The Man Behind Tony Robbins' Business Empire | How To Grow

Yeah, well, I'll give you a couple of the actual stories.

So the first really big one was Icy Hot.

And everyone knows it today because it's all over and Shaq is the spokesperson and it's very prominent.

And it's probably the number one by orders of magnitude over its competitors.

But when I got into it, it was an old line mail order product.

Same product, but they sold it for $3 by mail.

And I came from the mail order industry, which I'll visit back on and tell you the lessons you'd learn from that that are very profound.

But the mail order industry, so again, we bought this business and it was almost dead, but my employer... was masterful at aggregating third generation businesses that were on decline.

He had a huge chemical processing business and he would just buy any kind of product that he could put in his mixing bowls and send out because he already had infrastructure, he had distribution, he had fulfillment.

And he bought this just to add and it had other products.

But when we started analyzing, and this is what comes from my background, The buying dynamics of a buyer, here's what we found out.

Every time 10 people bought one $3 jar, two of them never bought again.

The majority of the rest bought every month because it was very, very effective for arthritis, bursitis, rheumatism.

But half of the majority that kept repurchasing bought something else from the catalog every month.

And about two would buy, excuse me, something in bulk at least twice a year.

Do all the math.

It turned out that every time we got 10 $3 orders, $30 orders, Two of them never returned, but we were making $50 on average profit per 10, even though two didn't buy, every year for life.

We didn't have a marketing budget, but we had the knowledge I brought from the mail order business that if you had a very good value proposition and you understood lifetime value, which most people didn't back then, It's not about the first sale.

It's about all the subsequent sales that result from that first experience.

So we didn't have a marketing budget, but we had enough analytics to know that every time 10 people bought, the repurchases, half of them came before that month was over.

So cash flow was very interesting.

So my job was to go to radio stations, television stations, magazines, newspapers, people that had packages going out to the geriatric market and persuade them to include or run ads for us when they had unsold advertising selling our product.

And this is where it gets really interesting.

And they'd never really had what we proposed.

We proposed two things.