Dear Marketing Professional,

ONE magic bullet determines whether you win or lose most business & financial battles.

IT took me from wannabe entrepreneur (desperate guy whose wife was shuffling credit card bills) to serial entrepreneur and consultant who has catalyzed the success of many people now worth tens (even hundreds) of millions and globally-influential author and thought leader in multiple fields.

IT is the Ultimate Life Hack.

If you’re armed & equipped, IT will work for you every single day of your life.

If not… IT will be used against you. Every single day of your life.

Let my own story serve as a warning:

My own desperation flotation rescue device was MLM. (For you maybe it’s copywriting or ad agency media buying or affiliate marketing. Or crypto or the trendiest hot entrepreneurial buzz.)

My wife and I were 27. Our baby girl Tannah was a year old. We were attending yet-another-motivational-rah-rah business rally in Oklahoma City, a 14-hour drive from our 2-bedroom brick bungalow in Chicago.

A cover band was playing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” In a romantic moment that was rare in our frenetic struggle to exist, Laura and I were dancing together next to the stage.

I smiled at her. She looked up at me and whispered, not in an accusing or demeaning way:

“Sorry, Perry, I’m struggling with cognitive dissonance right now.”

TRANSLATION: “I’m enjoying the band, but this ‘thing’ we’ve been doing has NOT BEEN working, and it still isn’t working NOW.”

Back at home, on the rare occasions I was around to play with my little girl, she would chortle and giggle when I spun her around my head and blow mouth-farts on her neck (her leche-nourished baby skin smelled so sweet)…

I was a sales rep from 7am-6pm with a 6pm-11pm side hustle nights and weekends. Thrilled as I was to be a brand new dad, I was barely seeing my tiny family.

MamaLaura had quit her legal secretary job 18 months before. I’d been laid off from engineering and taken a commission sales job. At 27 a few may feel invincible. But my stress was starting to bleed through the cracks.

I was waking each morning with sheets and pillow drenched in sweat.

I paid my doctor a visit. He said, “Perry, you have stress-induced mononucleosis. You’re pushing yourself too hard. You need to slow down.”

I had NO idea how… so I redoubled my efforts.

Laura would plead with me: Perry, you’re missing out on Tannah’s childhood, and those are days you can never recall. I knew she was right… but the noose around my neck was tightening.

I saw no other option, so I ran harder. We slid $1000 deeper in debt every month. The “zero interest balance transfer” credit card offers stopped coming.

I repeated mantras to myself in the mirror:

…and my cheeky affirmations tumbled to the floor along with the unpaid credit card bills.

My 13-year-old Toyota Corolla was patched together with Bondo, plastic hubcaps from Wal-mart, and muffler tape. Laura hadn’t bought a new wardrobe in years.

I had been spending each day cold-calling a manufacturer’s directory, pushing in-the-flesh appointments with people who didn’t want to see me. I concocted every pick-up line you can imagine.

Cold-calling pro tip: you can call almost any company, say to the receptionist “Can I speak to Dave in engineering?” and she will patch you through, because everybody has an engineer named Dave.

I had nearly been fired from my job, but another guy in another department had quit at the same time so they gave me his job – production manager. A pure admin job that I h-a-t-e-d.

Have you ever been so discouraged, desperate, despairing and beaten down that you acquired an impenetrable, irrational, clownish optimism – presenting to others as though your exoskeleton is so stone-like that no setback, no rejection can crack it?

That armadillo-skinned, reality-repelling guy was me. Not only that, I was trying to convince my friends they should join me in my perilous journey.

Yet, on lunch breaks and idle moments, my gears were revving 10,000 RPM. I knew if I didn’t improve my situation FAST we were certain to land in very serious trouble.

I’ll never forget a meeting in Indianapolis. Pitching a business opportunity for the 473rd time. I was three hours from home, one restaurant table booked 5 hours straight.

One prospect whom I’d cold-called after another would show up, each in sequence. I was rather proud of myself. It was my sales assembly line. I always ordered soup and I could usually get out of there for under thirty bucks.

One perceptive prospect said, “So let me get this straight. You cold-called me with a sexy line about ‘interactive television’ but you’re really just recruiting me into a multi-level. Is that correct?”

I maintained my armadillo-skinned game-face. I had been trained to “hold my posture.” After he departed, I drove three hours in my rusty 1984 Toyota Tercel back to my neglected Chicago bungalow and crawled into bed.

My wife and daughter had been asleep for hours. Three hours later the sun would come up and I’d go at it again.

Different night… 

Later that year…

Indianapolis again.

I had driven down I-65 for a Rush concert. I watched as Neil, Alex and Geddy displayed their prowess and musical magic. I’d never seen one of their shows before. My dear wife had scraped together $30 to buy me that seat. It was a revelation.

Musically thrilling and inspiring beyond anything I’d ever witnessed. Much as I relished the experience, I remained the cult-programmed motivational tape robot. I scolded myself all the way home: “You know, Perry, you didn’t really earn this. You ought to feel ashamed of yourself for taking a night off. You should be giving presentations and hustling.”

You know that old saying in poker?

Likewise:

“It” is 80/20.

It is the single most powerful force in business. Period.

And it is either working FOR you or AGAINST you.

All the time. 24/7/365.

How many 80/20 mistakes in my story can you count so far?

I was fornicating with financial folly.

Living in sin, in perpetual violation of every single one of the Five Power Disqualifiers:

• Begging for appointments with LITERALLY “anyone who could fog a mirror”
• Selling to people who did not have the money 
• Selling to people who did not have a bleeding neck 
• Selling to people who didn’t buy into my Unique Selling Proposition
  [because I didn’t even have a USP!!!]
• Selling to people who didn’t have the ability to say YES 
• Selling stuff to people that did not fit their overall plans.*

* Even if the only thing you do with this letter is print out the 7 sentences above, tape them to your wall next to your desk and act on them every day… your life will be immeasurably better one year from today.

I was not “racking the shotgun.”

Not sourcing from qualified lists.

I was hawking look-alike commodity products supplied by people who were less committed than I was.

Sacrificing myself, my loyal wife and my friendships.

I was not selling from my unique Marketing DNA. Rather, I was bludgeoning, contorting and resenting myself for not sporting a shiny glad-handing Zig Ziglar sales personality. For not being a “closer.”

Working seven days a week. (Even though Laura argued and pleaded that the Guy who invented “sabbath” was probably smarter than me.)

We NEVER took vacations.

I slugged down contrived “pump you up” talks, even as I did my level best to crush every impulse of genuine authentic artistic inspiration.

Forking over 22% interest on the money I’d borrowed last year… and the year before.

The motivational speakers crowed: “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

When you’re pouring out optimism like pancake syrup, the syrup bottle eventually runs out.

One of the saddest things about that torturous, pitted and pock-marked gravel road is your trust receptors get burned out. You begin to question everything about humanity. Especially yourself, your judgment, and your very sanity.

You begin to suspect everyone is ripping you off. You become bitter, jaded and cynical.

As I began to get real with myself, I was forced to confess:

Almost everything I’ve been told about sales and marketing has been a half-truth.

Which means… everything I’ve been telling OTHER people has been a half-truth, too!

Remember that hot night in Oklahoma City, dancing in my white long-sleeved shirt and threadbare khaki pants with my cognitive-dissonant bride?

Fast forward six months. It’s January in an industrial park in Downers Grove, Illinois. Freezing cold with snow drifts outside.

It’s 7pm on a Tuesday night. I’m at work late, talking to my new boss Mike at my new job.

I’d just received the biggest sales commission check of my life. $1500.

First month in two years that our finances have not slipped backwards. Laura and I are wheezing sighs of relief. Like the sensation when you almost rear-end someone on the freeway but narrowly avoid catastrophe.

Elation. Gratitude. Because suddenly we’re not circling the drain anymore.

Mike is saying to me: “Perry, you’re a good sales guy. How do we make sure you stick around?”

He offered me stock options.

I committed to stick around and get the job done.

The next four years were a magic carpet ride. (However, do not think for a minute that it didn’t still require buckets of elbow grease, deft maneuvers, sweat and bailing wire, and crisscrossing the country with customer meetings and growing pains.)

It wasn’t pretty… but it was progress all the way. This culminated in our company getting sold to public company Lantronix for $18 million. My stock options hit pay dirt.

I didn’t yet realize it, but I was just starting to apply 80/20.

~

In MLM they had a time-honored tradition: “After you quit your job, send your ‘negative brother-in-law’ postcards from the beaches of the world. So you can prove to him what a dufus he is.”

I flipped the postcard tradition upside down.

When I traveled to China for the first time, I mailed my upline postcards from Hong Kong.

When I went to Africa, I sent them postcards from Johannesburg. (Joburg is hardly the poshest tourism spot you’ve ever seen… but they didn’t need to know that.)

When I visited the Middle East, I mailed them postcards from Dubai.

I wasn’t giving them the finger. Nor was I blaming them for serving up the pink koolaid. We remained friends.

But they weren’t going to Dubai. They were still in Kansas, drawing circles… going around in circles.

A point most certainly needed to be made. And I made it.

~

Joshua Boswell was a freelance consultant. He came to one of my 80/20 intensives, where he had an epiphany. This is the story as Joshua tells it:

~

One of the reasons Boswell continues to thrive is:

80/202 is carved on his wisdom teeth. If Joshua is on vacation in Mexico and you wake him from a deep sleep, he’ll mumble:

“Amigo, 4% of your clients generate 64% of your dinero. And 10% of your clients are draining your children’s piggy bank.”

If you’ve read 80/20 Sales & Marketing (even 2-3 times) but your grasp of the material is wobbly… if you have a hunch there’s far more to be mined than you’ve deposited in your bank account so far…

…not only are you right, there is a nearly bottomless well of 80/20 insights and profits to be extracted. 80/20 is like a “punch” in martial arts: A punch is a punch… but it’s not the same coming from a yellow belt as from a black belt.

And if you desire to, like Joshua Boswell, attain respect as the “rainmaker” who turns flailing businesses around, accelerates successful businesses into titans…

If you wish to deliver unprecedented traction and “message to market match” to your clients, their sales strategies and marketing funnels…

Know this:

• There are legions of Google consultants, Facebook agencies and YouTube experts (both posers and legit players)
• There are train car loads of copywriters, funnel jockeys and marketing wizards
• LinkedIn in-mail boxes ‘round the globe are literally crawling with offers to “fix your business,” “bring you more leads,” “close more sales” and work monetary miracles…

…Yet not one person in 500 actually EXECUTES 80/20 the way Joshua, or any of my top estudiantes APPLY it. It really is the key to the kingdom. Because when you understand how to IMPLEMENT, discharge and accomplish 80/20 anytime, anywhere, to any situation…

…It becomes nearly impossible to back you into a corner or toss you a problem you can’t solve.

In fact I will make you a promise: