(dramatic music)
- I did not wake up one day and become
a successful guy in business.
In 1981, I started my first business up, and it failed.
1983, I started my second business up, and it failed.
So I thought, well, if two didn't work, maybe
another two more will work.
So in 1985, I started two more business at the same time.
They both failed.
So I sort of woke up one day and realized that
whatever I'm doing isn't working, and that was
a very profound thing to realize,
and so I went through a process of letting go
everything I believed in
pretty much and put it all back together again
and acquiring knowledge and wisdom from people
that I knew that spoke the truth.
And how I could spot the BS from the truth was
I lived a life of BS until that point in time.
So I knew what BS was as opposed to what was truth.
And I then started up my fifth business, and it was a
very, very successful business and went on from there.
And since that time, I have had mostly successes
and not failure.
But failure is a good thing.
You may have heard that before.
If failure leads to success, then I'm living proof of that.
The mistake I was making at the beginning was
I didn't know what I was talking about,
and number two, I was persistent as hell, but I was
persistent in the wrong things.
A lot of people say that persistence is really important.
Well, it is important but only if you're doing
the right things.
If you're just doing the wrong things, you'll go
in the wrong direction real fast,
which is actually really good 'cause you get it over with.
(laughter)
So don't worry about failing.
A lot of you already failed at one or two things in
your life, and you'll probably fail a lot more.
It's a good thing. It's a good thing.
So when you're going through it, it can be a bit painful.
So after I have some successes back in 1989, I had a
financial planning business, and I had a
financial seminar business.
What would happen was you would come to my
financial seminar, and to graduate that program,
you got a meeting with the financial planner.
So it was a very well-programmed stepwise
progression through, and it was very profitable.
Except we had one problem.
We couldn't get enough people into the seminar.
We had a marketing issue.
And I would do things like I would buy a $1,000 ad
in the Vancouver Sun and get
three phone calls and no enrollments.
You can only do that for so long.
And I thought I gotta figure this thing out.
So one day in the spring of 1989,
I got a fax from a colleague,
a 12-page fax from a colleague.
It was really a 12-page sales letter, about a marketing
conference that was taking place at a hotel near LAX
in California, and it was about 2,000 bucks for the Airbus
to go, which back in that time was a lot of money
plus airfare, hotel, and all the other expenses.
And I decided to go.
I just felt this was the right thing for me,
and of course, they had all these big names from marketing
that I had never heard of before, like Jay Abraham and
Gary Halbert and Robert Allen, these guys were all there,
And the only guy I had heard of was Robert Allen.
The other guys didn't mean anything to me.
So I head off down there with a friend of mine,
And I was there about ten minutes, and I knew
I was In the right place.
This is where I needed to be.
And one of the speakers that impressed me the most
was a guy called Gary Halbert.
He was a bit of a crude guy.
He spent time in jail for mail fraud,
and he was a real character,
and as soon as I heard him speak, I knew this was a guy I
wanted to spend more time with.
(laughter)
What's that say about Allen?
(laughter)
- I'm a real open-minded guy.
I'm open to any conversation with anybody about anything.
Always been that way, and I find that some of the
most interesting characters you learn the most from,
because they've had lots of interesting life experiences.
So Gary was there talking about all of his experiences
with direct response marketing,
which I had never heard of before,
And so he said, "By the way, any of you want to spend
a half hour with me, tomorrow afternoon starting at
one o'clock, you can spend a half hour with me
and I'll help you out with your business marketing problems
so I was the first guy in the back the room to sign up.
Next day at one o'clock, I'm in his hotel room,
and for the next half hour, he asked me three or four
questions about my business, then he proceeds to
tell me exactly what I needed to do when I got back home.
And sure enough, when I got back home, I did exactly
what he said, and it worked like a charm.
In fact, one of the first ads I ran,
instead of getting three phone calls, I got 53 phone calls,
and people gave us their Visas and Mastercard's
over the telephone, which I never
experienced before in my life.
But what happened back in LA was very interesting.
After I got the first half hour session with Gary,
I asked him a question, the question that changed my life.
I said, "Gary, would you mind if I sat in
and observed your next five,
what you're going to do with the other business owners?"
And he paused, and he said,
"No one has ever asked me that before."
And he paused again, and he said, "Sure, why not?"
So I sat there like a fly on the wall for the next
three hours while he went through the next five guys,
and I saw connections and things happen that
I never experienced in the half hour I had with him.
I realized how marketing worked and how
direct response marketing worked, and that's what
caused me to begin a career in marketing that
to this day, it served me very well.
He told me how to be given a copywriter.
He told me a whole bunch of other things.
He just poured his heart out for me in that timeframe.
And I came back a changed man, and ever since then,
most of my ads have been very successful
that I have written.
And same with sales letters and everything else I've done,
and I owe it all to time with Gary Halbert.
I'll share with you one of the
most profound things he told me.
If you want to be a good copywriter, anyone in the room
interested in being a good copywriter?
It's a lost art, it is a lost art, but here's what you do.
You find an ad or a sales letter that you like,
that really moves you, then you hand write it out twice.
you hand write the whole letter that you want to master,
and you write it out handwritten.
You can't type it, you've got to hand write it.
And that will engrain the style of writing into your brain.
And I've shared that with many people over the years.
There's only one guy I know who ever did it,
or two guys I know who ever did it.
One is DJ and the other was Dan Lok, and they're both
good copywriters because they took Gary Halbert's advice.
(applause)
Now, out of the hundreds of people I've shared that with,
nobody else ever did it, 'cause it was too much work.
It's going to take an hour of your time to do that,
two hours of your time.
- The trick's to pick a short letter.
(laughter)
Ten times your finances.
Ten times your business.
Ten times your marketing.
Ten times your life.
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