Disruptive Customer Acquisition

Perry Marshall

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Mark S A Smith: My guest today, I’m really excited to share with you, Perry Marshall. Entrepreneur magazine says, “Perry Marshall is the number one author and world’s most quoted consultant on Google Advertising, and he has helped over 100,000 advertised save billions of dollars in ad words stupidity tax.” And I know you’re laughing right now, because if you’re like me you’ve paid that stupidity tax too. His firm consults with companies on generating sales, leads, web traffic, and maximizing advertising results. He does customer acquisition. He’s published thousands of articles on sales, marketing, and technology. His books include “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords,” “80/20 Sales and Marketing,” which we’ll talk about on the show, and “The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising.” He’s also a fellow electrical engineer, the author of “Industrial Ethernet,” he’s a geek, a marketing guru. Welcome to the show, Perry.

Perry Marshall: It’s good to be here, thanks. I like it when I get interviewed by engineers because we can go places that not everybody can go, so yeah.

Mark S A Smith: And what that means is that we’re both systems thinkers, and anybody who has listened to the show for any time knows that I like to tease out the systems that make things work, and today I want to talk about disruptive customer acquisition. How did you go from the world of engineering and industrial Ethernet to the world of customer acquisition and marketing?

Perry Marshall: I got kicked out of my nest, I got laid off from my engineering job, and my wife was three months pregnant, and I didn’t want to move out of Chicago to get a different job offer that I could have taken, right. So, “Gee, I think I’ll go into sales. That shouldn’t be too hard.” I was already in Amway, that kind of thing. So yeah, exactly like you’re …

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: That was a rude awakening, and it was two years of bologna sandwiches, ramen soup, credit cards spiraling, second mortgage, threats to move in with the wife’s parents and all that kind of fun stuff, and sooner or later I had to get smart about it, and you don’t know what you don’t know, that’s the hard part about life, and I discovered direct marketing. Now, this is 20 years ago, it’s no so much news anymore that you need media to till the soil ahead of you before you go with cold calling. That’s not a big news flash today, but it kind of was then. So I said, “Alright, I’m going to get good at that stuff.” And I did. It saved me from having to move in with my wife’s parents.

Mark S A Smith: That’s the ultimate in motivational strategies, is stay out of the mother-in-law house, yeah.

Perry Marshall: In their case it was the broken down house next to their house on the farm in Nebraska. So I’ve just chose a more adventurous life, and it is a little reckless, I mean we’re all always trying crazy stuff, and we’re always breaking things.

Mark S A Smith: If you take a look at all engineers there’s two ends of the spectrum, those that want no risk whatsoever, and those like to try to push the envelope, or as I say, lick the envelope. We’re the ones that put our tongue on the nine-volt battery to see if it actually would work. The reality is, it’s how sensitive are we to adrenaline? And those that don’t like risk, they hate adrenaline. They hate that feeling, and you and I are out there, if we’re not feeling a buzz every day for just trying doing something new, we’re not even getting started. And I think that makes us really …

Perry Marshall: They can’t stop themselves.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah, it makes us really bad engineers, but really good at creating disruption.

Perry Marshall: Exactly.

Mark S A Smith: So there it is, right?

Perry Marshall: Exactly right.

Mark S A Smith: What is working now when it comes to acquiring customers? What do you see?

Perry Marshall: When I discovered direct marketing, that really was a caveman discovers fire event in my life. I’d been stumbling around in the world of entrepreneurship and sales and I’d never really run in to it. It was the red-headed step-child of advertising at the time.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: While there’s brand advertising and all that, and then there’s scuzzy, scummy direct-mail kind of people.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah.

Perry Marshall: Well, funny how they’ve taken over the universe, right?

Mark S A Smith: They have.

Perry Marshall: So now direct marketing is the king of Facebook, it’s king of social media, it’s king of everything. So guess what? It’s not actually all that profound anymore. It’s still one of the higher-paid professions that there is. Don’t get me wrong. If you’re good at direct marketing, you’ll make a six-figure income without too much difficulty, I mean that’s just a fact of life, okay?

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: But I’m always pressing the edge, and I’ll tell you what the edge is. It’s three things. Number one, it’s not the unique selling proposition anymore. It’s the definitive selling proposition.

Mark S A Smith: Well said.

Perry Marshall: So, unique selling proposition is, “Fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed,” which is Domino’s pizza, 1976.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: Which that was really amazing back then, I mean it was. It was absolutely amazing that somebody would deliver a pizza in 30 minutes in 1976. It’s not amazing now.

Mark S A Smith: No.

Perry Marshall: Not in the slightest. A definitive selling proposition would be more like, “Press the button on your phone, click on an icon, and a car will pick you up in five minutes.”

Mark S A Smith: Right on.

Perry Marshall: That’s a definitive selling proposition.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Perry Marshall: And it’s magnetic, and it sucks people in. That’s the first thing. The second thing is what Richard Koch calls The Star Principle. You need to be number one in a growing market. You don’t want to be number two, and you don’t want to be number three, and you sure don’t want to be number four, or five, or six, or you’ll be living under a bridge.

Mark S A Smith: That’s right.

Perry Marshall: And you want to be in a growing market, not a shrinking market, because if you’re in a shrinking market you’re in trouble.

Mark S A Smith: You sure are.

Perry Marshall: So what I just said, man, it eliminates about all 80, 90, 95% of what almost everybody’s trying to do. Number three is you want to radically simplify something, either in the form of making the user experience so elegant, or so amazing, which is what Uber did, or incredibly slashing the cost of something so that a whole different set of customers can now buy it that couldn’t used to buy it. This is what McDonald’s did with food 50 years ago. You could pick any one of those three things, but those are the disruptive skills right there. In fact if you wrap them up in one package, that’s a formula for billion dollar companies.

Mark S A Smith: Absolutely true, and let’s just review those. Definitive selling position, I really like that concept, it’s, “Let’s get definitive”. I’d like to add to the word, we have to be desirably different.

Perry Marshall: Oh, yeah.

Mark S A Smith: And I want to define what that desirability is. I can absolutely create a proposition. The Star Principle I think is really fantastic. You’ve got to shoot to be number one, be a category of one, there is no B. Those are all things that we’ve heard before. That’s a little harder to do.

Perry Marshall: Yeah.

Mark S A Smith: If that’s our goal, you’ll get to it a whole lot better than some of the other options. Then number three, radically simplify something, and that’s been a tenet of mine for the past three years, and that is frictionless. Let us make something frictionless, and all of the unicorns right now make a passionate experience frictionless.

Perry Marshall: Yes, they do. Nobody’s saying it’s easy.

Mark S A Smith: No, it’s not. That point though, the passionate experience frictionless, generates the fastest revenues possible. This idea of radically simplifying something is an awesome opportunity. Let’s go back to the first point, definitive selling proposition. How can we create that? Do you have a system that you’ve generated to create the definitive selling proposition?

Perry Marshall: Yeah, we do. It’s a whole big thing that we do with people.

Mark S A Smith: The thing is you could tell me, but then you’d have to bill me.

Perry Marshall: Well, no, I’ll tell you as much as I can. I really will. It starts with what I call the Bleeding Neck. Okay?

Mark S A Smith: Indeed. Yep, The Blood Spurting Problem.

Perry Marshall: The blood spurting …

Mark S A Smith: We’re right on. Exactly. The blood spurting problem. Yep.

Perry Marshall: The definitive selling proposition, it’s not just, why should I listen to you, but it’s why should I turn in my cell phone before I walk in the room and listen to you exclusively? It’s not just why should I consider you some kind of authority but why should I consider you some sort of demi-god? It’s much better to be a demi-god than an authority in all things being equal. And why should I camp out in front of your store before it opens at six o’clock in the morning as opposed to just leisurely showing up at nine AM? You actually have to walk backwards and it’s like this big riddle.

Okay, so somebody has blood squirting out of their aorta and it’s splattering on the ceiling. People do have these aches and pains. Okay, how can you solve this problem in such a way that they really would camp outside your front door with their squirting aorta and come in at 6:01 AM as soon as the lady unlocks the door?

Well, this usually requires some kind of quantum leap of thinking. Well, he’s not gonna do that for an aspirin. I’m pretty sure, it’s gonna have to be better than that. It’s gonna have to put the blood back in his brain, and it’s gonna have to fix his neck, and it’s gonna have to make him look good. It’s probably gonna have to include some kind of a tuxedo so he looks really presentable. Maybe a tuxedo that covers up the scar on his neck so that nobody knows that 12 hours ago he had a bleeding neck when he takes a beautiful girl to the banquet. This is what you want to do and it’s solving riddles. Can I do a riddle illustration?

Mark S A Smith: Let’s do a riddle. Riddle me this.

Perry Marshall: Okay, so here’s a riddle for you. You push your car until you finally stop in front of a fancy hotel, and suddenly, you realize you’re dead broke. Where are you?

Mark S A Smith: You push your car until you finally stop in front of a fancy hotel, then you realize that you’re dead broke.

Perry Marshall: Yes.

Mark S A Smith: Where are you?

Perry Marshall: You’re in Monopoly.

Mark S A Smith: Really good. In a completely different world.

Perry Marshall: That’s what a riddle is. A riddle is inductive reasoning. It’s reasoning from the specific to the general instead of the general to the specific. In other words, I know what I want, which means it needs to satisfy this certain condition, and then when I go another step back, what one thing would satisfy all of those conditions, right? All of the disruptive companies, whether it’s Uber, or there’s Auto One which is this thing in Europe which is just growing like a weed, where if you want to sell your car, you basically call a phone number, you go, “I got a 2009 Toyota Camry. It’s got 86,700 miles on it. Here’s a picture”. And they’ll make you an offer right over the phone. And unless the car is drastically different than what you described, that is the check that they’ll write to you when you go there and you’ve completely bypassed the car lot, and putting ads in the Auto Trader. It just makes it super easy.

Now, that’s a disruptive business because it’s just stripping out all the middle men and the whole car business. It’s also a network effect business, because once this thing is everywhere, it’s going be the only one that people want to sell their car to.

Mark S A Smith: Yes. Let’s just stop there for a sec. I don’t want to pass by that concept of a network effect business. I really want my listener to get that impact of that. It’s based on Metcalfe’s Law.

Perry Marshall: Yes, and I wrote an Ethernet book so I know about this.

Mark S A Smith: Of course you do. That’s why I really wanted to nail it down. You’re applying your systems thinking to this concept and what Metcalfe’s Law dictates is that the value of the network increases exponentially to the number of people that are involved in the network.

Perry Marshall: That’s right.

Mark S A Smith: And we can illustrate that very clearly by the wealth that Mark Zuckerberg created by creating this massive network along the way. Part of that Star Principle comes from using the network effect.

Perry Marshall: Yes. So, network effect is when every buyer or seller on the system makes it more valuable to all the other buyers and sellers. So Facebook works this way, and AirBnB works this way, and Skype works this way, and Craigslist works this way, and Uber works this way, and Ebay. They all work that way. So the more users are on, the better and better and better things get. So in the 20th century, barriers to entry were manufacturing costs and sales representatives and distribution outlets and capital and all this kind of stuff. In the 21st century, network effect is a better barrier than all of those things put together-

Mark S A Smith: Right on.

Perry Marshall: … because, if Uber is five minutes until any car picks you up then how would any other company ever even … how would you start another Uber? Oh yeah, 45 minutes wait time, you would never even get the thing off the ground.

Mark S A Smith: And that was called a taxi company.

Perry Marshall: Right? So the taxi was linear and the network of Uber is exponential.

Mark S A Smith: The taxi network had no network. It was Yellow Cab and that was about it.

Perry Marshall: Right.

Mark S A Smith: But there was no network even there. It was brand, it wasn’t a network. And I think that’s really important to call out, there’s a big difference between a brand experience and a network experience.

Perry Marshall: Absolutely. And networks are hard to start.

Mark S A Smith: Yes, they are.

Perry Marshall: They are freight trains. You’re starting a freight train but man they’re impossible to stop once they get going. How would you ever stop Skype? I mean, we’re on Skype right now.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: Right? How you would you stop it?

Mark S A Smith: You can’t.

Perry Marshall: They’d really have to majorly, majorly screw up. I guess if all their servers melted down and they didn’t turn them back on, then I guess we would all go find something else, but-

Mark S A Smith: Temporarily.

Perry Marshall: … it’s really extraordinary. Right?

Mark S A Smith: Right. There becomes this time, and for example, I choose Skype. I do have other options. So do you, but there’s a reason why I choose Skype. It’s because I end up getting the best recordings at a Skype than I do other platforms. Now, that could change over time.

Perry Marshall: Right.

Mark S A Smith: That’s also part of that radically simplify something from a disruptability standpoint, I think your three rules can also help us prevent our disruption.

Perry Marshall: Yes. So there was the three rules and then we added network effect and there was four. If you do those four things you almost can’t not succeed. It’s almost destined to work, and so it’s a big riddle. It’s just like that little Monopoly story. What would make that bleeding neck completely go away? What would be so elegant? What would be the more people do it, the better it gets? What would that look like? I’ve watched my own customers build businesses like this. So, 2010, I was in London, and I did this hot seat for a guy that this workshop I was doing. He had to explain to me what Fantasy Football was because I didn’t know.

Mark S A Smith: Whoa. Yeah, right.  In 2010.

Perry Marshall: That was the founder of FanDuel.

Mark S A Smith: Wow.

Perry Marshall: Yeah, the founder of FanDuel explained to me what Fantasy Football is, and then four years later I get a text from somebody and the guy goes, “Hey, you remember those guys in London? They just raised $200 million of mezzanine funding from some venture capital firm.” Oh, my goodness and yes, they’re on every Monday Night Football, every commercial, every sports bar. Yeah, the guy was from Edinburgh, Scotland. That’s a network effect business. Right?

Mark S A Smith: Absolutely true. It’s also tapping into a passion. And I see that as a critical aspect. You have to find a passionate audience that wants more of their passion easier, cheaper, more frictionlessly. That passionate component is what gets us back to the Star Principle. Stars have passionate fans.

Perry Marshall: Yes, they do. Fans that are distinctly different than the main markets. If you go back about 10 or 15 years, an Apple customer was distinctly different-

Mark S A Smith: Indeed.

Perry Marshall: … from a Windows customer. They were a different animal and it was like this weird cult-y tribe of people. Now, yeah, Apple is still a little cult-y, but man it’s an awfully mainstream cult.

Mark S A Smith: Gone mainstream, for sure. Can I add that fifth rule here, to serve a passionate fan base of some type?

Perry Marshall: Yeah, a distinctly passionate fan base, like the Grateful Dead.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: You have those five things, man, you got a killer formula for success in life. You might not think of it by tomorrow morning. If it comes to you in the shower, God bless you, but it’s okay to watch and wait and look for stuff. It’s like if you have that list in your head, and you’re kind of refreshing and reminding yourself, “Okay. This is what I’m looking for. Okay. Mental search engines switch on.” Just keep looking for that. Keep looking for that.

We talked about Richard Koch. He’s a good friend of mine. Thirty years ago he was a working stiff. Now he’s worth half a billion dollars. He works fewer hours than any high net worth person that I know. Richard has made his half a billion dollars investing in 19 companies. That’s like one every year and a half. He’s now like the guy sitting there at the slot machine going ch-ch, yanking that thing. He’s got his set of criteria. It’s very, very similar by the way.

Mark S A Smith: I’m sure it is.

Perry Marshall: It’s almost identical, frankly.

Mark S A Smith: I would say that it’s probably darn close. The advice I give people is if the company you’re investing in doesn’t make something frictionless for somebody, it’s not a worthy investment.

Perry Marshall: That’s about right. There’s only a small number of companies and opportunities that actually do that. That’s the reality.

Mark S A Smith: It is the reality. And that’s also what helps us define down to the Star Principle. That reality is there.

Perry Marshall: Number one.

Mark S A Smith: That’s how we do it. I love it. Let’s talk a little bit about “80/20.”

Perry Marshall: I would think that anybody listening to this show at least has some passing familiarity with “80/20,” but most people really don’t get it, even the really smart ones don’t. It’s no insult to them. It’s just it’s never been properly explained. Number one, “80/20” isn’t just this business economics rule of thumb. The 20% of your customers are going to give you 80% of the money. Okay? It’s a truism almost like a law of nature and it’s everywhere and it’s everything. It’s the size of computers on your hard disc and it’s which branches of your tree have birds in them, and it’s the traffic on the roads in the streets, and it’s the size of craters on the moon. It’s the size of sand in a bucket of sand. It’s just everywhere. Okay?

Mark S A Smith: Wow.

Perry Marshall: It’s a law of physics. Number two is there’s an 80/20 inside every 80/20 and then there’s another 80/20 inside of that, and there’s another 80/20 inside of that. What that means is that there’s these teeny, tiny little levers that just swing huge leverage. The third thing is in the frictionless world, it’s not 80/20, it’s 95/5.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah.

Perry Marshall: It really is true. You could spend like a year just unpacking what I said in the last three minutes. If you spend the next year listening to this podcast about 16 times and digging as hard as you can into “80/20” and Star Principle, it’ll be a year very well spent. I gave a talk at King’s College in London about a month ago, and I had all these college students. I said, “How many of you know what 80/20 is?” and like two of them raised their hand. I said, “Well, this is either the most important talk that you’ll hear this entire semester or maybe your whole entire college career,” and I went on to explain to them the extreme inequality of even just in their college career, “Five percent of your professors are 50% of the benefit that you get out of this school, so you need to attach yourself to  a really good one like a leech and kind of annoy the guy to death and squeeze all the knowledge out of his brain because that’s why you’re here. It’s not for all the other guys. It goes deeper and deeper.”

Mark S A Smith: I certainly have been exposed to Pareto’s Law a long time ago back when I was in college and then again when I did the classes that HP taught me in quality control. Pareto’s Rule I think is what they called it, but I never realized it went to the whole level of nature, the law of physics. How did you discover this?

Perry Marshall: I read Richard Koch’s original 80/20 book. It alerted to me to the fact that it was a law of physics. It showed how it’s true and just if you’re planting peas, which pea plants make the most peas and rabbits and stuff like that. He made this throwaway comment where he said, “This has a lot to do with fractals and chaos.” Well, I had-

Mark S A Smith: Oh, interesting.

Perry Marshall: … to dive very deep into fractals and chaos. I was like, “Wait a minute there. Hang on. Does that mean what I think it means?” Because fractals and chaos, there’s pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. Does that mean there’s an 80/20 inside? Yes. I’m fast-forwarding here. It means 4% of the inputs produce 64% of the outputs. It means 1% of the inputs produce 50% of the outputs. It means 0.2% of the inputs make 40% of the outputs. It just keeps going.

Mark S A Smith: And now we found those levers that we can adjust that make massive movements and disrupt the whole mess.

Perry Marshall: That’s right. It’s really spooky when you start to see this. Okay, not only is this everywhere but there’s a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. That means that 0.2% of the roads in Chicago carry 40% of the traffic, and you can figure out what the 0.2% are. Basically, if you knew the traffic on one road, you could figure out how much traffic is in the whole entire Chicago metro area by extrapolating it out. Okay? So it actually makes it very predictable and we use this to do pricing. We use this to do a little tiny test in a market, and you can extrapolate this whole expanded picture of what the demand is going to look like. You can figure out whether things are going to succeed or fail way sooner than most people thought that you could. It’s just crazy.

Mark S A Smith: What this implies is that we can use this 80/20 rule to cross the chasm. We can use this 80/20 to figure out where we need to target the next set of customers.

Perry Marshall: Yes. I have this thing called the Starbucks Principle of the $2700 Espresso Machine. I’m literally telling you the truth here. If you know that the Starbucks store in Northbrook, IL, sells 1,000 five-dollar lattes every week so that’s 5,000 bucks, you can be pretty sure that out of those 1,000 people, one of them will buy a $2700 espresso machine every week. It’s like a law of physics. So you could figure out how many $2700 espresso machines you’ll sell. You can figure out how many $270 espresso machines you can sell because they both basically scratch the same itch. You’re literally right. You can cross the chasm. You can work it both directions so I’ve got an example in my “80/20” book where tickets to a stadium for a football game for $50 translates to how many sky boxes? You can see that the 80/20 curve applies equally to the revenues of the Forbes 400 as to the dairy output of 38 counties in Wisconsin. I mean it’s this universal truism across all economic bands.

Mark S A Smith: Wow. That’s the secret magic crystal ball to figuring out where you want to go and acquire your market.

Perry Marshall: Yes, and it’s using 80/20 as a predictor instead of just a rear-view mirror. Usually people just use it to look at what happened in the past and go, “Yeah, it was 80/20.” But when you know, no, it’s going to be 80/20 and it’s going to follow this distribution. I’ve been having discussions with people about okay, how does this play out in cryptocurrencies? How does this play out in whatever the next company that gets to a billion faster than Zuckerberg did? You know that these things are going to happen before they happen.

Mark S A Smith: How do we apply this specifically to finding customers? You’ve just given me some examples that are some specifics around Starbucks? How can my listener take this idea and go select the next customer segment?

Perry Marshall: You calibrate to a group of people. You figure out that a group of people for a certain stimulus will give you a certain response. Okay? So this could be anything. This could be how many people will walk into the Toys “R” Us store and spend any amount of money at all or it could be like, “Oh, I put this advertisement in a magazine, and how many people will call the 800 number?” It could be just anything. But you calibrate an audience out there that is reachable to a specific activity, and if you can assign any approximate value to that activity, like, “Oh, well, the responses from that magazine are each worth $25.” Then you can immediately go, “Okay, so one-fifth of those people are worth four times as much,” you can walk it all the way up to the most valuable customer. You can go, “All right. I got 2,800 responses to that magazine ad, and I can be pretty sure that the most valuable customer in the entire stack is worth somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 for that one most valuable person.”

Mark S A Smith: You’re talking lifetime value in this particular case or you talking single purchase?

Perry Marshall: Anything that you can roughly calibrate to, so your first guess might be a pretty wild guess, but if you have any way of comparing them to other people or if you have any way of saying, “Well, I know they’ll spend $100,000 on an airplane because I already know they would spend it on a boat,” you could translate from airplanes to boat at least some back of the envelope math where you go, “Oh, well, you know, there’s three boats sold for every one airplane in the United States and they cost us so therefore plus or minus 35%, this is what these people are going to do.” And you’ll be amazingly right.

Mark S A Smith: There’s a combination of research and calibration and correlation-

Perry Marshall: Right. It’s just amazing how often this is true.

Mark S A Smith: … of which most people don’t do any of the three.

Perry Marshall: No. They can’t do it because they’re trained to think it in terms of Bell curves.

Mark S A Smith: Right.

Perry Marshall: In terms of averages, right? Most people, as soon as you just talk about statistics, even pretty educated people, even very educated people, they’ll always throw it on a Bell curve. I throw it on an 80/20 curve, which is my 80/20 sales and marketing book is all about that. One-fifth of the people spend four times the money. One-fifth of those people spend four times the money. It just keeps going and going until we get all the way to Warren Buffett. Then suddenly you realize if I got 100 kids in a class taking a science test, I’m not interested in the average kid at all. I’m interested in the Nobel Prize winner.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah.

Perry Marshall: You’re always looking for the Nobel Prize winner because that’s your star. That’s your simplifier. That’s your passionate person. That’s all of the things on our list right there.

Mark S A Smith: Finding that star is going to help you fulfill the Star Principle.

Perry Marshall: Right. Number one in a growing market.

Mark S A Smith: Really, really good stuff. Perry, this is really an extraordinary conversation. I appreciate talking systems with another systems thinker.

Perry Marshall: Really terrific.

Mark S A Smith: It’s fantastic. It definitely is a…

Perry Marshall: Geekazoids.

Mark S A Smith: Yeah, bring on the Geekazoids. Let’s do it. What do you want my listener to do to learn more about 80/20?

Perry Marshall: The starting point is you should go to perrymarshall.com/8020, and you can buy my book for a penny plus shipping.  In the US, it’ll cost seven bucks. International, it costs fourteen. If you’re an audible person, you can buy audible for whatever that, 15 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever, and you can listen on audible. It’s in paperback, Kindle, in the audio book version. It’ll totally change the way you see everything, like literally you will not be able to look out your window and not see 80/20. I could look out my window right now. There’s two houses across the street, there’s a sidewalk, there’s a road, and I could rattle off 10 80/20’s that I’m looking at right out there, and when you can do that, you can walk into any business and fix stuff, find profit, find loss and most importantly, figure out what 80% is just completely ignored because it doesn’t make any difference.

Mark S A Smith: All right. I have a copy of your book, and I have to confess it came into the house the week we moved.

Perry Marshall: That’s a good dog ate my homework story, man.

Mark S A Smith: It’s the best … so now you’ve got me compelled to dig it back. I have no idea where it … I’ll probably just have to buy another copy. It’s probably stuck in some box, some place, some way. I was hunting around my bookshelves as I prepared for our conversation. I couldn’t find it, but now you got me sold, pal. All right.

Perry Marshall: It’ll change your life.

Mark S A Smith: I accept that challenge. Thank you, Perry, for a fantastic conversation. Listener, go grab a copy of Perry’s 80/20 rule book. Change the way you look at the world. Change how you make money. Thanks for being on the show.

Perry Marshall: Thanks for having me. It was just a total riot. It was good show. Thanks.

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