The Wolves and the Mandolin: Celebrating Life's Privileges In A Harsh World

by Brandon Vallorani

  But what I saw was the opportunity to take what I had learned and apply it to a smaller nonprofit in order to make that organization grow to it’s full potential. The consultant meant well, but he mistook me for an administrator. At this point, I was just beginning to understand that I am an entrepreneur, a risk-taking builder, not a caution-centric maintainer.

  Starting and growing companies is what I love, and it works for me. I got to guide AiG’s Internet division from nothing to something big. Now I was given the chance to help AV grow by 600 percent over three years.

  Yes, AV was smaller, but getting to employ the techniques I had learned and developed at AiG helped us boost AV’s annual revenue from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million in a few short years.

  Seeing AV’s exploding growth was intoxicating, and I loved the opportunity to work for Gary DeMar and AV in particular because we promoted the philosophy that we could and should change the world into a better place. That message really attracted me because I’m an idealistic person who wants to enjoy the privileges of life and help others enjoy them with me. We should always strive to make ourselves and our world a better place. AV provided its constituents the resources and information to do just that.

  From radio programming and events to graphic design and e-mail marketing, I took everything I had learned up to this point and applied it to AV. We had to hire a full-time team of customer-service and warehouse personnel to handle the influx of orders we were receiving. One of our interns was responsible for putting all of our radio recordings online. We started running out of materials and couldn’t get them reprinted fast enough. We had to create a better web platform to handle all of the content and traffic, moving everything from the old system to the new one.

  But I’d learned more than how to build up a business; I had learned some big lessons on how to garner excellence from my employees through inspiration, as my father had always done, rather than through coercion or fear. I had learned that I needed to be more sensitive to the people around me. It wasn’t all about the end goals of the business. It was about the people I was organizing and whose abilities I was harnessing, which would make all of this good stuff happen.

  In hindsight, I should have spent more time applauding each and every employee at AiG for what that individual had done, as opposed to being the lone wolf going to board meetings where I got all the glory. I don’t think I mistreated employees, but I didn’t treat them the way I’d like to treat them now. Ideally, what I want and love to hear is, “Hey, I want to work for Brandon!”

  It’s amazing what happens when you start giving credit to your employees for the success of your company, how inspired they are to continue that success, and what a positive atmosphere it creates. As Ronald Reagan said, “There is no limit to the amount of good you can do if you don’t care who gets the credit.” Now that I really understand how important it is to give others credit, I enjoy praising my team’s work: “Look at what so-and-so has done in the marketing department. Look at what so-and-so has done in the web department. They’re doing a great job.” People will see the success you foster, and your reward for that success will be found in a happy, positive, and self-driven workforce.

  Another big takeaway from my experience is the importance of moving fast in marketing. When I had an idea, I would roll with it immediately. Two hours later, if the response wasn’t meeting my expectations, I’d tweak it, perhaps repackage the item with something else, and advertise it again.

  Especially today, digital marketing has changed the game so drastically that the ability to tweak quickly is an absolute necessity. For example, when you are paying per impression with Facebook and Google ads, you don’t want to waste your entire marketing budget if an ad is getting views but not engaging the clicks that can translate into revenue.

  The trick is being willing and able to turn on a dime rather than waiting around for results. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if I’d spent four hours creating an ad. If it wasn’t working, I would pull it and do something different. This approach has enabled me to sell more than $25 million in products online during my career. And once something worked, I didn’t stop with a single run! If something works once, find success with it again . . . and again if it works a third time!

  Recently, I decided to codify the successful approach I’d learned and retool it as the five tips for selling products that will work in nearly any business. Here they are:

  Brandon’s Five Tips for Selling Any Product

  Make it irresistible. Why does the customer need this product? You’ve felt that urge. But it doesn’t matter how good your product is if you don’t deliver on the basic need your product will fill—be it ease, comfort, or survival. People won’t buy it if they don’t see a need for it. Establishing that need starts with creating the story around the product, the story that engages the reader or listener and makes it impossible to resist the urge that they must have it.

  Establish the value. By now, prospective customers want this thing you’re selling, but do they want it more than the money in their pocket? You need to convince them that the product is worth more to them than it costs, that it’s a good trade of money for product. Businesspeople often make the mistake of thinking they have to set a certain price here because they need a certain margin. But your margins don’t matter if you don’t sell your goods. If the customer does not want to pay that price, you’re not going to sell anything and your margins are irrelevant. You have to convince prospects that their hard-earned money is not worth as much as your amazing product is to them.

  Set a limitation. You have to set a limitation of some kind, whether that’s limiting the quantity available or putting a time stamp on the price point. For example, “Only one hundred left in stock!” or “This price is only available for twenty-four hours!” Then, if it is an e-mail campaign, you send prospects reminder e-mails warning of even greater scarcity: “Only twenty-seven left in stock!” Otherwise, they’re likely to decide to get to it later and, in the end, forget about it altogether. They may decide that, after all, they can live without it. You must create the sense of urgency that demands immediate action. E-mail advertising is much more effective than print advertising for this step and one reason my business has seen great success. Buy now!

  Make an unbelievable offer. To channel The Godfather, you’ve got to make your customers an offer they can’t refuse. You’ve seen the television commercials selling some amazing gadget to make your life better. You’re already sold on it. It’s a terrific product, and the price is good. They’ve established that you have to call now because the price is going to rise, or they’re going to run out of these great gadgets. But what do they all do to push you over the edge and call that 1-800 number immediately? The announcer adds, “But wait! We’re going to give you a second gadget absolutely free.” That is that extra little bump that I call the unbelievable factor. It’s too good to be true. It has my warehouse manager freaking out because I’ve already got a killer ad, and now I’m going to make it a buy-one-get-one-free offer. “My gosh, we can’t do that! We won’t make any money! We’ll run out. This offer is too good!” You know you’ve got a killer ad when your inventory manager is freaking out. Sure, you’ve got smaller margins by throwing in an extra unit or giving free shipping. But you’ll make more money overall due to a much higher volume sold! Plus you’re reaching more people with your products and getting more people on your e-mail list. They’re sharing it with their friends because it’s such an amazing deal. You’ve got ambassadors running around promoting your brand and your products. Is it risky? Yes. Welcome to the world of the entrepreneur. You can’t make it big if you aren’t willing to risk it big.

  Build a big mailing list. Do you want to build your e-mail/mailing list fast? Here’s a great tip: give something away. Totally free. We once ran a campaign at American Vision for a completely free audio CD. All you had to do was ask for it. Yes, the production and shipping cost to send out those
CDs was several thousand dollars, and now I was just giving it away. What was I thinking? That audio CD got people interested in American Vision and all that we had to offer. Essentially, it was an advertisement cloaked as a free product. We tracked future sales that came in from the people who received that CD, and the residual revenue was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, far outweighing the costs. Notice how this tip combines all of the first four tips? It’s a shortcut, but you must be willing to give something away.

  I once had an employee who would walk into my office a little peeved to tell me, “Well, we sold out of this (item) again.” That’s kind of the point, right? I would hear it all the time: “You’re selling them too fast. Now we’re going to need to reprint them.” Well, that’s great! Now we can advertise: “Back in print due to popular demand. Have you ordered your copy yet? Order before we run out!”

  I’d get pushback, sometimes, from staff thinking we ought to raise our prices. Someone who hasn’t had experience in marketing might say, “You need to raise your price if it’s selling this fast,” and I’d have to explain there’s no magic that works like that. Believe me, if it did, I’d just double or triple my prices. But gouging the market doesn’t work, not long term, anyway.

  The market will tell you what you can sell your product for. My team has learned to find the sweet spot on each product. We learned the maximum a customer would pay for particular items. If we had gone above that product price, we’d have wound up with a full warehouse and an empty bank account. Margins are irrelevant if prospects aren’t interested in trading their cash for your product.

  Offering free shipping is a great example of adding value that will make your warehouse and accountants nervous. Customers look at shipping as a “nothing” that they’re paying for. Of course, many customers understand that they’re saving time and money by not having to drive to a store, search for that item, and stand in a checkout line, but not everyone sees that value. In my experience, many online customers view shipping costs as a tax. They push a button and get taxed to have that product appear on their doorstep a few days later.

  What we’ve found is that raising our item price slightly and giving free shipping will actually make it sell better than if we were to lower the price of the item and charge for shipping.

  We built a mailing list and an e-mail list at AV that was much larger than the organization had previously had. We built a brand-new website that featured new articles every day, something not done in the past. E-mail newsletters featuring the new content drove our web traffic up.

  Next came a better online store that used e-mail to drive sales higher and to increase the revenue coming into the organization. Our radio network grew to broadcasting on twenty-five stations. The publishing department exploded under my direction, going from one or two books released each year to a dozen new books per year. It was an exciting time, reminiscent of the pioneer days of steel and coal that my great-grandfather Luigi experienced. It seemed there was no end to the growth spurts.

  One particular book took AV to a whole new level. Ironically, it was also the success of this book that gave me the momentum to become fully self-employed.

  What I Know to Be True

  You cannot burn bridges. Even when things aren’t going the way I would like or staff aren’t living up to my expectations or situations are getting out of hand, I don’t let myself stoop down to the level of a growling, snarling animal. You must always be the bigger person, and this philosophy has been instrumental in the building of my companies. Ignore the wolves. Focus instead on what I call a mandolin moment.

  As Zig Ziglar said, “When you encourage others, you in the process are encouraged because you’re making a commitment and a difference in that person’s life.”2 Encouragement really does make a difference. I’ve learned time and again that encouraging, inspiring, and motivating my staff works far better in the long run than fear-based management.

  When I was the sword hand of an exacting boss, I was in the habit of meting out swift judgment. But when I attempt to run my businesses in that manner, it never works well for me, because that’s not who I am. I’m an encourager, an inspirer, and that approach has served me very well. It’s important to me to help people enjoy life’s privileges rather than be fearful of a life without them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Tipping Point

  The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

  Malcolm Gladwell, Author

  It was a dusty old book that was my tipping point, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, a thousand-page book published in 1864. What a title, right? This was, essentially, a historic encyclopedia made up of letters, quotes, essays, and other writings that underlined the Christian character of the founding of the United States. Drawing from multiple historical sources, it showed that counter to what the ACLU, among others, claims, this country was indeed founded by people who had a Christian ideal in mind.

  In a climate in which secularists were looking to strip inscriptions such as “In God We Trust” from our money, take prayer out of schools, ban statues of the Ten Commandments, and further secularize the country, this book was exactly what the religious right needed to prove that, yes, we were conceived and intended to thrive as a Christian nation.

  Gary, the president of AV, quoted the book in a radio debate on the subject of religious liberty with an ACLU attorney. The ACLU attorney was audibly nervous and upset about this book. “Where is this book? I’ve never heard about this book. I want to know about this.” It was as if Gary had just revealed a secret weapon.

  When Gary told her it was out of print, she was relieved. “Oh good. It’s out of print. It’s not a problem.” Gary’s immediate response was, “We’ll fix that. We’ve got to put it back in print.” We took that story and used it to create the need for the book. We ended up using a headline that read, “The ACLU’s Worst Nightmare.”

  When I arrived at AV in 2004, the organization was filling, perhaps, forty orders a week. When the book The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States came out with that big-ad push and marketing efforts, it exploded into more like forty orders an hour. Following my five tips for selling any product, AV sold a million dollars’ worth of the book in one year. Let me tell you how we did it and why it helped me launch my own business.

  We started out selling that book to AV’s own mailing list. That’s when an opportunity presented itself that would change the way we did business from then on. And it is what later launched my realization that I could make enough money selling products to start my own business.

  Our small nonprofit had arranged a national conference for our constituents in 2007. Our team was on its way out the door to North Carolina to staff this conference. A few hours before I was supposed to be on the road, I got a phone call from a salesman for Newsmax.com, the biggest player in those days. “Hey, Brandon, due to a cancellation, I’ve got an e-mail advertising slot available that’s going to be seen by eight hundred thousand people. It’s $8,000 if you want it.” I remember looking over at Gary’s son, James, who was our intern at the time, and saying, “What do you think? This ad that we’ve already created using the five tips for selling has been proven successful through our own mailing list. We’ve already sold more than any other resource.”

  At that point we were working with a much smaller mailing list, maybe one hundred thousand names. “How about if we take that same ad and ran it to eight hundred thousand people? Does the math work?”

  We did the math and decided, “Yes, it works.” It was a risk, no doubt about it. What if it fell flat and I had just put our payroll money on the line? Remember that in the nonprofit world every dollar you have is even more precious than in the for-profit world! But the math worked, so I gave the salesman the company credit-card number
over the phone, and we jumped in the car and drove to North Carolina.

  When I got to our conference location, I mentioned my decision to Gary. He was flabbergasted, especially because I’d gone ahead without running it by him first. I remember he held up his clamshell cell phone, pointed to it, and said, “That’s what these things are for.”

  At that point, for that company, $8,000 was a huge amount. But by the time we started setting up our laptops at the event, e-mails were already flooding in from this ad.

  We sold $40,000 worth of books in one day. That ad paid for itself four times over. We couldn’t even stay at the event we’d organized. Half of us had to go back home because the minimal staff back at the office couldn’t handle all the orders coming in. Believe me. It was an exciting problem to have. Gary was still shaking his head at me. He kept saying, “I can’t believe you spent $8,000 on an ad.” All I could say was, “But we made $40,000.” He forgave me, eventually. We’re even business partners now.

  Something in my gut told me that if a small list of one hundred thousand e-mails could do well with this product, it was worth the money and effort to send it out to a much bigger list despite the risk. Ultimately, this example is one reason why I believe that it’s sometimes better to ask for forgiveness than permission. But you have to be willing to face the consequences whichever way the dice fall.

  There were many business lessons packed into that one experience of renting that e-mail list. For starters, everything I’d learned up to this point was proven. All the pieces were in place: an inspired staff; a massive mailing list; an incredible product with a great story, at a great price, and in a limited quantity; and we threw in free shipping to make it an offer prospective customers couldn’t refuse. Liz and Ashley, our customer-service representatives at that time, couldn’t keep up with all the phone calls and e-mails. The entire web, radio, and customer-service staff had to drop everything and help the warehouse ship all the books out several times. We could hardly keep up with the demand.