Brian Kurtz: How to Build a Business Empire with Direct Marketing

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Imagine being so allergic to selling that people dub you the ‘Director of Sales Prevention’.

But for Brian Kurtz, an OG marketer who’s worked with legends like Gene Schwartz, Dan Kennedy, Gary Bencivenga?

It’s actually one of the many secrets behind his WILDLY successful direct marketing career.

He’s finally on the show, so today you’ll learn:

  • The HUGE mistake many marketers make with their copy
  • How to find a mentor (and make them want to guide you)
  • Why selling shouldn’t be your priority if you want your business to last
  • … and other ways to take your business to the next level

If you’re in it for the long haul, then Brian’s tips are pure gold.

Full Interview:

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Timestamps

  • 00:00 – Introduction and Welcome
  • 01:10 – Meet Brian Kurtz: Marketing Legend
  • 01:40 – Mentorship and Learning from the Best
  • 03:22 – The Importance of Audience in Marketing
  • 17:13 – Building a Business vs. One-Shot Promotions
  • 27:44 – Boardroom’s Unique Approach to Expertise
  • 32:14 – Iconic Promotions and Villains in Copywriting
  • 33:20 – Transition to TV and Infomercial Success
  • 35:31 – The Make or Buy Decision in Business
  • 43:44 – The Importance of Physical Products in Marketing
  • 47:21 – Building and Scaling Mastermind Groups
  • 59:21 – Personal Development and Marketing Intertwined

"I innovated on the 40-40-20 rule to prove that the list is the most important, your audience, the media you're buying. If you're buying the wrong media, and you have the best offer and the best creative, you get zero orders, but the reverse is not true."

Full Transcript

Brian Kurtz: [00:00:00] The audience is everything. I mean, I learned that from Gene Schwartz. He says that copywriters and marketers don’t create desire. The desire is already in the marketplace. You have to like hone it and find it.

Terence: And hi, welcome to Founders Go Naked. Today, I have a very special guest who I’ve been trying to get on this podcast for like months, and finally he’s here. And I’m talking about the great Brian Kurtz. So Brian, welcome to the stage.

Brian Kurtz: Thank you, Terence. It’s been, uh, I’ve been traveling a lot. I haven’t been avoiding you, I swear. Um, you know, you’re one of my favorite people. I know you just wrote a book and I think I, I endorsed it. And I, I love what you do.

Brian Kurtz: You’ve been in my Titans Xcelerator Mastermind, I think almost from the beginning, uh…

Terence: Yeah, almost from the beginning.

Brian Kurtz: Given where you live and where I live, you know, it’s not as convenient and yet you stayed a member for so long. And I admire the loyalty and the support, and I really appreciate you.

Terence: Thanks, Brian. So [00:01:00] Brian, I mean, yeah, that, that we’ve been there for like five years and I think I took a little three or four month, uh, vacation in between.

Terence: Right, right.

Brian Kurtz: Yeah.

Terence: Otherwise I’ve been part of the group. So for those of you who don’t know Brian Kurtz, uh, Brian has been in marketing for over 40 years. He has been in Boardroom. He was one of the business builders there, and he’s worked with some of the biggest names in copywriting and marketing history, those that today’s marketers will deem to be legends.

Terence: Or they don’t know who they are. Or they don’t know who they are.

Brian Kurtz: Or they don’t know who they are, right.

Terence: So Brian, name me some of those legends that you’ve worked with.

Brian Kurtz: Well, going back, you know, obviously my ultimate mentor was the guy who founded Boardroom, Marty Edelston, and he might not be known unless you’re on my…in my online family and you read my blog every week, you wouldn’t probably know who Marty is. Amazing entrepreneur, amazing mentor, teacher. And he taught by showing and not telling, which was always the [00:02:00] best, right? You know, it’s an excuse in a way, cause he never told me what to do. He just, he did his thing and I had to like emulate what he was doing.

Brian Kurtz: Um, those, those mentors are great. But then Gene Schwartz, the author of Breakthrough Advertising, some people think that he never existed, but he’s a ghost or something. And, and copywriters and marketers today know all about Gene because I keep his name alive by republishing Breakthrough Advertising, which was written in 1966.

Brian Kurtz: I was eight years old at the time. So I wasn’t even, you know, I’m, there are people that are older than me. Right. Um, but Gene Schwartz and then in the copywriting world, um, Gary Bencivenga and Jim Rutz and… you know, just amazing…. um, uh, legends of copywriting. And I, I got, I’m not gonna say I got lucky, but being with Marty, you know, Marty at Boardroom ran what I call a learning organization.

Brian Kurtz: So he always went to the outside for the best [00:03:00] brains. I mean, you know, he knew he was smart, but, you know, he was never the smartest guy in the room, you know, in Titans Xcelerator, we’re on a screen. I say, you know, and you have the t shirt and the mug probably that says if you’re the smartest person on the screen, you’re on the wrong screen.

Brian Kurtz: And so always, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. And so it’s really important to surround yourself with people smarter than you, have more wisdom than you. The interesting thing about that which is somewhat troubling, but worth it is that when I was like in my 20s and 30s I gravitated to the 70 and 80 year olds who were still around because you know they had all the wisdom, you know, people like, I mean, actually he wasn’t that old, but like a guy like Joe Sugarman, a guy like Jay Abraham, who’s still alive.

Brian Kurtz: Dan Kennedy is still alive. They’re not that much older than me, but they were a bit older than me. And, but then I had, I just gravitated to them because they had all the wisdom. And the [00:04:00] problem is now that I’m 66 years old, if you do the math, if they were 70, when I was 20, they’re dead. And so, you know, just the math, you know, um, longevity tables and actuarial tables will tell you that.

Brian Kurtz: But the interesting thing is that they live on in my world. I, you know, you have my book Overdeliver which I talk about, um, a lot about, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants, um. You know, you know, some people say I give other people too much credit for my career. I’m fine with that. You know, I, I don’t need to be told how great I am.

Brian Kurtz: I don’t need to be told. And there are people listening now don’t even know who I am. You know, you have a younger audience possibly cause you’re young and vibrant and I’m, I’m old and crotchety and…

Terence: Um, not that much younger.

Brian Kurtz: Oh, okay. You look a lot younger.

Terence: Just for the record, you know?

Brian Kurtz: Okay. Okay. Um, but, but it’s sort of like, you know, I, I feel like having [00:05:00] those mentors, those people in your past, it’s not to live in the past.

Brian Kurtz: It’s not for nostalgia. It’s not, it’s not just for the good old days. It’s more about, you know, what wisdom have you accumulated? And I always say that, you know, when you say I have over 40 years experience, it’s not one year’s experience for 40 years, it’s 40 years of cumulative experience. That’s the difference.

Brian Kurtz: And I’m not saying, um, I’m… you know, I’m better at it than someone else. I’m not, but I’ve always like taken each year and each piece of wisdom and lapped it on and made it like one plus one equals three, one plus one equals three, one plus one equals three. And, you know, the ultimate, you know, uh, result of that is that I have, you know, 43, 44 years of accumulated, accumulative wisdom, accumulated and cumulative wisdom, which is what it’s all about.

Brian Kurtz: You have to, it’s like compound interest on, on a bank account. You have to continue to compound it. Um, [00:06:00] and you know, that’s what, that’s why my mentors are so important to me. And you know, when it’s funny, when someone calls me an OG, an original gangster, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t ask for people to call me that.

Brian Kurtz: Or, or someone calls me their mentor. I think about it. First I think about, okay, I take original gangster as a compliment, but I also take it as I had my own original gangsters and I write about them all the time. So I’m paying it forward with that, but I take it as a real compliment when someone calls me the original gangster.

Brian Kurtz: But when they call me a mentor and I’ve earned it, like, they’re not just calling me a mentor because, you know, I… I did them a favor or something like that, but they really have learned from me. That’s the ultimate compliment that I can get. And so I always, and I’ve spent my whole career telling my mentors, they’re my mentors too.

Brian Kurtz: So, and it’s not the same thing as like when you get a, uh, an email, I get emails often and people say, you know, Brian, will you be my mentor? And I say, it doesn’t work like [00:07:00] that. You don’t choose your mentors. They choose you. And I have a bunch of stories about how, I mean, you know, you’re a good example. I mean, you reached out to me five, six years ago.

Brian Kurtz: You know, you were new, newer in the business than you are now. You were doing some things. You didn’t ask me for anything because that would be an ask from nowhere. I call it an ask from nowhere. But you would, but you were, you were inquisitive, you were enthusiastic, you were, you were contributing to me in some way and, you know, fast forward, five, six years later, hopefully I can contribute to you today and I’ve hopefully I contributed to you in our group, but that’s the way, and I don’t know, I’m not saying you should call me a mentor either, but I’m just saying that that’s how you find mentors.

Brian Kurtz: They, they choose you. Like, whether you like it or not, I’ve chosen you to some degree, and it’s because of how you put yourself out there to me and to everybody else, so there’s a way of being, I guess. To be able to, um, have you have people choose [00:08:00] you and I’ll go all the way back. My first name I mentioned, not Marty, but Gene Schwartz.

Brian Kurtz: So Gene Schwartz, I mean, he had no business being my mentor. I mean, he was like one of the top copywriters in the world. He was an author. Now we were using him as a copywriter at Boardroom. So that was, that was lucky for me. I stepped in shit there. But what happened was I saw that he needed help in his list selection for his publishing business.

Brian Kurtz: And I stepped up and I said, Hey, Gene, I see your list broker is horrible. They don’t know what list you should be using. They don’t know how to do the selections on the outside lists. I can do that for you. No charge. I wasn’t going to charge him, of course. And so I did his list planning for him, you know, for free, not expecting anything in return.

Brian Kurtz: That’s what I talk about in Overdeliver, a hundred zero thing where you just contribute a hundred percent with no expectation of return. What did I get in return? I got a mentor of mentors or people of all time [00:09:00] who invited me to his house for lunch on a monthly basis to just shoot shit. Yeah. So I’m not saying that happens that way all the time either, but you know, you have to contribute to connect.

Brian Kurtz: And in chapter 10 of Overdeliver, it’s… the chapter is called playing the long game. And it’s a series of situations in my career where stuff like that happened. And I think that, you know, I start the chapter with, I hate the word networking because I was known as a networker in the business. And I hate that word because it, it kind of implies, you know, Oh, he’s a networker.

Brian Kurtz: He’s got the most Facebook friends. He’s. You know, he’s all over social media. He’s, you know, he, he shakes hands with everybody at every conference and he’s just going on from one to the other. And that’s not who I am. I like to go deep as opposed to wide. And so, I mean, I have gone wider in my career. I mean, after 40 years, I’ve accumulated a lot of people… remember, lists are people too. And so my list is an online [00:10:00] family because I’ve accumulated a lot of people, but I try to go deep with them. Even people who are in my online family, who if they write to me off one of my blog posts, I like to engage with them and see what they’re about if I have time.

Brian Kurtz: And so it’s, it’s the idea of going deep as opposed to wide. It’s the idea of contributing to connect instead of networking. And so going back to your original question, you can see one question I’m off on a tangent. Well, I’m a tangent waiting to happen, but I just love this business. I love, you know, speaking to people like you about the business and about my career, because I think there are some things that people can take from my career and adapt them in some way. Not saying be like me, I’m just saying, adapt some things that I’ve had success with. You know, I have a track record of, you know, 40 some odd years and it’s worked pretty well.

Brian Kurtz: I have, you know, uh, I think it’s a pretty good model to, to look at anyway. [00:11:00] So that’s the only reason why I bring it up. And so this idea of having mentors, having teachers, having people to learn from on a regular basis, It’s probably the most important thing that anyone can do, and it doesn’t happen immediately.

Brian Kurtz: It’s not an easy button. You know, it took years and years, decades, to develop that relationship. I call it relationship capital. That’s what Jay Abraham calls it. He calls it relationship capital. So you take all of your relationships and put them in a bank account and it’s the most valuable account you’ll ever have.

Brian Kurtz: So yes, yes. Do one question. You said name a few people and I went off on a tangent, but I apologize.

Terence: No, that was great. And, um, I guess Brian, since you’ve kind of like, in a way, you’re kind of like passing the torch down from the, your OGs, you’ve become the OG and now you’re passing it to us younger people.

Terence: To carry on that torch in a way. [00:12:00]

Brian Kurtz: I’ve been, I’ve been writing about that a lot. I call them the NGs, the new gangs. You’re an NG. I mean, whether you like it or not, you’re an NG.

Terence: Yeah, the NGs. I like it.

Brian Kurtz: And the NGs have to, I define them. There are like some characteristics that an NG needs to have. One is not live in the past, but have respect for the past.

Brian Kurtz: Have respect for the original source of everything. Don’t take credit for something that you didn’t invent. You can take credit for how you innovated on an invention or a technology, but don’t take credit when you don’t deserve it. And most people don’t deserve credit. They deserve innovation credits, not invention credits.

Brian Kurtz: And they’re very different. And when you say I invented something, I think, I think you’re, you’re like crossing over a line because stuff was invented. I mean, everything in marketing today is based on principles of direct response that go back hundreds of years, hundreds of years. And especially, you know, to the, if you go back even to the [00:13:00] 1950s and 60s, the Mad Men of advertising and how they kind of got out of… like, they… even they were kind of sick of this general advertising of like image advertising and they wanted to get an ROI or return on investment on all of their advertising.

Brian Kurtz: And that’s when direct response marketing was born. I mean, it was actionable advertising, it was measurable advertising. In fact, my 1st book, the Advertising Solution. Which you definitely have because you, that was for your third year renewal in Titans Xcelerator. Um, but the Advertising Solution, we, uh, Craig Simpson, who’s a direct mail savant, a good friend of mine, he brought me in on the book, and we profiled six Mad Men, six like advertising guys.

Brian Kurtz: From mostly the sixties and seventies, but a couple of them are from the 1930s, like Claude Hopkins. And so the six, these six legends, they were basically general [00:14:00] advertising guys trapped, whether they were direct response guys, they were guys who wanted measurable advertising, but they couldn’t get to it because the advertising was all about Madison Avenue in the sixties and seventies.

Brian Kurtz: And it was, you know, just image advertising with no, no, um, accountability, no measurability, and these six guys like broke the mould. Um, and so I, I, it was a very important book for us to write. And it kind of, it kind of got me motivated to write Overdeliver, which is all my book, but the Advertising Solution was a great entry into this whole idea of where do, you know, where do babies come from?

Brian Kurtz: You know, where, where do all the… where do all the principles that we follow today, like RFM, Recency Frequency Monetary Value, which is, I have a whole chapter in my book about that. Um, where does the concept of lifetime value and how much you can lose on your first order to make it back on your second or third order?

Brian Kurtz: Where is, you [00:15:00] know, the idea of, um, and these, these, these are timeless. Like, I, I call it the 41 39 20 rule, which is, you know, list, offer, creative, and messaging. And, you know, it’s actually the 40 40 20 rule, which says that any direct marketing campaign depends 40 percent on the list, 40 percent on the offer, and 20 percent on the creative.

Brian Kurtz: That doesn’t mean the creative is half as important. What it does mean also is I made it the 41 39 20 rule. Didn’t invent it. I innovated on the 40 40 20 rule to prove that the list is the most important, your audience, the media you’re buying. If you’re buying the wrong media, and you have the best offer and the best creative, you get zero orders, but the reverse is not true.

Brian Kurtz: If you have the perfect audience and you have a mediocre offer and mediocre creative, you’ll make some money. Not as much as you can if you have all three of those things working on in sync with each other. But it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating to me that [00:16:00] that’s a mistake that a lot of marketers make today.

Brian Kurtz: They think that they have a great offer and creative and they don’t worry as much about the audience. Hmm. The audience is everything. The audience. I mean, I learned that from Gene Schwartz. He says that, you know, copywriters and marketers don’t create desire. The desire is already in the marketplace. You have to like hone it and find it and, and it may not be what you intend to sell in the first place.

Brian Kurtz: The audience is going to tell you, you know, it’s what, it’s what they need, not what you want to do. And that’s, that’s a classic mistake of, of inventors and entrepreneurs who think they have, you know, the best idea of all time, and it’s not been tested. It’s not been, uh, put out into the marketplace in any way so that, you know, they end up squandering a lot of time and money on products and services that have no audience.

Brian Kurtz: Audience is the number one.

Terence: So do you think that still applies in today’s world where you can use Facebook, LinkedIn, [00:17:00] YouTube, and all that stuff? And they say, Oh, well, you know, you let the algorithm just do the targeting. You just worry about the creative and the offer. What’s your take on that?

Brian Kurtz: Yeah, I think, I think you can, as I said, you can get away a little bit with that, but I think to really have a business as opposed to having a product or a promotion,. See, a product is not a business, a promotion is not a business. To build a business, you need foundational tools and the foundational philosophy of, you know, audience and lists before offer and creative.

Brian Kurtz: So I think that, you know, when you talk about the algorithms of Facebook, you know, the algorithms are one thing, but, you know, you still can do lookalike models and do segmentation and that’s only going to improve it. And that’s about segmenting the audience. So I think that what I learned in doing direct mail, cause I’m old enough to have marketed in [00:18:00] a world where there was no Internet, there was no email, there was no Facebook, so…

Brian Kurtz: in fact, chapter three of Overdeliver is titled how paying postage made me a better marketer and the discipline that we had to have. And we were, you know, um, doing direct mail where you’re paying for postage and printing on every piece of mail that went out, you have to be sure the targeting, I mean, it’s true that a 2 percent response rate.

Brian Kurtz: Could make you millions of dollars. It’s true. So you say what happened to the, you’re still wasting 98%, but it’s not, but 2 percent to get the 2 percent took incredible amount of discipline. And that’s with incredible precise list segmentation and everything that goes into putting together a direct mail campaign and I’m not endorsing direct mail for all marketers.

Brian Kurtz: I do endorse a multi channel approach, one that includes offline and online marketing. I think it’s a mistake for an online, somebody who’s online and [00:19:00] not pursue something offline to compliment online and using physical product. That’s a big mistake I think marketers make today too because like things like offline marketing, whether it’s print advertising, direct mail, TV and radio, becomes a differentiator because everybody’s just on Facebook, LinkedIn, email, which is all important, obviously it’s, it’s, it’s cheaper, it’s easier, but you know what, having a multi channel approach will differentiate you quickly and efficiently. You gotta know what you’re doing.

Brian Kurtz: I always say that, um, you know, doing direct mail is like making sushi at home. You know, you can do it, but I’m not making sushi at home. It’s too complicated for me. But, you know, the sushi makers, like, you know, the direct mail experts can do it for you. But you use the same principles that you use online.

Brian Kurtz: But the offline principles came first. So, you know, I have a section in Overdeliver. It’s called, it’s like O2O2O [00:20:00] online to offline to online to offline. And the idea of toggling between online and offline media is really one of the keys, creating a business. And again, not just a product or a promotion, you know, this idea that, you know, you have a winning promotion.

Brian Kurtz: And you run it everywhere on Facebook and ClickBank and wherever. That’s not a business. I mean, you can make money, but creating a business in direct response means multiple products means thinking about the second and third product when you’re marketing the first, the idea of renewals and continuity and built in lifetime value, that’s how you create a business as opposed to just a series of one shots.

Brian Kurtz: And I think that, um, that’s a, that’s a lesson that I, I teach all the time. I think it’s so basic and yet some people listen to it. Maybe some people listen to this podcast might have just a light bulb, might’ve just gone off. Some of them might say this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about and they might be have shut off already.

Brian Kurtz: So [00:21:00] I don’t know. Um, but I think that, I think that, If, if you’re listening, if you’re listening out there, just think about these concepts of differentiation, becoming a specialty and not a commodity, selling on things other than your price, you know, all of those things are basically building a business and not just a series of products or promotions.

Terence: So, Brian, how, how do you know if someone’s building a business versus just, you know, trying to make a quick buck. I mean, some people are in business and they’re just doing promotions and they don’t realize they’re actually not building a business. Is there a litmus test that you have?

Brian Kurtz: That’s a good question.

Brian Kurtz: I, I, first of all, it’s not mandatory. I mean, you don’t have to build a business. You can just build, you know, a product or a promotion and make a lot of money and move on from there. A lot of people in, in the… when I got into the infomercial business on TV in the mid 2000s, I remember there were people there that the infomercial [00:22:00] business was just, it could be a one hit wonder, you know, they come up with the, with the product, they blow it out and they move it to retail and they make millions and millions of dollars with no intention of creating a second product or… they don’t even know what the 2nd product is going to be and that can work to accumulate some cash. But I think that I think the litmus test would be that, are you, I’m not saying you have to make 5 and 10 year plans either. I don’t, I don’t really go for that as well. I think what you want to do is look at your…. your career and your business in quarters, 90 day sprints, and I learned that from Dan Sullivan from strategic coach, who’s the top coach for entrepreneurs in the world, and he teaches basically go quarter to quarter with 5 or 6 initiatives that you want to produce. It may not be the full product launch. It may not be the full thing that you want to get done, but you chunk it down and just get as much done as you can in [00:23:00] that quarter.

Brian Kurtz: But you target that at the end of the quarter, you celebrate what you accomplished and then go on to the next quarter with five or six initiatives. If you do it that way, that’s it’s not a litmus test per se, but that was a good question. But it’s sort of like, then you know that you’re building something.

Brian Kurtz: You’re not just doing a series of one shot. And, you know, again, you can do a series of one shots. It’s in fact, at Boardroom, I’m preaching this now, but at Boardroom, we had a bunch of $39 products. We had $39 books. We had $39 newsletter subscriptions. Now it’s true that the books, some of the books had renewals in them.

Brian Kurtz: There were annual books and we had, they were able to renew year to year. The subscriptions also had renewals. You, after you had had it for a year, you’d renew the second year. So there was a built in lifetime value as it were, but we were really building, I mean, I, I think I did a, I did a panel once with a bunch of great [00:24:00] copywriters and who had written for me at Boardroom.

Brian Kurtz: And the title was, you know, um, Uh, A Billion Dollars Worth of Business, $39 at a time, which is not a great way to run a business when you think about it, but we were able to do that at Boardroom because of the, of the wide range of products that were all related to the products that were the core product.

Brian Kurtz: So, you know, the key is another litmus test is, you know, having a hero product. So you have that one product that you think is, so that’s… the product is a business. But you have the hero product that leads the way and then everything becomes an offshoot. A good example in today’s world, people are familiar with Jeff Walker and Product Launch Formula.

Brian Kurtz: Um, you know, Product Launch Formula is the hero product for Jeff, but he’s got workshops. He’s got masterminds. He’s got, you know, higher ticket things that come off it. So, and it’s been the same hero product for years. So you can say, Oh, his business, his business is a [00:25:00] product. It’s not, it’s not. It’s got a hero product center, but it’s got all the offshoots.

Brian Kurtz: And that that’s where you always have to be on alert for what’s the next, you know, what’s the next big thing for you as an offshoot. So that’s some… I… hopefully I answered the question, but it’s sort of like, again, you can have, you don’t have to build a business. You can build products and you can build promotions, but I think if you look at it, and I think I think the way I would look at it is is is 90 day sprints always think about offshoots that you could and also charge a higher price.

Brian Kurtz: Like at Boardroom, I never got into Ascension models, for example. I mean, it was the 1980s, you know, I never had like $1, 500 courses and $2,000 software. It was always $39 on $39 on $39. And it’s no way to run a business, believe me. It [00:26:00] worked for us in, in a different time, in a different marketing atmosphere.

Brian Kurtz: But I do think that the idea of Ascension models is super important. You know, the idea of, you know, you start with the $47 product, then you go to the thousand dollars product, then you go to the. 1, 500 product and you need to build it not just on price, but on the benefits for the person. And you have to, you have to survey them.

Brian Kurtz: I mean, um, you know, I’m, I’m fascinated with someone like Ryan Levesque who I followed his career from the beginning, who has his quiz funnels that people aren’t familiar with them. And all that is is like segmenting your list to find out what they want next. And we did that at Boardroom with concept testing, which I talk about in my book Overdeliver about how you can sell the next product to the same audience.

Brian Kurtz: By surveying them, asking them, you know, and your best customers will help you with that. You don’t have to guess. And that, that tells me [00:27:00] that that’s a litmus test that you running a business and not just cause you’re looking for the next product. You’re looking for the next service. You’re looking for the next.

Brian Kurtz: The next run on the ladder, but you’re doing it intelligently through research and, and surveying. So I think that’s where, um, that, that separates the, uh, the men from the boys or the, the women from the girls, um, in terms of like building a business for, for, in fact, the subtitle of Overdeliver is build a business for a lifetime, playing the long game in direct response marketing.

Brian Kurtz: That’s a premise that I live by. Everybody doesn’t have to live by that premise. It’s fine if you don’t. But if you want to live by that premise, that’s some of the ways to do it.

Terence: So Brian, one of the things that I noticed, um, correct me if I’m wrong, but Boardroom was based on, like, you, did you have a bunch of researchers coming up with information, or did you have, like, a personality behind that [00:28:00] information?

Terence: How was it like?

Brian Kurtz: Yeah, it was an interesting, um, situation, because Boardroom, which the big newsletter became Bottom Line Personal. So Boardroom. Was the newsletter that Marty started the business with, which was how to help small businesses run their business. But we started figuring out that those people needed, I’ll call it the, the executive at home information.

Brian Kurtz: So we got into like the consumer side of the businessman or the business woman. And so Bottom Line Personal was our, um, that was our, our became our flagship newsletter at a company called Boardroom. And the company actually switched branding. After that, we became Bottom Line Publications, Bottom Line Information.

Brian Kurtz: So Bottom Line Personal was, was the lead newsletter. We got into health, uh, information. We always had tax information. So what we did was we didn’t have one expert. We always went out to a series of experts. [00:29:00] We had panels of experts in health, in finance, in taxes. In, in business development and, you know, human resources, everything.

Brian Kurtz: So Marty, Marty was not an expert in any one thing, but he was the most curious man on the planet. And you’d say, well, that doesn’t qualify you for everything, anything. Right. Being just curious. Well, in Marty’s case, it did. Because he became, uh, what I call the bloodhound. And if you see commercials today and you hear them on the radio, What they don’t want you to know.

Brian Kurtz: And, you know, what, you know, we, I’m not saying we invented that because I don’t want to, I don’t want to claim we invented anything, but we were doing that in, in the early 1980s, you know, what, and we used to have like these, these headlines of, you know, what your accountant doesn’t want you to know, what your lawyer doesn’t want you to know, what your doctor doesn’t want you to know.

Brian Kurtz: And, and we had other variations of that. And so [00:30:00] Marty, in, in the promotions, became the watchdog, the bloodhound. He was watching out for you. And it’s an interesting approach, which a lot of people have used over the years. We didn’t invent that, but we, we perfected it. We perfected the blood because we didn’t have any one expert.

Brian Kurtz: A lot of our competition at the time in the newsletter business, one of them was Agora, who a lot of people know. A couple of other companies that were publishing and many others had usually a guru. So they had a guru, doctor, a guru, financial expert, and then they sold products off of that guru. We didn’t have that. And the copywriters that used found it a little frustrating because it’s easier to focus in on a guru, but when they started focusing in on the bloodhound, on Marty, it became a pretty powerful approach.

Brian Kurtz: Which said, Hey, I’m Marty Edelston. I’m at, I’m just like you. I hate, I hate being taken advantage of. I hate, you know, how the world works and the idea of [00:31:00] inside information and secrets became a premise for us that we literally took to the bank. And so we had a book called the Book of Inside Information, which was, you know, basically the greatest hits of our newsletters and 500 pages, indexed by topic, health, finance, taxes, and written by experts.

Brian Kurtz: So, our editorial staff were basically curators and interviewers of the best experts in the world. And so the story meetings would be like, let’s go, you know, find the expert on thyroid cancer and get an article on that. And so, so it was a different approach. It wasn’t like one person’s opinion. Now Marty’s opinion comes through, but not like a guru, but as a bloodhound.

Brian Kurtz: So it was an interesting approach and one that people have viewed. And if you don’t have a guru, like some people say, I can’t do a newsletter because I don’t have a guru. I don’t have that singular [00:32:00] voice. It’s easier to write with a singular voice, I agree. I mean, Boardrooms, publications are harder for the copywriters to get their arms around.

Brian Kurtz: But when they got their arms around it, it was powerful stuff. It was really good copy. Um, one of my favorite, uh, promotions was written by a guy named Eric Betuel, who was one of our top copywriters. And it was, it was a magalog, so it looked like a magazine, but it was actually a promotion for a book. And the book title was The Big Black Book, kind of like the Book of Insider Information.

Brian Kurtz: And, um, the cover said 12, uh, 12, yeah, 12 smiling swindlers. 12 smiling swindlers and the 12 smiling swindlers are your accountant, your lawyer, your financial advisor, your, uh, tax, uh, consultant. And so the car repair man, you know, it was, uh, your real estate agent, everybody’s a swindler and talk about like creating a villain in copy.

Brian Kurtz: I mean, that’s always been a premise of copyright. [00:33:00] You gotta have a villain, whether it’s an industry or… someone who is a particular villain. We had villains all over the place. And they were just the people that were around consumers all the time trying to take advantage of them. And there’s Marty, you know, the protector.

Brian Kurtz: So it was, it was, it was powerful. It was, it’s some of the best, uh, promotion. And then we went a little more positive when we went into TV. Uh, with an infomercial, we used the Treasury of Health Secrets, which was our health stuff greatest hits. And in the Treasury of Health Secrets, the premise of that was the greatest medical team ever assembled.

Brian Kurtz: So it wasn’t smiling swindlers, we went positive. You can go positive or negative, right? And so it’s just a different approach. And so the greatest medical team ever assembled, we went, we were an infomercial, and we would interview the doctors themselves on screen. This guy from Harvard, and this guy from MIT, and this guy from Stanford, and this Nobel Prize winner.

Brian Kurtz: And we had like little snippets of all of them in the [00:34:00] show, talking about credibility and proof elements. Gary Bencivenga, one of the great copywriters of all time, talks about proof elements. These were ultimate proof elements of the value of the content in the book. And we had all of these amazing experts and they just, they weren’t even being interviewed.

Brian Kurtz: They were just like showing up on screen because our producer went all over the country. To film them with their medical school behind them, you know, talk about credibility and proof elements and basically talking about the item that they wrote in the book. So there’s a guy, you know, who has identified a new gene for Alzheimer’s and he’s talking like, you know, I developed this and this and this, and it’s in the book.

Brian Kurtz: So it was, it was, um, it was, it was one, it was a incredible learning experience, but it also made us a lot of money. I mean, I I’d say the, the infomercial business alone accounted for over 200 million just [00:35:00] in. Infomercial sales of books and then an additional 100 million in the ancillary from going online and back to direct mail with the stuff from the infomercial again, 02020, we moved, you know, we moved online, on display advertising, we had direct mail, we had TV, talk about a multi channel marketing approach. I outlined the whole program inside my book. So, but yeah, it was, uh, it was an amazing time.

Terence: Yeah. The reason I asked Brian is because like, I see most infopreneurs nowadays, they are creating their own information, spending months creating a course and bottom line is they may not even be the best people to do it because there’s probably better experts out there.

Terence: Is that model, do you think, that Boardroom creates, is that replicable in today’s world do you think?

Brian Kurtz: Yeah, it is. I mean, it depends. I mean, if you’re, [00:36:00] if you really are an expert in something very precise. Yeah. I mean, you probably should just go for it on your own, assuming there’s desire in the marketplace for it.

Brian Kurtz: But I think that it’s sort of like the idea of make or buy. It’s, it’s always a decision in a, it’s always a business decision. Whether to make or buy. I mean, there are underpromoted, underutilized assets everywhere. So let’s say you want to do a, um, you want to develop a software for, um, I’ll make it up, like for list segmentation.

Brian Kurtz: And you know, somebody who’s developed it, hasn’t marketed it and you can partner with them as opposed, get a headstart. You might want to revise it a little bit, but I think the idea of collaboration and buying, as opposed to making it from scratch is always on the table. It’s always like, it’s always something that, you know, the maker buy and the [00:37:00] idea of, of, um, like, and the thing is white labeling has been going on forever.

Brian Kurtz: You know, you can, I mean, in the supplement business, you know, you can have like a customized CoQ10 supplement or a customized fish oil, it’s not customized, it’s from a manufacturer who’s manufacturing it for a lot of different people and you’re putting your label on it. And then it’s all about the promotion of how to differentiate.

Brian Kurtz: Now, if you really, the difference is if you can really differentiate it, like if you can go to a, um, a supplier that’s only supplying to you and there’s an ingredient, I’m using supplements as an example here, but it’s true in any industry and they can develop, they have an ingredient that no one else has in their CoQ10 or something like that. There was something that we, we, we got into a supplement at Boardroom. Um, it was called Mito Forte or something. It was a joint, a joint remedy. [00:38:00] Not, not, you couldn’t make claims, but it was, it would alleviate joint pain. And we found out. It was an ingredient that could only be found, it was, it was true, it wasn’t… you can’t make this shit up.

Brian Kurtz: If you make it up, then you’re lying, and that’s not good. But we actually found out there was an ingredient that could only be found in a part of Africa. I forget what it was. Sudan, somewhere, uh, Nigeria maybe, in somewhere in Africa, in these like expansive caves where they would take it off the cave walls.

Brian Kurtz: And now you have a story, right? Copywriting is storytelling. Yeah. And so now you’ve got like a, a joint medication. There are tons of them out there and you have a differentiator that says we have the ingredient. Is that ingredient going to be the thing that’s going to alleviate all your joint pain? I don’t know, I mean… but it is an ingredient.

Brian Kurtz: It’s been tested. You know, some doctors tested it in a [00:39:00] lab and said it looks like, there’s some, there’s some positive results on this. I mean, you have to be careful. Your copy still has to be compliant when you’re writing about it. But I use that as an example of where, you know, the make or buy, you can just buy, you know, the joint pain thing, put your label on it and do it that way.

Brian Kurtz: And just have a great copywriter differentiate it. Or maybe there’s a differentiator with somebody who’s developed the product already, hasn’t marketed it at all. And really has a better mouse trap. They have something that is unique and so sometimes, and that’s why research in terms of product development and that’s why surveying is so important.

Brian Kurtz: It’s why being connected in the marketplace, not networking, but contributing to the industry. If you’re in the, in the supplement business and you’re constantly contributing. Your expertise, whether in marketing, copywriting, whatever, [00:40:00] you will connect with people that you’ll find them and go, wow, this guy or this woman developed this.

Brian Kurtz: They have no idea that they’re sitting on something that I could sell. They can’t sell it because they don’t know how to sell, but they’ve got the product. That’s a perfect situation where you buy and not make it yourself. So, I mean, I’ve been a little broad here, but I hopefully I’ve made the point of the make or buy decision is always… should be front lobe in your brain. It should be always thinking about it because you don’t have to invent everything. And I, I say in Overdeliver, I didn’t invent anything in my entire career. And yet I think I’ve innovated and connected the dots often enough to create incredibly successful marketing campaigns without inventing anything because I bought everything around the corner. I bought everything that I needed to and you put together a team the story of the [00:41:00] infomercial was interesting because you know I had the product the book, but I needed a host. I needed a premise. I needed a producer.

Brian Kurtz: I needed media buying. I needed all the different things that go into it. I wasn’t going to do all that from scratch. I had all the experts that I could find to go. I have been accumulating experts. I always wanted to be on TV with our products. I knew all the experts when I got the idea of how to price it and how to position it, once I had that, I was off to the races because I knew all the people that I could go to.

Brian Kurtz: So I basically bought. I didn’t make anything. In fact, we already had the book made basically just repositioned it. We changed the design of the book. So it’d look better for TV and not just for direct mail. It was really, um, it was a make and buy decision, but I think anything today, uh, could be part make part buy, all buy, all make, depends on the product.

Brian Kurtz: Depends on how you’re positioning it. And [00:42:00] depends on what kind of collaborators you can find and partners you can find.

Terence: That’s such a good lesson on business or collaborating. Um, so let’s, uh, talk a little bit about Brian. What, what do you see? I mean, you’ve been in marketing for 40 years.

Terence: What do you see some of today’s marketers are kind of like, missing out on that, you know, the marketers of yesteryears were doing really well? And today’s marketers are missing out on, I mean, we talked about the list a little bit, but is there anything else that we’re missing out on today?

Brian Kurtz: Yeah. I don’t like to sit and sort of lecture all the new whippersnappers and cause then I’ll be, I’m grandpa at the picnic, you know, you get off of my lawn, you know, I don’t want to, I don’t want to play that role.

Brian Kurtz: That’s not who I am, but I will say that.

Terence: Yeah.

Brian Kurtz: I think that, um, I think that a lot of, of, um, a lot of marketers today, it’s easy to hang out a shingle. It’s easy to create a product. It’s easy [00:43:00] to, to just go on Facebook and sell something. And so I have this, this phrase that says, you know, everything in marketing today, especially is not a revenue event, but everything’s a relationship event.

Brian Kurtz: And it sounds corny. I know, but it’s really true when you think about it. And the beauty of online marketing is that it is less expensive. The barrier to entry is a lot lower than things like direct mail and print and TV and radio. So the, but the barrier to entry is not an excuse to be sloppy. It’s not an excuse to just throw anything out there and see what sticks.

Brian Kurtz: So using the same discipline of what I learned in direct mail is probably the biggest thing that they can do. Also the value of physical product. I think a lot of online marketers are missing the boat on this. Now you say, well, my audience is younger. They don’t really care about physical product.

Brian Kurtz: Everything is digital. I just, I maintain that I don’t care. If [00:44:00] you’re a human being, you like to touch stuff. You like the tactile feel of a product. And so if it’s not that everything should have, you know, a, um, a physical component to it, but, you know, in, in Titans Xcelerator, even there, I give the USB once a month, just so people can get something in the mail in a plastic case that kind of, kind of solidifies their membership and it gives them content that’s not anywhere else in the membership.

Brian Kurtz: So there’s a method to madness there in terms of, like, it adds to the tact. It’s like… it’s like you can feel the offer. You can feel the product and not just have it stored on your hard drive. And I think that, you know, look, you could have piled up binders. I have them. Of courses and all the kinds of stuff that are on most people’s hard drives today.

Brian Kurtz: But I think the, the thing that, you know, that using physical product in some way to incorporate into your [00:45:00] offer is something that again, it’s not a miss. It’s not, you know, if you don’t do it, you don’t do it. And if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit for your offer. That’s fine. But I think it can enhance your offer.

Brian Kurtz: It can, um, it can really add a dimension that few other things can. So those are a couple of things in terms of the discipline of, you know, making sure that every message that goes out, does it need to sell something? In the direct mail, we didn’t have that luxury because we were paying posters and printing.

Brian Kurtz: Everything sort of had to sell. But I think that online you have the luxury of not having to sell on every email. Now, some people in email marketing say every email should have an offer. There’s different opinions on that. I understand why. You know, even just a, uh, you know, a super signature with an offer at the bottom is fine on every email.

Brian Kurtz: I don’t, I don’t, I don’t tell people not to do that, but [00:46:00] I think that there’s a time and a place for storytelling in email. There’s a time and a place for relationship building with your email… you can do it by email now, but you can do it on Facebook. You can do it in LinkedIn. So, I mean, I’m doing a whole LinkedIn campaign now of taking pieces of my blog, my weekly blog posts, and just posting them with a couple of hashtags at the end, no real offer in most of them.

Brian Kurtz: They’re just putting my content out there and people are going to find me. Then I finally do a CTA, a call to action to have them sign up. Okay. You know, from my email list or my online family, and there’s a way, it’s sort of like romancing people as opposed to just hitting them, you know, over the head all the time.

Brian Kurtz: And so, yeah, it’s a philosophy. Not 1 that I say you have to follow, but I think when you’re building a business for the long and playing the long game, I believe relationships trump all, those are a couple of things.

Terence: Cool. Brian, uh, talking [00:47:00] about relationships, I mean, you call yourself the master of anti selling or something like that.

Brian Kurtz: The director…

Terence: What do you call yourself again?

Brian Kurtz: Director of sales prevention.

Terence: The director of sales prevention. Yeah. But yet you have like three thriving mastermind groups. Can you tell us how you built them?

Brian Kurtz: Yeah. So I’ve got, um, right now I only have one, but I’ve had as many as three and I go in and out, but I think the thing is, when I left Boardroom, I had 34 years experience at that point.

Brian Kurtz: So I already had built up a hefty relationship capital account and I did it all the ways that we’ve talked about on this podcast. So… you know, I don’t have to read, you know, talk about that more, but I was established in the business, so I did a Descension model as opposed to an Ascension model, not, not everybody can do that.

Brian Kurtz: And what a Descension model was is [00:48:00] I started with a $25, 000 Mastermind. Live Mastermind. And I put 23 people in it almost immediately. So that’s a half a million dollars. Immediately, I had a half a million dollar business and it’s not that easy because I, I had spent 34 years to get there. So it took me 34 years to get to a half a million dollar, um, business with a mastermind.

Brian Kurtz: Now, I had success in Boardroom. I was an equity partner at Boardroom. Nobody’s crying for me and money. I’m fine. But so what happened was I did a Descension model. So I went from the $25, 000 mastermind to the $10, 000 mastermind. Which was like for more junior people, and now the one that you’re in, Titan’s Accelerator, is a $2, 000 mastermind.

Brian Kurtz: But it’s all virtual, no live events. But the principle is the same, and now that I had, I had those established, and this, then, then flip it, for most people who are listening to this, [00:49:00] to do an Ascension model. You still need that low ticket initial purchase to get to even the 2, 000 mastermind. And so what I did was I had, I had access to Breakthrough Advertising, which I have the exclusive rights to with Gene Schwartz’s wife.

Brian Kurtz: And so…

Terence: That’s how I got into your mastermind group, by the way, I bought Breakthrough Advertising and that’s how we connected and yeah, I’m part of the mastermind.

Brian Kurtz: And also then we got more proactive with that. We have a Breakthrough Advertising bootcamp. So we do a two and a half week bootcamp, which anybody in Titans Xcelerator and the Mastermind can go for free, but we get new people to come into the bootcamp.

Brian Kurtz: It’s like $197. That’s the low ticket, right? The low ticket for you. So the book is $125. So that was your ticket into my world. And eventually you join the mastermind, but the Breakthrough Advertising boot camp is directly related almost because it’s on zoom, just like the mastermind. [00:50:00] So you get into the Breakthrough Advertising bootcamp.

Brian Kurtz: We teach extensively for two and a half weeks on six hour and a half calls. It’s… it’s in depth. And then, you know, I am the director of sales prevention, but I still go for the… I still had a call to action, which was to join the mastermind. And then we get great people out of the bootcamp into the mastermind.

Brian Kurtz: Then I developed something called the Overdeliver bootcamp. So the Overdeliver bootcamp was an idea that I took from, I expanded on an idea from Jason Fladlian, who’s an amazing marketer in webinars, and he’s just phenomenal, and he had this thing that he developed called an E class. And what an E class is, and it’s, he didn’t invent that, but an E class for him was basically most people buy books, but they don’t read them.

Brian Kurtz: So the idea is that with a book, you then sell, um, what I call the Overdeliver bootcamp. So for two and a half weeks, six calls, an hour and a half each, we go through the book with [00:51:00] exercises and advertising bootcamp. It’s proactive, interactive. We have hot seats. We have, you know, uh, worksheets, homework, people look at their business and adapted to Breakthrough Advertising. Overdeliver has a lot of things in it that people can, they can do an RFM analysis of their list.

Brian Kurtz: They can create like intentional dinners, which is something that I teach in chapter 10. So basically the Overdeliver boot camp going into that’s also like $197 and then we sell Titans Xcelerator. That’s even more direct because in Breakthrough Advertising, I’m teaching Gene Schwartz’s stuff. In Overdeliver, I’m teaching my stuff and I teach my stuff and how I work in, in the mastermind. So it’s even a more direct link, but I guess the point is that even though I started with a Decension model of masterminds, now the Ascension [00:52:00] model works because I have lower ticket. So I went high ticket to low ticket and you can go either way.

Brian Kurtz: Depending on your experience, depending on the, you know, your online family and your offline family and who you can promote your stuff to, you know, creating a mastermind is instant business. I mean, if you have stuff to offer, I think there’s been a little bit of, I want to say this, uh, politely.

Brian Kurtz: So, um, you know, Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi who are, uh, wonderful guys, entrepreneurs. I don’t really know. I don’t know Tony. I know Dean. And they develop like mastermind formula where people can like… basically the idea of share your genius with the world and we’ll help you develop your own masterclass. So it’s kind of bastardized the idea of exclusive masterminds and that anybody can do it.

Brian Kurtz: They don’t promote it that way, but it ends up getting promoted that way because you know, it’s, it becomes a [00:53:00] commodity, uh, and masterminds are anything but commodities. So as far as masterminds go, there’s a lot of ways to do it. There’s a lot of good ways to do it, a lot of bad ways to do it. Um, but if you have something to share, that’s, that’s unique and that you have an audience that would be responsive, you can do it as a Descension model and Ascension model. You can do it with low ticket products into a mastermind. That’s usually the way to do it. You know, there’s no one way to do it, I guess is what I’m saying. And I just gave you the way I did it.

Terence: Yeah. And I think, um, being part of the mastermind, this is quite amazing because we get access to some of the greatest minds and marketing.

Terence: Like I think we’ve had Jay Abraham, we’ve had Dan Kennedy, we’ve had Ryan Levesque and a whole bunch of others. There are too many to name…

Brian Kurtz: Yeah. The thing is…

Terence: …in the past five years.

Brian Kurtz: And what I realize is that the people, the members of the group become the stars as well. So we have like what we call Titan spotlight. [00:54:00] So we have outside speakers who are well known.

Brian Kurtz: The people in the group can always share and they do a spotlight. We have one this week. With a member who’s going to, uh, who’s going to talk about, um, how she uses Instagram in her business incredibly well. And so that’s a hands on person who’s got a skill and an innovation. And she’s a member of the group.

Brian Kurtz: I’m not going to the outside. I don’t need, I don’t need an expert. She is the expert. So that that’s one of the benefits of creating a mastermind is that the group itself becomes the content. Which is great.

Terence: Yeah. And I mean, we do have a lot of high, highly intelligent and really smart marketers in the group, by the way.

Terence: Oh yeah. So yeah, it’s good to be hanging out with them. Yes. Yes. So Brian, um, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for your time. And I guess, you know, we kind of hit the hour mark. So, um, as much as I like to talk for another hour, I think we just have to wrap things up. But Brian, if people want to find out more about your [00:55:00] mastermind, find out more about Breakthrough Advertising and yourself, uh, how do they get in touch or how do they follow you?

Brian Kurtz: So there’s an easy way to do it. You go to briankurtz. net, b r i a n k u r t z. net. There’s an opt in page for my Sunday blog. I think you get a download of an interview I did with Perry Marshall, one of the great marketers of all time, and he interviews me and that’s, that’s the, that’s the, the welcome mat into my world.

Brian Kurtz: Uh, you’ll be on my, you’ll be part of my online family. I blog every Sunday and Wednesday with content. I don’t sell a lot. I only sell educational material. If I sell someone else’s educational material, I don’t take affiliate commissions. So what I do is if someone’s selling something. And I think it’s worthwhile.

Brian Kurtz: I give, I, I asked them to take my affiliate commission and give that as a 50 percent discount to my online family. So it’s a nice formula for me. Cause I don’t, I don’t need the money from affiliates. I, it’s just not part of my [00:56:00] model. So it’s a good model. I’m not saying it’s not, I’m not saying affiliates are bad, but I don’t need affiliate commission.

Brian Kurtz: So that’s a really good way to, to kind of screen out the people that I want to promote and the information I want to promote and it’s all direct marketing education. It’s never anything that’s like, you know, yoga or meditation, which are fine things, but they don’t fit for what I’m selling and my audience.

Brian Kurtz: So, um, so that briankurtz. net is the way to get into my online family. If you want to buy my book, which I make no money on, if, if you go, don’t go directly to Amazon, go to Overdeliverbook. com, O V E R D E L I V E R, book. com. And on that site, you go, there’s a button, you can go to Amazon, Barnes Noble, go buy the book, you come back to the site, opens up a new window, and you come back.

Brian Kurtz: And the, you’ll see the bonuses on that site, just for buying the book, are incredible. Um, going back to where we [00:57:00] started this conversation in terms of my mentors, many of them are honored on that page. Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, 2 of my direct mail mentors, Dick Benson and Gordon Grossman, who people on this call probably never heard of.

Brian Kurtz: And yet they each wrote a book, which is out of print on that site. You can get a PDF of both books. So there’s like 11 bonuses, just incredible bonuses. As I said, a Dan Kennedy swipe file, a Jay Abraham course, and 19 keynote speeches that Jay Abraham gave. Some videos from my Titans event in 2014. So it’s just a, it’s just a great, I mean the bonus, I hate to say this because it puts down my book, but it’s probably the bonuses are worth more than the book.

Brian Kurtz: Well it is because the book’s $25 or whatever it is, and the bonuses are, some of them are priceless. You can’t get them anywhere else. And some are worth thousands of dollars. So, um, so Overdeliver book. com is another way to get into my online family. Plus you get tons of amazing [00:58:00] content, warm you up to the kinds of stuff that I… that I sell, that I provide for free. So Overdeliverbook. com is another way to go. And on my site at briankurtz. net, um, I do have a tab at the top and it’s got work with me, which has the mastermind information. It’s got a product tab, where you can buy Breakthrough Advertising, you can buy gene Schwartz’s other book, the Brilliance Breakthrough. I have rights to that as well. A couple of swipe files from great copywriters, Jim Rutz and Bill Jamey. So I’ve got a lot of all educational, all copywriting and marketing resources, um, unique to me and my career and my world, uh, universally beloved people who shared their genius and now I can share their genius with a lot of people as well.

Brian Kurtz: So the entry point is briankurtz. net, but there’s a lot of other ways to get into my world. And I encourage all of your [00:59:00] listeners to just get in my online family. You’ll get a welcome series to my blog. And then, you can read me every Sunday morning in your inbox. Um, and you know…

Terence: Yes, I read them every Sunday. Very thoughtful messages.

Brian Kurtz: Thank you, Terence. I appreciate that from someone like you, especially. I, I think that…. the, the interesting thing is that I was talking about this with Jeff Walker, who’s, he’s the one who invented Product Launch Formula. And we were talking about how, you know, there’s a, there’s such an overlap between personal development and marketing, like personal development, like self improvement and Tony Robbins kind of stuff, and, you know, being a better person, all of that, and marketing, like tactics and techniques and all that, and marketing philosophy.

Brian Kurtz: And it’s a Venn diagram. And the shared area is bigger and bigger than ever before. And so it’s interesting when I write something that has a marketing bent to it, but it’s not really all marketing, [01:00:00] like the one I wrote this past Sunday was the, like, you know, confidence is not arrogance. And it was almost like personal development than marketing. I do have a marketing example in there of a copywriter who came and approached me to write for me and stuff. But it was like, I was kind of teaching something that I don’t even think is in my sweet spot, but it becomes my sweet spot because marketing and personal development are so intertwined.

Brian Kurtz: And so I find that, and I find the, the engagement with my audience, like people who email me on my, my weekly blogs, I get many more engagement emails on the personal development stuff. That’s more personal development than marketing. And yet I’m a marketer and it’s, it’s supposed to be all about marketing.

Brian Kurtz: I did one on, um, a couple of weeks ago, Jaggering at 80, which was all about the Rolling Stones concert I went to, but also the lessons I learned there, marketing [01:01:00] lessons. It’s more personal development of, you know, longevity. It was like longevity with relevance. And is that a marketing concept? I don’t know.

Brian Kurtz: It’s, it’s like a little bit of both. And I got a lot of response to that blog post. So it’s, um, it’s fascinating to me, this idea of personal development and marketing. And so, you know, it’s, I see myself… it’s a marketing blog, but it goes beyond cause you have to. If you’re writing anything in marketing, you’re going to write stuff in personal development.

Terence: Brian, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. And, um, we’ll hope to have you back again in the near future again on this podcast for more juicy stuff from you.

Brian Kurtz: Thank you, Terence. And I hope to see you on a Xcelerator call soon. And, uh, you are one of the stars of the group. So I appreciate you very much.

This podcast is hosted by Terence Tam, author of Lead Surge: 8 Radically Effective Marketing Funnels for Coaches and Experts. He is also the Founder of Radical Marketing, a digital marketing agency that partners with high-ticket coaches to scale their businesses with Webinars – by using a proprietary blend of story ads and battled-tested sales funnels to achieve better returns on ad dollars.

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