If you’re required to exert willpower to do something, it means there’s
internal conflict. It means, the ‘why’ is not big enough or the ‘why’ hasn’t
overtaken your desire for whatever the alternative is.
You want to make your ‘why’ so big that your ‘how’ becomes easy.
Your self-control is what will distinguish you from all the others. It’s what
will give you the ability to show up every day, whether it’s at the gym, at
school, building your business, making money, or training in martial arts. It’s
doing what no one else is willing to do, so you can achieve what they won’t.
That’s what comes from conquering your Little Bitch and forging your self-
control and discipline.
You know what I’m talking about and you probably can’t believe I’m talking
about it. But I am. You not only need to come to terms with its existence, but
also with the fact that you have to get it under control.
You must let the Little Bitch know who’s in control. Let it know who’s the
master. Starve it of oxygen and never let it see the light of day. Remove all
the fear and inhibition it breeds. You must let your hunger for success, in all
areas of your life, out-wrestle your Little Bitch, making it obedient to your
hunger for success.
Without this deep hunger for success, it’s like trying to work a lighter that has
no fuel. You get sputtering little sparks, maybe even a short-lived flame, but
no fire.
Your hunger and drive must be blazing so big, so bright, and so furious that
no one can deny it. You must crave success so intensely that the work it takes
to attain it is irrelevant.
Fall in love with the work itself, not just the result. Learn to enjoy the
excruciating pain, you must endure to be successful. Success isn’t just talent.
Talent will help get you started but it won’t get you to the Promised Land.
You have to create a work ethic that ensures you become successful. Hard
work and effort will beat talent 99% of the time. Put in the work to ensure
your success. Don’t look for shortcuts. Don’t make excuses.
People are always asking me about the secrets and growth hacks I use to
grow businesses. Sorry if this disappoints you, but there are no secrets. Yes,
there are strategies, tactics, and levers you can pull to unlock serious growth
in your business – however, they all require you to put in the work to make
them work.
The only qualification that I would add is you have to work hard on what gets
results. Invest your time in the 4% that drives cash flow. Love the work itself,
but set goals and demand results from yourself. Plan for progress and achieve
it.
Instead of looking for get-rich-quick-schemes, secrets, hacks, magic pills, or
silver bullets, roll up your sleeves and get ready to do the work.
Take an honest look at where you are now and where you want to be. Then,
ask yourself what you’re willing to do to get there. What fire are you willing
to walk through? How much pain are you willing to tolerate? Then make a
plan to get there, act on it, and do whatever it takes.
Your job is to be the best entrepreneur and business person you can be. To do
that you have to train and practise to master your craft, continually learning
and getting better at the activities that really move the needle for your
business.
You want to train and level-up your abilities as much as you can, as often as
you can. So, I want you to imagine this scenario:
There is one business owner who wakes up at 8am, has breakfast and gets to
work at 9:30am, answers emails, manages some admin, and begins to work
on important activities by 11am. One hour of work goes by, and it’s 12pm –
time for lunch. He goes to lunch and is back in the office at 1:30pm. There
are a few emails that need replying to, and after doing that it’s now 2:30pm.
His focus turns back to the important activities, and it takes fifteen minutes to
get back in the zone and start to focus. An hour goes by and it’s 3:45pm when
the phone rings. He gets stuck on a call with a client, vendor, or manager. By
the time he finishes, it’s 4:30pm. A few more emails have come through,
along with a handful of messages on office chat. It’s now 5:30pm and time to
go home and ‘switch off’ for the day.
for himself and his company was two hours.
Now imagine another entrepreneur who wakes up at 4am. He heads to the
gym, listening to an audiobook on his 30-minute commute, levelling-up and
feeding his brain with new information. He completes a 45-minute workout,
then a sauna session to get in peak state keeping the mind sharp for the day
ahead. He showers and heads to the office, again listening to an audiobook,
gaining insights, arriving at the office at 7am. He dives straight into deep
work on the activities that really matter. No checking emails, no distractions,
just laser-like focus on the task at hand. 9am comes around, two hours have
flown by as he’s been in a deep, focussed and uninterrupted state. He stops
for 20 minutes to have a packed breakfast and grab a coffee.
It’s now 9:20am, and he’s back at his desk, jumping straight back into deep
work on highly-leveraged activities that will move the business forward.
Another two hours go by, it’s 11:20am. He hops inside his inbox, archiving
and deleting emails that don’t need a reply, actioning others with short, sharp
responses, or simply jumping on the phone for two minutes to sort out an
issue that would take 20 minutes to deal with via email. By this time it’s
12pm and he’s already done four hours of solid productive, proactive ‘move
the needle’ work. Already twice what the other entrepreneur completed in a
whole day, and it’s still only lunch time.
He has a healthy lunch and turns off the brain to recover and decompress. It’s
now 12:45pm, and he’s back at his desk, refreshed and raring to go. There are
a few pressing issues that take an hour and 15 minutes to resolve before he’s
able to get back to the work that really matters. It’s now 2pm and he gets in
another two hours of deep work. Writing sales letters, coming up with new
offers, creating new products, forming new strategic partnerships – whatever
they might be.
It’s now 4pm and time to head home to beat the traffic and see his kids.
Again, audiobook on, constantly feeding the brain. Arriving home to play
with the kids, bathe them, have dinner. It’s now 6:30pm, and he picks up a
book written by a proven master in their field on a subject he is looking to
improve in his own business. Reading for an hour and a half, again training.
It’s 8pm before he puts on Netflix or just goofs around with his partner and
he’s in bed by 9:30pm.
Six hours of deep work. Two hours and 45 minutes of training and
sharpening the axe. This adds up to eight hours and 45 minutes of work
directed at becoming a master each day – more than three times the other
entrepreneur.
Look at how much more training he’s able to do and how much more of the
work that really matters. And it’s simply by starting at 4am and being
focussed. All this extra ground covered, and this doesn’t include the extra day
he works on Sundays.
As he keeps working, the years go on and the advantage he has over his
competitors just gets wider and wider. Five years down the track and it really
doesn’t matter how much work the competitor puts in over a given quarter, or
if they don’t take holidays one year, because they’re five years behind. After
10 years, forget about it, it’s over. They’ll never catch up.
As entrepreneurs, and as people in general, if you want to become truly great
at something, there is a choice we have to make. You have to make the
inherent sacrifices that come along with it, including hanging out with friends
or watching the game on the telly. It’s just a matter of what’s important to
you. If you want to be a master at your craft, you have to make sacrifices.
When you’re serious about success, there’s no off-season. Nor is there
anyone coming to save you. It’s just you attacking your goals with gusto and
a relentless single parent mother work ethic.
If you follow the principles outlined in this book and do the work, you will be
successful – beyond your wildest dreams. I will give you all the tools you
need so that you’ll never go hungry in life. But like anything worth attaining,
it requires a lot of work and dedication.
Are you hungry for it? Willing to put the work in? Fired up?
I thought so!
Let’s get busy.
The $500,000 Learning Curve
Before writing this book, I went back and looked at all the money I’d
invested in learning what I know today. Seminars I’ve attended,
books I’ve read, tests I’ve run, and all the money I’ve lost along the
way…
It added up to $500,000.
That’s right. Half a million dollars. I could scarcely believe it myself, but it’s
true. I call this my $500,000 learning curve.
The thing is, looking back I realised that most of that money was spent on
useless, ineffective gimmicks peddled by so-called ‘gurus’ and ‘specialists’.
People selling the false dream of living on the beach, working an hour a day,
and living the high life off a stream of passive income. Or promoting ‘secret’
tactics to get your website on the front page of Google… only for it to fall off
to the 20th page the next day.
None of that stuff worked. None of it.
It was after burning through all that cash I decided to dedicate my time to
studying people who had had real successes. Masters of advertising, with
actual, bankable results across multiple industries, spanning decades of
success.
I dedicated myself to studying all the greats from the past 150 years. Guys
like Robert Collier, Eugene Schwartz, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert, and Gary
Bencivenga. These guys quietly worked in the background to generate
billions of dollars in revenue, often turning tiny businesses into huge
household names that are still around today.
If you’ve never heard of them, Google them! For example, Robert Collier
was a 20th-century American author of self-help and New Thought
metaphysical books. His book The Secret of the Ages, published in 1926, sold
over 300,000 copies during his life. Much of what he taught about the art and
science of selling are still true today.
I read every book on human psychology I could find. I went deep – like,
really deep. What I learned from them completely changed the way I
approached business. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Some of it needed
to be completely reimagined to work in today’s digital age. And now I’m
going to share all of it with you.
I know what you’re thinking, why on earth would I share all this knowledge
at such a low price point?
It’s simple, really. Success doesn’t come easy, and it’s rare that anyone
manages to make their dreams a reality without others opening and holding
the door for them from time to time. As you reach for your goals and benefit
from the wisdom I’m handing you in this book, don’t forget to pass the good
sentiment along and help those coming up behind you.
Because if you’ve done well, it’s your obligation to spend a good portion of
your time sending the elevator back down. And that’s exactly what I’m doing
in this book.
From where am I sending the elevator back down? Well, the strategies and
tactics I’m about to walk you through have generated over $400,000,000 –
and counting – in revenue for my clients and me.
I’ve worked with thousands of leaders here in Australia and around the world
to help them rapidly and exponentially grow their businesses, by helping
them increase that traffic, leads, and sales in the most effective way possible.
In the process, I’ve learned a thing or two about growing a business fast. This
is something, as I’ve already mentioned, that ultimately comes down to
human psychology – the triggers that make people want to buy… or not want
to buy.
It’s this deep understanding of consumer behaviour and marketing that’s
turned King Kong into the fastest and most in-demand online marketing
agency in Australia, which has been ranked in the top 100 fastest-growing
companies in the country two years in a row. We’re ranked as the 28th
fastest-growing company in the country by The Australian Financial Review.
In fact, we’re so busy we have a list of clients waiting for their turn to work
with us.
Since then I’ve been called the ‘King of Consulting’ by Foundr magazine
(placed next to Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, and Arianna Huffington!),
and have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc Magazine, The Sydney
Morning Herald, and hundreds of other notable publications.
Rest assured, I know what I’m talking about. And I’m going to share with
you the results of a decade’s worth of trial and error, split testing over
millions of page views, and millions of dollars in ad spend. You’re not going
to learn ‘the flavour of the month’ tactic that’s here today but gone tomorrow.
You’re going to learn strategies that have been successfully deployed for over
150 years!
Long-term strategies you can literally base your business off.
Sadly, today there seems to be an unspoken belief that the most important
element behind profitable marketing is simply having the latest software with
all the bells and whistles.
The latest landing page builder, CRM software, webinar automation tool,
one-page shopping cart checkout system… or a super slick sales funnel.
Go to any marketing forum or Facebook group and you’ll see hundreds of
questions such as these:
What’s the best landing page builder?
Which is better WordPress or ClickFunnels?
How many follow up emails should I have in my funnel?
Or worse…
What’s the best colour for my call to action button?!
It’s ridiculous but true…
Here is the brutal truth: None of this matters.
Why not? Because you can have the most advanced technology,
tools, and
sales funnel with all the fancy bells, whistles, and advanced marketing
automation that delivers a lame vanilla offer your prospects simply ignore!
In contrast, this will never beat a white-hot, irresistible offer (developed using
‘The Godfather Strategy’, which you’ll learn about in Phase 4) presented to a
starving crowd of your best prospects, presented in a new and unique way –
but delivered using simple and rudimentary technology through a basic sales
funnel a child could operate.
In the following pages, I will teach you how to do all this and more. These
strategies have been tailored to work in today’s ruthlessly competitive world
of online marketing, and have been proven to work for nearly every business
model. Just as importantly, they’re easy and straightforward to follow.
First, I’m going to show you how to become the trusted authority in your
space against whom all your competitors are measured. Then I’m going to
show you how to use that status to have customers practically throwing
money at you.
After that, I’ll delve into specific strategies and techniques you can use to
open the floodgates of traffic, and how to most effectively turn that traffic
into customers who buy and buy again.
There are many problems that can occur as a business grows, but there is only
one that’s deadly – and that’s the inability to bring in new customers in high
enough volumes with high enough profit margins.
Once you have systems in place that bring in new, high-paying clients on
demand (we’ll be covering exactly how to do this in the pages of this book),
and once you’ve got the ‘selling’ dialled in for your business and you start to
scale, you’ll eventually let other people take over the one-to-one sales
functions. Won’t that be amazing? Of course, you’ll guide them as the
company grows, help them take advantage of opportunities, and work with
them to avoid potentially damaging mistakes.
As your business scales and revenues climb, and you have multiple traffic
channels bringing in sales, you can let other people do most of the day-to-day
selling. However, by establishing your marketing credentials during the first
stage, when the selling secrets of your business are still unknown, you’ll gain
a deep understanding of your business that will serve you well for the rest of