. And that's once again, it's true of the grocery store aisles, or the support tickets, or the complaints or the product defects. And so my
brain set on fire. I'm like, oh my word, there's all these levers in my life in my business that I never noticed before, and I can start them.
And so how do you think about that as a thought later as a consultant and the products and the services that you're producing. What are some ways that you've applied that in your own work.
Well, So it not only applies to the upsides and small numbers of people spending large amounts of money, but it also applies to things that are losing you money and things like holes in your bucket, things that are dragging you down. So most people, most companies, almost anywhere you go, ten percent of what they sell is actually losing them money. Ge years ago, back when GE was like really hot and happening, back in their heyday about twenty years ago, they had a policy of they always
fire ten percent of their employees every year. Now that sounds cruel, but it's actually very good business. About ten percent of whoever's with you doesn't belong there anymore. And it doesn't have to be like some mean and nasty thing. It could be just you need to mutually agree that it's time for you to go find a job that's a better suit for you. Know, you're like Roger, You're
not passionate about this job. I don't see a lot of energy like I Recently, I had one of my team members where we had an honest conversation and he's like, you know, I'm just not feeling it anymore. And it's like, okay, great, well, let's let's find a way to get you off to something that you like better. And let's find somebody who wants this job, because this is a great job for the right person. And so eighty twenty is about what you don't do more than it's about what you do.
Something that you talk about in Detox decluttered is you talk about ten dollar, one hundred dollars, thousand dollars and ten thousand dollars per hour tasks and on the topic of eliminating things, how do you identify what you're doing when? And how do we do less of these ten dollars an hour tasks.
If you talk to Helen, who works as a receptionist at a dentist office for fifteen dollars an hour, probably if you asked Helen, what parts of your job make more money and what parts make less money? Like, Helen, if we paid you for the tasks you perform instead of you paying you by the hour, then how do you think we should grade those tasks? She would probably say, well, okay, I suppose these jobs are these little things are worth five dollars an hour, and probably these other things are
worth fifty dollars an hour. What she doesn't realize is that's actually the truth is probably most of what she does is worth almost zero. Some of what she does is worth negative money, and a few things she does are literally one hundred dollars an hour, one thousand dollars an hour, even ten thousand dollars an hour. And you go, how does a fifteen dollars an hour secretary make ten thousand dollars an hour? Well, I'll tell you. So you got somebody they need five thousand dollars of crowns and
dental work. And they looked at all the websites and clicked on all the Google ads, and they think wood Dale Dentel looks pretty good, and so they call wood Dell Dental and Helen goes, woo Dale Dental, can you hold please? And then she puts them on hold for two minutes and then she picks up two minutes later, she goes, Hi, can I help you? And they're gone. So they were going to spend five thousand dollars in two minutes to hold music scared them off and they're
not coming back. It took two minutes to lose five thousand dollars. So how many dollars per hour is that?
That's a lot.
It's one hundred and fifty thousand dollars an hour that she lost. Okay, so a secretary lost ten thousand times her hourly wage in two minutes.
And so how then do we get better at identifying what are those thousand or ten thousand dollars an hour tasks when we're thinking about our.
Own work life?
So first you have to be aware of it. So it literally is true that at least for a few minutes or seconds a day. Certain things that you do are incredibly valuable. Like let's say that you're buying a car and you spend an extra five minutes getting the price done by one thousand dollars. Well, you just made twelve thousand dollars an hour for five minutes, right. And our days, in our schedules and our lives are full of these little high leverage things, and so first you
just have to be aware of it. And so I have a chart on page twenty three of Detox Declutter, Dominate, and it's got a column of ten dollars an hour tasks like renting errands and cold calling people or talking to unqualified prospects or doing your expense reports. And then there's a column of one hundred dollars an hour tasks like talking to a qualified prospect or helping an actual customer solve a problem or outsourcing a really simple task.
And then there's thousand dollars an hour work like planning, prioritizing your day, or negotiating with a qualified prospect or building out your sales funnel. And then there's ten thousand dollars stuff like what I was talking about with Helen as an owner of a dental practice, you realize maybe you do some mystery shopping, and you're like, oh my word, a third of these people are getting put on hold for a minute or more or five minutes or whatever,
which is disastrous. Well, whatever you and your staff do, whatever time it takes to figure out how to never put anybody on hold like that again, how to always make sure the call gets routed to the right place. Whatever time you spend solving that problem is easily thousand dollars an hour work because it controls a major lever
in your business. Because if twenty percent of your time produces eighty percent of the predit activity, and twenty percent of the twenty percent makes eighty percent of the eighty percent and so on, that means one percent of your time generates fifty percent of your income. And this is true for almost everybody. It's just masked by the way we put people in salary hourly wages. It makes the accounting easy, but it doesn't tell you anything about what you're actually getting from the work.
And so once we've identified these ten dollars an hour tasks, and I would say the average listener probably doesn't have an assistant that they could delegate to. For example, what do we do with those ten dollar tasks? How do we do less of them?
Well, so I want you to reconsider whether or not you should have an assistant. First of all, a lot of us have children, and you know, even maybe simple things like cooking dinner, or doing the wash or shoveling or you know, mowing the lawn. Okay, there's things like that. Let's talk about assistance for a while. So if you want to go on the really cheap end, for probably seven or ten dollars an hour, you can hire a virtual assistant from the Philippines. They'll do all kinds of stuff for you.
How would listeners go about doing that?
So I've had an awesome virtual assistant, Elaine, who we've had an inventium for many years. But for those that have no idea how they would even start with hiring a virtual assistant, what would they do?
The Deep Talks book has an online bonus. It's free. It comes with the book where we actually spend about forty five minutes or an hour with a guy who runs a company that just hires virtual assistance, and he walks through the process and he talks about how you match an assistant to an entrepreneur. It really is a very important thing. Now you could go on a site like up work dot com and you could try people
out literally for two hours at a time. Now, now what I want you to consider is, let's say you have a virtual assistant for ten dollars an hour and you're only going to hire them for four hours a week. That's forty dollars a week, and it's going to give you four hours of time. In the four hours of time that you gained. Can you find a way to make one hundred dollars an hour for a half an hour or one thousand dollars an hour for five minutes.
You don't have to pay for the assistant for a couple of weeks, and so this really is feasible, it's not unrealistic. I think anybody whose time is worth more than thirty dollars an hour should get themselves an assistant. It will completely change your.
Life, definitely. I couldn't agree more. And what else should we do? Like in our personal life? I know something that I do is that I will delegate or outsource tasks that completely drain me of energy, like whether that be food, preparation or cleaning or gardening. So I'm such an advocate of that, But how should people be thinking about this all sorts of ten dollars an hour tasks, even outside of their work life.
So that's a great question because a lot of times when people start talking about outsourcing, they immediately think things like, well, I'm going to outsource my Facebook ads or my copywriting or writing my emails or something like that. Those are the hardest things to outsource that there is, Okay, you know it's easy to outsource is well, best four hundred bucks a month I ever spent is the cleaning ladies
that come over every week. It's really easy to find people who know how to do stuff like that, and it's a lot harder to find people who do a good job working in a business. And so usually the easiest place you can make yourself a whole bunch of time available is just by outsourcing some of your personal life and getting things you don't even like doing.
Yeah, I think that's such great advice. And look, you mentioned not outsourcing writing and writing great persuasive copy is something that you're.
Very very well known for.
And I want to ask because I think any listener writing is part of their job, writing to persuade, and some listeners might be like, but yeah, I'm not a copywriter, but I mean even every email that you send is probably persuading someone to do something. So what are your top strategies for writing really great persuasive copy.
We have a test called the Marketing DNA test and you can find it at Marketing DNA test dot com. And what I found the hard way over many years was that different people sell very very differently from each other. So there are people who are natural copywriters and they would love nothing better to do than sit in front of Microsoft Word for you know, several hours and get the exact right phrase and word and everything, and like that is a certain kind of salesperson, but they're completely
other kinds of salespeople. Like I call them hostage negotiators, and they are people that you can just throw into a situation and they have this gift of somehow magically walking out the door with whatever they wanted, the purchase order or the deal or what have you, and you go, how did you do that or what did you say to make him? Usually they go I don't no, I just said it right. And then there's another kind of person.
They like they're they edit videos for hours and get they get it to look exactly right, or they design the brochure or they design the graphics. So in other words, there's there's completely different kinds of salesmanship. And what I found is you have to figure out what is your
marketing DNA. And so if you're a writer, then writing is ten thousand dollars an hour work, or at least thousand let's say, if you're a hostage negotiator, then being on the firing line that's thousand dollars an hour work. Or if you're a great public speaker, then that's what you should do. So the point is is you need to figure out what is your most natural selling modality, because everybody has one, and I have worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and one thing I've seen over and over
is I've seen hostage negotiators trying to be copywriters. I've seen copywriters trying to be video production editors. And when you find your groove, it's going to be so much more fun and enjoyable and productive to sell.
I think that's great advice in terms of finding the method through which you sell naturally, and I know for me, writing is one of those methods. So I'd love to hone in on writing and how can we be persuasive when we write?
So a long time ago I hired myself a writing coach, and it was John Carlton, who's fairly famous. So I would send him stuff that I wrote and he would send it back and usually you would say, you know, Perry, you need to take your inner salesman out for a walk every now and then. And he would say, Perry, you are writing from your heels. In other words, you're not being bold enough, you're not being clear enough, you're not being assertive enough. And an amateur would assume that, oh, well,
John just has a different personality than me. No, a good writer is a good writer, regardless of their style. And what I had to learn to do was I had to picture. Well, John gave me a picture. He said, imagine that the person you're talking to is a giant, eight hundred pound somn ambulant sloth laying on the couch
in front of this TV. And you have to smack him with a two x four just to even get him to move, okay, and you have to light a fire under their butt, so they will get up and pick up the phone or send the email or whatever. So how are you going to get his attention? Well, then the next thing is you have to talk about what he cares about, and you have to enter the conversation inside his head. You need to read him a
page in his own diary. Now how do you do that? Well, my experience is I have only been able to read a page in the diary of a person i've already been. So if I've been an engineer, I can read an engineer's diary. If I've been a sales guy going to house to house trying to sell vacuum cleaners, then I can read that diary. If I've been a kid whose dad is dying of cancer, then I can read the kid that diary. And so you need to sell to
people that you've had experience being. And I think a lot of people are out there trying to sell to people they've never been. They're trying to sell things that they've never bought, and then they wonder why they're not persuasive, And I think a lot of it is picking your battles.
So how does that apply.
Let's say if someone's trying to persuade their boss to do something. And a lot of people that have a boss have never been a manager and they've never had managerial experience, So how then would they apply that kind of advice.
So try writing a day in the life of my boss and write it in first person. So my name is Jane Smith, and I am the manager of a Hurtz rent a car unit in Elmwood Park, Illinois. And I get to work at seven o'clock every morning. I leave at six o'clock at night, and I have these twenty three employees and you just go from there, okay. And I take lunch at twelve thirty. And while I'm at lunch, I get this phone call and I get
this phone call. And when that well, and when he said that to me, what I thought was, oh no, not again. And you put yourself in their shoes.
So'y literally writing a diary entry.
Yes, And if you can write three or four pages of that person's life and maybe you actually give it, give it to somebody who has that job and go it is this about right now? That's that's actually really easy nowadays, because like you go on fiver and I'm sure you could find a rental car manager or a manager of something, and go, so have I, like, have I nailed the life of a manager? And they'll tell you you'll probably get Okay. Page one and page three
were great, Page two and page four totally off. Okay, well tell me and you know, it's really such a an insightful endeavor to do this. But see that is exactly that is almost exactly what sales copy is. So amateurs write sales copy that talks about the features and the benefits and how wonderful your life is going to be. Really great copywriters suck you into a story. They suck you into even if it's not written like a diary.
It's somebody's diary and it's completely believable. And when you read it, you're in the store.
And so once we're in the person's shoes, so to speak, how do we think about putting structure to a piece of writing that we want to be persuasive?
So my favorite structure is problem agitate, solve, And the most important part is agitate. So let's say that, okay, we're selling to a rental car manager and we are trying to sell some sort of insurance that makes it a whole lot easier when somebody damages a car. Okay,
I'm just making this up, all right. So what an amateur copywriter will do is they'll say, Hi, we're this insurance company and we are quadruple A rated by all these agencies, and we've been in business since nineteen twelve, and they're going to tell you and we have this incredible new policy that's blah blah blah. And so that's an amateur copywriter. What a real good copywriter, Well, he'll
echo something that this manager thinks. Almost every day, if I get another phone call from another person who turned down the liability waiver who now wants to give me a piece of their mind, I think I'm going to strangle and then I am going to somebody's going to call the police, and I'm going to be in the back of a police cruiser and I will be taken to Cook County Court and I will end up in
Cook County Jail for the next six months. And I'll almost enjoy it for the first half an hour, even though I'm getting arrested, because at least I choked to the living crap out of So you make it so vivid, Okay, So all right, dear hurts manager, I'm writing to keep you out of prison and then you chuckle, you know, But seriously, I want to handle this for you. I don't ever want you to have another one of these
phone calls ever again. The rest of your life. I want you to eat your French fries at Arby's without the slightest worry that your cell phone's going to ring and you got another one of these yin yangs who wrecked another cock. See that's what a good writer does is you can see it, you can taste it, you can smell it, you can imagine. It's like, oh yeah, this is so realistic. It's like Stephen King. And by the way, if you like horror fiction, read a Stephen
King novel. It will make you a better writer. I guarantee it.
Yeah, and I know that a lot of writers recommend I want to say, is Stephen King that wrote on writing?
I think, oh, yeah, that's a great book.
Yeah. I've had a lot of people recommend that. And that's interesting.
On the topic of books, I'm curious what books have had the biggest impact on how you approach your work.
Well, the dtax Declider Dominate book I would say about twenty five percent of it is a distillation of what I've learned from Richard Kash. I think he's the most underrated business author. So he wrote the book I had the epiphany reading was called the eighty twenty Principle, and I took what he did in that book and I extended it to the eighty twenty inside the eighty twenty. And he's got two other books that are really extraordinary. One is called Simplify and one is called Our Principle.
And I'll just briefly give you a capsule because I in Detox, Declutterer, Dominate. Those are two of the seven steps that I teach. So Simplify says that your highest aim from the standpoint of what you're going to sell is create an irresistible product that's a joy to use by simplifying. And what that means is, you know, let's say it takes eighty six steps for somebody to do business with you and use your product, or install the product, or get a roof put on their house, or like
whatever it is that you sell. What can you do to cut the eighty six steps down to fifty or thirty or however much you can shave off, and have you ever paid attention to how many of those little steps there actually are. There is hardly a business in the world that can't shave ten, fifteen percent, twenty percent of the complexity in the hassle out of the process. And what people don't know is if you cut the
steps in half, it won't double your business. It'll probably quite ruple your business because everybody else is so difficult to do business with.
It's something else that you talk about in the book. You spend a bit of time talking about the morning ritual that you've been doing for the last seven years, and I'd love you to describe that because I think I thought it was quite interesting and also quite extreme, the amount of time that you're spending doing what you're doing. So can you describe that for listeners?
So I call it renaissance time. The worst possible way to start your day is you wake up in the morning, you reach over your ninth stand a phone into your bed, and you either get in your email box or you get on social media and you start reacting to people. That is the worst way to start your day, and it's how most people start their day. Here's a great way to start your day. The only thing you get to do with your phone is look at what time it is, or maybe you look at the temperature outside.
You are not allowed to open Facebook, You're not allowed to open email. You are not allowed to text anybody. You're not allowed to let anybody pull your strings. You take a shower, you get a cup of coffee, and you sit down with a notebook for twenty minutes and you get yourself sorted out. If you had a dream, you write down your dream. You had an idea in the shower, you write down the idea in the shower, what I'm going to do today? You meditate, you ask
for wisdom. And only after you've done that, and probably you also like look at your day and think about, all right, so what do I get going on? How can I best approach this? What are the twenty percent the eighty percent of useless things? And I'm going to push those off my plate. Only after that do you get into your day. That's renaissance time. And I suggest at least twenty minutes. And if you will do that, you will be amazed at how much better your whole day goes.
And I know in your book you talk about doing that for you for a minimum of one hour, sometimes two hours. Is that something that you do every day?
I have not missed a day in seven years.
Wow, that's that. That's very inspiring, Perry. I know we're almost out of time. My final question for you is, Perry, for those that want to consume more of what you're doing, what is the best way for people to do that?
So I don't know the price in Australia. I know in the US our book on Amazon, Detox Declutter Dominate, it's a little over nine bucks. Maybe it's fifteen or twenty Australian, but it's not very expensive. You go to Amazon and buy Detox Declutter Dominate. This is thirty six pages. It is the most informative thirty six pages of any short business book that you have ever read or bought. And everything in this book will still be true twenty
five years from now. And I don't know how many other books can tell you that, but this is true. There is not a wasted word in this book. In fact, quick story, a year ago, this was a fifty thousand word book and my friend Robert scrub said, Perry, send me your book. I want to play around with it. I go, okay, send him this document. He chopped it down to eight thousand words and and he goes, Perry, this is your real book. I just chopped out the eighty percent that you didn't need. And he said, but
I want to do something else. He goes, I want to add some infographics and charts and illustrations so that it's a fun book to read. So everything we're seeing in words is also in pictures, so that it's incredibly easy to consume. And we're taking twenty years of what you've been doing and teaching, and we're crunching it down to seven things. And that's what he did, and that's why he's the co author of the book. I'm a writer.
I would never have come up with this myself, and I think it was absolutely brilliant and this book will completely change your life.
That's a very cool story of how it came to me.
And look, I would echo that the book is packed with very practical strategies that really powerful, So I will link to that in the show notes. And I think it is a rare business book in that sense that is not just patted with stories and waffle fantastic content. So Perry, it has been awesome chatting with you and having you on the show.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you, it was a delight to be able to talk to you, and Amantha, I want to thank you so much for having me on today.
My pleasure. That is it for today's show.
If you enjoyed my chat with Perry, why not share it with someone else who you think would benefit. Just click on the little share icon, which is generally a box with an arrow pointing upwards wherever you listen to this podcast.
And that is the easiest way to share it.
And next week, for the next few weeks, there are going to be some best of episodes that I've got scheduled. Over Christmas, well, I take a few weeks off from the show, so hopefully you will enjoy those best of episodes because I certainly enjoyed doing every single one of those interviews over the last couple of years.
Of doing this show.
So that is it for today, and I will see you next week, and I will also see you in the new year with fresh episodes.