Okay, I’ll Show You my financials.

When I built Bradford & Reed with my brother Michael, we didn’t have outside funding and we had no prospect of getting it. So we hustled our asses off.

As you can see from this video, even the company’s name was designed to give us an edge. We knew that calling the company Bradford & Reed would mean more people would take our calls. We picked the name because we knew it would help us get our calls answered.

No one would ever turn down a call from a company called Bradford & Reed, because it sounded like a law firm (trouble) or a venture capital firm (opportunity). When they finally took my call, it was my job to sell them.

I love sales. All real businesspeople do.

I always revealed to people why we invented the name Bradford & Reed. And even that was part of my sales process. It let the prospect know that I trusted him/her enough to be open, and it communicated what I think made my company special: our hunger and creativity.

Did the technique work? Damn right it did.

As you can see from this video, it was part of what helped us reach $38,572,258 in annual sales. (That’s right. That’s million.)

I know I shouldn’t care about money. It’s declasse to even talk about it, right? But some people were born to care about little animals in the destroyed rain forest. And I was born to care about little numbers on a financial statement. To each his own.

But there’s one thing that’s missing from the story: legacy.

You probably don’t know that we were in the online greeting card business, even though we served hundreds of thousands of greeting cards every day. You probably don’t even know that the brilliant team we formed created a top 20 web property, in terms of traffic. Your world–and most people’s world–wasn’t rocked by us.

Now my mission is to build a legacy, something that changes lives and outlives me. To do that, I need to learn from the best mix of people I can. That’s why I record these programs on Mixergy.

I also need YOU to use the ideas I gather and build a world-changing, legacy-making business from them. Because if these programs, interviews and ideas don’t help YOU, then after I die, all I’ll be remembered for is caring too much about little numbers on financial statements.

So what do you think? Am I giving you information you can use to reach that goal? Is there anything I can do better?