Business is eternal. Business will go on with or without you. The decision you have to make is how willing are you to do what is necessary to go on.

Businesses expand and grow by employing perception and gaining perspective. The only instances in history where a business continues to grow in spite of antiquated methods of marketing and manufacture are when you have a product(s) that is so in demand or so consumable that manufacturing cannot keep up, which keeps the price (perceived value) high and the presses rolling.

If your drive for success is pure and your ultimate goals are altruistic, huge dividends will accrue for those willing to maintain focus without losing their humanity.

Any worthwhile idea blossoms when it has been accepted and put into practice by a significant number of others. This replication becomes self-sustaining at a certain point and forces align themselves to maintain flow of raw materials, a delivery system and consumer market that grows exponentially.

Market forces, however, can be fickle and awareness must be maintained of what is next.

A niche can be expanded to a notch, which makes a mark that develops into a spot, which can be maintained by repeating the process again and again.

Alliances must be made every step of the way to ensure reliability and sustainability. It also keeps a flow of fresh ideas to be refined and engaged at the proper time. When you stop growing, you start dying.

Here’s my tuppence:

A consistent series of back end offers is critical to your business because:

1) All your customers are going through their own lifecycle and are at some stage in your overall customer lifecycle process.

2) A cycle is just that – a cyclical process, which you want to keep going round and round.

3) Customers who’ve been through the stage of buying from you once, are experienced in that stage of the lifecycle process and know the drill (which you want to leverage & capitalise on).

4) Having a consistent series of backend offers keeps these customers on the cycle – going round and round, purchasing more & more from you and increasing their overall lifetime value.

And, it’s important that you build alliances within your marketplace because:

1) It’s a cost-effective way to increase the number of customers entering & experiencing your (their) lifecycle.

2) It allows you to leverage the alliances’s offers, products & services and offer relevant ones to your customers, thereby extending their lifecycle without you having to do all the work to produce the products/offers all the time.

It’s a virtuous circle (or should that be cycle?!).

I’ll be brief. I have created hundreds of website concepts with back end offers and systematizations similar to those in your manifesto. AND, they are not even in maket yet. Want to hear them? You have my e-mail. Thanks

Good day Rich,

First off, thank you for giving us this opportunity to rub shoulders with you and Agora. It is indeed priceless and may my effort below secure me this opportunity. Please enjoy…

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Why is it critical that my business has a consistent series of back end offers?

Firstly, the system of consistent back end offers placed in front of my customers gradually moves my customers with every back end sale from a freshly converted customer to a hyper-responsive loyal customer. Every purchase they make represents a further commitment to their relationships with me. I have here a deliberate system in place that purposely builds up a base of true, loyal hyper-responsive customers over time.

Furthermore, with a systematic back end process, I am able to test to establish the best sequence of offers to make the most money on the back end.

Secondly, an established system of back end offers allows me to identify and measure certain aspects of my business that are vital towards enhancing my relationship with my customers and hence, maximizing profitability. They are:

i. 80/20 Customer Pyramid: The back end system allows me to analyze my business in a structured manner and see whether 20% of my customers account for 80% of my profits (The Paretto Principle). If they aren’t, that means I don’t have enough back end offers (at higher price points) in place, hence, I am not maximizing my profits. Even worse, by not offering more of these back end offers and furthering my relationship with my best customers, I might permanently lose them to my competitors who are doing so.

ii. Latency Period: By having the back end system, I am able to calculate the average amount of time taken by a customer to make 2 consecutive purchases, and this is known as the Latency Period. The Latency Period enables me to identify the 3 types of customers I have and hence, adjust my marketing and sales process to suit each type to maximize profits:

- One; are the customers who are “in heat”. They seem to have a ravenous appetite for my products. For them, I will put out as many offers as possible in front of them as quickly as possible. This is to prevent losing them because their appetite is larger than my normal schedule of back end offers.

- Two; are the customers who more or less stick to the schedule set by the Latency Period. They are my loyal hyper-responsive customers that keep buying and spreading the good word about my business. In order to maintain retention of them, I will offer them special loyalty prices and such.

- Three; are the customers who are “sluggish” or whose responses are falling behind schedule as determined by the Latency Period. For these customers, I will take actions to bring them back on schedule such as offering them discount coupons or special bonuses.

iii. Customer Life Cycle: A Customer Life Cycle is the progression of steps that my customer goes through from the point of consideration for that front end purchase to the point where he/she is considered to be a loyal hyper-responsive customer (in the back end). The schedule of the various actions/offers involved in the Customer Life Cycle of my business depends on the Latency Period. The longer the Latency Period, the longer the Customer Life Cycle will be.

Beyond the Customer Life Cycle, a customer who does not end up becoming a loyal hyper-responsive customer will no longer be considered a customer and will be dropped. In other words, the Customer Life Cycle also means the period of time in which I still have a customer. This helps me in to identify the non-customers in my customer base. Identifying this group of people in my customer base allows me to assess how much business and profits I am losing everyday and take appropriate remedial actions.

iv. Lifetime Customer Value: The Lifetime Customer Value is the total money spent by my average customers spanning the entire period that these customers are likely to do business with me, which is the Customer Life Cycle. Since I am able to discern who exactly are still my customers and the exact offers involved from the Customer Life Cycle, I can easily calculate the Lifetime Customer Value for my business. This metric is crucial towards maximizing profits in my business due to the following reasons:

- One; with the Lifetime Customer Value, I am able to determine the value of a newly acquired customer (on the front end). This figure tells me how well my business is doing profits-wise when it is compared to the Cost Per Acquisition. The bigger the difference, the better my business is doing. My job then is to continually strive to lower the Cost Per Acquisition and/or increase the Lifetime Customer Value.

- Two; given a number of new customers acquired over a given period of time, and by applying the Paretto Principle to the successive buying stages in my back end process, I can determine the expected number of customers that should complete the Customer Life Cycle and become my loyal hyper-responsive customers. This figure together with the Customer Life Cycle can then be used to calculate the Expected Lifetime Customer Value of my business. Simply, the Expected Lifetime Customer Value denotes how well my business should be doing. By comparing the Actual Lifetime Customer Value to the Expected Lifetime Customer Value, I am able to assess the performance of my business in the right context. My job is to get the Actual Lifetime Customer Value of my business to match the Expected Lifetime Customer Value, or even surpass it.

Lastly, by systemizing and automating the back end process, it allows me to consistently and continuously allocate more time, energy & money to the front end process. Below are the reasons why I want to do this:

1. In order to complete any endeavor successfully, given finite resources it is only logical to allocate more resources to the harder processes than the easier processes in that endeavor. Since the front end sale is harder to make than the back end sale, I concentrate more on the front end process than the back end process.

2. By concentrating more on the front end process, I am able to strategize, innovate and devise new ways and means to bring increasingly more fresh customers into my sales funnel which automatically means more sales on the back end (due to the automated back end process). And since back end sales contribute a greater percentage of my business’s profits, increasing sales on the back end means geometrically increasing profits.

3. Every business has attrition and my business is no different. Only as long as I bring in an increasing number of customers (on the front end) faster than my business’s attrition rate can my business be considered as expanding. If the opposite happens, I am going out of business everyday.

4. In being more involved with the front end process, I am constantly on the ‘battleground’ of my marketplace, so to speak. As such, I am able react promptly to any changes in my marketplace’s trends or behaviour and more importantly, in my competitors’ marketing tactics and strategies.

Why is it important that I build alliances within my marketplace?

The importance of building alliances within my marketplace stems from the fact that in the online marketing world today business owners are constantly forced to specialize in micro-niches within their respective industries. This is due to 2 main reasons: the ever growing competition caused by the low (in a lot of cases negligible) barrier of entry into the online business world and the expert-seeking behavior of online consumers caused by their hectic schedules (less time available to make decisions) and the ever expanding variety of choices available.

So, in order to remain viable and profitable, online business owners have to establish themselves as an expert in a sub-niche within their main niches. The bigger and more competitive the main niche, the narrower and more diverse the sub-niches are. An unfortunate side-effect to this is that the potential customer base available to these online businesses gets smaller and more limited. The size to which these business can grow is limited. This is unavoidable as the online business world evolve and grows.

As such, only by building alliances within my marketplace can I grow my business beyond the limits imposed by my specialization. This is why:

One; only by partnering with other experts in my niche can I expand my list and hence, my market. What is happening here is that we are leveraging on each other’s customer acquisition mechanisms. Plus, we are reaching out to customers who probably would never have known of us if not for the alliances.

Two; by building alliances in my marketplace, I have access to resources that I probably would never have access to if not for the alliances and so do my partners. This increases the business knowledge base that is available to us. What this does also is that as we utilize the newly found resources to grow our respective businesses (expanding list), we are also growing each other’s businesses exponentially by virtue of our alliances.

Three; alliances that are forged today tend to lead to bigger and better alliances in the future. Since every business will definitely know other businesses that I don’t, many of them bigger businesses, every alliance that I build will lead to other bigger alliances. As a small online business owner, this upward domino effect can only bring expansion and success to my business.

In effect, online businesses in the same niche that build partnerships with each other are akin to a conglomerate of companies or divisions. All parties working with, not against, each other to grow themselves and the conglomerate as a whole.

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Phew, that’s the end of my summary! I sincerely hope it matches what you are looking for. Once again, thank you for the opportunity. Be seeing you Rich! ;-)

Best regards,
Andy Iskandar

P.S. When will you be announcing the results Rich? Getting me all nervous and excited already…

With the right alliances we can literally rock the world! Too bold? Too arrogant?

No way!

As a husband and wife psychology team, we have tested and proven that we can help people Overcome the Fear of Being Fabulous™.

The Fear of Being Fabulous™ plagues nearly everyone’s pursuit of success whether in business, wealth building, relationships, health and fitness, or anything else.

Why? Because they live with unconscious negative beliefs stemming from the way they were raised — forbiddances like: “Don’t get a swelled head.” “You’re not like the rich people.” “Think you’re better than we are?” pounded home with “You’ll never amount to anything.”

There’s a huge market for what we produce, but we can’t reach them alone. We need alliances with large, like-minded info-marketers.

That’s why it’s critical that we establish alliances with large publishers like Agora Publishing
to help the millions worldwide who suffer from resistance to becoming truly successful.

These alliances are vital to making our “Overcoming the Fear of Being Fabulous,” “Breaking Through Resistance,” and “There’s No Such Thing as Failure” products and services available to the largest markets possible.

Our back-ends produce great conversion rates and the added revenue that costs us nothing to generate . . . because they provide the additional help our hungry and eager customers are looking for.

Now Rich has shown us that we need to learn how to systemize our back-end process so we can create the really large profits waiting to be made with our future alliance partners.

The Final Chapter offers a step-by-step plan to help you build your on-line business. Energized with personal anecdotes, Rich shares his discoveries for success with anyone who desires to learn and profit from his knowledge. Although most people employ more time and effort to the front-end, The Final Chapter urges you to apply more emphasis to the back end offers to sustain and grow your business. His secrets include building alliance partners and using powerful tactics to understand trends, interpret the market and capitalize on customers’ passions. Loaded with details, this quick-read explains how you can learn and create your own profitable on-line business. Although work is required, all guess-work has been removed.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK – First Unscripted Iteration

I’m NOT going to apologise for the length of this post.. it’s highly original, different, and contains ideas that will, if Rich takes them on board, absolutely revolutionise the scale and method of his business, and through modelling him, everyone else’s. Obviously most people won’t have the stamina or the insight to see the significance of all this at first. But I’m not writing it for most people, I’m posting it here publicly in order to win the trip to Florida to meet – and hopefully brainstorm business ideas – with Rich and Agora. So I’ve ‘pulled out all the stops’ – this is the ‘real me’, which I know most people find hard to take, it’s a cross I’ve had to bear all my life. But Rich is a pretty high-powered dude, and if I can’t pull out all the stops when I’m writing for someone like him, when can I? What follows is meant in deadly seriousness, and conveys a very important, singular message. Which anyone who has the intelligence and patience to read it will readily see.

Why is Rich Like a Flying Fish?

Perhaps I should have said ‘mud skipper’, an amazing fish that lives most of its time out of the water on mud flats, and has actually adapted to breathe air through a membrane at the back of its throat. That would make the point I am going to make in one of two little metaphorical stories below even better.. But I decided to use poetic licence and make you a flying fish, even though they can’t actually breathe air (which as you will see, is the central metaphor of my fable) because, well, wouldn’t most people like to be a flying fish, rather than a mud skipper?

Note on metaphorical stories: this must seem very strange and oddball to some people, but if we look at the fascinating range of responses to Rich’s competition above, from a psychological point of view – because that’s my major discipline -I can see that they range from being what you might colloquially call very ‘left-brained’, even rote repetitions of points actually taken from The Final Chapter, word for word, to, on the other hand, the delightful but puzzling trilogy of stories about Messrs Front-end, Back-end and Al Liance, which I would put on the extreme ‘right-brained’ side. It’s a story, but can we derive much meaning from it?

Now, one of the tricks of good communication is to appeal to both the left and right processors of the brain, by including both hard evidence, factual statements, in a clear concise manner, but also weaving them into, and including a story, preferably a personal story about the author’s life. Rich is very good at this :) Also, little myths and fables, like Aesop’s fables, can be very illuminating. So I’m going to include two below, and I make no apology for that. I know you studied NLP with Richard Bandler, and may well know that NLP was created when Bandler, then a psychology student, approached then assistant professor of linguistics John Grinder for help in modelling the gestalt therapy of Fritz Perls. They ended up moving to a community in the Santa Cruz mountains where they were influenced by Gregory Bateson (a hero of mine), who introduced them to Milton Erickson. Anyone who thinks that story and metaphor have no place in answering a question on marketing (or any question) should read ‘The Teaching Tales of Milton Erickson’, or Bandler’s recent ‘Adventures of Anybody’. Bateson also considered storytelling and metaphor of central importance. Certain readers will find the stories more interesting, other people will be interested in plain statements. So its good to provide both. Bandler’s 1996 lawsuits against Grinder and others are also relevant to a point I make about caution in business partnerships below.

Well! – I finished reading ‘The Final Chapter’ about two hours ago, and having digested it, and thought about it, I now feel in a position to make a definitive answer to Rich’s Florida trip question. I did make a couple of stabs at it above, but as I said, I was only half way through it, as I am playing catch up.

But I’m not just going to answer the question, I am going to do something that coaches often like their students to do. I am going to be, what they call ‘contributive’. I am going to expand some points that I made before, but now I’m in a position not only to answer Rich’s question better, but as the subconscious often does, when you start turning a question over in your mind, it tends to deliver answers sequentially, like progressive software or web site iterations. So I am going to try to make this my definitive iteration, as I don’t want to labour the point.

By the same token, we shouldn’t assume that people have taken an important point on board, something we know is a real insight, just because we have told them about it once. The human mind has a wonderful propensity for dismissing things. It likes to read, watch and approve of ‘the same old thing’, because people have a natural need to feel that they ‘already know’. So, as many innovative thinkers in history have discovered, one has to endure being ignored, mocked, or considered irrelevant, if one is every going to persevere and get anyone to recognise the significance of what you are saying. If you consider the list of eminent people in history, mostly mavericks working in disciplines they had no ‘official’ business to be working in, whose ideas provoked this kind of reaction, but were eventually proved right, I am happy to be in their company.

Now, how am I going to get this important information across? Well, one of the things I have studied is exactly that. One principle is that your communication should be a coherent whole, it should drive to one point. So I’ll do that. Everything in your message should present, support, or reiterate your singular message in different ways. *Then* you have a chance of someone seeing the significance, and, what is called, truly *understanding* you – ‘getting it’ – having an ‘A-ha!’ or Eureka moment, an epiphany.

So that is what this post, this message, is directed towards. Towards creating a moment of insight, an epiphany, in Rich, principally, as payback for the Internet Business Manifesto chapters, and also, because I genuinely think I would be the most valuable person to come and brainstorm with him and Agora. I know that’s a big claim, from a list of 27, 461 who have registered interest in your new coaching program, Rich, but please bear with me and I’ll show exactly why I think that, in as clear and full a manner as I can. I was sorry to hear about your ‘HEATED’ discussion with the publisher of Early to Rise. I always tell my kids – who are all absolutely set on never working for anyone else, but running their own operations, that if they are going to hook up in a business partnership with someone, they should always make sure that they retain at least a 51% share of the business.

What clued me into this was that I had an uncle who was in a 50-50 partnership with someone. They had different skills – he was a draughtsman, the other guy had the shop floor and people management skills, and unfortunately it came to loggerheads and they couldn’t agree, and had no option but to wind up the business because neither would bow to the other. So it is something to bear in mind. If you are going to ‘get into bed’ with a big company like Agora, then you’ve got to decide how to handle the power disparity. It’s apparent that you are a big admirer of Agora and some of their leading lights, but you also make it clear yourself that this ‘big fish’ is looking imminently to move into Internet marketing waters – your waters, if you think about it..

Your little contretemps is an indicator to me that, having always run your own operation, and being highly self-determining and used to running things your way, if you are going to collaborate with Agora under their instruction and control, you maybe have to consider ‘holding a candle to the devil’ a little, and seeing things their way – within the context of the collaboration. Remember, from their side it’s *also* an exercise in business intelligence, ‘picking brains’, and of course its useful, and could be highly fruitful for Agora, yourself, and all of us who are following the trail of bread crumbs you are being kind enough to drop. But it goes without saying that you will still keep your own business – Strategic Profits – running separately, where you have 100% control (or at least 51%!).

I would expect Strategic Profits to grow into a multinational corporation, in the same way that Mike Lynch’s Autonomy has, which I remember when it was a business start-up in a Cambridge UK business park ten years ago. Lynch is a brilliant Cambridge Ph.D.., specialising in artificial intelligence, but he has shown that he can turn his intelligence to business also. Lynch’s Autonomy would be a good model for Strategic Profits to follow. It is now (inevitably) US based, and has its intelligent desktops on a large proportion of US fortune 100 companies, as you’ll see from their homage. But Lynch himself has not turned impersonal and ‘corporate’. I emailed him at Autonomy a couple of years ago and got a message to ring his secretary, who gave me Mike’s answer to my query in person. You have already developed a strong brand in Strategic Profits, but growth and incorporation while retaining that brand name are made somewhat problematic as I’m sure you are aware by the fact that there is already a Strategic Profits, Inc.

I think you should keep in the back of your mind that, unless you are to sell out and become an ‘Agora man’ – which would totally contravene the whole business philosophy I’ve heard you extoll – Agora and Strategic Profits, while they remain separate entities, are going to still in essence be competitors. Like my kids, you wouldn’t want to be anyone’s puppet 100% of the time. It’s just not you, is it? You’re smart to want to collaborate with a potential corporate competitor strategically, for the purpose of learning and deriving benefits, but not become, essentially, their employee, which is what they’d like. How many times have big companies or governments wishing to move into any market begun by buying or buying off the pre-existing competition?

Agora may have been very nice to you, but businesses are in business to make money, which as The Final Chapter points out, involves obtaining accurate business intelligence on your competitors, for the purpose of penetrating their market, stealing their market share, and ultimately making money instead of them. So as long as you retain your business independence – and I hope you do! – there will inevitably be this undercurrent to exchanges and negotiations between you and Agora. It may be that you see your role and ‘niche’ – your Internet business expertise – as very different from Agora’s niche as an information marketer. But remember, no niche is sacrosanct, and big companies are being attracted by the blood in the water of big launches like Mike’s in January, Brad and Andy’s and yours. They want ‘in’, but just be aware, when you are sharing, that you are not the only one capable of modelling excellence and systematising business processes..

But I know you are a really smart guy, and I’m not necessarily teaching you anything you don’t know, just thinking aloud, showing you how I think. I think that you are probably smart to enter into some kind of collaborative business partnership with the corporate, there’s a lot to learn and be gained on both sides. I just wanted to inject a note of realistic caution. I guess I’m saying, since they have the big guns, to a certain extent you have to acknowledge that, for once, it’s you that is riding shotgun, but have keep your horse along side just in case, yes? :) (sorry about the weird mixed metaphor, but I think it conveys exactly what I mean) I think that accommodating or ‘bowing’ to the head honchos at Agora will be necessary to some extent, else there be a parting of the ways. You have to bend and show a little deference maybe where it doesn’t hurt and will score you brownie points with them, but keep your own counsel and be very shrewd and clear about where you draw the line, giving your own business goals and interests priority over those of Agora where need be, just as they will be acting in their own interests.

Having said all that, I’m going to launch into my presentation.

How to begin?

Let’s start with a little story about the flying fish, or the mud skipper if you like.

Rich, I see you as someone who is evangelising business, being a missionary about business, and change the business climate. Now, you have very good reasons for doing this. Since I’ve been involved in studying marketing – and I’m not a marketer, this isn’t my field, but that makes it interesting because you are going to be seeing from a totally different interdisciplinary perspective. Interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation often produces insights, Bandler and Grinder’s linguistic ‘take’ on psychology being one example, Darwin’s amateur naturalist’s observations revolutionising palaeontology, and the astronomer and meteorologist Weneger’s theories of continental drift, derided by geologists in his lifetime and after, eventually revolutionising geology in the revised form of plate tectonics being two other important examples. What I’m sharing is my observation, part of my central thesis of creative synergy, that marketers – or any discipline – speaking only to each other, will tend to see and repeat the same kinds of things. But bring someone in from a different disciplinary background and you get a different perspective, a fresh ‘take’. That is what I’m hoping to provide here.

So I’m going to apply my perspectives to marketing and business, give you my ‘take’. Not my field, although obviously I am currently learning rapidly, having decided to go to the top and learn from the best. Ploughed through your three Internet business manifesto chapters is probably the best start I can make, isn’t it? I’m very grateful to the friend who pointed me in the direction of your business building presentation on Google video. I immediately recognised your enthusiasm, relentless energy and brilliance, because as I hope this extended answer demonstrates – I’m like that :)

My perspectives are – well, both my first class honours degrees are in psychology and semiology, the study of signs, I think they call it semiotics in America. And that field has grown to embrace literature which a lot of my modules on my first degree were in, but is basically the study of meaning, how we signify, how we communicate and how we read situations and meaning. So I cannot help but look at things in a psychological and semiological way, just as its natural for you to look at things in a business way.

So I’m applying my psychological and semiological perspectives to your marketing question about back-ends and strategic alliances, so hopefully you’ll be getting something very different from this post than you will from all the other hundreds of posts and comments in reply to your competition, I would imagine.

So why is Rich – why are you – like a flying fish? I think I said in one of my other posts you seem to me to be what I describe as ‘planing’ like a hydrofoil (me too :). There’s a kind of takeoff point when people start to go into permanent flow and there are various signs of this. One is enormous energy, a sense of ‘lift’, tremendous enthusiasm – all the things that you radiate and that come through in your writings and recordings. It very often goes along with high intelligence and ability as well, and obviously that comes through too.

I’ve got that too, but unfortunately, (because of the joint requirements of high energy, perseverance and the discrimination required to recognise that I’m not a crank and what’s coming next is absolute gold worth reading I can pretty much guarantee we’ll have lost pretty much everyone else by now Rich. Anyone else who’s still with this, congratulations, it says a lot for you and believe me what’s coming next is worth it. See me later ( fellow-planerATkeedecemgero.c o m :) this far and output levels, I can pretty much guarantee this there are going to be very few others who will have got

unfortunately shortly after coming out of university having spent six years getting two first class honours degrees, during the first stages of my Ph.D.. I developed a serious illness which dogged me for thirteen years, and was only cured by surgery just a few years ago. So I’ve kind of had the middle section taken out of my life and I’ve had to cope as best I can. I continued to keep a journal – which now runs to 5.000 words, and spent the vast majority of my time studying all the subjects which were of interest to me, principally philosophy, psychology and the study of culture and cultural communication (semiology).

So you’re ‘planing’ like a hydrofoil, while most people are in ordinary boats. And that’s where you’re like a flying fish, because a flying fish planes when it comes out of the water. It emerges, it leaps into the air, it opens those big fins that serve it as gliding wings, and it starts to plane, its speed, movement and manoeuvrability being far greater than in the sluggish environment from which it has escaped. It’s in a totally different environment, and if flying fish had emotions and vocal chords you could imagine hearing a shout of joy and exhilaration as it finds itself flying free of the water.

Now, lets for the purpose of my teaching metaphor say that flying fish are like mud skippers, and when they leap into the air and they glide through the air they are actually conditioning their gills or throat mechanism, whatever it is those mud skippers have, to absorb oxygen directly from the air, like they can from the water. And the more the leap into the air the more comfortable they become in the new environment, they become acclimatised and able to spend most of their time flying through the air. They don’t want to go back into the dull, sluggish water. Just as mud skipper fish today spend almost all their time sunning themselves on the mud flats breathing air, which presumably confers an evolutionary advantage on them, maybe they and the flying fish are safer from predators out of the water, or they wouldn’t have evolved to do it. Fascinating, isn’t it? Do you see where I am going with this? Good :) now read on.

Now, its a bit lonely up there, because you are the only flying fish, and your vision of course, because you can move a lot faster, you can soar, you know, like a bird, and it’s just – fun! – you like to operate in that way, you’ve discovered something exciting and new. And what you would most like is to change the climate so that ALL your fellow fish start flying with you in a school. And initially you would like a group, but basically you would like to change the whole of the fish habitat from water – which in my business metaphor means the kind of clunky, inefficient business atmosphere and practices that are currently endemic to the Internet and probably the vast majority of business world-wide also. (I can really relate to this because my own mission is very similar, except that it relates to wider society rather than specifically business).

And so you dip back down here, and you are communicating in your fishy way, “Look guys! Come up here! This is fun! Come on, come up here!…”

This is where my crucial suggestion comes into the metaphor. Now what you want to do, metaphorically is, you want to get us to breathe air, and get as many people to be your paying clients, and in return for being your paying clients you will teach them to breathe air and to ‘fly’ (like the flying fish you are :).

Now, when you take on a limited personal coaching program, a single-tier coaching program, you’re going to be getting probably 500 people? If you can coach more than that personally good luck to you, but you’ve done that, I know you’ve done that. Let’s push it and say you can do five or six hundred people you can coach at once. And there you’ve got your school and they’re leaping, and they dip back down and they’re leaping and they dip back down. They’re gradually getting acclimatised to breathing the air of your new business climate, as you coach them in how to fly properly and breathe air properly and all the wonderful things you know how to do.

What about all the other millions of fish?… what about all the other millions of fish?

Wouldn’t you like them to be your paying clients as well? Or at least as many of them as can find this blog, and can find your offer?

Well there’s a way you can do it, and I’ve checked, it doesn’t appear anywhere in any of your three Manifesto chapters, so if you’ve got this on the back burner fine, but you know, it doesn’t appear there so as far as I can see I’m giving you something new. And publicly, anyway, I’m the person who is breaking this first.

People reading my previous posts might of thought “What a chump, he doesn’t even know what the ‘back end’ is, but you see there are back ends and back ends, aren’t there? I’m going to coin a new term here. There may already be a marketing term for this but what I’m going to be focusing on is a form of back end, and it’s what I will call the ‘negative back end’.

Now you’ve emphasised quite correctly, towards the end of The Final Chapter which I’ve just finished reading, the importance of the ‘positive back end’, the back end where you sell to those clients who have already bought into your program. Now, you’ve cited two different examples, and with some, you know, you might have a small purchase front end, and I mentioned in one of my other posts that a low entry front end could range from anything like the 19 dollar e-book down to 1 or 2 dollars, and you could drag people in that way and then upsell them. But most likely I believe that your modus operandi from what I’ve seen is to focus on that tip of the pyramid, quite understandably, quite rightly, the twenty per cent or less of clients that provide you with eighty per cent, and will always provide you, with eighty per cent or more of your profits, providing you are doing your job properly. This was something I got absolutely. I first encountered the Pareto Principle in a book called ‘The Magic of Psychic Power’ by David J. Schwartz Ph.D. (now out of print) which I sent away for by mail order when I was sixteen, in 1971. So I’m very familiar with it.

And so you’re, in my opinion – it’ll be interesting to see if I’m right – you are pitching you’re front end at a reasonably high level, because those are the people you want to reach, those are the people who you want on board because they are the most profitable clients.

But they may be the most profitable clients, but they don’t necessarily include all of the most contributive clients and the ones that will actually help you or will be most useful in a business environment or a business relationship. There can be reasons why useful business people, and useful friends, and useful strategic allies may not, temporarily, have X thousand pounds to spend on a brilliant coaching program, however much they might like to. Until they can get their businesses cranked up. So it’s a chicken or egg thing. We need your advice, guidance and support to get the money to do your coaching program, but we can’t get our businesses cranked up until we’ve been in your coaching program. See?

And I think what you are doing, disseminating information, and I can see its a wonderful marketing device – it’s certainly motivated me :) – and as I said in a couple of posts before, yes I’d love to be on your coaching program. But… supposing I’m not, and supposing I can’t afford to do that? Do you want to lose me as a customer? Or would you like to *gain* me as a customer? Someone who would actually dip into their pocket and buy?

What would be optimal – from the point of view of your profits, influence and growing your customer base, as opposed to just your list – is for you to somehow have the ‘psychic ability’ to pitch to me – and your 27,000 + other prospects – whatever value product from your coaching program I could maximally afford, wouldn’t it? In other words, without over-stretching me, and without manipulating me in some way to make me uncomfortable (which has happened to me since I started looking into marketing in July. I have to say I’m not with the organisation that did that any more. I was quite cross about it. I took somebody’s word for something and allowed them to upsell me a couple of 200 dollar products which ended up being of no use to me at all. So we ‘live and learn’ :)

But, you know, I’m coming along with all your other 27,000 interested people, and we come to your coaching program sign-up site on November 1st, and we see the price. And you shouldn’t reveal the price until we get to the page (you’ll see why in a moment), and you should have on there a ‘Yes, please’ and a ‘No, thanks’ button. And I notice that, I think what you do at the moment, certainly what a lot of people do is have a Yes button and an ‘enter your e-mail address’ capture link for those who don’t buy.

Which is okay, you can add us to your list. But a lot of us are already on your list, and wouldn’t you rather add us as paying customers? in which case you get all those new customers on your list as well. There’s a very simple way you can do that.

Basically, what I’m saying is… if you want to turn us all into business ‘flying fish’, the thing you should do is give each of us a taste of ‘flying and breathing air’, proportionate to the extent that we are financially able or willing, to contribute.

Now everyone is able to contribute financially. Everyone who’s on the Internet *must* be able to contribute financially to some extent. And I’m not necessarily talking about going as cheap as 1 dollar. What I’m saying is.. – let’s switch into another metaphor:

I considered calling this the ‘catchall customer net’, but I then thought of another name for it as well, let’s see… what did I call it?… It’s the backstop, as well.. it’s the customer backstop, but it’s tiered. It’s a little bit like – let’s try and find a metaphor: this doesn’t exist in reality, but let’s imagine that there was a spider that er.. Now there are things called sheet-web spiders, okay? – I used to love spiders as a kid, and I still do. They have a most extraordinary variety of webs with which to catch different types of prey. But let’s imagine – there may be, you know, amongst all the thousands or millions of different spiders there may very well be but I’ve never seen one – but let’s suppose that there’s a multi-tier sheet-web spider, and each tier has a finer mesh than the tier above, than the sheet above, you get me?

So it’s a little bit like a sieve or a colander this web. And the prey, falls into the web, it falls off a leaf, or out of the sky, and it lands on the first tier. And the first tier web has got a very coarse gauge web. The squares of the web, or the criss-cross pattern of the web in financial terms are the major premium coaching program cost, okay? And the people who can pay that get caught by that coarse mesh. Then the ones that don’t all fall through. The one’s who can’t afford – let’s say for the sake of argument 5,000 pounds. I’ve no idea at all what your coaching’s gonna be, but let’s say it was five thousand pounds – they fall through the premium coaching net. And they land on the next tier. And let’s say that the next tier is 2,500 pounds. And let’s say that for 2,500 pounds they get 50% of the rights and benefits and goods and services that your premium coaching program clients get.

And the ones who can’t or won’t afford 2,500 pounds fall through to the next tier, which is for the sake of argument say 700 pounds. ( I’m sorry I’m speaking pounds, call it dollars, you know, it doesn’t really matter, it’s the principle that counts, isn’t it? You’ll fill the figures in yourself. And so the seven hundred pound clients get stuck there, they can afford 700 pounds of goods and services, they know you provide good value, and you make absolutely sure that each tier does get value for money so that no-one feels sore or that they’ve been ill-used in comparison with the other tiers.

The premier customers – including your ‘hyper-responsives’ – who get stuck on the first tier don’t need or get to see the lower price/lower value offer do they? They get the maximum benefit because they can afford the maximum benefit, and so on down the line. It doesn’t mean you can’t ‘positive back-end’ them regularly at a later date, but if they’ve just paid for your premier, top-notch coaching program, you might want to give your hyper-responsives a break, and you’ll be able to afford to, because of all the extra dosh you’ll be making from ‘negative back-ending’ all the other 20,000 odd of your customers, won’t you? :)

So then, past the 700 pound clients we come to the, I don’t know, let’s say 300 pound clients. And they take on the benefits of a 300 pound purchase – you could simplify this, you could just do 3 tiers. I mean, you haven’t got much time until November 1st. Okay, so then the 300 pound clients stick there, and then we come down through to the 97 pound or 97 dollar clients. But you see you can go further than that, because of the 27,000 people plus who’ve expressed an interest in your coaching program, I’ve got to tell you there are going to be a significant percentage either can’t or won’t even afford 97 dollars. I’ve been in that situation and I’m sure many other people have, for whatever reason.

And so you have to provide more tiers. And the more tiers you provide you are now starting to pick up the ‘long tail’ I think you call it – the long tail of your potential customers, that is. You are starting to pick up people who may be contributive in ways other than financial, which I’m certainly trying to be, believe I have the potential to be, very much so. And those people, there are a lot more of them, aren’t there? But they also, once you’ve got them on your list you do have the potential to upsell each and every one. And wouldn’t you rather have 27,000 people who come to your site to buy your coaching program on your customer list than just a couple of thousand, or however many would buy your premier program?

Now you could stop there. Stuart Lichtman’s basic product is his e-book, retailing at seventy-nine dollars fifty, but you then get nine bonus e-books mailed to you on a regular basis over the next few weeks. He starts off with that, it’s what I bought and it’s what pretty much everyone buys, I think, to get familiar and get into the swing of using his cybernetic transposition method. Then he runs two premier teleseminar with net visual aids – so there aren’t the same material or shipping costs as the premier audio or video coaching programs we so frequently see – comparable in cost with what your premier courses have cost this year, I think. The first is a course where he helps you master his method, which he has used to turn around or make successful over a hundred companies, and the second, even more expensive one, so many thousands, is where he takes people who’ve been through that course and licences them as trainers in his method. He runs those two courses alternately, and a percentage of completers from the method course will then go straight on to the trainer course. And there are a few nice wrinkles in there. Get this – your partner can attend the teleseminar course free, and you are free to repeat the course without extra charge. It’s quite complex, and some people don’t quite ‘get’ it first time, but do when they repeat. And finally, there’s a reduced price for people who buy the method and trainer courses together – which I want to do. I seem to remember it came to something like 4,000 pounds – but check that price. There are also ‘early bird’ discounts for each course. His tariff is simple, easy to understand, generous in terms of e-books, recordings and e-materials and of his time, but his material costs are probably limited to his server and teleseminar fees, and you can get basic voice conferencing free, so it can’t be costly, can it?

( By the way, I did of course consider whether it would be okay to post that rough description of Lichtman’s operation here. The way I look at it, it’s a trade-off. Unless you already knew all the details – and as he keeps it relatively low key and you are involved in so much else I have no reason to think you would – it’s useful information for you, because as I say, he is the closest thing to a generational precursor you have, I think. Having worked all his time in the business and corporate sector, at 67 he’s retired from all that and sells his Joe Vitale presented e-book and does his courses, I think, because he still likes to work and pass on the benefit of what he knows. So you learn something from my description, and if he benefits from the odd referral, fair exchange, yes? He doesn’t even have an affiliate program (don’t all rush :) and I’m not financially connected with him, it goes without saying. )

So you could pitch your lowest e-book offer at around Lichtman’s 79.50 offer, or you could go even lower. Those who pass on the 97 dollar offer could drop through to a 47 dollar offer, and the 47 dollar clients drop through to, I don’t know? How low can you go? I would have thought that, you know, whether you’ll be doing a 19 dollar e-book like one of your Final Chapter examples, it’s not impossible, what is it? about ten quid? You could end it there. It might seem peanuts compared to what you get from your top-of-the-pyramid hyper-responsives, but think! – even if you just negative back-ended
a 19 dollar e-book and monthly course like the one you described, and got say, 10 million dollars revenue from that low negative back-end pitch – I guess pretty much *everyone* who couldn’t afford premier would take it, Rich – in one fell swoop you’ve added thousands and thousands of customers to your list – more than will afford premier, that’s for sure – and effectively done a ‘two in one’ high and low end launch.

I think it would be a bit farcical to go any lower, although – people do it, I’ve noticed, on the basis that very few people – even for an mp3 interview with someone they’re interested in, I’ve certainly bought them – will pass up a 1 dollar interview. And if you can get a few million people, you’ve made a few million dollars, haven’t you? There’s a young woman who wrote a paperback and only charged post and packing, and I believe its called The Millionaire Mind, and she’s made a million dollars out of it. She said I want to give away a million copies, and I presume the way she’s done it is that her post and packing charge is a little more than it actually costs to produce and ship the paperback, so she makes a little profit, say she makes a dollar, on each copy on each of a million customers – there you go, she’s made a million dollars. So I don’t disparage even the 1 dollar offer.

But let’s say for now that you’ve decided to stop with the 19 dollar e-book:

‘Here’s the principles of some secrets that I didn’t include in my three part Internet business manifesto. I’m going to give you 19 dollars worth of extra stuff, let you in on the practical details of half a dozen of the techniques I outlined in general in the IMB, give you the foundational basics to build a better business.’

So you stop there. That is my ‘back-end backstop’, okay, my ‘catchall customer net’.

All of that is what I describe as the ‘negative back-end’. That’s where you sell to the people who have not bought your major premium product because they can’t afford it. You’ve now gained them all as customers, made a bit of money out of them – brilliant. So – that is ‘the importance of back-ends’, then, with my individual twist. I accept all of your arguments on the importance of the ‘positive back-end’, because you make most of your profits on upselling, (or downselling, or sideways selling, you know, just selling! :) to people who’ve already bought from you, especially those who’ve spent big bucks.

I also accept that while it’s important for you to have a lot of positive back-end products to keep the interest, the enthusiasm of the customer stoked, and stuff you can throw at them when they are ( as you describe it :) ‘like a porcupine in heat’, er, when they are ready to buy. Say somebody gets an inheritance, like I did a while ago. Suddenly you’ve got money to buy, you want to buy the stuff you want to buy, you’re interested. You’d love to have bought all that stuff before but you couldn’t afford it, suddenly you can, and you’re like a porcupine in heat. You *need* that stuff on your positive back-end, you need to be able to be receptive to that so when somebody shows an interest and wants to buy they can do that.

But the consistent buyers who have enough money and enough fire and enough enthusiasm to buy everything you come out with, you treat them like gold, I absolutely agree. So that’s the importance of the positive back-end, it’s where you derive your main financial benefit from. As well as upselling them after their main purchase, to about 50% of their first purchase, you can even upsell them after they’ve clicked ‘yes’, but before they’ve actually paid! It’s been done to me :) But I think that’s more for front-end sales that start low. If they are buying your top-of-the-range premium product costing thousands, perhaps its a ‘bridge too far’ (greedy, even?) to try the prepay upsell.

But you see I’m focusing here on something totally new, at least, insofar as it doesn’t appear in your three part Internet business manifesto. I’ll just mention where my focus came from. In semiology there is a concept called marginalisation, we are encouraged to ‘read in the margins’ of any text, look at what is missing or marginalised, what the text *isn’t* saying. So while absorbing all your positive information and enthusiasm, with my semiotician’s hat on I just naturally look for and what is called ‘foreground’ (highlight) those elements which are conspicuous by their absence from all you say.

It’s a fascinating discipline, because to the semiologist, no text or statement is ever ‘innocent’, there’s always something lurking beneath the surface of apparently straightforward statements. It’s what you are *not* saying, that stands out to the semiologist, you see? Semiology/semiotics (also called deconstructionism) has a lot in common with both psychoanalysis and detective work. My clinical supervisor in the Health Service happened to also be a leading forensic psychologist (like ‘Cracker’, if you’ve seen the TV show) so I guess seeing how she thought about things encouraged me to think like this. So when you emphasise your positive experience with Agora, and make it sound all ‘sweetness and light’, I naturally home in on where there ‘slip’ might be showing, like your argument, and that gets me to analysing the likely power relations between you and Agora, and their potential ramifications for you and your business.

The most famous deconstructive semiologists are Jacques Derrida and Raymond Barthes, and there are a couple – Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, who combine psychoanalytic and semiological perspectives. You may have noticed all these people are French, which is where the discipline originated, (C.S. Pierce, an American, made a very similar perspective his life work, which he called ‘semiotics’). A lot of it is pretty unreadable, but at its core there are some very profound and useful ideas. Which is what I’m drawing on here.

MARGINALISED IN THE INTERNET BUSINESS MANIFESTO: THE ‘NEGATIVE BACK-END’

So I’m focusing here on helping you reach the people – *ALL* THE PEOPLE (well, almost.. say 90.something% of them?) – who like me are just not going to buy your premium product on 1st November – because they are, shall we say, ‘temporarily financially embarrassed’ …

But those of us would be entrepreneurs and less successful business owners who have watched the video, and ploughed through your IBM parts, if we’ve got any sense, would like to be your customers, and benefit from your coaching and business intelligence to whatever varying extent we can. I want to ask:

“How many people, involved in Internet business would buy *some* product from Rich Shefren now, if they were able.? ”

I would suspect it would be to the advantage of every person in business on the Internet today, which is an awful lot of people! So it’s only a question of getting the word out, marketing, publicising, advertising, letting people know. And getting those ‘Negative Back-end’ products in place… and you can catch THE LOT.

THE ‘FLYING FISH’ STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

And then what you’ve got is, you see, going back to the flying fish metaphor, you’ve got Rich out there leading the shoal, you’ve got all your hyper-responsive regulars jumping like crazy, breathing air like crazy, gliding like crazy (seeing who can glide the furthest = make the most from a single launch). And then you’ve got the other little guys in kind of tiers underneath, and they’re all hopping out, leaping out, taking a gulp of air and crashing back down into the waves. Rich, you’re gonna get the whole OCEAN jumping like that. You can spread you’re influence, you’re customer base throughout the WHOLE INTERNET. It’s already not doing too bad.

And what you will do then is, you’ll change the social climate… It’s interesting, I began this answer with the intention of providing links to a series of slides, and I was going to explain how your work and mission relates to mine in psychology and semiology. But I’ve ended up not doing that. I’ve ended up staying focused on a target and explaining to you, answering your question really about the importance of back-ends, and explaining to you my distinction between the conventional ‘positive back-end’ which everyone else has reiterated in various ways, and what I call the ‘negative back-end’, the ‘back-end backstop’ or the ‘catchall customer net’. And I think that is also of crucial importance because you are then gaining people as your customer, you are making your first sale to them, and by that kind of multi-hierarchical, gradually tightening mesh of ‘negative back-end offers’ you should, in theory, be able to catch ALMOST EVERYONE, almost everyone. Depending on how low you want to take your back-end backstop offers.

But, erm, it shouldn’t be too difficult to set up. I’m going to get this up on your comments as soon as possible, and I’m going to entitle it ‘NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK’. Because I believe that amongst all the comments this one will be the most valuable to you, IF you get and read it quick. So if I can put ‘NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK’, because that’s what I believe it is, make it ‘bright and shiny’ :) , hopefully you’ll find it, or someone will see it and draw your attention to it, and you’ll get that hierarchy of negative back-end products in place, even if it means delaying the launch a little while.

Good Luck!

P.S. I’ve put the important stuff down here, because I know that people always scroll to the bottom and read the ‘P.S.’s, but I can’t remember whether it was you or Mike I heard it from (Mike?)

In my humble opinion the lead time between your announcing that you would (unexpectedly) be offering a further non-corporate coaching program and your actual launch on November 1st, is TOO SHORT, given the scale on which you are hoping to operate. I recommend you delay it, as Stompernet was delayed. For two very important reasons:

1) A short to medium delay will give the news of your course time to disseminate very widely throughout the Internet, reaching more and more of those business people who are most in need of your help – those struggling online shop and business owners who are really not plugged in to the ‘happening’ Internet marketing scene at all. And I’ll tell you, there are thousands and thousands – I’ve met a few. No affiliate programme, not a clue. Just set up their online shop and hope for the best. It’s all of THOSE that you want and need to reach, right?

2) The very dissemination of your MASSIVE Launch, which it will become, if you delay it – a REAL PHENOMENON – bringing more and more and more interested entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs to your offer page as time goes on, will create an absolutely HUGE potential customer base, which you can tap to the tune of something approaching 90% maybe? IF you have time to read this post, assimilate my multi-tier ‘back-end backstop’ idea (I apologise if I’ve overdone the reiteration, but from experience, as I said at the beginning, I have found that if you don’t do that, and make it clear as crystal, people sometimes dismiss it as either ‘know it already’ or nothing requiring or meriting immediate action.)

MIXING THE TWO METAPHORS: THE ‘FLYING FISH’ STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

This is something that just came to me this afternoon, and it’s really cool – well I think it is, anyway.

Let’s imagine that the flying fish live on airborne prey. There is a little shiny black spider, which we call a ‘money spider’, I don’t know whether it’s the same in the states? In England, we say that if you find one of those little critters on you, you’ll be receiving money!

I once wrote a newspaper feature on spiders (I told you I liked them), and I began with the most astonishing fact about them I know. One of the tiniest species – those ‘money spiders’ spread by being carried sometimes thousands of miles on web parachutes – little threads that they extend into the air on a windy summer day. They can even cross oceans and continents like that, up in the clouds, before descending to the ground. Walking on a heath in England on a sunny day you sometimes see their gossamer threads trailing over the bushes and across the paths, where a whole load of them have come to earth. I’ve actually had one crawl up my finger, stand on the tip, extend its silk thread into the wind, and float off.. It’s amazing what you can notice if you’re observant.

NOW – I know this is stretching the metaphor, and mixing it to, which is supposed to be bad literary practice, but it explains strategic alliances SO WELL:

Let’s suppose that these ‘money spiders’ (customers) are the natural food of the ‘flying fish’ (Internet entrepreneurs who have been clued in by Rich, and so started to ‘fly’, or ‘plane’) Normally, when a rain of their shiny spider prey descend, they are hard pressed to catch just a few, before they sink to the bottom of the ocean.

But because my flying fish have become so brilliant, and begun to CO-OPERATE, also, they have become intelligent enough to suspend a giant, incredibly fine net (fine enough to catch ‘money’ spiders) between them. And so they catch ALL the money (spiders) that fall into the net they suspend between them – a bit like an airborne trawler fleet. And the more flying fish they are, the bigger net they can hold, and the more money they make, because the sky is ABSOLUTELY RAINING ‘MONEY’ (spiders :) And of course, the ‘Net’ is the interconnecting web of JV offers, affiliate links, back links to help search engine placement – cross-promotions via each other’s lists that I am getting nearly every day now.

COMBINE all that – all those Strategic Alliance methods, disseminated throughout virtually THE WHOLE BUSINESS INTERNET – and you have your change of Internet business climate, Rich. You will have achieved your Mission. You can die in peace :) (just joking!)

And as well as delaying your 1st November launch to assimilate all this, and get your multi-tier ‘back-end backstop’ offers produced and in place – and I know you can do it because I know you are capable of being massively productive, like me. Just dictate it all – that’s what I did :) I know you’ve got enough distilled Internet business wisdom to knock up a few killer e-books and other products, or just take one or two away for each price point you go down the net, yes? As well as that, YOU SHOULD MAKE THE DISPLAY OF A ‘SHEFREN ASSOCIATE’ WEB SITE BUTTON OR SHIELD (something classy like the rather nice ‘The Secret’ Seal at the bottom of my blogger blog: wisdom-teachings.blogspot. c o m would be cool :) NOT ONLY A MATTER OF PRIDE, BUT ALSO A CONDITION FOR EVERY MEMBER OF YOUR MASSIVE ‘SHEFREN ASSOCIATE’ PROGRAM, which will include EVERY PERSON WHO HAS BOUGHT ONE OR MORE ELEMENTS OF YOUR COACHING PROGRAM, HEAVILY DISCOUNTED, ACCORDING TO THEIR MEANS.

Wow! Now, I could be sitting here thinking, “If I post this ENORMOUS tome, its going to set the seal on my business fate for all time, I’m just going to be viewed as a crank and a nutter :) But I’m not thinking that, I have absolute confidence in all I’ve written here.

And you know why? Because I’m right. Subsequent to my previous posts, where I pleaded for some lower price coaching option, I have just literally read your e-mail stating that was what the argument was about, and how you are now planning to offer a two tier system on November 1st. Great! So we’re part of the way there already. But you MUST think more radically. Let’s say your premium program were to be 10,000 dollars. By putting in a second tier at 5,000 dollars you might double your sales, perhaps a bit more. But you will still be missing out on THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of smaller potential sales and additions to your customer base, Including me :)

Finally, this reminds me of something I wrote at the end of my second degree. As I was closing my final exam paper, I wrote that I knew that I was radical, and that my answers would be radically different from a lot of the parrot fashion answers that the examiners would be used to reading. So its test, I said, FOR YOU. I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am first class honours material. I have maintained straight ‘A’ grades through the three years of my degree. So if they don’t recognise my brilliance and originality, I won’t lose any sleep, it will simply be a failure of the system, and show it to be hide bound, moribund, and incapable of recognising raw talent and originality. They gave me a first :)

I know, like everyone else, that you are an extremely bright guy, Rich, quick on the uptake, sharp as a razor, fast on your feet – you’ll need to be to implement this! :)

That’s why I’ve REALLY stuck my neck out here. I’ll just mention that, on every test of coaching skill I’ve ever taken, I’ve got top marks. I also have a prominent example – and another less startling but still impressive one – of a world-class achievement by someone who will readily acknowledge that it was a result of my initial impetus and inspiration that it was produced. I can send you the link. Believe, me, you’ll be impressed.

I’m in the position I’m in partly due to a thirteen year illness, and partly because I’ve been employed in the public and voluntary sectors. I first took an interest in Internet marketing in July this year, because I recognised that I needed to, as you explain marketing does, create a demand and present the creative products of two members of my family to the world, and help them to derive incomes from them, to better our family’s standard of living.

So now I’ll post this, with a link to a blog as a back-up, if there’s any problem with the size, or someone has sufficient lack of insight to remove it. Believe me, I know what most people are like, but I’m counting on your vision and intelligence to ‘get’ this. And if you get it, Rich, and social proof me, everyone else will, too.

And if I can’t ‘get me coat’ now, when can I??? :)

____________________________________

I am developing a product at the moment which will have one main component with three backend components initially. Each backend component will be a much higher priced product than the previous. Why? because the market i am looking in can pay $37 for a product but can also pay $5000 for a product and know that they are getting true value. The original product plus the backend products need to be “TIMELESS”

A very simple example of this is “How to Boil an Egg” this information will be needed again and again. How many people at this moment are thinking “How can I learn to boil an egg.

Any product or service that I build should be timeless, have great value to the buyer and provide ever increasing revenue streams to my back end “How to Boil an Egg” product portfolio.

If I picked one thing up in your trilogy it was the difference between US and European Direct Marketing Businesses.

This leads into why Strategic Alliances are important to me so that I can leverage other peoples skills, strength and TIME. This will increase my bottom line many times.

Also If I have a good relationship with one alliance partner I can get them to recommend me to other partners, thus multiplying the whole effect of using other peoples skills, strength and TIME

Thanks for the opportunity here and the great information in the report trilogy

All the Best

Richard

I built my former business a dive shop 15 years ago, when teh PC was just relaeased and no one had ever heard of CRM, based on the premise that the first time you sell to a client you are selling you and your business and that is the product not the dive course or the piece of equipment they paid for.

We built the business with a total of just 175 new customers each year to doing today’s equivalent of a 1,5 million dollar turnover. This comprised, advanced courses (we had the highest conversion rate in the country of new divers to advanced divers) travel, local dives and of course equipment. With an active client base that we worked to keep active with social events special weekend trips and offers we averaged just over $3,000 per active customer. Our golden rule was to make sure that every letter or phone call to them contained something of value to them. If we couldn’t define the list then we broadened the offer.

The challenge is now to transfer that level of customer relationship development to my new on line vertures.

“The Final Chapter” Summary

Selling Model – Focus on Units (anything from cars to e-books)
Business focuses on:
1. Cost to generate a unit
2. Maximimum price per unit
3. Advertising, direct copywriting to generate sales of units

“The Final Chapter” – A Change in Focus

Marketing Model – Focus on Customers
Business focuses on:
1. Front End – Cost to generate a new customer
2. Back End – Maximum sales per customer
3. Strategic Alliances – to generate customers

PPS..
I have not made light of the BACK END… it is just that if everything else is in place, I will know every detail of those products my client wants so desperately and with a perfect system in place, I will have the Passion and Resouces to create and supply Heaven on Earth for each and every one of them…if not…what rhymes with “well”…..???

Every potential Internet marketing entrepreneur will benefit from Rich Schefren’s essay on Internet marketing, The Final Chapter. In synopsis, the author explores two principles critical to the success of the Internet marketer:

A marketer must build alliances with other marketers within the marketplace of his business; and,

A marketer must establish a coherent and consistent series of back-end offers.

Why are these principles vital?

When an aspiring Internet marketer enters an alliance with an established Internet marketer, he enjoys a triple benefit: He leverages his market by using the established customer list of the venture partner—reducing the cost of acquiring each new customer. He takes on the color of the affiliate’s good-will, dependability, reliability, expertise, and desirability. And, at the same time, he profits from the established talent and expertise of the partner’s team.

When an aspiring Internet marketer develops a consistent series of back-end offers, he creates the opportunity to realize significant financial gains. The repeat customer is the backbone of the Internet marketer’s business. The second, third, fourth sale—and beyond—is where the marketer realizes the majority of his profit. More and better back-end offers increase the potential revenue from each front-end customer. These back-end offers lengthen the term of the relationship between the merchant and the consumer.

As consumers continue to purchase under an established relationship, they become susceptible to purchasing higher-dollar products. These loyal customers crave more, and are willing to pay for more. The marketer must have an array of back-end products available to capitalize on that potential market.

Thanks for your honesty in the last comment, Rich.

I’ll try to explain what to do as best I can.

First of all you actually need a great front end vehicle. I know you speak at seminars, but you need a real product to bring people in.

What I suggest you do is write a Manifesto based on everything that you’ve learned by coaching these people. Talk about the difference between opportunism and building a business. Give it away for free. This is actually a front end believe it or not, even though it is free.

It will spread virally. You can then bring people into a coaching problem. You can have two tiers and elite one and regular one. They will be the same except the elite will be condensed and you will personally coach the elite group and have a seminar with them. I know it sounds contrarian, but this isn’t really your back end like you. It’s more like your middle.

What we’ll do later on is have a membership program. This will be the back end for those who are already in the coaching program. We’ll call it the Internet Wealth Alliance and people will pay a certain amount a year to join. Now it will be better than anything you can do alone because you will do it by forming an Alliance will Agora. That means they will be able to provide a lot of the Strategy, Resources, and Tactics that you couldn’t provide on your own. Everything will be recorded too. Eventually, you can remove yourself from the actual coaching in the Wealth Alliance. You could even sell your business to Agora if you wanted – but don’t do it yet, because if you do, they will want you to keep on working and the call is to get you out of the business – to have a coaching program without a coach. By the way, you could do this with your own material and you should, but you just wouldn’t have the reach and leverage you’ll have by working with a bigger direct marketing company.

Of course to get people into this Internet Wealth Alliance you just need to release another front end vehicle, another chapter of the Manifesto talking about the importance of alliances and backends.

It’s really easy. You can do it!

Simon

Little Jimmy wanted to build a rocket. He looked in a magazine and saw an ad for a rocket kit. It was a well-written ad talking about how he could shoot this rocket really far into the sky and he just had to send in his money. Well, little Jimmy couldn’t resist and scrounged together the money and sent in the money.

Pretty soon, his rocket kit arrived in the mail. He tore it open right away and started putting it together. But unbeknownst to him this mail order company had never built real rockets because they grew up before rockets ever existed. They grew up driving and fixing cars and making model cars. At that time, most cars still had the engine in the front of the car. So the instructions for building the rocket were just like the instructions for building the cars; they just replaced words here and there.

Of course, when little Jimmy went to build his rocket he put the rocket on the front end of his rocket (at the nose). His Dad didn’t say anything but just took him out to the field to shoot off his rocket.

When he lit the rocket with great excitement, the rocket pushed and pushed but couldn’t get off the ground.

Little Jimmy was in tears. Well his father bent over Jimmy put his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder and said, “Son, don’t worry, we’ll make it right. The problem is that you just got it backwards. It’s not your fault. You just put the engine in the wrong place. The driver got to be in the back if you want to get off the ground.”

People always laughed at me, but when I built a car I put the engine in the back to propel it.”

So his Dad helped little Jimmy put the engine in the proper place. Then little Jimmy lit the rocket again, and lo and behold the rocket flew up into the sky. Little Jimmy clapped with Joy and hugged his Father.

From that day forward, Jimmy wanted to be an Astronaut and work for NASA and fly in a real rocket up to the moon. So he did his science studies and went to MIT and afterward, a dream came true, he got a job with NASA.

At that time, NASA had already launched rockets into space and they wanted to launch a Space Shuttle. It would be something that would orbit the earth and fly back down. The problem was that they couldn’t figure out how to get the thing off the ground and they even had the engine in the back this time.

They tried and tried. Jimmy told his father about the problem when he came to visit for the Holidays. By this time his father was getting quite old. But his father said, “Jimmy, I understand your problem. But the answer is really simple. When I used to race cars we always had people pushing the car to get started. We called them the Boosters. You need the same thing with your Space Shuttle. You need some rockets to help boost you off the ground. Just Align them along side your Space Shuttle. Once you get out of the atmosphere, they can drop off and you can turn on the Back End of the Space Shuttle. It’s really easy, my Son.” Then Jimmy’s Father drew him a picture of these other Vehicles pushing up the Space Shuttle; Jimmy took that picture back to NASA. To them, it was pure genius. The used it and Jimmy’s dream came true because of the Multiple Vehicle Boosters his Dad supplied, he got launched up in the very first Space Shuttle!

Stay tuned for the next episode where I tell you how they built a Space Station using the Alliance Factor.

The reason I would like to meet Rich Schefren and the Agora Team is because I would like to find out how to reach Newbie’s, Baby Boomers and most of all….the largest untapped source of income overlooked by most if not all Marketing Gurus…..Women. They do not buy on impulse like most men do. They have different Buying Strategies altogether and have to be sold in a completely different way. Internet Marketing today is geared more for men and there is a lot of Testosterone at play between rivals with each one being the EXPERT and only a short time ago the so called EXPERT was learning the same type of course yet now has all the answers.

Usually you find Marketers battling it out for Affiliate, List Building, Adsense, etc. business and the people who buy these courses are led to believe they can quit their jobs and make a six figure income on the Internet with the purchase of only $39 or $97 or $197…or more. Realistically they have a better chance at winning the Lottery than making a six figure income on the Internet.

Unfortunately most people have not been in business before and have no idea of the cost of doing business (bricks and mortar in my case….Bowling Centers, Restaurants, etc.) or even what it will cost to run an Internet Business. Most people are led to believe that they will not have to do much to maintain their new business and will only have to work a few hours a day to bring in large amounts of cash each month. This might be true if the business was up and running and generating a lot of cash and all you have to do is a few hours a day to maintain your business. Even then (if you have ever been in business before) you know that you have it on your mind 24/7…….365 days a year.

With millions of Baby Boomers retiring in the next 2 years and the untapped source of income available from half of the population that are not being sold the way they like to be sold (Women) this is the reason I would like to meet Rich Schefren. He has had experience operating “REAL” businesses….hehe….in the past and would be one of the best sources of information to draw from. The Agora Team would also be an interesting source of knowledge especially with my desire to reach the Women customers.

These are the reasons I want to learn about Backending in order to increase income from any Website I might create.

Respectfully,
Tom Malley

It is critical that Direct Marketing Businesses have a consistent series of back end offers. We don’t want to leave money on the table. Our customer is someone who’s bought from us and is expected to buy again. We must provide them with satisfaction, creating a comprehensive system of records and testing. This system of integrity and synergy answers questions of effectiveness.

After the initial sell, records indicate the latency period, the average amount of time between two customer actions. Efficiently, we do nothing until that period passes. Then we market to inspire our customers to buy more, avoiding losses to our competition.

Customers respond at different frequencies. Our records inform us of customers’ values, how much we may expect them to spend during their life cycles. Records indicate trends that qualifies a customer as hyper, regular or sluggish in their response to our back end marketing strategies. Testing results provide intuitive insights about what else might work better. This, too, is tested. The higher scores support a procedural evolution, greater customer satisfaction and increased profits. This develops the consistent series of back end offers.

Direct response businesses began in the USA and Europe about the same time. The difference was that European companies didn’t attempt to create alliance patners through the rental of customer lists and the creation of joint ventures. Their solitary approach precluded European expansion, resulting in smaller ventures. The USA has multiple 100+ million infopreneur ventures. The $300 million per year Agora Publishing Enterprise exudes Excellence, Education and Expertise tantamount to its Premier Internet Marketing Stature.
{260 Words!}

Once you have won an initial sale with your customer, it’s like they have said;

“Hey I like this offer, this company is going to deliver what they say they will and I’m happy to put my money where my mouth is and TRUST them.”

From that moment on you have their trust and attention, combine this with back end offers and a properly structured customer path and support and there’s a good chance that they will stay receptive to what you’re offering for a long long time.

When I think of building alliances within my marketplace I picture the roots of a tree, quite simply the more roots a tree has the stronger it will be, and a strong tree will stand taller live longer and weather allot more storms.

It comes down to what you said in the internet manifesto. Being Strategic instead of opportunistic.

Without a set plan for backend offers then you are following the opporunitistic model vs the strategic model. What are you are doing is just trying to figure out each time what offer you can provide to your list to generate cash flow. Looking for the next quick buck. That means you are constantly involved in the buiness and in essense have a job and not the business of your dreams that will allow you to stop working eventually.

As rich said… having that back end already in place will allow you to focus on customer acquisition and allowing people to go thru your sales funnel. Allowing you to crank the money machine at full tilt.

But the most important key to the above is knowing your numbers. specifically the lifetime value of your customer AND your cost to acquire that customer. If you only pay attention to those numbers then you are well ahead of everyone else. You can crush your competition and they would not know what hit them.

Alliances are critical to the growth of your business because of the long tail effect. You are creating a funnel so that you can continue to create a flow of new customers. By knowing your acquisition costs and lifetime value you are able to make better offer to your alliance group and thus make a compelling case to work with you. perhaps you pay better than anyone else all because you know the lifetime value of your customer. Alliances will also give you access to customers you would not have ever contacted thru your normal acquisition.

Finally, I would agree with Rich that we have been given false information. Not intentionally.. because the guru perhaps did not know any better.

Many of the top tier marketers are very vocal about the autonomy that they create and the lifestyle that autonomy affords them (dan kennedy). They brag about having no employees or overhead. But after hearing rich you realize that what they have created is a lifetime job. Its a job that they have great control of.. but .. if Dan Kennedy decided to stop taking on copywritting clients then the money would stop coming in. the problem is that we just dont know any better than to follow the path of the Guru. Rich did what most people would never think to do… to question the validity of the model being told to us and to share his insights. Bottom line is that there is no lifestyle business… but if you build the business of your dreams .. then perhaps it can help you live the lifestyle you desire.

I am thankful to be in the coaching program with him .. but if at the very least.. you read the free docs that he has written.. he will have opened your eyes to the path to create the business of your dreams…its up to you to decide if its the right path for you.

Thanks Rich

It is absolutely critical that a business have a string of back end offers with increasing price points to continue to feed your top 20% clients. You bring in “customers” through consistent tweaking of the front end offer or sales letter. Then, in order to become a multimillion dollar success you MUST develop strategic alliances with the top direct marketers in the business to share lists and clients. You can only accomplish this by removing yourself from the business to work on the big ticket items and jv/networking almost entirely.

Rick, I am so excited now – I finally get it. I have had a self-employed “job” for years and I have finally found the answer to my entrepreneurial goal. It is certainly not going to be easy. But, with hard work, determination, an action PLAN, and all of the right people and tools, I know know that the goal is ATTAINABLE. Thank you!

Hmmm, my test comment worked. Let me try my original again…

The experts tell us that only 4% of businesses survive beyond 10 years.

Our own observation tells us that most of these survivors aren’t even real

businesses…they’re just glorified jobs for their owners!

And it’s getting a whole lot worse!

Our digital world has changed the marketplace forever. Without the limitations

imposed by the physical world, consumers are able, and willing, to seek out

specialists whom they deem to be experts in their field.

No longer can the internet marketer survive as a jack-of-all-trades. He must

specialize.

And so emerges The Long Tail.

No sooner are niche markets created then they’re sub-divided into smaller and

smaller sub-niches. Thus the customer universe for each sub-niche becomes more

limited, making it more difficult to build a larger, more sustainable company.

…which is why alliances are becoming so important.

Strategic alliances provide marketers and business owners a way to compensate for

the reduction in the available customer universe.

You see, in alliances everybody’s lists are used to grow each others lists.

Trying to expand your customer universe using just your own client acquisition

techniques will always produce only a small fraction of what your business could

earn if you were also leveraging the customer acquisition techniques of all the

other major players in your niche.

Plus, well-structured alliances also give small businesses access to resources that

would otherwise be out of reach. If your goal is to build a successful business you

must either join or cultivate an alliance where you have at least one member or

partner at the top of their game or someone who has access to the world class

talent you most likely would never get a chance to connect with.

The fact is, your business won’t survive unless you have new customers coming

through your door, and without leveraging the efforts of alliance partners you’re

seriously limiting your ability to find and attract these new customers.

But there is another, perhaps more sinister trap that is causing so many businesses

to fail.

The common sense approach to business success is to apply most of your time and

resources to constantly developing new back-end offers, after all, that’s where the

big money is…and in the short-term this opportunistic approach will probably

deliver greater profits for you. But in the long-term…

Well the high failure rate of businesses shows that the prevailing common sense

approach is flawed.

To be hugely successful, uncommon sense is required.

Uncommon sense tells us that if you’re constantly fiddling with your back-end

offers, you’ll have no clearly established path for your new customers to take

after they buy from you the first time…

…which means you can never test to establish the best sequence of offers to make

the most amount of money on the back-end and you can never develop any predictive

modeling systems to maximize your revenues from every customer.

Uncommon sense tells us that we need to formalize a consistent series of back-end

offers that map a clearly defined path for our new customers. This customer life-

cycle can then be used to take someone from a converted customer to a hyper

responsive (which is exactly where we want them to be), and to develop loyalty and

get retention. It’ll produce a model that will give us:

* Criteria to determine who’s still a customer and who isn’t
* An idea about whether our customer base is actually growing or shrinking
* An accurate way to determine the value of a customer
* A method of identifying the hotter buyers and sell them
* An indication that we are leaving money on the table by not having enough back-

end offers in place to satisfy our customers

…all the necessary metrics to grow our business behemoth.

But most importantly…

Uncommon sense tells us that when we have a formalized backend process we can be

aggressive on the customer acquisition side and out-maneuver our competitors.

Uncommon sense tells us that when we have a formalized backend process we can focus

our energies where they’re most needed – on the front-end, because these sales are

harder to make, face more competition and require constant innovation…and yet are

essential to attracting new customers into a relationship with our business…and

these new customers have the greatest potential value.

Uncommon sense tells us that the source of our future back-end profits comes from

our successful front-end promotions and if we’re not out in the marketplace being

forced to figure out what customers want then we’ll get out of touch with the

current trends in the marketplace…and if we’re not seducing these prospects, our

competitors will be.

Uncommon sense tells us that if we want to build a successful business empire, we

need to search out and partner with those who have gone before us…and succeeded!

We need to imitate their uncommon sense approach by focusing on developing such

skillful marketing techniques that our prospects want our products and services

before we’ve even offered them!

Because it’s then, after we’ve built a “real” business, that we can enjoy the “real

life”!

Hmmm the test comment worked and I noticed others had made comments about the length of their posts so I tried splitting my orignal comment into 2 parts…but as you can see only part 2 has appeared…stay tuned for Part 1 (and then read it first…preferably) :)

Part 1:

The experts tell us that only 4% of businesses survive beyond 10 years.

Our own observation tells us that most of these survivors aren’t even real businesses…they’re just glorified jobs for their owners!

And it’s getting a whole lot worse!

Our digital world has changed the marketplace forever. Without the limitations imposed by the physical world, consumers are able, and willing, to seek out those who specialize and are therefore deemed to be experts in their field.

No longer can the internet marketer survive as a jack-of-all-trades. He too must specialize.

And so emerges The Long Tail.

No sooner are niche markets created then they’re sub-divided into smaller and smaller sub-niches. Thus the customer universe for each sub-niche becomes more limited, making it more difficult to build a larger, more sustainable company.

…which is why alliances are becoming so important.

Strategic alliances provide marketers and business owners a way to compensate for the reduction in the available customer universe.

You see, in alliances everybody’s lists are used to grow each others lists.

Trying to expand your customer universe using just your own client acquisition techniques will always produce only a small fraction of what your business could earn if you were also leveraging the customer acquisition techniques of all the other major players in your niche.

Plus, well-structured alliances also give small businesses access to resources that would otherwise be out of reach. If your goal is to build a successful business you must either join or cultivate an alliance where you have at least one member or partner at the top of their game or someone who has access to the world class talent you most likely would never get a chance to connect with.

The fact is, your business won’t survive unless you have new customers coming through your door, and without leveraging the efforts of alliance partners you’re seriously limiting your ability to find and attract these new customers.

But there is another, perhaps more sinister trap that is causing so many businesses to fail.

Please read on in Part 2…

Without A Back End, You’re Left With Just A Job, Not A Real Business.

It’s critical that your business has “a consistent series of back end offers” because THAT IS THE SYSTEM that will work for you, so you can make more money, spend less time and truly have the “lifestyle business” you dream of.

Having your back end offers [your system] in place is also critical because it allows you to test. The Back End is the foundation for the rapid and scientific optimization and growth your business.

Business, Especially A “Lifestyle Business”, Is A TEAM SPORT.

It’s important that you build alliances within your marketplace because of one word: LEVERAGE!

While markets expand and niches multiply, you MUST have the leverage of Alliances to survive. However, you can THRIVE with Alliance by leveraging every marketing dollar of the group, cross marketing to each others lists with endorsements, and sharing ideas, strategies and winning tactics.

It’s like playing Pro Football… If you were going up against the Oakland Raiders, you wouldn’t want to walk onto that field alone, would you? Of course not! Play with a Winning Team!

Thanks Rich – See You Soon!

First, Rich suggests that the way Internet Marketers have been approaching their business has been completely backwards, quite literally. They’ve been confusing the priority of the front end and the back end. Internet Marketers have, for the most part, getting people in on the front end and then hitting them with everything possible, in no particular methodology on the backend – that is, whatever affiliate promotion they can possibly do. The problem with this approach is that you don’t have a sales funnel. You get them in the door and then you just let them walk on through.

It’s kind of like the gates to Chinatown. You convince them to enter and then you just let them be assaulted by whatever might come at them. But that’s certainly not how it works in a well run business.

Think for example of Disneyworld. I used to live in Orlando. In fact, I almost took a job at Disneyworld. In that process, I had many a chance to visit and even read their Disney University insider materials. But until I read Rich’s Final Chapter, I didn’t get what was really going on there. When you visit, once they get you at the front door with tickets, they then hit you with a carefully controlled series of backends “in Mickey’s footsteps” from food to merchandise to finally a lifetime membership, all within their gated sales funnel which they call Disney World. That’s how you want a sales funnel to be. You want to control the customer and lead him to your backends in your “World”, not lose him to the wind. In doing so, Disney can easily track the total amount they make per customer visit and even customer lifetime value. Consequently, they can improve on the process and lead their customers along a different path or change a presentation to increase the value.

When we think about it in the real world, it makes perfect sense. But in Internet Marketing we don’t do that all. While he’s not explicit it about in the report, Rich believes that three major direct marketers influenced internet marketers to follow the opposite model. I happen to know who those people are, and the weird thing about them is that they are still working and don’t really have a “business” even though they make a lot of money. What they have is a lifestyle like racing horses. Of course, these people are much more successful than I am and one can learn a lot about marketing from them, but maybe not how to build a long-term growth business.

So if you follow their route you end up working forever. Why? The real money is in the backend and they just give away the backend. The pioneers of Internet Marketing learned from them and now just repeat to everyone else. Now, to be fair, not all Internet Marketers approach things that way (e.g., Mark Joyner – that’s why he could sell his business!). Certainly, it’s not true in the larger direct response world. Take the big marketing companies like Agora or Boardroom. They concentrate on moving people from the front end to the back end with a carefully orchestrated series of messages. The back end is often another year and ultimately a lifetime membership. Once they have people in the funnel, they can precisely test what elements will get to the backend. Agora has an exact sense of customer lifetime value in because they control the customer’s world. Their the kind of company you want to learn from and form an Alliance with.

I will put in short:
- Know your customers and you will control your business – This reflects the importance of everything around the back end.
- Divide to conquer – reflect the importance of the alliances in the marketplace. It’s preferable to have a small share in a larger cake then have 100% of a smaller (or non-existing) one. That’s the reason it’s easy to understand your option in partnering with Agora.

I would like to take the chance to thank you for all the materials you have made available.
My background it’s in engineering so I’m sure I’m always missing some important key concepts and that’s the reason why running my business is a more difficult task. I’m catching up and like me I’m sure that your materials are of great help to many people.
Now I only have to commit and put your tips in practice, and who knows if soon my company could become a success case study.

Taking this into consideration I would like to leave you a suggestion:
I get to know your materials a few days ago and just by reading them and comparing to other stuff I have read, I know you do not need to prove yourself because your strengths are clearly emphasized in your work and only a misinformed person will not note the differences to other materials… But it will be good and it might have a high impact in your front-end (bringing new customers) if you could have a real life detailed example.
I mean, pick up a niche company, and put it to the top applying the same strategies we read in your books. Show the real numbers before and after, detail the strategies applied, etc, etc. It would be like the big brother of applied marketing strategies… (Maybe I’m getting carried away by my big imagination :-))
I know you already do this with the companies and persons you work directly but a few details come out. It seems also that you are more in “making the process automatic” then getting more involved directly.

All the Best!