Make an Impact, Be Tough but Adaptable with Perry Marshall

Brandon and I had a conversation back in 2009, 2010 that totally changed our lives. And that conversation was with the gentleman that we're interviewing today. We had no clue at the time just how much of an impact that would make. We're going to reference that in today's podcast. We just grabbed a beer with a guy that somebody told us we should talk to and. Like, it's kind of amazing looking back that he was willing to do that with us.

And I still come back to things that he shared in that conversation that have helped me be a better business owner and entrepreneur, helped me be a better wealth builder, helped me be a better friend and parent and just an overall person, good person. So I'm really excited for you to hear from him today. I'm going to come back at the end of the episode to do a little bit of a recap, some things to take away from the the what Perry shares, but also on YouTube, you know,

comments are open. Would love to hear what sticks out to you as part of this episode. So for those of you who might be

new to the Wealth System Financial podcast, welcome. So glad you're here. I'm going to share you a little bit of what our podcast is and what it's about and then we'll jump into the interview. In a world where chaos seems to reign supreme, where uncertainty lurks around every corner and financial markets are now more unpredictable than ever. There's one place you can turn to to find clarity and control. Welcome to the Wealth Wisdom Financial Podcast. Hey, I'm

Brandon. And I'm Amanda. Join us as we dive deep in the world of personal and business finance to assist you in navigating through the chaos and building the financial future you deserve. We believe when conventional financial thinking doesn't get you where you want to go, you need wealth wisdom. So if you're ready to take control of your financial destiny. Tune into the Wealth Wisdom Financial Podcast because in a chaotic world, your money shouldn't be. Subscribe now and never miss an episode.

OK, welcome to the show, Perry. So glad that you're here. For those who do not know the famous Perry Marshall, tell the tell the audience a little bit about yourself, a little of your history before we jump in. Master's kid from Lincoln, NE. I got geeked out on audio equipment and got an electrical engineering degree in in Nebraska. And while I was in school, I started getting into entrepreneurship. In fact, I had my first business was selling

speakers. The first pair was age 14 and when I was 17 I was selling them in a showroom and I had a brand and all of that. And eventually I moved to Chicago and I got a professional job doing that. And then I got laid off and my wife was three months pregnant with my first kid and I couldn't find a job in engineering without moving somewhere. So I went into sales and so that was my baptism of fire. With bologna sandwiches and ramen soup and spiraling credit card debt. And

I got fired from that job. Two years later, I remember I came home. It was a week before Thanksgiving and I walked in the door at 9:00 in the morning and my wife goes, you got fired again, didn't you?Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did. How did you guess? So I've had a bumpy ride. And just before I got fired from that job, I really started to get serious about myself. I think I was running on a whole bunch of fantasies and ways that I wanted the world

to work. Or, you know, I went to seminars and they told me this is how the world works and I really wanted to be that way. And I said, well, I got to get serious about how the world actually works and what should I actually be doing. And along the way, I discovered direct marketing and direct marketing is the, it's the version of marketing that an engineer could understand. Well, see, it's a process and it follows these steps and you have to measure things and things

have to be accountable. And then you change the process and it changes the outcome and. That turned out to be one of the most important discoveries that I ever made and my life. Well, next job I got after that, I had also gotten serious about making sure that the job matched my actual skills and not the skills that I wished that I had. I don't know if anybody else has ever made that error in your life, but. Things got pretty

desperate for a while. I mean, I think we were three months from moving back to Nebraska and living with my wife's parents for a while, which would have been a horrendously embarrassing admission of failure to, you know, to do something like that. So we we came pretty close. We scraped the guardrails and andThe company that I then started working for, they had a website. At the time, most

companies did not have websites. They were open to trying this direct marketing stuff and we grew that business 20X in four years and we sold it to a public company for $18 million. And I hung out my shingle as a marketing consultant and at that point I said. What if I got really good at this?Like, I'm kind of good at this marketing stuff. What if I got really good at it?And so that is what I've been doing for the last 22 years and and I'm talking to you. So I got a wife and six kids. I

live in Chicago. Two kids are standard issue, two are adopted and. We do a lot of interesting things, including help entrepreneurs build bigger businesses. So well, I want to add, like when we came into the picture, we didn't know you. We just knew you as a guy from church. And then we, one of the pastors was like, hey, you want to meet?We were asking business owners and any business owners pick, learn. I hate the word pick your brain, but we were like, oh, no, that's what you

do, I guess ask. And so we had a, I remember the beer with you and we didn't know that that anything about you and in general, we just knew, oh, that's a business guy, let's get some advice. And that advice helped us. It was like the advice you said was audition your employees. And that was when we had the coffee shop and that saved us up. We didn't hire perfectly, but we did. Not hire a bunch of duds

because of because of that. And so that and then I was like years later we had we were transitioning out of that and and your name came up again. I was like wait, I didn't know he was famous in in those areas at all. I just knew he was some business guy and it was five years later that we figured out that we we had. Had beer with the Perry Marshall and we we were like, oh, that's awesome. And and started diving deeper into that 8020 sales and marketing.

Got that for the coffee shop and now we're in the financial world and still those same principles work in finance. They work in all areas and you know, even as we interviewed you and if you guys want to go back to our back in the the archives of ours, we had talked to you as a bright at COVID and you had said some things that stuck with me that there is going to be more Black Swan events happening, that this is just the beginning. It goes from 8020 to 95 five and now.

And and I think you were starting, this is again feels like a long time ago, but it was like 3, three to four years ago, about 3 and you had mentioned something about a I that A I is going to take over. And I was like man, apparently he is a a prophetic person because now I use a I in everything and. I feel like it's it's really interesting what you said. Then go back again. You'll listen to the episode and

you'll be like, oh wow, that's crazy. I don't know if you remember that episode, but it was, you know, pretty awesome. And you told us to change our business name, which we did, by the way. We finally listened to you. We are no longer Grandma's Wealth Wisdom. She was great, but we kind of put her to pasture. Sorry, Grandma. Well, you guys have reinvented yourselves a whole bunch of times, and people don't necessarily recognize how much you learn every time you do a personal

reinvention. After a while, you start to notice a lot of patterns and pick up a lot of things that most other people miss out on. So I'm sure it hasn't been all a bed of roses for you guys, but. I salute you for continuing to evolve. So you you brought up several things that I think would be very good for us to talk about today. So you talked

about 8020, you mentioned 95 five and I want to explain a reason why the 21st century is very different than the 20th century and it's a reason that nobody else has ever. Talk to you about. I'm sure this is going to be new to every single person on the call. So first, let's do a little, take a little review of 8020. So one of the biggest breakthroughs and epiphanies that I ever had in my entire business life was when I realized 8020 is an absolutely central. Foundational principle of

everything. It's not just a business rule of thumb. So almost everybody has heard of 8020 or they've heard 20% of the people own 80% of the real estate or 20% of the people own 80% of the wealth and the other 80% only own 20%. Most people have heard that somewhere. And it's true. But that's only the tip of the iceberg is, first of all, it's not just a business and economics

thing. It's a law of nature. It's true of meteors and planets and stars and rabbit populations and the size of craters on the moon. It's a fundamental inequality of cause and effect. It says that if. If water is running down a hill, it doesn't evenly run down the entire hill. It concentrates in one place and makes a river. A river is an 8020 phenomenon.

And so I was reading Richard Koch's 8020 book about 20 years ago and I suddenly realized, whoa, wait a minute, this is a fundamental principle of nature and it's fractal. Meaning there's an 8020 inside every 8020. So not only does the top 20% produce 80%, the top 20% of the top 20% produces 80% of the 80% and then it keeps going and going and going. So this is incredibly powerful. It means 1% of what you do produces 50% of your income. So if you draw it on a graph.

8020 looks like this, where as you get over to the right side, the arrow goes up and up and up at a speed that you can barely fathom. And then you can you can draw a little line at the 80th percentile and you say this is 80%, this is 20% and this red part. Says that 80% of the wealth is up here, and as you go closer to the right side, you get closer and closer to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett. Well, that in itself is incredibly powerful.

But there's something else that I want to explain which helps you understand the times we are in, because we are in weird times. This is no surprise to anybody. So

here's what the the digital world and therefore much of the world now is not even 8020, it's 9010 or 95 five. So the Internet is at least 901010% of the website. Get 90% of the traffic and 90% of the websites get 10% of the traffic. So think how differently that is from 80208020 says the top 20% have 16 times more than the bottom 20%, the bottom 80%. But if it's 9010, the inequality ratio isn't 16 to 1. It's 381 to one. This is how the world is actually

changed. Now, I don't want to get too much into the theoretical reasons for why this is, other than just to say it's because the Internet is frictionless. Yep. Well, so here's what 9010 looks like. 9010 is the blue line where the have nots have less and the haves have more and frictionless systems work perfect until they break, and when they break they don't work at all. So this is not some weird little theory. This is your everyday experience. So let me give you an

example. Do you guys remember that giant freight freighter that got stuck in the Persian Gulf about three years ago and you saw the satellite photos of ships backed up and backed up and backed up for miles and miles and literally all of a sudden there's no bread in the convenience store and. You know, and Costco does not have TVs and the supply chains just because of 1 ship. Yep. Well, that wasn't a problem that happened 200 years ago.

200 years ago, you did not have all the world's goods going through six shipping ports, but now you do. And you have supply chains that are hyper-optimized and you have just-in-time manufacturing and just-in-time shipping. And you know, when you go buy bread at the supermarket, there's not a big warehouse with 100,000 loaves of bread waiting for everybody to come and pick them up. There's more bread coming on a truck tomorrow. That's a

frictionless economy. It works great until suddenly it doesn't work at all. I think we just had something like that with Microsoft, right? Just happened. Oh, a patch and somebody screwed up. I don't know, maybe. And I'm like, wait, it just shut down the the Fed and other places. Yeah, airports. This is crazy. This is

why this is the agility decade and at the beginning of 2020. I wrote a blog post called 10 Predictions for 2020 to 2029 and I said this is the agility decade and half the things I predicted have already come true. You can go back and look at that blog post. This is a fundamental reason why and so this means that you have to build access capacity. Into whatever you're doing or something will break. So let's bring this just even down to your time.

If all your time is spoken for and consumed, if you're working 60 hours a week and there's no way to not work 60 hours a week because you committed yourself to doing all of these things, then the minute something goes wrong, you have no margin to go fix anything. Or no margin to stop. Oh my, well, my, you know, this job stopped. So I go drive an Uber. Well, you can't drive an Uber if you're already washing dishes 60 hours a

week. And like, whatever your version of that is, I don't imagine a lot of your people are Uber drivers, but you get the analogy. Like you have to have backup systems. You have to have other ways of getting things done. The the worst number. Is one only one way to contact my customers, only one way to get new customers, only one product on the shelves or only one big client. Any of that can be just catastrophic. And the like the the the zeitgeist, the social media that it doesn't, it doesn't

cater to that. Most people don't. Think that having several hours a day that are unstructured, unspoken for is a good idea. And then they do have several hours a day. They're unstructured. They just spend them watching TikTok. Well, that doesn't help anybody. So we are in a different era now. And again, I'm not going to get into a bunch of theory, but the reason the world is 9010 is because things are

frictionless. And a frictionless world is a different world, and it's a more volatile world with more risks, not less. Yeah. So I have to admit something. And for for our listeners out there, don't let this put you in me a political box. I don't fit into any political box. Think of this purely as a millennial thing. OK, put me in that age group. So, you know, we're the the participation trophy kids, right?And when when I first started digging into 8020, I was mad. I was like, this is not fair.

I'd like and and I remember finally, I think it was, I think it was an e-mail. I love your emails that you sent were on your e-mail list. I read everyone. There was one about it. There is some unfairness here, but your job is to move up the curve as much as you can move up the curve and then bring other people along with you. And I love that as like, that's what I'm trying to do, right?This exists. I can't fight it, but I'm going to go with it.

And this is what I'm going to do. Talk to me about how, like, if it's less friction, then that maybe I can move more quickly, more easily, more. It's more I'm more agile, more able to maybe for those that are like, yeah, I want to move up the curve. Let's talk a little bit about what that looks like now. Well, so my friend Dan Kennedy has this. Phrase. He calls it the phenomenon. The phenomenon is the 18 months where you get more progress than you did in the previous 18 years.

And this happens to lots of people who really commit themselves to their craft. You know, you guys are in financial planning, but it could just as well be a musician or an artist or a or a plumber. But if if you're doing something where if you get really good at it, you could get recognition. Somebody could notice you. You could make a breakthrough. It's true. Anytime you have a breakthrough product or service of any kind, this can happen.

You're on a plateau. And you practice your guitar every day, and you practice your guitar every day, and it doesn't feel like you're getting better. It just feels like you're practicing and practicing, practicing. And maybe you're not really getting that much better. But the way the world works is that at some point you're going to hit for a period of time, a hockey stick, and it's going to go up. There's a great book by Matt called Mastery.

By George somebody, I forget his last name, that talks about this. And there's a bunch of versions of this. It happens in technology, it happens in finance, it happens in people's personal life. And he says the people who do the best are the people who enjoy practicing the guitar for its own sake. And they don't go, man, I'm so angry. I'm not getting better. Well, I'm just going to stop this. Well, those people never get

the hockey stick. That never happens. But if you stay at it, which means it doesn't just mean doing the same thing every day. I mean, you might be buying every different kind of guitar playing book that you can find and watching every you're probably trying all kinds of stuff. But if you keep at it, you're going to hit a spot where all of a sudden. You start making a lot of forward progress and that is all hands on deck.

Like at that point, yeah, you're probably are working 14 hours a day or doing 20 podcast interviews every week or or going on a book tour or or going and seeing a zillion clients or or whatever it is because when you have that breakthrough. It's the equivalent of a band having a song on the radio. And when you when you have a hit song on the radio, like there's no guarantee you're going to have another one. Think about U2U2 is one of the most famous bands in

the world. I do not believe the latest album songs from their latest albums actually get played on the radio. I don't think they do. They they're they're playing where the streets have no name from the 1980s. They're not playing. And this is true of almost any band, which means when you're in that hockey stick period, you need to take advantage of every possible opportunity and you need to cultivate your audience. A few years ago, I went to see a band called Dream

Theater. They had one hit in the 1980s and it was only a slight hit. Like it was on MTV for a little bit. I don't even know if it hit the pop charts. I went to their concert 10 years ago and there was 5000 people at it. Well, how does a band with only one sort of kind of hit song in the 1980s end up with 5000 people in Chicago?It's because they cultivated a fan base faithfully and carefully. You guys know what it is to cultivate a fan base. It's cultivating clients, cultivating

customers. Like you've got to take care of them. You've got to pay attention to them. And then you actually can make a living for a long time on one hit song. Yeah, there's a couple things I was thinking about in and and also thinking about the EOS method and and us. So for us, we're really good at processes. We're really

good at at that part. They, like we mentioned before, traffic is the hard part, but but I know some people are really good at traffic, but they can't keep their customers to save their life or they're there's they're really and this is us. We're really good at the present, but we're not good at at the wrapping paper because what's the point of wrapping paper?It's stupid in my opinion, right?Like really it's it's a waste of money. But we we think about that and then I think about

our book, right. Our book is not the best biggest seller, but but what we thought about is it's from chaos, which is confusion, haphazard, anxious, overwhelming and stressful. And it came back back to you on the way back machine when our faith and it's moving from chaos to still. and understanding these 80/20 rules, but things like that. But it's stepping back, being still, uh, you call it Renaissance time, thinking time. Uh, and it was before, um, I read, what was it?The, The World Less Stupid.

Uh, you were already talking about that stuff. Uh, on thinking time, which we call Renaissance, Renaissance time. And we say, set your sights, track your in and out, inspect your progress. Look for 1% adjustments and live deliberately. If you understand the 8020 or 95 five and you're deliberate, it's going to be huge. And I feel like for us, we're at that almost curve that's about to hit. And we've been doing our reps for the past five years learning this. And I'm like, oh man, it is about

to get crazy. The hard part though is with our book, they're like, oh yeah, it's too hard because that means you're you're wanting me to think. How can you speak to people on the power of thinking and why that's important in looking at the 8020 thing, 955, wherever it is?

I've always been a thinker and I've always been a person who's trying to get people to think. And that's countercultural. Like if you want to not think, just get on Tiktok, right? So it's an uphill battle to be a thinker and to want people to think and to to sell a complex product that requires thought. And first of all, doing what you believe to be right and virtuous is in some sense its own reward. I do what I do the way that I do it, because I believe this is

the right way to do it. And I don't cater to every whim in the marketplace. I think Seth Godin said something like if you split test long enough, you end up selling porn It's kind of obvious. Well, that's a road to nowhere. That's just a race to the bottom. Oh, we're we're just going to do whatever attracts attention for today. That's not a path. What I have found happens.

When you have a cohesive set of values and you're consistent and you do what you're believing in, is you acquire people who, like you, feel that there's just not enough of a certain way of being in the world. And once they've found it, my experience is they'll stick around a long time. I've had a lot of people say to me. I subscribe to every single marketing guru and I unsubscribe from every single one of them eventually, except you. And you're the only one

left. I've had that said to me many, many, many times. And I I believe that every e-mail you send out should have value. Like there should be something in it that teaches you something or or makes you smile. Or, you know, it shouldn't just be a cash grab. And when you surround yourself with those kind of people, it's consistently astonishing at how good those people are and how good their friends and colleagues are, and what a great cake you end up baking when you have the

best ingredients. It's extremely rewarding and I love connecting people together that would never otherwise never get connected with each other. And and it does work. I remember when my Google AdWords book was really popular. I mean, that was my biggest quote hit song on the radio. I knew that that may only last so long. And I remember, dude, I am making hay while the sun shines. I am. I thought of it like a

steak. That I was pounding in the ground like I'm going to pound the stick so deep into the ground that nobody could ever pull it out. And and I was in that mode for about 7 years. I was just banging the AdWords drum, banging the AdWords drum. Now seasons change and seasons come to an end and you know, after a few years of that. I

had some frustrations. My biggest frustration was I don't have any control of what Google does and Google is increasingly not don't be evil and I I just came to dislike it more and more. And so I shifted my attention to the 8020 book and the main reason was. You know, Google could get bought, they could get sold, they could go out of business, they could change their policies, they could, they could change anything they want to change. 8020

is not going to change. So not going to build my house on the sand, going to build my house on the rock. And I'm going to use my platform to teach people an eternal principle rather than just a bunch of techniques that are going to go away next year and.

Cultivating that has been very rewarding because you whatever you do is going to attract a certain kind of person. So what kind of person do you want to attract? Well, I'd like to attract the kind of person who reads a Stephen Covey book as opposed to, let's say, a person who reads Think and Grow Rich, which was written by a con

man. There are a lot of good, successful people that read Think and Grow Rich, but I think 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has a lot more substance than Think and Grow Rich. Yep, I'm so glad you said that. We've had

a lot of conversations about Think and Grow Rich over the last couple months. I really don't like that book. I don't like the vibe. And if you research it, almost everything in that book is made-up. Almost everything Napoleon said about himself was made-up. The man was a con man. And then some people, people get mad at me. They go, oh, Perry, that doesn't matter. Why are you trash talking that guy?Cause he's fake, right?But you study people, you become a fake person.

Yeah. So I've been using this. I do have

a question. I've been. Oh, we're gonna fight. I've been using this analogy a lot. Icebergs. There's so many people that above the water look like they're amazing, but once you get under the water, right, that they have, they're puny, right?There's nothing there. And I'd much rather be a huge iceberg under the water, have all my stuff together in the background, and then we just got to get better at what people see above the water so they can see like, oh, there is

more below. And that's what you're talking about here is like we want to be all like the people we want to build with. We want to be the same below the water. We want to have the same core principles, the same ideas. OK, Brandon, jump in. Sorry, because I am part of a

mastermind group that they love think and grow rich and you know, think it and it'll happen and you know all that. And I listened to the book and and I like some of the principles and and I think sometimes for me it's like confidence in myself. And to have that confidence and and and they as I was talking to one of the people in this like you need to have more confidence. I'm like there's a lot of people who have confidence and they're selling snake oil, right. They they look really great.

And for me I want to like my and I don't know if I want to say humility but I I don't want to think come in that I have it all together cause I don't no one does but but in our world. In the TikTok world, in this 955 world, people are just putting out sizzle without the stake. And for me, I'm like, yeah, but but you need to have the essence, the core set and most people. And the reason that I think that there's a problem is because we haven't we we did the think and grow rich or we

did whatever. We don't have the core set and and whether it's profit first, I like whole life insurance, infinite banking because it's kind of a. Foundational asset. It could change, right?But but at the core, I want to have substance to to me and not just sell a a widget, right?And I don't know what's his name's Napoleon Hill's background, but I'm like, yeah, some of it I need. But then there's a lot of fakers out there and they're just using maybe even your stuff to

amplify. They're fakeness and people are like, oh look, that that guy looks good cause he has a Ferrari or has a nice whatever watch or something. How do you combat that knowing like really there's something deeper that you just mentioned. Sorry I can rant on this because I've been thinking about this a lot. Well, I'll tell you a story when

Google Ads was brand new. It was a gold rush. It really was the biggest development in advertising in the last 50 years. It was a very big deal and it was a huge sea change in advertising. And it took several years for people to wrap their head around what it really was and what it really meant. And so that meant that for the first couple of years, man, especially compared to now, it was so easy. And some people could just fall off a log and buy some Google ads and

make a lot of money. And I would listen to stories by like Dan Kennedy would tell stories about infomercials in the in the 80s because there was a deregulation of TV time that happened sometime in the 80s and it suddenly became possible to have 30 minute. TV commercials. And so in the early days of infomercials, it was easy money for anybody that jumped in and figured it out quick and it got harder and

harder and harder. So by the time the late 90s when I was learning about marketing came along, it cost 75 to $100,000 just to try an infomercial once with a test broadcast and so. It had wiped out all of the little guys and there were only a few players left. And I listened to that story. I knew that history repeats itself and I knew that it would get harder and harder in these super easy days of easy cheap advertising would end. And so I had tons of people showing up every day.

Teach me this stuff. This is amazing. And I would tell them,

if you're still only using one advertising channel one year from now, I have failed. Here's the real objective. We're going to start with these Google ads because they're fast and you can test stuff and it's relatively inexpensive. You're going to get your message right. You're going to get your message more dialed in than any of your

competitors. And then you're going to go to all the other advertising channels and you'll go to Yahoo and you go to MSN, you go to television, you'll do radio and you'll do newspapers and whatever you got to do. So that if Google shoots you in the head or if the prices go way up, you're still going to have a business. And I would repeat this and repeat this and repeat this. So a couple of years go by, all of a sudden, one day, I remember it was probably August.

Of 2005, thousands of advertisers woke up and all this new thing called quality score had suddenly been installed. Quality score. Your quality score is a one out of 10 and your minimum bid is $5 and everybody's underwater. Now let's remember. There's people with payrolls and revenues and quarterly objectives and vendors to pay, and all of a sudden all the traffic stopped. I had a teleseminar. This is even before webinars. I had a teleseminar with 3500 people on it going,

what in the world just happened?And like we're scrambling around to figure out what is this quality score and how does it work?Well, here, here's the point of the story. I did not have a single person throw a rock through my window and say, Perry, you told me this thing was so awesome and I built this business and now the whole thing caved in like a House of cards and I'm mad at you and I'm giving you the finger. I didn't get any of that. What I got was this guy's always told me

the truth. So, Perry, what do I do now? Like I told you to diversify. I had people sending me emails. You told me so. I didn't listen. I'm sorry. I'm going to repentance. That was the kind of reaction. So

I think it's Eric Weinstein has this phrase. Who is a break glass in the case of emergency person? Well, when COVID hit, I had a whole bunch of clients who were break glass in case of emergency type people. People just knew they could trust him. And that's who got people's money. When everybody's hanging by their fingernails, they have no idea what's going to happen in the next two months. They're like, well, I'm going to hire

Bob. So like Bob Regneris was one of these people and he was running a Facebook advertising agency at the moment. And when COVID hit, a whole bunch of companies just stopped their advertising and the cost of Facebook advertising plummeted. And Bob was like, you need to advertise here, you need to advertise now and you need to do it on Facebook. And these people would go hire Bob and he would help them do that. Well, Bob's always been a break glass in case of emergency

person. He doesn't make stuff up. He doesn't lead people down a Primrose path. He's he's a and and then you have all the other people that proverbial they were swimming naked and then then the tide went out. Yeah. And and so you know, I don't think there's an easy shortcut to being. A trusted authority that people know that over a period of years that you're as

honest as the day is long. I can just tell you that the people that take the shortcuts and don't really have the substance have this funny way of disappearing and getting washed up really fast. I had a friend in about 2006 or 7. We were in a mastermind group together and he goes, hey, Perry, do you want to go to the mastermind in a private jet? And I'm like, how much is that? Well, it was a lot of money. I'm like, no, I think I'll take Southwest. Like, why would I spend that kind of

money?Well, he was making $2,000,000 a year. Well, guess what?He was in the subprime mortgage business. Of course he was making. $2,000,000 a year in the middle of 2006. But in 2009 he was bankrupt. Like I watched him circle the drain. He was flailing, grabbing at everything. Nothing could save him. Man that. And boy, he landed hard. And he did learn his lesson, by the way. I mean, I think he he was young and experienced. But man, that was a hard lesson.

I I think about that with Profit 1st and and understanding our numbers or in general is when people come in and they're like, oh, I have this $1,000,000 business. I'm like, what's your, uh, real revenue?And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, well, that's that's what I want to know. How much do you take home?Oh, I I bring in $1,000,000, but I I take home. 40,000 I'm like, well, that's not a healthy business,

right. And and so, but then people don't want to deal with the, they want to be in the delusion oftentimes and that's a hard thing. Yeah, I'll jump in there. Perry, I know. Thank you so much for all the time you've given us. I know we're almost up on our time. I have to we could keep going for hours,

I know. What you're showing me is like, so we were two years into this business when COVID hit and what we did that week after the shutdown started, right, Friday, March 13th, 2020, the next week we were reaching out to our customers like what do you need?This is why we have your emergency funds. What, how can we help?And what I discovered in the years since is that that's not what other financial professionals were

doing. They were hiding. Cause they were scared like cause that was the most volatile week of the stock market in a long time. And they didn't, they didn't want to answer the phone. They were scared, you know, like all things. And to like have that story as like we know those things are going to happen, maybe not the same way, but in different ways to know like those are the people we are, we would do the same thing and maybe probably even better because we've got

more experience under our belt like. And I think the reason I'm sharing that story for you is because I think. If I go back to, you know, reading 8020 sales and marketing, I did Productivity Express that you offer. So like dialing in my time, knowing what's going to actually move the needle, that kind of thing. And then also the marketing DNA

test that you offer. I I go back to that and remind myself like, yeah, I haven't figured out traffic, but I at least know like what's in my wheelhouse, not what, not just parroting what other people are doing that seems to be working for them. Yeah, those things have been super helpful for me. I recommend them to people all the time. We'll put links to those. We're not affiliates of Perry or anything like that, guys. We just love

what what we've learned from him. And I still go back to the lessons in here over and over again. I've got dog ears, I've got underlines. Super great. I want to give you the chance to share anything else that you wanted to make sure to share with those that are checking this out. How many pages?Like 30 pages

that just this little guy. Well, you know, the guy that asked me to get on the private jet, there was a we were in our mastermind group and it was my hot seat and there was this one point where he goes, he goes, Perry, you're too humble. You are Perry effing Marshall. And and that was before he crashed and burned and. I don't think

he would say that. No. There was a certain amount of caution that I had of not overestimating myself or always being a little cautious, always being the break glass in case of emergency guy. And not getting too far out over my skis. And there's this very fine line. It's in fact, I don't even know if it's a fine line. It's more like a paradox is you have to be confident and you need to be humble at the same time. Both like one is not contradicting the other.

You need to be humble from the standpoint of there. You never know what you don't know, and none of us are perfect and we're all human and we all make mistakes. Yet you do have to put your cojones in a wheelbarrow sometimes and say I'm the leader. Follow me. I think we're in a stage like that right now with national politics. We have a huge vacuum of leadership. We have highly incompetent people in the offing. And frankly, most of us can't really do much about that. But you know

what we can do?We can get out of bed every morning and we can do our job and we can lead and we can figure out what do we know that we know that we know that's right for our clients and our customers. And we can get in their face and say I know that, I know that, I know that you need to be doing this and it doesn't have to be a lot of

things. Again, 8020. Just what's the 20% of the 20% that you know that you know that you know And you, you can't get strung out on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, CNN and YouTube obsessing about what everybody else should be doing and what's wrong with everybody else. That's not going to do anybody any good. Stop all that. Like I had to. I had to grab myself by the pelt, Perry. Stop getting on

Twitter. Stop getting sucked into all this nonsense and work on the stuff that you can change because people are depending on you to do what you do. They're not depending on you to fix the Oval Office or anything like that. Do what you do. And I think some of the people that are listening to this. You may do something this week or in your lifetime that's more important than anything the president does and you don't even know it. How

would you know? Well said. And I now have an image. I'm going to put my ovaries in a wheelbarrow. Thank you for that and and I just like like being a creator not a consumer like we are we do a podcast right and we will put on TikTok and all that. But as business owners and as individuals that that going back to the thinking time and and the book right that we have is is we are all.

Creators, whether it's with family or with our job or or wherever and and we need to move from being a consumer because that's what got us in this mess anyway to to being creators and then knowing like even as I'm building our business, I am creating something that I employ people and we want to employ more people because we are the answer, not whoever's in office like I get to create jobs, yes. You too, Harry. Thanks so much for being with us and sharing your

words of wisdom. I want to let your audience know you can get 8020 sales and marketing for only $7.00 inside the US at sell8020.com. That's SELL 8020.com and it comes with a couple extra videos that regular people don't get. So you can buy it on Amazon for 18, but we have a special price. At sell8020.com and the book really will change your life. You'll dog ear it, you'll you'll bend the corners, you'll you'll have highlighters, and it'll change

the way that you see everything. Because there really are huge doors that swing on tiny little hinges that you barely even notice. And those hinges are super important. 100%. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. OK, that was amazing. There were so much value that was shared in the that conversation. I want to highlight a couple things just to reinforce them.

First of all, like that whole idea, like 95 five or 9010991, whatever the new 8020 is with with the Internet world, it works really well until it doesn't work at all. And that's kind of scary. And that's scary if you're in business, but it's also scary if you're building wealth, right?We all know when there's supply chain shocks or other things, you know, Internet patches that don't work, that that can impact our wealth building if our money is in the wrong

place. And they're, you know, like some people are scared that maybe the whole thing is going to fall down. That's why I love that Perry gives us. A way to think that counter like counters that and helps protect us, helps us be more resilient, you know, if it doesn't work at all for a while. And that's being agile. He called it the agility decade, building extra capacity so that you can change. We actually have a really one of my favorite episodes

we've ever done in this podcast. It was back in August 12th of 2022. We're going to put a link to it in the show notes along with the other links that we mentioned. To Perry's stuff, this episode is all about agility and adaptability. And it's actually Perry mentioned some forces of nature, right, that do 8020. This is actually, I would say, right up there with 8020 as a thing with nature. I think of, you know, we don't have dinosaurs anymore because they couldn't be agile and adaptable when

a big meteor hit their planet, right?Is what science tells us. But we have animals that existed when the dinosaurs were here. Bumblebees, for instance. They were able to adapt and be agile and withstand such a catastrophic event. How do we be financial bumblebees, be financial bumblebees, there we go, um rather than dinosaurs?Then he mentioned like this idea of the phenomenon. Where do we find those 18 months to transform

the next 18 years?I love that. I want to start looking for that, intentionally seeking out how do I make more of those moments happen, even if they're only 18 minutes to transform the next 18 days, right?Like that kind of idea. Love that. Also, how can I be, how could you be a break glass in case of emergency kind of person?When we build more resilience, more agility in our financial lives, in our businesses, we become.

The the people that others can't depend on to be able to keep their jobs if we're employers or to be able to keep putting food on the table if our, you know, we have children that are dependent on us or, you know, those kind of things. How can you be a break glass in emergency kind of person?That would be a great thing to explore and see how you can implement that in your life. And then final big take away for me, stop getting

sucked into nonsense. There's a lot of nonsense out there, particularly in the financial world. And I invite you, whatever it looks like, to, you know, shut down a bunch of that noise, financial noise in your life. You know, we're big proponents of STILL, right?We made it an acronym. We love like, I know you know way more than you think you knowYou probably have more knowledge than you

need to reach your financial goals. What you probably want and need is to not get stuck into nonsense and instead. Operate from that knowing that you have look for maybe pieces, you know, holes where you need to fill in gaps of knowledge, but do more from what you already know rather than always seeking out new information, never doing anything. Because in Perry's words, you could do something this week more significant than the president.

What's that going to be for you?What are you going to do this week that's more significant maybe to your life, maybe to the lives of the people around you?Maybe to your city, maybe for your state, maybe for your industry. What might you do that's more significant than what anybody else could do?You've got your own unique goals, your own unique talents, abilities, your own unique way of thinking about things. What might you do that's more significant than what anybody else on this planet

could do?That's going to build resilience. That's going to build agility. That's going to help you become a break glass in case of emergency people and that person. And that's going to help you create a phenomenon, right?At a moment in time, whether it's 18 minutes or 180 days or, you know, something like that, that totally transforms the rest of your life. I'm going to leave it there. Keep pondering that. This has been super

encouraging and inspirational to me. Let us know, as always, how we can help you on your financial journey to walk alongside you and reach your financial goals. I know this episode hopefully will be one that you listen to again and come back to some of the wisdom that Perry shared. In the meantime, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. We've got some other episodes coming up about resiliency and how to build more into our financial

futures. We're going to get, you know, more specific about money in the next couple episodes this month as we. Get into that topic so it subscribes so you don't miss a single one of those. And then of course, live long and profit. The topics presented in this podcast are for general information only and not for the purposes of providing legal, accounting, or investment advice on such matters. Please consult a professional who knows your specific situation.