Dan Kennedy’s Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of ... files/Dan Kennedy CLASS ONE.pdf · The value of an ad or sales letter, especially one with evergreen that has long life

Dan Kennedy’s “Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of Running a SUCCESSFUL Copywriting Business” with Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero

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Dan Kennedy’s “Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of

Running a SUCCESSFUL Copywriting Business”

With Lorrie Morgan-Ferrero

LORRIE: Welcome to the call. This is the first of 2 information packed calls with marketing legend, Dan Kennedy, and Dan, I know you don’t like it when I call you a marketing legend but let’s face it—we are all on this call because we want to be you. We want your lifestyle, your bank account; we want to know how you run your business so effortlessly so that we can do it too. I want to tell you that I have over 8000 subscribers on my ezine list and when people sign up with my ezine, I ask them what is your biggest question about copywriting. About 25% don’t answer at all but the ones who do—half of them are interested in having a lucrative copywriting career. That is 3000 people. I assure you there are not 3000 people on this call. A problem a lot of copywriters have—especially newbies—is they want to hang out their shingle and start making the big bucks but it takes a lot of more than that—it takes investing in yourself and learning from someone who has been there before, like Dan, and that’s why I have no doubt that those of you who are on this call are going to be wildly successful in your business because you aren’t afraid to invest in yourself. The information you will learn today and next week is not a variable you will learn any place else. Even a lot of high level copywriters don’t have access to the information that Dan is going to share. So you are part of a privileged group and I want to acknowledge you and congratulate you for being on this training. That being said, I would like to welcome Dan Kennedy to the call. DAN: Hello there. LORRIE: Dan do you have any opening remarks for us eager students? DAN: Well I let folks know sort of how this will work. I am going to work backwards and the first night—tonight—I want to talk about what you do once you have clients: Client management and optimizing income and contracts. It requires something of a leap of faith for people who may not a have good client base. The second night, I am going to take care of all of those questions. And give you the keys to rapidly escalate the quantity and quality of clients that you




get and talk about how to hunt for them, how to find them, and attract them and all of that. Tonight I have 5 big strategies that I want to get through as I urge you tell them-- we’ll e-mail them tomorrow a summary of the strategies. Of course you will take notes. And we will e-mail a contract items checklist. So that they have that. Before starting, for people who may not be totally familiar, I thought maybe 2 or 3 minutes for background and what my business looks like now. I got my first money for copywriting in 1973--$500, for a Beat the Control campaign that was a cattle call, the company ran an ad and anybody could come in and try to beat the current control. If you won than the control was yours and you got $500. At the time I thought that was the most amazing thing I had ever encountered. I briefly had a real ad agency and was in the business of any client in any business to do anything, anywhere, at any time, for any fee. That lasted about a year and a half. When I moved to Phoenix from Ohio in 1978, I hung up 3 shingles—one of them was copywriter. I never made less than $100,000 a year doing it and always part time, the last 10 years copywriting fees and back end royalties have exceeded a half a million dollars a year, in the last 5, over a million dollars a year. I am very fortunate to have built up a stable base of long term clients with whom about ¾ of the business have been them with the continuing group of clients who keep coming back for more. These days I am even turning down work from past and repeat clients. Recently I have referred out a lot of work for one of my clients because I couldn’t possibly fit it in. What I think is important is that most of the business practices I want to talk about tonight have changed very little. From my first years to now—the numbers have changed but the business practices have not. The other thing that some people would find incredible is that I have no qualifications. I am a high school grad with no college education, no apprenticeship at an ad agency or anything like that. I did grow up around the peripherals of the business. My father was a commercial artist and had a type setting company and I have direct sales background—which is pretty useful. The reason I am doing this is that recently I have become aware of very significant differences between my business practices and the way that other copywriters operate. A few years ago I paid attention to the trade directory called, Who’s Charging What?, it was quite a shock to see people whose names we all know, and their published rates and how low they were. I have long taken note that named copywriters can be found after 10 to 20 years still running ads in DM News and Target offering to do free critiques to get




business. Which is an appropriate technique early, but definitely shouldn’t be necessary after 30 years in the business. My conclusion is that the majority is wrong and my methods are right. LORRIE: That’s great. I got a big shock too when I got Who’s Charging What? The range of copywriter fees and the names of people I recognize that are authors, their books are in Borders, and they charge what---compared to you –is peanuts. Let’s get into the strategies. First strategy that you shared with me is we need to understand what we do—what do you mean by that and why is it important? DAN: I find that people in most businesses and professions don’t know what business they are in. I don’t think copywriters are any different. Most of them start out limiting their income with their own self sabotage by misunderstanding and as a result, misrepresenting to their clients and prospective clients, what they are all about and what it is that they do. Direct response copywriting is unique in the way of copywriting. There is traditional advertising copywriting, which can be 4 words of copy in USA Today with a logo and a picture of a car. It’s hard to make a value case for that but it exists, there is technical copywriting. What I do and what most people on this call are doing and contemplating doing—and should be doing—is direct response copywriting. That is a specialty and it requires multiple skills—most notably sales skills. I compare it to a cardiac surgeon vs. an MD or a cosmetic dentist vs. a general dentist—as you climb up the specialist ladder, the value goes up and so does the fee. The direct response function is the most valuable in a business. I’ll tell you a story. Some years ago I did a bit of work for Weight Watchers, corporate. At the time they were owned by Heinz, the folks that make ketchup. The president of Heinz was from Europe and he was clueless about the weight watchers business. I asked Les if he had ever had a weight problem, he said no, any one in your family ever have a weight problem? No. Ever sell anything? No. ever work at a retail store and sell anything face-to-face? No. the real kicker—ever been to a Weight Watchers meeting? No. he was clueless. One day he calls me into his office—about 3 months after working for him—and he says he had discovered a problem, he had done some calculations and they are paying him more per hour than they were paying him. I said, I am glad you have the door closed because here is the thing, you know how to do everything there is to do here better than I with the exception on one thing and that is to make the phone ring and make people show up at meetings. That you don’t have a clue about and I am the guy who knows how to do that. Without me, everything else you know is pretty useless. So it is appropriate that you are paying me more than you but we will keep it our little secret and we won’t tell anybody.




Most of the clients that you deal with are going to be adept at other functions of their business. They may not be particularly adept at the marketing functions. Even if they conceptually understand them and you hope they do. They probably are not going to be capable of translating their sales functions into media, into print as you are and yet everything else they know how to do. Whatever works and buildings they own and whatever patents they own and whatever products they have are greatly diminished in value, if not rendered valueless, without the ability to get them sold. It is very important to have an understanding of the extreme value that you bring to the table so that you can position and present it properly. LORRIE: It’s a lot more than “copywriting”? DAN: Yes it is extremely important to think of it that way and to present it that way. There are 3 things that we bring to the table or that we do when we arrive at copy that sells. One is we Create Assets. The value of an ad or sales letter, especially one with evergreen that has long life. It can be in the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. I’ll take you through a few examples—I have over 25 sales letters or copywriting projects with back end royalties that have paid me more than $100,000. One of those is a sales letter that I wrote 8 or 9 years ago for someone in the real estate field. It has been worth millions of dollars to him, obviously for it to pay me 6 figures, and the asset continues to have value today. What is significant about that is that it is the only asset in his business that is as valuable. Not the office building he owns, which his office sits, not any equipment, this is it—this is the biggest asset he has got. For clients in the seminar business, restaurant marketing systems 2 years in a row, I have done their boot camp projects and been paid over $100,000. Last years campaign put 400 people in a program $3000 a piece, give or take, which if the math is right is 1.2 million dollars. At the event 100 people were put into his coaching programs at $10,000 a year, which I believe is another million. That is an asset that has produced 2.2 million dollars in business. LORRIE: Did you have to educate him that that was an asset? DAN: I have educated him over a period of time—certainly when you first get them you have to educate them. It is critically important that nobody looks at this as words on a piece of paper. You or them. My clients pay by the inch(?) in a sales letter and a half hour television show and an audio tape for them and doubled the size of the business overnight and drove the entire business for 8 consecutive years. Pretty much an evergreen asset, ultimately making the client so rich that he hit is enough is enough and closed the business and




walked away. We are creating assets that have tangible value much the same as a piece of equipment has tangible value. The second thing we are often doing is Create additional Profit Centers. Quite often fro under-exploited customers or back end opportunities. Most clients that you are going to work with may be doing a good job on the front end of their business and getting customers but then leaving all sorts of money on the table on the back end where you get to go and play and create marketing campaigns that produce money out of thin air for them. So again, this is another asset—it’s a business within a business. Each marketing campaign that creates a new profit center can be viewed that way. For example for a lot of my clients in the seminar business, I invented selling the seminar in a box on tape--starting an ad campaign even in advance of the seminar itself, and then a flip up. If you bought the seminar in the box from 2003, then another went into place to give you book credit for what you spent on the seminar in a box for the seminar in 2004. So one direct mail campaign really begat 3 direct mail campaigns and the whole thing gave a profit center that wasn’t there before. When you do that you may bring $100,000 to $200,000 or a half a million dollars a year in a new and additional profit center and again – that is different from 6 typed pages. The third thing we do is that we Solve Problems. Quite often as you become known to clients and develop relationships with clients, that is what is going to happen. Some years ago, with network marketing industry was widely used generic audio tape that hundreds of nutrition companies used called, Dead Drs Don’t Lie, it was so prolific that I would wager that a third of the people on the call received at least one. The FDA decided that the tape itself was fraudulent and they descended on the companies that were using it. Depending upon what else was going on in that company, they either put that company out of business or they fined them heavily and gave them brief windows of time to get that tape out of the field. I got a call from a large company that was using this tape and I had known the president’s father so I was known to them. They had never been willing to pay my fees to have me come in until they were in real trouble. Then, fees weren’t an issue. They were taking that tape away from some 200,000 people and they had to replace it with something that would be as effective, so now fee was not a discussion, it was—how fast can you fit us in and how much will it cost to have you bump whoever was in line in front of us. Quite often that is what we are doing; we are stepping in and solving a very serious problem. I was just hired yesterday for a very large contract for a company in a particular industry were they and the entire industry is in trouble. So we aren’t talking about marketing problem, we are talking about a rescue. They are looking at the marketing campaign that I am going to create as reinventing their business and that is worth a great deal of money.




LORRIE: You’re talking about creating assets and additional profit centers and solving problems. It’s really something a lot deeper; it leads into the next strategy which is Re-Defining and Expanding Your Role. DAN: Yes, when you think of your role, you don’t want to be defined as narrowly as, or just as, a copywriter. That is your own definition, your own thinking in your own language. I will give you 2 analogies: one is the Dr/pharmacist or architect/construction worker analogy. You go to the pharmacist to the prescription filled; the doctor does the diagnosis that decides what the prescription ought to be—who makes the most money? The other analogy is contractor or carpet layer. Who makes more money in that situation? From a positioning stand point the money position that you want to be in is the control of the diagnosis and prescription. You don’t want to just be filling prescriptions. A lot of people think of this copywriting as that the client is going to do the prescribing. The client calls you in and says I need a half page ad to sell this bottle of glop and it’s going to run in this magazine and how much are you going to charge to write this half page ad? That entire scenario is deadly. It is a scenario that you don’t want to be in because maybe they need a half page ad and maybe they don’t, in all probability they don’t know what they need. They may not need an ad at all or they may need a 2 page spread or a small box ad or they may need an ad that goes to 200 magazines or they may need an ad that drives to a message that drives to a website that drives to a teleseminar. They don’t know any of that. So let them give you the assignment, like the old Mission Impossible show, you don’t want to be that hired guy being sent of on a mission. You want to be the person doing the diagnosis and prescription—deciding what the mission is with and for the client. That is the whole issue of re-defining your role. In the second night that we are together , I am going to talk at length about how this comes into play from the first square—from attracting the client, starting the relationship with the client, and solves a lot of questions about how to keep the client from screwing things up after we do it. Client compliance is a big problem in keeping the client from arguing with us. This re-definition of role from the very beginning preempts and eliminates 90% of those problems. So we will talk about that the next night. LORRIE: I can’t wait to hear that one. Next strategy, number 3—is Copywriting in the Context of Strategy? What do you mean by that? DAN: it’s a continuation of the role issue and it is that you want to be involved as a strategist and then write copy, not as a copywriter put in a box and given a job to do. There are 2 reasons for it: one is the clients is not qualified to diagnose and prescribe—he shouldn’t be his own doctor, at the very least, left to his own devices—he will overlook opportunities, he will ignore media, he will opt for a ‘thing’ rather than a process.




LORRIE: Why is that Dan, is he too close to it? DAN: He’s too close to it, he doesn’t want to open his wallet, and there is a lot he doesn’t know. So you take a client who decides he wants a full page ad but does he know if it should drive to a phone number? Or drive to a recorded message? Does he know whether or not it should have the website in it? If it should, should it go to his regular website (which probably sucks) or should it go to a website specifically set up to link to that ad? Should he do a voice blast in front or behind a direct mail campaign? He doesn’t think of those things—it’s up to us to think of them from a standpoint of re-defining the role, expanding the work we do, and exercise a greater control over the client. He is not qualified to diagnose and prescribe. The second reason is that if you view this as an assignment that is minimum wage work. That is the carpet layer, that’s the contractor telling you what to do. That is low wage work. Projects, higher wage work. Relationships are high wages plus profit sharing. You have got to define your role in away that gives you the best economic opportunity. Let me take you through a couple of examples so that you see how this happens. I have client I work with off and on in a practice management company for chiropractic and dentistry. He called me in and thought that he needed a new seminar brochure. What he needed and bought was a complete business reinvention. New theme, new identity, new materials. He also thought he needed a renewal campaign for his tape of the month prop which he viewed as a sales letter—what he bought was a sequence of 5 sales letters and a reengineering of the product from one level to two levels of subscription—and membership vs. subscription. What is significant about that is that I didn’t improve the renewal rate over what he had done the year before on his own. We renewed the same percentage; however, I improved the revenue by over 45%. I created a second level and repositioned his membership. His mind was that this was a $15,000 job; he wound up a $45,000 contract plus royalties LORRIE: So he gets more out of it in the end? A: Very few people will begrudge you your fair share when the positioning is right to start with. I have another client who thought this was a rewrite of his generic campaign selling his product to anybody and everybody. I taught him how to niche the product by market but that took him from one campaign to 8 campaigns. It greatly expanded the fees. A small example from early in my career—1975-1076, a company in Minneapolis, National Computer Systems, met me at National Speakers Association. They thought they needed a brochure but they but they bought what I call a big box—brochure, long letter, 2 audio tapes, follow up pieces




that all get packaged into what gets put into an elaborate box that get sent to a prospect—the copywriting fee went from $5500 to $16,000. This is about moving from what they think to what you think. A great analogy is in cosmetic dentistry often someone comes into the office with the idea that they are going to patch something, they know they have a bad tooth, and maybe that they need a bridge. It’s the dentist’s job to switch them from that kind of thinking to thinking of complete mouth restoration. Often taking them from a $2000 or $3000 commitment to a $30,000 or $40,000 commitment. That job is easier; they perceive him differently than just a dentist from the beginning. This all loops together with how you are viewed, how you present yourself, how you present, and how you start out with the client. LORRIE: This is so illuminating the way all the strategies ducktail with one another. It’s like a total mind shift—when that shifts. Your business itself starts to shift. When you are working with different strategies and putting them all together, then the next strategy comes in which is Expanding the Scope of the Projects. DAN: You certainly want the most income that you can get from each client. The reason people have so many questions about this business is getting a client. And the reason we is exist is to get a customer or a client. Given that, you have to expand the complexity and scope of each project thereby expanding the length of the relationship and the amount of money that you get from each client. Typically it is done in 3 ways; there are steps in a marketing campaign—most people view it as an ad, a brochure, or a sales letter—we need them moving into thinking about marketing campaigns, processes and systems, multiple steps. The second step is multiple media, again they are thinking an ad, or a brochure, or a sales letter, or a website. Often they should have all of those things and other things as well. A call earlier today with a group of 18 people in an industry where they all are in one client group of mine—we took them from direct mail to direct mail plus audio plus DVD. They will probably actually end up spending $10,000 to $20,000 totally (with the total group of 40) about a half a million dollars is headed my way. The third way is to generic to niche or niche to generic. Often you will have a client come to you and they will sell their product or service to one market—either a big market of everybody like fast weight loss for nurses or fast weight loss for truckers, etc. multiplying the number of campaigns. Or they may be operating in one niche and have a product that can go mainstream—so you expand by markets. Some examples--A company about a month ago, Safety Technology, they sell safety products with everything from safety products to tazer guns. They




came thinking they needed a sales letter and a follow up sequence I identified that they are selling to 2 types of buyers they sell to professionals—burglar alarm companies and dealers, security companies, private eyes, spy shops –they also sell to flea market and swap market dealers—opportunity seekers—and sending the same material to both markets even though they have different interests. So that begets 2 campaigns instead of 1—2 sets of ads, 2 sets of sales letters, 2 different audio tapes, 2 different websites, 2 different teleseminar scripts. It doubles the scope of that project. LORRIE: You do these at the same time? You mentioned the weight loss for nurses, etc. would you do all of this at the same time? DAN: If you can and they let you, you do them all at the same time because there is speed to be had by doing it that way. You can end up doing it sequentially, you would work with the client for years and that is ok under certain circumstances. Any of these 3 ways or all of them together. Some years ago I was brought in by international correspondence schools, they thought they needed a simple direct mail piece being sent to everybody who answers our TV commercials (again client prescribing). You may remember these schools—ICS__ with Sally Struthers on the commercials, so they brought me in and had me consult on television. And then as I am re-defining my roles so they thought here is a TV guy who knows what he is doing—by the time I got done with them they realized that here is a marketing guy who knows what he is doing. The next conversation is—here is a direct mail piece that we send out and we take everything in and it works pretty good except for the letter, so we need a good 4 page letter to go into this package. If you but that prescription and let that be the way the deal works you will get paid to write a 4 page letter which you can only get so much for. From their standpoint and mine, that is not what they needed. Amongst other things, they needed a book so that project went to a 16 page letter; it went to an audio CD script and a 300 page book that was ghost written for them. This is the strategy of expanding the scope of projects. LORRIE: It is important to recognize that you are turning what might have been a single, simple and quick assignment into something that extends over months. That is kid of a new concept for a lot of us copywriters. Why is it important? DAN: The main reason it is important is because presuming you are a good copywriter what you will tend to be bad at and will like the least is the process of getting clients. Typically what will happen is that you will work and be done with what you call the one off and hope there won’t be anymore work and then you go look for it. If you want stability, if you don’t want rollercoaster income, then this has to become about more work for each client. This goes back to what I am going to talk about on the second call—selection of clients—but if the most onerous thing to do is to get a client then you want to focus on getting clients and handling them in such a way that




you get to live with them for a long period of time and they represent an income source. My average contract takes 3-4 months to fulfill from the time it is inked to the time that they have everything on an agreed upon timeline and averages about $50,000 to $75,000. I will do 20 to 30 such projects in a year and a few that are huge and some extend over a year. This is about getting into their businesses. So that you get more money from fewer clients, you have fewer clients and you don’t need to chase them you can end up having them standing in line for you. It is also about breeding client dependence in the way that you define the role. Some people may remember the big human potential movement; it was made fun of in a movie called Semi Tough. I was getting a hair cut and was next to (inaudible) and I asked Warner if you would up EST in its essence what is it that you do? He said, we preach independence and breed dependence. You can chalk that up as cynical but that is really what it is all about in client management. In doing that they are coming to you over and over again and they are open to this expansion of assignment and project. LORRIE: You don’t have to keep building trust because it is there and you know how each other works, right? DAN: It starts tin the beginning, trust is a subjective thing and it is not all about results it is as much about positioning and when you are in front of diagnosis and prescription, it is far easier to exercise control and to be looked up on as a trusted advisor. When you are behind diagnosis and prescription and being told to write this 4 page letter and don’t exceed 4 pages and make sure the paragraphs are indented. It’s the Dr/pharmacist example if the pharmacist tells you that you might have a fungus and you ought to go in and get a test, you might take that seriously you might not but if your cardiac surgeon says you might have poopoo fungus and I can give you a test, you say—where? When?--not how much is it. These 4 strategies that I have talked about an important in terms of client control. LORRIE: The next strategy is Expand Scope of the Relationship, so how do we get there? DAN: It is extremely important because what most copywriters do is the engage in transactions and the worst income in the world is transactional. That is where customer dictates to seller. A transaction is that you decide—if you have been to a chiropractor, the one who has the weakest practice is a transactional practice. You go in when you feel like you have a crick in your neck or a back pain and you get and adjustment and the chiropractor fits you in. there are a lot of starving chiropractors that let their patients get away with this. At the other end there is the chiropractor who will not take a patient on that basis, they will hand you the yellow pages to go someplace else and they put you into a treatment program that requires you to be in a relationships with him and to get you in a certain amount of times each week, etc. the worst transactional and the worst relationship is one-dimensional.




LORRIE: That is so funny; I was thinking for myself that I do the same thing with the chiropractor. I go if I am hurting but if I were forced into that situation I would probably not get to the pain. DAN: Of course. It is far better for the patient to be in that kind of relationship with them and the doctor is better off from a financial standpoint as well. Again then he needs fewer patients. The worst relationship is one dimensional where you are viewed as doing and called upon to do one thing. Like let’s call Mary when we need and ad and we only need an ad once or twice a year, so Mary gets called on once or twice a year. That is terrible business so you want to put copywriting into context of a relationship and that means consulting. It may even mean other things: training, coaching, strategy work, providing and managing vendors, deal-making-matching one client with another. One quick example, I got hired after a lunch meeting with a referral to come in for 2 days for a fairly large company, take their top marketing team and day one do training in direct marketing, information marketing 101. Day two work on strategy that will lead up the back end to copywriting assignments. The fee for 2 days is $50,000, to be fair I did the same thing 10 years ago and the fee was $5000, the dollar changes but the concept is the same. As a result of being with them for 2 days and setting the framework for how everything is going to work as an authorities figure, the relationship will be different from there on out. So the goal is continuing work to expand the relationship. I think of the roach commercial it’s easy to get in but you can’t get out. That is the way it is supposed to be with a relationship with me. I have clients who continue to do work for them one continuous basis—as one thing ends another begins for 5, 6, 12 years. That is what you want. There are 5 main kinds of continuing work with clients so let’s go through those: One is periodic or reoccurring. That is close to transaction like a client in a seasonal business or one who exhibits in couple of trade shows at a particular time of year. So that’s when they crank up a marketing machine. They do direct mail, ads, and handouts for the show so you expect that to happen on a reoccurring and periodic basis. Second is sequential, that is when one project births the next. Most important question for you to answer for your client is what’s next? They actually want you to answer that—did you do a good job of breeding dependence? My aim mostly is that as one thing concludes we are beginning the next thing and so on. Third type of continuing work is truly continuous. For relative beginners the is a way to get a couple of book (inaudible) that pay by the month and pay the




same amount of money every month so that you can pay the light bill—it adds a sense of security to your business. This is the promotion of the month approach where you are doing monthly newsletter, weekly e-mail tips, you’re creating the ad of the week that appears in the newspaper that is all in a continuous program. You have literally blocked out x number of hours a week or month to do it. Early in my copywriting work, I always had 2 or 3 of those accounts so you knew you could pay the rent no matter what. On a high level, not the beginner, the continuous account is also very desirable instead of a sequential way of things; there are some things that are just continuous projects. I have a couple of clients that do 2 major seminars a year and the marketing campaigns are up to 6 months long, I am continuously working on this for them, year round, 12 month plan and the base fee is equalized. So the same amount of money is arriving each month. LORRIE: You are in a contract with them? You figure out what the monthly retainers are going to be? DAN: Yes. We will get to that. Fourth is new markets and new opportunities. The way to have continuing work with clients is by continually unearthing new opportunities for the client in their business, you need never leave. Since most clients are very focused on 1, 2, 3 ways to sell what they sell in 1 or 2 markets, very limited back end; you can often go into a company and reveal to them an opportunity that they didn’t know they had but requires your work and you can live there for a long time. That is how you grow with a client. I have 2 clients that have frown with me over a 10 year time—one a 4 million dollar company to a 300 million dollar company, the other from one million dollar business to a 20 million dollar business. You keep on covering things that you don’t necessarily point out all at once; I have a saying, my vision sees farther than theirs, so it’s about what’s next. Five is new products and services. You create work for yourself by helping a client see that they should also be selling x, they should also be providing y. in my work with W Ranker, the infomercial company, Proactive, which is the biggest part of their business today, I pushed them into the acne business, as a result of what I learned in an entirely unrelated situation with a different client. I created a lot of work for myself by pushing them into that business. Those are the 5 ways of creating continual work. LORRIE: Do you have this set up on a chart somewhere or do you just find it second nature to you? DAN: Yes, it’s in my head and I am not the most organized guy on the planet in that respect so it was never in a chart. It sort of is by constantly processing what is in their business and their industry through this filter.




LORRIE: Got it. All of this kind of lays the groundwork for our most important topic—money! We want to know about the mistakes that we make in setting fees. So, what the 6th strategy is Sufficient Compensation. DAN: The first thing to know about that is that you ought to get as much as you can. Let’s look at the way people get paid, there is billable hours; hourly, daily, weekly, monthly. An awful lot of people—copywriters , as well as consultants—price themselves that way—almost everybody starts that way. I did briefly, not knowing better. But, your first goal in life is to begin transcending billable hours trap. Some copywriters bill by page, it was that way for fiction too. Louis L’Amour, in his books, he always had his characters dies by the sixth bullet, when asked about it, he said—I get paid by the word. You take a big step up when you move from those formulas, to pay by project. All of my work is coached in defined products that have multiple pieces. So, it is about the sum total of everything, not how much time. I figure my fees are based on time, but they don’t know it and it’s not what they are buying. It is important that that is not what they are buying; they are buying this agreed upon project. There are also access fees and retainers—we mentioned the monthly retainer, I have a private client group that pays a $17,000 fee to be in the group and essentially that gives them right to hire me. Then we get to royalties: four basic things going on in the world of copywriting you see usage—you see copywriters, those who do a lot of direct mail and see them getting page for per piece mailed, a penny, a penny and a half and with large volume accounts, that is a big issue. If you need a control and you have a winner—like my work with Weight Watchers, might beat the control fees but would have mailed 5 to 10 million pieces in a calendar year, even a penny a piece would amount to something. Sometimes its usage for insertion—like a radio show or print ad—there is a fee and then another $50 to $100 every time that it runs. A second kind of royalty money is per result. That is dollars per lead, a dime for every coupon that is redeemed, and in some industries where they can’t fee split—like financial services—you have to get paid by the lead or the event –number of people who attend the seminar vs. the actual revenues. \ The third time of revenue is percentage of gross sales. And the fourth type of royalty is percentage above base. That is where, an example would be—clients already doing 12 direct mail pieces a year and last year they did a million dollars. So, a million dollars is now their base. They pay no royalty on the first million, without they are going to use your direct mail, they pay 5% of the gross for everything above a million. That is percentage above base. To give credit where credit is due, I was ignorant about this as any thing when I went to speak at a Gary Halbert seminar--$7000 per person seminar. I was sitting there half paying attention and he




said it as a routine thing of this is how things work around here, he was telling everyone that they couldn’t hire him as a copywriter but if they did it’s x dollars plus x % of the gross sales. My head spun around like that girl on The Exorcist because it never occurred to me. As an author I had done this, you do the work once and hope that you get paid for a long period of time. It made perfect sense because you are creating an intellectual property asset, but I had never heard of it being done. I have never taken a job or been involved with a client since without a percentage of gross sales or some other type of royalty on the back. So, those are the four ways that you start to get out of the billable hours and create a passive income after the fact. LORRIE: When you go into the usage, do you dictate to the client how many pieces they are going to send out? DAN: Yes you can. I am able to mandate it, although there are some contracts that have use requirements. I have not done one of them but I have seen them. By controlling the strategy and properly selecting the client in the first place, you have a reasonable frame of reference as to what is going to happen. My preference is percentage of gross sales. LORRIE: You trust the client to just tall you? DAN: That is something we will get into with the contract. LORRIE: Well, Tony Ostian has asked about royalty buy-outs, any thoughts on that? DAN: I have done them, I occasionally still do them, and I don’t like them. I have one client that you couldn’t do business with him without them, without a buy out or cap and consequently, about 5 years ago, I stopped doing business with him. But, I essentially created a marketing campaign for him that created a 400 million dollar a year business and my royalty cap out was at $200,000. So, that’s unacceptable to me. But, sometimes you have caps where there is an agreed upon royalty that when you hit x number of dollars, it’s over. Or you have a buyout, when I do them I tie them to a test period, you may have a royalty percentage and you have 3-4 months to test the campaign anytime during that test period, if you see you have a huge winner that is going to make you a fortune beyond all imagination on Earth, you can buy out the royalty. Usually it is for 3-4 times the original fee. And if you go past the deadline, you can no longer buy it out. LORRIE: How long is the test period, approximately? DAN: Depends on what they need to do, sometimes 3 months, sometimes 4 months. Again because you are involved, you know what that is going to look like. Then there are other variations on this compensation, let me just go over them—a couple of them are very important. One is a pure royalty, where




there is no fee and you would only want to do that with clients that you know, that use the work they get, they do a lot of advertising, they do a lot of mail and even then—occasionally do it, I don’t do it for a fee, I do it for an advance against the royalty. Kind of like the author of a book, so in this case there is a $25,000 transfer of money, but it’s not a fee, they get to recover it from the royalties. There are use fee renewals. Some copywriters will charge x dollars to create this project and then every year, get the use renews, if they continue to use it, they get paid another fee. There is no royalty in between. LORRIE: Do you update things annually like that or are there other conditions? DAN: You can or cannot; it depends on what you want to do. In a royalty relationship, I tweak. With results guaranteed forever because I am sharing in the revenue. On a renewal fee that would be the more limited, there are as you know—beat the controls, you want to do that –someone started out by doing it with a local merchant, but it has to be someone you know legitimately with follow through and has a real control that you know the results from. The big marketers bring in copywriters to beat the control. I haven’t done it on a spec basis in over a decade. There are pro copywriters who seek these opportunities out. There is profit center ownership. This is anybody who is familiar with Jay Abraham. Jay’s stories know that in several instances, Jay made a lot of money by going into a company that was doing nothing with their customers after the initial sale, creating a business behind their business to feed on their customers, under their name. Even putting up the money in some cases to do it, creating all the marketing and sharing in the revenues. There is copywriting tied to product—this is very interesting. I have a client, Lester Nathan; he works with independent pharmacies across the country. He brings to them a hot product which he finds or has developed. For example, when the arthritis drug was taken off the market, Lester came to the table very quickly with a topical pain relief product for which he had a great story. He writes the copy for the ads, he creates the store marketing materials and he ties it all to the sale of the product. So, he not only gets money for the pharmacist using his ads and his marketing materials, but he gets a commission on all the product that sold. It is one turn key package. There is also licensing by area where you create a marketing campaign for a particular type of business—this is important to beginners because they may do this at a local level and have a winner. Then you bicycle it to one user in each area and then each user pays you a fee and a royalty. I got a fax today




from a client that I worked with on this type of project – he is financial services—we created a marketing product, a series of 3 sales letters—direct mail pieces—designed to get appointments with particular prospects for financial advisors. The use of that campaign customized, to a financial advisor, was sold area by area by area. So, this week 33 of them were sold at $9000 a piece. That is $200 and 70 some odd dollars. So, you would have got, for one financial advisor in one area, you may have gotten $5000 to $10,000 to write that campaign. If one can use it a 100 can use it and if you make it very exclusive, its value goes up. There’s commission from vendors and sometimes there is a lot of compensation there because you are introducing your clients to media that they are not using. For example, if they are going to do a multi step direct mail campaign and you have them do 2 voice broadcasts in between, they have never heard of voice broadcast before you told them. They have to get it done by somebody and that somebody should be a vendor you control who pays you. You have media placement, you have recorded messages, websites, e-mail blasts. One group I know of has a private label program where they take their entire on line website and you get a commission on all of the lists. Then there is barter. That’s a way to get paid. I have done it very rarely. LORRIE: I find that the backfires a lot of the time. Someone always feels that they got screwed out of the deal. DAN: Well sometimes it is easier for a client to give you things than to write you a check. Sometimes it is easier to get added concessions. A trade show company in addition to fee and royalty, I got a free booth in all of their shows. I don’t want the booth but I will turn around and give it to a couple of my clients. There is equity deals and you have these opportunities when you are an established pro with a reputation, you have them when you are a rank beginner dealing with small business that may become a big business in the future. They are very tricky, I have done 3 in my entire life—one worked out great, one was so-so, one of them worthless. Equity in privately held companies and being a minority share holder is tricky but sometimes there is big opportunity. Last is self promotion via their marketing. I could spend an hour on this alone; it ties to things we will talk about next time about how you promote yourself. An example, I have books, I always want to get my books promoted but I don’t want to spend my money to do it. The campaign that I mentioned that sold to financial advisors, that campaign includes a gift with appointment offer, the advisor who gets the appointment with the direct mail campaign, brings them a gift—the gift is a library of my books. The direct mail piece




promotes my books. It won’t generate 150,000 for financial advisers but it is a 150,000 impressions. You will find that if you study a lot of my work for clients, that I weasel myself into the work. LORRIE: And they look good because they are getting something substantial for their clients. DAN: It gives them a branded thing instead of an unbranded thing. I will work myself into someone’s sales letter as a testimonial. In order for me to be a successful testimonial, there has to be a paragraph describing who I am which becomes promotion. So, that’s a list of things you do to increase the compensation that you are getting for the work you are doing. LORRIE: Dr Harlan Kilstein and Tony Ostian and actually several people have asked how do you price the job? DAN: actually I have a pricing formula and I pretty much stick to it and I don’t take advantage of deeper pockets clients. If I price a client that is out of my market that’s ok, I don’t discount because that is all they can afford. I have done it this way for 20 years, the numbers have changed but the formula has pretty much been the same. Before I give you the formula, the way that they both asked the question needs to be changed and everyone needs to be working on their own frame of reference. The word job is an evil word. As is the word assignment. I don’t price jobs, I price projects—I don’t use the word price either, I use fee. Doctors have fees, hookers have prices. We may be closer to the latter than the former but we don’t want to acknowledge it with perception. So, here’s the formula for me: it is the estimated time required if I get it nonstop in days. That is not how most projects get done—but if I locked myself in a room and did nothing but work on this, how many days is it? That gets timed my base day fee which is the lowest amount of money that I will do anything for. My base day fee right now is $9200 that is the lowest that you can sit and talk to me for, if I think a project is going to take 8 days, it’s 8 times 9200. That’s the fee; it may be discounted by the size and scope of the project or the time economy for me to do multiple projects together. If I get into a zone and do weight loss for nurses and weight loss for pilots and do it all at the same time, I will get that done faster than if I do sequential. I may discount a little for that when I put the project together and then there are royalties on top of that, usually 3% to 7% of gross sales. LORRIE: We could spend a whole day on pricing projects maybe we should. Maybe at your sales letter workshop, you had me spinning off a little about how you can—I am completely mind boggled now. DAN: You could spend days on fees and fee structures. The list we went through is really the framework. The idea is to get out of I’m hired to write 8




pages, and then you cut and piece the different compensation options together., some of it affects how we do contracts but I want to mention 2 things—you mentioned the sales letter workshop and was a small mastermind group kind of round table thing. I am thinking about dong that kind of event about these business issues. Really delving into the business of copywriting and marketing consulting and doing it a 12-20 person event where we are working on people’s business. If that happens, it is not for the faint of heart, the fee will be between $10,000 and $15,000 a person. It will be intense long hours of work, not sitting in a chair and listen to people talk to you. If anyone finds that interesting they should e-mail you and let you know. LORRIE: The e-mail is [email protected] DAN: I also want to recommend a resource, I did a series of last-ever boot camps on different topics—one on consulting and coaching, we did an in depth multi day boot camp all about this business. We had hundreds of people there who paid between $3000-$5000 to be there, I did most of it but we did have some guest speakers, Steve Miller—a top consultant for the trade show industry, Craig Proctor—he ahs the largest coaching program that I know of that is all group and telephone delivery $847 a month, Summers White—a top consultant in the financial category and is great at running a lifestyle business, Joe Polish—he’s been a client of mine for years in the carpet cleaning industry and has a coaching program with over 100 people at $10,000 a year and provides prefab marketing campaigns; so each of them did a show and tell about what they do and how they do it. We taped the whole thing, so there is a consulting and coaching business boot camp in a box with everything on CD, transcripts, the same reference was used at the boot camp itself and the sample book that was handed out—that alone is worth more than the cost of admission. It has everybody’s sales letters, ads, marketing documents, faxes, some of their contracts, all of the samples of marketing material that they use in their consulting and coaching businesses. If you go to dankennedywebstore to get it you will find it priced at $1997. I would say it is a bargain at twice that. Lorrie has arranged for everyone on this teleclass to get it for $1397—that’s a $600 price break that is good only through 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. You will also get as free gifts an unedited recording of tonight’s call and a copy of my No BS Sales book, which I would like you to read before the next call. We will Fed Ex those bonuses out to you from my office. If you get the whole expansion and redefinition of your role, this is the most relevant resource I have for you and I would be happy to make it available to you at a big price break—oh, and 2 payment installments are ok. LORRIE: we are much more consultants than copywriters, it is a different mindset. This is available at my website www.red-hot-copy.com/dkdiscount.htm and I will send out an e-mail when I give you the summary that has the info but it is only up until 3:00 because Dan is mean and won’t let me put it up any longer than that. I promised I would take it




down then. When I send the checklist of the contract items, summary notes the audio of this class will also be posted on mp3. So, contracts… DAN: There are 6 contract issues that are the biggies. One is description of project or projects. The key her is specifics, this is literally the list of what they are getting—a long form sales letter, 3 follow up steps and a teleseminar script and 4 follow up faxes—it’s all listed there. There may even be more detail in an appendix, sometimes I will make a transcript of a telephone conversation or in person meeting, the portion of it where we are discussing the project I will make that an appendix to the agreement. The second one is continuing advice and services this is about describing, defining and limiting their access. This is where you put how they are going to work with you in addition to copy and what they are not going to get in addition to copy. In my case, there is language that tells them I work only by telephone appointment, you can’t pick up the phone and call me catch as catch can, and talk to me. There is usually a 10-15 day delay from the time you request and appointment from the time that you get it—that is all in the agreement. These2 items are about preventing disputes by preventing misunderstandings. People a month or so will not remember the conversation that you had, but they have a copy of the agreement and they signed it, if you have to refer to it you can. The third big contract item is ownership. This varies a lot but I have a few examples: one is a to of contracts are pure work for hire—all ownership are the clients, that’s fine if that is what you want to do or if you are going to put caveats in it. So they own the work they own the copywrites sometimes within defined areas of use: however I have language that always lets me use the same stuff as examples in my newsletters, seminars, speeches, books and courses. I can take client work and put it in that sample book I just discussed and give it to you, if I didn’t have that in my agreements, I couldn’t. Then there is local or defined use where you might want to retain certain rights. Sometimes this is as important to the beginner as the pro, it is really important if you are creating stuff for a local client that has the potential to be used by other clients in different parts of the country or world. I can take what I did for dental and rewrite it as chiropractic. Sometimes there are length of time and renewal issues, I always find new ways that people can take advantage of me. There is a new clause in my contract that is a resale restriction. It says they can’t take the work that was prepared for their use to promote their business and bundle it up and turn around and sell it to others. There is a prohibition against that. Lorrie, I think we had a question about one of the 3 contract issues.




LORRIE: Maggie Dennison had a couple of questions about ownership issues. How do you handle copyright issues if you are using subcontractors? DAN: I have done very little of that and have had less luck with it. So, I have on occasion done it, 99% of the copy I deliver, I write—I make that a selling point. If you do use subcontractors, you want them to be pure work for hire. You want to own all of the rights—they own none. They should also sign confidentiality agreements, non-compete agreements, those clauses ought to be in your agreement with them. Fourth item in the contract is compensation. How much you are getting paid, when you are getting paid and I will make a big comment on that. I talk about it when I talk to entrepreneurs about money—there is single difference between how rich people get paid vs. poor people. Poor people get paid after they do the work; rich people get paid before they do it. So, single mom working in a factory over here, she works all week and the she gets a paycheck, she is always a week behind. Donald Trump gets paid for money on a building when he agrees to let them put his name on it before the work is done. My contracts are typically either third, third, third. Sometimes if it is a large contract the payment will be in 6 installments. The bench marks for me are usually first draft, finished copy, and first use. I am a 2 draft guy—if it requires me going back more than twice, that is probably the last time I will work with that guy. There is then, forfeiture of partials. If they stop the project at some point along the way, whatever they have paid at that point, and if you wish a fee prescribed above it, must be paid but they are not getting back the money they have already paid. Royalties and how those are paid. My contracts have language that I have the right to come and audit their books. Most clients will steal a little, but you don't want them to steal a lot. Sometimes it has to do with bad bookkeeping that is why I have that clause. I can look at their credit card slips or their bank statements, their shipping records or their ad placement. When you are integrally involved in what they are doing, no body can run the same ad 5 months in a row in the same magazine and tell you that they sold 6 units. LORRIE: How do you verify? DAN: Fortunately I have never felt that there was a situation where I had to enforce the clause. But the clause says that I or a representative—accountant or whatever—can go and audit their books, and if there is a discrepancy, then they pay for the audit. I have threatened it a couple of times and suddenly better accounting appeared, but I have never had to do it. The fifth item in the contract is the timetable, what is the schedule? When are they going to get what? It is very important to resist the tendency to




promise what you can’t do. Every body wants everything yesterday, we can’t blame them but they can’t have it. I wrote a contract today and the guy desperately wants a launch in December, and I understand that but he is getting finished work January 1. If it costs the client or the project, that’s ok there is another bus coming but you don’t want to be in a position where you are over-promising a delivery. The weasel clause—that’s what attorneys call it—says that your ability to meet the deadlines that are listed in your contract in part relies upon Prompt response and cooperation the client. If approvals are unreasonably withheld, delays occur in their response, you are not liable. Sixth, is really important, it’s indemnity and liability limitations. You want the client realizing that you are not practicing law and you are not responsible for what you are delivering to them being legal—that is their responsibility. I don’t know enough about your business to determine whether or not you are complying with all applicable federal and state laws. Your job not mine. A liability limitation has different ways to do; the current language I use has all these disclaimers about how I am not liable at all. and the final liability limitations states that I can not be held liable for an amount greater than the fee. In certain categories, say weight loss and nutrition, you have to think about whether you should be named as an additional insured on their liability policies, whether they should have advertising liability, and you should think about if you should buy consultant liability insurance –which is dirt cheap. They indemnify you against any cost or liability that arise to their use of what you give them. LORRIE: Did you have an attorney write this up for you? DAN: I am a plain English guy, so this is all school of hard knocks stuff that is cut and pasted stuff and probably half of it was there from the beginning and half of it has evolved. In different environments when I do have an attorney write the contract, I then go and rewrite it in plain English and let the attorney sign off on it. If you have too many whereas and thereas you make like unpleasant. LORRIE: We have a question from Diane Conklin that wants to know if you use the same contract with every client, or do you change it by job? DAN: I have a template that has a standard template in the computer and there are about 25 stock paragraphs. Some contracts get them all—some only get part of them, it is basically fill in the blank assembled for the client. The part that has to be done from scratch each time is the project description. Mine are roughly one to two pages.




LORRIE: I know we are going to send a checklist out to everyone but is it possible to actually get a copy of one of your contracts? DAN: You can hire me to right a copy. I always resist doing it because each one is different. I am not in the business of practicing law or writing contracts. I knew you were going to ask so I will make a compromise. Everyone who gets the resources we talked about tonight, I will send a copy of an actual, current contract with the names blacked out and any other specifics and I will send everyone a copy with caveat that it is designed to be used as an example, not to verbatim become yours. And should it verbatim become your, I accept no responsibility. I’ll send it in print—I don’t want it circulating the internet. LORRIE: We have about 15 minutes left for questions, so I am going to open up the lines and see how everyone is doing. We will try to answer as many questions as we can. Once we get a question, we will mute out the rest of the callers so you can answer. I also want to say that you recommended some suggested reading, we have homework before the next call which is next week, Tuesday October 11, at the same time 8-10 EST. What Dan suggests is that you read the section on Takeaway Selling in his NO B.S. Sales book (which is part of the resource package) and Robert Ringer’ s book To Be Intimidated Or Not To Be Intimidated (that is at Amazon). I will have the titles up when I send out the auto responders. CALLER: I got as far as an agreement work proposal for somebody after we had a lengthy conversation, I gave him the plan and I am not hearing from him at all. I followed up with an e-mail about a 40% conversion rate and suddenly he came up with a piece of the project and then I hear nothing. Should I just forget about him, he seems like a potential good client? DAN: Let me say several things—first I would neuter the word ‘proposal’ out of your language. If you must use them—call them action plans. Really you should be doing an agreement, that meeting should have ended with a verbal agreement of what was going to be done and you only going back to put it in writing. Secondly we are going to talk next week about these initial meetings because they shouldn’t be free. You tend to get better results when they act. As to your specific question with this client, if the nudge brought him back out of the woods and got him going, there is no reason won’t do it again, and another nudge, and another. There is nothing wrong with that, in fact, good client prospects ought to be on a continuous contact program—we will talk about the next week too. So they are being feed all the time of your demonstrations of your expertise and examples of your work and success stories on a continuous basis. If you got a response by giving him a nudge, by all means, continue to nudge him. I wouldn’t give up on him. I have had clients, not this way, where there has been an initial meeting and an agreement, they booked a telephone appointment and then didn’t follow through, or we have conversations at an event and they hadn’t followed




through, and I have had that happen 3 or 4 times over 3 or 4 years before finally getting a project. That’s how you keep your pipeline full. Last year I did work for someone for the first time who I saw every year at a conference for 6 years and every year he took me aside, had a conversation with me, and said—when you get back to the office, have someone let me know what days you have available because we have to get together and I have to do this project. We had the same conversation every year for 6 years and I thought it was amusing, and then after 6 years, he hired me. The good news is the rate was a whole lot more than if he had done it the first time. So, there is nothing wrong with what you are doing with him now that you are in the soup with him that you are. Generally, you want to maintain contact with prospective clients that you have identified could have value—so that is the right thing to do as well. You are going to change the way you do your initial process as a result of what we talk about next week. CALLER: The last time I spoke with him on the phone, I thought we had an agreement—he said, yes, do this, so I took it as an agreement and I haven’t heard back from him. DAN: Probably has to do with a lot of things like how you got him in the first place, with no deadline in which the agreement becomes null and void. This is probably more a positioning issue than anything else. The other thing I will say is that you become embolden with deal (?) and it becomes very important to set in motion enough things so that you have 20-30 of these not 2, because it is sort of the equivalent to –when my step daughter had a kid, the kid burped and everyone was in the room to check on it and they rushed it off to the doctor; by the time she had her third kid, the kid pretty much has to set fire to the living room before anyone pays much attention. When you only have 2-3 prospects, the energy is wrong and you pay too much attention to one of them and worry about them—if you have 20 it’s different. Most consultants—I put copywriters in the group—don’t set in motion a lot deals, they work to get one and then they do the work and then they have none and they start looking for them and get another one—as opposed to having a constant system of 20-30 things to generate business, working all the time so that the pipeline is full. We’ll talk about that on the next call too. CALLER: How do I find liability insurance? DAN: Any halfway decent property and casualty guy can write it. It’s nothing unordinary, there a number of carriers that provide it so any independent insurance agent can write it. It is possible that your regular property casualty guy can do it. Most insurance guys are so bad at their business that they never bother to see what kind of business you’re in to recommend it. Like all insurance, it has 500 weasel clauses and if there is ever a problem, they will do their damnedest not to pay off on it. But, it is one piece and it’s very inexpensive—you can literally buy it by the million dollars. It is designed to




protect you against liability suits based upon the advice that you dispensed or the work product that you have delivered. CALLER: With my existing clients that I am charging fees for my projects, what is a savvy way to now start introducing royalties without pissing them off? DAN: There is no good answer to that question. There is no law on the planet that says you can’t grandfather a client and change the policy to the next new one. That is probably what you will wind up doing because you have to be ok with losing the ones you’ve got in order to make the switch. The first thing to do is to reengineer what you are doing for every here on out. Then consider selectively switching over the clients you have starting with the ones you care least about or, you simply do it and write a hell of a sales letter – which hopefully you are capable of doing—about why this is better but necessary. One of the selling points about it is that you are now in the game. So as opposed to delivering x and getting x, you’re now going home and not sweating it. You are now in the game. I will tweak it as long as they are testing, I will modify when results warrant—if the results start to slip, I will tweak that piece in order to extend its life. Periodically, I will discuss what’s going on, what the results are, what we might do to test it against our own control. This puts you in the game. You also want to position it as an alternative to fee increases. It is the lesser of the bad news. The time has come where I have to substantially raise my fees and I can raise the fees or I could go to a formula that is fairer to the client because it keeps the fee at a modest and affordable level-- project by project--and then has me getting my profit from success, the same way you do. You make it appear to be a more reasonable approach. For many clients, it is because whatever 000s you want to use—for example, if we took my fee and I didn’t charge a royalty, I charge 3 times the fee. That would literally bar some people from ever using me, where now they can because the way to get in the game is not prohibitive. The rest of the money they are paying me is out of money that they are making. If I make you a million, how happy are you to give me 500k of it? Royalty agreements and percentage above base agreements are not that hard for people to swallow because it is money they don’t have. They don’t think a lot about it at the time that they are doing it. That’s another way to go back to your old clients is to do a percentage above base arrangement. Lorrie, I think we can squeeze in one more if you want. LORRIE: That would be great if there is a short one out there. CALLER: You mentioned that with a royalty agreement you get permission to go in and audit, are some of the smaller businesses be nervous about it? Are there any alternative ways to –have you actually ever had to go in and audit?




DAN: I have never had to do it; I’ve had to threaten it. If somebody was nervous about that clause, I’d be gone in a hot second. You have nothing to fear if you are going to be honest. Quite frankly, it is less onerous for a small business than it is for a large business. I have never actually had them balk at this. This has never been a discussion. LORRIE: We are at the end of the call, I will be sending out messages to you all about what to do next, about our next call, where to go. And you have till 3PM to take advantage of Dan's offer—thank you Dan. A $600 savings is very cool. Thank you for sharing your amazing information very honored to have you here. DAN: Next week we will spend all of our time on where they are and how to get them. LORRIE: If anyone has any feedback go ahead and e-mail it to me I will get what I can off to Dan if it is pertinent.

Documents

Dan Kennedy’s Insider’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of ... files/Dan Kennedy CLASS ONE.pdf · The value of an ad or sales letter, especially one with evergreen that has long life