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Here’s your program.
Andrew Warner: Hey everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart, and today’s guest is Murray Smith. He has started or turned around 13 businesses including Indian Motorcycle, American Brands, and Dave & Buster’s Canada. I remember reading an article about how he bought Indian Motorcycle trademark from bankruptcy and built it into the second largest U.S. motorcycle company.
These are amazing accomplishments for a man who it turns out, and I didn’t know this until recently, used to clean sewers. Murray’s also the co-author of a bestselling book “The Answer” where I read that fact. And he’s helped more than 50,000 businesses grow. Murray, welcome to Mixergy.
Murray Smith: Thanks, Andrew.
Andrew: How long did you spend cleaning sewers by the way?
Murray: Two years.
Andrew: Wow. I actually thought when I read that that maybe you were in there for a couple of days, said, “This isn’t for me,” and left. Two years of you cleaning sewers?
Murray: Yeah. When I went to public school, I was diagnosed with having a learning disability and was plucked from regular school and put into a school for kids with special needs. And I was told by my teachers and everyone around me that I wouldn’t amount to much and that I should expect nothing more than to work in a factory when I get outside of school. So naturally, when you are conditioned that way, when I left school, I took the first job I could get the highest amount of pay and that was working in somebody else’s feces, in sewers 200 feet underneath the ground.
Andrew: Wow. And the whole time you were there, were you just frustrated, plotting your way out or did you accept it because that’s the way you thought life was supposed to be?
Murray: Well, initially I accepted it because the money was very good. And then, obviously, I became restless very quickly, and I started looking around at the other people that I started to watch in business, including the two owners of the sewer company, and noticed that they weren’t any academically smarter than I was. And in fact, what they were doing is they were focusing on the critical few things, as I’ve learned over the years to paraphrase it, they were focused on the critical few things that were necessary to run a business. And they didn’t worry about the trivial many things that were a distraction or balls that were dropping. They focused on those critical few things that they built multi-million dollar businesses.
And after watching a half a dozen people that I thought were no more smarter than me do the same thing, I figured that I could take my shot at it and see what would happen. And I went out and the first business I had ended up selling it for a couple million bucks.
Andrew: What was the first business? I want to spend time on Indian Motorcycle, but what was that first business?
Murray: Well, the first business, I went up against the largest telephone companies in the world. In 1980, they deregulated the telecommunications industry in North America, and I decided to start up a telephone company. And Alltel, as it was called, acronym for Alternative Communications, ended up being quite successful and I enjoyed it. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from both the lessons I learned from the mistakes I made, and I also learned the lessons from the successes from others and realized quite quickly that learning from others was much less painful and more certain than learning from the mistakes I made on my own.
Andrew: Who’d you learn from back then?
Murray: Oh, I had so many mentors that ranged from family friends that were entrepreneurial in spirit to those people that I was cleaning sewers for. There was just so many mentors that I couldn’t just point to one. I learned, again, at the time that if I, whether it was from business or whether it was from personal relationships or even particular niches within business, I could get mentors that had been there before me, typically 5, 10, 15 years ahead of me. They managed to give me the insights to save the time, the money, obviously the cuts and bleeding that would happen if you were doing it on your own.
Andrew: How formal were these mentor relationships?
Murray: Initially they weren’t formal at all. And as I started getting older and realized that you get what you pay for and if you pay for somebody who’s a professional mentor, I realized quite quickly that you can end up achieving much more in shorter periods of time. I lay a lot of the responsibility and a lot of the success that I’ve had to the mentors that I’ve had along the way, whether it’s a mentor in helping me write a bestselling book, a mentor in helping me build a motorcycle company like Indian Motorcycle.
One of my mentors there was an individual out of Toronto, Canada, who was an investment banker. His name was John Albright, and he managed to see an opportunity and guide me in the way in which that I needed to raise the money, the $100 million, to be able to acquire the trademarks out of bankruptcy, consolidate a dozen companies around the world, and get an active trademark in about 100 countries around the world. So from a mentor, I managed to do and learn something that I could have never had in the lifetime that I was going to be dealt with.
Andrew: Okay. So I remember reading about Indian Motorcycle. And when I was in school at NYU, I was studying people like you who would take these companies that had gems of assets but were just wasting away. I remember one of my favorites was Famous Amos Cookies. It was a dying brand; some entrepreneur came around, bought it, turned it around and just made it into something that people got excited about again. And that was just my fantasy, to be able to do that in business. And I remember reading about you, and it’s such an honor now to have you here on Mixergy and to be able to talk to you and ask you questions.
And you said before the interview started that you’d tell us the story behind Indian Motorcycle. I’d love to hear it.
Murray: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. I’ll keep that brief because there’s much more value to come in the broken down pieces for how that came together. But essentially, Indian Motorcycle went bankrupt in 1953. And from 1901 to 1953, Harley-Davidson and Indian Motorcycle competed for who was the number one motorcycle company in the United States. And after the investment bankers took over in 1953, shortly thereafter, that original company went out of business and it stayed bankrupt until 1998.
When I bought it out of bankruptcy, I went into competition with a dozen other large, international companies like General Motors, Harley-Davidson, and other organizations that were fighting for that very prized American legacy brand.
After about 17 months of negotiating and battling it out in court, the group that I represented were victorious, and we ended up with the coveted Indian Motorcycle name. We paid $23 million just for the name. None of the other assets that would typically have gone along with a purchase of such a company, such as manufacturing or real estate or any of those other physical assets. All we got was the name and a bunch of goodwill that was associated with it.
But the reality was that we also saw and recognized the value in American brand such as Indian Motorcycle, and we knew that we could turn it into a global lifestyle brand that not only featured bringing back the motorcycle but could feature hospitality, clothing, licensing, even gaming into casinos and whatnot.
And so we began the process of building a million square foot manufacturing plant in Gilroy, California. Produced our first motorcycle in 1999, and I think have subsequently produced in excess of 25,000 since then. We built the first of three Indian Motorcycle cafe and lounges in Toronto, Canada, and went on to build an additional two in the U.S. and other international destinations. Built a clothing line that was distributed in some 8,000 clothing stores throughout the world and built a licensing division with some 450 items that would be carrying the Indian Motorcycle brand name. As well, of course, we had the sales and service and a couple hundred dealerships in various parts around the world that would ultimately sell the motorcycles and the parts and the accessories when they came online.
The first year of business, and this is the next part of why you would pay $23 million to buy a name. The first year in business we managed to generate $75 million in revenue with a $300 million value. The second year, it was close to $200 million in revenue with a half a billion dollar value. Unfortunately, at that particular point in time, I ended up with a massive heart attack on an airplane and didn’t do so well. So while I was in the hospital recovering from that, my partner, who was the then-acting CEO of Coca-Cola, took over my job as CEO and Chairman of Indian Motorcycle while I recovered. That’s the start and the end of that story.
Andrew: How did you get to $75 million when pretty much all you had was a brand name, and one that wasn’t active and one that many people didn’t recognize?
Murray: Well, we consolidated a number of companies that were actively involved in some way, or shape or form, in businesses in which that we wanted to be involved with. The clothing company alone was doing about almost $20 million at retail. The clothing under a couple hundred different types of products, leather jackets, jeans, it was a real hip, it was a fashion statement to wear that brand. It was a higher end price point. Our leather jackets sold for $1,000, unlike the $100 or $200 Harley-Davidson jackets. Our brand was juxtaposed to Harley-Davidson in that we went after the banker crowd, the professionals, the doctors, the lawyers, the accountants, those that had the disposable income, that would be willing to pay for the quality merchandise that would come along with such a brand as we positioned it.
Andrew: And when you acquired a clothing manufacturer, did you acquire them with a different brand name and you started to add the Indian Motorcycle brand name to them?
Murray: Well, in the case of Indian Motorcycle, they had a clothing company in Toronto, Canada that were a wholesale manufacturer. And there was two fellows there that owned that company, and we acquired them and rolled them into the family and ultimately had five operating companies, of which one of them was the clothing company. And they went about expanding it to outside of the clothing industry, into motorcycle dealerships and into other retailers. Even so much so that in Italy, if you can believe it, we acquired a company that was doing $16 million a year in jeans, just in the country of Italy with the brand Indian Motorcycle.
Andrew: I see. Okay. So, there were people who were still selling products with the brand on it? And you were consolidating them?
Murray: We consolidated the brand globally so that it would truly come back under a single, global lifestyle brand. And we made it lucrative and interesting enough for why they would want to do that. Everyone that we talked to wanted to be a part of bringing back Indian Motorcycle, and we were successful at doing something that somebody hadn’t been able to do in 50 years.
Andrew: How were you able to do that? How were you able to go and bring all these people together? From what I saw, you didn’t have a history of acquiring companies before.
Murray: No, it was a case of having a vision.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Murray: And being strong enough with that vision and convincing other people to see what the potential was of that vision. Most people looked at Indian Motorcycle and saw a motorcycle. We looked at it and saw a piece of American history, a piece of American history that was responsible for the industrial age, was responsible for us winning the war, both wars, because Indian Motorcycle’s motorcycles fought in both wars. So there was a heritage, there was a love for Americana, a love for the kind of freedom that the brand and the spirit of what a motorcycle brand would do. And as well, the aboriginal component of it being an Indian, meant that it was built with integrity. It was the freedom of the American way.
And people around the world at that time really looked at, outside of the countries in which that there’s ongoing issues with, they looked at America as the source of entrepreneurship, the source of freedom. And so we, after designing and putting together the vision, it wasn’t very difficult to get others to buy into it because we invoked a public relations campaign that had us almost [13:15] in that we challenged Harley-Davidson’s races, and we really tried to become almost in a positioning where their old nemesis has returned.
The first 50 years of both of our existences were very competitive, and then they had the opportunity to market their products and build their brand on their own. And so we took the opportunity of really creating a public relations campaign, and we got about $200 million worth of free media over the two year time that I was Chairman and CEO.
Andrew: So one of the things that I liked about reading your book, the bestselling book “The Answer,” is that you show people how to take their vision and articulate it and put some power and vision behind it so that they could achieve it.
What I’m wondering hearing your story is, how do you come up with that vision? To many people, the vision might have been more limited. To others, it might not have even really fully crystallized. It might have been an idea that Indian Motorcycle is a great brand name, there’s something here, it shouldn’t die, I know that there’s a business in this. But they wouldn’t be able to form an idea. How do they do it?
Murray: Well, every idea’s limits are the person who hosts the idea. The limits of my ideas are endless because I wasn’t, and I don’t want to say infected, but I didn’t go through the same mental conditioning that most people did. With my learning disability going through school, I wasn’t subject to a lot of the same filtering process. And normally, by the time you’re 20, you’re pretty limited in how creative you are or how big you can dream. And so, from my standpoint, I was always capable of dreaming big and achieving even bigger than that.
So if you start down with a single thought, and understand how goals are achieved, and what the process is that we’ve got to go through to achieve it, we understand that every single one starts with an internal desire or an external influence. It’s then introduced to an emotion, and that emotion helps it formulate into a belief. And a belief, manifesting itself over time, turns into a behavior. And it’s that behavior, that when followed consistently, will turn itself into the results that we ultimately are looking for.
So if you start off with just a thought and start to share it with others, and if you’re open-minded to consider looking at doing things differently and what the possibilities are versus what they’re not, the idea can take form and can start to birth. And very quickly, Indian grew.
For me, five years prior to that, buying a t-shirt from this company in Toronto, I bought one of their Indian t-shirts. I thought to myself at the time, what a beautiful piece of clothing, what a great brand. And being a motorcycle enthusiast, I thought to myself I’d love to be a part of bringing that back.
Now that thought happened five years previous. I would’ve bet you a million dollars that it wouldn’t have been me that had actually brought back the Indian at that time. But that thought manifested itself. It manifested itself so much so that I started to attract into my own life those people and those opportunities that were associated with it, such that over . . . I could spend an hour just talking about the number of events that had occurred over that period of time. [interference] I really aligned myself to be in the same room with somebody who had an interest in leading up a team to go and acquire the trademarks.
And again, going up against organizations like General Motors at the time, who would have thought that independent, small business owners would have been the successful people at the end of the day? All starting from that original thought, having affirmations, having visualizations. Even to the point where I’m sitting down and meditating over the outcome, truly putting the power of intention into play.
All of those factors over its typical gestation period, or regular gestation period, for whatever an idea is, nobody really know what that is. But in this particular case, the gestation period for that was a five-year period of time.
Andrew: So you would actually do affirmations? You know, I’ve read a lot about them in self-help books. I’ve heard a lot about them in the Nightingale-Conant CDs that I used to buy. When I interview entrepreneurs and say, ‘Do you do any affirmations? Have you ever done them,’ even the most successful ones will say, ‘No, I really don’t.’
Murray: Well, I do them and I know that one of my business partners and my co-author, John Assaraf, does them. And we’ve worked with thousands of business owners all over the world, and they do them. Can you sit down and scientifically prove that they work? The answer’s yes.
For those that believe that it’s airy fairy, that it’s a part of that California foofoo stuff, I let people believe what they want. I believe that doing affirmations, doing visualizations, even a budget, an Excel spreadsheet is a visualization, it’s the intent of what you want to achieve financially. And any time that you can get clearer with that intent, any time that you can have your subconscious working on behalf of your conscious, your subconscious being that part of the brain that works 800 times faster than your conscious, affirmations, visualizations, meditations are the means by which to get information into your subconscious.
We know scientifically that your subconscious is that much more powerful. Why would you not want to take advantage of that? I can demonstrate on dozens of occasions how that type of belief system will actually shorten the manifestation period and start to attract into your universe or into your life, the things that are required so that it all lines up. So that if you’re aware of it, you can take action with it and move forward.
Andrew: Can you give me one example?
Murray: Indian Motorcycle was a great example.
Andrew: How did you set affirmations there?
Murray: Well, initially when I first bought that t-shirt, it became my favorite t-shirt, I wasn’t doing affirmations. But as I started getting closer to the brand, or the acquisition of the brand, that it could even be a reality. Once I met my friend Rick Genovese from the west coast in Canada, who was an investment banker, we started to sit down and to visualize and to affirmate the actual resolution of owning the trademark. So we would have the positive affirmations that we would talk in terms of already owning it. What would we be doing with it? We’d be building not only motorcycles, we’d be developing a global lifestyle brand. We even did affirmations for what the USP, or the tagline, would be that would differentiate us from everybody else.
Again, constantly reminding ourselves of the positioning of the brand is another way to use affirmations successfully, not only to acquire things, but to get clarity on things.
Andrew: I see. So where most people would say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it with my business partner or my friends because I don’t want to jinx it, or I don’t want to then get crushed if it doesn’t happen. Let’s wait until after we acquire it to start thinking about what we’ll do with it,’ you do it beforehand. And it not only helps you get ready on day one, but also helps your mind and subconscious get ready for this and start to look for opportunities that will make it happen.
Murray: Absolutely. I got a client that I work with that’s no longer a client but it’s a continued friendship, out of San Francisco, and he owns a biomedical company where he goes around and he picks up waste from various doctor’s offices and whatnot. And when we first met, his objective, his goal, his intended outcome was he wanted to generate twice the revenue. He was doing about a million and a half dollars a year and his challenge to me was, ‘Can you get me to three million?’
And when we sat down and started going through the process of visualizing, was that really what he wanted? What came about as a result of it is no. He didn’t want to generate twice as much revenue. He actually wanted twice as much profit. And on a million and a half dollars in revenue, he was generating about $175,000 in profit.
When we started going through the exercise of visualizing on achieving that and what we would have to put in place in order to allow that to happen, we realized that that also was not what he was looking for, that his real intent, what he wanted out of his business was recognition for the 18 years that he put in building that business. And so we talked about what that meant. And what that meant was he really wanted to sell that business. And with $175,000 in profits, we put a plan in place that eight months later, he executed that plan and sold his business for 50 times what his earnings was. In other words, he got more than $8 million from the sale of his business.
Andrew: I see.
Murray: That’s the power of visualization. It provides you clarity that you need to [interference] are then start to pull into place those things [21:50].
Andrew: One other question before I move to the next step of this conversation. Meditating. I buzzed my hair this weekend. When I look in the mirror, I feel like I look like a Buddhist monk, which makes me think, ‘I’d like to meditate,’ but I never can. How do you meditate? If I go to and I did a weeklong meditation retreat and if I talked to people in the yoga community about meditating, I feel like I can’t relate to them. You’re an entrepreneur, you’re a businessman, my audience and I can relate to you. You meditate. Why do you do it? What’s the benefit? And then how do you do it? Teach us.
Murray: Well you know what, I used to be, what someone called, the anti-Christ of personal growth. I thought that the industry was plagued with Evangelists and people that were seeking to make money at the cost of others without giving them the value that they bargained for. And meditation was one of those things that I felt was the sleight of hand with the cards, it really didn’t work. And I could never meditate myself.
It wasn’t until I actually had this heart attack on an airplane, and had a cardiac arrest and died, that I had an experience that would come back a couple years later to confirm what I had thought originally. And that is when you do go into a meditative state, and I’ll explain to you in a minute how I was capable of it, you end up in a space in which that’s so surreal and so focused, that you’re actually not thinking of anything, yet the clarity you have on everything is at the exact same period in time. It’s remarkable.
The only way that I was capable, and still capable of meditating today, is through a program called Holosync. Centerpointe Research has a program called Holosync, and it’s a system of CDs where you listen to the chimes and the water drops. There’s a certain, particular type of music. It’s actually not even music. There’s a particular type of, I don’t even know what you call it. But anyway, you listen to it, and it put me instantly into a meditative state, so much so that it took me right back to the moment in which that I died and that space and that tranquility existed at the same particular point in time. So I knew that I had gone into a meditative state, which I’ve subsequently read about these Tibetan monks and others that have been meditating for 28 years try to get to that state.
So if any of your listeners have a difficulty of focusing and trying to meditate through their breathing or focusing on the air between their nose and their mouth, I suggest going out and trying Centralpointe Research because it worked for me.
Andrew: Now, just so my audience doesn’t think that I’m giving them all kinds of woo-woo, New Agey ideas for what to do, there’s a business purpose to meditating, right? There’s a business benefit. What is it?
Murray: Clarity and focus. When I meditate, I get so much clarity and so much focus on what I do, that it just gives me that actionable steps that I need to take every day. I’m the last airy fairy, foofoo guy that you could meet on the planet. And until you can actually sit down and do it, this goes back to the concept of being willing to consider doing things differently. If you’re so close-minded to these concepts, I appreciate that because I was as well. But if you’re willing to even be slightly open-minded to trying these innovative and new, different ways, they’re a part of what I believe to be the Work Smarter Program than working harder. Because if you can work smarter and adopt some of these principles and almost give the operator’s manual to your brain a chance, you’ll be surprised and amazed at the same time at the kind of results that you can get as the result of it.
Andrew: So for example, while I was doing research on you, I started writing down where my head was going. And I said, “Well, I’ve got to update the live calendar so people see where that is.” And then I wrote, “I’ve got to send my friend over at inDinero a password to a website that I’m using so they can see how that works.” And then I’ve got a bunch of different things. Meditating helps you clean out your mind, or at least tune out all those thoughts so you can focus on the one thing you’re doing, so you can do it really well. Is that said well?
Murray: That’s what I use it for. Others have used it for other purposes. But in business, I use it for the purposes of clarity because we all lack so much focus that if we could just focus in on the one thing that’s the most important, and be able to resolve that. Think of if you had the opportunity to do that repeatedly throughout the day, and work through as many as 20, 30, 40, 50 issues and opportunities at the same time. You get more clarity on how big and how best to approach opportunities or to be more risk-adverse and navigate your way around issues that might otherwise [interference].
Andrew: So I was thinking before this interview started, as I go through all this with you, people are going to think, “Well, that’s him. That’s Murray Smith. He’s the guy. He’s building all these companies. He’s turning them around. There’s some people who are exceptional people and it’s just them.” So, before we started, I asked you if you could talk about maybe one of the case studies, someone who you’ve worked with, to give people another persepective. And you mentioned that we might want to talk about Nick Sampson. Can you talk about him?
Murray: Sure.
Andrew: What’s his business?
Murray: Before we do that, I just wanted to ask everybody a question. I’ll ask you the question and then relate to everybody. Do you know people that are not as smart as you are but are doing better than you are?
Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. I hate to say it.
Murray: We all do. The reverse of that, do you know people that are smarter than you are that aren’t doing nearly as well as you are?
Andrew: Yeah.
Murray: So really, it’s not that I’m any smarter than anybody. In fact, I’m not as smart as most people as defined by the educational system that grades us. But it’s the way that we focus on things. It’s the, as I call it, the critical few things. It’s the perspective that we get from things that makes us who we are.
And Nick Sampson, who we’re going to talk about, a company, one of our clients Behavior Works, he’s a perfect example of that. He’s in the business of helping retailers and other organizations get more from their existing clients. And he does that by focusing on customer satisfaction, customer retention, the length of time that someone buys from you, the amount of purse or wallet size that they can extricate at the time of sale, and the amount of conversion from the people that originally walked in the door.
When we first met Nick, he was of a certain mindset, following a certain pattern, doing a certain amount of revenue, just under $2 million a year. His old belief system limited him to be able to develop more than that. He was stuck in his environment based on his belief system. And through working with us, we managed to change that belief system, reposition the business so that people were no longer looking at him as coming from a profit sector. So we took the unique positioning that he had, changed it from a cost center to a profit center, changed the way his belief systems worked about how he approached his business, how he approached his clients, how he approached himself with the way he thought about what was possible, and we shifted just his ideal client.
Most people think they know who their ideal client is and Nick’s no different than anyone else. He’s been in business for 20 years, selling to the same people, and you would’ve thought that if anyone knew, Nick would’ve known who his ideal client is. And the reality is, who he was selling to was in part his ideal client, but the attributes, the wants, the desires didn’t match up. And so as soon as we changed the ideal client positioning, his unique positioning, and his belief system, his business changed overnight. Sales became more effortless. They were with less longevity in terms of their sale cycle. They were just more certain that they were going to happen.
Andrew: I’ve heard some of my favorite writers say that they have an ideal reader. Gruber of “Daring Fireball,” for example, he writes about Apple products and he says, I think, that one of his ideal readers is a guy at Apple. So I’ve heard it said for writers. What does it mean for business to have an ideal client?
Murray: Well, the best way I can illustrate that is through an example.
Andrew: Please.
Murray: At Dave & Buster’s Canada, first of all, if anyone doesn’t know what Dave & Buster’s are, they’re large-scale, 60,000 to 80,000 square foot restaurants and video entertainment centers for families and businesses. And the one in Canada had gotten itself into trouble. They’d opened up $16 million a year in revenue and quickly drove down to $10 million a year. They required $11 million just to operate, so they were in a situation where they were insolvent.
And when I went in to look at the situation, prior to taking over the company, I realized that who they were marketing to, or who they thought their ideal client was, was in fact not their ideal client. And that can be easily ascertained by just going in the facility, looking around, and realizing that most of the people that were in there at this particular point and time of the day were 25 to 40-year-old males. When only after speaking to them for five minutes did we realize that the reason why they were there was because the decision maker that was responsible for them being there was a 35 to 50-year-old woman.
And how that came about is when you look at Dave & Busters’ revenue stream, where the money comes from, it typically comes from corporate events. Corporate events are typically decided by office managers, or people responsible for events, which are predominantly women. Half of their business is made up from family events, birthdays, anniversaries, other events that go around the social nature of the family. And who makes the decision in those environments? The women, the mothers, the grandmothers. Even when it came down to date night, when it was decided upon where they would go, it was often the women that were either influencing or making the decision.
And so instead of continuing to market to a 25 to 40-year-old male, knowing who your ideal client was, and marketing to them had an immediate effect where their revenues dramatically went up by $3.5 million over just a few months.
Andrew: And so do you find your ideal client by seeing who’s already engaged in the business? Or do you find the ideal client by thinking of who you’d like to have in there? Or does it matter?
Murray: Well, if you’re a startup, you’ve got to put down a list of the things in which you want in a client. And they follow under three categories of the traditional demographic. That’s what they are, male, 30 to 50 years old, 2.1 kids, makes $150,000 a year, lives here. That’s the traditional part of identifying your ideal client. The second, the newer part, is your psychographic profile, which is who they are, which is how they think, how they believe, the things that are important to them. Those are the wants or the hot buttons or the desires that they have. And then the third component is their behavior. Their behavior can often dictate the actions that they take in which to purchase your product.
If I was an online marketer, and I wanted to sell a particular product, I would want to know more about the behaviors of my ideal client so that I knew where to position my products online so that I ultimately slipped into their decision-making process, which we’ll get in to in just a moment.
So those are three components that make up knowing who your ideal client is, if you don’t know who they are. If you’re already in business, it’s simply, again, asking them what they want from you. Making a list under the categories of the wants, the desires, under the behaviors, so that you actually have a very clear picture of what they want from you, and then subsequently what you want for them. Because what makes it ideal is when you can match the two up together. It sounds like it makes it more like a meaningful conversation between two people with an ultimate decision that’s made at the end to do business with one another.
Andrew: So how did Nick do that? Did he have a vision of who his ideal client was originally and you helped him change it? Did you help him identify it? Can you give me specifics with Nick?
Murray: Sure. Specifically with Nick, he was set up as a research company that was doing analytical reviews of the behaviors of customers while shopping for mystery shopping programs, customer satisfaction programs. And so in those particular cases, the people that were doing business with Nick were from the operations side of the organization. So they looked at what Nick did as a cost center. What we did is suggest that now that they’ve got that data, why don’t they analyze it, and put some strategies to it that would ultimately see that data being used for revenue-generating activities. So within the organization, it changed the profile of the person from being operations to being marketing-driven.
It also, externally, went from organizations who are looking for customer service outcomes to companies that were looking to generate more revenue. So by simply shifting the value proposition from here’s data or research or analytics for you to use to here are the strategies that you can use to get your existing company’s customers to buy more from you, it changed both the internal people they were speaking to, and it reorganized and prioritized the companies that they were ultimately selling to.
One of the companies that they were trying to get their attention to for several years, within one month ended up signing a $400,000 contract with them because they could see how to make the investment when it was attached to a revenue-generating activity and not a cost center.
Andrew: Ah. And the other phrase that you used when you were talking about Nick was “unique positioning.” What is that?
Murray: Well again, unique positioning is the single most important thing that differentiates you in the marketplace. It’s what’s responsible for your traditional elevator pitch. It’s how you manage . . . I’ve got a whole list of them. Here it talks about elevator pitch, your sales pitch, all of your marketing messages, all of your branding, all of your taglines, your headline, any training you might do to staff or customers, any media, public relations, media relations, any member or client type communications. Really understanding what makes you unique and different in the marketplace and your ability to articulate that is what’s working today. It’s the quiet amongst the noise. When there’s so much clutter out there, whether it’s online or offline, it really doesn’t matter what business you’re in, you’ve got to pierce through that clutter, that noise, and the best way to do that is with clear decisions.
People buy emotions, they justify logically, and so appealing to someone’s highest emotional value is recognizing what their wants are through your ideal client and then communicating that in a way that describes what your unique positioning is in the marketplace.
And with Nick, Nick’s unique positioning today is about focusing on getting more from your existing clients. So their USP is “more clients buy more, more often,” versus their old positioning, which was helping you assess or analyze your data on your research.
So again, switching the center of gravity and focus to not being about a cost center, not being about analytics, but being about getting more from more customers more often gave them a unique positioning in the marketplace and differentiated them in the mindset of their customers.
Andrew: Can you give me another example? Maybe describe what OneCoach is and talk about what the unique positioning is for OneCoach?
Murray: Well, OneCoach is a coaching and consulting company that I own down in San Diego along with some other shareholders. My primary focus and interest today is MainStreet. MainStreet is a business growth network, and what we focus on is the growth, how people can actually get more out of their business.
So our USP is “your business and life just got better.” Because we think at the end of the day, people aren’t in the business for the sake of business. They’re in it to improve the quality of their lives. So MainStreet, we’re all about working with small and microbusinesses, online and offline, to focus and teach them on what the critical few things they need to know in order to drive revenues and profits, increase sales, so they can overall grow their business. We’re a business growth network.
Andrew: I see.
Murray: So that’s what our USP is here. We provide affordable solutions to small business.
Andrew: USP. I keep saying UPS in my head. [laughs] Why did you decide to go after this business, why specifically this target market? Why this business? Considering your background, I would have thought maybe you’d take another brand and turn it around.
Murray: Well, you know what? I recognized that the future, and this isn’t all higher purpose related, but there is a higher purpose in it, that with the number of failure rates that exist out there in businesses, that 50% close their door in the first year and as many as 80% in the first five years, I wanted to take the knowledge that I had and to share with people. You don’t have to be a genius. You don’t even have to rate high on the IQ level. If you focus on those critical few things, you can be successful. And I wanted to change the odds for small business owners, and that’s why I own the four companies that I do that are all focused on different, unique ways in which to reach out to the 30 million small business owners in the U.S. and more than 140 million worldwide. I wanted to create the next business in helping small business grow.
Andrew: Okay. What’s the one thing that, if we’re listening to this interview and we’ve got our business and we want to start to see results, what’s the one thing that we should focus on?
Murray: Well, I’ve written that bestselling book that you’ve talked about, “The Answer,” and part of that book is from my life’s work on focusing how to attract more clients for small business owners. And in attracting more clients, there are five programs. It’s those five programs, that to me, I’m not trying to sell the system, I’m trying to use it as an illustration, that those five programs are what’s key for me for small business owners to focus on.
There isn’t any one thing, but there are a critical few things that if you do focus on, you’ll have a much more likely chance to succeed. And they are this: If you know who your ideal client is, and you know what their wants are and what your wants. If you know what your unique positioning is, and you know clearly what that is so that you can communicate it. If you understand the sales process, and that’s one of the most key components of all, because in the sales process, there is a limit within the universe of possibilities, and if you knew what those critical few things are to you, that would kind of give you some insight to the combination of your own safe.
And what I mean by that is that there’s only seven distribution channels in all companies anywhere in the world, online and off. Those are the points in contact where a transaction is completed between what you’re selling and someone buying.
There’s only 23 marketing strategies and there’s only 91 marketing tactics. If everyone knew which of those universe were unique and specific to them, they, like a key, would be able to stick it in a lock and turn it. I’ve seen it happen in so many businesses.
So again, ideal client, unique positioning, sales process, revenue plan. Something as simple as even on the back of a napkin at a bar, writing down how you plan on achieving what you think you can accomplish in business. If you wanted to develop a million dollar business, simply writing down the price of what you’re selling times the number of people that would need to buy it times the numbers of months in a year, if that didn’t add up to a million dollars, something has to change. Either the price has to be increased, the number of people buying it have to increase, or you have to add more product or service into the mix.
Most people don’t operate with a revenue plan. With Indian Motorcycle, it was on the back of a napkin. We put together a $75 million plan that showed exactly what we needed to achieve it and like a vision board, went out and accomplished it.
And the fifth component is you need to know what your competitive advantage is. You need to know what differentiates you in the marketplace, how to communicate that in a way in which that people will buy what you have to sell. If I was starting over in business again and somebody had to said to me, “Here are the five things in which that you need to know. Don’t focus on the other hundred things that are going to plague you and occupy most of your time, just focus on these,” I think I would have been even that much more successful over the last 25 years.
Andrew: What about market size and some of the other things that they teach you in business school? How important is that?
Murray: Well, it depends on what your goals and objectives are. If you want to build a billion dollar company, you better have a market size and potential that’s going to be able to support that. There are so many competitors out there in today’s marketplace. When you consider there’s 30 million business owners registered in North America, something as many as 50 million that are actually operating because the Baby Boomers don’t have enough to see themselves through retirement, so they’re offsetting their retirement with part-time jobs. When you think about the 10 million women that are expected to enter the self-employment force over the next five to seven years, there’s a lot of competition out there.
If you’re not positioned and ready to be effective at it, then it doesn’t matter how big your market share is. What matters is whether or not you’ve got a product or service that’s got a big enough demand that you know who the client is, that you know how to communicate to them, and you can do so in a competitive way.
Andrew: Looking here at my notes, as I was reading the book, there was something that struck me. You’re saying to people to go after, I forget the way you say it and I’m not finding it here in my notes, but, ah, there, extraordinary goals. And I’m thinking, when I’m tired, when my business isn’t going right and I’m picking up a book like ‘The Answer,’ what I’m looking for is I just need to get comfortable. I don’t want all the headaches involved in business. I just want to be able to pay my rent, to pay for food, take a nice vacation. And here you are saying to people who bought this book who are probably in that situation go for extraordinary goals, go for something big. Why?
Murray: Because anyone can be average. And most of us don’t know what our potential is until somebody encourages us to go beyond our potential. It doesn’t mean that you have to. We’ve got more clients than not that are satisfied with earning $100,000 a year and it’s because we’ve told them it’s okay to think that way. But for those who can achieve more, for those that want to achieve more, but their limiting beliefs, their mental conditioning, their experiences through life are holding them back, we want to let them know that’s not all that there is.
If you want to be extraordinary, if you want to think extraordinary, if you want to go out and dream big, dream big and we’ll help you get there. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to get there, doesn’t mean that the manifestation and gestation period isn’t too long to acquire that or you need too many resources. But why not dream big? And if you’re the type of person that doesn’t want to dream big, that’s fine too.
Andrew: How do we give a vision meaning? I think that the book was talking about the importance of having a meaning behind a goal like earn $50,000 or $5 million or $50 million.
Murray: Well, the laws of compensation are simple. You’re directly and proportionally compensated by the number of people that you serve.
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Murray: That’s just good old math. Some people call it quantum science. At the end of the day, if you figure out that you’re selling something that has a value of $10 and you sell 100,000 of them to somebody, then you’re going to make $1 million. That’s just how the math works.
But when you look at the higher purpose behind something, depending upon what it is, people can get a higher purpose out of making the little plastic pieces that go on the end of your shoelace. They can feel good about that.
It’s the passion that creates the payday and the purpose. Passion is the single most important ingredient in business success. 5,000 entrepreneurs were studied and questioned and when they were all asked, they all claimed that the number one thing in which that was responsible for their success was their passion. When another group were inquired about, that had failed, they lost their passion. They didn’t have the belief that their business would ultimately deliver what they were looking for.
And so having that higher purpose, having that passion, behind going out and generating 50,000, 500,000, or 500 million, it’s all worth it.
Andrew: I’ve got a note here to come back and ask you about this. We talked about lots of millions here and millions there in the beginning of the interview and what I find is when we talk about all these millions that it just all comes together into this meaningless blob. So I often like to go back to that first million, the one that is most significant. Can you describe what it was like to earn that?
Murray: [laughs] There was a lot of broken glass that had to be crawled over in order to get to that first million I might add. There’s two parts of that equation. The first part is the million that your business makes. There’s less than 5% of all businesses ever get to a million dollars in revenue. There’s less than 1% of those that ever get to $5 million and there’s less than 1% of those that ever get to $100 million.
So we’re not talking about a lot of people on the planet that even understand what it’s like to have a million dollars. So when you do get that million dollars, and you know that you can do anything with that that you want, you can buy any house that you want, virtually. This is going back 25 years ago. You can own any vehicle, you can buy any boat, you can travel on any vacation. When you can do whatever you want, there’s a satisfaction, there’s a peace of mind where you actually don’t spend most of it. You just are accepting the fact that you have it and all you want to do is build on it. That’s where you start to realize that giving is as much important as it is receiving.
And there’s an equilibrium that happened with me that said, ‘You know, it’s not just about going out and getting money.’ For me, my first million dollars was about a report card that I didn’t get in grade 3 when I failed and was kept back. That million dollars to me was my A-plus. That’s how I looked on it.
So, for most people who didn’t have to go through school with what I had to go through, they may have a different emotion attached to it. But for me it meant that I really passed grade 3 when I actually failed it.
Andrew: [laughs] Wow. All right. Finally, if anyone wants to connect with you, what’s the best place to do that?
Murray: There’s a couple places. They can go to my personal website where they can learn more about me and that’s gettheanswer.com. Regular spelling, gettheanswer.com. They can read about the book or read about attract more clients or get to know more about me. Or they can go to our business growth network, accessmainstreet.com. Again, that’s accessmainstreet.com and they can learn about how small business owners can access a board of advisors at an affordable rate.
Andrew: I like that you’ve got real words in your domain, unlike me. I got Mixergy. People start inventing words that should fit in there. Is it Mixenergy? Is it Mixisynergy.com? I like the way you did it, clean and simple.
Murray: Oh, also, if any of your listeners wanted to take advantage of certain programs that we’re giving away, we’ve launched a multi-million dollar business growth makeover at businessgrowthmakeover.com. And we’re giving away $3 million worth of business growth resources all in alignment with your ideal client and Access Main Street. So if they want to take a taste of what we are offering, they can go there and taste of it no cost.
Andrew: All right. What’s the domain again?
Murray: Businessgrowthmakeover.com.
Andrew: All right. There’s some people who at the end of the interview say, “Andrew, just tell us that you’ll link to it on the blog.” And there are other people who say, “Can you please ask him to say it slower so that I can go over to his website?” So I hope I pleased everybody here and actually, if you don’t like it, just hit the off button, people. But I do hope that you go and follow up. I’ve really been looking forward to doing this interview and I’m grateful to you for coming here and spending this hour with us.
Murray: Well, Andrew, I appreciate it. I love your interview style, and I hope your clients and your guests get some value out of this and help move them a little further along in their own journey.
Andrew: Thank you. And Joe did you get that? We’ve got to get the transcript and get his testimonial. He loves my interview style. This isn’t just an average person saying it, this is Murray Smith. Thank you very much. We’ll go and find a way to put that up on the website in big letters. Thanks.
Murray: You have a great day, Andrew. Thank you.
Andrew: You too. Great meeting you. Bye.
