It’s really very fitting that my first interview of 2014 is with Captain Lou because recently I got off a fantastic ship in the middle of the Caribbean with Captain Lou and 400 hundred of the worlds brightest internet marketing minds and did we have a blast or did we have a blast?!
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About Captain Lou
Captain Lou has 30+ years of sales and marketing experience, offline and online, b to c and b to b. He considers himself “psychologically unemployable”.
After getting fired 5 times in a row, Captain Lou built several 7-figure sales operations from scratch on little more than an 8th grade education and fire in the belly.
His goals are to travel the world, not only fulfilling his own dreams and fantasies, but also those of his clients.
Captain Lou prides himself in showing niche group leaders how to cruise the world for free, with their own highly profitable “Special-Events-At-Sea”.
He is the Creator of CruiseMarketingMagic.com and the Million-Dollar-Groups-System for travel sellers, as well as the Producer / Planner of the amazing annual Internet Marketer’s mastermind - MarketersCruise.com
For more information, check out Captain Lou at:
CaptainLou.com or SpecialEventsAtSea.com
Prefer to read than listen? Here’s the transcription
19 January 2014 – Captain Lou Edwards
It’s Nicola Cairncross here from The Business Success Factory and I am absolutely delighted to welcome to the podcast Captain Lou Edwards.
It’s really very fitting that my first interview of 2014 is with Captain Lou because I have literally just a week ago got off a fantastic ship in the middle of the Caribbean with Captain Lou and 400 hundred of the worlds brightest marketing minds and did we have a blast or did we have a blast?!
Captain Lou: Oh my goodness did we ever… I am still recuperating from the blast we had.
Nicola: I think everybody is. I only realised at day 3 that my ankles were swelling up because I was not drinking any water…I was just drinking frozen Margaritas.
Captain Lou: Awesome, awesome. I think that today I am going to be more of a Captain flu than Captain Lou but I will persevere.
Nicola: I’m Nicola Cough Cairncross today. So if I have to mute myself, that’s what’s going on. I was thinking to myself that’s OK because Captain Lou can talk for England or America. So I won’t have to say too much…
Captain Lou: No, No, No, Wait a second Nicola. I need you and your audience to help me overcome my extreme shyness.
Nicola: Oh, I have heard about this extreme shyness. It manifests itself in lots of different ways, doesn’t it? Largely on stage.
Captain Lou: That’s true. Most people greatest fear in life is to have a microphone in front of their face and speak on stage. My greatest fear is to not have a microphone.
Nicola: To have it taken away from you. That is awesome. I don’t even know where to start with the best bits of the cruise really because I loved the mastermind sessions, I loved the hot seat sessions, I loved the tips and tools sessions. Every time we were called to the Ebony lounge, I absolutely loved it.
Captain Lou: Yes, it’s hard to describe. We had people – the tried and true alumni, original friends and guests that have become family over the years that come back every year. It’s really quite an extraordinary mastermind and networking vacation with the perfect work and play balance. It’s my biggest event of the year, you know I do many group niche cruises and special events.
It’s hard to explain the experience that you and I just had. People just have to come and see for themselves what it’s all about. It’s an experience. It’s not a seminar or a conference or a trade show, but rather a unique relationship building experience that is kind of magical. I don’t know if its the formula that we have patented over the years or the wonderful people that we attract from all over the world. It’s really amazing.
Nicola: We walk around with our internet marketers badges on so everyone can recognise each other and you can reconnect because I’ve been there in 2009 and I’ve missed it since then because my business took a bit of a dive which all my listeners know about and I have built it back up again, and I was very proud to be able to get on the ship again this year.
You walk around the ship and everyone just talks to you who is an internet marketers cruiser and you just make new friends. And this really struck me on the ship – the staff who were just walking along corridors going about their business, they bothered to look at your name tag and greet you by name. I found that amazing.
Captain Lou: It really is awesome. We happened to have a particularly great staff and crew on this year’s cruise. So the warm fuzzies were in high gear.
Nicola: Yes, they were. Even from the guy who was making my omelettes in the morning through to the guy who served our table, they all took the trouble again to call you by name. I don’t know if that’s an American thing, but it’s such a refreshing blast of fuzziness as you call it, when you come from the UK.
Captain Lou: Yes. Much needed in January for sure
Nicola: Yes, and that kept been going through the bad weather in November – December, knowing I was going to be getting on the ship. Anyway let’s stop raving about where we’ve just been and tell me a bit about yourself and your business at the moment, because obviously I’ve known you for a while, I know you do specialist cruises… Tell us a little bit about where Captain Lou came from and how did you get into the cruise business?
Captain Lou: Well, you know… For those of you that haven’t read my books or know my story, here’s the short version. I was an 8th grade dropout that has never seen the inside of a high school and yet now I’ve lectured at colleges and speak on stages around the world. I was the kid, the goofy, uncontrollable kid that was voted least likely to succeed.
After my Mum died, when I was 15 years old, my dad was very old and had problems of his own and couldn’t properly care for me, I kind of ran away from home and joined, not the circus but close to it, Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Federation back in the late 70’s. Yes, I was running around with people like André The Giant and Ivan Putski “The Polish Power” and Bruno Sammartino, and this really dates me but the wrestlers kind of took me into their family and I became a ring announcer and colour commentator and radio talk-show host. New York’s youngest radio programme producer back in the late 70’s and early 80′s.
Nicola: Wow, the high day of disco!
Captain Lou: It was, right, absolutely, it was an amazing experience and I did that for about four years and my well-meaning friends and whatever family I had left said: “Lou you’ve got to get a real job and stop going on the road with the professional wrestlers, wrestling will never be big”
Nicola: Really [laughs]
Captain Lou: Amazing…Timing is everything and I had none of it, so I quit pro wrestling to get a real job and for the next twenty years I became New York’s only straight – as in heterosexual – interior decorator.
Nicola: Oh my god, that’s brilliant.
Captain Lou: I did very well. In fact, I was a blind man – that was my niche specialty. I wasn’t really blind, I made customised blinds for your windows and that’s what I was known for. I had a sales force, I always had a strong sales background and in the tri-state area of New York City we would come to your home and show you nice fabric swatches and different colours for your window treatments and I did that for 20 years. I did very well, but I hated every minute of it, I just hated it. It was not fulfilling! Did you ever have a job where you’ve done something very well, but you hated your life?
Nicola: Pretty much every job I ever had was like that. I always got jobs very easily, but after 18 months I was fit to self harm myself.
Captain Lou: Yes and then you say, there’s got to be something more to life than this.
Nicola: And you look at your salary if you’re in a job and you think, “Get bigger for God’s sake!” If you’re in a business it’s even worse because you’re paying everyone else first, aren’t you?!
Captain Lou: Ain’t that the truth! Yes, even today I pay everyone before I even pay myself. And managing a payroll through up times and down times, as you know, it’s not easy. But going back to the window treatments, for twenty years I was making a living and then I decided I want to start making a life.
I wanted to help fulfil dreams and fantasies because if I did that for my clients, in turn I would be doing the same for myself right? So why not do something that you love and, like the cliche saying goes, “if you love what you, do you’ll never work a day in your life.” So I decided to just toss it all to the wind and give up what was actually a very good paying sales job and I decided to work to get into the world of travel because I wanted to see the world.
And in January of 2003, I find out about something called an Internet Marketing Seminar. It’s called “The Big Seminar”, it’s 11 year ago in January 2003, and I decide well, there’s something called the internet and maybe, if I start this travel business, I can get customers not just from around the corner but maybe from around the country and eventually around the world.
So I show up. I did what Woody Allen suggested, that 80% of success is just showing up, right? And I decide to show up at an internet marketing conference called “The Big Seminar” and I start learning about putting up websites and building lists and doing.. back then we didn’t have webinars.. so it was teleseminars.
Nicola: Yeah, I remember those.
Captain Lou: You remember those? And how to bring your product or service to the rest of the world? Back then I was just doing part-time travel as a hobby. It wasn’t even a serious consideration!
Nicola: So what were you doing exactly? Fixing up trips for individuals or something?
Captain Lou: Right, like any of the hundreds of thousands travel agents that are sitting in a room with those racks with the brochures and attempting to sell one-on-one instead of one-on-many. Like you say fixing up a trip to somebody that might want to go on vacation, but I was a very shoppable commodity with very low commissions, the way most travel agents still do it ‘til this day and that wasn’t going to work. I needed to learn to think bigger. To think bigger financially and to niche-ify my business into something that was unshoppable and also to learn how to sell one-on-many instead of one-on-one as we are all doing here. I know you and all of our colleagues do the same thing. You know that the potential for one-on-many is way greater than just sitting with one person and hoping to make a sale.
Nicola: I am fascinated Lou because it does lead into the first question really. I’m fascinated to know what made you think “Ok, travel, I could do that”. Did you just leap straight in, did you know someone who was doing it, or did you meet a mentor?
Captain Lou: That’s a great question. It was more kind of a challenge from many, many different areas. Most travel agents don’t make a lot of money. The typical travel agent in the USA earns between $18,000 and $23,000 per year and works about 60 hours a week, so it wasn’t a very enticing career for me to go in to also there were people in the internet marketing industry that said, “Lou, you will never get a good number of people to give up their businesses for a week and join you on a vacation for networking in the Caribbean. So your idea of putting together these niche cruises where people will bring their families and network and build their businesses.. That is never going to work.” There was a very famous internet marketer, I won’t name names, he said to me.. “I think you should be doing one-on-many but I don’t know if you are going to get marketers to all want to come together and brainstorm and network. That might be harder to do.”
So I took that as a personal challenge. Another thing Nicola, is that the cruise industry itself back then, told me people don’t book high ticket multi thousand dollar packages online. They’re not comfortable with the internet. They are not going to put into a shopping cart, their credit card for $2,000 or $3,000. They need to be sold by telephone the old fashioned way. No one is going to book travel on the internet that readily.
Nicola: Listen Lou. You’ve jumped ahead something shocking there. One minute you’re going to The Big Seminar, which I think was one of the Armand Morin’s, wasn’t it?
Captain Lou: Correct.
Nicola: And the next minute you’re selling your idea for specialist cruises for marketers. How did you get between, a little travel agent going to his first internet marketing seminar to having that idea of putting big marketing networking cruises together for marketers?
Captain Lou: How do you make that jump? Well, I wish I could take credit for it, but actually it was a woman named Holly Carter that happened to be in the audience, just another attendee. And she came up to me and she tapped me the shoulder during a session and she said “Hey Lou” – back then I was not even Captain Lou, I was just Lou, I don’t know when people started to calling me Captain Lou – she said, ”Lou, could we put together…do you want to do a JV with me?” I didn’t know that JV stood for joint venture, so I thought she was asking me to smoke a joint with her in the bathroom. I thought she was asking me to do drugs with her.
Nicola: Out by the bike sheds. Naughty old Lou.
Captain Lou: I said no, no I don’t do stuff like that. I’m very, very conservative. A good boy and I don’t do things like that. She said “No, no, no, it’s nothing like that! It’s a joint venture, it’s a partnership. Why don’t we go and ask the speakers? Why don’t we go and ask Armand and Alex and all of the speakers that host the event, if they would email their lists and bring their families onto this cruise and then if they got enough people they can get a free cabin and we can all go and hang out in the Caribbean, instead of some stuffy hotel conference room.” She said, “Lou could you put together a seminar at sea where we’re all sipping pina coladas in a jacuzzi at sunset while sailing away from some sun drenched island in the Bahamas or the Caribbean. Is that what you do Lou? Could you do that?”
I thought to myself, well I’ve never done anything like this before but with all courage and bravery I turned to her and said: Oh absolutely! That’s my specialty.
Nicola: That’s my specialty?! You actually said that’s my specialty!
Captain Lou: I actually said that’s my specialty while my heart fell into my shorts.
Nicola: That’s excellent. So you went off presumably and found out how to. You started to talking to people, doing research and talking to the cruise lines and everything, but they told you it would never fly. So tell me what kept you going when everyone was telling you no.
Captain Lou: Sheer insanity. For that first cruise, the first thing that kept me going, is, remember I still had money coming in from my main business which was the window treatments. So back then, before Little Shop of Cruises there was a Little Shop of Blinds and I had a steady cash flow coming in. So I could invest time and money into this crazy idea of doing group cruises around the world and doing teleseminars and putting together events. Let me give this a try! We had nine months to put together the first group cruise and I figured in nine months you can either have a baby or you can have a cruise. For me it would just be easier to do the cruise so…
Nicola: Was Mike Filsaime and Donna Fox involved at this stage?
Captain Lou: No, this is way before Mike and Dona and all the big boys came in and really help my career and take it to the next level. No, it was just Holly and Armand and we did a cruise nine months later on Halloween of 2003 with about 55 people and, you know, I was a nervous wreck because I have never done anything like this before. I’d just gotten into the travel business a year earlier, right! I was just an ordinary travel agent, I had no idea about producing events nor marketing them and doing all the web stuff, list building, audio and video and teleseminars… that was a learning curve for me as well.
So when we did the cruise, everything went wrong.
Nicola: Of course it did!
Captain Lou: I thought it was a total disaster and I wrote in one of my books that I actually at the end of the cruise went back to my cabin and hid under the bed and started to cry because I felt that most of the guests would know that I’m a fraud. That I had no business being in this business. And that it was a disaster. But instead, when I finally… and I’m a man that admits that I could cry when things go wrong – I love chick flicks and romantic movies
Nicola: You’re a Metropolitan.
Captain Lou: What do they call it? A metrosexual right? A metrosexual heterosexual.
So after I dried my tears and come out of my cabin and it’s the last day of the cruise, I have everybody coming up to me and hugging me and high-fiving me and thanking me for this world-class experience and asking me when can we do it again.
Nicola: Oh my god
Captain Lou: You know what the moral of this story is? Is that you are your own worst [enemy] and in your mind you’re not perfect, you are flawed, you are a fraud, you are terrible, people will see that you are not worthy. In your mind you tell yourself these stories that are simply untrue. Just because you can see all the things that are wrong, many, many, many of your customers see everything that’s right.
So they basically said “Lou this was the greatest ever and this is what you should do, this should be your business model. You should do this in all different niches and online with different websites. You’re great at this and we love you.”
That’s when it solidified. Wow. I’m going to do this seriously. I’m going to do this full time. I’m going to make this into a multi million dollar business online and I am not going to let anything step in my way, including the cruise lines that tell me this cannot be done because they were unable to do it and they spend millions and millions of dollars on their marketing.
Nicola: Yeah. I can sort of see how it happened because you build the trust in you and really we just put our credit cards in if you tell us to.
Captain Lou: Exactly.
Nicola: The other thing that really strikes me about your business and having experienced it several times, is the customer service is just astonishingly good. We send an email whatever time just to get it off of a to do list to your people and someone always replies really quickly. I understand that you even been experimenting with some sort of Apple in your phone so that you can be even more propped off the mark when you get an enquiry email or or a customer email.
Captain Lou: That’s actually true. I know it sounds very cliche, but we talk about under promising and over delivering. The customer service has to be number one and I want to treat everyone the way I want to be treated. In this world of impersonalisation, impersonal technology, shopping malls and online ordering, the human factor is often quite lost. So, if there is somebody browsing on one of my websites, I want to know if they have a question. And if they have a question, I want that sent to my smartphone instantly so I can help them if my staff on duty or Nancy or Denise are not available at that moment.
I don’t want them waiting until tomorrow to have to submit out a support ticket. I want instant email responses. I want people on my website to be able to get answers immediately and by providing this tremendous customer service you build raving fans that love you and want to support your cause and refer you even if there’s no commission in it for them.
Nicola: Oh I know. We had a bit of a laugh on the cruise about this being the worst affiliate program on the planet or something.
Captain Lou: Right. Nicola, I bragged that we have the worst affiliate program on the planet while everyone else in the internet marketing space is offering 50, 75 and 100% commissions to get partners to promote for them. We offer an experience that is unrivalled and unmatched and people promote for us, not for the money, but to expand the cause and the good of what we’re doing.
So if you fail to get us ten referrals in the next year and then we payout then you get nothing but a hug and thank you and acknowledgement from the stage. But you know what people want more than money, more than anything, they want acknowledgement and respect. They want to know that they are important. People want to matter. Don’t you agree?
Nicola: Yes, that is very true. I am driven by several things and one of them is learning and another one is recognition. You just want to feel that you’ve made a difference.
Captain Lou: Exactly. Somehow over the years, we’ve kind of perfected the magical formula of making a difference in people’s lives. Not just with the Marketers Cruise, I do an annual Murder Mystery At Sea we are doing one this summer to Alaska on the Grand Princess. We have veterans of the US Marines Corps that we are doing a cruise for on Halloween this year with a hundred Marines. We have all different niches from all walks of life B2B and B2C that we try to make into a community of camaraderie, of helping each other, of special life experiences, of going forward together so that it becomes an annual cruise like the Marketers Cruise.
I am probably jumping ahead in your questions because a lot of people know me as the person who runs the Marketers Cruise with Mike and Donna but what you might not know is, I also am an info marketer. I have a couple books out and I have a DVD. I have a home study course called The Million Dollar Group System, which trains travel agents on how to do a seven figure travel business online, specialising in groups like I do and that’s a $2000 coaching program and I have many, many students.
In fact, I am gearing up for a webinar later to our webinar, with my travel agent students that want do what Captain Lou has done, which has seemingly been the impossible because everyone said it can’t be done. So when people say it can’t be done, that’s the time to really start working hard and accepting that challenge.
Nicola: That’s brilliant. I know that’s the perfect time to mention it because we are still in the phase of talking about you and your business at the moment. I want people to know about the people I’m interviewing for this podcast. I want them to know about the real person behind the name before we go into the three questions…
You’ve touched on the first one a little bit, but what I’d really like you to do is just wrack your brain a bit and think about your best learning, resource, revelation to date, around your business mind. You talked a little about your mindset at the time and how you realised that you thought it was a disaster but everyone else was loving it.
Looking back over your entire career actually, what’s been the biggest learnings or the biggest aha! moments you’ve had around business and mindset and success thinking and stuff like?
Captain Lou: The biggest aha! moment was also my biggest challenge and is what most marketers who fail to make big money, wrestle with every day. It’s a mindset. It has to do with your financial thermostat as T Harv Eker would call it.
Nicola: I have been to one of his events actually. In New Jersey.
Captain Lou: New Jersey. That’s right, The Millionaire Mind. When you grow up poor, not with a lot of money, and you come from a blue-collar family who’s based on security rather than entrepreneurs. Who tells you to go and get a job in the post office rather than following your dreams. When you’re cutting coupons and not being able to make ends meet and looking for deals and bargains, you have in your mind, you think that everyone else in the world is in the same place you are and that no one will really value or pay you a tremendous amount of money for your expertise or your service.
So the biggest stumbling block that I had, that everyone has to some extent, is not feeling worthy or not knowing that they even have permission to go after high-end clients and charge high dollars for the extra value that you offer. I’ll give you an example.
It took me eight years to come out with my own $2000 coaching program because I can easily charge $2000 for a cruise. I don’t have the responsibility of putting on the cruise. In a way I do, but I’ve got a lot of support from the cruise line, their staff and a billion-dollar company. But selling yourself in your coaching, in your information programs and charging more than $97 for a DVD… I remember being terrified of even charging $97 for my first DVD product back in 2007 and to charge to $2000 in the hope that you can provide 10 times that value, is so scary to get over that hump and to value yourself (number one) and then to also go after people that aren’t broke.
You’ll notice that with the Internet marketers, we have a lot of successful markers coming from around the world that have six and seven figures businesses, some 8 figure businesses.
With my murder mystery group, these are older people, it’s not B2B, they are mostly consumers, but they’ve demonstrated that they have savings and high earnings. So the people we attract with our cruise, don’t blink when we add on a few hundred dollars for event fees or excursions. They don’t blink when its $2000 per person to go on that Alaska cruise because they have the means to do it. So we are not targeting markets that don’t have money.
So the two point answer to that, is by studying the masters, T Harv Eker is one of them, but by hanging around all these great marketing minds and entrepreneurial geniuses.. it took a while, but I finally developed the confidence in myself to a) go after high-end clients and b) value myself enough to be able to charge high-end prices for my consulting, for my coaching in the travel industry, for my speaking, that I’d never before thought, certainly not for an eighth-grade dropout with limited education, that I could ever command these type of fees. And then have people thank me, in the long run, and ask me why am I not charging more.
So to me, this is an unbelievable blessing from God, but I speak to so many of my colleagues that are terrified about setting a $1 million goal or going after high-end clients or charging their true value for what they have to offer. I’m sure you’ll agree with me on this.
Nicola: That was brought home to me very firmly on the first cruise because as you know Lou I like to play poker so I was sneaking off to play poker. It was the first night so I hadn’t met anyone and there were people around the table I didn’t recognise at all. It was all people who had jet lag like me and some of them were normal people on the cruise and some of them were Internet marketers and I met two very interesting characters and a chap called Robert Allen, I don’t know if you recognise the name at all, but…
Captain Lou: Robert became a good friend and advocate of the cruise, He is a great guy.
Nicola: Absolutely. He was on the table that night, enjoying a swift game and two of the other guys were very under the radar internet marketers and it was only when we got to know them as a result of my having met them that night that we found out that both of them were individually doing over $30,000 a month in affiliate marketing and nobody had ever heard of them. They weren’t gurus, they weren’t even selling a product. I don’t know what they were doing to make that kind of money. That lifted my barometer of what was possible with internet marketing, just that one experience there.
Captain Lou: Absolutely. I don’t know if you know this, but just a couple weeks when we were cruising together, as you know there were a number people who got up on stage and shared who they are and what they do and then we had the presenters who were the group leaders but did you know that we had two guests in our audience, in our group, that were actually bonafide billionaires?
Nicola: Billionaires?! No, I didn’t know that.
Captain Lou: We had two billionaires, one of them in the field of personal development and one of them, not in traditional internet marketing, I don’t really want to mention his name but if you would look at these two people and see the way they were dressed and how low key they were and how unassuming they were…you might think that they are just an average 9-to-5…You would never, ever ever know that those two gentlemen were billionaires on our cruise and I believe they are coming back next year. But they didn’t make a big deal about it.
Nicola: No, no, of course not. The best thing is that you go on the trips and the trips are organised just so its internet marketers only and I made a point of going off for a couple of trips because I wanted to… You just never know who you are going to end up sitting next to.
You all just get chatting really naturally and then you end up giving each other bits of advice and you are not intimidated because you don’t really know who you are sitting next to. You share what you can and you help them if you can and then they help you back and then you find out later who they are! It’s just an incredible experience really.
Anyway, we are getting off topic. I knew we would. Let’s come back to the business mind stuff. So that was your biggest challenge and also your biggest shift in a way, around your mindset. What do you think helped you make that shift from someone who’s blueprint was set low to someone who’s blueprint changed?
Captain Lou: So many things that come to my mind. My dear friend Kevin, who is not a marketer, he is a plumber who saw me spinning my wheels in that rat race to try to obtain more and get to the top and he said “Lou, it’s very important to keep your life as well as your business on a manageable level. You have to be healthy and have a good balance.” I said that’s what I am trying to do with these cruises is create a work and play balance. And he said “But you’re killing yourself!”
Nicola: The play is too hard work as well as the work being too hard work
Captain Lou: Exactly. So when you relax and allow yourself for things to come more easily and keep things at a manageable level, you’ll realise you don’t have to work that hard for money and success to come to you. This said by a man that never advertises doesn’t even has a business card and he has more business that he can ever handle. People know, like and trust him. That was one thing that got me to slow down and really focus on the activities that were the highest and best use of my time.
Even to this day I say what… it is absolutely fun and a pleasure and an honour to do this interview and a podcast with you Nicola and you never know when the twists and turns in the road will lead to something of an opportunity for me and for you because of this interview.
Yet today, in my day today there are at least three things put on my to do list that are revenue generating and will make me thousands of dollars. Some people shy away because it’s easier to maybe turn on the TV or go get a sandwich or provide that customer service, you know the emails – you get lost in email hell… the busy work, but I have learned that I have to focus on building my business every day, on the revenue generating activities that will make me huge amounts of money in the long run.
Some of the things are scary, some conversations that you have that lead to new groups or new speaking gigs or new opportunities – I’m working on a new book that I am going private label for my travel agent students later in Spring – and those are the things that you kind a say “Ok, maybe I’ll get around to that tomorrow” but the truth is that tomorrow may never come.
Today is all we have, is Now O’clock and if you have that fire in the belly and the hunger in the belly that I want to really be financially secure, enjoy my world travels, not when I am 65 or 75 and my health may be in decline but when I’m 55 and I’m 54 right now. I only have one year to achieve this year’s goals
Nicola: So you’re on a mission?
Captain Lou: Right. Absolutely. I can’t put off things to one day because one day may never come. So if there’s an opportunity I want to jump on it. But I want to jump on the opportunities without killing myself. Running around like a rat in a maze. And that’s what a lot of marketers do – they jump from opportunity to opportunity and there’s months that money comes in and there’s other months that money goes out. You know, it’s kinda like the wild wild west isn’t it.
Nicola: It is, very much so. Even though it’s been nearly 10 years or so since internet marketing took off as a profession, it’s still wide open out there.
So that leads us neatly on to question number 2. What is the one thing that comes into your mind that’s been most useful for you around building your business, around your business marketing? What was the one thing you have to put your finger on and say that made a huge difference?
Captain Lou: Oh my goodness. It is so many things. Let me start with learning how to sell from the stage. I took the John Childers Million Dollar Speaker training several years ago in California and I’ve taken other speaker training classes as well. It’s one thing to sell one-on-one by phone as a travel agent, but getting up on stage in front of a hundred, two hundred or five hundred people and being able to make a compelling offer, whether it be for next year’s Marketers Cruise or whether it be to traveling agents, for why they should join my $2000 coaching program, that’s a skill that has earned me lots of money selling one-on-many, live from the stage and it’s gotten me speaking engagements around the world.
I went to Thailand two years ago for an 18 day trip and Bangkok and Hong Kong. I’ve spoken on stages in London and throughout the USA. And as a result of that speaker training and just honing my craft – I cannot say that I am in the league of a lot of marketers that are able to make half a million dollars from a 90 minute presentation, I have friends that do that – but I will say that the first time I pulled in $38,000 for one hour… Phyllis, my sweetheart, Phyllis and I, we broke down into tears. When we had a $38.000 hour. That’s one thing.
The next thing is webinars, websites, affiliate sites… The whole idea of marketing online to the world via the internet, social media.. I have about 38 websites and some of them are just laying stagnant and some of them are bringing in income every single day. These are things I don’t normally talk about it. I am also an affiliate of sites and I have affiliates checks coming every month because I happen to mention a software or tool that I use and that I like and then somebody clicked on a link and now I have cheques coming in every month for that. I don’t really talk about that. So there’s not one thing.
The question was what’s the one thing, but there is really not one thing. There are many, many things. There is many ways to monetise my business, from the group cruises that we produce with separate websites that exact message to market matches. So rather than having a website that talks about 20 different things that I do, I’d rather have 20 different websites that target a specific viewer and converts them to sale.
So if you were a murder mystery fan, I would send you to MurderMysteryAtSea.com. If you were a US Marine Corps vet I would send you the usmseavetscruise.com. If you were somebody that wanted to put together your own niche group for your own audience or charity or company organisation I would send you to specialeventsatsea.com.
Nicola: Of course you didn’t do all of that at once. You’ve built that up over the years because some people feel there’s so much they need to do, that they get overwhelmed. But you started somewhere and just took a step after the other didn’t you?
Captain Lou: Exactly right. People listening right now, thinking, “Wow, Captain Lou has to 38 websites, no wonder he has a 7 figure business”, but no, it’s taken me 14 years to become an overnight success.
Nicola: I love that expression!
Captain Lou: That first website I did back in The Big Seminar days, it was horrible. It took me until May of 2005 to add a shopping cart where people could put their credit cards in 24/7. Just to figure out the whole audio and video and shopping cart process, I was like a deer in the headlights. I was terrified. I kept on buying all the products like most people do – the software and the training programs. I would go through half of them and I would only implement one or two things and then I would go and have a sandwich. I wondered why, how come I’m not making a ton of money?!
So it took me forever just to get the first website going and then the second and the third and the fourth but you know, what my relationship suffered because Phyllis saw me staying up till 4 o’clock in the morning most nights, learning how to become an overnight millionaire. By the way, the secret is there’s no such thing as overnight millionaire, at least not for me, maybe some others.
Nicola: I don’t know anyone that’s made it overnight. They say that every overnight success takes about 10 years to happen, so you were just a tiny bit late to the party.
Captain Lou: Yes, I mean there are guys that are half of my age and they are making money quicker than me, but for me it was slow and steady wins the race. Every day I am going to work on this and make it succeed because I don’t want to retire from the window treatment business, as the blind man. And in November of 2009 I finally closed up the blinds and window treatment business and said I’ve got this business to a point where it can sustain me full time and I’m able to make payroll for a staff to help me grow the business.
Nicola: That is the biggest point of leverage, isn’t it. When you reach that point where you realise that you’ve got to get help and then you have to be able to afford the help or you have to know that the help is going to make you more money so you will be able to afford the help.
Captain Lou: Yes, it’s very scary, but if you do everything in your business for yourself, then you are not really working on your business, you are working in your business and you’re a slave to the biggest lunatic tyrant of all….yourself.
Nicola: Look in the mirror and see the boss and he is a mad man.
Captain Lou: Absolutely. So we all need help and even if you hire someone part time or you outsource to overseas… I have actually people that I’ve vetted and I have an office and I have Nancy and I have Judy and at times Nancy brought in Denise and they come in and help me out and they do the admin, the back office, the processing, the customer service, the accounting… They do all the things that I was doing for those first couple of years.
Nicola: So we’ve talked a bit, you’ve touched quite a bit on the money thing generally and it’s been absolutely fascinating to hear you talk about that as we’ve gone through. But if I had to point my finger at you and say “Right Lou, what’s the ONE thing, apart from that bit about the blueprint, was there anything else that you’ve learned about either making money or looking after your money or anything to do with money at all that you would like to share with my listeners?”
Captain Lou: Absolutely, because it wasn’t until I was in my late 30’s that I realised or understood about saving or investing what little money I did have. Back in the window treatment days, I actually made pretty good money and I squandered all of it and lived beyond my means and had no caring whatsoever for saving for a rainy day.
I didn’t find any new maturity until probably decades later, maybe in my 40’s and certainly now in my 50’s. All too often I see a lot of my internet marketing colleagues, even my good friend and partner Mike Filsaime – we’ve talked quite openly on stage about having a $6 million dollar year and spending $6.5 million dollars. And at the end of the year I think he had 1.38 employees in several locations and many multiple successful product launches. So my good friend Mike pulled in over $6 million dollars and spent $6.5 million dollars. He was actually $500,000 dollars in debt.
I wondered how can someone with a $6 million dollar business not have pulled aside like, a million or two to invest in some good stocks and bonds and mutual funds or real estate or gold or what have you. And so my biggest take away, my biggest lesson is, and it’s been this way for the last decade, is if I’m having $100,000 year, $20000 are going to go into the bank. When I say bank it could be stocks or bonds or mutual funds or recently I’ve been investing in Real Estate now I’m into buying gold. I like to have a little hedge, some gold coins and gold bullion’s but the point is that it’s not how much you make, it is how much you keep.
Do I want to be the king of cruises for the next 25 years? That might be nice, but I want my money to be working harder than I am. So if I am having a lean year I will cut down my expenses and save and investment. If I am having a million dollar a year, that means that I am not going to spend two million dollars for next year, I am going to save 20% of that and invest it.
It’s about scaling your investment so that your money works harder for you than you do. Many people don’t have the discipline to do that, I didn’t in my first 35 years. I had an employee, back in the window treatment business, that was the same age as me and he asked me a question, “Lou you’re the big shot talking about success and Entrepreneurism… how much money do you have saved, how much money are you worth right now?” I remember him asking me this question and I said how much do you have saved? He says “Oh, I have about $267 000 saved up and invested”
Nicola: Your net worth
Captain Lou: Yes, his net worth was $267,000 and I looked at all my bank accounts and figured how much I owe and how much I’m worth and I was like 38 years old and my entire worth was $700.
Nicola: That’s absolutely fascinating that you say that because you don’t hear many people talking about this at all. One of the things, even though I have a company called The Money Gym and I learned all about making money and teaching people how to make money and invest money in fact… Because I’d come from a place…I had a hotel and it’d all gone wrong I ended up with a lot of debt and I was carrying that debt. I was never or I never felt like I was in a place where I would be able to save even 5% let alone 20% of everything that I was earning.
When I went bust just after 2009 / 2010 when all the property started to crashing around one of my multi-millionaire property investor friends said to me, as I was crawling my way back up again, he said, “You’re in a great place now, you’ve got nothing and your overheads are pretty much nothing. When you start to put away 10% of everything you earn from now on, then you are going to be in a much, much better place psychologically to be successful because you’ll have learned the trick of religiously putting away some of the money you’re earning. You’re never going to make it again until you do that.”
It flips a switch in your head, doesn’t it, when you do that? Even if you’re saving 5% of £20 or $20. It doesn’t matter how tiny the amount is, it’s something to do with the discipline of actually doing it. Would you agree?
Captain Lou: Exactly correct. It has taken me half a lifetime to figure this out and implement this. We have lots of friends…I’m not just singling out my friend Mike, I love Mike very much, he has helped me tremendously in my business career. But to have that discipline, to save for a rainy day, whether, from like you said £20 or $100,000 or a million and then to take the time to say: how will these savings best serve me? Maybe I should put a little bit over here, a little bit over there. Maybe I can put a down payment up. Whether it’s real estate or stocks or bonds or mutual funds or gold bullion’s or investing in another business…things that will make your money grow so that the money starts being your partner as well.
I have been doing that for the last decade, regardless of lean years or phenomenally successful years and I could go crazy right now and say, because I have had 3 of the best years of my life in the last 3 years.
Nicola: Congratulations
Captain Lou: Thank you… I could say I’m going to take this money and I’m going to buy that vacation home I always wanted in Florida or San Diego. Then I’m going to, where we live now, I am going to get a bigger place for Phyllis and me. Maybe it’s time for me to buy… I have my 2008 Sebring convertible and I am having a mid life Chrysler.
So people say “Lou! You made a lot of money last year, why don’t you buy yourself a fancy sports car instead of that stupid Chrysler. Someone like you should be driving a really nice Mercedes or a Jaguar, you should get a fancy sports car, you can afford it!” or “Why don’t you just go and just buy that property you were looking at in Florida?”
The answer is I have no guarantee that next year… I sure hope Nicola that next year is going to be my biggest year ever and I’m going to be super successful, but I have no guarantee that that will happen, I have no guarantee that (God forbid) a terrorist should sink a cruise ship and it’s the end of the Cruise industry. I have no guarantee that I won’t get sick and be unable to run my business and even though I have employees now, there are no guarantees of what tomorrow is.
Even if you have a great year Nicola, let’s say you have a fantastic year and you make a lot, a lot of money. There’s no guarantee that next year you’ll have the same amount of money. So what are you going to do with 5,10 or 20% of that money, right now, to make sure that you don’t have to work for the rest of your life if you don’t want to.
Nicola: Yes, I actually run my money on a spreadsheet on Excel, its quite a simple thing. Again, it was taught by multi-millionaire property investors, friends of mine. I actually have the first lines, after the income lines, are the saving for tax line, saving for a rainy day line, pay myself first line which is what Robert Kiyosaki describes as putting money aside to invest in stuff and that money goes out first before I have any expenses or living expenses or anything because I have learned my lesson, you know? I think when you’ve been up and down and then up again. You learn your lesson, don’t you?
Captain Lou: Nicola even if you have to put physical money in a jar, you have 5 jars on a coffee table and you have to force yourself to put money in a jar and not go to that dinner or to that movie or to that concert or not buy that new dress. Whatever you have to do to discipline yourself every day, every week,every month.
You talked about saving for a rainy day. I would imagine living where you do, that you should have 80% of your savings in that rainy day jar.
Nicola: I’ve also got a line saving for a certain cruise. That’s my other line.
Captain Lou: That’s a good one.
Nicola: You like that one. That has just been fascinating. Thank you so much for one of the most interesting answers I’ve had so far on that one.
Now I am going to turn a curve ball at you and I’ll just tell that I can edit out anything, any mumbling and grumbling and ruminating that you might need to do. I like to throw my guests a final surprise question before we go on to you to tell me what you’re looking forward to in 2014.
You can choose from one of the following questions:
1) What’s the best bit of advice about business that you ever been given?
2) Do you remember the moment when you realised that you can do this, I think you’ve covered that one
3) What is the one thing you wish you’d know when you went into business for the first time?
An answer to any of those questions would be great.
Captain Lou: Well those are great questions and the first thing I am looking forward to in 2014 is getting over this cold. That’s my major goal at the moment, but that’s a short term goal and my long term goal is I made a toast on the cruise ship, that the best ships are the friendships and so beyond your health, what do you really have but your relationships.
So I can sit here now and talk to you about all the exciting entrepreneurial projects that I have in the fire for this year. My new groups, my new book coming out. My new speaking gigs, but you know what? All of that has to take a back seat to making it a year where I am a better friend to people one-on-one. Now what do I mean by that?
I’ve got my thousands of fans on FB, readers and subscribers and customers and we live in a community where we’re blessed to have many friends, but my Dad, may he rest in peace, once told me, “Lou if you are a friend to many you cannot truly be a friend to any”, and so I am letting that take heart and what that means is my goal is to not spread myself too thin. To be a better one-on-one friend to the people that have been with me through thick and thin for decades past and to not let them fall by the wayside because they have no understanding whatsoever what world it is that I’m in and what I’m doing.
Some of them were a little frightened by it because they see me doing things in a way that they would never even wrap their arms around and so I think to myself my biggest goal is to nurture the relationships. I don’t have much family, my family is mostly gone. My Dad had me at age 62, my Mum died when I was a teenager and I was an only child so my family is the one that I have created, as my family of choice instead of chance.
So, the biggest and best investment that I can make this year is to nurture the relationships that have helped me get to this point and not forget to take the time to smell the roses and spend the time with the people who are my family, my close friends. You know what? Even if it means holding back the reins of winning, let me see if I can explain this. There’s this adrenaline rush with all these opportunities and projects and things that are working for me right now, to just throw myself into it more and to accept every speaking gig and to maybe put out two more books instead of another book or maybe to expand my coaching program or take on new groups that I got proposals for in the last several weeks, one actually a financial cruise and another one a martial arts cruise that we might be working with.
Here’s the thing Nicola, if opportunity was limitless and your earnings capacity was limitless and all of a sudden you were a Rockstar, you were like a Hollywood celebrity and the doors are just opening for you. How many of those doors would you go through at the risk of your health suffering or your friendships and relationships dying. Because you’re going to just jump onto the next big thing? So I think it’s very, very important to me that I remain balanced, somewhat humble, in a state of gratitude and kind of pull back the reins of everything that’s going on here, even at the risk of making less money just to have a more balanced and better life and of course, as I said before, to save at least 20% of it and invest it in things where the money will be working harder for me than I am.
It is a very big challenge, Nicola because our ego tells us, when Nicola says we have a spot for you to do an interview tomorrow and now I have two more interviews later today, that I admit I didn’t say no to as I like being in the spotlight, but the thing is when somebody puts the spotlight on you Nicola and puts that microphone in front of you and tells you they’d like to partner with you or interview you or do a JV with you or ask you to come and speak somewhere. How difficult is it for you to say “I’m sorry, I have a family birthday party to go to or my social calendar is really full and I am not taking anymore business commitments. I have this to do, I have that to do…” How difficult it is for you to not grab that opportunity, even at the expense sometimes of your health or your close relationships?
Actually, I am turning the question around and I am really asking you that Nicola? Do you see where I am coming from?
Nicola: Yes, I do. It’s fascinating that you should say that because first of all I am very thrilled and privileged that you’ve given me the time which enabled me to get to know you better which has been a real personal thrill.
Also, when I went bust all I had was my family and my friends, but in that time when I was at rock bottom, I learnt the secret of happiness because up to that point I had been always striving and I wouldn’t turn anything down like you say. I was always striving for success. But in the year and a half that I had no money and all I had were my friends and family, I learned the secret of happiness which is to learn to live in the moment and to look around and say “Am I OK now? Have I got my health? Have I got something to eat? Have I got a roof over my head’ Is there someone who loves me nearby to give me a hug? YES. I am happy”.
So now I find it very easy to say no to things if it conflicts with anything I do with my friends and family because that’s what counts at the end of the day? That’s all that counts.
Captain Lou: Exactly. Nicola, the biggest success that I learned from my uncle Ron (may he rest in peace), he said to me, “Lou it’s great that we’ve made a lot of sales, it’s great that people love us. But sitting here with you, eating a pastrami sandwich at our favourite deli…” (yummy pastrami sandwich in New York city), “it’s the peaceful passage of time and these magical moments that are worth more than millions of dollars” and he took my hand and he said, “This moment is all we have, it is our greatest success that we have each other, that we have this pastrami sandwich with the salad pickle. That we have laughter and good times and fun and friends… It’s success that many people never know! Including many, many multi-millionaires.” The fact that we are able to stay in that moment, Nicola I don’t know if you like baths, but if you take a bubble bath with some nice scents, maybe some soft music in the background and someone that really loves you comes and brings you your favourite food. That’s more important than anything that we’ve just discussed in the last hour on success and Entrepreneurism.
Nicola: Brilliant. What a lovely way to wind up a fantastic interview that I’ve enjoyed every single second of. I really thank you for joining me tonight, especially if you got two more after this, but I want you to know how much I’ve really enjoyed it personally. It’s been a wonderful experience for me.
Captain Lou: Same here. I promise to not be as mushy and revealing on the other interviews.
Nicola: [laughs] Well that’s just brilliant. Thank you very much, Lou. I really appreciate your time and I’ll talk to you very soon OK?
Captain Lou: Thank you so much. Much success to you and love to your sister Sarah as well.
Nicola: That’s very sweet of you. She will be thrilled that you remember her. Thank you Lou. Bye Bye.
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