Dan Henry | He Delivered Pizza for 7 Years… Here's How He Made $45 Million

0:00You have made how much money throughout your career in entrepreneurship? Roughly$45 million. $45 million. Dan Henry, an internet marketing legend. This is the greatest lie ever told. How many times have you heard somebody say, I know my worth? You hear it all the time. Yeah, broke people say that. If I offered to sell you this gym bag for$1 ,000, would you take it? I probably would not buy that for$1 ,000. Okay. See, that is how a poor person thinks. A rich person would at least ask, what's in the bag? That's insane. You sold pizza for seven years. I did. before discovering entrepreneurship. The ultimate tragedy in business.

0:33Somebody else who does not care about their customers as much as you, who is not as good as you, is going to get the sale instead of you simply because they were better at explaining it. Would you like to hear the bridge to my webinar, which is a million dollars in August? I'd be happy to share the bridge with you. Let's hear it. Let's go. Okay, so... Damn, Dan. That was a masterclass. I think I'm ready to buy. I think I'm ready to buy. Dan, if the four of us sitting here were to die tomorrow and you could bring one more guiding principle and message with the younger generation, what would you tell them?

1:04I would say... What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the School of Hard Knocks podcast. I'm James, here with Jack and Josh, and we are out in Dubai with an internet marketing legend, the man Dan Henry. What's up, bro? It's great to be here with you, my friend. Absolutely. I'm excited to be here. Dan, for the people that don't know, you sold pizza for seven years. I did. before discovering entrepreneurship, before discovering sales, and you have made how much money throughout your career in entrepreneurship? So roughly$45 million. $45 million. I want you to start us off by taking us back to the exact moment when you realized that you were never going to get rich working for somebody else.

1:39Yeah. So I was delivering pizza in Chicago, and I got this delivery by this guy named Gupta, and it was at the edge of our delivery zone. It was like super cold, like probably negative 10 degrees. And I swear. No, I'm telling you. I'm laughing just because he dropped the name. Why? His name's Gupta. What do you want from me?

2:01Dan Henry: He's never, he's, hey, he never forgot, man. Oh, I know his name. I know the son of a bitch's name, okay? But you know what? I'm thankful for Gupta because he's the reason I got rich, okay? Because I go to his freaking apartment, and it's like, you know, 15 floors up, and the elevator was broken in the apartment. And so I had to walk up all 15 flights of stairs. I give this dude his pizza and like I forgot something dumb like ketchup. First of all, who puts ketchup on their pizza? Okay. And so the guy makes me go all the way back to the store, get the ketchup or whatever it was I forgot, drive all the way back.

2:40And then he stiffs me. And it was at that moment I realized that, you know, nobody is coming to save you. You cannot rely on the generosity of others. You cannot rely on anybody You have to take control of your life and the truth is is that I had no skills then because I would spend my nights playing Tekken 2 smoking pot and watching TV and just being a complete loser a degenerate a degenerate okay now I'm in a marketing degenerate, but you know That that that behavior did not improve my life and I had girlfriend after girlfriend leave me and one day I came home and I had another girlfriend leave me her bags were packed at the door and she said Dan you're not going anywhere in life and you know at first I thought oh she's just being crazy or whatever but I started to look at myself and realize no like if I was a woman would I want to be with a man that literally had no skills was delivering pizza had no ambition in life would I want to do it no I wouldn't and so instead of you know sulking I decided to do something about it so I started reading books I started I looked for a better job I got a sales job at a company I started learning my skills and what's crazy and this is amazing the more you learn and the more skills you develop the more valuable you become and so the more money you can make because in this life and by the way this is the greatest lie ever told how many times have you heard somebody say I know my worth well okay you hear it all the time yeah broke people say that because look you may know your worth but if you don't know how to get other people to know your worth you're screwed so what i discovered when i was young was that yes i could improve my worth but i also had to improve my communication skills so that i could show others how much i was really worth so i could get paid for it and that's when everything changed my life just started going up up up and obviously today i live in dubai and everything's great we're gonna there's definitely a lot to unpack there but i first want to just say i think one of my favorite parts about that is you got sick and tired of being sick and tired yeah because you mentioned that you kind of had that realization with yourself where it's like all these people are leaving me it's like i need to become more valuable um and so i just want to say that like just point out there the importance of having that capability is probably a big reason why you you ended up making it out to dubai and becoming an entrepreneur to begin with.

5:06Yeah, you have to. Look, this is how the world works, right? So what is more valuable, silver or gold?

5:13Dan Henry: Gold. Probably gold. Gold. Definitely gold. What's more valuable, platinum or gold? I'm going to guess platinum. I'm pretty sure platinum is more valuable than gold. I'm not a mineral expert here. But why is it that, for instance, gold is more valuable than silver? It's rare. It's more rare. Exactly. You see, in life, things that are more rare are worth more. That's how human beings assign value. That's why when you're looking for a wife, for instance, or you're looking for a husband, the qualities that you look for, like why does a woman want a man that's six foot tall and makes 500 grand a year and this and that?

5:49Well, that's rare, right? Why do we want a woman who has certain qualities? Because those qualities are rare. And so the more rare you are, the more valuable you are. So all you have to do is go acquire skills that are rare and voila, you will make it in life. It's not that complicated. But it also goes back to the other point that I wanted to touch on that you said that I thought was very well put was that the people that think that, oh my goodness, like I know my worth. It's like that saying that it's not what you know. It's not who you know. It's who knows you. So like if the people don't actually know that you are valuable and they don't see that in you, then it's not even going to matter to begin with.

6:26Well, this is a concept in business that most people don't understand. So for instance, if you're walking down the street and you see two lemonade stands and the lemonade stand on the left Says freshly squeezed lemonade and the lemonade stand on the right says yellow water with sugar Which one do you buy? Freshly squeezed. Freshly squeezed. But why? It's the same product. Why would you buy the freshly squeezed lemonade? Brandy. Brandy. Did it not sound better? It did. See, that's the thing. People don't buy good products. They buy products that sound good. And if you can't make your product sound good, then here's what's going to happen.

6:57The ultimate tragedy in business. Somebody else who does not care about their customers as much as you, who is not as good as you, is going to get the sale instead of you simply because they were better at explaining it. It doesn't matter if you're better at it. You also have to be better at explaining it. And that is how you succeed in business, by being good at both. It's almost like when you go to the grocery store and you look at the back of the label of everything, especially in the U.S., you know, there's all these like terrible ingredients, but they're, you know, they're products that sell left and right every single day.

7:32It's just the branding on the box fools everybody. Yeah. Well, I mean, I don't think, I generally advise against having a crappy product and making it sound good because you do have to sleep at night, but man, if you can do both, like I remember one time I was at Grant Cardone's office and he said, you know people you don't have to have the best product you have to have the the most known product and i agree with that but i also think that if you really want to win you need both because now you're not only going to get that word of mouth going but you're going to get that initial sales going that initial momentum that comes from a message that makes sense to the market that makes them want to buy even if they don't know who you are what's like you think about all the beverage brands that get launched in today's world that are backed by all these celebrity figures and you think because they have all the attention but think about all those i mean even lionel messy messy had a beverage company that just went you know out of business within a year or two because again it comes down to you have to have a product as well didn't that happen with that prime thing that prime energy drink they're still going up they're still going yeah

8:34Dan Henry: but they had some problems i don't think they're as big now but they're still they're still moving yeah i i've read some article about it like it was it kind of leveled off and was going down a bit So I've always prided myself on making great products and being great at selling them. So, you know, you were selling pizza. You know, you were kind of in that one-trepreneur phase. What was that big break for you that, you know, got you from kind of that phase of being broke to hitting that first home run? Oh, great question. So I got a job at this sales company in Trenton, New Jersey. And if you ever remember the company OxiClean, In the 1990s, they hired a guy named Billy Mays to do an infomercial.

9:13And they went from$10 million a year to$100 million a year in five years. And the company where I got a job was the same company where Billy Mays got his start. And the sales manager that trained me was the same guy that trained Billy Mays. And here's what the job was. You would go to these grocery stores and you would do this live demo of like a blender or cookware or something like that. and you would sell like a one-to-many sales presentation you'd sell these sets of cookware or these blenders in these stores and so i remember one day i'm at the big warehouse where you know all these products existed and my sales manager he brings me into the main warehouse and he shows me all of these racks of products and they got these forklifts and all this and he says let me ask you a question what do you think makes the what room produces the most money in this building and I thought well the warehouse because look at all these products he says no it's this room over here and he takes me over to this room this real tiny room and inside this room were about 10 dudes who were sitting there writing and he says we call this the money room and all these guys here they're really good at writing the scripts for these presentations and he said this This is how we make millions of dollars.

10:35It's not the products. It's the script that sells the products. And that's when I realized something about business. The script is the business. Because if you think about it, have you ever seen the Titanic? Yeah. You guys have seen the Titanic? It's a legendary movie. Oh, yeah. Have you seen the other 13 movies about the Titanic? No. Do you know why? Probably the script wasn't as good. Exactly. They sucked. The script wasn't good. And it wasn't Leonardo DiCaprio that made it because nobody knew who he was. That movie made him. just like in you remember p90x from the 1990s yes yeah okay so at the time there was billy blanks who was a celebrity martial artist and he sold a home workout program called taibo and also you had p90x by tony horton now nobody knew who tony horton was but they had an amazing script that was rooted in direct response selling principles.

11:31Taibo did not. They just had like a celebrity guy. Well, Taibo did about$150 million and P90X did almost a billion dollars. Why? Because they had a better script. The script is the business. Just like with Titanic, that movie did better because the script is the business. And what I discovered about a business is, and this is what do this is how i've scaled to 45 million this is how i've i've done such amazing numbers with basically a handful of staff is i focus on webinars and what is a webinar it's a speech that gets your clients when you host that speech online you call it a webinar now human beings have been using speeches for thousands of years to do amazing things become presidents spread religions grow companies.

12:20And what is a speech? It's a script. It's what you say. And so I focus most of my efforts in my business on developing a script to sell my product. And literally where everybody else is hiring sales teams and worrying about setters and this and that and whatever heck else that they're doing these days, for the past 13 years, all I have ever done, the majority of what I have thought is sit down and develop one good script I host it online webinar and that's how I sell and that's how I print and to me that is the best way to grow a business because at the end of the day it's just a speech to get

12:59Dan Henry: you clients and if you have a great speech you get a lot of clients one of the lessons that I want people to really pay attention there to there is the fact that you focus on one thing for 13 years yeah and that's just getting really good at one skill for someone who's never made a VSL and never really made a script before what are three principles that you could give them to find success and making their first ad webinar how about i give you one principle that'll take care of all of it i love it you need to have what's called the one belief okay it's three things first it's a big idea it's some sort of idea that makes the customers see the problem differently then you have a mechanism a mechanism that allows them to take advantage of the idea then you have a product that allows them to take advantage of the mechanism for example P90X their big idea was your muscles don't grow because they adapt to the workout okay great I never thought about it that way but how do I take advantage of that mechanism muscle confusion if you can confuse the muscle it'll grow okay well how do I take advantage of that?

14:04Ah, buy our home workout tape that allows you to confuse your muscles every day. Now, if I came to you and I said, hey, how would you like to buy my home workout tape on how to confuse your muscle? You'd look at me and think I was crazy. But if I explain the science behind all that first, now all of a sudden, that's the one thing you want more than anything. Same thing with the squatty potty. Do you remember the squatty potty? Of course. Okay. So what's the big idea the big idea is human beings are not meant to sit up and poop because why for thousands of years when we lived in caves and this and that we would squat on the ground and so our intestines and our body developed into that format and now when toilets came along now we're we're getting out of alignment and now it's hard to poop so the unique mechanism here is squatting but you're not gonna go outside and pop a squat on your lawn because that would be weird.

14:58So what do you do? Oh, you got this stool that goes underneath the toilet, which allows you to squat in your bathroom. Big idea, mechanism, product. The big idea makes them see it differently. The mechanism allows them to take advantage of the big idea. The product allows them to take advantage of the mechanism. If you have these three things, you have a business that can beat all your competitors because why? When you say this stuff, it will just make so much sense to your customer that even if you're not famous, even if you're just getting started, you will blow the competition out of the water.

15:34Five to 10 years ago, nobody could really leverage AI the way they do in today's world to do all their marketing, to come up with their scripts, do their copywriting. But in today's world, I bet you would probably agree that the majority of people that are writing scripts are using AI completely. How do you feel about outsourcing these types of efforts, script writing, copywriting, advertising to AI, or are you a proponent of keeping your actual creativity on? I want to know your personal thoughts on outsourcing marketing strategies and coming up with scripts in business. I am not a fan of using AI to write copy.

16:05I'm a fan of using AI to replicate a human being that writes copy. So for example, let's say you're an amazing copywriter. Let's say you're an amazing marketer. You can set up an AI and you can say, listen, delete everything you know use none of your pre-existing knowledge only use this source of truth you create a folder of your stuff you put it in the folder and then you say only use this you're gonna get a completely different result now I have 13 years of experience I've spent over eight million dollars of my own money on ads for my business I have data that no one else in the world has especially when it comes to my business.

16:47So if I create that source of truth and then I use AI on that, I'm going to be able to produce infinitely better marketing copy and ideas than just logging into chat GBT or Claude and saying, hey, write me a sales page. Okay. Because then you're going to get the same thing everybody else gets. So what you have to do is you have to use AI as the brain, but not the knowledge. If you can do that, then you can get ahead with AI. How do you feel about people that copy your copy? if you have to copy my copy I already know you're not very good at it so I'm not worried about the competition I've never met somebody who's copied my stuff who's been able to even remotely compete with me and I mean people do it all the time I mean the amount of stuff I've I've seen out there even by like you know now bigger and bigger names that copy my stuff they they still can't get the results I get because they don't they don't understand it at a fundamental level they're hacks they're just monkey see monkey do but they don't understand how to open up the brain of the monkey and know how it works.

17:48Dan I've heard you say before that you know you want your sales team to be order takers yes off of one of your webinars what did you mean by that? So a webinar should do the selling the call should do the closing closing is just getting them comfortable to give you their credit card number and get them to buy selling is get them getting them to want the product so the webinar gets them to want the product the closing call is just an order taking call where they're comfortable and sometimes you don't even have to get them comfortable they're ready to go I'll give you an example I used to charge a hundred thousand dollars for a VIP coaching day okay one day you spend with me I look at all your stuff I charge a hundred grand for it last month I sold six of them and one of them I sold over DM on Instagram because the guy watched my webinar he saw my content he literally messaged me I thought it was a joke he messaged me on Instagram I explained everything to him and he's like okay give me wire instructions so you give I give him wire instructions he wires the money and I thought this dude's just joshing right he's he's kidding no the wire hit the account and that was the moment I realized like dude I'm this is way too cheap so I raised it to 200 ,000 and I still have people buying it so again imagine for a moment like like think of it just think about this for a second if a certain pattern of communication can take a home workout tape to a billion dollars whereas everybody else even with celebrities is stuck at 150 million if they can sell a frickin stool that you put under your toilet so that you can I mean like could you ever imagine a bunch of people sitting there with their knees up in the air in different like i mean these products you would think would never do these numbers but why did they do these numbers because they have presentations right and when you have a great presentation for your business amazing things can happen so give you an example right we were talking before we started what's the most valuable tech company of all time apple apple apple who sold apple to the world steve jobs what did steve jobs do every single year to sell more Apple?

19:56He did a live presentation. He did a live presentation. What is that infomercial that 10x'd a laundry detergent, OxiClean? It was a...

20:05Dan Henry: Live presentation. Live presentation. It was a recorded presentation. Not live, yeah. Recorded presentation. Comes on at 3 in the morning. Okay? Who's the only billionaire life coach? Tony Robbins. What does he sell? He sells presentations. And he does a presentation to sell you into another presentation, and then another... So he's got his$5 ,000, whatever it is, Date with Destiny. And then he's got, you know, Unleash the Power Within. And then he's got Business Mastery. And then he's got Platinum Partners at$85 ,000. These are all speeches. They're all presentations. You see, doesn't matter what business you're in.

20:38If you also get into the presentation business, then that business will skyrocket. That's the key. The best communicators are the best business people because that's what really matters is how you can take what's in your head. And by the time it comes out of your mouth, it sounds as amazing as it truly is up here. I need some tactics right here because I feel like some, you know, some people listen to this might hear that and they do, they are going to do, they get the script, they're going to do a webinar, but they can't make the ask. They just, they have a tough time going for the ask in the pitch.

21:13What are like some tactical skills that maybe people watching could take away from this on how to actually ask for the sale. Easiest way to ask for the sale is to get your audience to ask you to sell them. Because think about this. If somebody said, hey, I want you to pitch me, would you not feel a lot more comfortable to pitch? Yes. Yeah, okay. So the trick is to get them to ask you. So we call this a bridge. So in a webinar, and by the way, I don't believe you should teach on webinars. Teaching is like the worst thing you can do on a webinar. I'm happy to explain that. Yeah, why is that? I want to hear the tactic.

21:48Okay, here's why you shouldn't teach on a webinar. And this is coming from somebody who's done 45 million with webinars. There's a scientific reason for this, and I'll prove it to you. With science. In 1987, Peter Galwitzer, he's a psychologist, he found that there are two modes to the human mind. There's implementive and deliberative. And basically what that means is there's trying mode and buying mode. So once a human being decides to implement something, the part of their brain open to new decisions lowers dramatically in brain activity. So if the first time you ask somebody to do something is to try something like a tutorial, a task, something that you would teach, you've now shut down the part of the brain that gets them to buy.

22:31So the first time you ask them to make a decision should be a decision to buy. So how do you do this, right? You don't want to teach tactics, tips, or tutorials. You want to teach principles, mechanics, why things work. I call this the content matrix. So imagine you had four quadrants, right? You can teach what to do, why it works, when to do it, and how to do it. Now, in order for somebody to care or have context on how to do something, they have to know what to do. They have to know why it works, and they have to know when it's appropriate to do it. So if you just focus on what to do, why you're doing it, and when to do it, and you leave out the tactical how, now the person's gonna get value because they're gonna understand the underlying mechanics behind what you're teaching but you're gonna keep the part of the brain open to decisions active so when you ask for the sale that part of the brain is still available and they can make a decision to buy so this is not an opinion this is science right I discovered and but by the way I used to teach on my webinars and it was a struggle when I discovered this study that he did I realized okay it doesn't matter my opinion about whether I should teach or not what was wrong with me was I was misunderstanding what value is people do get value when you explain why things work the way they do and the mechanics behind it and the principles behind it in fact they like that better but when you teach tactics they get overwhelmed and they want to go try it and if they go try it and it doesn't work then who do they blame you or they say they're gonna try it but then they procrastinate and they don't do it and and then what do they not do?

24:10They don't buy. In any case, they don't buy. So you can teach, but if you teach in a certain way that doesn't put them in the mindset that is trying mode, you'll keep them in buying mode and they'll buy. Now, when you are in your teaching section or your value section of the webinar, you have to get from the content section to the selling section. In the middle, there's this thing called the bridge. And the point of the bridge is to get people to ask you to sell them. So, for example, this is an old principle I learned from a guy named Dan Kennedy. It's called form. Family, occupation, recreation, and money.

24:51You give a reason why you have a product. You mentioned family, occupation, recreation, and money. Why is that? Because everybody has a family. Everybody has an occupation. everybody has some sort of recreation and everybody deals with money so it's instantly relatable would you like to hear the bridge to my webinar which by the way my webinar did a million dollars in august on auto not live i'd be happy to share the bridge with you let's hear it we gotta go okay so when i was a kid um and by the way you start with an interesting fact usually is great way to start it did you know i've been to disney world 66 times as a kid you haven't i have That's insane.

25:32That's nuts. You know, when I asked you if you came for money, you said, dude, I'm from Florida. No, no, we were broke. Here's how this happened. My dad was a radio announcer, and he would do the radio commercials for Disney World. And so as a perk to that, they gave us free season tickets. So every weekend almost, we would go. But we didn't have a lot of money, so we would have to wait in line the whole time. And so even though we were there every weekend, I spent most of my childhood waiting in line at Disney World. One day, my dad splurged and got a Fast Pass. And it was the most fun I ever had with my dad, literally ever.

26:11And I said to myself, one day I'm going to be a businessman, I'm going to get rich, so that I can always buy the Fast Pass anytime I take my kids somewhere and we can have as much fun as possible. Now, I make content for two types of people. The first type of person is the person who is willing to wait in the general admission line and wait for their dreams. For those people, I make my YouTube content, I make my Instagram content, and I make low-priced information products. Then there's the second type of person. This is the FastPass person. This is the person who's willing to invest in a FastPass to get what they want faster.

26:49And if you're anything like me, you always want an edge, you always want the FastPass. do we have any fast pass people here and people will raise their hands or they'll say me in the chat and then I'll say would you like me to explain what we have to offer that would be your fast pass to getting this done quicker easier and with a higher level of success and everybody goes yes me me me what if they just asked me to do they've asked me now to pitch to sell I said Great. So, and by the way, this is a webinar called the Million Dollar Webinar Workshop. It's how I script webinars. Because I've done 45 million with webinars.

27:27I've written dozens and dozens of seven-figure webinars. So I just do this workshop on my approach to scripting webinars. And at the end, I say, listen, I do that bridge. And I say, hey, are you too busy to write your own webinar? How about my team write it for you? We have a done-for-you webinar service. And I just explain the service. I explain how it works. And I say, go here and apply, talk to my team, and we'll see if it's a fit. Boom. We did a million bucks in August doing that. Damn, Dan. That was a master class.

27:54Dan Henry: I think I'm ready to buy. I think I'm ready to buy. I was just like, man, I'm a fat. I want the fat right here. So here's the question. Is it better to sell to rich people or broke people? It's always better to sell to rich people. Because when you sell to rich people, rich people generally have more expensive problems. Okay? Now, you can sell to people who have less money, but you have to sell a lot. You have to sell a ton of volume. But when you sell to rich people, you can charge more because you can impact more because they have more expensive problems. And therefore, you can sell more with less customers.

28:31So I believe if you're getting started, if you can just figure out an expensive problem and you can solve that expensive problem, you can make a lot of money because you can charge a lot of money per customer but if you solve a cheap problem now you have to have a huge audience a big brand when i got started i mean i made 2.9 million my first year with webinars by the way and i was solving expensive problems and the the more i got further and further into my career the more i learned skills that could solve more expensive and more expensive problem. If you are struggling with sales, if you are struggling with your business and your offers and all that, and I say, listen, I can write you one 45 minute speech that will erase all of the horrible financial decisions you have ever made.

29:21I am solving a massively expensive problem so I can charge a decent amount of money.

29:26Dan Henry: That's the key. How important is it to have a backend offer? Because the most expensive acquisition is getting a customer to do business with you for that first time. So what's your thoughts on having a back-end offer? Is it absolutely necessary? And if so, how do you go about approaching that? Well, I view back-end offers a little bit differently. So to me, I view the back-end offer as the offer. And then I will come up with other offers to get people into that offer. So, for instance, I generally do paid webinars. I don't do free webinars. And here's why. How many times have you been sitting on the couch and you've been watching TV and you see a movie trailer?

30:09And you see something in that movie trailer that you don't like, and so you don't buy a ticket to go see that movie. How many times has that happened? All the time. All the time, right? How many times have you bought a ticket to a movie, gone to the movie theater, got your popcorn, got your drink, sat down, saw something you didn't like in the movie, and you got up and left? You don't. Never. You got skin in the game. Why? Why? Because you're already paid to be there. You're already invested. You're already invested. So I do paid webinars. Why do I do paid webinars? Number one, people that pay, pay attention.

30:40People that pay attention, pay more. And so on top of that, if I do a free webinar, I have to spend a bunch of money in ads. I have to get people to show up, which is, you know, webinar show-up rates are a problem, right? You know how you solve the problem of webinar show-up rates? You know how you get nearly 100 % show-up to every single webinar? You charge for the webinar. Problem solved. Okay, period. And so if I spend a thousand dollars on ads and I make say $800 back, I've now liquidated 80 % of my ad costs. Sometimes I might make$1 ,100 back. I might make even a little bit of profit. So now I get a nearly 100 % show up rate.

31:21I'm not down in my bank account on ads. I've not wasted a bunch of money on ads. And now I got a bunch of people on the webinar who are not freebie seekers. They're not leads. They're customers already. And that's who I'm selling to. And now anybody that buys on that webinar, do you know what we call that money? Profit. Because we've already broken even, or most of it, on the front end. So all you have to do is charge for your webinar. And you can have upsells to get the AOV of the funnel. Do you know what AOV means? Average order value. Average order value. Okay? So not everybody is going to just buy a ticket to the webinar.

31:56They might buy some upsells. So you have the average amount of your order. And if the average amount, for instance, our average order value is$170 on our webinar funnel. So as long as we can get our cost to acquire a customer, our cost to sell one ticket at or below or around$170, we are now breaking even. So we spent$162 ,000 in August on ads. We made almost all of that back and then we did nine hundred and fifty ish thousand From the webinar you got a 10x return We got a 10x return because I focus on breaking even on the front end and now all the back end All that we sell in the webinar is profit.

32:36This is what we call funnel mechanics If you understand the funnel mechanics or the funnel economics, I should say if you understand the funnel economics of a paid presentation, a paid webinar, you will see that most of the time, they are incredibly superior to a free webinar. And that's how you crack the code. And this specific offer that you ran this last month that did a million dollars, close to a million dollars in profit, they had a high margin, 80%. Yeah, like 800 and something. Which is crazy. With that, what was that business that you were ultimately, it was like an auto company, right?

33:10No, this is my webinar. For your, just for your. For our done for you webinar service. Wow. Yeah. So this is my first time doing a webinar on webinars. Because I know if somebody's watching this right now, they're like, oh, you did a webinar on webinars. Well, yeah. For the past 13 years, I've used webinars to sell other stuff. Software, consulting, done for you agencies. I had a sales training agency. And this is the first time I've been like, you know what? Let me do. And you want to hear a funny story on this. Do you know who Jeremy Haynes is?

33:40Dan Henry: Yes. Okay. So I about a little under a year ago, I was having a rough patch personally. You know, I had I had really become bored with my business and I just hated everything that I sold. Like I had no problem selling it, but I just wasn't interested in it. You know, you do things for over 10 years. You get you get bored, man. Like you you just you want to do something new. This is why, like you see these these singers or these actresses, they become, you know, they start other businesses or they decide. to become a model or something just to do something different and I just was not happy with anything I sold like it didn't interest me you know I would do an offer it would make like half a million dollars and then I would just be like I don't want to I don't I'm just not interested and this is like a death sentence for an entrepreneur because you can be talented you can know how to sell but if you're not into it man if you don't have the passion for what you do it's going to be a problem and so I I respect Jeremy Haynes because he's doing really well and I reached out to him and I said, hey, can I pay you for a one-on-one call?

34:43I just want to get your perspective on what you think I should sell, like a second set of eyes. Because I had worked with everybody in the industry. I hadn't really worked with him yet. I thought he would have a good perspective. I thought he'd be like, because he's known of me for a while, and I thought maybe he would have a perspective on it. And so I couldn't get him to get on the call because, you know, in Dubai we use WhatsApp, and he's American, and Americans don't really use WhatsApp. And so I would message him and he wouldn't catch it. And I just couldn't get on the call with him. I got he was too busy or he wasn't using WhatsApp or whatever.

35:18And so, you know, I was talking to my CEO Ahmed and I told him about it. He says, can I make a suggestion? And he says, yeah. And he says, what is the thing that you think you're the best in the world at that if it came down to it, if you had to compete with anybody else and your life was on the line, what would it be? I said, oh, writing a webinar. I'd go against anybody you can name any person on the planet and I would go head-to-head with them on writing a webinar guaranteed And any of the people that I don't think I could win to they're all dead like David Ogilvie or something, you know, and so He's like, why don't you do like a workshop once you do a webinar on your script writing process for webinars I said, I don't know.

36:01Nobody's gonna be interested in that like that's like like nobody cares about webinars everybody's like dude just do it let's get some cash flow let's do because i was stuck at like 250 a month for like two years which i had had i had 1.5 million dollar months i had like crazy months prior but i was just like sort of depressed what kind of happened going from 1.5 million to quarter million mostly personal problems problems at home um i'm gonna tell you right now man like if you're not happy in like your personal relationships it really does affect your business because you're you're like a man's peace should be at his home and if you don't have peace at home if you go to war all day and then you come home to another war you you don't want to go to war the next day but if you come home to peace you gear up man and you're ready to go out on the battlefield the next day and you're excited about it and so it just i wasn't in a good family situation and um that was that's really the honest truth you know i'm not gonna like comment specifically on that it's private but like that's essentially what it was and um i'm in a much better situation now i i got remarried and my i love my wife my wife is freaking amazing she is the most feminine woman she takes care of me she she knows like how to treat a man like she is freaking amazing um but i still like didn't really know what i wanted to do so i tried this this webinar workshop how did you and your wife meet oh we we met on an app bro on a marriage app like i was like looking to get married i'm like here's the funny thing um because i've been married before i was like i'm done with the bs so i messaged like 300 women on this app and i made them all take a personality test and i literally just matched myself with the person who psychologically we were aligned the most and this was the girl and we started talking and then we got married a couple months later but like i was like i'm not gonna let my emotions get i'm gonna use science this time because i'm a very analytical person right like whenever somebody says to me like when i work with a business and they say well this isn't working that's not working i say like okay well what's your close rate they'll say that's 50 i'm like how do you know that to be true show me the data are you tracking it no well then it you're lying you're lying because you as a human being can't remember there's a principle called the forgetting curve it's a psychological principle the average human being forgets 90 of what they learn within seven days so if you're telling me your close rate is 50 and it's not on the spreadsheet you're a liar okay you might not know that you're a liar but you are because you can't physically remember why because you're a human being so i know how your brain works and you can't remember that so you've got to track it i'm data only we have a thing in my company you don't get to speak you don't get to have an opinion unless it's based on data you can't say anything unless you have the data to back it up or keep it closed it's such it can't be on vibes no it's just like oh i feel like you get the feel is outlawed the word feel is outlawed like i literally have an automation in slack if it catches the word feel it throws a flag up.

39:07I swear to you. No, no, no. That word is banned. That word is banned. I feel like my close rate. I feel like our audience doesn't... I feel like I know my audience. Well, if you knew your audience, you'd be a millionaire. So you clearly don't. So why don't we figure it out? Even yesterday, we were in a group chat with me and some of our team. And we're making a big decision on something, on how much we're going to pay for a certain thing. And basically, like everybody's saying well i feel like this would be better and it's just like guys we're making this decision out of our ass right now this is not a therapy session like this this that we we have no no like factual proof that like anybody in this group i don't even i don't entertain that from clients i don't entertain that from staff i just don't even entertain that as soon as somebody says that i shut them down immediately because it's a waste of both of our times to even have that conversation where's the data if you don't have the data come back with the data i don't to hear your opinion because opinions are like assholes everybody's got one and everybody thinks each other stinks show me the data okay um so so here's the thing so i don't get the call with jeremy haynes he's too busy to do the call that i would have paid him 10 grand for my coo says hey man why don't you do what you're best at do a workshop on webinars i think it's a bad idea because i don't think anybody cares about webinars you know what he says to me he says make them care that's what you're great at that's a bar so I started writing this webinar on how I script webinars right first time I ever done that I get super excited about it I get so excited about it I'm like I don't even care if this sucks and it doesn't make any money I just enjoy talking about this so I do this whole thing I do the webinar and it does like really well it smashes and I'm like huh and so we started experimenting with this this done-for-you webinar service and we were selling it internally and you know we were doing well with it like the webinars we wrote for our clients were smashing and but then I thought but we're not going to be able to scale this because nobody cares and that's that's why he said like do the workshop so we did it and it just did really really well and then we just kept doing it and we went from 200 grand a month with that offer to 950

41:16Dan Henry: in four months incredible man congratulations on that thank you and you know what it was it was because I just it was just something it's this very simple principle sell what you're best at oftentimes we do this really stupid thing as entrepreneurs where we look at other people who are selling something and doing well we go I'm gonna sell that because they're doing well but the thing is they're doing well because that's what they're best at if you're not best at that you're not gonna do well with it do you think that also dilutes people's brands when they want to just jump to the next hot feed and do that.

41:50It makes you look bad, man, because it makes you look. And I did this for a while. I literally did this for a while. I'm guilty of it, too. I started selling. I sold a personal brand course. And to be honest with you, it was good. People got results. But I'm not interested in personal branding that much. I mean, I am, but not to the level I am in sales presentations, speaking. I would love, if I ever did a beginner offer, it would be how to become a paid speaker. because I really have passion for that. You know, do you know I get paid more than Obama to speak? I believe it. You know, Obama gets paid$350 ,000 per speech.

42:26I just did a speech in Vegas. I made$500 ,000 because Obama gets paid to speak. I get paid when I speak. See, that's the difference. If you're not famous, you can't get paid a lot of money to speak because how do you get paid a lot of money to speak? You're famous. People come because you draw a crowd. If you can't draw a crowd, then you got to speak and sell something. And if you speak and sell something and you're good at that speech that sells something, you can make way more money than even the most famous people. What do you do differently from everybody else that allows you to make$500 ,000 when you give a speech?

42:58So it's simple, right? You show somebody how to solve their problem and then you offer to do it for them. Or you offer to make it easier, faster, or make it simpler. That's it. So I'll give you an example. When I was young, when I was in my early 20s, I made$3 ,500 in a day with a speech, and nobody knew who I was. And I was in a small podunk town of Spring Hill, Florida, and here's how I did it. I went on Facebook. So at the time, I was a blogger. I wasn't making any money as a blogger, a little bit, but not much. And I thought, well, you know, I'm not famous, but I can talk about a famous problem.

43:39And a famous problem was, how do I start a blog? so I went on Facebook and I posted in the Facebook marketplace and this I said hey I'm doing a seminar at a hotel on how to start a blog a one-day seminar it's free and if I if memory serves the name of the hotel was the micro budget hotel like literally that was the name of the hotel it was a hundred and fifty dollars to rent a conference room for the day so I pay the hundred and fifty dollars about 30 people show up I show them how to start a blog and how to write a post how to come up with the idea for blah blah blah blah blah now what do you need to have a blog you need website hosting well at the time there was a company called hostgator and they sold hosting for ten dollars a month if you sent somebody to that company with your referral link you got paid a hundred and fifty dollar commission why because they knew people would pay for website hosting for years so i did this seminar this speech and about three quarters of the way through it i said okay guys now we need to sign up for website hosting so your blog can go live and I promised you your blog would go live by the end of today so everybody go to this link and sign up so everybody went to that link or most of the people did and they signed up through my referral link which I got paid$150 per signup and I walked away with roughly$3 ,500 it was 30 3200 or 3500 I don't remember but around that from that affiliate commission for that day and I I walked out of that speech and I didn't have any product to fill.

45:12I didn't even have a business. I just did a speech on a famous problem and I offered to help them solve that problem. And what was one of the ways? They needed website hosting. And nobody knew who I was. But everybody knew what problem they had. If you're not famous, you're not going to be able to get paid to speak. But if you talk about a famous problem, you'll get paid when you speak. Dan, what do you think is the difference between broke people and rich people? Oh, I love this. So here's the difference between broke people and rich people. It's all about how you think. For instance, if I offered to sell you this gym bag for$1 ,000, would you take it?

45:53I probably would not buy that for$1 ,000. See, that is how a poor person thinks. A rich person would at least ask, what's in the bag? because if there was$10 ,000 in the bag you just lost out on$9 ,000 you see broke people care about what things cost rich people care about what things are worth because then they know what it costs if they don't take advantage of the opportunity this is opportunity cost and this is what rich people understand and poor people don't that's game right there can I make one point on that yeah So I just got offered$100 ,000 to speak somewhere. I turned it down. Because on the same day, I was going to put on my own event, and I know that I'll make at least$300 ,000 to$500 ,000 from that event.

46:42So I turned down$100 ,000 because they were paying me to speak because I knew I would make three to five times more because when I do that type of speech, I get paid when I speak. See what I'm saying? And here's the funny thing about being a paid speaker. You don't need a product. Do you know why? Because when somebody watches you speak, somebody attends a speech, whether it's a webinar, a paid seminar or whatever, what are they doing? They're coming and they're investing their time to hear you speak about a problem. Well, if you then sell them into another speech where you go deeper on that problem, that's the best thing you can sell.

47:21Because in e-commerce, there's a principle. Sell more of what they already bought. If you buy protein powder, what is the upsell? Hey, get another two bags for the price of one. They sell more of what you already bought. So if you've already attended a speech to learn how to solve a problem and I sell you into another speech, like a seminar or something like that, what is that? It's another speech on how to solve that problem deeper. This is how Tony Robbins became a billionaire as a public speaker. It's selling more of what they got. I have one quick follow-up before this. You had mentioned, you know, hey, like if you don't have like a following and don't know people, then you have to rely on making money when you speak.

47:59Right. So do you think, it's kind of a question related to this, do you think it's better to have 10 million followers and a large brand and following, or do you think it'd be better to have 10 ,000 of the right followers? Obviously 10 ,000 of the right followers. I mean, how many people do you know on Instagram that do stupid stuff, dancing, smashing plates against their face, whatever, and they've got millions of followers, but they're dead broke. A lot of people. Yeah, a lot. A lot, a lot. But then you have somebody who has like 1 ,000 followers and maybe they make a$10 ,000 sale because those 1 ,000 followers were the right followers and they were solving a problem that people were willing to pay for.

48:35I don't ever, like, dude, I didn't even, my first$10 million, I didn't even have an Instagram or a YouTube. I ran ads to a freaking webinar and I made$10 million. I literally have a screenshot from Stripe for 9.2 million from a single product and then we moved off to a different merchant company because I would not recommend Stripe, by the way, for anything. It's like, yeah, they're, they're notorious. I mean, they're notorious for shutting down accounts, holding your money, whatever. But, um, but yeah, dude, like I, I, I, I didn't have any of that. I just had a speech. That was it. I scaled a speech.

49:12Dan Henry: Is there a certain price point to where you think people shouldn't do webinars, like low ticket? Like, would you recommend people who are selling a product for 50 or a hundred dollars still do webinars or do you think it's like webinar or webinars and VSLs are reserved for people who are selling like you know$900 and above no dude I mean if you're selling something for 100 bucks I think a webinar is overkill but you just do a VSL a video sales letter which is really just to me a short webinar because I'm literally doing the same thing I'm just doing it in less time so for instance I have a VSL which is a short speech that sells my million dollar webinar workshop for 97 then the actual workshop is two and a half hours then we sell multiple packages for uh done for you webinars we do full funnel builds we do like full done for you services like we hand you the speech on a silver platter we have seminars events i have private consulting etc but all of that comes from a little speech to a bigger speech you know i mean so we sell with speeches so i got a quick game for you let's play the game it's rapid fire section okay so what's a better city for business Dubai or Miami oh Dubai how was that well well for one like in Dubai you don't have taxes right so if you're from a European nation or something like that and you come to Dubai you're not gonna pay any taxes also in Dubai it's the there's ease of access you know like if I drop my phone and I need a phone right I can get a brand new iPhone to my door in 10 minutes with the 10 minutes app.

50:46Like you can't do that in Miami. You got to go to the Apple store, this and that. Um, also in my opinion, Dubai is cheaper. Like I just visited the U S and it was like stupid expensive. It was like$75 for me to order two bowls from a healthy food bowl place. And it tore up my stomach because you know, the food in America is full of chemicals and preservatives and all kinds of garbage. And the food here is clean. It's super clean. Like I mean I felt I just visited the US for like a month and a half and I literally thought I was gonna die I Lost like 20 pounds. I couldn't eat the food. It was terrible Then I came back here and immediately I felt like you know, I had actual nutrients in my body I mean it was rough dude It was like when I I mean you got to remember America was very different like 20 years ago I remember America being amazing now.

51:39It's like camping, you know, I mean it's it's it's ever since COVID, the quality of life, it just really went down in the States. And it's sad, man, because like, are you guys, you guys aren't, are you guys from the States? Yeah, Texas. So do you know what I'm talking about? Like, like, you guys are young, like, I'm a little bit older than you. But like, America used to be dope. And now it's like, it's rough, dude. Like, like, I feel bad for you guys. Because when I was a kid, my family, my parents, they had normal jobs, and we could afford a house if you have a normal job now there's no way you're affording a house like it it's it's rough it is rough so um and obviously there's worse countries in the world like whenever this argument comes up somebody mentions like somalia or something and it's like dude like yeah but like there's other countries like that are that are really like you know what amazing country iraq iraq is an amazing country how come because like there's a lot of opportunity there.

52:39The food is amazing. The people are super nice. It's clean. It's beautiful. You would never guess. But like I go there all the time because my wife, my wife is from Iraq. And the first time I landed there, I was so nervous. I was like, oh my God, am I going to get kidnapped or something? You know? And then it was just so welcoming. It was so nice. I mean, I was like, wow, this is like, you know, on that. And we got to get back. We got to get back to the game. But I just want to make a point on that is that, you know, I recently went and visited Nigeria for the first time in June, and we shot a ton of content out there.

53:09We interviewed incredible entrepreneurs and billionaires in Nigeria. And when you tell people, hey man, I'm actually going to Nigeria next month, they're like, they kind of look at you like that. Well, 50 % of Americans don't have a passport, but they have an opinion on international affairs. But it's just wild how a lot of countries that are definitely worth visiting and perspective changing kind of get a little bit of bad wrath and then it ultimately changes everybody's perspective. from people who don't leave their own country, who don't see the world. Like, like, we have a very technical term for that.

53:43It's called ignorance. Like, talking about things you don't know about. And I'm guilty. I was guilty of the same thing. I thought all this stuff. And then when I got a passport, got on a plane and went outside of the U.S., I was like, oh, wow, like, this is all completely opposite of what I thought. Okay. And then I developed a new opinion. That's called growth kids like for all the people watching at home when you think something and then you go and learn new information and then you change your opinion that's called growing so you this is a very important part of getting older this is just a tip from a guy that just turned 40 so you've

54:18Dan Henry: made 45 million dollars throughout your career what's the biggest lie being told to aspiring entrepreneurs on social media today oh man gosh there's so many um the biggest lie being told on social media probably like work harder like you know that's a trend right now everybody's saying like work harder you got to work harder and I do believe you should have a hard work ethic but I'll give you an example so um quick analogy if you were standing in the middle of a road and there was a bag of cash 20 miles away they had 10 ,000 dollars in cash in it and you could choose to walk the 20 miles to get that cash or you could walk one mile in the opposite direction to get a car and then drive to the cash, which would you choose?

55:01Walk or drive? I'm going to the car. I'm going to the car. But wait a minute. Aren't you walking in the opposite direction of what you want? For a short period of time. For a short period of time. So see, what's happening here is sometimes in life, we have to walk in the opposite direction of what we want to ultimately get what we want faster. You see, the car is leverage. There's too much information out there that says you just have to push forward and work hard. I don't work hard. I work hard at obtaining leverage. This is why I do webinars and speeches to grow my business because while other people are building sales teams and learning how to lead their team and recruit and manage, I'm like, screw that, dude.

55:45I'll just come up with one great speech that blows it out of the park and then my sales calls become easy, everything becomes easy. So I just focused on obtaining the leverage that would make all that other stuff irrelevant. And that's my opinion. That's the biggest lie is just work hard. I think you should work hard at obtaining leverage. What's harder to sell?

56:06Dan Henry: $100 product to someone who's broke or$10 ,000 product to someone who's rich? Oh, it's harder to sell$100 product. 100%. Are you kidding me? Oh, yeah. Because the broke person will have like 10 ,000 questions and they'll be like, oh, my God, I don't know. Whereas the guy who's buying$10 ,000, they'll be like, money sent, thanks. Because you know why? People who are broke, they have a lot of time but not a lot of money. People who are rich, they have a lot of money but not a lot of time. Which means they don't have a lot of time to bother you with stupid questions. If you can solve their problem and they know you can solve their problem, they give you the money and they let you do your job.

56:46Dan Henry: Period. If you lost everything tomorrow, what's the first business you would start? It doesn't matter. I would just use a webinar. I would just use a webinar to sell it. I would just pick something to sell and write a webinar. If you had to pick one, though. Well, obviously, the easiest thing to sell is, in my opinion, a seminar. Because what is it? It's just talking, right? So if somebody attends a seminar, whether virtual or in person, I get time with them to help them solve their problem. So it's kind of like consulting. It's like one-shot consulting. We call them seminars. And I would just create a free or low cost speech that sells them into a more premium speech.

57:23And now all I got to do is talk. I get paid to talk.

57:26Dan Henry: So the final one for you is what's a business model that's making people rich today that you think will be dead in five years? Like AI stuff, man. Like teaching AI. Because here's the thing. Here's where people are making a lot of – here's where people are screwing up with AI businesses. They're teaching AI. So here's what's happening. AI changes every few weeks so that means you have to change your business every few weeks but if instead you build something that doesn't change but you build it with AI now that does not change on the front end behind the scenes you're just getting more efficient more efficient more efficient but what you sell on the front end doesn't change okay so so for instance we will always, let's say you were a relationship coach, right?

58:13Well, okay, here's an example. Right now, a lot of people are worried that the coaching and info space is going to go away. But the people who are smart, what are they doing? They're building AI versions of themselves. So for instance, we just built Dan AI. And what Dan AI is, it's 13 years of my coaching calls, my$100 ,000 VIP days I record them all I load them into the brain our data our trainings my seminar everything and so when you ask it stuff not only does it answer the question but it makes sure you're asking the right question it works with you as if I was working with you and so I'm not selling how to do AI I'm selling something that people will always need advice from somebody more experienced than them but I'm using AI to make it more efficient that's the key build products with AI don't teach AI.

59:02And you spent time around a lot of very successful other people in the internet marketing space. I wanted to ask you who's impressed you the most, you know, like going to... Dead or alive. Let's do both actually. I think both would be really interesting. Oh, I would probably say David Ogilvie because, and you know, a client of mine, he did one of my 100k VIP days and he brought me a gift and it was an original issue of the May 19 May 31st 1958 issue of the New Yorker which had the famous David Ogilvy ad for Rolls Royce and it was the headline for it was at 60 miles an hour the loudest sound you will hear in this brand new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the electronic clock Now, when's the last time you saw an ad for Rolls Royce?

59:57You haven't. Because that one ad put them on the map so much that they never needed another ad again. And David Ogilvie was incredibly, he was an amazing advertising mind. And if you study him, you will learn more than any of these new age marketers. because all these new age marketers are just watered down versions of five generations after guys like david ogilvy so my edge in marketing and advertising is i go back 50 60 70 80 years ago and i like like basically i don't take advice from people if they're not dead be and that's my edge i literally just study dead guys and that's why i i am generally better than even an upper echelon marketer because those guys are the best why would I not study the best so I would say David Ogilvie for dead well Dan we like to end these podcasts off with two questions I'll start and then Jack will will end it uh Dan if the four of us sitting here were to die tomorrow and you could leave one more guiding principle and message with the younger generation what would you tell them wow that's good I would say never follow your passion because everybody has the same passion.

1:01:13Winning. When you're good at something, when you win at something, you will develop a passion for it. And the best advice I can give to you is instead of trying to be successful with something you're currently interested in, find out what you're best at and pursue that. And you will develop an insatiable passion for it. Because who you are today will not be who you are in five years. And who you are in five years will not be who you are in 10 years. and who you are in 10 years will not be who you are in 20 years. And every single one of those people at times will be interested in different things.

1:01:49So if you only pursue what interests you, what entertains you, the chances of failure are extremely high. Find out what you can win at and pursue that. Play the game you can win. It's a beautiful answer right there. And Dan, in the career, life, and legacy you've built so far, how do you want to be remembered? I want to be remembered as a good guy because at the end of the day, I don't think anybody cares how much money you make. I think people forget that stuff. But if you genuinely make a good impact on the world and you solve the problem that makes the world a better place even in a small way, people will remember you not for what you gained but for how you helped others gain.

1:02:38And that should be the most important thing, contribution. Love it. Well, Dan, this was a fantastic conversation and episode. We appreciate you being with us, Mark. Awesome, man. For everybody tuning in right now, be sure to like and subscribe for amazing content, amazing episodes coming every week to the Hard Knocks podcast. We're going to put the links down in the description for you all to follow along with Dan Henry across all social media platforms to stay up to date on the incredible stuff he's doing in the internet marketing world. And lastly, we're going to put a link down in the description to get access to the number one entrepreneur community in the world today, the School of Mentors, where every week we We host live calls with the eight, nine, 10, and 11 figure entrepreneurs we interview on the School of Hard Knocks.

1:03:13We can't wait to see you on the inside. With that being said, we'll see you in the next episode.