Detox, Declutter Expert Perry Marshall Joins Us On The Steve Jobs Inspired Join Up Dots Podcast
To subscribe to the podcast, please use the links below:
Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
Click Here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes feed)
If you like the show, we would be so grateful if would consider leaving the show a review in iTunes as well as Stitcher Radio. A couple minutes of your time can help the show immensely! Thank YOU!
How To Detox Your Biz Expert Perry Marshall
Detox business expert Perry Marshall is my guest today for the second time, on the Steve Jobs inspired Join Up Dots free podcast interview.
He is an a man who Entrepreneur Magazine states, “This guy is the #1 author and world’s most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising.
But that was years ago, one thing for sure is Perry loves nothing more than to tackle new projects and author new books.
In fact the last time he was on the show he was discussing the works of Charles Darwin and how they also applied to business.
His newest book, Detox, Declutter, Dominate: How to Excel by Elimination (co-authored with Robert Skrob) reveals how readers can grow their business 4X faster by eliminating 80% of wasted effort.
Step 1: Use renaissance time to gain discernment and clarity. Perry shares how to establish mindfulness habits to maximize your creative and productive space
Step 2: Make your business 2x more profitable with 80/20 focus. How to stop “jumping over dollars to get the quarters” and optimize your efficiency!
Step 3: Managing your time is all about subtraction, not doing more! Step 3 teaches you how to Earn $1,000 per hour at least one hour per day with 80/20 time.
Step 4: Create an irresistible product that’s easy to use by simplifying. Learn how to keep it simple for the customer in order to create a product that is valuable and not easily replicable.
Step 5: You’re not doing yourself any favors by trying to be cheaper and better in a saturated market.
The Big Steps To Business Detox Success
The Star Principle reveals why 80% of the profit comes from 20% of companies in the stock market. Use the Star Principle to carve out a niche where you’re number one!
Step 6: Build an impenetrable moat around your business. Perry shares sure-fire ways to insulate your business from competition.
Step 7: There are two kinds of entrepreneurs: business builders and artistic entrepreneurs.
If you’re an artist but work like a business builder, you will burn out your inner artist.
Freedom is a lifestyle choice, and step 7 will show you how to enjoy the freedom to create and reinvent every single day.
So how can someone starting in business today bring such clarity into their business and life, when most people simply makes things up as they go a long.
And out of the Seven steps, which was the one that he actually thought “you know I could actually be a little bit better at this one myself”
Well lets find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr Perry Marshall.
Show Highlights
During the show we discussed such weighty topics with Perry Marshall such as:
Perry shares the discussion he had with his boss, which shifted his business massively in the right clear and focused direction.
Why you should always ask for someone to prove themselves by putting their own money into the game first.
Why without realising it people are wearing the busy badge when its the last thing they should be wearing.
and lastly….
Perry tells an amazing story of how one mans profits simply went through the roof by simplifying everything he could.
Perry Marshall Books
How To Connect With Perry Marshall
Return To The Top Of Detox, Declutter, Dominate: How To Excel by Elimination
You can also check our extensive podcast archive by clicking here– enjoy
Full Transcription Of Detox Expert Perry Marshall Interview
Intro [0:00]
Life shouldn’t be hard life should be a fun filled adventure every day. So now start joining up dots tap into your talents, your skills, your God given gifts and tell your boss, you don’t deserve me. I’m out of here. It’s time for you to smash that alarm clock. And start getting the dream business and life you will of course, are dreaming God. Let’s join your host, David Ralph from the back of his garden in the UK, or wherever he might be today with another jam packed episode of the number one hit podcast. Join Up Dots.
David Ralph [0:43]
Good morning. Good morning. It’s a great day for the world and it’s a great day to be alive. Welcome to Join Up Dots. If you’ve never listened to the show before where the bloody hell have you been? I’ve been I’ve been doing this for years. And if you do, listen, and you listen all the time, thank you very much. Drop us a line. Tell us where you listen, except for the guy who told me. He listens on the toilet every morning, which is too much information. Well, today’s guest is a guest who’s coming on the show for the second time. And he’s a main woohoo Entrepreneur Magazine once stated, this guy is the number one author and world’s most quoted consultant on Google advertising. But how is years ago. And one thing for sure is this guy loves nothing more than to tackle new projects and offer new books now. In fact, the last time he was on the show, he was discussing the works of Charles Darwin and how they also applied to business his newest book, detox declutter dominate, and how to excel by elimination, co authored with Robert scrub reveals how readers can grow their business four times faster by eliminating 80% of wasted effort. There are seven steps from use renascence time to gain discernment and clarity to create an irresistible product that’s easy to use by simplifying. And then of course, the star principle, which we will talk about on the show. So with all these steps, how can someone starting in business today bring such clarity in their business and life when most people simply make things up as they go along? And out of the seven steps, which we will talk about, which was the one that you actually thought, hang on, you know, I could actually be a little better at this one myself. Well, let’s find out as we bring onto the show to start joining up dots with the one and only Mr. Perry Marshall.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [2:32]
Good to see you, David. It’s good to be here again.
David Ralph [2:36]
Yeah, it’s lovely to have you here. Are you feeling as sexy as last time, and in Join Up Dots world? The word sexy just means that you can tackle anything you feel that life can just bounce off you. You feel good. You’ve got that inner power. Do you feel sexy Perry?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [2:52]
I’m so sexy. I’m going to have nine babies in the next nine months.
David Ralph [2:56]
And the kid cannot be the mother. Oh, should I be the father? I don’t know, which is the best way to go for that. What would be the best should not be the giver or receiver Perry
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [3:06]
agender has gotten really confused lately in the modern world. So I guess you know, men are having babies. And so you can you can be the receiver today. How’s that
David Ralph [3:18]
I will be the receiver for you, Perry and I don’t think I’ve ever said that to another man in 51 years of being on this planet. But um, but for you, I will do that. So let’s get straight into it. Because the last time he was on the show, he was talking about Charles Darwin and how it applies to business, which was a really interesting discussion because it was so different from other concepts. Now what you’ve gone into now is something that is, you know, it’s out there a lot the 8020 focus, right, the parados principle, what was it about this one that made you think Hang on, I can bring it something different to this, this, this isn’t something that’s just been seen and done, rinse and repeat time? I can bring Perry Marshall into it.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [4:01]
Well, five years ago, my In fact, it was this time of year and it was a day kind of like now like it’s snowing outside. And I was talking on the phone and I look through the window of my office door. And the President of my company has suddenly appeared in the next room. And that was very strange because he lives in Nebraska, which is 500 miles away. So he was unannounced. At my house
David Ralph [4:29]
he’s done something bad Perry Did you did you think something bad?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [4:35]
I was pretty sure I had done something bad. I was like this doesn’t seem good. And so I got off the phone. I’m like Brian Perry. What brings you here on this snowy February days, and he sounds very Undertaker she goes Perry. We need to talk the revenues and expenses. are out of balance, and we need to be doing something about this. And in thus ensued about an eight hour conversation, I think he showed up at three in the afternoon, and we were still talking at 11 at night. And we kind of had this big argument about Brian, uh, you don’t understand, well, you know, we’re gonna do this cool thing and, and this other cool thing, and we, you know, I get this project, I got that project, and, you know, these are going to be so awesome. And he’s like, well, we have too many projects, and we have too many employees, and we have too many expenses. And, you know, we’re gonna smack into a wall if we don’t fix this. And so we arm wrestled for the rest of the day. And basically, I won. I would
David Ralph [5:51]
expect nothing other than that, to be honest, Perry.
Unknown Speaker [5:56]
Well,
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [5:58]
three months later, it was clear that I hadn’t really won and it was clear that he had been right in
David Ralph [6:03]
track Perry don’t backtrack. Once you once you get to that point that you’ve won. Draw that sand in that line in the sand, even if it’s on carpet, or whatever, wherever you do mark a pen. Make sure that you don’t backtrack you. Are you married Perry? Have you realised this is how we have to operate as men?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [6:24]
Yeah. Yes, I’ve been married for 31 years. Yes. So you know, retrenching and redoubling your efforts. And so I’ve been redoubling my efforts for the last three months. And it hadn’t been working very well, three months later. And now I was three months further into something I should have fixed three months ago. And in what ensued was the most stressful summer of my business life. When we spent the entire summer trimming, shaving, trimming, cutting, laying off trimming, shaving, cutting. And finally, probably around September, the ship started to write itself. And are
David Ralph [7:16]
you talking about business or your personal grooming, you weren’t sitting opposite each other like, like monkeys? plucking and grooming and trimming? That’s a horrible
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [7:26]
image. No, no, it was not that thing where baboons, you know, pull lice out at each other’s hair, it was the business version. And it really was not pleasant. But when I got to the end of it, first of all, it had been drilled into my brain, how much unnecessary excess superfluous stuff had accumulated over, I don’t know, probably 15 years of running a business, and how many things we were doing that we didn’t really need to be doing, how many things we were doing, that weren’t really contributing to the bottom line, and how much complexity I had created around myself. And when it was all done, it was like, Man, this ship is a whole lot easier to steer with all without all that extra cargo. And that is where this book originally came from. It was a total mindset shift. Because, you know, I think a lot of people that, you know, you and I would associate with, we have an abundance mentality. And, you know, we believe in alchemy, and we believe in turning lead into gold or turning sand into Pentium chips. And that’s all great. But there’s a mentality that often comes with that, which is, the solution to every problem is to just to sell more, or add another thing, or invent another product, or, you know, promote some new deal. And we’re always adding, adding, adding and the thing that I learned, and it took a while to drill it into my thick head, it was actually the most elegant thing you can do is subtract. And so we I call that multiply by subtracting. And the subtitle of the book is how to excel by elimination. And it’s a 36 page book by the way, you know, most most books are 200 pages. This is a stripped down, subtracted version of subtracting.
David Ralph [9:42]
I’m gonna write a book like this called How to pull out quickly and easily do you think Excel? Do you think in on the same sort of level?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [9:52]
Well, you know, most things are a lot easier to get into then get out of and that’s kind All right.
David Ralph [10:02]
Yeah, let me jump into that because that is a key point because I am actually missed the minimal. If you look at my podcasting setup, people say to me really is that is that how you podcast? And everything I do in my business is very much based on, am I getting results for it? And I’ll give you a little story that this week, I’ve been trying to recruit somebody not for my business, but another business that I’m working with at the moment, and for to manage the Instagram platform. And that’s just it to manage the Instagram. And everybody’s saying, Oh, yes, we will manage the social media. And when I say to them, right, it’s going to be based on results. We want to have X amount of followers increase, we want this we want, but they backtrack. And I think, I think that is a problem where everybody says that they can do something or they need something. But actually, people don’t actually look at the results that they’re going to gain. By buying the extra platform, buying back calls, getting that VA and all these kinds of things that creep up on you. It’s all gonna be results based, isn’t it? If you’re not getting the results being that that’s the first thing to look at, but get rid of it?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [11:16]
Well, your Instagram experiences Exhibit A of the bane of advertising since the beginning of time. Everybody would love to buy you some impressions and get you some exposure and get your name out there. But if if you’re going to insist on results, you’re immediately eliminating 90% of the players like 99,
David Ralph [11:39]
I would say I would say 990 9.9%. And the one that’s does say yes, probably doesn’t speak English and doesn’t know what I’m asking.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [11:52]
Well, and well, I’ve lived this. I mean, I wrote the book on Google and Facebook advertising. And you know what, just a tip. Because there’s lots of people who struggle with this. And like, you got to do something, you got to have some exposure you got you got to get some advertising going. So here’s a rule, this will, this will almost always eliminate the bad people is you insist if a person is going to do advertising for you, you stipulate, you say you have to prove to me that you bought traffic and converted that traffic into dollars. And you have to show me that you did it on your own dime with your own money. And that will eliminate somewhere between 97 and 99%. Of all ad agencies. Yeah, most people have never done that. There’s something about using your own money to promote and advertise something and having to get the result back. It warns you really good.
David Ralph [13:03]
Yeah, I think that is spot on. And I think that bit of advice will get rid of the last naught point naught naught 1% of people. And that’s a clear path again, you know, we’ve got nothing. So with that kind of concept about less is more and results driven driven is the key focus on a business, let’s start looking at your book, because there’s some interesting stuff. I’m sure it’s all interesting. And I like the fact that it’s 36 pages, you know, you can literally sit there, you know, in in the morning, having your breakfast and you’ve done it ready for the day. And then read it again the next day and read it again the next day. So it becomes your thing. So let’s look at step one, use renascence time to gain discernment and clarity, parishes and that shows you how to establish mindfulness habits to maximise your creative and productive space. Now, when I saw this come through, first of all, the thing that I liked out of all of that was space. Because with space, you’ve got the ability to grow, you grow into the space, if you squeeze yourself into a little box and wear a GIMP outfit, you’re going to be in that little box wearing a GIMP outfit for a long, long time. But you’ve got a face, every goldfish grows to the size that the bowl, but in business, we tried to sort of suppress ourselves. So tell us about that. renascence time warm and productive space.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [14:26]
So most people are conditioned by every job they’ve ever had, by school by everything to look busy. And most people feel guilty if they don’t look busy. And being busy is a status symbol. It’s actually kind of a passive aggressive status symbol like, David, I’d love to talk to you but I’m just too busy. Right? That’s like a subtle way of saying that I’m, I’m better than you. Okay, well, so so people are without even realising. It are just filling their lives with sawdust. Whereas space is extremely important in and in social media. What social media has done is it’s filled up every last 10 seconds of space. Like while I’m writing an elevator, and it’s not going to get there for 45 seconds here. Let me check my cell phone and see if there’s some new thing on Twitter. Okay,
David Ralph [15:30]
do you see like weights? Have you seen my kids? Well, I’ve seen mine. I think I went to the toilet, they go into the toilet with their devices. And I say, just leave them outside. And they go, Oh, no, no, that’s the one place that you’ve got something to do, you should be really busy. And you know, you don’t need to fill up the time, but I still have to fill up every second.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [15:54]
That’s right. So the worst possible way to start your day is you wake up, you reach over to the nightstand, and you pull a device into your bed and you start the death scroll. That is the worst way to start your day. Renaissance time says, you do not go on Facebook, you do not go on Twitter, you don’t go into your email, you don’t start texting people. You don’t interact with anybody electronically at all. You roll out of bed, get your shower, get your cup of tea, and sit down with a notebook. And think and write, pray, meditate mindfulness, gratitude, and and figure out your day, and get yourself sorted out. And if you had a great idea in the shower, write down the idea. If you’ve got a big day ahead of you look at your day. Think about oh, you know, I had dinner with my daughter last night, it was really great. And you can write that down. And I’m not real dogmatic about exactly what you do. But the important part is it’s your clear, open spiritual space, where you listen to not everybody else in the world. You listen to yourself, you listen to God, you listen to the muse, at least 20 minutes and your your look busy programming will, will just fight against this and your haptic addictive cell phone media. mentality will try to drive like no, like, you’ve got to jump up and go do something you need to you need to go interact with something you need to reply to some email you need to check in. I’m sure there’s like a return or a chargeback or something, right and no, like no, like, get yourself sorted out. That’s Renaissance time. And I am totally serious about this. I haven’t missed a day, in seven and a half years, this is the best habit I have ever cultivated,
David Ralph [18:12]
is I don’t look at emails I don’t Well, I don’t look at social media at all. It doesn’t interest me. But I’ll be honest, there’s a big hole in my life at the moment, where every morning I would reach out for my tablet or my kids have given me and I would look at what kind of madness Donald Trump was creating. And I would sit there I’m so happy. And now it’s like America’s closed, nothing’s going on. And I don’t know what to build a time up with. So I just lay there looking out the window at the clouds. So
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [18:45]
I have to say as an American. When I go to Europe, and Donald Trump is on the news, I think to myself, don’t you guys have anything better to do than listen to us?
Unknown Speaker [19:04]
We don’t like
Unknown Speaker [19:05]
Oh, no word.
David Ralph [19:07]
It’s like, you know, when the strange person that you kind of laugh at behind their back, you know, we’re across the water, we clean the giggle and we kind of like it as well, you know, but no, I do. I do sort of miss that. So, so this is a good stepping. So people get up in the morning, and they shower, and they make notes and they just kind of they breeze into the day instead of jumping out of bed thinking bang, I’ve got to get going. Okay, now with that. How does that fit in with personal energy because one of the things I’m really big on in Join Up Dots is trying to express to people that they don’t get success unless they look after themselves. And they’ve I was the poster boy for destroying myself. And now I’ve come 360 which I’ve never understood that phrase because doesn’t that put me back in a bad place. I was shouldn’t be going 180 I don’t understand what that is. But anyway, I’m now totally, you know, I will nap all the time. I’m like, an 80 year old cat, that just literally, if you find a fence panel, I’ll ever sleep on it. So the personal energy, how do we build that in as well as building what we need to do for our business.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [20:21]
But most people don’t have any clear idea of how they, personally, ideally get the most performance out of themselves. Okay, we’ve been so like, give you an example, we homeschooled most of our kids, for most of their education. And so now if you go to normal school, then you’re dragging kids out of bed at 630 or seven o’clock in the morning. And then they’re they’re going to get on school bus or good getting them to carpool and go to school. That is not how we raised our kids. In fact, everything I’m about to tell you is sort of representative of how I run my business. What what we did with our kids was, you get up when your body is done sleeping, and then you get your schoolwork done. And then you can go play. And so they would typically wake up around eight or nine or 10, or whenever they woke, and this is every day.
David Ralph [21:33]
He went a penny they weren’t teenagers, were they because that would go out the window totally.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [21:38]
Well, anywhere from age five to age 18. And, and typically the teenagers asleep even later, my 16 year old now has weird hours. But like, I don’t care what hours he does, as long as he does his stuff. And so it usually takes them about two or three hours to do their schoolwork. It does not take six hours to get an education, or do schoolwork, or do homework. If there’s no need. There’s, there’s so much that goes on in a classroom at a school. That’s just filler. Okay, and then if our kids want to stay up until two o’clock in the morning, fine, like whatever, as long as long as you’re not watching stuff on TV that we don’t want you watch, I don’t really care what you’re doing. And oh Perry Perry
David Ralph [22:27]
out how naive are you? And they they’re waiting until dad snoring away. And then some x rated videos on very softly with their headphones, they’re going to be watching stuff that you don’t want them to watch.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [22:41]
Well, we’re not totally ignorant, but we have ways of figuring out what’s going on. Right. So. So we, you know, we, I believe in, in maintaining a trust relationship with your kids in an honesty with your kids rather than a dictatorial kind of thing. But anyway, I mean, I’m not really here to get into raising kids so much. The point is, is that is that so like teenagers, teenagers function better when you don’t drag him out of bed at 630 in the morning. There’s there’s nothing inherently virtuous about dragging out of bed at 630 in the morning, what matters is did you do what you’re supposed to do? Did you learn what you’re supposed to learn, they actually learn more. The way that I’m describing, I’ll put my kids up against anybody, no matter what school they went to. And this is this is true of our work, too. And most adults, most people I know, here’s the truth about your work. Most people are going to do about three really good quality hours of thinking and producing and, like moving the needle. Yeah, in a day. Yeah. Okay. And and in your you’re deluding yourself, if you think that you’re gonna have 10 or 12 hours of just super productivity, and then it’s all 100% No, it’s not, you start to lose some of your edge. Most people, you know, around 11 or 12, or certainly by after lunch, they’re no longer in their best space. And so you need to arrange your day so that you’re doing the very most forward thinking, productive, best use of your time in the morning when you’re fresh after your Renaissance time. And you’re not reacting to the rest of the world or putting out fires until you’re past your peak performance. And so that pushes for most people that’s going to push email, social media, media phone calls, fires, crises and to the afternoon. And, and but most people do the exact opposite the opposite, they start their day with a crisis. And they eat breakfast watching CNN, they start their day with a crisis, they don’t have any personal reflection time, they don’t have any time to think. And then what they do, it’s kind of a funny thing. They save their thinking time, they’re reflecting time. And they’re like forward progress time to like 430 in the afternoon, when they’re totally beats. Or even, or they wait until 10 o’clock at night. And you know, they’re tired. And well, I don’t know, let’s think about how we should plan the rest of the week, that’s a terrible time to plan the rest of your week. So most people have this completely backwards, you can’t imagine how it will change your productivity and your effectiveness,
David Ralph [25:59]
I think I think we can imagine because I think everyone can imagine, I think everybody knows that, don’t they, you know, when when we have, they should be at work by eight o’clock, I used to have to be at work by eight o’clock, the other side of the City of London. And I used to have to leave our past five in the morning to get there by eight. And all the time, I used to think this isn’t conducive to lifestyle. And I used to get home about midnight and four hours later was doing it again, you know, it was just shocking all the way through. And so I think everybody knows about the work life balance applies. And of course, most of them are getting it now because of the pandemic, which is a different subject. Now. Okay, so we’ve really hit home on that one. So we’ve got to look after sales, we’ve got to keep ourselves breathing space and space to grow into the business. Now, I’m not going to do all of these, but this one really interested me, okay, step two, make your business two times more profitable with at 20 focus, how to stop jumping over dollars to get the quarters. The people do that, because I looked at that, and I thought what person jumps over $1 to get the quarter.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [27:07]
People do it all the time. In fact, there’s a very interesting rule by a guy named Lynn Bertini, he calls it the 2120 rule. So listen to me carefully, he says 120% of the profit that your business made last year came from 20% of what you sold and who you sold it to. And that was the top 20%, like the cream of the crop. He said, the bottom 20% of what you sold and who you sold it to last 20%. And it brought you from the 120%, you could have made to the 100% that you actually made. In other words, most people 20% of what they’re doing is actually moving them backwards, not forwards. And all you’d have to do is fire a customer, discontinue a product, stop offering a service, just completely stop it. And you’ll immediately give yourself a raise. Not to mention, you don’t have to do it anymore. This is almost always true. 95 to 98% of the time, I’ll walk into a business and this will be true. And they don’t know it or they know it. But they’re in denial or, you know, they’re they’re emotionally attached to that product. And you know, it’s it’s it’s stale, it’s not profitable. They’re they’re taping pounds or dollar bills to every box that that ships out. And they really should just stop.
David Ralph [28:50]
Now I agree. Now you’ve rephrase that, that I agree with that 150,000% because every time I look at somebody who is spinning too many plates, basically most of it is dealing with customers that aren’t really paying them anything. And I say to them, just get rid of those customers. I give you a classic example I’ve taken over an offline business, okay. And one of the first things that I went down there, I looked at it and I thought this is ridiculous. We’ve got so many accounts, where people take the products and then pay when they fancy it. I’m going to cancel them. And the bloke I was working with at the time now it’s my my own thing and I controlled it all. He was absolutely adamant that we shouldn’t be doing this because these people buy products and I was saying they buy products but they’re not bloody paying for them. And we’re having to pay for the things that we’re giving them and then wait forever in a day to get the money back as soon as I get the money. I’m closing the account. It has done nothing other than boosts our bank balance because now they still want the products but they pay and they pay and they come in on the counter and they Do it. But I argued for months about that saying, I don’t want accounts anymore. And that’s exactly the same. They were they were terrible customers. I’ve got one customer left that I’m waiting to fire. And once I’ve got rid of them, it’s just effort as well. But you say, you’re not, you’re not chasing around trying to get cash out and totally agree with you.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [30:21]
Why would anybody pay for something now, if you’ll let them pay it 90 days from now,
David Ralph [30:27]
or some of these were about six months from now? You know, it was basically, you know, I had a conversation with one of them. And they said, I don’t think it’s fair that you put us on stop after our custom for so many years. And I said, I don’t care. I said, What you want is a limit that just keeps on going up and up, and you pay every bit now, when you fancy it, I said, it’s not going to happen. We go 60 days, if you don’t keep up with 60 days, I’m closing the account, you know, and it’s done nothing to them at all. You know, they, they’re just a bad customer. So get rid of them.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [31:01]
Get rid of them. You don’t have to be mean about it. I was
David Ralph [31:05]
I was I was mean, I think there was a line in a classic Tom Cruise film called cocktail. And he, he splits up with his girlfriend and his girlfriend gets really upset. And she says, Tom, or whatever his name was, it wasn’t Tom, I can’t think of his name was in cocktail. She says, You know, I don’t want it to end badly. And he says, everything ends badly or it won’t end at all. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that. You know, and that is why so many people get hung up with not doing the unpleasant task, because they don’t want to feel bad or look bad. But ultimately, you just got to do it. Get in there and do it and move on. He’s a sage, isn’t he Tom Cruise? Is he not a sage?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [31:50]
He is and and, you know, back when, when jack welch ran GE, he fired 10% of the staff every year. That’s a very good idea. Most companies need to be doing that. In fact, most of most of you, there’s somebody you need to fire and you know, you need to fire them and you just haven’t done it yet. Who is it? Get it done. You’re not doing them any favours by them being on a team, they don’t belong on. The world needs to be reshuffled, there’s better people out there. And also, most people don’t realise a bad employee cost you five times their salary. Hmm.
David Ralph [32:34]
Yeah, there was a guy I used to work with before we move on. And I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day, I just happened to be on LinkedIn. And he was telling the story about the guy who gave him this advice. And when I was reading it, I thought, I know exactly, you gave me this advice. And he was saying, imagine you are a manager of a team. And you get another job in another company doing exactly the same thing. But you’re doing now, how many of your team would you have to take with you? How many could you not do without? And if you can’t answer that they shouldn’t be in your team now.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [33:11]
That’s, that’s right. And look, good people are hard to find. And you need to hire slow, and fire fast. And if you look at the most successful people, like, if you look at Steve Jobs, he spent a great deal of his time recruiting the very best people he could find anywhere. So no, nobody, nobody is immune from this. And it’s just like, you have to accept it’s part of business and part of life. That that finding and keeping good people and getting rid of bad people is a never ending process. The good news is when you have really good people like, like, really good people are 10 times as effective, but they’re only two or three times as expensive. Really good people are the best bargain ever.
David Ralph [34:10]
Yeah, I agree with that. So keep on digging around, you know, I’m going to be digging around for months, I think trying to find the person that goes yeah, I want to work for results. I want to work for results, you know, I will challenge myself. And we’ve actually said that this will develop into a proper social media manager position with other people working for you know, and I think what opportunity there that you’ve just got to prove yourself and then you’ve jumped ahead of the curve. You’re going to be one managing it, but now it’s difficult. So let’s move on. Let’s move on. Let’s find some other sexy ones. I’m gonna go with step four, I’m going to move past step three. And step four is create an irresistible product. That’s easy to use by simplifying Now, I know that a lot of people come to this, and they it’s their utopia, but they want to Create a product, but they they haven’t got the backstory to go with it. Now I want to ask you that, first of all, do you think somebody can just be sitting there in McDonald’s and suddenly think of a product and make a big success of it? Or do you have to kind of live it a bit so you really understand the nuances of the pain points and the solution you’re providing.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [35:21]
I’ve rarely seen the bolt of lightning from McDonald’s for a brand new product suddenly materialise into usually it takes a lot of listening and a lot of iterating and a lot of feedback, and a lot of tinkering to get there. But most people, they Tinker their way into products that are more complicated and less joyful to use, and more cumbersome and have too many features. alike. Okay, a really good example of this is most car radios. Have you ever noticed you rent a car? And you’re like, you want to turn on the radio or change the station or something? And like, you have to punch through six menus just to get to the FM presets. Yeah, or you? You can’t You can’t even figure out like, okay, so like, I just plugged in my phone, like, Where’s that USB thing? Right? It’s like, it’s like somebody didn’t have any clue about can you make this as simple as possible? Like, you know, the radio that they had in a 1979 Datsun was easy to use, like, you know, it had at a volume control. And it had a tuner like, I could figure that out. Right. And most things are way too complicated. One of the people that I talked about in this book is Mark mix surely. And like, it’s, it’s really sexy to talk about disruptive businesses like Uber or Airbnb, or, or Tick Tock or something, okay. But Mark is in the roofing business. Again, I don’t know how you can get any more ordinary or pedestrian than roughing. But the name of his company is rough, simple. And he’s so this guy. Five, probably five and a half years ago. He was he was dead broke. He was chewing anxiety pills. His four kids and his wife were living in his in laws basement with him, because they didn’t have enough money to live on their own. And he was making $40,000 a year selling advertising for Catholic Church bulletins. Now that’s a hot gig. Okay, and he he in this business partner had started this little roofing company on the side. And he realised he had to make, he had to simplify the roofing business. And he told his wife, every day, I’m making all these phone calls and talking to all these people, it’s wearing me out, I’m making $40,000 a year, Honey, I’m going to quit my job. And I’m going to go sit in the coffee shop, and I’m going to figure out how to make this business great. And like I’m just telling you, and, you know, if if it doesn’t work, then I guess we’ll be living in your mom’s basement a little longer. But I think this is the wage He’s like, Well, okay, so he quits his job and he goes to the coffee shop. And he meditates on basically, the points of this book, which are all on the back cover. And and he meditates on create an irresistible product. That’s a joy to use by simplifying and he starts asking really detailed question. When somebody wants to buy a roof, what do they find irritating? Well, if you know anything about the roofing industry, pretty much everything that the salespeople are irritating, the websites are irritating. The guy is dropping nails in your yard or irritating. In the crew, yeah, it’s all the guy tracking mud in your bathroom. It’s all irritating. And he said we are going to fix all of that. And he started going point by point by point through the whole entire process is like I am going to make this the pleasure. Okay, so back then, that that was that business was doing a few $100,000 a year and most of it was going right back out to the roofing crews so he and his partner were hardly making any money at all. He’s now over 10 million. He’s in In the Washington DC area, he has 300 Google reviews with 4.8 stars, he has designed the entire business to get five star Google reviews. Because everything about it is simpler and easier than every other roofing guy in Washington, DC.
Now, let’s remind you this is roofing. He didn’t start Uber. He didn’t invent the next social media app. He’s fixing roofs. This can be done in any industry. I just had a conversation yesterday with a guy who’s doing this in the lumber industry, which is, I mean, these there are hundreds of slow backwards, you know, pound your head on the brick wall industries that are there, they are so dysfunctional, and they are so far from actually pleasing, pleasing a customer. These problems exist in medical care, and every where you look, there are no lack of opportunities. And if you simplify the customer’s experience, it’ll be joyful to do business with you. And you’ll get the five star reviews
David Ralph [41:28]
is a fantastic story. And I want to jump in there and ask you, you know, did these profits go through the roof, but I didn’t, because that would just have been a stupid joke. But it is one of those things that you you look at it, because I’m big on non sexy businesses, because most of them are something to do with our living, plumbing, plaster, decorator, fence, panel, person, gardener, all these kind of things that you think yourself is not really a sexy job. But these people are, you know, struggling for clients. And there’s opportunities everywhere in this regard.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [42:07]
Well, not only that the trades are some of the highest paid jobs around because nobody seems to want them and that’s okay. The thing about a person like Mark Mark isn’t swinging a hammer. He’s, you know, what Mark actually did was he doesn’t even he doesn’t employ employ roofing crews. He Hi, or he doesn’t employ roofers. he hires contractors. And he pays them on time, and he pays them a set rate, so they’re not dickering or negotiating all the time. So like literally every week, his roughing crews get paid. So he has outsourced roofing crews that are lined up to do work for him. And they’re doing the hiring. And so see, you don’t have you can run a business in the trades without being a bricklayer and, and you know, Google is not going to take away a roofing job. Facebook is not going to take away a bricklaying job. None of that digital economy stuff is going to touch these industries. Meanwhile, like easiest, you know, if you if you just got out of school, easiest way to make 80,000 a year is in the trades.
David Ralph [43:38]
Yeah, it makes my mind go in many different directions because there are opportunities everywhere. But of course, I’m a professional podcaster. So my, my mind has gone to Should I asked you about Step five, Step six or Step seven. So I think with this, leading on from that, based on a kind of concept that most people would go loads of people are doing this loads of people are plumbers, loads of people are fence panel people. How do you do step six, build an impenetrable moat around your business Surefire ways to insulate your business from competition.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [44:16]
So this is though, this is the thing that the quality of your income and your life most depends on of all the steps. So if you if you build a great business, but your castle doesn’t have a moat around it, it’s not going to be a great business for long. It’s it’s your insulation from competition that is the real determiner of your quality of life. So if you are constantly stressed out by your clients in their emergency is always your emergency and they don’t value you and you’re always negotiating price and delivery and in fighting competition then that’s because You don’t have a good moat. So there are two kinds of moats or barriers to entry for competition, if you will. There’s 20th century moats. And that stuff like land and capital and buildings and lines of credit and stuff like that. 21st century moats are network effect. Now network effect is when everybody’s seen this. And a lot of times people don’t have a word for it. It’s when Uber gets more writers, which gets more drivers, which lowers the wait time, which gets more riders, which attracts more drivers, which lowers the wait time. And rinse repeat that for five years. And you can get a car in five or 10 minutes from anywhere to anywhere. And no sane person would ever go start a new taxi company, because Uber has it all locked up. Now that’s network effect. But it’s network effect that costs like a billion dollars of venture capital to get off the ground. I identified something that I call network effect for Mere Mortals, which is similar processes, but you can do them with elbow grease. I’ll give you one example of one of those Should we just
David Ralph [46:23]
ask other people out you should write Okay, get let’s let’s get pens and tablets and stuff. This is gonna change our lives. I feel Perry is going to hit us with something here.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [46:35]
So I already just described it to you. And it would go right over most people’s heads. But Martin surely did network effect for Mere Mortals when he designed his business to get five star Google reviews. Because online reviews are network effect because reviews, attract reviews, and good reviews attract more good reviews. So if mark, think about it, you’re shopping for a rough use you type Roof Replacement into Google, and three ads come up the first ad 300 reviews, 4.8 stars. Next add 10 reviews four stars. Next, add three reviews one and a half stars. which refer Are you going to pick?
David Ralph [47:36]
Now here’s a question. I agree with what you’re saying. Yeah. But I know how difficult it is to get people to do reviews when they’re happy. You know, you can do the most amazing job in the world. And I got our leave a review. That’s brilliant. And I don’t do a thing about it. So how do you get people to actually spend that 30 seconds because it doesn’t take a long time. And it’s great for a business. But you know, podcast reviews really hard to get people to listen all the time, and I go, can’t be bothered. And Google reviews exactly the same. You know, my business, my shop, it’s got 83 reviews, and we’re at 4.7. Just because we had a couple of idiots that just gave us rubbish reviews when it was nothing to do with what we did wrong. We didn’t actually do anything wrong. They just gave us bad reviews. But bear in mind how many people come through? And how many people go, oh, I’ll tell all my friends about it. And I don’t, they don’t. So how do you get them?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [48:32]
So here’s what Mark did. Mark put a consignor on site, whose job was to make sure that all of the communication with the customer was always going great. And when they got to the end of the job, and they asked the person to sign off on the job, they put an iPad in front of the customer and say, Would you mind right? It’s like they go, are you really happy? Is everything great? And they’re like yes, yes, yes. And it says Would you mind writing us a Google review, and they have them do it on an iPad right there at the kitchen table. When the job is being done and killing two birds with one stone. They also get the check right then. So they don’t they’re not chasing him around for the next 30 days getting paid. So he gets an instant Google review and a check at the same time.
David Ralph [49:28]
Problem with the customers that I have, most of them are totally stoned. And the rest of them are just like cavemen basically where we’re dealing with stone to cavemen and that that’s the women that the men are even
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [49:42]
worse so. So I just want to make clear that reviews is only one of 12 different network effects for Mere Mortals that I describe in the detox declutter dominate but they can also be things like using data They could also be things like service as software, or software as service, or they could be proprietary language that like if you have a community and you you have a shared language among that community that all of these things become. They’re like invisible moats. And funny thing. Two months ago, I was in Ireland, and I stumbled upon a castle, tiny little castle in western Ireland, and my son and I were walking around it. And we suddenly realised I was like, what’s this big depression in the land here? And my son goes, Dad, look, it’s a moat. And you know, the funny thing is, I had never actually seen a moat of a castle except in like a children’s book.
David Ralph [50:58]
It was an It was not sort of to it to wake you up. Did you not look at the crocodile thing? Hang on?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [51:06]
Well, it was because there was no water in it. Okay, but it was actually about 30 feet deep. And it went all around how these bushes growing in it. And once I recognised what it was, and kind of looked around, it was like, you know, if a bunch of bad guys were coming from over there, and they had to run down through this moat, and come back up to get to my castle, it would be really easy to nail them with a spear, or a rock, or a bow and arrow. And, and in what was interesting was when we were from the road, looking at the castle a quarter mile away, it was not obvious that there was a moat there. But there was, and, and, and I thought, I’ll be darned because the what you want in, in a business moat, you want a barrier to entry. That’s not obvious. You want something where, you know, this looks easy, but it’s really hard. Because then people get stuck in the moat, and they never come and take all of your stuff. And like, and I know, some people think that oh, well, you know, isn’t competition good? Not for you.
David Ralph [52:23]
Interesting point. Nice, actually. And it’s one of these things that we could go on for hours a day, really. And there’s so many sort of different avenues. But of course, we’re sort of running out of time here. So what would be the simplest moat that we can do? Well, for somebody out there who’s already got a business, and I thought, yeah, I haven’t done this at all, what would be the simplest mode?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [52:47]
Okay, the simplest mode is, is this. It’s making the process simple for the customer, even if it makes it complicated for you. Okay, so the biggest moat of all around Mark McSorley’s business is that shaving off all of the rough edges of the customer experience was hard and complicated and required very careful thought and attention. Over years, okay. And, you know, there’s all of these little things that happen in the background, there’s all these little steps, his employees and the systems and software everything else has to make to give the customer that experience. And you know what, it’s like, you watch the Olympics and you watch like a ballet dancer. And they what do they do they make it look easy.
David Ralph [53:49]
And I ballerina Olympics. I mean, I do.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [53:54]
I’m such an uncircumcised Philistine. Maybe they don’t, maybe it’s the pole vault, maybe it’s gymnastics, whatever it is, right. But the professionals make hard things look easy. The best mode is building the complicated processes, behind the scenes that make the customer experience simple and look easy and seamless in flow. Well, that is the that’s the best moat. And here’s why. Because when the customer experience is easy, it happens faster, which attracts more customers.
David Ralph [54:36]
Yeah, yeah. And I love the fact that you say it’s, it’s the professionalism that makes it look easy. It’s the behind the scenes work. It’s the hours of assessing and fine tuning and doing things to make other people look at and do that looks easy. But of course, yes, I’ve worked out why it looks easy. If you look at all this sort of you know, Late Night chat show hosts and stuff. And you think they’re only sitting there chatting. You put a normal person there. Except for Jimmy Fallon is rubbish he is but the rest of them know what he’s doing for a living. But the rest of them they just did just on their game because they make it look easy.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [55:21]
That’s right. And and so that’s that’s the if you make the customer’s experience simple and elegant, it will become an invisible note and then you can build the other moats around it again, there are page 30 of the detox declutter dominate book, which again, is only 36 pages we at 20 this book, in fact, about six months before it was published. Rob, my co author came to me and goes Perry, I cut your 50,000 words down to 8080 20. Your book. You’re welcome.
David Ralph [55:57]
I how do we say surname? It can’t be Rob scrub, can it?
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [56:00]
Is it skroob? robe Oh, robot scribe brilliant guy. Because not only did he not only did he chop, a 50,000 word, but down to 8000. He added a bunch of graphs and charts and illustrations and infographics to make the book very digestible and easy. And so what this is, this is a book you can easily read in an hour, but you can refer back to literally every day literally every week, or you could just look at the back cover. And you go which one of these seven things do I need to be doing right now? And it will always take you in the right direction. Yeah, brilliant,
David Ralph [56:42]
brilliant. And what we’ve done we’ve streamlined today’s show. So there hasn’t been any music. There hasn’t been any sound clips has been no adverts is the simplest podcast I think I’ve ever done. I don’t think I’ve ever been without any city stuff going on. But of course, you Perry what way that our audience can connect with you and of course fine.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [57:05]
Well, you can find the book on Amazon. It’s called detox declutter, dominate by Perry Marshall and Robert strobe. And if you liked what you heard today, go to Perry marshall.com. Scroll down and sign up for the 30 day street MBA, which will punch you in the face from the very first email and and get you on the right track. It will, it will completely change your life. You
David Ralph [57:32]
see some kind of psycho masochism thing that you’ve got done by email, people, people just get punched in the face every every morning before I go to work.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [57:41]
Every morning, every morning after your Renaissance time. You open the email and I punch in the face and you go Thank you sir me I have another
David Ralph [57:50]
and do you wear leather while you’re doing this? Do you wear leather sort of pants and top
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [57:54]
in jackboots.
David Ralph [57:57]
Ah, I’m signing up, I’m signing up straight away. How are you? Thank you so much for spending time with us today, joining up those dots of your life. Kind of we didn’t really get in there. Please come back again, when you have more dots to join up. Because I do believe that by joining up the dots and connecting our past is the best way to build our futures. Dextox Expert Perry Marshall. Thank you so much.
Detox, Declutter with Perry Marshall [58:16]
Thank you so much.
David Ralph [58:19]
Mr. Perry Marshall. So yes, seven steps to clarity and it really is important to understand where your your results are coming from, where’s your 8020 because you know, that literally work and effort goes out the window and rewards come your way. And it is difficult to sort of focus in on it, especially when you’re building a business. And it kind of it wraps itself around you and you do stuff and you think it’s working and being something else doesn’t work. And then in the end, you end up with loads of stuff you really do every now and again have to look at it and clear the decks and go Okay, that might have been profitable, but it doesn’t suit my purpose. That might have been profitable, but I don’t like doing it anymore. And really focus in on where your rewards are coming from. And very few people do that. I promise you very, very few. Until next time, I will see you all again. Stay sexy. Stay young, stay vibrant. And I’ll be here soon with another episode of Join Up Dots.
Outro [59:20]
See ya by the end of China. You’ve heard the conversation. Now it’s time for you to start taking massive action. Create your life we’ll be back again real soon. Join Up Dots Join Up Dots Join Up Dots jolina Join Up Dots
