Ask Darlene Davis

Two powerful forces connected in The New Money Masters series when Tony Robbins interviewed Eben Pagan.

Luckily this is a series where you receive a CD of the interview along with an additional audio CD to play in your car.  Here are some of the golden nuggets from their conversation.

Eben juxtaposes how poor people and rich people think.  The poor guy says “How do I get a million people to pay me a dollar?”  The successful dude thinks “How can I give $100 worth of value to a million people and if they get value out of it have them give me $10 in return?”

Eben calls this Moving the Free Line.  In an online course he offered the first month free.  His goal was to give away “$1,000 worth of value to anyone who wanted it.”  This enabled him to launch a multi-million-dollar product for a new company.

His Five Perspectives of Business are:

1.    You.  “Attitude is the most important aspect of business success.”  The first and most important step is to develop yourself as a leader.  To do so, you need a daily ritual that you consistently follow.  “When you make yourself strong, you unconsciously re-program and re-prioritize your whole life, and then you’re stronger to help other people.”

2.   Your Market.  This is your product and services.  “… if you get the product and customer matched, then the marketing takes care of itself.”  Eben discusses how to select a niche that is right for you, to avoid the 97% mortality rate of business ventures.

3.    Your Marketing.  With the most competitive business environment in history, “[t]he best marketing is actually a fantastic product.”  He recommends getting inside the mind of your customer via surveys, forums, pay-per-click ads on Google, or the use of Textilizer, a program that takes text, e-mails or any form of communication from your clients, then by the press of a button “the program analyzes the thoughts of your customers by words or phrases.”

4.    Your People.  The bottom line is “You become who you surround yourself with.”  As Confucius said, “Never contract friendship with a man that is not better than thyself.”  Eben goes through the steps of hiring the right people.  He has 80 virtual employees – none of them work from his office.  He recommends that you hire people who complement you, are Superstars and driven, i.e., they are proactive.  They ask for more responsibility.

5.    Your Systems.  Systemize your business and build systems that automate the busywork.  This allows you to focus on the higher-level tasks.

Having listened to this interview multiple times and taken copious notes, my take away is that Eben Pagan represents the Platinum Standard of the online entrepreneur.  He is humble, eloquent, well-read and passionate about his business.  A true mentor!

He taught me to begin a daily routine that encompasses exercise, drinking water (which is not my favorite thing), meditation, laying out a daily plan and action steps to implement the plan.

“It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.”  Ursula  K. Le Guin