Ever bought groceries at ALDI? In Chicago it’s the cheapest grocery store you can find.

Everything in that place is processed to the max. Huge conveyor belts cough the stuff into cardboard boxes as fast as the High Fructose Corn Syrup can pour in.

You can buy a box of quasi-Pop-Tarts for 89 cents and a 2-liter bottle of looks-like-7-up for 59 cents.

Most expensive groceries in Chicago? Some natural health food store that’s even more expensive than Whole Foods.

A friend calls this “The real cost of real food.”

You don’t have to go to Whole Foods to get real food. You can get it at the Farmer’s market. Or you can grow it in your own garden.

But you are gonna go out of your way to get it, and if it’s served up as conveniently as the TV dinners and chicken pot pies, it’s gonna be expensive.

Cuz fresh blueberries don’t gush out of vats the way High Fructose Corn Syrup does.

Education is like that. Most people are buying theirs at ALDI. They wonder why it’s full of filler and High Fructose Corn Syrup.

You can grow your own if you want. You can do 100 split tests at your own expense and develop your own knowledge base from scratch.

You can troll the Internet for weeks and one marketing article in 100 will probably tell you a good deal of what you need to know right now…

IF you’re smart enough to know which one it is, and IF you have time to read the other 99 and purge them from your head.

So yes, you can go out into the woods and pick berries if you prefer. Or you can just buy the good stuff. And there’s not too many people who sell the good stuff.

(If I only had a dollar for every person who says, “After subscribing to 37 different gurus, you’re the only one who’s still standing…”)

How Much Should You Spend On Your Business Education?

I can tell you what I’ve done. When I was in Amway I spent about $100-200 more per month. When I was in the Dilbert Cube with a website on the side that made $300 a month, working in a “in the land of the blind the man with one eye gets to be king” industrial market, I spent about the same as I did on Amway.

The quantity of information I got was less but the quality was greater.

That was probably 2% of my total annual income.

After I started my company, the amount skyrocketed to well over $500 per month, which was something like 3-7% of my annual income.

That percentage has not changed very much for me.

What that means is that something like New Renaissance Club, which is a tremendous bargain at only $199/month, is a barebones minimum for self-respecting person who’s halfway serious about becoming a skilled marketer.

If you’re a guy making $75,000 per year (regardless of whether it’s from your business or from your job) then I totally get that things are “tight.”

If that’s the case, squeeze as much juice out of your membership as possible. Send the forum messages to a folder that you check regularly; follow threads and participate; pay attention to critiques and all kinds of other odd stuff that comes in over the transom.

You should be on the New Renaissance webinars and you should be looking at what other programs you can benefit from. (Few programs have gotten more jumping-up-and-down raves than 80/20 Productivity Express.)

A logical next step is something where you get some kind of coaching.

It’s one thing to get a general audience fire hose of information; it’s another thing to get custom tailored advice for your own situation.

Live events are also indispensable. And if you’re far beyond that “75,000 per year guy” as so many Planet Perry members are, you should ask yourself what will transport you to the next level.

If you’re making $300K a year, you shouldn’t flinch at spending $16K on your marketing education. That’s how you ensure that biz keeps growing. In some markets, that’s how you keep from going backwards.

I don’t make the rules. I just tell you what they are. I can sure promise you that the money you invest in Roundtable takes you light years farther than all the free webinars in the world.

So many people are swinging that axe incredibly hard. They’re good hearted folks, but you can only swing an axe about 14 hours a day before you collapse from exhaustion.

They don’t know that raising their self-investment from 2% to 6% could make their axe four times as sharp and they could be working four hours a day instead of 14.

Perry Marshall

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.