by Jeff Walker
The more time you spend in your genius zone, the better for you, your business, your clients . . . and the world.
Your Most Scarce Resource
Your most scarce resource is focus.
The world will conspire to distract you. Your phone, email, text messages, instant messenger, social media, and more will all pull you away from what you should be doing.
Many people wake up and instantly look at their phone. They check messages, check email, check various social media. That’s a huge mistake—the only thing that’s waiting in your phone is someone else’s agenda. If you check your phone or your email right away in the morning, you’ve lost control of your agenda. There will be emails or messages waiting for you to respond, and once you start responding you’ve lost control of your day.
You should start the day by focusing on your highest-value activities before you get caught up in other people’s agendas for you. What are your highest-value activities? The ones that are in your genius zone or a Unique Ability®.
Clients You Love
I mentioned this in the last chapter, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it, but having great clients whom you love working with and serving is a fantastic shortcut to loving your life.
I frequently hear people complain about their clients—but the thing is, they’re the person who picked those clients.
Remember, if you want different clients, then change your business, change your product, change your messaging, change your marketing. You’re the one attracting those clients, and making the decision to work with them . . . so pick great ones.
My highest-level clients are the people in my Platinum Mastermind group, and I love spending time with them. It’s a small group that I meet with several times a year, and space in the group is severely limited. To get into Platinum, members go through a rigorous application process. My team and I screen for people who fit the group culture and who I really want to spend time with. Every time I leave one of those meetings I’m more energized than I was at the beginning of the meeting. In fact, I try to set up my schedule so I always have a Platinum meeting directly before I lead one of my large workshops, because I know the meeting will leave me on fire with energy as I head into the big workshop. As I type this, we’re in our fourth year with Platinum, and many of the members have been with me since the beginning.
Of course, that’s just one example—the larger point is this: You control who your clients are. You do that through your market selection, offer selection, and marketing.
Don’t compromise on this. Attracting new and better clients is what Product Launch Formula is all about. Now go get the clients you want.
You Can’t Get There Alone
When I started out, I had this fantasy that I could build my business all by myself.
I figured my life would be a lot simpler that way, and since it was a virtual business with a virtual product, I figured I could really scale up the business without creating a team.
In fact, I didn’t hire anyone or use any contractors for the first 10 years I was in business. That was a big mistake, and it ended up holding me back. I now see that was about as mature as a two-year-old saying, “I can do it all by myself!”
The reality is that you can’t build anything great by yourself. And if you even try, then you’re going to be spending huge chunks of time working outside your genius zone.
Once you start building a team, your life will get more complicated. That’s inevitable—any time humans are involved, things get more complicated. You will have to learn to be a leader for your team (if you don’t already have that skill). And in many ways, you will have to answer to your team.
One thing that will make this process a lot easier is if you stick to a policy that my friend Eben Pagan calls “stars only.” In other words, you want to hire only stars—the people who are in the top 10% of any skill set. In fact, you should probably take this further and hire only those people who are in the top 1% of any skill set.
Stars will make your life easier. They will be self-motivated. They will require less supervision and training. They will have less drama in their life. If they’re good at their skill set, but they’ve got a lot of drama, then they’re not stars.
The Magic Word
As you become more successful, there’s one word that will become more important than any other. That word is “no.”
As Warren Buffett said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
In Chapter 12 I said that the idea of “opportunity cost” is the most important consideration in business. That’s what we’re really talking about here, but on a more personal level. As you become more successful, build more personal power, and grow into the role of leader, other people will find you more attractive. It can’t help but happen—it’s automatic. There’s a huge vacuum of leadership in the world right now, and people are looking for leaders to plug into and follow.
The next step is that more people and more deals start to pop up in your life. Many of the opportunities will be very attractive and would have impressed you if you’d had those same opportunities earlier in your life.
However, you must be very careful about what you say “yes” to. You have to become increasingly more selective. You need to get better at saying no. Anything that doesn’t advance you toward your future and your bigger vision for yourself is something that will take you off your path.
I’m not saying you can’t be a friend. I’m not saying you have to abandon the people and things that got you where you are. And I’m certainly not saying you can’t lend a helping hand. You just have to be very careful of your time and your energy. Every new opportunity you say “yes” to closes the door on another opportunity.
Drinking the Abundance Juice
When I first started publishing my free investing newsletter in 1996, there was another web site publishing a very similar newsletter. However, even though we targeted the same niche, our sites were very different. They charged for their newsletter; mine was free. They had a much more professional-looking site; mine was very amateurish. In fact, back then I couldn’t even afford to buy a domain name or web site hosting, so my site was hosted on a free server.
That competing site was published by a guy named Frank Collar. I would often look at his site and wander through all the pages. It was my ultimate dream to have a professional site like that and publish a paid newsletter like he did. But I didn’t know how I would get there. I didn’t know any of the tech stuff required and I didn’t have money to hire the people who did. And I didn’t know how to sell stuff. Most important, I didn’t have the confidence to ask people to buy my stuff.
In any case, one day I got an email from Frank. He asked me how I put together some of the stock market charts on my web site. That email gave me a shock. I was surprised that Frank even knew who I was or that my site even existed, so on one level I was flattered.
On another level, Frank was a direct competitor. It was like he was Coke and I was Pepsi (although in reality, I was more like some generic cola). We were in the EXACT same business. And those charts on my site were the only thing that was pulling in traffic to my site. These days, it’s a simple thing to post an image like a stock chart to a web site, but it was a different world back then. I’d spent the better part of a day and more cash than I could afford figuring out how to do it. I had invested time, effort, and hard-earned money to create those charts on my web site, and I saw them as my one major asset in my business.
So as I looked at that email from Frank, I wondered what to do. Should I give him my trade secret? Should I turn him down? Or should I just ignore his email?
In the end, I decided I might as well help him out. I knew that if I had figured it out, he would certainly be able to. And why put him through the day of tedious trial-and-error that I went through to learn how to do it?
So I took 20 minutes and I typed up a c
omplete set of instructions for how I created and posted my charts, and I sent the email off to Frank.
Within just a few minutes I got an email back from Frank thanking me. He went on to tell me that he had many years of newsletter publishing experience in the offline world, and he had done a lot of testing of his online newsletter. He shared a lot of great information about some of those tests—including some critical pricing tests. And he went on to tell me that if I ever wanted to publish a paid newsletter, then he would be happy to help me out with his knowledge and experience.
In that moment, when I read that email, my life changed.
I realized that we were operating in a brave new world, where in many (most?) cases, cooperation was more important than competition. Years later, I would coin the term “Abundance Juice” to describe this phenomenon.
Simply put, you have the choice between an abundance-based mindset and a scarcity-based mindset. Choose wisely, because your choice will impact every area of your life. In my experience if you pick the abundance mindset, there’s a lot more joy, fulfillment, and . . . well, abundance.
A few months later Frank did indeed help me launch my paid newsletter. His advice and experience gave me the confidence to create that newsletter, and it became a huge success for me. (That was the $34,000 launch I told you about in Chapter 1.) Then a couple of years later, when he was tired of publishing his newsletter, Frank actually GAVE me his list of paying subscribers. I took over servicing his subscribers and made a lot of money doing so. All because I had helped him out with a simple favor. All because I had shared the Abundance Juice with him.
One of my core beliefs is that you will be far happier if you drink the Abundance Juice and adopt the abundance mindset. And in addition to being happier, your business will grow faster and larger, you will attract better clients and partners, and you’ll have a much bigger positive impact on the world.
So I invite you . . . go ahead, drink the Abundance Juice.
A Life Well Lived
In my opinion, there is no other business building system with more amazing success stories in the last decade than Product Launch Formula. I have walked you through the entire formula in the pages of this book. In other words, I’ve given you the tool to create your business.
But, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. I’ve given you a lot of power.
But make no mistake—building a successful business will not automatically lead to a happy and fulfilled life. There’s plenty of miserable entrepreneurs out there. The trick is to create a business AND have a great life. To get there, you need to be intentional with the business you build and the life you create. It doesn’t happen by accident.
Dancing Your Way around the World
Sebastien Night was born in French-speaking Guadalupe in the Caribbean, and he now lives in France. He first went through my training in 2010. Since then he’s been using PLF to build his business. Initially he was in the French “dating advice” market, where he taught shy men how to approach women and ask for a date. Eventually, Sebastien transitioned to teaching French-speaking people how to build their online businesses, and he’s now known as “the French Marketer.” Sebastien has done dozens of launches, and he’s built up a serious business. In fact, he’s one of the most prominent online publishers in the French-speaking world.
As with any entrepreneur, he’s put in a lot of work to get to where he’s at. But he’s also created an incredible lifestyle. A high point so far is that he was able to fulfill two lifelong dreams of his fiancée, Cecile—dancing and traveling around the world.
Last year Sebastien took a six-month trip around the world with Cecile, and they danced the entire way. They visited Australia, Brazil, India, Argentina, South Africa, Thailand, Durango, and New York. While they were in India, Sebastien proposed to Cecile—and she said yes!
During the trip Sebastien worked one day per week. Like mine, his business is completely virtual, so he could work anywhere in the world. The entire trip was financed by one of his launches, and he’s also going to be paying for two great weddings (same bride for both, but one in France and one in Guadalupe).
The thing is, if you pull Sebastien aside, he’ll tell you that the most exciting part is that he has friends and family who have seen his success, and they’re now following his example and creating their own businesses.
(To see my Case Study with Sebastien, as well as the video of his round-the-world trip with Cecile, go to http://thelaunchbook.com/sebastien.)
It’s Your Time to Launch
Chapter 14
So that’s the Product Launch Formula.
Now it’s your turn. The formula has been proven thousands of times over. All of my personal success has been built by doing exactly what I taught you in this book. I’ve built several businesses now, and every one of them was based on the Product Launch Formula. In fact, I launched the latest one just a few weeks ago, and it got off to another roaring start, thanks to the very strategies I’ve laid out here.
What’s more important is that this is the exact formula my clients have used to generate more than $500 million in sales. That’s a half-billion dollars in success stories. They’ve done it in nearly every market or niche you can think of, with products that range from cage fighting to meditation workshops to tax preparation to marching band accessories.
Death of Launches
Back when I first published PLF in 2005, the online marketing community was still a relatively small one. Most of the big players knew each other. And it took only a few months until some people started talking about the “death of launches.” That was the exact phrase used in a major white paper that came out less than a year after I released PLF. Some of those “in the know” predicted that the PLF model was so powerful, it would collapse under its own weight. Conventional wisdom said that once everyone in the marketplace had seen a launch or two, the whole launch idea would stop working. As the old quote goes, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
The truth is, the launches have only gotten bigger and better since then. A more apt quote would be “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
So what happened?
Tactics Come and Go, Strategy Is Forever
Military (and business) leaders nearly worship The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The book is thousands of years old, but that doesn’t stop every new generation of leaders from reading it. That’s because the book is about strategy, not tactics. And strategy never goes out of style.
The reason PLF keeps working is that it’s based in strategy. I teach plenty of tactics as part of the formula, but those tactics are always used to serve the overall PLF strategy. And frankly, tactics come and go. For example, when I first started doing launches, streaming video didn’t exist. For that matter, blogs didn’t exist. Nor did social media or webinars. But now we use all those tools in our launches.
Tools change, tactics change. Strategy endures.
Creating a close connection with your prospect will never go out of style. Building up the anticipation for an event will never go out of style. Mental triggers such as social proof, authority, community, and reciprocity will never go out of style. Building influence by delivering massive value before you ask for the sale will never go out of style. The exact way you actually deploy those things has changed and will continue to change. But the PLF strategy keeps working.
Turn Your Computer into a Money Machine
Sometime around 1994—I don’t recall the exact date—I received an advertisement for a product called “Turn Your Computer Into a Money Machine.” Now, I’ll admit that’s a pretty cheesy name, but it caught my attention enough so that I opened it up and started reading. I suppose I was in the perfect target market for the ad at the time—this was back when I was in my stay-at-home dad phase. We were struggling to make ends meet, and I really needed any kind of a money machine I could get.
The ad arrived via email, and it was really long—it must have been 10 pages
or more. After I read it through once, I felt like I needed to read it again, so I printed it out on my dot matrix printer. Because that printer was slow and the ad was so long, it seemed to take forever to print.
Over the next week I read that ad over and over. It talked about creating “special reports” and selling them online. It talked about the wonders of having a publishing business and selling direct to consumers.
The idea seemed nearly unbelievable to me. However, the publishing business had been around for centuries, so I figured it had to be profitable. And I knew of small, independent publishers who seemed to be making money. For example, when I looked for books on some of my interests like whitewater kayaking and mountain biking, all the popular ones came from small publishers who were grassroots, mom-and-pop businesses.
On the other hand, I had never created or published anything in my life. And even more frightening was the very idea of selling. I had no experience in sales. In fact, if I listed the absolute most unlikely possible career choices for myself, sales would probably be at the top of the list.
And there was another big problem—”Turn Your Computer Into a Money Machine” cost $99.50. At that time we were supporting a family of four on Mary’s lone paycheck from her government-funded job. When I put together a budget for our family, we had a little more than $400 left as disposable income per year. Spending nearly a quarter of our yearly “spending money” on something like this felt like a risky proposition.
But that ad made so much sense. The entire idea made so much sense. And I was desperate for a change. I spent a full week reading through that ad again and again. Every night I would lie in bed thinking about it. I would wonder if it could possibly work for me. What could I publish about? Would I actually follow through and do it? Would I be able to sell anything? Or would it be another failure in my life?