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Rockstar:
Become a Highly Paid,
High Profile Person
in Your Industry
Kane Minkus
Copyright © Kane Minkus 2011
Kane Minkus asserts his moral right to be identified as the author
of this book. All rights reserved.
This book is dedicated to:
Jeff Slayter, my colleague, esteemed friend and prime inspiration.
His commitment to helping people is unparalleled and keeps
me going. His integrity with people and in business has been an
inspiration to me. He reminds me that good people do finish first,
and that success is built out of one great relationship at a time.
Love you like a brother, man.
All the global promoters and people who believed in our work,
even when we were just getting started, and had very little actual
ability to speak and present our topics well. Thank you.
My family, Mom and Dad, for all their endless confidence and
support in all the crazy adventures I take on. Mom, don’t worry,
I’m still eating well. Also: my brother Kirk and sister Korie for
being huge inspirations around love and support. I love you all.
Gitta for being an incredible support and always loving me through
the ups and downs of Entrepreneurship.
My son Arijan for continuing to teach me about true and unbridled
expression; as that is what really makes business move forward at
light speed: communication and true expression.
Alessia, for helping me connect with my passion, heart and people
at the deepest level possible. Reminding me that romance exists
everywhere in the human spirit. I am a better coach, trainer and
man because of you.
All the hundreds of thousands of fans, participants, clients and
Entrepreneurs that have come through my events and applied
my models and concepts for greater business results – you are an
inspiration.
Special thanks also to Emily Gower for editing and working with
me on making this book readable for human beings.
Also special thanks to Pat Chan, whose artistry in photography
helped us capture all the best moments.
Rave Reviews for
Industry Rockstar
“Kane’s teachings resonate to the heart for leaders of businesses big
and small. His commitment to bringing the best strategies globally and
human dynamics for Entrepreneurs has been heard around the world. I
recommend listening to his strategies and approach, because the more
you can surround yourself with great leaders, the more you can grow
into your highest abilities to succeed. I personally use these leadership
strategies to drive teams and produce breakthrough results on a daily
basis.”
– Rick Belluzzo, Former President & COO of Microsoft,
Author of “Hard Headed & Soft Hearted”
“Kane was just on my stage, he was fantastic, people loved him!”
– T Harv Eker, Best Selling Author and creator
of The Millionaire Mind Intensive
“If you’re looking to transform your life and to live your dreams I highly
recommend Kane Minkus. He’ll give you methods and techniques that
will allow you to reinvent yourself. Remember those two names, Kane
Minkus. They mean double dynamite!”
– Les Brown, Rated the Worlds #1 Motivational Speaker
“I was working with Kane and the work he does is classic. If you get an
opportunity to work with him, pick it up fast! He’s very good. He’ll
show you how to make the shifts that you have to make to get the result
you really want to get.”
– Bob Proctor, Star From The Movie ‘The Secret’
“Every so often I come across a really exceptional leader in this field
of educating and inspiring and transforming lives. His name is Kane
Minkus. He like myself has been dedicated for many years to studying
and researching what makes people magnificent.”
– Dr. John Demartini, Human Behaviour Expert,
Star From The Movie ‘The Secret’
“I’m not new to business. I’ve built and sold five of my own companies
for multiple millions. I’ve invested in over 200 Start-ups including
Google and some other names you’ve heard of. I’ve seen a lot of people
and I’ve been around the block and Kane Minkus is a fantastic business
coach. He coached me recently and really helped me achieve some
transformation in my business and I’m not an easy customer. I found
sustainable results from Kane. He’s the real deal, he’s great at getting
business transformation in record time and sustainable benefits. So if
you’re thinking of working with Kane, I say right on! Do it!”
– Christine Comaford, Venture Capitalist, Serial
Entrepreneur & Best Selling Author
“Understanding a business inside and out is critical for success. Kane
continues to share his proven Industry Rockstar formula globally to help
business owners and entrepreneurs succeed faster.”
– Keith J. Cunningham – International Business Speaker &
Author, Creator of the CFO Scoreboard Software®
“I’m an entrepreneur, a Psychologist, an author. I’ve been on the Oprah
show several times and for about 12 years, I was the psychologist for the
Good Morning America show on ABC, I worked for the NBC Today
show, for CNN, I’ve hosted my own nationally syndicated show “Can
this marriage be saved” and in all those years of television, I never had a
plan on how to get my books, my CDs, my DVDs, my products into the
hands of the people for whom I had written them for and created them.
Then I met Kane and everything changed.
“From my very first coaching session, I had a speaking engagement and I
sold every single product I had on my name. I am so grateful that I now
go around telling everyone “Oh my God, you gotta meet my new secret
weapon – Kane!”
– Dr. Brenda Wade, Author & Psychologist for
Good Morning America, Today Show, CNN
“I’ve been doing online marketing for over a decade now. I’ve spent over
100 million dollars buying advertising online. I built companies that
have been over 100 million dollars, and I’ve consulted with some of the
leading experts in direct response. Guys like Frank Kern, Eben Pagan,
and I tell you, there are very few guys like Kane Minkus. This guy has a
time tested, amazing system, which allows you to build great business
relationships fast and create important joint venture partnerships. The
second thing that I love about Kane is that he actually walks the walk.”
– Scott Rewick, The “$100 Million Dollar Man”, Serial
Entrepreneur and Experienced Media Buyer
“We work with folks like Mark Victor Hansen, Bryan Tracy, Les Brown,
John Gray and help them grow their businesses. If you think about
partnering with someone that can really help you take your business,
your idea to really map the plan, understand the entire sales negotiation
process, how to truly grow your company, you want to partner with
Kane Minkus. He does it consistently.
– Bill Walsh, Venture Capitalist & Serial Entrepreneur
“I’ve been a professional basketball player for over 16 years. I played
in the NBA, I played in the NBL. I transformed from a professional
basketball player into becoming a professional speaker. I travelled the
world; I’ve been to ten countries. I’ve spoken to over two million people
and in that entire time, I have never met anyone like Kane Minkus.
They have helped me with my platform speaking. They have helped me
increase my bottom line. Aside from that, at the largest event in Australia
this year, I was able to get 1,000 people to get out of their seats, go to the
back of the room and get involved in my program. This guy is amazing!
If you want to change your life, if you want to change your bottom line,
if you want to have success in your life, in your industry, whatever it is,
he will teach you how to be a Rockstar! Whatever it takes, go and spend
time with him.”
– Eric Bailey, Ex-NBA/NBL Star & International Keynote Speaker
“I personally cannot say enough good things about this guy! The most
impressive thing about him is the speed of implementation of the stuff
he knows. I think you should pay close attention to what you are about
to learn.”
– Frank Kern, Highest Paid Internet Marketing,
Direct Response Consultant in The World
“The work Kane has taught me over the years has not only been invaluable
to my sporting career but also my business!”
– Natalie Cook, Olympic Gold Medallist & 5 X Olympian
“Sloppy success is better than perfect mediocrity. Kane Minkus has
always focused his clients on becoming “Progressionists” instead of
Perfectionists!”
– Alex Mendossian, Internet Marketing
Guru, $223M in online sales
“I’ve been peak performance coaching for about 20 years now and I’ve
worked with Olympic athletes and businesses all over the world. I was
really impressed by how much substance there is to Kane’s coaching
abilities. If you’re really serious about getting peak performance out
of your life then get yourself a coach, I couldn’t recommend this guy
enough. All the best!”
– Steve Anderson, 4 X Olympic Gold Medal Coach
“I am an Olympic swimmer – I swam in the 1988 Seoul Olympics for
Germany. Kane Minkus boosted my business confidence, but the most
important part was, that I found my inner peace and what was holding
me back in achieving my goals in the future. He has enlightened me and
it was the best thing I’ve ever learned in my life. I would recommend
Kane to anyone.”
– Stephanie Bofinger, World Championship & Olympic Athlete
“Spending a lifetime focused on helping people create the wealth
they want, I know there is no greater gift then a proven system and
great mentorship to follow to that end. Kane and Industry Rockstar is
dedicated to truly helping people learn and apply strategies they need,
in order to get the best things out of life - and eventually have wealth as
a platform of security to take care of their families and enjoy all that life
can offer them.”
– Bill Bartmann, Billionaire, Nominee for the 2014
Nobel Peace Prize & Author of Bounce Back
Contents
Foreword ................................................................................ xv
Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now .1
I’m Talking to You..................................................................2
What Stands In Your Way? ....................................................4
Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt .....................................................6
The Reality Is... ....................................................................18
My Story .................................................................................21
For the Love of Music ..........................................................22
The Forming of Industry Rockstar .......................................34
The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus .................................41
The Hierarchy of Focus .......................................................42
Which Level Are You At? ....................................................50
The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change ............................55
Personal Branding Strategy...................................................56
Internet Marketing Strategy .................................................70
Globalization Strategy .........................................................75
Packaging and Positioning ....................................................79
Distribution Method of Your Message .................................86
Information Division ...........................................................90
Global Partnership Strategies ...............................................95
Knowledge and Growth Strategy .........................................99
Achieving What You Want: The Results Chain .....................107
Owners vs. Players .............................................................108
Ideas Are Worthless ...........................................................111
The LSF Model ..................................................................113
The Mindset Of A World Class Business Owner..................119
Risks Worth Taking ............................................................121
Your Value .........................................................................124
Confidence ........................................................................135
The Power of Focus ...........................................................139
The 6 Most Influential Positions in Business ........................151
1: The Industry Rockstar ....................................................152
2: The Messenger ...............................................................154
3: The Internet Marketer ...................................................156
4: The NLP Guru...............................................................158
5: The Coach & Consultant ...............................................160
6: The Social Entrepreneur ................................................163
1: The Industry Rockstar.......................................................169
The Industry Rockstar Formula .........................................172
Step 1: Perspective .............................................................174
Step 2: Personal Branding ..................................................188
Step 3: Packaging ...............................................................194
Step 4: Positioning .............................................................196
Step 5: Presenting ..............................................................200
How The 6 Revenue Streams Work Together ....................215
The Ascension Model ........................................................216
Releasing Your Inner Rockstar ...........................................223
2: The Seminar Leader & Speaker ........................................229
Leader vs. Speaker .............................................................234
Increasing Your Influence from the Stage...........................237
The Income Opportunity ..................................................239
Step Up and Take Centre Stage .........................................241
3: The Internet Marketer.......................................................245
Concepts of Internet Marketing .........................................249
The 7 Core Components of Internet Marketing ................256
4: The NLP Guru ..................................................................263
NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) ...............................263
A Quick History Of Our NLP ...........................................269
The Three Reasons to Engage NLP ....................................271
5: The Coach & Consultant ..................................................293
The Most Valuable Level of Coaching ...............................296
The Art of the Highly-Paid Coach: 4 Specific Structures ...305
Consulting .........................................................................312
Your Ability to Lead ..........................................................314
6: The Social Entrepreneur ...................................................317
The Power of Being a Social Entrepreneur .........................321
The Advantage of Being Socially Responsible ....................324
Be the One Who Changes the World .................................327
Get There First .....................................................................331
About The Author.................................................................335
Foreword
by Dr. John Demartini
Of the years of my pursuit of being an educator and teaching
others how to unleash their inner most potential, to fulfil their
most inspired missions and bring their most unique contributions
and impacts to others throughout the world, I have not witnessed
such an opportune time as we presently have upon us. Today there
are major psychological, socio-political and technological shifts on
the planet and we are at a significant pivotal point for the growth in
our overall leadership as individuals and collective human beings.
Each of us has a magnificent contribution to offer from within
and an unbridled ability to impact others in a purposeful and
transformative way; and now is one of the most convergent times
in history for the opportunity for us as Entrepreneurs to share
who we are authentically with the world and not only create social
impact, but also create economic wealth in return.
On my travelling journey around the world over the last 40
years, researching, educating and inspiring others, I have rarely
come across such an astute individual that engages human hearts
and enlightens human minds to embrace modern day business
challenges as does Kane Minkus. His intentions, abilities and love
for using business principles as a vehicle for empowering individual
entrepreneurs and in turn solving world problems is a force to be
reckoned with.
Today it takes a true understanding of oneself, as well as modern
business strategies and tactics to be economically viable and
socially responsible. In your hands you hold one of the most
revealing business books available that shares where the world
xv
is headed and how leading entrepreneurs will be able to achieve
massive socioeconomic results and impact through their inspiring
professional journeys.
As new social entrepreneurs become multidimensional and more
fully equipped as business leaders so will the demands of our
modern economic environment necessitate new strategies and
tactics for them to achieve their competitive-cooperative edge.
Kane and the work in this timely book will give you a sophisticated,
yet easy to understand road map of the future business landscape
and how to navigate with it.
To make an even bigger difference, today’s business professionals
and game changers will need to integrate and embrace their
spiritual side with their practical business side. They will have
to engage in an entirely new form of business involving personal
branding, videos, social media, internet marketing, global business
partnerships, community development and new forms of packaging
and positioning for themselves in each of their marketplaces. This
is precisely what Kane has spent the last decade obsessed with, not
just for himself but also for every existing and future entrepreneur
around him.
Having spent personal time with Kane, and getting a sense of his
deep love of connecting with people, sharing his vast business
wisdom (even though he is still very young!) and seeing the way his
attendees and clients take to his message and caring personality, I
am inspired to see a new generation of leaders, thinkers and trainers
continuing their causes to further the evolution and advancement
of life on this planet.
This book is a treasure chest of knowledge and offers a new school
of business thinking that can take anyone, from any walk of life,
and any set of current circumstances, to become an internationally
known business messenger – impacting the lives of millions around
the globe.
xvi
Whether you are a new or seasoned entrepreneur, beginning or
old hat professional, you are going to satisfy your desire to grow
and expand your repertoire of dynamic business concepts and
leadership abilities through the wisdom provided in this book.
Kane is on the precipice of inspiring discoveries through his work in
neuroscience, modern business practices, interpersonal leadership
perspectives and multidimensional thinking. His focus on social
entrepreneurship holds the key to the future of businesses that
will direct and change the world.
It’s time to listen intently to the wisdom of this young man, and
consider his insightful business strategies intently. It’s time to
connect to your own inspired business mission from within and
use it to drive your endeavours forward in your life now and for
years to come. It’s time to set aside your circumstances, become
bigger than you presently imagine yourself to be and lead your
family, community and nation into an even more productive and
empowered future.
This book will show you how to do all those things, and Kane will
be there in the pages, with his heart and solutions to help you
achieve the results and impact you desire and deserve. And to help
you leave your inspiring legacy that will transform the world.
Dr. John Demartini
Founder of the Demartini Institute, human behaviour specialist,
educator and international best-selling author, and Star of the
movie and book: The Secret.
xvii
Industry Rockstar in Nuremberg, Germany presenting to 3K
Business Owners, Entrepreneurs & Experts
xviii
Build Your Passion,
Make A Difference,
Leave A Legacy Now
“They say !ere are two great
days in a person’s life – !e
day we are born and !e
day we discover ‘why’.”
William Barclay
T
here is a major movement in the world today that is allowing
people and entrepreneurs to globalize their businesses and
their brands, and help people all over the planet like they
never could before. We are now a global society. Never before have
we had so much access to millions of people to be able to do
business together, and help, learn from and impact each other. The
power of the internet increases on a daily basis, making it easier
than ever to connect to people all over the world. You can virtually
travel to people, provide them valuable products and services,
and make money from anywhere in the world. Buzz words like
‘personal branding’ and being ‘a messenger’ have become common
in our society now, but very few people really know or understand
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
how to put all the pieces together to make their businesses reach
the heights they want.
Ultimately all of us want the same thing: A life we can call our
own, where we make the rules and call the shots. We want to be
able to wake-up when we want, earn the money we want, travel
when we want and help as many people as possible along the
way. That’s what this book is about. It is our mission to empower
heart-centered Entrepreneurs/Business Owners and start putting
major wealth in the hands of those who love openly and have
their intentions set on bettering the planet. This book is about
how to harness your knowledge, ability and experience to change
the planet, earn millions a year doing it and leave the legacy you
want to leave on the planet. It’s about becoming a Rockstar in
your Industry and reaching the top of the industry you are most
passionate about. It is about taking what you love to do (and what
you have probably been doing for free or have been underpaid for
years), and turning it into a six, seven or even eight figure business.
Most people spend their lives trying to figure out how to fit into
the structures around them in order to make money and have the
freedom and impact they want. This book is how to be the person
making the structure that others want to fit within.
At some point in my life, I had to choose whether I was going to
become an expert playing in someone else’s structure, or design
my own. Guess which one I chose? It’s time for you to choose that
too so you can start playing a bigger game and be part of the global
movement rapidly sweeping the planet.
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rebel entrepreneur – and you are ready to help a lot more people
more effectively and earn significantly more money than you are
now. It’s for you if you are already successful (maybe you are
already earning six or seven figures) but you feel that you have lost
your passion for what you have been doing, and you are ready now
to move into another stage of your life where you are passionately
delivering your talents to the world in the exact way you want to.
No matter who you are (you might just want to use the lessons in
this book to accelerate your status in your current job, company or
industry), I am certain you can raise your profile, position yourself
at the top of your industry and achieve the professional success you
want. I’m certain you have expertise, knowledge, wisdom or advice
that you can package up into products and services and distribute
globally to sell or use to market your current business; all along
helping people who don’t know what you know. If you’ve made
mistakes and can prevent others from making those same mistakes
then you can have one of the fastest-growing types of businesses
globally: an Expert’s Business (also known as an “Information
Business”). I will show you how to take your knowledge and
package it up into products and services that you can distribute
online and offline. I will also show you how to expand your current
business by using your knowledge to market your products or
services more effectively all over the planet. Finally, I’ll show you
how the fastest growing businesses are using all this together to
expand, reach more customers and ultimately become more of an
impact globally.
This book also shows you how to “position” yourself at the top
of any industry, because money always flows towards the “sure
thing”. Today you must be seen as the Expert, Authority or “Go
To” source for something. There is a lot of noise in the marketplace
today with people calling themselves experts. It’s only going to get
worse and more competitive as more people discover how possible
it is to position themselves as the only logical choice and create an
incredibly fulfilling and financially rewarding business out of their
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
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Kane Minkus
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
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Kane Minkus
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
Every business I have ever run (except the ones that didn’t work out
well) were cash flow positive from the first day. This book is about
building a business that is overflowing with money and opportunity.
It can start now. Industry Rockstar, my global, leadership training
company, has become the #1, training company in the world for
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client results. Most people make back their price of admission for
the training, during the training itself. We work hard to prove that
you can create a business from scratch in minutes and start making
money immediately. And we regularly have people clear tens of
thousands of dollars, while in our trainings, some of which have
never had a business before. How is this possible? Because there is
so much money and opportunity already floating around you that
once you understand this you can start reaching out and having it
flow into you – instead of past you.
Our participants have done most of the work for us. They have
spent their lives preparing for the moment when we teach them
how to take their life’s work and turn it into a massively thriving
business that churns out cash daily. This was the same way our
coaches saw how talented we were and helped us put the structure
around our genius. I was a broke, homeless musician at 23, and then
by 26 had built one of the largest multi-media companies in the
world by using the information we are teaching you in this book.
If you think it takes years, you just haven’t learned the Industry
Rockstar style of business building yet.
How much money is there in the world? Infinite! So why isn’t it
in your bank account? You will learn how to make sure it does end
up in your bank account throughout this whole book.
This leads us to the next myth people often believe about business…
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
Um, excuse me; am I responsible for your life? Are you responsible
for mine? No, you are responsible for yours and I am responsible for
mine. So whose responsibility is it to get value out of something?
It is the person using the product, or buying the service. In other
words, the client is responsible for getting the value out of the
purchase. Later on, we will really debunk this myth because it is
not your responsibility to create value for your customers; it is your
responsibility to be clear. Just like in this book, our responsibility is
not to create value for you; it’s to be clear. Clear about our ideas,
concepts, perspectives and lessons. Your job is to derive the value
from this book.
If you don’t agree with this, then just put the book down –
otherwise you will get no value from it. Stay tuned for how you
can give-up having to prove your value to your customers. This
will lift a huge weight off your shoulders and dissolve one of the
main reasons people hate to promote and sell themselves: they feel
like they have to “convince”.
Entrepreneurs who are struggling are doing so because they are
undervaluing themselves. Yes! I mean you! I don’t care whether
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you are making six, seven or even eight figures; the truth is that
you could be doing even more. You could be making 10 or 12
figures. There is no limit. Most people are simply undervaluing
themselves. Other than the obvious impacts this has on your life
– such as not earning the money that you know you can earn and
that you deserve – the real problem with undervaluing yourself is
that by doing that, you give the people around you the permission
to do the same. No $100 an hour coach has ever coached someone
to become a billionaire. By design, if you are cheap then you are
unconsciously telling your clients/customers and colleagues they
should be too. One of our influential mentors, Keith Cunningham,
once said, “Pick the price you want to earn and never compromise.”
I live by this. Pricing is determined by you – pulled out of thin air –
and is a component to how the world interacts with you. We will
cover this in detail later as it is a key to success. Just know now that
it is never about price, it is always about perceived value.
By the way we will look at the 5 types of value later on: Perceived
Value, Discovered Value Guaranteed Value, Accidental Value &
Final Value.
overnight. It’s like that famous song by Dire Straits, “Money For
Nothing” where the whole song makes fun of the fact that people
think musicians haven’t worked hard to be a big success – as though
it happened in the blink of an eye:
“Now l"k at !em yo-yo’s !at’s !e way you do it
You play !e guitar on !e MTV
That ain’t workin’ !at’s !e way you do it
Money for no!in’ and your chi#s for free
Now !at ain’t workin’ !at’s !e way you do it
Le$e tell ya !em guys ain’t dumb
Maybe get a blister on your li%le finger
Maybe get a blister on your !umb”
- Dire Straits
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
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Kane Minkus
someone’s life they will completely ignore me and love Keith and
his work, and others will completely take to me, and decide they
want to study with me for a time period. The point is: there is an
audience out there for you.
Your audience will self-select based upon who you are, your
experience over theirs and your packaging and positioning in the
market.
People ask me all the time, “Who are your competitors?” Honestly
I have never felt like I have any, and neither should you. If someone
has good personal affinity with me, and finds my work awesome,
then he or she will work with me. You have a unique approach on
how to solve the problems in your life and we all need each other
to learn different angles and approaches to solve our problems. This
means you are an expert to anyone who doesn’t know as much as
you in that domain. This also means you can start tomorrow talking
about your expertise and developing your clients and customers
online and offline.
MYTH #6: The more degrees you have, the more money
you make. (More General Business Myths Will Follow
Throughout The Book!)
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Build Your Passion, Make A Difference, Leave A Legacy Now
you are not as stupid as me!” In any business, people want to avoid
pain, reduce lost years, and rise to success as fast as possible. If you
package up your mistakes into systems and techniques that can
help others, then you will have incredibly valuable products and
services.
In today’s world, where there is a complete over saturation of
experts and options, the winners are those who get the results for
their clients. Most people think that getting results for their clients
is about how good they are, but actually, that is one small part of
the puzzle. Your clarity, packaging and positioning of your work
in the world is actually what causes most of your client’s success.
For example: a contractor who is vague on who his perfect
customer is, will likely have customers who aren’t having good
results. Regardless of how good they are at their job, if they are not
right for the customer then the result will be mediocre. Getting
clear about who your perfect customer is will increase your
success – NOT how good you are. This is why someone who is
not necessarily as good as you at their actual job, may be getting
better results with their clients or a better market response. By
the end of this book (and when you choose to join us in our live
Industry Rockstar trainings) you will understand exactly how to
make yourself as successful as possible.
here for anyone that wants to take advantage of it. Most people
allow their fears and others around them to limit their experiences
of life. They let their fears of not knowing what to do next stop
them in their tracks and end up doing nothing. You need to become
unstoppable and know that decisions you make now affect the rest
of your life and generations of your family after you.
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My Story
“Anyone who !inks my
story is anywhere near
over is sadly mistaken.”
Donald Trump
O
ne of the things you will learn in our Industry Rockstar®
Branding system is how important your life story is. Your
story is literally the glue that will bond your customers to
you and your company. It is part of what will build your personal
brand and it is what gives you the MOST credibility in your work
with people. They want to know you have lived what you teach
– not that you have just intellectualized it. You have many great
stories about your life: everyone does, without exception. It just
depends on whether you are willing to start to see them as great
and inspiring. Your life story will inspire people and it must be
told. Here is mine.
As we reveal all parts of this journey, start noticing all the finer
details of what I am sharing with you – as you are going to do the
same in your books and products, on your websites and in your
presentations. This was the beginning of the Industry Rockstar
brand…
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My Story
I played piano anywhere from 4-6 hours a day until I was 17 years
old. Practicing and learning songs religiously, I wanted to be the
best in the world. It was so much more than a hobby for me as
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My Story
Me at 15 on tour
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Kane Minkus
Garden, Joe Satriani, Faith Hill and her writers, and numerous
other smaller names. It was while I was attending Berklee College
of Music at age 21 to study Music Productions and Music Business
that I met my future business partner Nick Thomas.
barely knew how I was going to eat, and I often fantasized about
magically having someone drop money in my lap to relieve some
of the pressure. I would miss paying my mobile phone bills because
I had no money, and my phone was shut off for days at a time until
I could figure out ways to make more money.
One day, in San Francisco, I literally ran out of gas on the Golden
Gate Bridge (in a car my brother had given me) and a police car
had to push me, in my own car, across to the other side of the
bridge. There I was, being pushed across the bridge by a police car
in the middle of rush hour traffic, with all these cars going by me.
Life became like a slow motion film. Kids and people were looking
out their windows at me with concerned expressions. I felt like I
really had hit rock bottom in my life.
I decided something had to change. I was not willing to go on like
this forever, and I had spent so much time devoted to a talent that
was doing nothing for me. For a moment I thought – my dad was
right – there is no money in the arts! In order to earn something –
anything – I started playing piano and singing at a very flamboyant
bar in the Castro, a notoriously gay part of San Francisco. The
owner felt badly for me, and thought I had pretty good talent, so
he let me take over one night of performing in this crazy cabaret
bar.
It wasn’t long before I had built up a following there and had the
room packed with a few hundred people all singing songs along
with me from Billy Joel, Elton John and lots of cheesy 80’s pop
rock songs! But again, there I was, feeling super talented, having had
over ten years of experience and abilities in a field, and still getting
paid so little – just enough to barely survive. It felt like enough
was enough and I really wanted to know why some people made
so much money with their talents while others always struggled.
At the same time my friend Nick, from music school, and I decided
to start a media company out of our bedrooms that focused on
creating audio soundtracks for Internet websites. We were ahead of
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our time as the Internet had just started using audio on websites to
differentiate the experience for a user. It was new, but we wanted
to be first to the field. Except there wasn’t much of a field there
yet! So again, we were both heavily trained, really experienced
audio professionals and were making barely any money!!
Let’s add another interesting part into the story: A few years earlier
at age nineteen or twenty, when I was at Berkley College of Music, I
had fallen in love with a girl who was from Los Angeles. She would
constantly listen to my phone arguments between my father and
me over whether I should be a lawyer or a music producer. It was
through this that she suggested that I go to this seminar called
the Landmark Forum. I looked into it and it sounded weird to
me – like a cult – but she really pressed that I should go and do it.
Literally to have her stop hounding me about it, I just went and
did it... and I loved it. It was awesome. I walked away knowing and
believing that I actually am authoring my own life. The idea that I
was a victim of my circumstances or my life story hit the ground
and fell to pieces around me.
The idea of being a seminar leader, helping people shift their
mindset, change their lives and achieve new results with themselves
and others was very powerful for me. I saw a future in that, but for
now I had a mission to be a big name in music. And so, there I was
a few years after, homeless, lying broke on a friends couch in San
Francisco in a completely windowless room that we were using
as a studio (and my bedroom). I knew then that one of the most
important things I could do was be in environments with people
who were successful and who would talk about how to be more
successful and influential. I was too broke to afford any training to
help me, so I went and volunteered at a Landmark Forum in San
Francisco – just so I could be immersed in the atmosphere.
I ended up being at a seminar with a guy slightly older than me,
named Bryan, who was an Executive Coach. As fate would have
it, it turned out that his mother was one of the top Executive
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My Story
Coaches in the Silicon Valley. She was one of the key people
responsible for bringing Stephen Covey’s work into the corporate
world. Bryan not only understood leadership, but he had just sold
his own media company in Los Angeles, that was just like the one
I was starting up with Nick in San Francisco. I asked him if he
would help me. He normally charged tens of thousands of dollars
for coaching every year, so I knew it was out of the question for me
to pay him. However, he felt sorry for me, and he also understood
in detail what kind of business I was in. I had run a few events that
had produced average results, but I had never understood how to
build and run a profitable, successful business.
Bryan met me at my office/bedroom, which was like a dungeon
studio (which we were using to start up this new business). Nick
had put a couch there for me to sleep on; it was a love seat actually
that was too tiny for me to sleep on. I had awakened every morning
with kinks in my back. Bryan agreed to help me out in return
for some equity in the business. I had nothing to lose. He saw
something in me that I don’t think I saw in myself: determination,
persistence, and aggressiveness. I had the willingness to take risks
that other people wouldn’t. He realized that I knew how to ‘do’
within the business and that I had a talent, but I didn’t know how
to think like a CEO. He was planning on showing me how to do
exactly that: how to run a business, not just do business.
We ended up going on an adventure together. Bryan came in twice
a month from there on and worked personally with Nick and me,
coaching us on how to run our business. In the first month, Nick
found out that he was going to have a baby. He came in that day
and said, “We’ve got 6 months to make something of this business,
or I’m out.” This was a tipping point. We got serious. We began to
take our work with Bryan to a whole new level. I spent as much
time with Bryan and his parents as possible learning every single
thing I could about thinking and living like a CEO. I not only
wanted to learn everything that they were doing, but I also wanted
to learn what they had learned. It sent me on a mission of about
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My Story
create more six figure incomes per year than any other training
organization on the planet.
So, just because I had a real talent for the piano and keyboards
(in fact, I was considered as one of the best in my school, and
even in the country) didn’t mean that I was masterful at creating
money out of that talent. Bryan saw my talent with no structure,
something I see every single week in the trainings I run. So many
people, who are smart, talented and bright, don’t know how to get
clear, get packaged and get positioned in their own industries.
One of the big themes in our work is that you must have a coach
and you must work in groups of people who are better than you at
what you do. That is exactly what I did with Bryan and his family
throughout my twenties.
About three to four years after Nick and I started our music
business – a media company called SomaTone Interactive – it grew
to be among the top five companies in the world in its field. Our
company focused on applying audio sound tracks and animation to
film, TV, and video games globally. We started with nothing – no
contacts, no relationships, no understanding or knowledge about
the media industry. It was just a passion blended with a dream
to create a successful company. That alone didn’t do it of course.
Passion and good intentions are great, but they are meaningless
without understanding how to package up and position yourself
into an industry to have money flow to you.
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People in the industry, our friends, and our family were stunned
at how fast we grew the business, especially as it was a service
business in a field that was over-saturated and over-commoditized.
We moved our business from commodity-based (“how cheaply can
I get your music and sound efx?”) to value-based (having people
say they “had to work with us” because we were “the best”). In five
years we had worked on over 1,500 video games, a half a dozen
major motion picture films, two top rated TV shows, and dozens
of award winning ads. In fact you have probably heard our music,
sound efx or voice-over productions (without knowing it). I also
got to fulfill my lifelong dream of working with an orchestra to
record songs I had written. I hired the Berlin Film Orchestra in
Berlin, Germany and spent two weeks recording three magnificent
soundtracks with them for video games, and a handful of songs I
wrote on my keyboards in my bedroom years earlier, to be used for
business projects.
So, not only can you create the career you want, but you can also,
choose the quality of the career you want to have and how you want
to contribute to the world. Our company specialized in providing
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My Story
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My Story
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My Story
Founding the Jeff & Kane brand and the Industry Rockstar Brand
in 2008 (teaching people how to position themselves as an expert,
personally brand themselves and package up their knowledge into
products and services), we began traveling internationally in 2010
together running our seminars and trainings. First going abroad to
Europe and then beyond. Our first trips to Australia was in 2011
before we rapidly expanded the growth of the Industry Rockstar
brand to the countries of New Zealand, Canada, UK, Germany,
Amsterdam, and the South-east Asia region in Singapore and
Malaysia. In early 2012 we had the privilege to do a five city tour
through India to rooms packed full of 500+ Indian entrepreneurs
completely excited to learn how to take their talents and skills and
position themselves globally.
In 2013, we started recruiting trainers to lead our events globally
and now have a dozen trainers that travel globally leading our
business trainings in 12 different countries.
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(In 2013 Jeff stepped out of Industry Rockstar to pursue other business
and personal ventures of his own. Today he continues to lead some
events globally for Industry Rockstar when timing permits.)
Through all of the trainings and workshops Industry Rockstar trainers
give the ultimate goal of our work is Social Entrepreneurship.
Industry Rockstar trainers and methods teach people how to
become Rockstars in their Industry; how to position, package and
productize themselves in such a way that they can earn the money
they want to with their passion. Then, we empower heart-centered
people, who want to make a massive contribution to people of the
world, to achieve what they want professionally so they can give
back. We give up time with our own families to get out into the
world and help people. The reason we do this is because we feel
we make the most impact directly on people’s lives when we can
work with them in person. We want people to run their businesses
connected to the idea that they are helping other people. You can
use your money and more powerfully build your business and
network when you are engaged in contributing to others in the
world – whether that’s funding other charities and causes or even
businesses in countries and locations in the world that need it most.
As part of our seminars we support global charities like Amnesty
International, Virgin Unite and UNICEF by playing business games
in our training rooms where owners choose to donate portions of
the new money created to charitable causes globally. It’s a powerful
way to combine business, talent, money and community.
The most successful entrepreneurs in the world are all involved
in this conversation. The more successful they become, the more
they ask, “How can I give and help other people?”
Passion, talent and team are the three things I always rely most on,
in building a successful business. This brings us to the next most
important thing you can do – which is to partner with people that
are massively successful. When we say “start at the top” – we mean
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it – and one of the best ways to do this is to partner with the top
people right out of the gate.
Most people would think that’s ridiculous – “Why would the world’s
most successful people want to partner with me?” you might say.
Except, be careful about what questions you ask yourself – because
it is what gives you the quality of life you have. A better question
is “What can I give the world’s most successful people so they
will find me valuable enough to partner with them?” Ask better
questions and you will get better results. Your brain is magnificent
in answering the questions you ask it. If you ask it questions that
lead to success, then success becomes inevitable.
I knew from the very start of being in the training, seminar, speaking
industry (or any industry for that matter) that I wanted to partner
with the top. When I started SomaTone – I wanted to be partnered
in with Electronic Arts, Disney, Pop Cap, Zynga, Warner Bros. and
Dream Works – and that’s exactly who we partnered with – in
the first couple years of starting our business. In the speaking and
training world, I again started by not knowing anyone, or having
any contacts AT ALL! But I wanted to partner with the largest
in the world – the biggest promoters, the biggest brands and the
biggest speakers. So that’s what I set out to do. The first thing I did
was made a list of everyone I wanted to work with and meet in
the industry. That list included people like Tony Robbins, Robert
Kiyosaki, Frank Kern and more.
I found ways to be at conferences where these celebrities on my
list were going to be, and found ways to meet them and talk about
how I could be of service or value to them. One of my secrets to
success is finding top people and finding out how I can help them.
Always ask other Industry Rockstars how you can help them first
– before you ask them to help you.
Top people want to help others who are action takers and are
determined to create a massive and positive impact. All top industry
performers need great people on their team and are always on the
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lookout for new, fresh, creative and incredible talent to add to our
friends, colleagues, JV partners, vendors, and so on. It’s time now to
make sure you get clear about who you want to partner with in the
world and start finding a way to get to them to talk about doing
business together. This leads us to our first framework of success to
build the business you want.
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The Entrepreneurial
Hierarchy of Focus
“Life is not about what it is now –
it is about what it can become.”
- Anonymous
I
often ask people in our rooms, “who would like to triple their
rates?” Naturally, everyone raises their hands. I say, “OK! I’m
going to give you the secret. Get your pens out and write this
down…” They all diligently get their pens. Then I usually get on
a chair and scream, “Triple your rates!” Everyone has a chuckle at
me, and we get to the reality that YOU set your rates. Earning more
money is not about setting new rates. That part is easy! Seriously,
if you want to raise your rates – do it now. What’s the hard part?
Being in circles of people who can afford them.
I remember when I decided to raise my rates to $100K a year
for private coaching. I decided that that was what I wanted to
charge to work with people. It was a good price tag for filtering
only the most serious and high earning private clients. But it wasn’t
hard to declare that! (You can declare that right now if you want,
and you should! Raise your rates right now! Double them right
now!). The real challenge was being in conversations with people
that could afford those new rates. Ah ha! This is when we started
to notice that different levels of people are in different types of
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The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus
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The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus
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idea what Bug House Chess is I’ll share briefly how it works as it
became all the new rage in America over the last decade.
You play Bug House Chess with two independent chess games
going on next to each other (so there are two couples playing each
other simultaneously next to each other). Except the person next
to you, becomes your partner. Every time they take a chess piece
off their opponents table, they can hand it to you and you can
place it anywhere you want on your chessboard. This constantly
changes the dynamic of the game, and it can shift the power in a
split second.
There are other dynamics that make the game exciting, but here’s
what I noticed. As soon as the rules changed from the traditional
game of chess, I was awesome at it. I don’t know what it is, but
changing the rules of how the game worked suddenly made the
whole thing work better for me and I was like the reigning champion
of Bug House Chess that night! (Yes I know, not something you
write home about).
Here’s the point: it’s never about the players, it’s about the way
you use them. A great leader knows that there is no such thing as
bad employees, only bad leaders. Every person you meet can be a
huge asset to you and can be a partner with you in changing the
world, if you know how to position them in your life.
So what does this all mean? It means that you should work with,
network with and spend time with people that you actually like
on a human level (that are already successful). There is never a
need to do business with someone, just to do business with them.
But beware if all your friends are low achievers or having financial
problems. It means you need a new network. I don’t mean to sound
cruel, but there is a harsh reality in who you surround yourself
with and the opportunities you will have as a result.
I have found every time I thought I would just schmooze with
someone because there was some professional advantage to
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The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus
knowing them and I didn’t really click with them, that it never
really worked out. The same applies with the top players. There
are some that do click with you on a personal level, and some that
don’t. Write off the ones that don’t and spend time with the ones
that do. I see so many people working hard to prove themselves to
some successful person, or trying to fit in. It reminds me of high
school where everyone was awkward and trying to figure out how
to fit into the different social circles. Build the world you want and
then choose the people that you want to fit into your world.
Number 2.) Big concern: “Why would they want to talk to me?”
Great question! If you ask yourself this question, change it to
something more useful – because this question doesn’t help you at
all. But more importantly, this leads us right into our Hierarchy of
Entrepreneurial Focus…
I successfully networked my way to the top of several industries,
and along the way we noticed that the people at the top were in
different conversations then the ones at the bottom. Naturally this
shouldn’t surprise you (nor did it surprise us). But before we were
there, we didn’t realize what conversations they were in.
I don’t know about you, but I found it exhausting and time
consuming to have to start at the bottom of an industry and work
my way up through networking. When I started in the speaking
and training industry, I made a conscious decision to start at the
top – by using the techniques in this book.
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than likely, they will also be interested in doing business with and
being involved with you.
People often do business with people they have relationships with,
like their friends. This means that there is a common conversation
and common ground occurring. One of the biggest mistakes I see
with Entrepreneurs who want to accelerate their success, is: when
networking with high-profiled individuals, Entrepreneurs often
engage the Rockstar in the Entrepreneurs “level of conversation”
Instead of engaging the Rockstar in the Rockstar’s “level of
conversation”.
Here’s an example. If you are someone who is a year into running
your own practice, and you want to know how to make more
money or more clients, your conversation will likely be about how
to get more clients. You will be seeking out courses on marketing,
and you might be talking to friends about how they get clients.
This is very different than if you are running a $5 million company
now, for example. You are then likely to be in a totally different
conversation – probably about leadership or how to help more
people. The point is that different people at different levels of
success are having different conversations about different issues.
If you want to rise up the ladder, charge higher rates, and work
with higher profile clients, then you need to know how to be in
the higher level conversations. We refer to this as the Hierarchy
of Entrepreneurial Focus, and this model is essentially the levels
at which entrepreneurs put their attention, as they grow in status
and success.
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The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus
in, is “how to structure and start their own business”. If you are in
this conversation and you have little or no experience on how to
start it up, your dialogue will be focused around that.
The second level of conversation is someone who has been in
business for awhile, and who is running a practice or business.
This person is engaged in the conversation about how they raise
their rates and change their positioning to be at the top of their
field. They are interested in increasing their profile and reach, and
improving their brand and significance in the marketplace.
The third level of conversation, once you have reached the top of
your profession or have made the money you want, is how you buy
your life back. This is about how you extract yourself from your
work by scaling out your service company, put your knowledge
into products, systematize your business and reduce the amount
of time you have to work in order to make the same amount of
money. Here the term “leverage” becomes key. Leveraging your
time and your talents.
The fourth and final level of conversation, once you’ve been able
to buy your life back and you make the money you want, is how
you can help more people. There are people in our training rooms
who have the belief that money corrupts you. However, money
actually magnifies what’s in your heart. If you love people, the
more money we give you, then the more ways you will find to
go and love people. If you are feeling worthless or feeling like
a fraud, the more money I give you, the more you will feel this
way. This is why people can make a lot of money but still feel
unfulfilled – because they haven’t worked out their deeper level
identity around whom they are, so the money only magnifies that
unfulfilled feeling. (More on this later)
The most successful people in the world that I have spent time
with have all been in the conversation of how they can help
more people. In fact, until we completely got engaged with this
conversation for ourselves, we were coming from the perspective
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The Entrepreneurial Hierarchy of Focus
Back to our story about the Indian CEO: as soon as I started talking
to him about what he does outside of work, he opened right up.
He told me that he has a charity that donates to young girls in
India who don’t have the right clothes or books – so they skip
school, because they are embarrassed to attend. This CEO was
fully engaged with providing supplies so these girls could feel they
fit in, and could receive an education to help them achieve more
in life. When I became engaged in talking about what I do from a
charitable perspective in the world, we suddenly had the synergy
and engagement that I wanted with him. Naturally, this led to the
relationship I was hoping to have with him. We started discussing
how we could help him help more people. Then the conversation
took off and a relationship was forged!
Where most people approach successful people with requests about
how the successful person can help them, often the successful are
not really interested in having that discussion but entertain it out
of politeness. Ultimately that kind of conversation goes nowhere.
If you approach successful people in their conversation, you will
have a higher probability of creating a relationship with them.
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Sharing the Industry Rockstar Formula in Vancouver, Canada
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54
The 8 Essential
Domains of
Major Change
“The best way to get rich is to
figure out where !e world is
going and get !ere first.”
T
here are eight essential domains of major change currently
occurring in the world that relate to the major movement
and shift in the way business is being done globally.
These eight domains are completely widening and increasing
the possibilities of people and entrepreneurs around the world
– and they are happening all around you right now. These eight
domains are the way the world is going, and it is where business is
headed for the next ten years or more. Some of the most successful
businesses in the world are already functioning inside these eight
domains, and they will continue to. Your ability to understand
the opportunities and take action on implementing these eight
domains into your current business is crucial for you to forge
ahead of your competition, raise your profile in your industry and
have the success you want now. As you read on you will find an
explanation of these 8 Essential Domains of Major Change.
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
This concept will not be new for long though (I can’t wait for you
to reread this book in five years time and say, “Ha! I remember
when personal branding was unknown! Now it is everywhere!!”)
We always say that if you want to make a lot of money then figure
out where the world is going and get there first! At the moment
this is where the world is heading. This will also be a timeless
business principle from here on out, as the whole world shifts to
working more personally with each other through social media.
People all over the planet are coming together and doing business
in almost exactly the same way, using the same online platforms.
The world truly is smaller than it ever has been thanks to the
internet and social media. The first thing people do, when they
meet you and think they might want to do business with you, is
look you up on line and see what kind of personal brand you have.
They start Googling you, looking you up on Facebook, LinkedIn
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and other social media and internet sites. You will hear me say in
our presentations that, “The only two ways someone knows about
you is from what you tell them and what’s online!”
If you do not have a good personal brand established online, then
you are communicating to your customer now, “I don’t want to be
known and you will have a hard time reaching me.” This doesn’t
work anymore.
Today people want to be served and connect to real people (no
more call centers, automated phone lines, six layers to get to the
top, etc.) – so using your personal brand is one of the best ways
to demonstrate that willingness to connect with your customers,
create a personal relationship with them (since it is obviously not
possible to personally connect with every customer) and increase
the market’s trust for you and your service or product. I realize
there is a scalability problem with being so personally accessible,
and productivity experts would slap my hand for saying this. But,
sorry, there is theory and then there is practice. Using your personal
brand and doing a great deal more with your personal brand –
like personal marketing videos, live appearances, interviews, social
media pages, blogs about your life, etc. – will help your customers
have the experience of getting you personally even when you
cannot connect to them one-on-one.
Essentially, a brand is only a promise kept. The promise is a promise
of an experience you will have when you interact with the brand.
Like luxury, reliability, fun, etc. It’s time to start thinking about
what you want your brand to be experienced as. Kane-Maybe a
better way to say this is “It’s time to start thinking about how you
want your brand to be experienced” When I started leading business
trainings, I wanted to be known as the “real deal”. No seminar or
training fluff. When you work with Industry Rockstar trainers or
coaches you get results. But we also wanted to be known as SUPER
fun. So, if you catch our videos – sometimes we are super playful
– just to have fun, but then focus on presenting very compelling
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we get too far ahead of ourselves here is the only thing you need
to remember: Your database is the most important thing you have
in (any) business.
Another way of saying it is: your customer list. This list of people
you have a relationship with is the most important asset your
company will have. Treat it like gold, take care of your customers,
give them good information to help them, love them, be good to
them, and you will build a very valuable asset for your company.
Now on the flip side, if you use your Personal Branding to simply
accelerate your business or profession (even if you have a job),
that’s awesome and this will help your business and status grow.
Your business can one day be acquired (if that’s important to you),
even though you have used your personal brand to develop it.
Look at Apple for example. Steve Jobs used his own personality
to build Apple’s brand in the market place (and his own at the
same time), but he was fired from the company once and it kept
going. Naturally his personal brand was so powerful that it did
affect Apple’s profits, but (in my humble opinion) they made a
huge mistake never replacing him with anyone else that used their
personal brand as well. And naturally, Steve’s unfortunate passing
is separate to the fact that Apple is a running and functioning
company separate from him. The success or the growth of Apple
with or without Steve Jobs is a separate conversation and is really
a Leadership conversation. But the use of his personal brand
accelerated the success of Apple, while still allowing it to be a
separate functioning company that could be run or sold.
If you use these personal branding techniques to raise your status
at your company, you will build a separate brand for yourself in
your industry and often end up the way many of our participants,
who attend Industry Rockstar Intensive (our three day course on
Branding, Packaging and Positioning). They get multiple offers that
pour in year after year for them from other competitors, offered
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
Recently we had a woman, named Pauline, come into our four day
Experts Business Bootcamp called “Industry Rockstar Intensive”,
which trains our participants in everything they need to know
about personal branding, packaging and positioning themselves
for success. Pauline was struggling. The reason she attended our
seminars was because she was tired of struggling to get clients,
and then when she did, she found she could only charge them
about $60 per hour for relationship advice. She wanted to charge
more, have more clients, reach more people globally, create passive
income from online, leverage her time through workshops, and
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
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The 8 Essential Domains of Major Change
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If you want to make money globally, you must think globally. And
you can start a global business right now on the internet. The way
we are using social media, splash pages, email drip systems, opt-in
databases & double opt-in email, CRM’s, and opt-in email forms is
completely different in not what they are but how they are being
strung together. We will take a look at some of the core concepts
as to how we and our colleagues (who happen to be some of
the most successful Internet Marketers in the world), are most
effectively reaching people, building relationships with them, and
then offering products and services to customers in order to help
them.
If any of the terms I listed in the first sentence of the last paragraph
are unfamiliar for you (social media, splash pages, email drip
systems, opt-in databases & double opt-in email, CRM’s, and opt-
in email forms), then this is the perfect book for you to start to
understand the essentials and some of the lesser known techniques
to sourcing people online, building relationships with them and
effectively making offers to them. If you are already a seasoned
Internet Marketer you will also find lots of juicy approaches to
refining your online marketing system.
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1. Always pay your vendors full price for their services – every
time we have ever done a “deal” or swapped services for
services, it has NEVER, NEVER, NEVER worked out well.
2. Have regular meetings with them throughout the project
to keep them accountable and on schedule – high amounts
of communication are essential. You CANNOT just hand it
off.
3. Pay in milestones so that the vendor is motivated to get the
work done. Give a small deposit to let them know you are
serious and then pay as they deliver the work.
4. Have a back up vendor – Vendors in the internet space are
notorious for being difficult, getting very busy with other
clients, and dropping the ball. Always make sure you have a
back-up vendor or the company you are working with has
multiple vendors they use.
5. Always get all the assets – in case you need to jump ship
mid-stream with a vendor, make sure you get all the original
asset files (like Adobe Photoshop files, Adobe Premier Files,
Dreamweaver files, etc.)
6. Try to find someone in your time zone and highly referred
– If you are not used to outsourcing off shore, or don’t
have any experience with it – you could end up throwing
away a lot of time and money. Everyone loves the fact that
you can “outsource to India, China or the Philippines” for
a fraction of the price than the Western Countries, but
realistically, there are great vendors in every country. There
are expensive and inexpensive vendors in every country
and you want to hire good ones and pay appropriately. By
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Unfortunately, people do not buy what they need– they buy what
they want (which is not always the same thing). Make sure you
are packaging up your products and services into the things people
want, NOT what you think they need.
In this book I’m going to talk about how to most effectively package
up your products and services so that they are more saleable and
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CASE STUDY:
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In Rimini, Italy with 3.5k Business Owners all ge8ing the Industry
Rockstar Formula simultaneously translated into Italian
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MYTH: You can only sell when you clear it with the person
se!ing up the event and make a formal offer.
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for someone who has not spent the time there… they have no
idea, and you can be an expert to them, and sell your information
to them.
Doing this will bring innovation and inspiration to you when you
start to break down what you are so masterful at, into a format
that is so simple that other people understand it. It’s during this
process that even you will gain a deeper appreciation for the skills
and knowledge you have inside the products and services you are
providing your customers.
CASE STUDY:
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You know there are a million ways to make a lot of money, and
before I even got into an Experts business, I was making tons of
money in other businesses. I could close up shop tomorrow on
Industry Rockstar training company and be set for life. I do this
business, because of the people we meet, and the ability to impact
so many people in such a positive way. And so will you.
If you are someone who needs to make more money, we will teach
you how to do that. And one day when you are earning enough,
you will be amazed that you ever worried about money. Then
you will also notice how much of your attention is on helping
people and earning money as a by-product of that. That’s when
work becomes play and you never stop working, because who
ever wants to stop playing? We need more people in this business
helping others globally. It’s our only way out of all the darkness
our planet and communities have put us into. I could go on forever
about the importance of you taking on this approach to business.
People ask us all the time why I share all this information instead of
keeping it for myself. As you can probably see from this book (and much
more to come), I am very transparent about how to create success, how
to successfully do this business, and how to become the best in the world
at it, because the world needs your knowledge and advice right now
more than ever. People everywhere need access to knowledge, advice
and systems that will help them be more successful. Money does move
mountains and I want you to be empowered with it so you can help
more people (more on this in our Social Entrepreneurship section).
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for you. We are all more powerful together. There is no faster way
to expand your message and your database than working with
people who are already established. First of all in the market you
are headed into, and next, in the global market, where you should
be getting a piece of the action.
When you build a relationship in business with a global bank
or international company, for example, you can accelerate your
business and reach a greater number of people. Later in this book,
I’m going to give you exclusive insights about how to position
yourself and create an infrastructure, so already established brands
will find it attractive to partner with you.
A quick question to get you thinking now about how to find the
right global partners for you is, “What companies service a customer
that could benefit from the use of your product or service?” In the
end people partner together globally to bring each other valuable
resources, reach more people and make more money. Start asking
yourself right now: who do you know that could bring valuable
resources to you and your company to help things move faster?
I have noticed that the most successful people in the world are
often frustrated by one thing in particular: things are not happening
fast enough! When you become ultra rich, the first thing you will
notice is that you can do anything you want with your day and time.
The next thing you are going to notice is that you have unlimited
opportunity to create and help people and a VERY limited amount
of time in which to do it.
If you are already financially successful, you know what I mean. If
you are building your pathway there now, or just getting started
– let me say that the day will come, where money is really not a
conversation, but it is really about your time, and how precious
your time is. I ask people all the time, what is more valuable, time
or money and they say time, but for many people the answer is
cerebral and they haven’t really experienced in their body about
how precious time is.
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There are two crises that I have gone through in my life that
literally changed my perspective on life forever, and therefore I
wish that everyone has these two experiences… I always say I hope
that everyone goes through a Financial Crisis (that they survive!),
and a Health Crisis (that they survive!!). These two types of crises
completely change your perspective on life in a very kinesthetic
way. It’s not like it’s a theory any more about how life can change
so dramatically in a moment, but it is a real experience. And once
you experience it, you never want it to happen again, and your
outlook on how precious time is comes completely into view.
Now is the time to get going on your business, now is the time to
pursue what you have always dreamed of: getting paid for loving
what you do and working with the people you want to work with.
Now is the time to get partnered up with people globally so they
can help you spread your message and wisdom to those that need
it most.
I had a great teacher at Berklee College of Music where I went
to school to study music business and production. His name was
Livingston Taylor. Livingston was the brother of the famous James
Taylor and musically brilliant in his own way. He taught a class
at Berklee called “Stage Performance”. And I will never forget the
resonance of him saying over and over to us throughout the years I
spent there, “Someone has to be the star in your industry, why not
you? Someone has got to do it… There is an audience for you if
you let there be one. The only people that don’t have an audience
are the ones who don’t get started. Someone has to be the star,
why not you?”
It’s time you start getting the attention of people around the world,
and partnering up with others that already have the resources that
you need, whether that’s exposure, expertise, or relationships. It’s
time to make a list of the things that are holding you back now,
and start finding partners that can supply you with those things, or
help you in return for some mutual benefit.
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I always loved the story that Jeff would tell on stage about his
Father, who was one of the founders of oDesk, a Global brand in
the outsourcing space. Jeff grew up in an environment where his
father really understood outsourcing, in fact so well, he built a very
successful business out of helping other people achieve it. Because
of that, Jeff grew up always thinking that it is better left to someone
who is an “Expert” in that field. He suggests this is how he made it
through college – by outsourcing everything! I mean Jeff is Dyslexic,
ADD (actually HDADD – High Definition Attention Deficit
Disorder), and still became a multi-millionaire in his early twenties.
As it turns out, Sir Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and many
other famous people are also Dyslexic. But that’s not all they have
in common. They also didn’t let that stop them from becoming
the success they knew they should be. They partnered with people,
outsourced and hired people to help them fill in the gaps. If you
position yourself in the marketplace, get clear about who you serve,
what problems you solve, and partner with good partners that have
the resources that you need (in exchange for some mutual benefit),
and you will be on your way to building a very successful business
for yourself.
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worry about what you are not seeing”. We will talk more about this
concept later as we dive into Coaching, one of the most growing,
powerful and misunderstood professions in the world today.
The most successful people in the world have a structure and a
strategy in place for how they are going to continue to grow and
challenge their limits every year (after all that’s one of our most
core human desires: to grow, expand and deepen our soul). I am
100% driven by the desire to expand myself on a daily basis, and
therefore I specifically strive to make mistakes. Why? Because I
know that I am not playing a big enough game if I’m not making
mistakes. Growth requires making errors and learning from those
errors so you can improve in the future.
Later in this book, I’ll outline the essential distinction between
coaches, consultants and mentors. The lack of understanding of
how each one differs from one another causes a commoditization
of each profession. In other words, coaches think they are
consultants, consultants aren’t sure if they are coaches, and mentors
are trying to do every role. This prevents each professional from
harnessing exactly what they do and help others to do their best.
It also prevents them from properly targeting the right clients
for themselves, and therefore ultimately sacrifices real long-term
fulfillment in their business.
The age-old saying is that all top athletes have coaches. Top
executives also have coaches. I personally have five different
coaches, consultants and mentors that I rely on, as well as boards of
advisors and boards of directors for different companies. I attend
countless workshops each year for my own growth and learning,
and conduct my own trainings in excess of 280 days every year
(which is the best way to grow by the way: teach others).
Since I was in my late teenage years, I have been heavily immersed
in personal development work, continuing education work,
completely out-of-the-box explorations in Social Dynamics®,
Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), human psychology,
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My mother and father worked with her for years engaging her in
learning materials that kept her interest and taught to her learning
style in fun ways. Years later after high school, not only did my sister
get accepted into top Colleges and Universities, but she also ended
up as a stellar student, ranking on the Dean’s List of top students.
She then went on to become a very highly paid and successful
executive in the fashion and book publication industries. She’s not
only brilliant, but she’s also powerful and assertive. Why? Because
my parents would not buy into a future of someone else’s tiny
view of what was possible for her.
Are you buying into other people’s predicted future for you?
Or are you putting yourself in an environment of positive and
successful thinkers? This is one of the reasons people who want to
be successful (and are successful) surround themselves with other
positive, successful people. Success breeds success – and misery
breeds misery. I have one rule about people around me – if you
are not saying something positive, useful or actionable then I don’t
want you to talk to me. Unless we are exploring the problem, risks
or negatives in an attempt to shift them, I don’t want to hear about
them. I train people in my life that they will not be in my life
unless they follow this rule. I realize this is aggressive, but this is
how I want to live: with positive energy, people and conversations
in my life. I’m not saying I never discuss anything negative, but it
is always in service of moving towards a positive outcome quickly.
There are two ways to get into circles of positive people around
you:
1. Buy your way in: why not? Hire a coach, be part of an
organization with successful people, pay for a seminar, and
build a network of powerful thinkers. Do you want to know
how to become important to a successful person? Become
their number one client. I have done this many times.
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You Want: The
Results Chain
“Big results require big ambi&ons.”
Heraclitus
T
here has never been a better time in history than now to
start your own business or expand your business rapidly. As
a side note, by the way, there has also never been a better time
in history for a woman to start her own business. The next decade
has been coined as the “Decade of the Woman Entrepreneur” (by
the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation – the world’s largest non-
for-profit foundation devoted to Entrepreneurship). We see more
women than ever finding the right opportunity through our work
to take their knowledge and wisdom and turn it into a practice or
business that brings income into their households and lives.
There are not enough female speakers on stages who know how to
sell, and, there are not enough women leaders and business owners
in the marketplace in general. I’m speaking globally because you
might be in a country where there are many women in positions
of leadership and owning businesses, but globally, women leaders
are a massive minority. There is a huge opportunity for the woman
entrepreneur that is going to take action right now before the
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and just start hiring and training other talent and systematizing our
business. I began doing everything I am sharing with you in this
book, and it was only then that we took that company to multi-
international success and top five in the world in its category. More
importantly for me, at that time, was that I got to just do what I
loved to do all day long: speak, create, share, teach and lead.
It is a crucial mindset shift that the most successful entrepreneurs
make. They start to believe that someone else should be doing
things for them to help them grow their business. Their first
question becomes, “How do I stop doing this task and get someone
else’s help so I can leverage my time?” I call this moving from
Artist to Owner mindset (or from Player to Owner).
As an owner, you get to design your life. In taking on the mindset of
an owner, you move from being at the effect of your own business
to being at the cause of your own success. You engage the power of
delegation in all areas of business, from social media and marketing
through to video production, accounting, administration, and
more. The best advice I ever received from an executive mentor
I had was, “Notice that almost everything you are doing can be
done better by someone else; so why not hire them and leverage
your own time?” Jeff and I know we have areas of strength and we
have areas of weakness when it comes to skill-sets. So, we surround
ourselves with a winning team to take on the roles where we are
weak, to help us succeed.
Here’s the point: so many people are out there learning social media
marketing strategies, web design principles, marketing techniques,
and more, when they really hate that stuff. If that’s you, then let
it go! Learn to say our favorite phrase from one of our mentors:
“It’s somebody else’s problem!” All the doing in the business, all
the stuff outside of what you are really good at should be someone
else’s problem. More on this soon…
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L→S→F
1. Lead Generation (L) – Marketing
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good at what you do. But I am saying that being good at what you
do does one thing only: maintains happy customers. If you do not
have a “Refer a friend marketing program” or you don’t actively
ask for referrals, the odds of you having a high refer rate goes way
down. In fact it becomes chance that it happens, and I don’t want
you to build a company on chance.
Referrals are awesome and definitely the least expensive way to get
a customer. And they are coming in through the marketing stage of
your business. The best clients in the world to work with are those
who are loudest – make them happy and they will be permanent
walking billboards for you! I love to work with emotionally loud
people and then make sure they are 150% fulfilled with our
trainings, products and services.
So, the most important positions (or hats you can wear) in your
business are those of the Owner (Brand, Relationship & Product
Owner, the CEO (Leader of teams and strategic thinker), the
CMO (Opportunity Gatherer) and the CSO (Closer). If you just
wear these four hats for 90% of your day and put 10% of your
attention on becoming better at what you do, like reading books,
attending courses, increasing your skill-level and adding to your
qualifications, your business will grow in leaps and bounds.
By the way, would you rather work with someone who has a long
line of certifications and degrees in their field but has had very
few clients, or would you rather work with someone who has no
degrees but who has worked with thousands of clients and had
great results?
A majority of people would choose the second person, because
put simply, they want the greatest result possible and the greatest
return on their investment. The second person, the one who has
worked with thousands of people, has very likely learned a lot along
the way because you learn so much when you work with every
client and customer. The more clients and customers you serve,
the more skilled you become, the more targeted your products
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and services become, and the more credibility you build for your
brand.
So if you are the kind of person who is trying to get it perfect
before you get out there in the world and make money, give
yourself permission to stop that and get out there. Instead of being
a perfectionist, become a progressionist. As we say in our trainings
all the time: “Be willing to take imperfect action.”
CASE STUDY:
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Now, you may not have a Masters or PhD, but you are likely over
educated! (I’m sure you don’t hear that much, but I’m here to tell
you like it is!). You are probably over educated or educated enough,
and what there is to do is get yourself packaged and positioned, and
mostly get out there and start selling your products and services –
to and through better networks of people, for more money, and for
less work. (In fact, consider that your “smarts” are actually getting
in the way of you making more money!) Most people who are in
our rooms have taken all the courses, read all the books and they
are ready to take all that knowledge and turn it into products and
services and sell them for high prices.
In fact most, if not all, of the fulfillment-oriented roles in your
business – from website design to copywriting, accounting to social
media – are roles that should be another expert’s tasks in your
business (maybe everything except where you need to personally
show up as the product).
Every successful executive throughout history says that you need
to identify your passion and strengths, and hire people who are
better than you at everything else. The only two things you need
to really have your attention on, to hyper-grow your business, is
ownership (building more products and services to sell) and selling
(creating new opportunities to close new clients). No one has ever
come back to me upset that they were closing more customers
every day and making more money.
On the flip side, I have thousands and thousands of people walk
into our rooms that have spent hundreds of hours trying to learn
how to use social media or master their website creation – when in
their hearts, they just want to be the artist and share their wisdom.
It’s like a singer trying to play all the instruments in the band
because he doesn’t want to hire someone else to play them! A
lack of cash flow to hire the right people to take on roles in your
business, and being a perfectionist or ‘control freak’ are the two
biggest reasons why small businesses never grow to their potential.
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Don’t let these stop you from achieving what you would ultimately
love to achieve.
I am focused on training more entrepreneurs to think like the top
CEO’s and owners in the world. When you engage with me, in
our products or our seminars, I train you to become a master of
creating opportunity in your business. I do this through training you
to become an unstoppable marketer, a world-class sales person and a
brilliant brand builder. Then you will be able to take these skills and
build such a cash-cow practice or business that you will have all the
money you need to hire the right people around you. These people
can take care of the accounting books, social media campaigns, PR
releases, etc., so that you can stay focused on being the Rockstar
– speaking, teaching, building relationships and helping people. So,
maybe there is a lot of mindset to this equation of success? The
Owner Vs Player mindset is an important one to shift.
Let’s explore a bit more of this to get to the core of the most
successful people. But, we know, you have heard all the mindset
stuff before – so let’s look at it from a completely different angle.
Palm Springs, CA sharing influence tips with 1800 Business Owners, Experts & Entrepreneurs
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“If you !ink you can do a
!ing or !ink you can’t do
a !ing, you’re right”
- Henry Ford
T
ony Robbins and many successful, personal development
training companies, have established since the 1970’s that
it really is our mindset and our beliefs that set the entire
foundation for everything that we do, which is what gives us all
of our results. Before I dive directly into what you need to do in
order to become an Industry Rockstar, it’s essential that we work
together to align your thinking with the people who are Industry
Rockstars.
If you are reading this book, then you have probably done a lot
of personal development work. You may have done workshops or
seminars, or listened to CD’s, tapes or read numerous books. You
may even have a very robust self-help section on your shelf or
computer right now. This chapter is not going to be your run-of-
the-mill mindset conversation. This is a look at some of the most
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If you think you need to raise capital to start a business, nine times
out of ten you are wrong – more often than not, you don’t need it.
You are just terrified of selling. We are going to make the assertion
here that raising capital to start your business is likely the wrong
way to go (especially if you are a first time business owner).
If you have a track record of successful businesses and entrepreneurial
activities, and/or are creating a specific piece of technology (yes
technology companies often need funding more often than other
companies do), then maybe funding is appropriate..
There might be some other cases where you could convince me
funding is necessary – but it is very rare. Most companies that are
successfully funded are not starting from scratch. They have a
proven system, market and product or service that is already selling
in a market place. Then they are seeking funding for expansion.
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there going, “I know, I know, I know”, but you are still looking to
raise capital for your company then you are missing the point. The
better you become at sales, the more interested people will be in
giving you money to help you with your initiatives.
Even businesses that really need capital to get going because of a
need for assets – like a logistics company, building/construction
company, or restaurant, etc. – you can bring in partners that have
assets, access to capital, etc. You can put together the deals and
have no financial risk. Honestly, if you have never run a successful
business before, be very careful about taking in any capital –
because it is very high risk.
Moving on to the last type of risk you can take… The most
valuable risks that you can take and the ones that make the biggest
difference in business are the emotional risks. An emotional risk
might be calling your friends and contacts and telling them about
your new business. It might be approaching successful people to
talk to them about becoming part of a joint venture. It might also
be about selling something. Entrepreneurs who succeed and scale
up fast are those who are continuously taking emotional risks. The
principle that I live by is that if something feels a little emotionally
risky, then I generally head towards it to explore it and often take
the emotional risk. The only shots we regret in life are the ones
we don’t take.
Your Value
Value is another big mindset issue that we notice in people with
whom we work. My private consulting/coaching rates are in excess
of $100,000 USD a year for my personal one-on-one time with
a client. To date, that is at the top end of coaching as leadership
coaches. When my clients engage with me, usually one of the first
things we do is raise the rates they are charging, because they are
too cheap. Or if they are in a product business, we develop a real
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high-end expensive product for them to sell. And they are ALWAYS
freaked out by this – until they close their first sale (which is often
quickly). Then they kick themselves for having been so cheap!
Most of the time people spend time trying to convince us why their
rates should be low to compete. I believe the exact opposite. If you
really want to compete, then your rates should be high. Experts
charge expert rates. If you are not expensive you will never be
perceived as an expert. It is hard wired into people’s consciousness
that expensive things are higher value – whether they are or not –
all humans believe this.
MYTH: You must start at the bo!om and work your way
up (with credibility, exposure and prices.)
You may have been trained in school to start at the bottom and
work hard to move up to the next level. I mean that’s how it
works in school: as long as you work hard in each grade, you pass.
That’s fine, except that’s not how the real world works. And don’t
think I am talking to the recently graduated college student here!
I have been training Entrepreneurs all over the world, that have
been in their professions for 30+ years and struggling to raise their
rates any higher than the industry standard. As soon as we get our
hands on them, they are able to double and triple their rates (if not
more). Naturally, being successful does require a certain amount
of work; however success is not about where you start, it’s really
about where you are now. So, why not start at (or closer) to the
top?
There are two differentiators for people at the top. That is they
have used the positioning techniques we will be teaching you in
this book, and created relationships to be there. So start creating
relationships with people at the top. I really got this when I was
working in the record industry under a very famous record producer
in New York. He will remain nameless for his own sake. I was
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You do NOT get what you deserve in life you get what you ask
for in life. I always say to people in our workshops, “Ask for twice
as much as you expect to get, because you just might get it!” With
some coaching around his own relationship to his self worth, the
Photographer was willing to take a risk and take on our advice,
which for him meant changing the price.
Are you curious to know what happened? Well, it took him 167
sales conversations to sell the first photograph at that price – and
then he did it (it took him three months). He sold it for $50,000.
The next photograph took him 112 sales conversations to sell it.
The one after that took him just 75 conversations to sell it. To cut a
long story short, the same photographer who was struggling when
we first met him is now selling hundreds of thousands of dollars
of his own photography every year (to magazines, film, collectors,
etc.). The important thing to note here is that if he hadn’t shifted
his own perception of his value – and been willing to take action to
follow that up – nothing would have ever changed for him.
There is no inherent value on any product or service. You cannot
go to the library and find me the “book of values” on you and how
much you should cost for your products or services! All products
and services are inherently valueless, and invaluable. Valueless to
the people who don’t care about them and invaluable to the people
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Physical Activity
Do me a quick favor right now…
Extend your right arm now fully in front of you with the palm up
until it is parallel with the floor and perpendicular to your body.
Now, bend at your elbow until your hand is facing you and your
arm makes a big “L” shape. Next, rotate your shoulder so your arm
stretches behind your head and down to the upper part of your
back. Now pat yourself on the back between your two shoulder
blades.
Nice job!! You just congratulated yourself for working so hard
for all these years trying to convince people of the value of your
product or service. And now, let all the weight of that lift off your
shoulder as you pat yourself on your back and say to yourself now,
that you will never have to do that again. The value is determined
by the buyer. Your job is to go on a discovery with them and help
them discover the value.
The only value you are responsible for is the initial Perceived Value
– the pitch that gets them curious. This takes just a few seconds
and something specific we help people craft up when they work
with us.
To one person, what you do and what you sell is completely
worthless. To another person, it’s the most valuable product or
service in the world. The question of where to set your rates
essentially comes from what you want to earn. Remember it’s
never about money – it’s about value for the buyer (which they will
determine).
All people pull their rates out of the thin air and decide in a
heartbeat what they are going to sell their product or service
for. Often they look at others in their industry and use them as a
starting point. So, if you are going to create them out of thin air –
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why not charge a LOT for what you do? Like way more than your
contemporaries. I do! And you can too!
The question is not how much you charge – remember it is never
about the money it is always about the value. And the challenge
is not doubling, tripling or quadrupling your rates, the challenge is
how to find the people who will pay that. So the real deal is not
about your value, the real deal is about the network you’re part of.
It’s time for you to be increasing the financial status of the people
you surround yourself with, if you want to increase your rates.
A million dollar tip for you is that if you are in the personal
development or holistic field, or some sort of consulting or
coaching field, then people are generally willing to invest 10-15%
of their annual income on learning, growing, trainings, coaching and
consulting. This is why if I am selling someone leadership coaching
or consulting, and I want to charge them $100,000 a year, then I
know they need to be earning somewhere from $650,000 to $1
million per year, to be able to afford my services. It’s not that other
people wouldn’t find it valuable; it’s that it is not sustainable for
them financially to engage services at this rate.
Some people will be willing to spend more if they know that it is an
essential step for them to get out of some massive pain (which could be
a boring life, or could be some real pressure).
If you want to charge $100,000 a year for your private clients,
then you need to be networking with people who are earning
this much. In our Rockstar Trainings, we teach you how to be in
those conversations (refer back to the Entrepreneurial Hierarchy
of Focus about how to network in higher circles). This is another
reason why people say that your income tends to be an average of
the five or six people who you surround yourself with on a regular
basis.
If you are reading this and thinking, “I have no interest in working
one-on-one with private clients consulting or coaching,” then just
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Financial Sustainability
By the way, I feel very strongly about our clients being financially
sustainable, when they engage with us. We rarely encourage anyone
to go into debt to invest in themselves through us, unless we are
absolutely certain that it is the right answer to their problem.
There is another perspective on debt and when it can be appropriate
however having people constantly going into debt is simply not
a sustainable approach. This is also why Jeff and I have created
different tiers of training, products and services, including this book,
so that more people can invest with us. You can do the same. Your
job is to serve as many people that you want with your services
(who can afford your new high rates) – while being sensitive to
the different financial capabilities that come along with all your
interested clients.
Build an array of products at different price points to allow anyone
to buy from you. We call this “Covering Your Market”. We go into
great detail on this topic, in our Industry Rockstar Intensive event,
where we help people design and build their products and brand
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There is nothing wrong with people who are broke, however, they
can’t help you to raise your income because they can’t afford you.
Earlier in my life, I wanted to help artists take the “starving” out
of the “starving artist”. I ended up feeling burned out, and it just
wasn’t sustainable for me to be working for little or no money.
I encourage our participants to create products for people who
can’t afford your higher end services (or who want to get to know
you before they invest in your trainings or one-on-one services).
If you do want to help people, personally, who have no or little
money, give them scholarships that can be used toward purchasing
your products or services, while you make money serving plenty of
other people who can comfortably afford your rates.
By the way – if you haven’t already noticed this, the more you
charge the better results your clients get. Just think about it: if
I charged you $500 for this book, would you value it more? It
would be almost impossible not to! We always value what we pay
more for. What I have noticed over the years, is that when I coach
people that pay me “little” money, versus when I coach people
that pay me lots of money, the people that pay me lots of money
have better results (quicker) – regardless of what background or
network they come from.
False! No matter how much desire people have, it only gets them
to a financially comfortable place. When we work with clients
that are super successful, regardless of how much drive they have,
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if they are not committing with real money and lots of it, they
lose focus. When we are working with people who are completely
broke (occasionally I have been asked by completely desperate
celebrities to help them out of their rut, and I agree to do a pro
bono client in exchange for a % of the results) – as soon as they
get some success and get comfortable, they slow down massively.
I have seen it hundreds of times and our clients have too. I always
find a way for someone to have real skin in the game through a
financial investment. When people pay a lot, they pay a lot of
attention. It’s time for you to charge your clients and customers a lot
of money too. I don’t even care where the money goes: sometimes
we just have our clients donate money to charity initiatives that we
support. We might not even have them pay us our or companies
directly. The money is about the client having skin in the game.
The point of this little section is for you to get that some of the
actual results of the clients is proportionate to the amount of
investment they make. The financial pain the clients puts themself
into to work with you, is an important ingredient to the success
they achieve. If you knew that your clients would get more by
paying you more, would you be okay charging more for your
products and services?!
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Confidence
Confidence is the number one trait of successful people. See how
confident I am in saying that?! LOL! Most people are out there
trying to gain confidence, except there is really nothing to gain,
as you can’t go and buy confidence from the store. Confidence
comes from the inside, and it’s generated by an appreciation of
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where you are at, instead of making yourself wrong for it. People
who are or appear to be very confident are simply saying “yes” to
everything that is happening and everything they are experiencing
in that moment.
A lot of people are afraid to pick up this book, come through
our trainings and then call themselves a Rockstar in their Industry
because their self-confidence is low. But, being an expert is a total
perception. How do you really ever know that you are an expert?
You could say that you are never an expert! Here is what I do to
help our audiences to shift their confidence level quickly:
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The expert is just someone who knows more about a topic than
someone else. Maybe the people who you follow and learn from do
have the experience and background – they’ve been an expert in
the field for more years – but I would just call them an experienced
expert. It’s all about marketing anyway! You need to start digging
into your life and looking at how to position your experience and
expertise in the most credible way possible.
Look at it this way: my four year-old son takes tennis lessons from
a nineteen year old tennis competitor. Her name is Bonnie, and no
one reading this book would ever know her. To my son, she’s an
expert, and therefore she gets our money. Why? She decided to
call herself a tennis expert and market herself in line with this. To
Andre Agassi, I’m sure Bonnie is far from an expert.
If you’re concerned about what an expert is, it’s because you’re confused
about what an expert is.
Anyone can be an expert so long as the people working below them
don’t have the same or more expertise. If you look at this more
closely, what I’m saying is that if you can help somebody, then you
are their expert. If you take someone’s money and then help them
solve a problem, then I don’t care what you call yourself! You’re
in business!
Here are seven ways from which you can quickly draw credibility
and therefore gain confidence that you have what it takes to be
“positioned” at the top of your industry:
1. Ever had any results with clients? That’s the most important
thing – results. If you are getting started or haven’t had a lot
of results read on…
2. Your story of your life gives you credibility – your story
includes your mistakes, and those mistakes will save
someone else years of wasting time and money. That’s
important!
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Please know this: there is an audience for you. I don’t care how
nuts you think your hobby or passion is – there are people all over
the globe that like that too. And will pay you to learn more about
it (yes, at whatever level of expertise you are currently at).
PARTICIPANT STORY
I remember a woman that was in our training who was in her late
60’s. She loved adventure, but was not sure what to do with her life
at this point. She was feeling passionless and came to our training –
primarily to be entertained for the weekend. She just wanted to be
around all these other inspired people. However, what she found
is that there were also a handful of others that were clueless about
what their passion was, or what they could do as a business. This
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was the perfect conversation for her when we started talking about
how to identify your passion and turn it into a business.
We have seen people become apathetic because they don’t believe
they can make money doing what they really love. Except that’s
a lot of silly talk! I had one woman in a training saying she loves
dancing but she knows there is no money in it as a performer.
She was apathetic and slightly depressed. So we whipped up some
concepts for her, and now she runs a very lucrative dance school
where she gets to dance and get paid (and she doesn’t even run
the classes).
So back to our story about this lady who was in her late 60’s: she
put her hand up when we asked who was feeling like they didn’t
know what their passion was, and that’s what was stopping them
in life. We brought her up onto the stage and worked with her for
about 10 minutes asking her what she was really passionate about.
Suddenly she lit up and said, “I love to jump out of airplanes and
bungee jump!” Now this knocked everyone over in the room.
I asked her if she could take other people who wanted to go on
adventures in their life, out to jump out of planes and bungee
jump – specifically maybe an older clientele that wanted to be
adventurous in that stage of their lives. I asked her if she would like
to do that. So guess what she is doing now? She runs a boutique
practice where she takes older couples on major adventures. And
she loves it. But mostly the problem was that she wasn’t willing
to allow herself to consider doing exactly what she loved to
do and make money at it. We helped her create a brand, some
services (which were adventures she takes people on) and got her
positioned in the market as the “Go-To Grandma for Adventures!”
How cool is that!
There is a business in everything you love to do. This is really my
gift to the world – to help anyone see the business possibilities
in what they love to do, and help them create it to make money,
so they can experience the most freedom and play in their work
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now to create the next phase of your life. You have a long life
full of lots of opportunities and choices. Right now is the time
for you to choose the things you enjoy most and look at how you
can bring your talents and gifts to the world. By the way, if you
haven’t already noticed, all businesses do the same thing: help
people. These days it’s about connecting with your customers on
a personal level.
One of my coaches always said the only thing that happens of
value in business, happens between people. If you are not clear
about your passion, you have taken your attention off of the
difference you make for people and the interpersonal connection
you get when you do business. When it comes back to helping
people, facilitating them in having an amazing experience in life,
and connecting with them on a daily basis, does it really matter
what you do anyway? In every business I’ve owned and run, it
never made any difference what we were doing (as a daily activity
or what we were selling) as long as people were getting served,
helped and the planet was becoming a better place.
Try on that concept for yourself (that what you are actually
“doing” doesn’t matter), and then get your butt out there to help
the world. It needs you now. The vehicle of what you choose is
really insignificant, so choose the one you have the most fun at –
and charge a lot for it! This is what it means to become an Industry
Rockstar.
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Hanging out with Sir Richard Branson An evening with Bill Clinton
discussing Charity work with Virgin Unite discussing philanthropy
Spending time with Tony Blair With Bob Proctor discussing human potential
on the topic of Leadership
Photo shoot with Dr. John Demartini just Sharing the stage with Les Brown
before a tour together through India and ge8ing motivated!!
My friend and talented Business Man, With Mariah Carey on Tour - while contracting
Richard Belluzzo – Former President of with Sony Music in my early 20’s!
Microso9 – a9er sharing the stage in Asia
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“Formula for success: rise
early, work hard, strike oil.”
O
ver the years of working with top executives, high
performing entrepreneurs and top practitioners on their
businesses and lives, I noticed that there were several
similar patterns occurring between them. I noticed that they were
able to occupy different professional characters in the world (at
different times) in order to be maximally influential (and flexible)
in business. What I’m about to reveal is not individually new to
business, but what is happening is that different personalities and
individual character roles have become more important or more
prevalent than they used to be in the past.
More people are occupying more character roles in their professions
(i.e. wearing more hats), and the most successful are becoming
excellent at six specific characters or positions in the world.
The most successful entrepreneurs are undoubtedly those who are
becoming the most effective at putting all of these 6 characters/
positions together. The six positions are:
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Released in 2006, revolutionized business all over the world – simple but
very powerful when used in sequence - and deep when you dive in.
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2: The Messenger
The messenger (or Seminar Leader & Speaker) specifically uses
the power of public speaking to accelerate the power of their
message. People who use public speaking, or profit speaking
(platform selling, Webinars, teleseminars, etc.) are quickly moving
their companies and their careers forward.
They use their ability to speak to carry their message to people
both online and offline. Since videos are the primary mode of
marketing these days – public speaking is essential to be effective
in marketing and selling. In a study of 600 top executives world-
wide, the number one thing they claimed as the reason they were
successful was due to their ability to articulate their ideas and
influence groups of people.
If it terrifies you to speak in front of people – you are not alone.
Public speaking is the number one fear of human beings. However,
it’s time to get over it. I know that’s not very good coaching,
but here’s the real deal: I have done over 1,200 trainings, in 12
different countries. I have spoken to crowds as large as ten thousand
people at a time, and as small as fifty. Want to know a little secret?
I’m always nervous. Even after 1,200 times. I probably will always
be nervous. I was easily the world’s worst public speaker when I
started. I would easily bore my audience to death and put them to
sleep.
It makes me smile to think about those days. The thing to realize
is that all successful people have fears and concerns. We just bring
them along for the ride, and little by little over time they get
less and less loud in our ears, until they are really just a tiny dull
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sound in the very back of our minds. I’m not sure they ever really
disappear, but they certainly stop being so annoying!
Since I am a certified Master Practitioners of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic
Programming), and have spent over a decade studying with top
NLP gurus internationally, there is a much more sophisticated
solution for concerns and fears, through the use of NLP. But my
really quick suggestion right now is, “Have your emotions, don’t
let them have you.” Most of the time, we fear what we don’t
understand or what we do not have a process for. If you haven’t
studied really top grade public speaking with someone, it’s time
to get started, because the people that are on top are working on
becoming more articulate in front of groups.
You can hide and ignore it, but if you look at the trend of people
showing up in public speaking trainings these days, you will find a
massive upswing in attendance. Industry Rockstar has specialized
trainings for participants that want to become world-class
presenters, trainers and platform sellers. It’s a set of techniques I
developed over the years of doing it wrong so many times, on so
many different stages, in front of hundreds of thousands of people.
I love leading trainings and workshops, facilitating meetings and
getting people to take action in front of me, therefore changing
their lives. After having led personal development seminars, NLP
and intervention type seminars for major seminar companies and
Industry Rockstar for over a decade now, I have fused personal
development work into our business seminars for a very powerful
experience and results. This is one of the reasons Industry Rockstar
seminars are regarded as being so different. And we train our
participants to do the same. There are public speaking techniques,
which are different than, facilitating a transformational experience
in a room, which is different than Platform Selling – all three
are different arts. The more you understand all three the more
powerful of a presenter you will become.
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twenties are these days. Yes the internet is woven into the fabric
of their society, so it is easier for them. But that’s how it goes.
You had things in your generation that your parents didn’t. Most
professionals know they can’t ignore the internet, but they are not
yet, really taking an aggressive interest in understanding how it all
works.
Granted, I realize that it’s mostly because there is so much
information out there that it is just plain overwhelming. However,
it does turn out that there are only a handful of concepts you
really need to know to be able to manage others to execute well
online. Whether you want to get more leads for yourself, fill up
workshops, sell products, build your database, or create a following
or a community, effective internet marketing will get you there
quickly.
The scope of this book is not to teach you about internet marketing
but, I am going to layout the essentials for you to understand so
you can manage the people to whom you outsource. You must
continue to learn what you can do on the internet and put the
pieces together enough to be able to know what questions to ask.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of internet and internet marketing.
I have owned over a dozen well performing internet businesses,
some of which I bought and others I started (always with tech
savvy partners). I always hired a team around me of others that
could really advise me and get the actual detailed work done. At
the end of the day, I just don’t personally find fulfillment in the
internet marketing side of our businesses, but I realize that it is a
powerful tool and set of concepts to help accelerate your message
and exposure.
Whether you want to do the internet marketing yourself, or you
just want to be able to manage a group of professionals around
you, you must understand the core principles to be successful. It’s
kind of like building wealth: you must know how to manage your
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the most profound times I spent were the three years I formally
studied NLP.
I studied at a little school in Marin, California called NLP Marin
– with two of the world’s foremost geniuses on NLP, named Carl
Bucheit & Michelle Masters. Now, I’m sure you have never heard
of them before – because they haven’t been the most well-known
people in the world, unless you are in the NLP world. But Carl and
Michelle devoted thirty years of their lives to bring out the most
gorgeous, loving and incredibly masterful side of NLP for people
to have change and achieve whatever they wanted in their lives.
This is the NLP myself and the Industry Rockstar trainers practice
and teach in the world – and has been the most important body of
work I studied.
In every room across the world I always ask who has studied NLP.
The amount of hands have been increasing over the years to where,
often more than two-thirds of the room have their hand up. Then I
ask those who have their hand up, to keep their hand up if studying
NLP was one of the most life changing things they did, and every
hand stays up. This is not a book about personal development – it’s
a book about business. Although you cannot really separate the
two, we are going to keep you focused on making money right now
utilizing all your knowledge.
So, NLP is one of the most powerful studies of how the brain
works to create the experience of life that we have. If you could
be extraordinary at understanding how human beings create their
internal reality, and then be world class at being able to influence
or shift someone’s reality, then you really have some of the most
powerful tools on Earth for influence. Even if you have studied
NLP before – consider that you are being introduced to it for the
first time now – because my style of NLP is very, very different
than typical cookie cutter NLP taught.
NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming or Patterning. It’s
also not in the scope of this book to go through a whole history
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entry. So, anyone can call themselves a coach. It’s kind of like being
a musician.
The proof is in the pudding, or in the results you can create with
your clients, and the top coaches are like gold for their clients. I got
lucky in that I had some of the top people in the world as coaches
throughout my twenties, while I grew and built our companies
(and ourselves for that matter). I actually only got to experience
magnificent coaching. And I really mean magnificent coaching.
People think they have seen coaching and then they usually check
out our material and content in our six-month coaching course
called The Coach’s Masterclass, and their jaw usually drops. I can
rave about it, because there was a lot of contribution to it from our
world-class coaches.
Whether you want to be a professional coach or consultant (or
not) is irrelevant to the power that you have when you understand
things from a coaching and consulting viewpoint. My coaches were
like magical beings to me and the more I studied about the coaching
profession from them (and the other top consultants I was around)
the more I applied those tools and experienced rapid growth in
my businesses. In our Industry Rockstar Coach’s Masterclass, we
train coaches and consultants to be among the most highly paid
in the world. But here’s the fun part: half the room is not actually
interested in being a coach or consultant. They are entrepreneurs,
professionals and leaders who just want to understand the powerful
tools and techniques we are teaching them.
While I was building my media business throughout my twenties
(and a handful of other businesses), I was coaching people at night
and on the weekends. First it was on how to manage and grow
money then it was on how to manage and grow their businesses.
Either way I loved it, and when I was back in the saddle as a CEO
by daytime at my media business, I found myself using the same
coaching and consulting conversations I was having with my after-
hours coaching clients. As a coach I was trained to focus on the
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in regards to competition is, “beat ‘em – just to say you did – then
help ‘em build something awesome.” That’s how I have always
played it.
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Rockstar
“Be !e Industry Ro#star and
leave all !e expe's behind.”
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T
he Industry Rockstar is someone who is seen as being
at the top of his/her industry. He/she is someone, who
is extremely influential, well-known and has access to
resources, opportunities and connections that other people in the
same industry don’t have. The Industry Rockstar is someone who
is an innovator and a thought-leader in his/her respective industry.
In summary The Industry Rockstar:
• Is positioned as an expert in his/her industry
• Has celebrity-like exposure and branding
• Is seen as an innovator in his/her field
People who are already in the position of being an Industry Rockstar
have an endless supply of the right clients. They get invited to
participate in unique opportunities globally like: traveling the
world for presentations, participating in interesting business deals,
investing in special opportunities and being involved in special
events and gatherings that impact communities. They have the
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power to charge what they want for their time (and get it), they
get to contribute to people at the level they most desire, and they
get to be more focused on the world than on themselves.
Industry Rockstars associate with amazing people doing
extraordinary projects and business in the world. They design their
day how they would love to live – in finer details. This includes
things like where they want to live, when they want to wake up,
and how they spend their valuable time, etc. By being an Industry
Rockstar, you also get to own your time on Earth. Being an Industry
Rockstar means that you get invited into business partnerships,
promotional openings, speaking gigs and other opportunities that
can radically enhance and change you life and the people you care
about most.
This might seem like a long way away for you, if you’re just getting
started. You may be leaving a job or working on your first business
or start up company, or you may have already established a small
to medium size practice as an entrepreneur. You may feel daunted
by the idea of becoming an Industry Rockstar. Your first thought
might be, “How am I ever going to be at the top of my industry
when I already have so much work to do, just to get by?” or “how
could this be me when I’m just getting started?” or “How can I
become an Industry Rockstar when there is so much competition?”
All those concerns are perfectly natural and they are concerns you
must just take along for the ride.
You may have been seduced into thinking you need to become
better at what you do, but that is a definite dead-end. Building
your profile and being perceived by your market as being at the
top is a set of specific actions and ongoing positioning techniques
that we are going to be teaching you in this chapter.
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3. Packaging
a. 6 Revenue Streams of an Industry Rockstar
b. The Ascension Model
4. Positioning
a. Marketing Online & Offline
b. Partnership Strategies
5. Presenting
a. Selling 1:1
b. Selling 1:Many
A FUN room of excited Malaysians in KK, Malaysia. Discussing how to be dynamic on stage.
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Participant Story
There are two types of clients in the world you can work with, and
many Entrepreneurs miss one or the other market. The two types
of clients are the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) and the DFY (Done-For-
You) clients.
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The DIY clients are those clients who want to be taught how to
perform a task or learn a skill so they can become independent
and literally do it themselves in the future. Essentially you are a
teacher/consultant to these types of customers.
An example of this would be a person who wants to add an
addition to their home like an extra room, a shed, or an office out
in back of their house. And let’s say this person would like to build
it themselves. Well if you are a builder or know anything about
construction, you could put together training materials (either
Videos, manuals, workshops, etc.) to teach them to do this and
make a fortune selling training products to people who want to
build or renovate their homes themselves using your knowledge.
Another example would be websites. Everyone needs a website,
right? Let’s say you are someone who knows how to design
amazing websites, and I am a customer who wanted to design a
website for myself. I would buy information products from you –
videos, templates, tools, and maybe webinars – training me on how
to build my own website, etc. This is called the DIY, or the Do-It-
Yourself Market.
The second type of customer or client is called DFY or Done-For-
You. The Done-For-You client is the type of client who has no
interest in learning the skill or task for themselves, and is interested
in paying to have someone take it off their hands and complete
it. The Done-For-You client has little or no interest in how it has
been completed – they just want it done!
Let’s step back to our home improvement example just a few
paragraphs earlier. If I wanted to have an extra room built onto my
house, and I had no interest at all in building it myself or learning
how to do it, I would just hire someone who knew how to do it –
to build it for me.
This is a great case and point with my business partner, Nick, and I
from our media company (SomaTone Interactive). Nick loved the
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world of construction. When his wife gave birth to their first son,
he was home for several weeks with her. He needed something to
do when everyone was sleeping throughout the day. So, he built a
deck on the back of his house! It was pretty awesome, so I asked
him how he did such an awesome job (because I know very little
about construction), and he showed me a handful of books and
videos he used to learn how to do it step-by-step. For half a second,
I was inspired to do that myself…then I got over it! And when
I wanted to have a deck built off the back of my house, I hired
someone to do it for me. That way I could keep doing what I love
to do, which, at the time, was running my media business.
Start to notice in your world where there are clients that want to
be educated by you (DIY), and where there are clients that you
could just do things for (DFY), because of your knowledge. Here
are a few examples to get your idea juices flowing:
Knowledge/Passion:
Healthy Cooking
Possible DIY Customers
Moms with children between the ages of 0-14 where they
cook a great deal for them
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about a football coach that had all his players take ballet and
yoga to become a better team!)
Possible DFY Customers
Anyone, who wants to go to a dance or yoga class where they
will receive instruction from a teacher. Someone who wants
you to choreograph a wedding, or an important dance. Event
companies that need dancers for their events to spice up the
atmosphere.
The possibilities are endless. I have never met a passion that can’t
be turned into a thriving, 6 or 7 figure business. It just comes down
to your willingness to think creatively and follow the formula we
are laying out for you here.
It starts with just getting clear about who you want to work with,
serve or help all day long and laying out the possibilities in these
two different markets (the DIY and the DFY crowd).
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working with this “type” of person. Why would you want to work
with or serve anybody else?
Stop trying to serve everyone. Focus on the people you would
have the most fun with and love to help. There will be someone
else out there to serve all the other ones. The highest paid people
in the world get paid because of the value that their customers
experience from their products and services. You cannot achieve
that serving people that you don’t have a real love for on a human
level and a passion to help.
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Re-expertise
You could look at this conversation for someone starting a business,
but as it turns out, most business owners who want a radical
breakthrough or shift in their existing business need to identify a
deeper, more specific expertise that cuts through current market
saturation they are experiencing.
For example – perhaps you are a Business Coach and you, at first,
say your expertise is helping people grow their business.
That’s not specific enough to create new shifts in your business
and differentiate yourself from your competition. Something
more specific would be that you are a specialist in turning around
businesses that are failing. Or maybe your expertise is in analyzing
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Financial Statements and finding the key issues to address with the
business.
You can play around with the level of specificity that you use and
test it out on people. If they get excited – then you have the right
one.
This is, of course geared towards Personal Branding. If you wanted
to position your company’s expertise (or teams expertise), then
you could use the same concept but refer to the company or team.
Don’t feel like you have any expertise? Bring in other experts and
be the conduit to the world for other experts. This is how Oprah
made her fortune – interviewing other “Experts” and bringing great
people to the world.
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To clearly understand your business and clearly articulate it to
others, you must be able to identify the target market, the problem
that market has and the solution you provide.
There is a very powerful language script we use to network and
articulate what our business does when meeting others:
Typically, my clients are (Target Market),
Who are having the challenge of (Problem of market),
I help them get (X Result).
Fill in the blanks and you have a business.
Example: Typically my clients are Mortgage Brokers, who have
the challenge of finding more clients and I help them identify the
right markets to go into and reach new potential customers for
themselves.
Whip one up for yourself and start using it around town. See how
it goes and adjust until you get people asking you, “How do you
do that?!”
Now you know you have a business that can work.
Which moves us to the next step in the formula: Personal Branding
(Quick note – that script above is really a positioning strategy and
really should belong in the positioning section. However, after
personally guiding hundreds of thousands of participants through
the Industry Rockstar Formula, I have noticed it is helpful to create
it at this stage – to get clearer about what you do. Otherwise the
next levels of the formula are harder to execute.)
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Makeup
Makeup is all of the external stuff. Your Picture, Full Name, Your
Label, and the “physical” way you show up (your clothes, colours
etc.).
Your “Label” is the one that needs a little explanation. A professional
label is something that you normally reserve for explaining what
you do quickly. For example if someone asks you your profession
or what you do – normally people will answer with, “Coach”, “Real
Estate Agent”, “Teacher”, etc.
We are going to create a label for you that will rebrand you for your
Expert position. Your label is made up of the following formula:
• Territory
• Qualifier (a word describing how people relate to you),
• Results You Produce (or professional label)
Examples:
London’s Premier Property Investment Trainer
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Message
Your Message is the overall statement you are making in the world
with your work. It is the summed up piece of advice of your entire
body of work. It should be short (like 4-8 words) and is easily
remembered by someone who is hearing it for the first time.
Your message gets created out of the following structure:
You can Be/Do/Have (X Result)…
Examples:
• You can create a passive income engine
• You can be a successful entrepreneur
• You can have a passionate relationship
Once you establish this – often the final form of a “You Message”
is without the “You”. So the final version of the above examples
would be:
• Create a passive income engine
• Be a successful entrepreneur
• Have a passionate relationship
Moments
The Moments in your life are a major part of your Brand. The
stories you tell about yourself and your customers create a lot of
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the bond that customers have between you and them. Many very
successful marketers have noted how it is always the story of the
product that sells – not the product itself. You will use your life
stories and learn to tell them in an entertaining and profound way
– so that you can extract the lessons you have learned and share
them with your audience.
EVERYONE has stories, and the difference between the entertaining
and profound stories and the ones that are boring is how you tell
them. Story telling is an art to itself, but everyone has stories from
their life that can be vibrant, engaging and full of great lessons.
Human beings have been teaching each other through stories since
the beginning of time. And people love to listen to stories – that’s
how they learn the best.
There is a specific story called a Defining Moment Story – which
is the story of how you got to the place you are now with your
business. This story needs to be crafted and ready to be told
over and over and over again – in the media, in your videos, in
presentations, etc.
Method
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Positioning Is Marketing
All labels and positions are marketing. I mean I know CEOs of
companies that are worth $10 USD and I know CEOs of companies
that are worth billions of dollars. You can call yourself whatever
you want for starters, and then it is the substance behind the labels
that makes the final difference. What this all means for you is, if
you feel like an expert in your area, then start calling yourself one.
If you feel like a Rockstar in an area, then start calling yourself one.
There is no official licensing board of information experts, where
you need to pass an exam to be certified as an information expert!
It’s not just about the label of course – but it does start with you
declaring that you are some position in the industry. This might be
a bit of a mind-bender for you, but you can just start at the top by
declaring it. You can see if your peers agree over time. Someone
will ALWAYS laugh at you, and someone will always call you a
phony or a fraud or whatever. Get used to it. It is usually those
people who are frustrated with their own life. Those people will
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make fun of you until you are rich, and then suddenly you will go
from dumb and weird, to genius. You must declare who you are in
the world, and then stand behind it.
Let’s also be clear here: I’m not saying just declare yourself the
world’s greatest and then never do anything interesting. I’m not
saying label yourself something and never live up to it. I have seen
many so-called “experts” come and go on the internet over the last
few years. They are excited to call themselves the world’s best and
then disappear three months later into oblivion. I am saying if you
want to be the world’s best, start calling yourself the world’s best
and then start acting like it, start creating those results, and start
being and living it.
By the way, I always ask this question to my audiences in our
trainings, “How do you know you are not the world’s best already,
in what you do? How can you be absolutely certain that you are
not the world’s best?” I really was completely against calling myself
the world’s best at anything until I got a chance to travel all over
the world and get a sense of what is really going on in the world.
And then I thought, “You know what?” Many times we devote our
lives to something at which we become extraordinary. But because
we do it every day, and we hold ourselves up to perfection as the
bar, we always think we are nothing that special. It’s like when we
see our children or family grow every day, it seems like nothing
really changes with them. Then someone who hasn’t seen them in
years comes in and says, “My how you’ve grown!” and you think, “I
hadn’t even noticed!”
This is how it works with our own talents. It’s time to start getting
yourself positioned in front of people, positioned in the world and
appreciated for your brilliance and genius, that you might not even
realize you have. My advice is to start calling yourself world class,
and then doing everything, every day to live into that. Some people
struggle to take that advice, and those people will often spend the
rest of their lives waiting for the perfect moment for them to be
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perfect enough to actually hang out their shingle as great and as the
expert. In the mean time, they have been surpassed by people half
as good as they are, using better positioning techniques, making
more money, having a better life and helping more people than
they do. It’s time to take ownership of how great you are, and get
yourself positioned in the world as the genius you are. It’s time to
get the exposure in magazines, TV, radio, online, in front of groups
with one-on-one clients and anywhere that your perfect customer
is paying attention and your message can reach.
Marketing has two primary functions:
1. Get someone’s attention
2. Get them curious about you and/or your product/service
Once you get someone’s attention and they are curious about your
work, you have finished marketing.
Great partnerships and others that already have paved roads for
marketing you is the best way to go for fastest acceleration. When
other people have databases, fan pages, events, or built in exposure
platforms and can help you get your product or service to more
people they become a valuable partner of yours to help you get
more exposure.
There are several different types of partners you can have – and
this is by no means an exhaustive list – but here’s a partial list of
some ideas of where you can find good partners to work with you
and help you:
1. Individuals with good sized databases or robust social media
pages
2. Other Experts & small business owners – they will have a
relationship with their customers and can market to them
effectively
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Here’s a quick tip though for you to try out in your next presentation
if you cannot sell. Tell lots of stories about how your clients or
others have worked with you and how they have succeeded. That
will get people engaged in talking to you about working with you
or your company.
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the coach’s job is three things and three things only: 1) To decode
the framework of thinking that their client is stuck inside of (and
share their assessment with the client), 2) To assist their client in
having a short term perspective shift, to be able to move through
resistance and 3) To assist in re-patterning long term behaviors
(remove sabotage patterns) and help allow for new experiences to
be sustainable in their client’s life. This may sound existential, but
the coaching frame is one in which reality really starts to dissolve
and we start to begin thinking in an almost paradoxical sense.
The core belief that we have as coaches, is that the client already
has everything they need to be successful. However, the desired
outcome is actually not OK for them to have and sustain in their
life – otherwise they would already have it.
Again, we will really break this down later, because coaching when
done really well, is one of the most magical professions on the
planet, and we have had the opportunity to have some outrageously
magical coaches in our lives. Ones that we would practically call
mad scientists, geniuses and some of the world’s greatest change
agents.
What is cool is that all of who you are was programmed into you,
and it is possible to reprogram it. If the game you are playing of life
is one where you feel like $100K is a lot of money, then you could
work with a consultant to help you earn $100K a year by looking at
what to do to earn that. Or, you could work with a magical coach
who helps you recode your reality to experience $100K as being
a very small amount of money. Once you recode that reality, your
behaviors will automatically change for you to get the resources
you need to create that now. If you are reading this book, then you
are probably someone who has attended a lot of workshops, read
a lot of self-development books and heard it all around mindset
and coaching. That’s great – because that’s exactly who we train
to become world-class coaches. Those that have heard it all and
want to get better results with their clients and earn what they
are worth. If this is a new conversation to you about Coaching,
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stay tuned as we dive into the wisdom, models and concepts the
mad scientists, gurus and geniuses we studied under imparted to
us. These conversations allowed me to do the deepest and most
profound change work possible with global leaders including on
myself and was one of the reasons for my early successes in my
twenties.
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out there in the web world. However, if you have grand visions of
making millions online, it will take dedication and relationships.
When we teach our students internet marketing techniques through
our Internet Rockstar trainings, we present the expectation for
results very realistically and ask them to take it one step at a time.
It is like learning a new instrument. Well actually, it’s like I were to
take you into one of my recording studios around the world and
show you the room with all the equipment and say, “You too can
make millions in the record industry. You just need to first learn
how all this gear works… Actually, first you need to learn how
each piece of technology works individually, and then you need to
experiment with what happens when you put them all together.”
I chuckle at internet marketing people who talk about how simple
it is for anyone to make tons of money online. Look, that’s total
BS. But again, you can have some real impact learning a couple of
things that can help you advance your business.
Want to create more leads online for your business? Cool. Just learn
how to properly buy a URL, design an effective landing page, hang
it online, optimize it, get yourself a simple database management
system, hook it up to your landing page, shoot a video (we won’t
even start to talk about what it takes to shoot an effective video),
write an eBook (or design a free product), learn how to do a little
ad buying, optimize your ads so they convert, write a set of auto-
responders, make sure your content management system delivers
the eBook, then have a good call to action in the copy of the email
that carries the eBook… and then make sure you have some way of
getting those that want to talk more about your product or service
to contact you. Now, that’s a basic scenario. See what I mean?
So, here’s the deal – because I’m not trying to scare you off from
Internet Marketing – after all it is one of the major ways Industry
Rockstars are doing business these days. You need to think of this
domain as a longer-term investment and revenue source.
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Perth Australia, Private Event on Digital Marketing Strategies – Industry Rockstar Intensive
sell online to a database. You can also take the video footage from
your events, strip the audio files from the video content, turn them
into transcriptions and send the content to an editor to have them
produce a published book for you.
While you are presenting, someone in the audience asks you if they
can consult with you privately; now you have a new consulting
client. Then a charity comes to you and asks you if you would be
willing to help them raise money for a project they are doing in
South Africa. Because you actively engage groups of people online
and offline you can literally raise tens of thousands of dollars
overnight because of your influence and reach. You take the
initiative or cause that you are supporting, and the press becomes
aware of it. The press then distributes your name as someone who
is making a contribution, which gives you more exposure, which
drives more traffic to your website, which brings more people to
your events. People then come up to you at your next speaking event
and present you with a new business idea, (as presenting in front
of rooms gives you access to a whole range of new opportunities).
By this stage, you are literally inundated with people wanting to
attend your events, purchase your products, consume your content,
and invest their finances to come and learn and receive value from
you. The cycle keeps going on and on as your success and income
gets bigger and bigger, and you become more and more influential
in business. The point of the Industry Rockstar model is to leverage
– this is how you make the most money!
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It’s easy to track a lead coming from the internet when you can
know exactly how much you invested (cost-per-click) or how
much it costs to send out of a database (i.e. if you do a paid direct
mailer to a database), but in the service industry almost no one I
have ever worked with ever tracks these two numbers.
The cost of acquiring a customer in a service industry can be
really high (especially, if your primary marketing is offline – like
networking and speaking engagements). That means that your one-
on-one client work must be expensive in order to counter-balance
the cost of you acquiring a new client. No one seems to talk about
the cost to you for networking, sales meetings with perspective
clients that don’t close, multiple meetings, calls or emails with
possible clients, gas driving to and from meetings, time creating
proposals, signing contracts, etc. This is all a very intangible cost to
most service providers, and yet it is a potentially HUGE cost that
no one ever talks about, let alone tracks.
In a service model the following is a Meeting routine that I stick
to, to keep my CAQ (Customer Acquisition Cost) low. It’s called
a Three Meeting Close and it goes like this. Three Meeting Close:
1. Meet the client: somehow I would be introduced to or
happen to meet a client at a gathering, networking meeting
or speaking engagement.
2. Sales Meeting/Strategy Session (done on the phone or
Skype only – not in person): we would agree to one
(1) 30 minute phone call to see if we were a match to
work together. During this call we are in a sales format,
discovering whether we are the right match to work
together with this person. Either we would close the client
into our one-on-one (or group coaching services), or we
would go to step 3…
3. Final meeting: Sometimes clients for high priced services
need to meet in person to make a decision. We would either
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So, we just gave you a quick and poignant way to greatly reduce
your customer Acquisition cost for high priced services. So let’s
look at how to increase your Lifetime Value of Your Customer.
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Showing how to ascend your customers from products to 1:1 services in Penang, Malaysia
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my rates are as high as they are, and you should be the same. If
you are working with someone one-on-one, they should be getting
incredible results purely because of the personalized attention.
This is also because that one-on-one time is taking away from time
that you could be leveraged into teaching and speaking to groups,
building more products and running your team at your company.
Your rates are part of what pre-qualify your perfect customer with
you: someone who is willing to pay a large sum of money to work
with you is someone who is willing to demonstrate a high level of
commitment in learning from you and willing to actually do what
it takes (face whatever fears it takes) to really have change in their
life in that area. Your high rates are also a part of what causes the
client to really have the results they have (it lights a fire under
them!).
There are people all over the world who will pay you that money
because they are really committed to learning specific content from
you. Not everyone is the right client for you personally, and this is
the point of having very few people at the top of your Ascension
Model, as you get to charge higher rates and make yourself more
exclusive in your field.
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You can easily work quicker and make more money, and in fact
most of our clients do. It does depend on how much momentum
and resources you are starting with, but really comes down to how
committed you are to having what you want. Committed actions
make everything happen.
CASE STUDY:
I worked with a woman one time that was working a dead end job
in the military. She enjoyed the service, but she was miserable with
the job. She came to our Industry Rockstar Intensive event feeling
disillusioned with life and work. We helped her get clear about
what she could do to help other people and what she would really
enjoy turning into her very first business from her knowledge and
wisdom.
She decided that she knew enough about sales to really help other
people who needed to advance their sales skills (like independent
contractors, coaches, consultants and small business owners). We
helped her get clear about who she wanted to serve, what her
message was, how to package up her products and services (she
started with one-on-one consulting, but quickly created group
coaching programs, teleseminars and some training videos and
eBooks on the topic of sales).
She created a brand for herself (The Princess of Sales) and put a
date in her calendar and started filling her first workshop through
calling people and a bit of Facebook ad buying. Using the Ascension
Model, she packaged and positioned herself at the top in her
industry – even though this was her very first business right out of
work… and she was only 24 years old. Results? She did $200K in
the first six months of working with us. She was so overwhelmed
by the possibility of what her life could offer that she came back to
one of our seminars to share with the other participants and broke
down crying about how her life had changed. Her clients were
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I’ll tell you that one of the biggest myths that I wish I could erase
from the Earth is that successful Entrepreneurs are lucky. I hear
this more often than I can count. It’s just plain silly. Although,
every Entrepreneur will point to the Universe helping them out,
and putting some lucky plays in their cards, every successful
Entrepreneur works hard to create those opportunities and
relationships that it takes.
Mentors, opportunities and relationships are all it ever comes
down to. You have a lot of control over your life – more than
you are probably willing to admit at the moment. In the areas of
your life that you are not achieving what you want, it’s time to
be accountable for those too. If you are ready to leave your job,
take your business to that global level you should be at, create the
impact you know you can, free up more of your time by earning
more money for less time, or simply contribute to more people
globally with your talents, resources and abilities – now is the time.
By being an Industry Rockstar, you will get to give yourself, your
children and other people around you more opportunities to have
the life they would love. You will get to take care of yourself, your
family and the people that you love in a higher capacity and on a
higher level than ever before. Now is the time for you to make it
happen.
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Leader & Speaker
“Success is a science; if you have
!e condi&ons, you get !e result.”
Oscar Wilde
I
am now among the top presenters in profit-speaking in the
world. I earn more money public speaking than pretty much
anyone on the planet other than a handful of our mentors. I
tell you that to impress upon you that you can create a massive
amount of wealth if you take this particular art seriously. Believe
me; I had no idea it would be like this when I started – as I was about
as far from understanding how to make money in this business
when I started as anyone. I basically got here by being willing to
make so many mistakes. I have made more mistakes public and
profit speaking in the last five years than most people are willing
to make in their whole life! These days Industry Rockstar trainers
teach the formats, formulas and presentation techniques I use and
create for myself to effectively present in any situation. Rockstar
Trainer – our 4 day training on how to be effective in front of a
group of people (no matter how big or small), came from endless
stupid things I did and cataloged them as “do not do again!” And
the handful of things I got right, sequences of presentation order,
content and language patterns I tested over and over again until
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of your life and offer lessons you learned along the road relating
to where your audience is heading. There is a whole science to
speaking for profit, and this is part of what we teach in our four
day Rockstar Trainer training, but I just want you to feel at ease
about what you might be required to do.
Keynoting is different from leading seminars or selling from the
stage (referred to as Platform Selling). Seminar leaders are running
workshops anywhere from three hours to multi-day workshops
where you train people with the intention of integration of a
subject area. In these workshops you obviously have content in
which you want to deliver and train your participants, but when
facilitating a really powerful workshop you must be willing to
throw your pre-planned content out the window in service of
people actually getting the content into their brains.
A workshop should be all about actually getting the participants to
successfully use the system you are teaching. This will require you
to teach your system, but you must also make sure participants are
psychologically ready to handle the changes that are necessary in
their life. A seminar or workshop without a Personal Development
edge will often fall flat and be a boring technical training experience.
I’m not suggesting everyone try to become Tony Robbins, but I am
suggesting you need to consider that your workshops need to run
deeper than just teaching people new tactics. Examples of ways to
go “deeper” in your workshops are:
• Facilitating exercises where participants engage your new
concepts and get a chance to bump up against their own
limitations
• Give challenging meal break assignments to be in the “real
world” using these new skills and bump up their own
limitations for real results
• Have open discussions in the room that facilitate people
sharing their concern, fears or issues with these new concepts
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them with solutions after you show them the path to getting more
of what they want and desire in their lives.
Speaking and leading seminars is the fastest way to leverage your
time, to be seen by the outside world and your customers, and
to be seen by your team, as carrying the flag of your products
and services. Imagine that at every business conference you last
attended, instead of being amongst the audience or simply having
a booth there, you were a presenter (or the keynote speaker) at
that event. How many more opportunities and joint ventures
would you have received? How much less work would it have
required for you to convince others to work with you? How much
more respect and credibility would you have earned in the eyes
of your audience and other key players in your field? When you
speak, you position yourself at the top of your industry almost
instantly. Do you think if you traveled around the world and spoke,
that more thought-leaders would connect with you? Do you think
you would receive more invitations to be interviewed on radio,
television and in the media? Absolutely!
If you are a CEO or an entrepreneur, the best investment you
can make is in improving your level and ability to communicate
effectively. The fastest place to grow this is by being in front of
a room, and being tested by your marketplace and customers.
Practice, practice, and more practice.
The skill set it takes to be in front of a room of people is different
than the one that is best for one-on-one sales. However, there are
many very powerful principles that you can bring from profit
speaking into one-on-one. The more I studied Platform Speaking
the more my one-on-one meetings got easier to close.
When you can handle a room of 100 to 10,000 people, handling a
boardroom meeting or conference with company leaders is a walk
in the park. So why not test yourself on the toughest challenges,
like being in front of large audiences, delivering a message and
seeing if how your delivery of that message uplifts them? After
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all, you are in the business of helping people achieve more results
through inspiring them to take action, aren’t you?
Take a look at the most accomplished business people. Whether
they are comfortable on stage or not, they get out there and do
whatever it takes to share their message, because they know how
important it is. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are examples of this.
Warren Buffet was actually terrified of public speaking, but even
he overcame his fears to make sure his mission in business (and as
a successful investor) in the world is fulfilled.
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BONUS MATERIAL!
Just because I couldn’t resist giving you more structure, on how
to get started in speaking, here are…The 4 Key Areas to Profit
Speaking Success:
There are four key areas you need to start putting attention on
to really be successful in the public speaking, profit speaking, and
workshop industry. They are:
1. Pro Media Kit: Your pro media kit is going to be something
that every group asks for when you talk to them about
speaking at their event. So do yourself an early favor and
just get one put together. Here are the key elements of your
Pro Media Kit:
a. Pro head shot – get yourself a real professional
photograph so the viewer knows you mean business.
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You might be asking yourself right now, “What Do I Say When I’m
Speaking?” This is the biggest concern of every starting presenter
and speaker. Let me put your mind at rest… What will you speak
about when you present? Yourself, silly!! Your story, your life,
your mistakes, your systems, your formulas and how they can
be successfully used in your participants’ lives if they avoid the
mistakes you made and follow the step by step system you have
put together for them.
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Marketer
“The real secret to success is to
get out !ere and work like hell.”
Frank Kern
T
he Internet Marketer has become one of the most powerful
positions in business. It is essentially the person who
understands how to successfully leverage the power of
the internet to help more people and get paid to do that online.
Internet marketing changes and moves so fast that it’s changing
almost on a weekly basis. So, it would be futile to get into the
specifics of internet marketing tactics in this book, as it will be
outdated by the time this book goes to print.
It’s important to understand the fundamentals of internet
marketing, the mistakes that too many people make, and then
integrate this as an inherent part of your business and daily
activities. Internet Marketing is really something you are going to
either have to become good at yourself, or develop the capability
to manage someone who is doing it for you.
Since I already spent time scaring you in earlier chapters about
the reality behind Internet Marketing, I am going to dedicate this
chapter to laying out the concepts you need to know to dive into
internet marketing, or manage other great marketers for you to
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get the job done – under your supervision and decision making. I
recommend highly that you use internet marketing experts around
you (unless you truly love the internet and want to do a deep dive
into how it all works).
There are two components to internet marketing. There is the
quality of the online content, and then there is the infrastructure
to support it. The infrastructure includes all the technology like
splash pages, shopping carts, video campaigns and more – and it’s
constantly changing. The flavor of the month of how people are
communicating to one another, through Social Media, is changing
all the time. One month it’s Facebook, and then the next month,
it’s Pinterest. By the time you’re reading this, Pinterest may have
overtaken Facebook, or it might be wiped out completely.
More importantly than the technology side of internet marketing,
is the need to grasp the essence of internet marketing so regardless
of what tools are the most popular at the time, you will be able to
integrate those tools into your toolbox and know when to use or
not use something – or again, when to hire another person to use
something to achieve a desired outcome.
Let’s be honest: not only are most people reading this book,
and attending Industry Rockstar workshops heart-centered
entrepreneurs, but they as well as you, probably border on the line
of being an artist at heart (in their profession). This means that
you have a real passion for a topic or subject and really just wants
to share, teach, speak, give advice, and coach people about it, as
well as create products on that topic and be recognized for being
great at it. The online “infrastructure” content and conversation
probably bores the heck out of you.
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but not actually be the one doing the marketing. This might come
with the exception of designing a portion of the content for the
marketing (but even a hired copywriter can do most of that for
you). What I’m talking about is becoming great at delegating and
outsourcing, and more importantly being able to finance that
outsourcing by selling your talents as a consultant, coach, keynote
speaker, seminar leader, author and selling products in seminar
rooms.
I see many people rushing to the internet to get exposure and
because they think they are going to get this magical, passive
income happening overnight, there is nothing magical about it
– you still have to go through the processes of establishing the
background systems and setting up the content and platforms
to make this a reality. Not to mention having good relationships
with other online marketers– so that your product actually gets
exposure when you launch it!
Just because you are on the web doesn’t mean you will be making
money. You must have good JV relationships and understand how
to project product launches and online marketing to cut through
the noise online. One of the biggest things I learned, through
growing over a dozen, internet marketing businesses in the last ten
years, is that if it doesn’t work offline, it is not likely to work online.
You are best to spend your time designing, selling and presenting
your workshops, because not only can you leverage your workshops
by filming your presentations and creating products, but you will
also understand best what will have the most impact for your
customers. For example, what are the real problems people want
to have solved? Until you have a solid business, all the internet
marketing exposure in the world is not going to mean anything.
I have seen hundreds and hundreds of experts – or people who
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Splash pages (or opt in pages), media buying and ad banners are
about acquiring a customer.
Databases, drip systems, email campaigns are all about nurturing
the relationship with a potential customer.
Sales pages and shopping carts are all about offering to customers
and giving them a pathway to buy.
Start looking at the web in terms of “What do I classify this web
page as?” Is it trying to acquire you, nurture you or offer you
something? You’ll notice that every web page fits into one of these
three categories. Even websites that are not set up to sell anything,
like just information websites, are people looking to share and
connect with other people and create a relationship (nurture). To
make money online you must:
Acquire: find a way to entice someone to give you their information
(usually through giving away cool, free stuff), then
Nurture: Give them more cool stuff for them to get to know you,
then
Offer: Provide them a solution to their challenges (it comes back
to what problem are you trying to solve for them?)
Until you have this chain of web pages and technology going on,
there is no use talking about anything else. Additional conversations
after that are for someone who is in action with those technologies
in place. If you don’t have those things in place, the rest will
become information overload.
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Tracking Effectiveness
The internet allows you to effectively track what is working and
what is not working so you can invest more in what is working. For
example, it’s difficult to track how many clients came from seeing
a roadside billboard of you. However, an email blast that links to
a squeeze page of yours is easy to track the origin, the behavior
of the client on your site, and the conversion upon viewing your
product.
The best internet marketers always test their ideas on small groups
before they open the flood gates. Always make sure you are testing
your ads, splash pages, sales pages, etc., – frequently, on very small
groups or with small amounts of money before you open the flood
gates.
You can also discover what the most effective approaches are by
“split-testing” (this is a great concept for discovery everywhere in
your business!). Split-testing is simultaneously testing two different
strategies, on two different groups of people (with demographics
that are as similar as possible) in order to compare the data. This
allows you to confirm which one is giving you better results. It’s
the best way to identify which new decision is working with your
internet marketing campaigns, and this concept in general is one of
the best strategies you can employ in your business relating to any
change you want to make.
For example, you may have a restaurant and you decide you want
to alter a recipe for a menu item. You want to find out how much
salt is the right amount for a dish. You could test the dish on ten
people with increased salt, and test the original dish with ten
other people. Then you would need to survey the two groups to
determine who liked the amount of salt in the dish. Your results
would give you data upon which you could make your decision.
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why you’re reading this book, so you can get trained on hiring and
managing experienced internet experts.
It’s essential for you to drive traffic to your internet website and
splash pages. If you don’t have traffic, you don’t have eyes to view
your websites. Don’t plan on the theory that “If you build it they
will come”. It’s not going to magically happen.
There are four main ways we use to generate traffic for your
websites. Although, there are probably a hundred others, these
are the main ones that we use to build our businesses. The first
is through ad-buying such as Facebook ads, Google Ad-words,
banners on other people’s websites where you get a cost-per-click
(meaning anytime someone clicks on your advertisement, you just
paid to have someone see your advertisement). This could also
relate to any ads you take out on radio shows, in newspapers and
magazines. However, it has been shown that this offline marketing
is less effective than online marketing. This is mostly because the
time and distance between the person seeing the ad and buying
the product or service is longer – and that reduces the emotional
feeling needed for customers to make a purchasing decision. When
Tony Robbins was successfully using TV infomercials to sell his
audio programs (in the 1980s), people had not been trained in the
‘internet experience’ yet; one where people are able to see, buy
and receive something within seconds.
The second way we get traffic to our website is through affiliate
marketing. This is where other people are actually selling and
promoting your products or services for a commission. Building a
large set of affiliates is a marvelous way to make your empire grow
fast. It’s essentially a commission based incentivized sales team for
you! This means people are selling your products or services all
over the world, while you are doing something else.
The third way is through Joint Venture (JV) email lists. The
difference between affiliates and joint-venture arrangements is
that in affiliates, people are earning a commission off of directly
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you want to. If you don’t like the way business is done in your
country, or you think it is too hard to make money where you live,
get online and sell things to people in other countries. Do business
globally and find the right market and community for you to serve
with your knowledge and information. There is an audience out
there for you, and sometimes, the people who appreciate you the
most are not even within your own society or country.
BONUS MATERIAL
Here’s an up to date list of who are the trained, skilled people
and what technology you will need (at a minimum) on your team
to get this done for you. These are the roles of the people we
currently have working on our team, and what technologies we
use to keep our online product sales running smoothly:
What: Technology
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O
k! I am going to switch gears for the next two character
positions here – so be ready to head into another part of
your brain. Just as I noted that you must start to think
more multi-dimensionally to be a top leader in the world these
days, I am going to present to you how to do that specifically
– in the next two Character positions: The NLP Guru and The
Coach & Consultant. Be ready for a completely different type of
conversation now. Where before I have talked very tactically about
how to be at the top of your industry, I am now going to look at
the softer technical skills and the thinking-skills that are required
to get there. Although, each of these positions has clear tool sets
and techniques to be effective, I want you to start unwinding the
thinking that has limited you from achieving what you want. I will
do my best to be non “woo-woo” – but I am from California after
all!
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recode the limiting frameworks they have been operating in side of.
Finally, those participants that go through Leadership Interventions
are able to play the bigger game their heart has desired
I certainly didn’t make up NLP, nor the multitude of layers Carl and
his colleagues developed over 30 years. But I have now successfully
(and uniquely) adapted my own unique business version of it into
sales, leadership, marketing, branding, profit speaking and live
intervention work in our business seminars.
Auckland, New Zealand – Private Industry Rockstar Event – Sales & Negotiation Rockstar
However, most of the game is the wiring we are living with inside
our heads. You can build a beautifully designed box around an old
radio wired-up from the 60s and you are still going to get an old
sounding radio with a nice new shiny box around it. I can teach
anyone what they need to do to build a seven and eight figure
business: I’ve done it myself five times with many more to come.
I can teach anyone how to build a six figure business: I’ve done it
over a dozen times. But all the strategies in the world will fall on
deaf ears if that person is not wired to have success.
Now, most of the people that we work with in our trainings
have been “mindsetted” to death. They are sick of hearing all the
mindset talk because they have been going through it for years (in
books, audio tapes, workshops, etc.), and, regardless of how much
they talk about their mindset, they are still not earning the money
they want. There are times when you really do need to just stop
talking about it and get your butt out there and sell your product.
But, putting together great strategies with a full understanding and
continuous look at yourself (and the way you execute on your
strategies), creates a world-class combination.
Also – having spent about ten years doing every deep dive, personal
development seminar I could find in San Francisco and in the US
(and there are a LOT of them), I noticed something very different
was going on in the way we were learning NLP. People were actually
having long-term sustainable shifts, without having to remember to
be different. This was intriguing. It wasn’t just your cookie-cutter
personal development course repeating a typical breakthrough
to breakdown cycle. There was something very magical that was
happening to the students and with my clients as I continued
to study and apply the unique NLP and business psychology
models we were using. And that is what we have been bringing
out to the world in the Industry Rockstar events. (NOTE: we (at
Industry Rockstar) are not licensed therapists or official Doctors.
Everything that we use, study and apply from NLP, psychology or
neuro science, is from our own studies, interviews, research and
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testing. That means we have often gone way off the typical path
of most psychology professionals to find systems, theories, models
and strategies that are working more powerfully then anything I
have seen before.)
I started our seminar business not as a seminar business. I was sick of
all these seminars where no one got any real, long-term sustainable
results. As a consequence, Industry Rockstar was formed on the
idea that we were going to optimize our presentations and events
for real change during our trainings and really help people have
long-term change. Our events are about both providing the best
strategies around for business growth, and then the best coaching
to allow your mind to take it in, allow it to be OK to use those
strategies and actually become the success you want.
What is predominantly going on in the areas of your life where you
are not having what you want, is it is simply is not “OK” for you
to have it. This very statement was what intrigued me. It led me
down the rabbit hole of NLP and allowed me to go from talented
but broke, to talented and a multi-millionaire within a period of
a few years. Naturally I know I had something to do with it, but I
truly attribute the real magic of my success to my great coaches,
a proven system to follow and NLP allowing my brain to be OK
with being massively successful.
If you do not completely understand what I mean yet, about how
your mind (and safety patterning) are what allow you to reach the
level of success you want… then let me put you on stage in front
of ten thousand people and give you a loud microphone and 90
minutes to sell a million dollars of something. Or, let me put you
next to Sir Richard Branson at dinner and give you two hours to
figure out how to build a future relationship with him where you
do business together. If those things don’t get your internal alarm
bells of safety going off, then this one might. Hire a coach for $100K
USD and wire all the money now, then get on the phone and start
selling $100K of products to your friends and family. If you had no
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emotional experience to any of what I just said then you are either
not really stepping into the possibility of doing that… or you have
been through that before and successfully worked through your
own personal rewiring around it.
Those are just a few examples of the mind-altering growth I
needed to go through in the last decade of building my businesses.
It required continuous rewiring, re-patterning and time with my
coaches and NLP trainers.
This is the real stuff we actually bump up against in our trainings
with our participants. It’s not long after I start teaching a new
branding or “positioning” technique before most of the participants
start to bump up against their real concerns about their “value”,
being seen in the marketplace, being judged, making more money
than their family members, losing friends, and more. Since we
know this, I have designed our seminars to both be strategic and
have a personal development edge: because you cannot separate
the human from the actions. You will need to do this too, and
learning NLP will be the best set of tools for you to use to help
your clients get real and sustainable change.
If you are truly committed to people having long-term sustainable
change in their life out of your work, it will be absolutely imperative
for you to study NLP. If you want to accelerate your career to the
top at the fastest level possible, then it is imperative you study NLP.
If you want to understand human behavior and have the matrix of
Social Dynamics® (interactions between people) unravel in front
of your eyes, then it is imperative to study NLP. Seriously it is like
getting a manual for what it is to be a human being.
woman who put the heart into NLP. The type of NLP I studied
was a very heart-centered strand of NLP.
While mastering the basic tactics of NLP, I also learned how
to achieve the most sustainable level of change for people in a
therapeutic sense. It merged things like Bert Hellinger – who
specialized in family constellation and family dynamics work
– traditional psychology, transactional analysis, and more. The
important thing to note is that the intention of our type of
NLP, which is really what makes it so masterful, is a deep level
of heart-connection to your clients in order to fully appreciate
and understand them at a level at which they don’t appreciate
themselves.
There are many forms of NLP in the world. NLP in itself is a set of
linguistic tools and techniques to facilitate change and influence.
Some people have charged NLP with being a manipulative science,
but the only difference between the manipulative type of NLP
and the heart-centered NLP is the intention the person has who
uses NLP. Words can be used to start wars, or to inspire people
to create positive change. Of course, like NLP, it comes down to
the intention you have. We encourage those who we train in NLP
to use their power of persuasion to raise the value of people’s
lives and experience of life. If your intention is to make a positive
impact, then you will.
When I ask my audience who has studied NLP, a small portion of
the room puts their hands up. When I follow up and ask them if
NLP has significantly changed their life, all the hands stay up. NLP
is like getting a handbook for the brain. If you’re not interested in
having a handbook like this, then skip this chapter. And of course,
if you are interested, read on!
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1. Modeling
NLP allows you to model excellence. In fact this is how this science
was born itself – by modeling the most persuasive and effective
therapists and “change agents”. NLP has tools and techniques that
allow you to take what someone is extraordinary at, like sales,
wealth or marketing results, and decode the process into the
detailed steps. This means you can turn another person’s excellent
abilities into a repeatable formula for ANYONE to learn, master
and create similar results. Does this sound like it would be useful
for you to decode your own brilliance into formulas?
You can relate to this like the movie The Matrix when Neo starts
to really “get” the system and all the code of the computer system
starts to be revealed. Suddenly, he can use the inner workings of
the system for his greatest influence over it. NLP gives you the
distinctions you need to crawl inside the mind and patterns of
someone that does exceptional things, and decode how they do it,
so that you can do it too.
For example, if you want to become a successful Entrepreneur,
“sales” is an essential skill to master. There are certain things that
successful sales people do that unsuccessful sales people do not do,
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and if you do not know these, it makes it much harder to sell your
product or services. By using NLP effectively, you can model out
what works in an expert sales person’s world -so you can do more
of what works. People that are extraordinary at sales don’t always
necessarily know NLP, yet they unconsciously do things that, if
they were pointed out, could be identified, replicated and taught
to someone else who was just learning sales.
I have been hired many times to come into a company where the
CEO is the main driving force (and a bit of a control freak), model
out what he or she is doing so well, and teach it to the rest of
the team so they can help the CEO not be a bottle neck for the
company’s growth. This is all capable through the NLP Modeling
Tools. Modeling someone’s talents enables you to save time in your
learning curve. NLP is THE tool that allows you to do this. I’m
not saying it’s the best tool, I’m not saying it’s the most influential
tool, and I’m not saying it’s something that you need. I’m are just
saying that without integrating it into your daily business practices,
including your speaking and presenting skills, you are leaving a lot
of success (and money) on the table.
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If you are a coach, NLP helps you discover more profound issues
with your clients and help them find solutions that are more
sustainable. If you are in a leader position NLP allows you to more
deeply understand and influence your team. If you are a sales
person, it allows you to better serve your customers, understand
their needs and help them make better decisions. And on and
on for any position that requires you to use your brain and your
mouth. NLP helps you develop the aptitude to communicate on
such a deep level that you become simply irreplaceable to your
clients and colleagues – and friends and lovers… ha ha. And, they
are willing to pay significantly higher fees to work with you.
3. Understand Yourself
Naturally the deeper you understand yourself the more successful
you can be. A company is a direct reflection of the business owner/
CEO. The more you understand who you are, what motivates you
and how you can shift and change your patterning to achieve more
of what you want – the quicker you can get to the results.
There are unique components that make the style of NLP that we
studied and adapted particularly powerful, which is why our clients
get massive results in their lives. In fact, if you look through our
testimonials online you will notice that people are experiencing
unusually fast and life-changing results: such as making thousands
of dollars (and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars) within
weeks of working with us. NLP also allows you to incorporate a
Personal Development component to your workshops, seminars
and leadership. This will set you apart, and deepen the work you
do with your customers, clients and participants.
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It’s good to know this, and part of the reason all of us should be
engaging coaches is because the set of beliefs (especially limiting
ones in a certain area of life) that we all carry are invisible to us.
Our beliefs have become so ingrained in who we are since early
childhood – we don’t even notice anymore that they are impacting
our decision-making and actions as an adult. For example, most
people believe that when you are asked a question, you should
answer it. We learned this from early on in school – as we were
called on by our teachers to answer a question. It wasn’t like
we felt we had the option to just not answer. If we chose to not
answer we got in trouble, right? So we learned early on that when
someone asks you a question, you answer it… or else there is
trouble. Except, if you apply this belief to sales, then whoever is
asking questions in the sales process is the one who is controlling
the process, which means that if you follow that belief in sales, you
will be less effective as a salesperson. However, if I train someone in
sales to not answer questions they have the immediate experience
they are being rude, disobedient and there is going to be trouble.
Where do you think that belief came from? Right! Childhood!
If you want to be extraordinary in sales, then you will learn to
navigate the conversation and questions in such a way that you
influence your clients to a sale, while also leaving them satisfied.
If your client is asking all the questions and you are answering
all of them, then your client is generally controlling the ‘sales’
conversation, which is often reinforcing to them that they can’t
have what they want. To help someone who wants to be great in
sales, to “not answer the questions their potential customer asks”,
requires them to revise earlier beliefs that they coded in from
childhood. Our beliefs that we carry from childhood are invisible
to us, but completely impact the way that we do business in our
adult life.
The fifth level of change is Identity. This is essentially your beliefs
about yourself. For example, any statement that starts with “I am...”
is an identity-related statement. And we love to spend most of our
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The Systemic level of change work deals with what ecosystem you
are in and how that ecosystem keeps you sustained in a certain life
that feels safe and helps you feel like you belong. The strongest
ecosystem you are in is your family system. Some of your other
important ecosystems are your friends, your colleagues at work,
the community you live in, any religious or sporting clubs you
belong to, business networks and so on.
Your family system is a special one however, as it takes you back
to the formation of your entire existence psychologically and was
essentially a pre-fabricated box of beliefs that you were born into
that already started creating your world before you were even
there. We also refer to this in our work as family entanglements.
Many participants in our Industry Rockstar Intensive seminar
(our 4 Day Business Building Bootcamp) come in on the first day
and share that they can’t fathom leaving on the last day calling
themselves a Rockstar or expert in their field – even if they are
far beyond expert status already. Many of them are sitting there
saying they know they are an expert, yet if they go and tell their
family and friends they are an expert, they feel embarrassed or
ashamed. I could teach that person a million different ways to
make a million dollars, but if they live inside of an ecosystem
or they stay “entangled” in a family system that doesn’t support
feeling successful or important, then they will either never reach
that level of experience in their career or they will reach it and
sabotage the success once they have it. Each of us will continue to
eagerly avoid what we say we want, or sabotage it once we have
it, in an unconscious attempt to stay in rapport with our family
and ecological comfort zones.
While I am teaching techniques and tools at our seminars, I am
also constantly working with my participants on disentangling
themselves from their systemic entanglements. Only then can they
feel empowered to use these powerful skills/techniques. Otherwise
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Live Hot Seat – re-strategizing a participants business in the Industry Rockstar Intensive
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The third and final element that separates how I utilize NLP, from
the rest, is in the concept of blind-spots. The conversation that
everyone has been so enamored with for decades is noticing our
“blind spots”. Although there is a lot of value in knowing what
your blind spots are, this is not actually what I notice is the primary
area holding people back. There are traditionally three areas that
people look at for knowledge in the world: First, there is the area
of what we know we know; such as how to speak, drive a car, walk,
etc.
Then secondly, there is the world of things you know that you
don’t know how to do; such as speaking another language, doing
brain surgery, or flying a plane if you’re not a pilot. However, you
know if you did want to know how to do those things, then you
could take classes to learn. Most people spend their life trying to
reduce the area of what they know they don’t know, by learning
and expanding the area that they know they know. Despite this,
these two areas have nothing to do with being able to create major
change. If it did you would already have figured out how to do it.
The third traditional area that all us personal development junkies
talk about is, the stuff you “don’t know that you don’t know”, also
referred to as your blind spots. However, again, this is not the most
dangerous area from which people operate. The area that I work
on that is even more potent, is the area where you think you know,
but you actually don’t. This is where we have collapsed two areas
of life inappropriately together. I call this Collapsed Domains!
For example, if you believe that what you’re passionate about is
not necessarily something you make a lot of money in, then you
have two areas of life inappropriately collapsed together. One is
called ‘money’ and the other one is ‘passion’. They have nothing to
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do with one another. And as long as you are “certain” you are right
about that, then nothing will ever be different.
Naturally, it is more than possible to do what you are passionate
about and make an infinite amount of money at it. I and millions
of other people are solid proof of that. When someone has those
two beliefs/domains collapsed and they are “certain” they are right
about it, then there is no changing that. This belief is mostly what
we notice we are coaching on in our workshops. Beliefs that people
hold that are not invisible to them, but that they are certain are
right. There is no point in training anyone in any skill or technique
if they are certain that they cannot have the result that they want.
What I have noticed over the years of working with so many people
worldwide is that we as human beings tend to flip back and forth
between:
1. Being hopeful about having some result (by putting
obstacles in our way or sabotaging it)
Or,
2. Deciding that we are right about it not being able to work
out for us.
I can easily watch people go from hopeless (in number one above)
to apathetic (in number two above). Either way, it doesn’t have to
be like this. NLP allows you to (if you’re a coach) become one of
the most sophisticated change agents in the world and help people
escape this cycle – including yourself in the areas where you feel
stuck. Anywhere that people are stopped in their lives is an area
where they have inappropriately collapsed two or more domains
together and decided something they are certain about.
One of the most unbelievable and freeing experiences I had was
when I started working with my first business coach, and realized
that practically everything I had bought into as “right” about how
the world worked was “wrong”! Everything I was “certain” about in
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regards to success, making money and life had to get revised so that I
could actually start creating success the way the Universe intended
– the path of least resistance! I realized I was literally blocking
my own success by being “certain” about how the world worked
instead of being in a constant state of discovery and questioning.
Our race to certainty as human beings so quickly creates the cage
we are trapped in – not the platform that will set us free.
Collapsed Domains
If you are feeling underpaid and overworked, then you have collapsed
two domains and believe that making money and working hard go
together. In fact, we noticed this over the years: making a little bit of
money is hard. Making a lot of money is easy. Start to notice the areas
of your life that are potentially collapsed inappropriately like this.
(I’ll give you a hint – wherever you feel like you struggle to achieve
things is an area that has a collapse going on).
For example relationship experts often help people who want more
fulfilling relationships to un-collapse ‘love’ and ‘sex’, because they
are different domains even though they can impact each other. As
humans we often confuse domains that impact each other with
domains that are directly linked to each other. For people who are
often struggling with money in our rooms, selling their services and
products is collapsed with hard work. For them, making a lot of
money is very hard because of this.
I learned from my first coaches that the more you understand
yourself, the more successful you become in business. Whether you
become an NLP guru to understand yourself more, or apply NLP in
your business, it is one of the most profound things you will study
and learn in your life. We, at Industry Rockstar would love to be the
ones to teach it to you as we have a very distinctive approach. But
either way, get yourself involved now.
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“Winners who want even
more out of life.”
Chicago Tribune – Chicago’s Largest Newspaper
T
here is an unfortunate blurring in the world of distinctions
between consultants, coaches and mentors. The reason that
it is unfortunate is because each one is a valuable position in
and of itself. When one is thinking they are occupying one position
but they are really in another, they can’t actually have their client
receive the full value of what they are delivering. This leads to
them and their services becoming commoditized and lowered in
value by the client.
For example, if you are a coach acting as a consultant, you won’t
be able to earn as much as if you are a coach acting as a coach. The
same applies in reverse – if you are a consultant, trying to coach
– your clients will be unhappy. This happens all the time though
– and mostly with coaches and consultants not even realizing they
are doing it. The highest paid coaches and consultants in the world
clearly understand the distinctions of what it means to be a coach,
consultant or a mentor, and they can powerfully switch in and
out of the roles as necessary in order to help their clients move
forward.
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The Coach
As a coach, you are not hired to teach or give advice. This might
be a real shocker for you. If you are hired as a coach and you are
giving advice, then you just changed roles to a consultant. Now,
I’m not saying that offering advice in a coaching session might
not be very valuable for the client. I just want you to be crystal
clear about which role you are taking on (when you advise you
are always being a “consultant”). If you advertise as one type and
then occupy another, it will usually turn out very poorly for you in
terms of results.
One of the reasons the coaching profession has gotten a bit of a
bad reputation over the years, is because many coaches give advice
and think they are coaching. That is NOT coaching. . When you
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are coaching, – nobody cares about what you know – and you
shouldn’t care either.
As a consultant, you will stop getting paid when “what you know”
runs out. This is why even great consultants will have a shorter
lifespan with the same client than a great coach. As a coach, you
are helping the person with their human being side. As I refer to it
– Consultants often work on the more technical skills (capabilities,
strategies, tactics, etc.) where coach’s work on the softer skills
(communication, leadership, team interaction, etc.). We will get
more into this in a moment…
You might be asking – where does that leave a mentor? What does
a mentor do then? The only distinction of a mentor to me is that
they have been there before in doing nearly exactly what you are
doing. When I was broke and on my couch in my office and I
met my first awesome business coach, I saw that he was really a
consultant, mentor and a coach. He would teach me (consulting)
how to sell, by training me in selling techniques. Then he would
help me distinguish where I was afraid to take action in sales
(coaching) and help me work with those fears so they did not
sabotage my ability to sell. Finally, he could strategically help me
guide the company, because he had just sold a company that was
roughly identical in nature to the one I was building (mentor).
If you use these three distinctions and are clear about which
position you are in at which time – then you will be able to greatly
raise the success rate, value and longevity of your customer and
client relationships. (By the way – as I asserted that last sentence
to you, I was consulting!)
getting down to the human stuff with people. I feel like there are
lots of good strategies and strategists out there for any problem.
There are always lots of ways to solve a business problem. So,
ultimately the thing that really excites me is getting a strategy that
works integrated into the person’s life who wants results. As soon
as we integrate the strategy into their life, that’s when the human
stuff shows up – like fears, concerns, doubts, and so on. Those are
also the most powerful issues to work on with people… or at least
I love it. I realize it is not for everyone. However, understanding
the tools and techniques of top coaches is essential for massive
growth in your business and professional life.
One of the most unfortunate concerns of people, who want to be
top coaches, is that they have not achieved enough to be a good
coach. This is ridiculous, because you don’t hire a coach because of
what they know. You hire them because of a completely different
reason.
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They essentially avoid these areas at all costs. If you are willing to
be engaged in conversations about those areas, dive into the fears,
emotions and concerns related to those areas, take your client on
an exploration of those areas, and actually sit in the shame and guilt
they hold in those darker areas of their life – then you can be an
incredible coach. As it turns out, most coaches do not do this. They
are not willing to go there, and do not get long-term sustainable
change with their clients because of avoiding these areas.
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1. Motivational Coaching
This is where the job of the coach is to keep you motivated.
This is the lowest level of perceived value of coaching, however
I’m not saying this isn’t valuable coaching. Motivation is very
important for success. It’s hard to be successful if you are
not motivated. However, in regards to the other areas of
coaching, this is the lowest level of perceived value. Here’s
why: because inherent in this conversation, as soon as you
go away as the coach, so does the motivation for your client.
If the source of motivation is from you or the coach, then
as soon as the coach isn’t there, the motivation leaves – and
people aren’t as willing to pay high rates or a lot of money for
a result that is temporary.
2. Accountability Coaching
Accountability coaching is a style of coaching where you are
hiring someone to help you stay on track with what you’re
supposed to get done. It is someone that you check in with
– usually on a weekly basis – to help keep you accountable.
Essentially, the consequence is that you have to tell someone
else that you didn’t get your tasks done – and that usually
keeps people “more accountable”.
This style of coaching inherently has issues because as
human beings, we don’t really like to be held accountable. It
also reminds us of the humiliation we experienced in school
when we didn’t complete our work. It can be embarrassing.
I also don’t really believe that other people want to hold us
accountable, because there is nothing less fun than calling up
a client who you’re supposed to be having a good relationship
with, and acting like their parent. It tends to generate a weird
power struggle in the relationship where clients are hiring
you to essentially discipline them.
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they want to raise the bar on their actual results. I love having
conversations about raising the bar on execution – because
it means things are happening and they are on the verge of
changing.
For example: When a client comes to me and has been out
in the world having meetings but is unable to close clients
on their one-on-one services – this necessitates an execution
conversation.
Taking action will always lead you to somewhere great,
even if you’re not having the results you want to right now.
Execution coaching is all about action, and how you can
work with clients on what they are doing, and what they can
do to improve their actions for results.
I say this so often in our trainings, but only a handful of people
get it. If you just take action you will have some results. They
might not be the level you want at first, and they may even
be bad results. But, if you just get some results, then a good
coach can help you quickly get to the level of results you
want. Without any results, if you never pick-up the phone to
call people, if you never ask for twice as much, and so on, not
even the world’s best coach can make a difference with you.
4. Leadership Coaching
Leadership Coaching is the highest level of coaching available.
It deals with who you are in relationship to yourself and other
people to produce results. It includes who you are perceived
as in the world, and your ability to influence people and
create followers.
Leaders are obsessed with achievement, having huge reach in
the world, and an ability to mobilize followers to take action.
Leadership Coaching has the highest perceived value, and
what I have noticed over the years, of coaching everyone from
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MYTH – The be!er the coach you are the more you get
paid.
There are a few core distinctions that we think every coach should
have right now to shift their ease of meeting and courting new
clients, closing clients, and setting up a long-term relationship
with that client. Remember how we spoke earlier about raising
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the lifetime value of your client? Once you raise your rates to the
highest possible, the next way to raise your lifetime value of your
client is to work with them a long time! The longer you work with
your client the more you earn from that client.
Many coaches think that that their ability to maintain a paid
relationship with their clients over the long term has everything
to do with how good of a coach they are. As it turns out, it has
everything to do with how they set-up the relationship from the
beginning. The following structures were things we noticed our
coaches were doing, and when we changed our own coaching
structure, it made a huge difference to the length of time we
worked with each client (and therefore, the effectiveness of the
relationship):
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deciding every session if that was worth what they just paid. That
per session thing also feels icky. It feels like every time I get a service
and pay for it per session, that essentially I’m done. Then I have to
resell myself into the next session. There is no commitment from
the client. Just like you don’t pay “per day” or “per hour” to rent an
apartment or house, it should be the same for your services. You
are on a retainer with them and you are there to help them win.
As it turns out, people prefer this. It’s cleaner, when it comes to
dealing with money, and it puts everyone at ease so you can work
with them more effectively.
relationship for the client for a year. When you tell them you are
going to work with them forever, it’s not tangible enough. So they
need one more concrete chunk of time to get their minds wrapped
around. When you tell them you’re going to work with them
forever but you are going to have them commit for a year to start,
you have now contextualized the relationship.
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So, do yourself a favor and start your rates at the top of your
profession or just under the top. Rockstars charge Rockstar rates.
If you are not expensive, then you can’t command the perceived
value in the marketplace of you being at the top.
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BONUS MATERIAL!!!
I can’t help myself from sharing this with you. It has been so
valuable for our coaching participants over the years – so you
MUST know this now!
There are three levels of results. You must address all three levels
or you will get less for coaching than you should:
These are the tangible results that a person gets, from working
with you: For example: manuals, money, ability to travel, weight
loss, increasing his/her net worth, etc. If you are having trouble
closing more clients, focus more on these!
These are the emotional results that a person gets from working
with you: For example: excitement, enjoyment, playfulness,
vitality, energy, fun, etc. Anything that’s emotional, that someone
gets from working with you lives in Level 2.
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Consulting
On the flip side of the coach’s role, your job as a consultant is to
train people in your expertise. You can choose an area to focus
in on where you have advice and wisdom – usually where your
expertise lies. Consulting is about three potential areas:
1. Assessing what someone is doing in your area of expertise
and helping them understand what they are doing wrong.
2. Teaching a new technique, tool or strategy from your area
of expertise.
3. Done For You: Applying your personal time and skills to
produce some result for your client.
In this section, I am talking about one-on-one consulting. You may
have one individual, one couple, one company or one entity hiring
you. The thing you have to decide in order to create a consulting
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practice is what your area of expertise is, how you want to deliver
that in a time-bound fashion (in a one day training, 1-2 hour
trainings), and what you want to charge.
In trainings, I actually dive into how to formulate, execute on
and deliver assessments in all domains, but essentially one of the
most important things to take from this chapter is that consulting
is always easier to sell than coaching (but has a shorter lifespan
than coaching). This is because consulting or skills training, often
feels more concrete to people (so we will often lead or sell our
consulting services while we just mention our coaching to people).
It’s easier to track ROI (return on investment) to capabilities or
skills based trainings. Unless you are entered into a conversation
where someone specifically wants to talk about coaching (or
“leadership coaching” is an accepted form of discussion in their
world), lead with consulting. When you lead with a conversation
about strategic or tactical changes one can take (i.e. working
together in a consultative fashion), the client knows they are going
to invest money and receive a certain concrete (Level 1) result. It’s
easy to track a “cause = effect” result.
Take this example: if I said I was going to come in and train you
in sales skills and then we could look at how your sales have
increased each week, that’s very concrete for a measurement
of success of ongoing consulting (essentially sales training). It’s
much easier for the client to decide to pay for that versus when it
comes to Leadership Coaching, the client has no idea what that is
specifically. It really requires more of a leap of faith.
Leading with consulting sells faster. If you are a coach, you want
to consider adding consulting to your business. On the flip side,
coaches have a longer life-time relationship with their clients.
Leadership is something you can explore for the rest of their lives,
however if you were teaching sales skills as a consultant – for
example, then once they know what you know, your value runs
out.
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6: The Social
Entrepreneur
“A business absolutely devoted
to service will have only one
worry about profits – !ey will
be embarrassingly large.”
Henry Ford
T
he sixth and final of the most influential positions in
business, is that of the Social Entrepreneur. The Social
Entrepreneur’s definition is simple: it is a person who uses
part of their business resources to enhance the quality of life for
others in a community. Again remember, entrepreneurialism is
a mindset, not a position. This means you could have a job and
still be a socially responsible entrepreneur by using some of your
resources in your life – time, money, exposure, relationships, talents,
etc. – to help other people improve the quality of their life.
This doesn’t always have to be the ultra-underprivileged of the
world. Although I love to fund and support initiatives to help
those most physically and emotionally suffering in the world, I
also enjoy just doing socially responsible activities with those that
have a great life and want to take that to the next level. It is all
about contribution. I am a big fan of variety, so I like to support
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6: The Social Entrepreneur
It’s time now that everyone starts to take on the position of the
Social Entrepreneur. Most people think that “one day”, when they
are successful, rich and maybe famous, that then they will be more
socially responsible. Except that day might or might not ever come,
and people need your help now.
What I am seeing in the younger generation today is that social
responsibility is woven into the fabric of their DNA and they feel
it is not only important – it is just how life should go. Companies
that engage in socially responsible activities have higher retention
of better talent, report better morale at the office and acquire more
customers because of their community involvement.
Having tens of thousands of people come through our multi-day
Industry Rockstar events globally every year, we have designed
and play business games to raise money for initiatives around
the world. This means new money is created in the rooms, and
people are able to donate amounts of money like they never have
before. We have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in week-
end trainings and given it to initiatives that we research and invest
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in. The best part is you get to decide where to put that money!
Industry Rockstar has funded initiatives like under-privileged kids
going to summer camps, underprivileged Entrepreneurs getting
funding for new businesses, animal protection, human rights and
on and on. What will you do with your success and how will you
be socially responsible this year?
Super Camp Australia Project! Raising Money for a wonderful Teen Leadership
Camp – Industry Rockstar funded 40 under-privileged kids through the camp.
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you” is gone. The new model is, “how do I do both?” This is where
you get to do what you know in your heart is right. Don’t ever let
politics, or the thoughts of others, get in the way of an initiative
that could make a difference on this planet. As a business man or
woman, you are blessed with the gift and opportunity to be an
entrepreneur.
Even if you don’t run your own business (yet ) if you are driven to
be the best in the world, or even the best in your industry, this is the
ultimate pathway. At Industry Rockstar believe it is entrepreneurs
who are going to solve the world’s greatest problems – like water
problems, health issues, and educational challenges. After all, you
got into business not for the business you chose, but because of
who you are becoming by being in that business – right?
Raising money for Heart Kids – a powerful project helping kids with heart
issues get the funding they need to have operations and transplants
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These are big challenges we are describing, and now more than ever
we are seeing leaders and entrepreneurs taking their own resources
to support their local and global family. As a Social Entrepreneur,
you will have more reach, you will meet wealthier and wealthier
people, and you will really get “why” you are in business… and
then you won’t be able to stop. It gives you the energy and the
inspiration that you need to keep producing results and an endless
source of motivation to grow your business to help more people
each year outside of your business. I have talked a great deal in
this book about helping people inside your business (meaning
your customers). Social Entrepreneurship is about helping people
outside of your business.
If you want to engage with top executives and world influencers,
find out where they are contributing and find out how you can
personally and professionally help them to contribute more. So
many people approach us (and other world leaders) for business
deals. Be different and unique, and find out how you can help
world leaders to fulfill their own mission to help the world. Actual
business deals will happen later if they are meant to. Entrepreneurs
that we have surveyed in our trainings have always said the incentive
to help people is underneath the surface the entire time they are
running their business. Sometimes they just get preoccupied with
making money.
Engaging the previous five of the most influential positions in
business gives you the freedom to open up and step fully into this
sixth position of the Social Entrepreneur. Sometimes it takes a bit
of a shift, but get used to setting aside a portion of every dollar to
engage in some socially responsible initiative.
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Start opening your eyes wider and look into the world around you
to see what world problems you can find solutions for, or help in
doing so. Do business globally and consider the challenges that
countries beyond your own borders are facing. Find out how you
can contribute.
If you are reading this book, you are one of the few people in
the world who is blessed with the ability to read. If you bought
this book (assuming you did ), then you probably make more
money than 99% of the people on this planet. This in itself gives
you a social responsibility to raise our fellow human beings quality
of life around you. Your children, your business and the future
generations are depending on it. This may sound airy-fairy, but
don’t call it airy-fairy until you have sat down with today’s top
business entrepreneurs and have had a conversation with them
about what they would most love to see happen in the world.
Then you will see and hear that where their attention goes is on
serving the population of our planet – people, animals and the
environment included.
I want you to make as much money as possible, buy all the things
you want, take all the holidays you want, and design your own
lifestyle exactly the way you want. Along the journey of acquiring
all that, think about how to help others have what they want in
their lives – and take action to make it happen with your resources.
As Zig Ziglar said, “You can have everything in life you want if you
just help enough other people get what they want.”
When you engage in the influential position of being a Social
Entrepreneur, you will find it impossible for the contributions
you make to the lives of those less fortunate, not to impact your
own life. Being a Social Entrepreneur will raise your own quality
of life. As an entrepreneur it will open you up to even greater
possibilities and opportunities for meaningful exposure not just
for your business, but for who you are and who you choose to be
as an individual in business.
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Get There First
Steve Jobs was given up at birth.
He dropped out of college.
He was fired from Apple and his second company failed.
He made a major comeback 11 years later...
And forever changed how the world communicates.
What’s your excuse?
Having read through this book, you now understand where the
world is heading, how business is now being done, and how to
get there first. You have a solid understanding of some of the core
models that you can integrate into your business for bigger results.
The people who are already leaders in your field, understand
these principles and tools (consciously or unconsciously). They
are engaged in the six most influential positions in business to
leverage their time and generate success. You can too now. Make
Me Proud!!
This book is an entire waste of your time, and our time, if you
do nothing else other than tell your friends that it was a good
read. In fact, you’ll notice that in all of our Industry Rockstar in-
person trainings and workshops that we have much less interest in
educating people, and far greater interest in people taking action
and getting instant results. We feel the world is way over-educated,
and not in action enough. There are a lot more people that know
what to do, than are actually doing it.
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The most I can do as your coach is help you steer the car that you
are driving in the direction you want to go – but you can’t steer a
parked car! You can turn the wheel all you want, but you won’t
get anywhere! This book is a steering mechanism for the moving
car that you call your business, profession or practice. Whether you
join us in a live training or not, the very next action to take is to
record (on paper) each ‘ah-ha’ (light bulb moment) that you got
while reading this book. Action each great idea you had about how
to build your business, your life and your wealth.
I have two parting pieces of advice for you before you turn the
final pages of this book:
1. Take one piece of advice from this book every day and apply it –
for example, close a new client, set up a new splash page, or create
a new product. Success is made in daily increments. We often hear
about the huge wins or big successes people had, but there are
always many steps to the final success. One of my favorite sayings
is: “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” from
Lao-Tzu. This is completely true and so your job now is to take
the steps to change your business, build your first one, or take your
existing one to the heights you know it should be.
2. Get a Coach – Having a coach is a powerful tool, so make sure
you are working with a Coach you really feel is the right person
for you to help you get maximum results. People often think they
don’t need to have a coach, yet I have consistently had several
coaches for the different domains of my life since I was in my
late teens. I also have had several coaches I engaged in the same
domain at the same time! Great coaches, consultants and mentors
have easily been one of the biggest reasons for my success. People
who you talk to casually about your life and business, who give
you advice, are not coaches, they are conversationalists. Have a
structure, have a commitment, and invest in yourself through a
top coach.
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About The Author
K
ane Minkus is an International Awarded Winning
Entrepreneur, #1 Best Selling Author & Globally
Recognized Business Growth Expert.
Before Kane was 30 years old, he had started over 2 dozen different
companies from scratch. 5 of these companies reached multimillion
dollar, multi international status. Two of which reached global
brand recognition, producing over $20M in turnover.
In 2006, Kane founded the global business training company
Industry Rockstar®, which has since become recognized as the #1
Global Business Training Company.
He is the creator of the globally used Industry Rockstar Formula™,
a five step formula (originally released globally in 2006) about how
to become positioned as the Expert in your industry and build a 6
or 7 figure business that you are passionate about.
The release of his second book “Industry Rockstar®: Become A
Highly Paid, High Profile Person In Your Industry” in 2010, kicked
off a global series of events that have helped Business Owners
clarify their talents (and ideas) to bring to the market, relate
powerfully to their true value and achieve success they didn’t
believe was possible.
Having now offered 1200 training events, in 12 different countries
(training over 3 Million professionals online and offline) on how
to Brand, Package and Position themselves as Experts in their field,
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About The Author
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