Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, we have a very special episode that I'm excited to share.
One of the great joys in my life is my relationship with Jay Abraham. Jay and I have amazing, long conversations about marketing, philosophy, what's going on in the world, and this week I got to record one of these conversations for you.
It's a great opportunity for you to listen in to the ideas we talk about, and we also talk about something special Jay is doing with Tony Robbins tomorrow!
So this Saturday, Jay and Tony Robbins are holding a marathon event called 'Lock In 2021'. They do these amazing hot seat events where Jay gets to spend a day with Tony Robbins and his platinum group. These are people from all over the world, his highest level masterminds, and all they do is tag team back and forth doing Q&A hot seats, answering questions, helping strategize or solve challenges for these business owners.
Jay and Tony have edited 12 hours of the best of these sessions into a marathon session they're going to be hosting tomorrow.
This has my highest recommendation. I'm not an affiliate or anything like that. I want you to experience how they do it because our podcast is all about that same approach. It's essentially a hot seat every week we share and apply the 8-Profit activators.
So, check it out at Lock In 2021, and in the meantime, listen to my conversation with Jay.
Show Links:
ProfitActivatorScore.com
BreakthroughDNA.com
Want to be a guest on the show? Simply follow the 'Be a Guest' link on the left & I'll be in touch.
Download a free copy of the Breakthrough DNA book all about the 8 Profit Activators we talk about here on More Cheese, Less Whiskers...
Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 215
Dean: Jay.
Jay: I am here. Let me just get to my quiet place. Can I tell you that I had one of the most interesting conversations with Werner Erhard a couple of years ago?
Dean: No, tell me.
Jay: So, this guy that I have helped Barry Margolin, the Chinese energy doctor used to help him when he ran AS, and we were doing … This is very interesting. We were doing a discussion with Barry because Barry is very sharp. He's got a brilliant methodology, which is very powerful, but we were doing a discussion about what it would take for Barry to be more performance emancipated, to be able to literally go out there and be more connected to his audience. And I said, "Who, if you could emulate anyone, anyone would it be?" And he said, "Werner." And I said, "Well, you supposedly helped him a lot. Would he allow me to interview him and ask him what it was that makes or made him so engaging, powerful, compelling, authentic, mesmerizing and evocative on the stage?"
And so he set up a call and I did about an hour interview. It was very fascinating. Very, very fascinating. And the guy was very interesting because he had a very unique … I've always believed … And I know this is helpful for you to understand me. When I was at my public speaking peak, I would get on stage, Dean, and I would see the audience as pure innocent little children with curiosity and hopefulness and just total globs of wonderfully moldable clay. And when Barry and I were talking, he was so obsessed with the hurts and the sadness and the suffering. And when we talked to Werner, he said, "Look, I see the possibilities of their magnificence." But he had a very interesting distinction. He said, "I have no sympathy, but I have great compassion."
Dean: That's interesting.
Jay: - but I have great compassion for what they can be." And he said … It was very interesting. He said, "Those people are trying to make themselves the big factory." He said, "All I want to do is be the …" He used a really interesting phrase. He said, "I don't want it to be about me. I want it to be that they achieved this for themselves using either programs or the knowledge that I made available." But he says, "I don't want myself to be this …" It was very interesting and very unique distinction. The guy is very articulate. I don't know if he's very polarized in figure. I think he's still alive, but it's just really interesting.
Dean: I think that's great. This whole, the way that you let your curiosity kind of drive everything, it's always fascinating to me, that you just always are willing to pursue anything and go down whatever your curiosity allows. I enjoy that about you.
Jay: I'll tell you what, and if you want to talk about that for any reason, I believe that hopeless curiosity interpreted and the kids interpreted Dean because I think that … Very, very fascinating. I think that most people do not know how to connect what they are experiencing from outside their worldview and interpret what it can mean modified, adapted, adopted, and applied to their life or their business or their reality. I was listening to something on the news and it said … Let me see if I can … I wrote it down, hold on. It was really interesting. Let me see if I have it here. It was something to the effect of, do you want … It was, do you want your beliefs to be confirmed or challenged? That's not the right word. It was a different word than challenged.
And I was very fascinated because most people, I don't think really want to be challenged, even though that's … And challenged, not just in the gauntlet phrase, but challenge in term of flipping their worldview.
Dean: Well, you and I talked about that a lot, that one of the things we take, I want people to challenge my assumptions or challenge my results. I want to take the scientific method in everything and know what the truth is. We want a better way, if there's a better way for everything. It's interesting.
Jay: I think most people they delude themselves. Their veneer rhetoric says they want that, but they have great difficulty exploring and embracing it, I think.
Dean: Well, this is, I tell you, I am super excited that we're going to share with everybody today because this is something … One of the great joys that I have is having these long, amazing conversations with you that are just you and I. And so this is a fun thing that we can let people kind of listen in through a lot of these conversations. You can probably tell for anybody listening that the conversations, this is exactly how it goes. We almost start the conversation in mid-conversation. Because I look at everything we've been talking about for all this time is one extended conversation that we kind of pick up right where we left off.
Jay: I agree. It's just a continuation.
Dean: And -.
Jay: You're right.
Dean: But I sent you a text today before we talked that was a picture of the cover of one of my most prized possessions, which is the original Abraham Method, How to Multiply Your Business Results While Reducing Your Time, Risk and Effort. And it's for … Let me describe it for people. It's about, I would say a 36 page, 11 by 17 folded into a booklet that's a magazine style. But when I got this, Jay, the thing that really struck me about it is the visceral impact of the cover of this, that it's a very thick, beautiful blue, almost like linenie parchment paper card stock with gold leaf inlay on the cover. And it just looks and feels like this is important information. And 30 years ago, when I think about that, almost 30 years ago, 1991 or 1992, almost 30 years ago was when this journey started for me, looking back at discovering direct response.
And I was thinking, I was telling my girlfriend today as I was getting ready to come in here to record that, 30 years ago one of my favorite ways to pass a Sunday afternoon was to go to the Delta Hotel in Toronto, where I was, and they had a lobby with a real fireplace. And it was just a really comfortable living room type of area there, and I would go, and I would sit and read magazines and read books and drink hot chocolate and just read every word of something like this, and reading success magazine and going deep into my lifelong obsession now with marketing. And I remember every little thing in this book, I've probably read this 50 times, going through and highlighting and doing all these things. But what I want to share with you as some of the things that these lessons, as I look back at them now have created as frameworks for me.
And so, it's so amazing how putting something together like this, you never know what kind of impact you're going to have, but this looked like something that people should revere and save. Discover what's disposable. Tell me about that. What was your thought around that? Because you know that it's amazingly visceral the feeling that you get about it.
Jay: That's how it is. Well, you have to understand that at that point in time, I was on an ideological mission and a crusade. I believed that I had perspective, knowledge, and not just understanding, but the ability to be a catalyst to be able to connect and bridge for people understanding. But I also because I've made a lot of money with this knowledge for others and for myself, I demanded philosophically that they revere it for what it was worth. And we were charging back then 15 and $20,000 per person, which was a lot in '91. And I wanted every component to have the reverence and the import that I thought the knowledge that was contained there in deserved. And so we tried to create a very powerful perspective image, whatever you want to call it, that really translated to the recipient.
This is exceptionally valuable. This is something that commands and deserves your fullest attention, understanding and embrace. But I mean, I think that's because we had … There were 400 page books that were bound the same way. When we did those programs we were spending a dollar and a half a piece to make massive specialty chocolate chip cookies that we gave at the breaks. We wanted everything about the experience to be incomparable, because there was no referential basis that anybody could say, "Well, this is like this." Or, "This is like that." Because we wanted the entirety of the experiential dynamic to shift them to be very focused on what was going on. Would that make sense?
Dean: I love that. Yeah. I look back, so one of the things that I was introduced to from this Abraham Method was this idea of the concentric circles that you laid out with the coin or the gold DOP company that starting out, even though your end goal was to get people who would buy $50,000 or more worth of gold you started out only offering a gold coin for $19 or a silver coin. That would be-
Jay: That was one of our inventions, but you're right. We would take 19 and we'd get them to maybe a few thousand. And then we would get from a few thousand to five or 10 from tens of this and that. And it was a very progressive and a very … It was just a continuum. But I learned that from masters and it was fascinating that back then there were no funnels. There was nobody that was talking about LT. None of that was actually in place back then, Dean.
Dean: When you'd look at some … Up until 1991 was most of your involvement was as a practitioner then, is that right?
Jay: Yeah.
Dean: So you were actually like doing things not … You were doing deals and doing ventures and all of that. And then you started teaching in the '90s.
Jay: The story is very worth telling, only because it's ironic and it's quite … You know the movie, The Accidental Tourist. I became the accidental seminar presenter. Here's the story in a nutshell. For 10 years prior to '91, I was making an enormous amount of money for the time by looking at businesses that were underperforming based on this really basic understanding of measurable, scientific marketing, advertising, human nature just psychology that I had possessed through all this experience. And I was getting a share of all the upside that I could create. We were making millions and millions of dollars. And then very abruptly, I got a lot of, I would say, that I had a lot of hubris that I got too arrogant and too indulgent for my own good. And I went through a massive, very expensive divorce and I didn't work for two years.
And when I started I had many tens of millions of when I got done with all the attorneys and the transfer of wealth from me to my ex wife, I owed millions of dollars and I wanted to get back into the ring, but I hadn't for two years. And I thought it'd be really cool to do one seminar for an audacious price that could be promoted by some of the companies that I had made hundreds of millions of dollars each for, and that I thought maybe I'd get 10 or 15 people at $15,000. And it would force me to spend time and be paid to think through what had made me great when I did it very intuitively and automatically. And because I had so many people I've made money for, and they were very willing to sign very, very aggressive endorsement letters. The first one we did brought 350 people at 15,000.
I was shocked, but I accidentally got thrust into the seminar.
Dean: All of a sudden.
Jay: And then I started sharing what I'd done sort of discreetly and privately for clients.
Dean: That's so great. And that's really what the Abraham Method was kind of an introduction to some of the ideas that you had worked on. Some of the things you had done. I've always loved to hear all the stories. I remember hearing about-
Jay: I was very blessed. I was very blessed. I was exposed to some … I'm the combination and the integration of being benefited mentored by so many men and women who were so much brighter, more evolved, and they were willing to share with me distinctions, distillations of their belief systems, lessons. And I soaked it up. I just soaked it up.
Dean: I look at, and now everything in your mental construct here, everything layering on top of it. And it's amazing how, when there's an underlying idea, a principle that you can use again and again and again in other businesses. I think that's one of the fascinating things that makes you such a quick diagnostician of a business to be able to see what the actual issue is, and all the things that you can think of that apply to it.
Jay: I think that … I'm very proud of the distinctions I made and I keep adding, but I made some really … Just clinically, not arrogantly, when I was younger and probably one of the biggest was funneled vision versus tunnel vision. And it was quite accidentally. Here's the backstory because it's very simple. When I got started in life and in business life, I was 18. I got married at 18, had two children by 20, no education. I had the needs of somebody 40, nobody cared. Nobody would give me a good salary. The only people that would give me any opportunity were crazy entrepreneurs who would not give me a dime, but would give me a phone or say, you can have a piece of you sort of eat what you kill. And I jumped around, Dean, from not job to job, but industry to industry sometimes three or four at a time, because I wasn't on a salary. Nobody cared.
And after about 10, I realized that people in one industry didn't have a clue how people in another industry thought, didn't do the same strategy, business model, access vehicle, lead generating, conversion, positioning, competitive, revenue. Nothing. And I was able to-
Dean: What's your first aha of that? Do you remember when you thought to yourself, "Huh, that's something that I could use here."
Jay: When I did Icy Hot, the owner taught me lifetime value. He showed me that every time 10 people spent $3, the first time eight of them were worth $50 a year in profit thereafter forever. And that was profound to me. It was that piece of understanding. I was able to go crazy everywhere else.
Dean: Now tell the Icy Hot story because this is a really interesting thing. And I'm going to share with you some ways that I've used that exact principle, because I learned it from you. So I want to hear it.
Jay: I'd be happy too. It's older. So Icy Hot is pretty well known in North America. It's probably the top selling arthritic bomb, glob of gelatinous goop that treats temporarily arthritis bursitis.
Dean: But it was always.
Jay: No, no, no. I worked years and years ago for a man whose business was buying dead or dying old line mail order companies and consolidating them and flipping the assets. He was very smart. He would buy a business that was third and fourth generation where they'd run it in the ground. He would buy it on a very unique basis where he could consolidate everything, because he had a huge company that made all kinds of different chemical driven products. He was in the saddlery business, the automotive business, the pest control business, the patent medicine business. But he was very brilliant. He taught me a bunch of things. When he closed the deal. Most of these fourth generation families blended so low into the grand, they had no idea what their machinery was worth or even the facility.
He would take it on. He had pre-sold everything before close, where he made money at clothes. So they were paying him to buy the business. That was the first lesson. But he would buy a lot of them in one of them that he bought, they were basically buying just to consolidate was this company that made the product Icy Hot. And he was going to kill it. But he started looking at two things, the lifetime buying history of the buyers because the company wasn't generating any new. But they were buying over and over and over for years and years. And he saw that it'd be enriched just to give you the summary. Every time they got 10 people to buy a jar at $3, eight of them would buy over and over and over again, literally added value until somebody either came up with a cure for arthritis or they died.
Plus upon analysis, half of them bought at least one other product in the line. Plus upon analysis half again would buy twice a year in bulk. But the bottom line was those eight or where it's $50 a piece profit every year. With that he had no marketing allocation, but he got me excited about contacting all kinds of media outlets. Radio, TV, magazines, newspapers, people in ad packages, going to geriatrics and package inserts and persuading them whenever they had available access to let us use their unsold advertising or stick something in their baggage's promoting Icy Hot. And he would let them keep 100% of the first $3 sale. It cost us back then it was so cheap to make a product, put it in a package, send it out, buck a postage rate, 55 cents in the mail.
We were selling it for $3. So there was 2.45 in real profit, but our hard costs was 50 and five cents. We went to all the media and we said, "If you will do this for us, sell our product …" We gave them ads, we gave them in-search, we gave them copy. "Whenever you've got unsold ads, promote ads you can keep not only all the $3, but we'll pay you 45 cents on top, 115%." No one had ever done that. And we said, "All we care about is get us the buyer name right away so we can get the product out to them so we can get the back-end." Nobody had ever done that. It was really interesting. In a year we went from no exposure to over 1000 different media sources promoting Icy Hot all the time, all the time. And what happened was none of them were exceptionally massively successful. Although occasionally you did a grand slam.
But on average, every day, each one would be generating us three to five sales. So three to five times 1000 new buyers every year, 80% worth $50 a year in profit. At the end of about a year, two things happened, really fascinating. Pardon me. Number one, we had over half a million buyers buying over and over again. Number two, we had gotten on an adjusted basis by today's dollar equivalent to $250 million of free exposure for our then mail order company. And the exposure was so expansive that people started going to the grocery stores, to their drug stores asking for the product and it accidentally unintentionally forged what is called retail distribution. Meaning it went from a mail order product to a consumer distributed product.
Now, today that isn't as valuable as being a huge internet product. But then the difference between a mail order company and a consumer product, you can put a zero on the end of the value of that business. And at the end of about 15 months, it was sold for $60 million. That's the first phenomenon. I think he bought it for something like 100 grand. Now, that's not even the fascination. This is shows rigidity of mindset. A very limited paradigm. The company that bought it was a pharmaceutical company that then was based in Chicago. All they understood, Dean, was consumer product and retail distribution. They did not want the 500,000 buyer name. They did not want the over 1000 entity distribution chain, all the re the radio, TV, newspaper, magazines.
All they wanted was the brand and the retail. We got to go right back and we had one prohibition, analgesic stuff in stubborn arthritis that was a cream or an ointment or a SAB. Everything else in the genre we were free to do, and we went right back and did it again.
Dean: Wow.
Jay: That's an interesting story. Isn't it?
Dean: Well, that's amazing. And so, looking back now, so I heard that story in 1991 or '92, whenever it was, and that has stuck with me as a model, a mental model that we can use, an understanding that lifetime value is more important to know than just your short term cost of acquisition. And I've used that something to tell you how tale of two of the people in my life here. So I have a massage therapist, where I go and get massages quite regularly. And so I think if you average it out, I probably get three massages a month. And so we're talking about maybe probably a four or so $1000 client to a massage therapist.
And I was sharing this idea as a way of getting people … What I was suggesting to her was one of the things, was Groupon as a way of acquiring new customers, where they do all of the promotion, all of the stuff, and you are doing your offering to do an initial massage for somebody, for a percentage, a fraction of what it would normally be. And she was very reluctant, very like … Because I'm not going to give it away. Those are all the things not realizing that she's really good and that most of the people that come once continue to come again and again. And so she kind of shied away from the idea. My girlfriend who owns a studio called Amazing Brows and Lashes here in Winter Haven immediately saw the idea.
She's got products like services, where they do microblading for eyebrows and all these expensive facial things that they do that can be hundreds of dollars, $500 for a microblading. One of the things that they do are eyelash lift, which is about an $80 procedure, and takes about 30 to 40 minutes to do. She's got girls in her studio who do it. But Groupon, they do it on Groupon as a thing and generate lots of hundreds of people come to do the eyelash lift, but she gets the customer who now sees the studio. She's turned invisible prospects into visible clients. People who have come to your place who have done business with you, who know where you are. See all of the other things and some amazing percentage of the people who come for an eyelash lift will progress to other things and get eyebrow microblading or their lips done, or facials, or all of these things.
She's developed an ongoing clientele from that by basically doing the lash lift at breakeven. Because by the time she pays the technician, who's doing it's zero profit basically. But she doesn't have any cost of acquiring them. Groupon is doing all of the email to expose that out to people. And I've tried to share that with people, in terms of, of thinking past the initial interview. And most people, if they sell something for a $100, they don't want to spend more than $50 to acquire a new customer for that. Even though when that person buys the 100, they're going to potentially buy it forever. So understanding lifetime value has been amazingly useful for me as an idea. And I think that's something so many different ways that that applies.
Jay: I'll tell you something very interesting. There's a lot of different things here. Here's a couple of stories like that are very fascinating. We've taken it. I learned that early, and when I first learned it, admittedly, I only saw it direct application. But that the wonderment of all the exposure to all the different diverse industries I've been privileged to encounter gave me the ability to take it to a sublime. So we've had people take a similar situation. We've gone to people let's take … We've done it for chiropractors and any kind of professional that was legally able to do it. If they have under utilized capacity, we'd say, "Go to an influencer, tell that influencer that you want to buy him or a dollar denominated. At $2,000 of your services over a period of time. And the only stipulation you have is two things."
They treated as if they paid for it. If they schedule it, they use it. And if they get a fabulous outcome, they agree that when the situation arises, which it will people in their aura, in their business, in their social or our professional sphere, they will tell them about you. And we've turned enormous amount of under-utilized capacity. So they got three hours they're not using. You're better off having somebody there who has influence over 100 people than you are, nobody's sitting around waiting. And there's a … I guess in the last couple of years I've had people influenced me with taking the belief system higher. But think about this. We call it the difference between being a 2D and 3D thinker. And this is very interesting. It's the difference between thinking like a limited business person, or thinking like a private equity firm.
Most entrepreneurs or business owners, and we can go into the difference between just a proprietor and an entrepreneur. But most of them think in terms of 2D. Revenue minus expenses equals profit. And private equity firm and a very astute like-minded entrepreneur thinks 3D. They think in terms of also yield. What is that effort? What is that asset? That asset is that buyer, the relationship. The initial interaction you've had and the conveyance of value that you have provided. What is that going to produce on an ongoing basis over time in terms of ROI, in terms of yield. It's very more elevated concept, a little esoteric, but very powerful.
Dean: That's something when you look at that excess capacity, that is a big, big concept. And even more so now. The interesting thing is the difference between 1991 and 2021 is that there's so much that can happen in the cloud now that there's like gravity. I remember, I think I shared that in a conversation with you, how I remember reading Claude Hopkins and reading about Robert Collier and all these guys and thinking how lucky they were that they were sending letters for a penny. I thought, "Man, if I'm going to send letters for a penny, I'd be rich." And now here we are able to send any digital communications for free to millions of people. It's amazing. But this concept of excess capacity … Did I share with you what happened with Mr. Beast recently?
Jay: No.
Dean: Do you know who Mr. Beast is?
Jay: I do not.
Dean: He's one of the top YouTubers right now. He's got 40 plus million subscribers to YouTube, and video that he puts out gets 40 to 50 million viewers on eyeballs watching the videos. Now on December 23rd what Mr. Beast did was he launched 300 Mr. Beast burger restaurants on one day in 300 markets. And the way that he did this, the only way that you could possibly do it was he found independent restaurants in 300 local markets with excess capacity. And he partnered with them to prepare his menu. He makes cheeseburgers and chicken tender sandwiches and chicken sandwich and French fries. And that's it, a very basic menu, and all under the Mr. Beast burger brand. But it's only available through Grubhub and Uber Eats and Seamless and DoorDash. All the online through delivery services.
So, an independent restaurant who might be struggling right now and has excess capacity in their kitchen can prepare in addition to whatever they're doing Mr. Beast's menu and send it out the back door through the delivery services. And he opened 300 of them in one day. You start to see this … This is that VCR formula that I was sharing with you a couple of weeks ago, that the vision plus capabilities multiplied by reach. And so capabilities are where you find these excess capacity. So not only capability, but excess capacity of capability is an even more valuable asset that you have access to.
Jay: That's fascinating.
Dean: It really is. Isn't it? If you're seeing it now happening all the way along. It's how Kylie Jenner became a billionaire. She had the vision to make a cosmetics line and she partnered with Seed Labs there in LA, who make all of the cosmetics, basically private label manufacturer. And they have the capability to manufacture, distribute customer service. All of the stuff involved in making and delivering and serving the people who buy their cosmetics. And then you multiply it by Kylie Jenner's social media reach of 150 million people. And it's made in heaven. Kylie Jenner, she sold 51% of her company, her less than three year old company, 51% of it to Coty for $600 billion. And that-
Jay: And I heard she only had about 30 employees.
Dean: Seven people. So you think all they're doing is coming up with the vision of, what do we want to make? What colors are we going to do? What we're going to name them? Do all the creative stuff. And then immediately Seed labs to make the stuff and then get the word out to her 150 million people. And there you go. Now, Seed Labs is a great … What they do is they partner with influencers or people like that. They do all the behind the scenes stuff, but they know enough to partner with people who've got vision and reach.
Jay: That's fabulous. That's brilliant.
Dean: It really is. So you start to see like, thinking like that from a modern day situation, that's really where you must be going like crazy seeing all the opportunities like this now in the digital world, the rules or the scales are much different.
Jay: That's fascinating. And the thing about it is, there's another dimension to it. And that is the cost of creating value incrementally is zero. In other words, you have a $5,000, $10,000, a $500, $50 product or service above and beyond a bond breakeven it cost you incrementally digitally nothing. You can give it away. You can buy it for somebody, you can package it. You can make it a bonus. You've got so much latitude.
Dean: That's one of my favorite things is to couple excess capacity with a referral program, or a wind back program as well. But you look at the, especially if it's your incremental cost is zero or low. You've got so much opportunity that one of the things I've found is gift of friend is so much better than refer a friend, that we all want to feel like we're getting the glory of the gift that we're giving to our friends, rather than us selling somebody on doing something, it's so much more rewarding to give somebody a gift of that. It's an empowering thing.
Jay: No, no. Well the same thing. I have a very decisively different belief. And I talked about this years ago at a big event, but I'll tell you, this is fascinating. I believe that today, the word free has gotten marginalized. Still words. But I think the perception of value in free is very low. I think that a semantic change, meaning changing the perception and saying, "We will buy you this," changes very, very significantly the perception of value. And one more dimension. I think today, people miss the boat, Dean, by not explicitly expressing why you're doing it, and what reciprocal action you either want are asking or hope the recipient of you buying them this product or service experience will take once if an after it has a successful outcome for them.
Dean: I think that's … I agree with you putting the dollar amount on it. One of the things that we've done, I think that's true for anything, if you can put a real monetary value on something, Luba with her amazing browse, one of the way we built up her list was offering on Facebook $100 gift card that was her grand opening $100 gift card offer where we ran ads on Facebook within a 10 mile radius of her studio to women, and offered them a $100 gift card for microblading, which was essentially a 20% off certificate. That's really what it was, because it's $100 dollars on a $500 thing is 20%. But the perception of $100 is a very different thing. Like often when people are running percentage off offers, they're doing it to stimulate activity now.
So typically that's coupled with 20% off until January 30th. So you've got to spur you into action now. And when you're building a business like that, there's, if somebody is not ready right now to get their eyebrows microbladed, there's no need for them to respond to the ad. But we know that this is an aspirational thing, and $100 dollars gift card allows somebody to put their intention for getting microblading in their hope chest, basically, but identify themselves as someone who is interested in microblading. And so we were able to build that list very quickly because it only costs us a $1.50 to give those gift card. Like we were getting the leads for about $1.50 each. It costs us %1.50 to give someone $100 gift cards.
Jay: Wow.
Dean: So for $3,000 we built a list of 2000 ladies who all live right in the radius of the studio. And that's been the foundation of our business, because every week now we email those ladies every week and offer them all the services and all the things that they do at the studio. So it's been the asset, the capital investment of generating that list.
Jay: That's amazing. A funny question. Did you take that process anywhere else?
Dean: Yes. So now I use it all the time. This is one of the things that I love about experimenting with all kinds of different businesses, even as gifting. I think I mentioned to you that I do work with the Mosquito Authority. And one of the things that again is the most useful, valuable thing is excess capacity of the availability to do a service for someone. Now, this is as close to magic as you can get in a service. You've got mosquitoes and they come, they treat your yard and you have no mosquitoes. And it's transformational in your backyard. A courtyard that we walked through to get to my front entrance. And it would be in the evening on our glass door, on the front of my house, and in the evenings, if the light was on inside all the mosquitoes … I live in Florida.
So lots of mosquitoes ever, they would be all up on the front door and the game would be, we need to open the door, get in the house really quick and close the door to let the minimum number of mosquitoes in the house. And when they come, they treat the whole courtyard, the whole yard. And Jay, I can leave my front door wide open, and there are no mosquitoes anywhere. It's magic.
Jay: That's impressive.
Dean: So once people experience that though they then don't ever want to be without it. So instead of … This has been one of the big beliefs that I've cemented here, that I always say, sometimes it's less expensive to get the result for somebody than it is to convince them to give you money to get the result. And that's-
Jay: That's quite profound. That's a very distinctive but a very powerful insight. And everyone in your world listening should really think about this many times, because it has direct or indirect applicability to almost anybody.
Dean: And you start to think about that now it's like there's zero friction in somebody who's skeptical about whether you can actually get rid of the mosquitoes, because there's been lots of things that make promises. Like everybody has tried citronella candles, and everybody has tried the bug zappers, and everybody has tried the intermittent sprays that try and get rid of them and the ultrasound, and all that stuff. But none of them work. And so to have this as truly something different that really gets the result it's so much better because when people just like you talked about the Icy Hot people who get the service over 80% of the people who are this year, clients come back next year and the year after that. And the year after that.
So the retention and lifetime value of a client is so much more sort of to give somebody the free experience first is an amazing thing. Now, one of the ways that you can look at multiplying people is as soon as people have that experience and sign up to become a new client, we give them golden tickets to give to their friends so that wherever they go, they can be mosquito free. And it's like-
Jay: I love it.
Dean: It's a way of spreading one at a time. But that's using excess capacity and an understanding of lifetime value to look at that as, it's much less expensive to take on the incremental cost of delivering a treatment to somebody.
Jay: You're laying out for everybody a safe, but a very, very, very high leverage path to really growing their business long-term. And most people don't realize … It's very fascinating. They're playing unknowingly, usually a very short term game when in fact real business, if you're not just a promoter, that's very tentative, real business is a long-term game.
Dean: That's the thing, that they look at. So most of the time when business owners are looking at they're looking at the profit on the initial transactions that they have, and they don't think they can advertise. They want to keep their advertising costs below what that one transaction is. And so it's amazingly shortsighted how they end up thinking.
Jay: If you think about it reflectively, how much more income security, certainty, stress reduction, wealth creation, asset accumulation do business owners achieve as they thought more like this?
Dean: That's what I love. Like the whole concept behind the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast is each week I bring on a new business owner and we just talk about their business. And so I do it so that people can see how these are cross principles that you can apply in so many different ways. And it's fascinating to see, I find it very stimulating to apply my framework to lots of different businesses to look and see how do the eight profit activators apply to these businesses. And I know you do, and to have done a lot of Hot Seats like that, and that's what I really wanted to have you on to talk about that, because I know you're doing a big marathon of that with Tony Robbins coming up. But maybe I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and approaches to Hot Seats, and then maybe what you're doing with Tony.
Jay: That's great. And wait, just one second. Because where I am a bunch of army helicopters just flew by. They just flew by and I just did talk over them. So I'll tell you this historically, and very respectfully. I was doing Hot Seats I think probably before most people maybe many, maybe close to everybody. We were doing them back in the late '80s. But I've evolved it to a point where I become, I think because I've been able to experience over 1000 industries and been able to look at hundreds and hundreds of different marketing approaches, strategy, disciplines, business models, etcetera. We can usually look at a situation and in a very compressed and a very, very elegant, but efficient way, isolate what I will call the biggest log jam within that business that needs to be really addressed.
Most people don't … It's very much I can deem to the adage about people. So instead of trying to get the cause solved, they're really trying to solve the symptom, and I try to figure out what the hell is the cause. When we do Hot Seats we respectfully, but ruthlessly demand that the entrepreneur participating in the hot seat be able to articulate exactly precisely what the big issue is, why that issue is important and what the implication of that issue currently being a problem or a frustration, including an underperforming or untappable opportunity is and what it would mean as they achieved it. So we have clarity that they're really in alignment with their highest and best focus. And then we divide and conquer, but I've been doing it.
We've done it for $25,000 through translation in China. We've done for $50,000 in groups for high-end people. And then what we're doing now, which is really interesting is every year for the last five or six years, Tony Robbins and I have done together what I would call … He calls it pitch and catch. I call it a conceptual intellectual tag team. And what we do is he gets his high-end people that $85,000 a year and $150,000 a year platinum partners in lions together one day a year and for six to eight hours he and I just take on all comers, so to speak. They stand in lines and we'd go rapidly through and they pose their biggest issue, challenge, problem on underperforming opportunity, untapped growth goal. And we together address it from as many meaningful vantage points. We try to give them solutions, strategies, understanding. We reframe it.
It's very stimulating. And we do dozens and dozens and dozens of them every year. And I always receive the videos of them and we've taken the very most powerful and demonstrable ones, the ones that people, no matter what the businesses they're in can learn from. And we put them together in a marathon that we're doing on the 16th of January.
Dean: That's amazing. And I think it's worth noting what the people who were in that room had to go through to be in that room, what that means who's in the room. We're not talking about people who are … I love how Mark Cuban called them wantrepreneurs. We're not talking about people who are maybe someday hoping to start a business. You're talking about peak performers. People who have very successful businesses running right now. And that's the-
Jay: You're talking about everybody there from … The average company there is probably over 5 million enough to probably a billion, but they represent the spectrum and they've come from around the world. I have a list and I was just looking for it. And I got moved by my wife who doesn't lie. I'm at my beach house. It doesn't want me to leave things, but I went through it yesterday just in anticipation of something else I was doing. And it is remarkable, everybody from there's hedge funds, there's accounting firms, there's manufacturing firms. There's companies that one company does Oregon sourcing. Really interesting stuff. It's a whole spectrum.
It's interesting there's for-profit, non-for-profit, service companies, manufacturing companies, professional services, online, offline agencies, marketing people that it's just really interesting and the spectrum and the diversity of questions and issues that they pose and challenges that they come to us to solve are very fascinating. And just for reference up until COVID we would do these in Amsterdam, or we would do these in London. So people would, first of all, they paid two and beyond $100,000 to be a member of this group to be able to access this. It's only one of their benefits. They would fly thousands and thousands of miles. And they would come specifically for the pier people, there were about 1,250 people total that participated in these experiences.
If you put a pencil to it and you multiply that times an average of about $100,000, that's a lot of investment to gain access. And I think that … And very candidly, he and I together very, very interesting we're very compatible, but we come at each issue from different vantage points. So the integration let's call it the strategic sandwich that evolves is very, very … It's in comparable, and it's almost undescribable. It's really fascinating. And I go to it, I've always had to up my game. I'm very proud of my ability, but when I have to be able to match, which with Tony is very fast, very expansive, very articulate. It puts me in a role where I have to be more than on my best performance methods. I have to be beyond that.
So what you brings out at an enormous, so what extreme sports you can call it extreme collaborative contribution. It just it's imaginably powerful. It just really it's sort of like sparks flying and this exploding. It's really stimulating, Dean.
Dean: I love it. So where can people go to be part of this, if they want to join you for the marathon, January 6th, Sunday?
Jay: If they can go to ... It's a very simple landing page. It's called Lock in, L-O-C-K I-N 2021, the year 2021. L-O-C-K I-N 2021.com. And there's a really cool little … There's a three minute video that shows a spectrum of the people that have been in there, or be there. And you'll meet, there's a little distillation of what it's like. You get to watch us together a little bit, and there's an explanation. And by the way, it's very modest. It's practice. It's so little it's about one 10th of one 10th of 1% of what everyone else paid to be there. It's just enough to make people take it seriously. And it's 12 hours. It's a marathon. There's 63 different Hot Seats going on over 12 hours. And we also have guests perspectives recorded from Damon John, who I've had a collaborative relationship with on a number of issues. Very stimulating.
It will be a really powerful way to reset and get a business going and growing or get it really super performing for the year to come irrespective of the economy or the challenges.
Dean: That's awesome. And that's wanted to … The reason I was sharing the things like the Icy Hot story and the concentric circles with Bitcoin company and the modern … My application of those things is we just talked about literally two business case examples there that have reach over many different industries that I've used in many different ways. And so, this kind of thinking here, I think from concentrate to be able to hear almost at a concert pitch, as our friend Gary Halbert used to say, at a concert pitch, you distilling your best focused advice for a specific business to be listening for the underlying model that can be used taking away the content of it, like certainly pay attention to the content, certainly pay attention to the specific things that you're doing, but really pay attention to what's really going on here.
How many different ways could I apply this? Or, how could that apply to my business, if you're a single operator of one business. There's so much to draw from there. I can't imagine that anybody who invested the time to be part of it would get multiple, multiple of the return.
Jay: Thank you for that. I think we tallied up that in this 12 hours, there are over 100 universal lessons that almost any size type scope and geographic based entrepreneur could use directly or indirectly, meaning that if look at being … You and I know that my business model is that you can find grand slams, but each time you find one thing it will add 10 or 15% and you get 10 of them or 20 of them, your business doubles and redoubles doubles again, doubles again.
Dean: That's exactly-
Jay: That kind of lessons. I couldn't encourage more people, anybody who's ever thought that they've seen a hot sheet will be humbled. And I mean that very respectfully. It's more perhaps not only that I … There's nothing imaginable, the scope and expands dimension and agility that they will see. And there's just such a spectrum of issues, industries, business, and opportunity being exposed. And it just really, I get it every year when I do these with Tony, it's the high point of my career, because it is the highest level of intellectual stimulation challenge. And I think, Dean, I've always said every human being at all times, you move back and forth. You're a student and a teacher, you're a leader and a follower.
And I go back and forth because Tony and I come at it, he comes up with one perspective, I'd come up with another. Then we evaluate it. And sometimes we debate it in front of everybody. It's really interesting.
Dean: Amazing. Well, I've got it blocked off for me. I'm such an amazing-
Jay: I was going to have you critiquing afterwards.
Dean: Yes, I can't wait. So, there we go. So lockin2021.com and join us. You guys know I don't promote things on this podcast or do affiliate deals or anything like that. This is purely by way of introducing you to something that is going to make an amazing impact in your life, just like Jay's made in my life. So I want to transfer that to you. So Lock in 2021. I'll be there. Jay will be there. It will be very exciting. And I can't wait to hear the impact that it has on you. So, Jake, thank you so much.
Jay: Oh, good one, Dean. You're gracious. I have found our private conversations to be equally as stimulating and to introduce me to threads of perspective I have never had. And I've got to say just publicly that I think you have understanding distinctions and methodologies that anybody would be foolish not to avail themselves. If you look at it from a vantage point that is very, very elegant, very powerful, and very, very, very unique, but very, very profitable. And I've enjoyed. And I hope to continue enjoying the private discussions. Your mind is amazingly astute, and your ideas are enormously original. So thank you for that privilege.
Dean: I love it. Thanks, Jay. Have a great day.
Jay: You as well. Bye.
Dean: Bye