Category Archive

There’s a vast initiation ritual, akin to fraternity hazing, in which entrepreneur wannabe’s are stripped of their wallets and ID’s, forced to drink pints of vodka while spinning on merry-go-rounds. They’re fed sandwiches made of spam and fantasy lunch meat, and stripped of their self-respect and self-confidence one dollar at a time, before finally being released to re-learn everything they thought they knew in the school of hard knocks.

The name of this ritual is “Business Opportunity.” Marketing insiders refer to it as “Bizop.”

ICSC is a trade organization for malls and retail stores, who hate the fact that customers pay sales tax at their stores but not online. They wanna change that. Here’s what they’re telling their members.

You might want to contact YOUR congressman and suggest the exact opposite:

This summer, Trisha came to my 4-Man Intensive from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Long ago she rented a house for $350 per month.

In Chicago that would fetch you a tin shack under a bridge – but up there in the frozen tundra it grants you 3 bedrooms and a nice yard. Gotta love small town America!

Not fancy, but the place keeps ’em warm when it’s 40 degrees below zero. She still lives in that house now.

She explained how a few years ago she was sorely tempted to buy a fabulous home…

United States Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
New debt: $1,650,000,000,000

Today Kevin Thompson, a long-time customer from the Pacific Northwest, posted a very gracious thank-you to me on my blog.

Not all the comments on this blog post are positive; some are sad and even poignant stories of business struggles and defeats, mixed in with some fantastic success stories.

I need to tell you about Kevin.

It was a beautiful Indian summer morning here in September when Al Qaeda decimated the World Trade Center in New York City – and the entire world was plunged into chaos. I remember where I was, you remember where you were.

What I remember is….

My father-in-law, Ron, is a 77 year old retired farmer in Southeastern Nebraska. He wears a John Deere hat, sports a farmer’s suntan and talks kinda slow.

He had this to say about the Big Bailout:

You might not be in manufacturing, but no matter what you do, you’re still in the business of changing something or someone.

And whether you process plastic pellets or sell exotic travel packages, the following is always true:

I’m sad to report, my dear friend, mentor and father figure Tom Hoobyar passed from our midst this past Sunday, 71 years young.

Tom and I first met at a Gary Halbert seminar ten years ago. If you’ve never been to a Halbert seminar, it’s kind of like a Dan Kennedy seminar except everyone is on LSD. Not literally, mind you, but figuratively. Gary attracted a wooly, wild, creative bunch and that event was no exception. Halbert fans were advertising astronauts.

Tom was a CEO of a hi-tech company, hoping to….

This morning I got this email from Susan Kruger. She’s from Detroit. She sells study skills curriculum to public schools (which are a troubled bunch these days):

~~~

Perry,

We have a very long sales cycle, so it will take a little while to get a full picture on all of our initiatives. However, these are some metrics I can tell you for sure:

* August 2011 = our best sales month…ever! 40% better than August 2010.