Perry Marshall is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine. He’s guided clients like FanDuel and Infusionsoft from startup to hundreds of millions of dollars.
His newest book, Detox, Declutter, Dominate: How to Excel by Elimination (co-authored with Robert Skrob) reveals how readers can grow their business 4X faster by eliminating 80% of wasted effort.
He founded the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize, with judges from Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. Launched at the Royal Society in London, it’s the world’s largest science research award.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs uses his 80:20 Curve as a productivity tool. His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in the Harvard Business Review.
His Google book laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry, and Ultimate Guide to Google Ads is the world’s best-selling book on internet advertising.
Marketing maverick Dan Kennedy says, “If you don’t know who Perry Marshall is – unforgivable. Perry’s an honest man in a field rife with charlatans.”
He’s consulted in over 300 industries. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and lives in Chicago.
What you will learn
- The importance of applying the star principle to your business planning
- Why you should start your day being first, thinking second, and doing third
- The 7 steps to scaling and growing your business
- The 2 key tactics for starting and building your business
- Whether you should you create a niche where you can be the #1 business
- Why you should try and start a business in an industry with a growth trajectory of at least 10% a year
- Why you should apply the 80:20 rule to your business
- The importance of “re-creation” for solving problems and sanity
- A small book with big ideas you need to read
Transcript
Jeff Bullas: Allow me to welcome you to the Jeff Bullas show. Today I will meet Perry Marshall. Now, I have heard of Perry over the years, and he’s just written a new book and we’re going to have little chat about that as well, as amongst many other things. A little bit about Perry. Perry is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world, he is endorsed in Forbes and Inc magazine, he’s guided clients like FanDuel and Infusionsoft from start up, up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Jeff Bullas: His newest book, DETOX, DECLUTTER, DOMINATE: HOW TO EXCEL BY ELIMINATION, with Roberts Skrob, reveals how readers can grow their businesses 4 X faster by eliminating items in a wasted effort. That sounds good to most people really. He found the $10 million evolution, 2.0 prize, which judges from Harvard, Oxford, and MIT launched at the Royal society in London. It’s the world’s largest sites research award.
Jeff Bullas: He’s also been involved with NASA jet propulsion labs, who used his 80/20 curve as a productivity tool. His reinvention of the product principle is published in the Harvard business review. I think we can just cut straight to the case here Perry, welcome to the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on, and I’m sure our audience, some listeners will be intrigued by what you have to reveal. And for me too, one of your first steps you talked about is of special interest to me as well amongst the others.
Jeff Bullas: So, Perry, apart from those fantastic accolades and results that you achieve for others and your achievements, and written I believe eight books, how’d you get into this business and how’d you get into life?
Perry Marshall: I think my marketing journey really starts when my wife was pregnant, and I got laid off from my engineering job. And I’d lived in Chicago for two and a half years, and I didn’t want to pull up stakes and move somewhere else, which turns out if I wanted to stay in that type of a job, I was going to have to move somewhere. And so, I took a job in sales instead, and I thought, “Well, this shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve seen a lot of those sales guys, they don’t seem like they’re all that smart so this should be okay.”
Perry Marshall: And I proceeded to experience two years of bologna sandwiches and ramen soup, and cold calls and pounding the phone, and driving all over the place, and trying to see people who are not interested in seeing me. And finally at the end, I got fired from that job. That was my baptism by fire. My friend Frank, warned me it might not be as easy as I thought it was, but I didn’t really want to listen to him at the time.
Perry Marshall: This gave me a keen appreciation for the value of a sales lead, or the ability to generate a sales lead so that you didn’t have to beg, crawl, scratch, and just all of that misery. And I guess you could say by the time I encountered Dan Kennedy, which was the beginning of my marketing education, I had acquired a keen appreciation for that thing, which I didn’t really know existed.
Perry Marshall: And so, what happened was I spent several months digesting all of this and trying some things, but then I got fired from my job and I went to a new job and there were just enough things about the new job that were different, where I could actually start using some of these advertising and marketing skills because they had a website. And this is in late 1997, and most companies did not have websites yet.
Perry Marshall: So, we were a little bit ahead of the curve. So, I’m reading all these newsletters and I’m learning about print advertising and direct mail, and direct response, and all this stuff. And without anybody telling me this, I looked at that and I thought, “A webpage is not all that different from a direct mail piece. It looks roughly the same thing going on.” And we figured out how to generate leads.
Perry Marshall: And within a couple of months, what happened was, every morning when I would go to work, instead of opening my eyes in my bed in the morning, looking at the ceiling and go, “I have to make 100 cold calls today. I would go in the office, and I would have inquiries in my email box from people who since five o’clock yesterday afternoon had filled out some form and they wanted to know about our software, they wanted to know about our hardware, they had an application problem, and I would either call them or email them and they’d be like, “Oh yeah. Well, I had a question about that.”
Perry Marshall: This is so totally different than chasing people around. It was better than therapy. And my first commission check, it was the best month I’d ever had in my career and it did not come a moment too soon because by then we were hanging by our fingernails. I think if this had gone on much longer, we would have been moving in to my in-law’s house or something. That’s how I got into the market. It saved me, it saved my sanity. I was good and ready for it by the time it came.
Jeff Bullas: That’s a very exciting story and not dissimilar to what I experienced. I moved from teaching to sales, not engineering to sales, and yes, I sat at a desk and sold to cold call for two hours a day. And rejection isn’t fun, but it’s part of the job, talking to people that don’t know what they want to do with you. But I had an aha moment in 2008, when I discovered content marketing.
Jeff Bullas: And I’d built a website, created content and Vuala, I created a business leads turned up, lead magnets. So I totally get where you’re coming from. And I think it takes away the struggle. And you do use the term misery of the cold calling, chasing instead of the customer becoming inbound to you, rather than you being outbound chasing them. What amazes me still is a lot of people don’t get it. They just don’t know how it works. But we’re in the middle of reiterations of what you’ve been through and what I’m going through, and what we’ve been through.
Jeff Bullas: Let’s have a little look at your book that you have just published, which I’m quite fascinated by, DETOX, DECLUTTER, DOMINATE. And I believe it’s more a pitcher book than anything else, is that correct?
Perry Marshall: Well, Yeah, it is. And I’ve never put out a book like this. It’s 36 pages and there is not a single wasted word in this book. Now, the story is a year ago, this was a 50,000 word book. And I had been banging away on the keyboard for months working on my 50,000 word book, and we’d send it out to beta readers and stuff. And I sent it to my friend, Robert strobe. Who’s a very dear trusted friend and confidant, and Robert sent it back and he goes, “Perry, I 80, 20 your book. And I chopped your 50,000 words down to 8,000.” And he goes, “This is the book.” I’m like, “okay.” And he goes, “Hang out I got another idea.” And he comes back two weeks later and he’d done a bunch of graphics he’s like, “Now we’re talking.” And I ended up making him the co-author.
Perry Marshall: And what this book is, there’s all formulas, here’s the 10 steps or the 12 steps or the seven steps or whatever. These are the seven most important things in business thus seven. And they’ll still be valid 50 years from now. Most people could not possibly say that. And they’re just as valid, whether you’re a freelancer making $10,000 a year, or whether you’re extremely wealthy running multiple corporations, making $10 million a year, it’s true all across the board. It’s that principle centered, but yet it’s strategic. And so, there’s just never been a book like this, and there’s especially never been a 36 page book like this.
Jeff Bullas: I think that’s a brilliant concept. And that reminds me too, is that Robert really became your editor and then became a co-author. And there’s a great quote by Stephen King, the famous fiction writer that says, “Removing words is like killing your children, because you’re the one that created them.” And whenever an editor goes in and removes 2000 words, 3000 words, and I remember my editor went in and removed 10% of my book and I felt horrified.
Jeff Bullas: I just literally shut my eyes and went, “Okay, do what you will. You are killing my children.” Because you created them, that’s the reality. You created the words, you created the sentences, and they were done with blood, sweat, and tears over a typewriter, or as Barack Obama did on a yellow pad with a pen recently, just bought his book. Let’s dive in a little bit about the steps. So, there’s seven steps. I do like the first one that says, number one, step one, use renascence time to gain discernment and clarity. I think I know where you’re going with this, but I would love to hear your take on step one.
Perry Marshall: Most people start their day the worst possible way. Here’s the worst possible way to start your day ring, ring, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll on a device. Okay. That is the worst way to start your day. It gets you reacting to other people and dealing with crises before your feet have even touched the floor, which puts you completely behind the eight ball. And to add insult to injury, it feels productive, “Oh, that shipping the Singapore never got delivered. I have to go fix this.”
Perry Marshall: And then, you’re off putting out a fire first thing in the morning. Worst way to start your day. Oh, by the way, news, social media, emails, any of that, it’s terrible. Best way to start your day, take a shower, get a cup of coffee and sit down with a notebook and spend 20 minutes gratitude, prayer, meditation, reading something inspirational and getting yourself sorted out.
Perry Marshall: What am I going to do today? What’s important? What questions are on my mind? What idea did I just have in the shower that I don’t want to lose, I want to get that written down so that later I can do something about it. And you get yourself together, and you put your spiritual armor on, and then you start your day. Now, I have not missed a day starting this way in seven years, not one day. This is how important it is.
Perry Marshall: People have no idea how incredibly productive it is, because it doesn’t feel productive. It feels self-indulgent. It feels narcissistic. It feels like a waste of time. It feels like you’re burning day light, no that is the most valuable thing you do all day. That’s renaissance time.
Jeff Bullas: I love it. I identify with that. I meditate, read, meditate. I do not open my bed. I open my phone in bed. I say no a lot more, I have done the last two years. And I think what you summed up rather nicely too for me, is we think doing is productive, but being is actually more productive.
Perry Marshall: Being first, thinking second, doing third.
Jeff Bullas: Exactly. And I start the day slow. I do not want to be rushing out the door. I don’t want to be stressed. And there’s that real tension we have as human beings, that we’ve got to feel that we’ve got to dive into the doing right off the bed, because that makes us feel productive. And as you suggested, is that it’s the worst way to start the day. In fact, I wrote it and you mentioned things like going into social media, rabbit holes of credit, new term for that I’m calling them robot holes.
Jeff Bullas: And I wrote a 450 word poem last night about social media, it starts with social media is a headline question. Social media, I fell in love with you. And then I’ll go into where we are today with social media and what we need to do about it. I fell in love with social media. I still think it’s a great tool, but I just have to make sure that we don’t get used and abused, instead of using it as it should be as a tool.
Perry Marshall: Oh, yeah. Right over my shoulder, ultimate guide to Facebook advertising, best-selling book on Facebook advertising, you know what chapter one says? Chapter one says, your first step in becoming a great Facebook advertiser, which for many people is an entire career. Your first step is deleting the Facebook app off your phone. Why? Because you are not in the buffet line at red lobster, shoveling food in your face, in the restaurant, you are the chef in the kitchen making food for other people. You’re not eating the food, you’re making the food.
Perry Marshall: So, if you’re a professional in the many of my customers, direct response, advertising, paid social media, paid search, whatever, paid internet media, you are a practitioner of a craft. If you saw the sushi chef popping salmon into his mouth, while he’s making your sushi, what would you think? I’m dead serious about this. And it’s totally different to be a producer than to be a consumer.
Jeff Bullas: I think you summed that up beautifully. And I’ll distill that and I’ll try to break down the 20 of the 80. You need to create the buffet, not eat the buffet.
Perry Marshall: Oh, I’m writing that down. Yeah. I’m writing that down.
Jeff Bullas: And this is what it comes down to, the fabulous part of what we are as entrepreneurs and artists is that we are creators, and consuming is a second priority. And I came across a lovely phrase in an interview the other day with Lisa Sutton, from Las Vegas. And she used the term that, we all go into social media and we consume the highlight reels that are polished to an inch of their lives. But we judge ourselves by others’ highlight reels. And that’s the challenge we have as human beings. And that’s where the dysfunction comes in. But that’s a whole new topic, we won’t go down that rabbit hole. So step two, make your business two X more profitable with 80 20 focus. Let’s have a little chat about that.
Perry Marshall: 80 20 is one of the most powerful. In fact, I think 80 20 is the single most powerful idea in business. And what 80 20 says is 20% of causes make 80% of effects, and 80% of the causes only produce 20% of effects. Now, if you crunch the numbers on that, what it means is that the levers are 16 times more powerful than the non levers. And then, there’s another 4 x lever inside of that lever and another 4 x lever, and another four, because 80 20 is fractal 80. There’s an 80 20 inside 80 20. So not only do 20% of the people make 80% of the money, 20% of the 20% make 80% of the 80%.
Perry Marshall: That means 1% of what you did last year made you 50% of the money you made last year. This seems impossible to people, and most people would never even notice. But if you look at, “Okay, what deals actually put bread on my table this year? And what did it take to make those deals? And what was the thing that we delivered to that customer that made them pay the money?” You start chiseling it down.
Perry Marshall: And you’ll find out there’s actually very few people, and very few products, and a very few reasons why people buy the products that accounted for almost all of your success. And most of the rest was sawdust and filler. And when you start to see this, once you begin to see it for what it is, you can’t un-see it. And that actually brings me to step three, which is earn $1000 an hour, at least one hour a day. And people go, “I can’t imagine that. How on earth would I ever make $1000 an hour?
Perry Marshall: Well, let’s take, Helen is a dentist receptionist and she makes $15 an hour answering the phone and the phone rings and, “We are dale dental, please hold.” And then she puts them on hold. And then two minutes later, “Hello, can I help you?” And they’ve left. And they were ready to spend $5,000 on dental work, but you lost them in two minutes. Well, okay. So if you lost $5,000 in two minutes, how many dollars is that per hour? Well, I’m pretty sure that’s $150,000 an hour of business that she lost in two minutes.
Perry Marshall: Even Helen who makes $30,000 a year, can make or lose $150,000 an hour for a couple of minutes. And see everything in business runs on these tiny little levers, a sale is a delicate thing. So, you got the dentist, you got the office manager, you got the other staff, you got Helen, whatever time that those people spend making sure that nobody ever gets put on hold for two minutes. When they want $5,000 of dental work, that’s $1000 an hour work, it’s going to pay off and it’s going to return and return and return. In fact, it’ll pay off year after year, after year, as long as they follow the system.
Perry Marshall: That’s what I mean by $1000 an hour work. And see, once you just start to identify a little bit of it, if you start pulling on the string, pulling the yarn, you’ll find that there’s more, and more, and more.
Jeff Bullas: Does that also apply to people that are doing the work and decide that they will find someone to do it for them. Like amplifying their time?
Perry Marshall: Oh, absolutely. Because, the way Helen thinks about increasing your value is, well, I make $15 an hour. Can I make $16? How about $1650? Can I get $18? Can I get $20? That’s how most people think about increasing the value of their time. The way time really works is, some things are worth $10 an hour. Other things are worth $100 an hour. Other things are worth $1000 an hour. How on answering the phone is $10,000 an hour work, for two minutes. And so once you start, in fact there’s a chart in this book and there’s a $10 column, $100, $1000, 10,000.
Perry Marshall: These are typical jobs, particular for marketers and entrepreneurs. This is $100 an hour work, but this is $1000 an hour work. How much of that $10 and $100 an hour work can you give to somebody else? You very well may need a personal assistant. In fact, most entrepreneurs ought to get a personal assistant or a virtual assistant, whose job is to do whatever you don’t want to do. And frankly, if you have to sort through three or four of those people to find one good one, it’s worth every bit of the blood, sweat, and tears, because it will completely change your life. When the first thing you can do every day is decide what you’re not going to do. Total game changer.
Jeff Bullas: Yeah, I’ll totally agree with that. And because love is what controls, so best when we hang on so tight and afraid to let go of it. Let’s look at step number four, which is to create an irresistible product, and I’m intrigued by this. Tell us a bit more about this step.
Perry Marshall: Every business that people really enjoy doing business with makes something simpler. If you go buy a sandwich, you didn’t have to kill a cow and you didn’t have to grow the wheat and bake the bread. Right? And some of the modern billionaires are all simplifiers. Jeff Bezos, made it a whole lot easier to get a toothbrush, or to buy a book. A Tesla made it a whole lot simpler to have a self-driving car, now simplifying.
Perry Marshall: So, your number one job is to simplify the world for the customer and make whatever you sell more useful and a joy to use. One of my favorite examples of this, you talk about Tesla or you talking about Airbnb, and talk about these Silicon Valley simplifiers, this intimidates people. Let’s bring it a lot, lot closer down to earth. I’ve got this client named Mark McShurley, he owns a company called Roof Simple. And the name of the company was inspired by the simplified concept. And they’re in the Washington DC area and they said, “We are going to make buying a roof more pleasant, more useful, and have way less friction, way less simple.”
Perry Marshall: So it was literally detailing out the 187 steps that a person goes through, between starting to look up roofing contractors, and actually have an appointment. And having the guy come over and going through all the negotiations, and then having the roof put on, and then paying for the roof all of it, Mark put all of it under a microscope. And he’s like, “How many of these steps can we get rid of? How many of these irritations can we get rid of?”
Perry Marshall: Including things like, most roofing salesmen or from the roofing industry, which is completely dysfunctional. They have horrible habits. People don’t even like what they do. I’m not going to even hire those guys. I mean, I hired, clean cut freshly married baby guys, right out of college who don’t know anything about roof. So, I’m going to teach them how to do this.
Perry Marshall: And he chopped the, let’s say 187 steps. He got rid of 1oo, he got rid of a whole bunch of irritations. And so now you can sell a roof, install a roof at an above average rate, and have a very, very happy customer who is, and this is the punchline. So happy with the roof that he’s got 300, 4.8 star reviews on Google. Now, that actually brings me to moat number six, because that’s building a moat around your business.
Jeff Bullas: I think we’ve mentioned. So, step number five, which is kind of initial where you’re number one. So I think we just jumped on briefly. Sorry.
Perry Marshall: Yeah. This is so important. It is step five, carve out the niche where you’re the undisputed number one, via star principle. It is so simplistic on the surface that most people have no idea how profound and powerful this is. Let me explain what I mean by this. Most people think, well, I’m going to hang out my shingle. I’m going to start selling burritos or web design services or jets, or whatever you make, whatever you do. And I’m going to start out number six or eight, and then I’m going to crawl my way up to number five. And then I’m going to crawl my way up to number four. And I’m going to work my guts out and I’m going to be number three, and maybe someday I’ll be number one.
Perry Marshall: And hopefully by the time I get up to number four or number three, that life will be tolerably good. Well, what they don’t know is this almost never works. You will almost never displace number one. There’s all of these very complicated reasons why number one wants to stay number one. It’s why incumbent politicians get reelected so often. How many famous brands are like 50 years old, like general motors or, or Kleenex or whatever.
Perry Marshall: It’s very hard to displace number one. So, the star principle says, if you can’t be Coke, don’t be Pepsi. Be 7 up, create a new category of Cola, that is different than the old one. And if you can’t be 7 up, don’t be Sierra mist that sucks, Be Dr Pepper. Because, Dr. Pepper is a completely different animal than 7 Up. And whatever you do, don’t be Mr. Pibb, being Mr. Pibb or being Shasta will always suck. So, you find a part of the market that nobody is claiming and you claim it. And you be number one in that new category.
Perry Marshall: And this is incredibly powerful and it’s true in all dimensions. So it’s like, well, if somebody else is already number one on Google, be number one on Facebook. And if you can’t be number one on Facebook, be number one in Instagram or TikTok, or what have you. So it even applies to the media. In fact, many, many, many of my customers have been successful by mastering a media that nobody else in their market has mastered.
Perry Marshall: That’s why I’m the author of ultimate guide to Google and ultimate guide to Facebook ads. So, star principle is incredibly powerful. In fact, if the only thing you do is you just figure out how to be number one in a growing market, how to be a big fish in a little pond, it will completely transform your life.
Jeff Bullas: I think try your own niche, Acquia sub-niche micro-niche, whatever you want to call it, but don’t try and take on the likes of Amazon. Don’t try and take on, create a new search engine, create a niche within the niche that you can put your name to and be number one. I love it. That’s really, really cool. Step number six is building penetrable moat. I love the sound of that. So tell us more about how you would build a moat without using a big machine.
Perry Marshall: I have seen so many businesses start, and I think it’s relatively easy to start a business. What’s hard is to get the business to last. What I’m impressed with is making a business last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, and that’s never going to happen unless you have a moat. What is a moat? It’s a barrier to competition where, well it might look like it’s easy to compete with these guys, but actually it’s not.
Perry Marshall: There’s 20th century moats like land and capital, and buildings and finance, and all that stuff. But then, there’s 21st century moats. And 21st century moats are based on network effect. What is network effect? It is the best moat ever, because once you have it, it’s almost impossible to take away. Here’s an example of network effect. Uber gets more riders which attracts more drivers, which lowers the wait time, which attracts more drivers, riders, wait time.
Perry Marshall: And pretty soon in any major city in the U.S, you can get a ride in three to 10 minutes. Remember how it was with taxis? You call them, and there was some woman smoking cigarettes, answers the phone and she tells you it’d be 15 minutes and 35 minutes later, the guy actually shows up. How’s any taxi company going to compete with Uber now? They can’t, because Uber has a network effect.
Perry Marshall: In detox, declutter dominates. I talk about network effects for mere mortals, which are network effects that are not super obvious, but once you build them and once you get them in place are almost impossible to get rid of. One of them is online review. You’re in Washington, DC, you need a roof. So you’re going to look at roofers on the internet. If roof simple has 300 reviews, 4.8 stars, and the next guy has six reviews and four stars. And the next guy has five reviews and one and a half stars. Who are you going to buy a roof from?
Perry Marshall: And once Mark has a system for generating happy customers and 4.8 star reviews, it’s easier for Mark to get from 300 to 400, than it is for the other guy to get from six to 20 that’s network effect. And there’s about a dozen other network effects for mere mortals ingredients in the detox book. And you should be obsessed with moats, because if you have a moat, you can go on vacation and not be terrified that all your customers are about to leave.
Jeff Bullas: What’s the example of a couple more, just for our listeners. That would be nice.
Perry Marshall: Okay. Another one is data. If you have more data on what is working and what other people cannot see, this could be as simple as a Google account or a Facebook account, where you have more history than your next competitor, because it’s like, “Well, we’ve tested these 87 different ads and we know which ones worked and which ones don’t.” They can see the ones that work, but they can’t see the ones that don’t or didn’t and they don’t know why they didn’t work.
Perry Marshall: And so, you develop knowledge. Another network effect from your moatals is trust. If you are more trusted than everybody else in your market, it doesn’t take billions of dollars to generate trust. In fact, having billions of dollars is a good way to not be trusted because of all of the stupid things that big companies do, right? Software as a service, is a network effect to business, also is service as software. There’s a service called magic, where you text this company and they have people in the Philippines who will do anything you text them for $35 an hour.
Perry Marshall: If you text them and you say, “Hey, will you research what’s the best motor oil.” They will go and research what’s the best motor oil. And they’ll text you back and they’ll say, “Well, it took us 20 minutes. And we build you $15.” Or something like that. That’s called service as software. Well, it doesn’t look like much, but if you have all of the systems and all of the orchestration for all of your people to do that work, and you can have it done really fast. It’s a lot harder than it looks to compete with that business.
Perry Marshall: And so, there are lots of versions of this, and these are the things people should be obsessing about, not how many followers they have on Facebook. There’s all these trivial things that just usually don’t matter very much.
Jeff Bullas: Great examples. And especially another one is content I suppose, for publishers as well. That’s definitely a moat, and it’s one of our moats here. Good luck trying to create in my niche, the amount of content we’ve created. Yes, there’s other players. Now the other challenge too, in this space with the moats is global, because we are now playing a global game. Aren’t we? Maybe just a little quick chat about how you see the global scene in terms of, and the moat’s the same thing. When you’re having chats with clients and they’re working locally, what would you say to them about going global?
Perry Marshall: Well, if you’re local and you’re going to go global, you need to have, I call it a definitive selling proposition. Because, I don’t think a unique selling proposition will really cut it. You need to be the only person in the world that does some very, very specific narrow thing, which is what star principle says. You need to be number one in whatever market you’re in. So my first advice is, don’t go into markets where you can’t be number one.
Perry Marshall: I had a client a couple of years ago, he wanted to buy this company. And he said this company is run by an 80 year old guy, and he’s neglected the business for the last couple of years. And I think we should be able to just go in there, run it a whole lot better and do well. And I said, and we have this whole conversation about, well, yeah. But can you be a star? And I couldn’t figure out how he’s going to be number one in a growing market. And I said, don’t buy the company. Well, he bought the company. Two years later, he’s trying to figure out how to sell a company that nobody wants. It’s really sad. This is so, so important, and it’s not what most people are obsessing about.
Jeff Bullas: You mentioned the word start, with a phrase star principles is that means you need to be a star in every one of the seven steps. Is that what you’re saying?
Perry Marshall: No, no. Actually star principle is just being the number one player in a growing market. I don’t want you to do all seven, but if you master about two of them, your whole life will change. Master one of them and your life will change. If you are in a business where you’ve got a lot of competitors and you figure out how to serve unmet markets, where the demand is growing in those unmet markets, you won’t have competitors anymore. And you won’t be looking over your shoulders.
Perry Marshall: And when competitors do come in, they’ll be behind you. There’ll be number two, number three, number four, number five, and see most people don’t understand. Number two, three, four, and five, they eat the scraps, the fall off of number one’s table. And this is especially true on the internet. A lot of times on the internet, there’s not even a number six or seven. Somebody tells me what the number seven search engine is in the world. Do you even know? And if you did, would you care?
Jeff Bullas: Well that certainly blows me away when people sort of go, well, we’re going to create a search engine and compete with Google and I’m going, “Well, good luck with that.”
Perry Marshall: No. It’s pure foolishness.
Jeff Bullas: There’s one little twist on that one, which is the search engine, which says we don’t mind your data. That’s the niche.
Perry Marshall: So that’s a new niche? They are nowhere to be found in regular search engine. But they’re number one. I think duck, duck go. They’re probably number one in, we don’t use any of your data. We don’t do anything with it. And there is a tiny but real market for that.
Jeff Bullas: Yep. And I think that’s a great example of creating your own niche.
Perry Marshall: Yes.
Jeff Bullas: Number one, grab the niche of trust on data for search engines, that’s it. Let’s look at the last step and we’ll finish up with that. And one quick question at the end. Enjoy freedom to create and reinvent every single day. I love this. So it’s a matter of you can’t stop soon. You’ve got to give yourself the time and permission to keep evolving.
Perry Marshall: Yeah. I was at a conference a week ago, and there was all these entrepreneurs there. And I said, “How many of you, you love your work, you love your business, it’s engrossing, it’s all absorbing and you think about it constantly.” And all these hands go up. And that’s great. I said, “Whatever you do for fun needs to be just as stimulating as your work.” If you have the kind of business that it’s fun to be a workaholic, because there’s all these things that you love doing.
Perry Marshall: Playing Scrabble or doing nothing in a lawn chair is not going to pull your mind away from your business. Now, why do we need to pull your mind away from your business? Because the real genius doesn’t start until your subconscious mind starts working on your problems, while you’re doing something else. That is most likely to happen when you’re doing something that’s fun, exhilarating, engaging, like maybe it’s bungee jumping, or parasailing, or water skiing, or maybe it’s stamp collecting because maybe you’re so incredibly engrossed in stamps that you’re just like… But it has to be something you really love, and it needs to be intense and really engaging.
Perry Marshall: And most people don’t have hobbies or outside interests that are really compelling like that. They’ve set them aside. And then, they don’t give themselves permission to do it either. You need to do this, because you think for a living. I hope you think for a living, I hope you don’t just punch buttons on a keyboard for a living, or punch the clock for a living, or make widgets for a living. I hope you’re using this thing. And if you are, you have to have that recreational time and it’s okay. I’m giving you permission. This is a very, very important thing for entrepreneurs.
Jeff Bullas: I totally agree. And that’s why it’s called re-creation.
Perry Marshall: Yes. Yes. Exactly.
Jeff Bullas: I think it’s very important and we don’t give just the permission. I give myself permission to go bike riding lunchtime every day to rush down Hills on a bike, on a carbon bike like a teenager, to ride over the Harbor bridge to whatever. You need to get out of your zone and recreate because your brain I think consumes a huge percentage of our blood flow, because it’s just sucks it away.
Jeff Bullas: So you’ve got these cognitive resources and they are limited. And we need to give ourselves that permission to actually recreate it, and give ourselves the freedom to do that, I really love that. We have seven great steps. We’re going to share these with our listeners and readers and viewers, because we’re on YouTube channels. Well, the Jeff Bullas show on YouTube. So, just one last thing Perry, that you think you would love to share. That’s the number one thing that you’d like to leave with our listeners today.
Perry Marshall: I’d like to leave you with a thought here. Everybody in the world right now, you’ve got this pandemic and everybody’s wondering what’s going to happen next. Well, I picked this up from a guy named Akhil Patel, and his partner Phil Anderson. And you can look those guys up, I was casting about trying to figure out, all right, so what grid should I have for where we are economically? Are we going to go into some big recession when this COVID thing works itself out or what’s going to happen?
Perry Marshall: And what Akhil said was, “When you’re heading into recession, real estate has crashed and you can’t get credit to save your life.” Well, so here’s the question, has real estate crashed? And is credit impossible right now? In most parts of the world, no. Certainly in the United States, it’s booming. And even in Europe it’s certainly not hurting too bad, despite all the craziness that’s going on, we are in the middle of a 14 year economic upcycle that’ll be followed by a four year down cycle.
Perry Marshall: And that down is going to start happening in probably 2025 or 26. That’s not where we are now. We’re going to bounce out of this. Now I’m talking in super, super broad generalities. I’m not going specific down to any one single industry. But I think it’s important to understand where the wind is blowing. So, I am not minimizing the damage in the airlines, like all these other industries and problems. It’s a big, giant mess, no question about it. But for people who position themselves in growing markets and make themselves into stars, which right now is the time to make hay while the sun shines because right now we’re in these weird conditions you can do things.
Perry Marshall: There’s orange you can squeeze right now that you will not be able to squeeze a year from now. And you need to figure out what those are. There is opportunity everywhere, why? Because there’s pain and suffering everywhere, anytime there’s pain and suffering there’s opportunity. And that’s what I’d like to leave you with. You need to really be sensible about this. And frankly, I wouldn’t believe anything that most of the media is telling you, because most of the media is just terrible.
Jeff Bullas: Thank you for sharing that. That’s great wisdom and the insight, and sees the opportunity in the middle of catastrophe. I think that’s really, really wise. So Perry, thank you very much for your time. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I thank you for sharing your gift with the world. And this is part of the show, is to share people’s gifts. And it’s great about you putting your gift out to the world and sharing it, because we should be creating and then the real thing we really need to be aware of as entrepreneurs and as artists, is to share that gift to the world. Thank you very much for doing that.
Perry Marshall: Thank you for having me on your show Jeff, it’s an honor to talk to you and everyone.