Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today, we have Doug Crowe. Doug, welcome.
Thank you.
Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. Happy to. I’m Doug Crowe and the founder of a company called Author Your Brand and we help executives guys or entrepreneur speakers become bestselling authors without them having to write a word. And we’ve got a very defined process of journalists ghost writing, editing and research to make sure their idea, their topic, their, you know, unique selling proposition we received well by their audience and help them, you know, meet their goals, whether it’s monetary or branding or whatever It is interesting. I probably come from a point, I mean you can correct me if I’m wrong but may be different than most people, which is I when I had a book and I was like I tried to determine whether or not it would be a beneficial exercise to actually attempt to be a bestselling author.
And so I was looking for someone at the time to tell me why should I go and get that particular title? So can you have to go have a bash at that one and I sure can. And I I’m with you. I think I know we’re going becoming a bestselling author is irrelevant if you don’t leverage it in the proper way. We’ve done over 275 Number one best sellers on Amazon and I would love to tell you that every single one of those authors, you know, made millions and change the world. That’s not true. Of course a lot of people go down the exercise of promoting their book, getting it out there, getting the ranking up and then after it’s up they go, wow, I’m famous now. What? Well like any marketing, any message you’ve got to build and use a campaign. philosophy is opposed to launch philosophy. So yeah, we can become a bestselling author but without a structure and process and intention and a community to back it up long term. It’s just an eagle play intellectually. Okay, so to expand on that a little bit.
The part of it is not just the credential. It’s also the other things that go along with them, right? And it gets worse because there’s some statistics that are interesting. 54% of books that are purchased are never even opened. Of those that are open, half those are finished. I’m sure that you know, we both had some books haven’t finished or maybe not open. And because of that even becoming a bestselling author, even if you do campaign it and put promote it and do a decent job with it today. I mean leadership is down, book sales are technically down or flat, but book publishing is, you know, double digit growth, audiobooks, double digit growth. So a multimedia approach to your message is vital. I am strongly encouraging all my clients and friends and people that yeah, go ahead and go down that path of creating a book. But don’t stop there, you better also have some audio video, text interaction community thing going on there. Otherwise it’s very myopic. It does sort of remind me of the product launch.
And I suppose in a way that’s exactly what it is. It’s a product which you’re launching. Yeah. Right. And you’re launching a, you know, a $15 / $20 item. So no one gets rich off becoming a bestselling author, if that’s all they do, you know. Even J. K. Rowling made movies of her books. Right. I mean she did well with the books, don’t get me wrong. But multimedia is definitely the way you gotta go in nowadays in terms of how much you help people. I know that there are some people that struggle quite a lot with the actual process of writing a book. But would you say in terms of the percentages, would you say it is the it is the creation of the product or the selling of the product or both? It’s going to be both. I’ve seen wonderful books that don’t get promoted and don’t do well. I’ve seen mediocre books get promoted and do well. So it’s a, you know, it’s a yin and yang thing, it’s tough to say which one is more important. If you’ve got a decent message, marketing will always trump content in my opinion because great content without marketing is a tree that falls in force and no one’s going to hear it.
So I would say 51% of your outreach and marketing and community building is going to be vital component to your success. So let’s say scenario, someone you care about is like, yeah, I’m really excited. I’ve got this book and they’re saying all the same typical things that you might hear someone say, who’s not as well versed as you are and they were like, oh you got any thoughts on it and you’ve got that brief moment in time to give them some nuggets, what would you say? Two questions. Number one, what can you say that hasn’t already been said, which usually gets like, oh my gosh, you know, because everything we’ve learned and experienced usually already been printed. And the second question is, what can you say differently? That’s um, that will make a difference. Because if you take a look at like famous books, like you know, think and grow rich, Right? Oh my gosh, phenomenal, right. based on Wallace Wattles’ book, The Science of Getting Rich based on James Allen as a man think of based on the bible, you can go take any message and trace it back to its roots has already been published.
It’s just a regurgitated or repurposed or different perspective on a very common theme. So if you’ve got an idea for a book, great if you could talk about your story terrific, why should I care about your story? What’s in it for me? Why do you expect someone to take hours of their life and read your story without a very specific benefit to them? It could be entertainment to escape their life. It could be informational, educational, inspirational, a lot of reasons to do it. But you’ve got to ask these questions of your audience, you know, what do they want and how do they want it and why? Yeah I think thinking about the audience first is a good a good principle and it was actually something that was asked of me and it was sort of like the USP. So I didn’t I think about us p around businesses a lot but I didn’t for some reason think about it for a book but then I thought is there actually something that can be added here?
And I don’t know whether that’s a bit of a sceptical viewpoint because I quite liked your take on motivational, inspirational entertainment. And I think that has value those things. But I don’t know I guess the question is do you think things are getting a little bit saturated. The greatest thing in the world was the ability for you know Gutenberg give us the printed word and then for self-publishing to take over traditional publishing. And it’s also the worst thing, right? Because the greatest thing is anybody can publish, and the worst thing is anybody can publish. So, discerning the wheat from the chaff and getting the, you know, the needle in the haystack, that’s where marketing positioning and what I love is what you touched on is that that research that we do when we work with our clients, we don’t have a journalist interview them at all until we spent about a month in some focus groups and competitive analysis of other books in the genre to find out what’s really being said what the audience is actually looking for. And there is very specific tactics. We used to find that out and tell the author, hey, you can cover these three points because people are asking for it.
But these two are overdone. Don’t go down that road. Your book would be considered rehashing the same topic. So, and again, there’s always a new audience too. So it’s okay to come out with something that’s already been done, provided you’ve done your research, you’ve got a fresh audience is looking for your perspective on it. Yeah, this is another, there might be a theme here. This is another business principle, isn’t it? So I’ve heard it said that people go into a market and they say they’re going to offer this particular product or service without really checking whether there is a demand for that. And you’re saying the same applies to the book. Very much so we I have a lot of friends in this industry and I don’t know any of them. They might. I don’t know any of them that do the research that we do. We spend a month going into over 100 competing books. We analyse every single three star review, we catalogue them and collate them and give our authors a really extensive, like an eight-page report and what readers are commenting on. You know, we ignore the one star reviews.
People just kicked off or five star reviews even are just, you know, somebody’s mom. But a three star review is generally somebody who’s read the book has something constructive to add either what they liked, what they would like to have seen. So we take a look at over 100 of those and put them in the package for our clients and then we’ll actually test about a half a dozen book covers and titles with a focus group, which is really dialled in on their demographic. We call this information together for them. So when they look at their what their ideas, it’s either a thumbs up, a thumb sideways or don’t do it at all. And um, so far, for 12 years, we’ve always had thumbs up or sideways. Okay, listen, we can do this. Just make sure you don’t say this and they’re asking for this. So that research piece is vital. It’s overlooked because people generally like, I’ve got this idea for a book and it feels right to them in their little world, but they forget there’s a big world out there has already read other books on that topic. I read marketing and leadership books all the time and I can instantly tell you which ones are like, oh God, this is great. Doesn’t mean it’s new.
It just means the perspective and the stories might be so fresh and interesting to me that I can’t put it down. Yeah, the amazon feedback is also sometimes used for market research for business ideas and I think it’s quite a we say under undervalued place to go for highlighting gaps. So it’s interesting. Can you, I know you mentioned it initially about what you do, but can you take us through start to finish what you’re, what you’re offering is just so sure people are aware. We work with like I said, you know, executives c suite folks who want to do a book about half the time. They’re books aren’t even about their company or what they’re doing. You know, some guys want to build their brand and expand their horizons or go international. That’s great. The other half are like, you know, I’ve got this idea for something that’s going to impact the world more. We just did a launch for former CMO of Starbucks Asia and her book isn’t about Starbucks or anything like that. She’s not working there anymore. But it’s about a spare room that she opened up to a you know, a teenage prostitute basically.
And her mission is to make the world a better place. And those kind of messages, those kind of people are just so much fun to work with for us. So her book has already done so we just did launch and marketing for her. But our typical process for most people is the analysis. You know, what do you want to convey? What do you want to share? What do you want to get out of this? What’s in it for you? What’s in it for the world? To important questions. And it’s ok that you’ve got to have something in it for you. It’s your time and your resources And so after we take a deep dive into their client, the Reader Avatar, what they want to accomplish and how and how big they want to go. We then come back and do that. Research the research takes a good 30 days with the three star reviews. We do those in the focus group stuff. Once you get all that pulled together, we go, Okay, great, here’s some slight pivots. You want to make everything else looks good. Let’s go ahead and get you on board and we’ll go through the journalist interview process and our journalists, we have a couple of them. They ask the questions that authors who write their own books. Some of them are great.
They are professional writers, but those that are not. I can spot them in the first 10 pages like, oh boy, they should have a better editor or had a ghost-writer because they tend to be very narrow and a good journalists always ask questions what the reader wants to know. I’ve done a few myself and talking to clients about their story, what they’re going through and they’re glossing over some ruled golden nuggets like, wait, where were you when this happened? What the person say? Who was that? What’s your background? So I’ll take a deep dive into character development and scenes when I’m talking to my clients about their stories. So good journalist will spend, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours talking through their ideas, going through the blueprint that we’ve created because we’ve already created a table of contents and all the points there. And then our ghost writing team will go and create a sample and our firm is unique that we do unlimited revisions on the sample until it’s nailed once the samples approved, they’ve got the style, the person’s voice there. They’re pacing. then we go and do the book in like three sections at a time.
So we everywhere pause after three chapters. Take a look at this, another pause for chapters and at the end of, you know, four months or so. They’ve got a manuscript and there’s a couple rounds of editing there as well. It’s never perfect when it comes out, there’s always modifications to do but then it goes to proofing, it goes to lay out and design And it’s about a 6-month process start to finish quite frankly. and during that time we are also working with them on their website. And the critical thing for about half my clients is how we’re gonna monetise this $15 items, like we’re gonna give away the book for free, don’t worry about that or we’ll sell a few of them but we’re gonna focus on the idea of what you want to accomplish, whether it’s building community branding or maybe getting more clients. So a lot of my clients are you know, they’re 78 figure nine figure businesses and they’ve got big consulting opportunities and when you’re going up against censure or KPMG you better be, you better stand out if you’re not one of those guys. So being a bestselling author is one way to do that. The second way I talked about is like listen for every you know $1,500,000 consultant gig, you get there’s probably 90% of people that aren’t qualified to work with you or you don’t wanna work with them or for whatever reason, what do you do with them? Most of them say well I don’t bother talking to them. So what if you could make some money from that. What if you actually help them and make money at the same time. So generally about half our clients will create a digital curriculum to go with their book. So we go to launch it like, hey, here’s your bestselling book. Um, here’s the free pdf, whatever. It’s much easier to give away 1000 pdf eBooks and Upsell, you know, I don’t know, 30 50 people to $1000 curriculum than it is to sell 3000 books at a $10 profit margin. So we’ll do a pretty comprehensive course with them. They’ve got to use their own ideas, but well sometimes just take the table of contents and just talk it out in a more detailed or conversational manner like this and then create a workbook of course, maybe have a live thing, go with it depending on what they want to do. So it’s a book launch bestseller, launch curriculum, email sequences, website.
It’s a good exercise and creating a brand and creating what they call platform because we also put them on some podcasts. My media partners, a former producer with CNN and Good Morning America. So for those clients who want to go broad and go big, we can get them on some major media as well as, you know, social media stuff everybody does. But I’m big on getting into communities existing, big groups, non-profits and corporations are great places to move, you know, thousands of books at a time as opposed to one at a time, which is what most people do. We used the word comprehensive. I mean that, that pretty much describes it quite nicely. I would imagine uh, about half our clients come to us with nothing, no list, nothing, just an idea and some resources to pull it off and so we do it all for them. They only have to do is show up and talk to journalists, we write the book, they prove it. Of course, it’s gonna sound like them. We create the website, the email sequences, the media, the pr the podcast stuff. We do everything for them so they can just um, read there. They gotta review their own book. I’ve got to read it. He was feedback. But the end of the day, they’re not related type in anything.
It’s impressive. I always ask them when someone solves a problem like this, I always ask whether or not they are able to solve that problem because they went through all that themselves. So is that the case for you? Yes, I was spent 20 years in the real estate industry and I was an investor developer actually had my own um, my own uh, live class, I started an academy for training investors how to invest in real estate. So much fun. I had a radio show on ABC in Chicago about this. And when all that went away in 2008, you know, Douglas, You know, flying my airplane around, having a good time and training and teaching and had a great, great company. it all went away, you know, 20 years of building went away and you know, less than nine months really. Um, and so during my boo-hoo face, I, you know, went to my foreclosures and bankruptcy and all that jazz. But I also wrote a book, no, you write a book and when I’m all done with it, the book is awful. I mean, it was just awful. I wrote it out, I cranked it out, set aside and even had it edited, I came back and looked at it and it was just myopic thing of drivel.
It was awful. And fortunately in my radio days I had connected with some a listers, you know, Robert Kiyosaki, Laura Lang Meyer, those guys. And I talked to them briefly about this whole book thing and laurel said, I don’t, right, I’m a New York Times bestselling author, but I haven’t written a book, you’ve got three or four New York Times bestsellers Doug. Those are ghost written like, oh yeah, they could write much better than me. I’m too busy making deals and making money. I don’t want to write the money that I take the point. So I took my book and I basically just trash it and start over again and work in my second book right now and I’m using my team and my process to do my own book because even though I love writing and I’m pretty good at it, I have better editors and better writers than me and I can pay them less than, you know what I what I’m worth. So it’s and that’s true for everybody. That’s true for everybody. I’ve even hired college grad students for very little money just for the, you know, the credit to edit a book and gotten thousands of dollars of value for next to nothing.
So it doesn’t matter what your budget is. There’s a way to create a wonderful well positioned book. You need some resources to, you know, to market and create it. But you know, there’s a wide range there. It’s really interesting. I’m somewhat I’d like to dig into your story a bit before we before we do that. Have you seen an increase in demand for your services or in general as a result of what you referenced earlier when you mentioned self-publishing and we talked about podcasting, Do you feel like a lot of people want to be authors? Yeah. And the short answer is yes. 2019 and 2020 during the pandemic broke out. I am like a lot of people like, oh no, what? And I’m out of big news here. I don’t watch the news much. I went on to 9-11 to see what’s going on. But this is just drama. So I don’t watch it. I was on social media a little bit though And I for about, I think it’s 44 days. No new business came in like what’s going on? I’m positive I’m a leader. But I noticed inside me, I was little bit agitated with the whole thing.
So I went for a bike ride one day and tooling around and looking at the nature and the trees and birds and like wait a minute I’m in this beautiful bubble. Trees don’t know what coronavirus is. The birds aren’t participating in it. I’m just gonna stay out here. This is where this is the world. I like, you know, I could run my business from the bike trail of power. So I’m like, okay, well how can I how can I take this feeling this, this bubble of purity and bring it back to my business? So I think it’s social media which is affecting me. So I came back contacted my social media manager and said man, Change all my passwords and lose them for 30 days because I couldn’t trust myself to not go on. And he did that. And business went up 300% last year. So yeah, that was, that was my evidence that there’s always a demand for almost anything out there. Listen, there’s you know, 2.2 million new books came out in 2019 globally. you know us counts about a third of those, I think. So there’s a huge demand for what I do. I’m not even scratching the scratch the scratches the surface and what I what I can do, who I could help with this thing.
So there’s plenty of demand out there. But importantly, for, for your listeners is if you’ve got an idea for a book, you know, write it down, talk to somebody whether it’s me or somebody else and talk to people who might be interested in that and find out what they want to get out of it. So many books I see, or they just sound like diaries and like, nobody cares about you, sorry, nobody cares about me. What they care about is what’s in it for them, you know, you’ll zig Ziegler Radio station Wi I FM What’s in it for me? I just have to smile anytime anyone mentions zig I think it’s interesting that you spoke to Robert Kiyosaki as well. Have you got like a self-development background which helps in this little bit? Yeah, I interviewed him and can’t both of the radio show years ago. my background is kind of weird. I in high school, I, You know, junior achievement came to promote their program, you know, be a young business person at age 16 and out of 350 people, my class, I was the only one that said, that sounds cool, so I signed up and I had to get my mom to drive me to this place every week and the Junior Achievement, a great organisation non-profit.
I’ve been involved with both as a student and as a, as a, as an adult and you start a company and you build it and you sell something and you liquidate the company, you sell stock. It’s a complete process. And why was there? They offered a course you could take called the dale Carnegie course in Human relations of public speaking at the time. I was like the nerve of the school, second last picked in gym class. I was, you know, nobody recognised me by the time I got out of that course, I was class president, president of the theater Group Homecoming King. You know, everybody knew me because my personality had transformed through the Carnegie method of focusing on other people, you know, the calling them by name, you know, Thomas and just doing things that were taught, but we don’t always apply because we focus on ourselves all the time. That’s interesting because Warren Buffett says that the dale Carnegie course that he took is one of the most important or inspirational things that he’s done, which I find I found it difficult to believe.
But it’s interesting that you mentioned that as well. It makes me disgustingly optimistic to my normal friends. I’m, you know, I can, I can, I can look at almost any situation and find something good out of it, like okay, well I’ll just take this perspective thank you very much. Well something on that, I spoke to someone recently who said the three words um, that she uses after anything bad that happened is, but at least so that’s, that’s her effort of looking at for the silver lining essentially. Yeah, yeah, I have good friends in college, Thomas. He’s a Hollywood screenwriter, right? He, we’re talking about college, never forget he said this, he said, well he almost never die. It’s almost never is like, okay, we almost never die. And like that’s true and people are afraid to speak in public, they’re afraid to launch a new business, they’re afraid to ask a girl out. We have a lot of fear in us, but you know, unless you’re catching a bullet in your teeth on stage is a magician, you’re not gonna, I mean that’s a trick.
So yeah, it’s, it’s fear is uh, you know, we’re only born with to a natural fears. Everything else just learned so interesting. So around the topic of being a number one bestseller, what would you say are the main misconceptions? Yeah, the main misconception is um, once your best seller, you’re selling a lot of books. Um, we’ve done launches where we sold $2,000 in a day And launches, where we sold 34 books in a day in both cases, they became number one bestselling authors. So thinking you’re going to get rich because you’re a bestselling author is a huge misconception, is branding and even the New York Times bestseller, I’ve talked to friends in that in that level. And yeah, sometimes they make some money in the books, but it is with a publisher, The publisher gets most of prophecy given you an advance, you might get 5% royalties after your after advances recouped. So, making money from the book is, you know, I think, uh, one of my friends industry wrote an article about the odds based on data, right?
And the actual numbers show the number of books out there, number of people selling a million copies. It’s actually better odds to play the lottery that you think you’re going to sell a million copies of your book. You mean to be a winner of the, well, no, you can still, you got my, my clients, a lot of my clients make great money, 67 figures because of, but not directly from their book, but people think I can write a best seller and make them and sell a million copies. It’s um, it’s much worse than a crapshoot. It’s worse than playing the lottery. You’re better off playing lottery if that’s your goal, if you want to use your book as a fulcrum or lever for something bigger and better for yourself or your family, your brand or non-profit, whatever it is that works great, but don’t expect to make money exactly. Directly from a book itself, it’s, it’s a $15 item. So um, you either have to be doing mass volume like a celebrity would or it needs to be, um, in order to do something else like you didn’t at the beginning of the episode.
Yeah. Which, which brings me to this point of, yeah, yeah, selling lots of books means you’re a celebrity, right? Or a lot of people use the term in non-profit in the nonfiction world of being a thought leader. You know, I’m a thought leader. Really? Okay. Yoda, what are you doing? Leading my thoughts now. Come on. How about an action leader? How about making a dent in the universe? I’m actually like seeing some results from, from what you’ve done, right? I mean all these accolades bestsellers, a great badge, but it’s just a badge. It’s no different than a medal on a, on a soldier, right? They’ve done something, they got a medal for it. But that’s something is now over. So it’s a reflection on what you’ve done that. What you’re going to do should people do it? Some should not everybody, um, anybody who understands the process and the long tail of it and understands that if you have a business or a mission, you don’t do business like an Emily Shanks case it’s just a mission, it’s not a, it’s not a business at all. If you’ve got not just intention, but the belief that you can make a difference in the world, then a book is a great thing to do.
If it’s just to make money, it still works. It’s just not the kind of people we work with, we work with people who want to make a difference in the universe really. And that’s it. I’ve had a few people come to me with their, you know, a couple celebrities, you know, talking about themselves during the interview and you know, it’s just not a cup of tea. It’s just not, it’s not, it’s not what our company does. Other companies would love to have a sports figure or celebrities. Great. I don’t have a problem with that at all. It’s just that we don’t do that. We work with a celebrity. We’ve done with a couple of them. They are, they’ve got something bigger to, to accomplish that gets me jazzed up because money is great. It’s a good thing to create it. But at the end of the day, you know, don’t get buried with that. I get better with the legacy. So that legacy is much more important to me and tomorrow my clients interesting. Any thoughts on downloadable books and how that’s changed what you do.
Well, I’ve been around for a long time, I remember $30-$35 e book days, right with that kind of stuff. There was a lot of fun back in the day before the Internet really took off. But a downloadable eBook is great. It’s instant delivery. Um, it’s fast. It’s, you know, zero cost of goods. The challenge with them is that I don’t know if you’re like me Thomas, but I’ve got plenty of downloading books on my computer that I haven’t read. It’s easy to ignore them these books back here. I can’t ignore those. The spine that covers staring at me now. That’s not talking about me. I’m thinking about that author, that author has a free billboard on my head and in this podcast showing people, hey, I’ve got a message, I got something cool to say. So, nothing wrong with the downloadable eBook. We do a lot of kindle promotion, a lot of, lot of PDFs and we do that stuff. But if it’s just that they call that a lead magnet, right? If it’s, if it’s a print and digital and audio and maybe even video, if you have multimedia on that, it’s much better for whatever you’re trying to accomplish, doesn’t even matter what it is, it’s important to go down the road of getting out there.
The challenges with printed books is that it is less than 100 pages. It’s so thin on a six by nine or booker size. There’s no spine. So you got to have something, you’ve got to have something to say that 110 or more pages long otherwise turns into a brochure. Yeah, it comes back to what you were saying about the audience as well. So thinking about what they want to consume rather than just what you want to do right? How can you serve them? How can you solve their problems? You know what the problem is and what else they tried to do to solve that problem. These are important questions that nobody asked like, okay, um, I’m pretty sure that whatever book you create is not the first book they purchase, right? So you want to find out what else they’ve read what they got out of it and what was missing. That’s why the research pieces, I can’t talk about that enough. So you mentioned the 2008 housing crisis. Um, the only reason I bring that up is because I find that people tend to learn a lot of adversity. So what would you say you learn as a result of going through all that hardship? Still learning it?
You know, at, at the time I go back to when I was doing this in my, in my 40s I had purchased real estate. I have met Robert Allen did a lot of no money down deals. I purchased houses, apartment buildings. I even purchased a subdivision off of eBay once I purchased comments and office building. I’ve done condo conversions, I get calls with stockbrokers telling about their, you know 9% performance and I was slightly rude Like 9% dude, I’m getting infinity return. I might no money down deal, I put nothing in. I make 300 grand. Can you do that for me? I know it’s risky. Well not for me. So I was a little bit arrogant as I went down this road and that’s when you know, God says, okay, just teaching a lesson. So I was doing all this great stuff in real estate. I have my academy, teaching investors with my radio show. I had an airplane that time. It was a great time, my life. And when the crisis hit, you know, it wasn’t one thing that knocked me out, it was just incremental one thing went wrong.
The second thing went wrong and within like 30 days I’m like, whoa, what happened to everything just collapsed. And I didn’t have one foreclosure. I had 19, you know, and the bankruptcy and divorce and when you go through trauma. It messes with logic. It messes with your values and I remember going through the stuff with my, my therapist at the time because I was, I was a mess. Right? I was, I was a mess. And you know, he said, who are you? Well, I’m this investor because if you don’t have that anymore then who are you? Right. I don’t have an answer. And for most men, we identify who we are with, what we do and some women too for that matter. So if you take away what you do, the question you should ask yourself is who are you? Why are you here? And when I did those questions I I got depressed, you know, MR positive, right? I was voted most likely to succeed in high school. Here I am with bankruptcy, divorce, foreclosure and a pistol on my desk with a hollow point bullet in it, staring at me for a whole week.
Thinking that’s also a solution. I didn’t eat the bullet obviously because I’m here, but that thought didn’t come and go in an instant. It’s stuck around for a very painfully long time. the lesson I learned from that and at the time, you know, I love zig, I love Tom Hopkins, I love all the things I’ve read and I was going through this crap, this dip, what I call my boo face, I hated those guys, I used to love them a year ago now, I hate them because like, oh most millionaires been broke 2.2 times in her life and I’m like dude, I wouldn’t wish this upon my worst enemy, No way. Emotional pain outweighs physical pain because it lingers a lot longer. Most physical pain, what I learned a long, long, long preamble to the answer here. Painless success is temporary, even emotional thing, you know daughter is not talking to me. The shame of going through a lot of crap that I went through. It’s all temporary at the time. It felt like forever. That’s why people do kill themselves because it feels it’s the pain of not being around was less than the pain of being around with that shame, guilt and depression.
So, I understand what people go through that stuff because I almost did it. So the lesson I learned was like, man, you know, they’ll say, say for the suicide hotline, never had a permanent solution for a temporary problem. And all problems are temporary. You talk to any even somebody with disabilities, you know, I was listening to a book just yesterday and the guy talked about perspective and how this guy in a wheelchair, I didn’t say I have to be wheelchair says I get to be in a wheelchair. Yeah, otherwise I’d be in a bed, not be able to move around this wheelchair gives me mobility. Right? So that perspective. Things like, Oh yeah, good point. So yeah, all pain is temporary, like success. So you’ve got to keep that things, you know, persistence without patients doesn’t work and patients about persistence doesn’t work. So it’s a good combination. Have persistence and patience is my master formula. Well, it sounds like it’s like you say quite a traumatic time. there are some people who look back at trauma and they actually say, you know, I wouldn’t have changed it.
I still would have gone through it. Would you say you’re at that point? No, I think you’re lying. I think they say that now because I became a better person, I became more self-reflective, more aware. I became a better person. But I’m sorry. I if I had my druthers, I prefer not to go through that and just can you have my old path now? What? Because we don’t know what would have happened. Maybe I would have learned those lessons and another less painful manner. I don’t know that the whole time travel thing, right? You know, we don’t know the other alternate universes, but am I grateful for it? I guess I have to be grateful, you know? But um, I like, oh, goody, like super grateful. No, I accept it and I learned from it. But so if I could go back and change it. Yeah, I would. Absolutely. Yeah. Doesn’t like it. You ask the question, Who are you or your therapist asked you, do you feel that you have a good answer to that question? I have a better answer. I’m still on my journey of course. But um, it came through a business coaching session just last year, quite frankly. And I alluded to earlier about who we work with, but he’s listening to my, my sales calls and uh, he’s, you know, we reported back to me a week later said Doug, listen to of your calls this guy and this guy, the first one you were excited, motivated.
You really pumped him up and you got him thinking about his book and his and his message. Also, if it’s a good job, the second guy, you were kind of indifferent, you don’t really cold, but you didn’t really seem to care about what he was talking about. And I’m looking, I’m looking to the, my notes on the two, the two guys like, that’s true. He said, Well, Why did you buy the talking to the 2nd 1? I said, because I’m in business, I’m gonna, you know, I want to do business. I want to produced books for people. He said, yeah, but you’re not going to do with him, Are you guys know? So why are you gonna talk to him? Because I need a business? And he said, well, if you don’t talk to those people, I think your business will go up, not down. I said you were gonna talk to less people and make more money. He said yes. And I said, well, I’m paying you money is my coach. So I’m gonna do what you say a lesson right there. and he was spot on, right, because I if someone’s in it just for themselves, their ego, they don’t get past the first phone call, like, uh, you know, I’ll give him some referrals because I have people in the industry, they’d love to work with you.
It’s just not for me And my business went up 3% because of what he taught me. So who I am, I am a catalyst. my book or book coming out in the future. My business books won’t make a big difference in the world. My other one down the road might not this year, but in a couple years I’ve got a couple of ideas for books, but more importantly, I have my, my finger in a few dozen pies that will change the world. one of my clients for example, Craig Hansen, former Coast Guard Commander and these guys, military guys all about talking, what’s your goal? What do you want to achieve here, dog, I work for a company, I’m going to go off on my own. My mission is to end veteran homelessness. I’m with you, let’s do it. I have to match this style, right? Like let’s do it, I’m in and we talk about it like monthly, we both know that this is a big goal to end veteran homelessness, this is massive. It may or may not happen in our own lifetime. We don’t know, I don’t care. The fact they’re on that path to make that change is all the fuel we need because we’re gonna need to raise, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to do it, not gonna come from us, going from other people and people don’t rally around small goals, they really around goals like Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, his goal and global poverty with micro lending, like he’s not going to end poverty in Bangladesh, he wants to end global poverty, I’m like, okay, not put craig off the Nobel Peace Prize, but we’ll see.
So I mean one of the things that I like to talk about in terms of pursuing certain things is pursuing, meaning, it sounds like you are doing that. do you, when you reflect on the real estate days, do you look back at that and think that you were doing something meaningful in the sense that you may be building or helping assist people in homes and how does that relate to what you’re doing now? Do you feel like one is more meaningful than the other? No, everybody has, everybody has the chance and the opportunity to make a difference, whether it’s impacting one person or one million doesn’t, there’s almost no difference in my mind to that. I had, I had my, my business as a real estate trainer came from people going to these weekend boot camps that I’ve met and I went, I went to a bunch of them and I follow up with a few of them on the Monday after the event and no one’s doing anything. Oh, it’s just spent $5,000 at this, you know, XYZ seminar, how to invest in real estate and nobody does anything? So I presented one of my friends who is a genius, genius venture capitalist guy.
And now he’s he says why don’t I just went to this option seven our dog. I saw a guy do the whole weekend boot camp for options trading And he talked to the promoter and like I said yeah we grossed about two million the event with about $1 million dollars in expenses. So we netted about little shy of a million dollars in a weekend. And Chris said Doug you can do it for real estate, you can do a weekend boot camp with your experience, you’re speaking of investing in real estate, you can do a weekend training thing and make $1 million dollars in a weekend. I said crystal things don’t work. And he said, well work for this guy. He said no, I work for the promoter, not the participants. So his challenge to me was okay smarty. Once you design something that works. So I came back with a week later with the outline school Live classes. 10 weeks, 16 people were class um, manuals. The course book is written in four personalities. So depending on personality, got a different manual. Oh and nobody graduates until they buy a piece of property. I give this business plan. He looks at, it goes 16 people in the class. semesters he’s doing math in his head going, you’re not gonna make any money with this.
I said that wasn’t the goal. You said to create something that works for the people, that’s what I created. And so I ran that business for 5, 6 years did great. And we, we, we helped over 250 people, um, by the first piece of real estate because nobody left my class, my school without buying a piece of property. So did I impact, I don’t know how many, but I’m sure some became one of them. Oh my gosh, Romero, former dishwasher, he’s a multimillionaire. So the trickle effect of what he’s done, he’s probably helped out more family than I ever did. So yeah, catalyst for change, real estate publishing, it doesn’t matter as long as you got the intention and you understand the butterfly effect, you’re part of this ecosystem, so do something good. I’m not sure if you stay in touch with that industry, but I think that there are a lot of people who perhaps could have benefited from that um, philosophy because I don’t think it’s full of people like that. It’s not, and that’s, that’s, it’s a shame because I tried to, you know, I was not, I didn’t have a lot of em in an experience at the time.
So when I, when the writing was on the wall in 2007 or eight, whenever it happened, like I need to sell this company, I could even sell, I just closed doors. It was horrible. But yeah, I’m a big on accountability and, and we still made money, the company, we didn’t make, you know, $100 million ranking, but we did okay with it. And I got the opportunity to be on the radio and buy properties around the world. It was, it was fun. But yeah, people to ask me often when you’re gonna get back in the real estate dog, you seem to really have a passion for and all that. And I do like it. But um, I can only, you know, serve one master right now. So I’m in the, in the publishing and that right now, probably a real estate on the side. And uh, I did put, when I close my doors. I did one thing though from integrity standpoint Thomas. I’ve never, even though I went through bankruptcy, I’ve never lost my phone number and I told my students said, you know, I’m closing the doors, but my phone is always on for you and you can always call me or email me and I will answer your questions and help you out is my guarantee to them as I will never leave you. Okay. The great story and I appreciate you sharing that because again, it’s not easy to talk about the tough times.
Can I ask you what your current goals are studying marketing my whole life and this happened just this past year that I’m taking a look at the media right? And You know, I’m 60. So I’m looking at like, you know, decades of, of media and my degree from North-western radio, television, film. So I love the media and I love what it used to be and what it used to do. And nowadays I, I don’t see it anymore. I don’t see a thing called news in the United States. At least I see a lot of propaganda. And so, um, I’m looking at what people are digesting and being persuaded by and it makes me sad and look at social media and look at this deluge of noise and people trying to break this noise with their little messages and everyone’s trying the same thing. So it’s again your drop in the ocean literally. So my goal. Um, I’m taking some pages from a couple authors I know and consultants in marketing and I am on a mission to transform my company’s outreach and media and marketing from an expense first neutral and then make it an income stream.
So marketing and my company, 12 months from now will not be a cost centre. It will be an income stream. Just like Cleveland clinic. Trouble larger companies are doing this quietly. People look at it. They go, that’s interesting. But you know, rebel used to have ads on tv, they just focus on their cool videos now that people buy and license and pay for. So the marketing is no longer expense. It’s an income and that’s not easy to do in a small, small, medium business world. So I’ve got some things in place to, to pull that off, but it’s gonna take me a good 12, 18 months maybe even to get it going. But it’s, it’s gonna be so much fun because my goal eventually is help my clients do the same thing and say forget the noise, forget all the pr ads, earned media, all that stuff. We’re gonna focus on owned media and community with like zero Ad spent. That’s the, that’s the goal so far, if I’m interpreting correctly, it’s kind of like having your own channel or having your own media company, which people pay for.
And that’s your, it’ll be actually beyond channel, it will be a network, but all be able to reveal more when I get to set up, it’s still being pulled it together. So if you want to chat again and, and even six months, but happy to show you what we’re going to just put small, it’s going to take time to do this. So I’m uh, being patient. Well, when someone has a big, a big goal, a really interesting goal, I always say that come back when you’ve, uh, when you’ve got something to share. So I certainly will appreciate that. Have you got anything that you feel is valuable that we haven’t talked about today. Um, yeah. You know, when, when people go on media like this and podcast that generally give away something right? They give away a checklist of blueprint chapter local jazz, great stuff. and you know, you probably tell them a contrary, I like to do things a bit differently. So what I have is a good time to tell you, I’ve got this thing where a person can actually answer a few questions and I will basically some of the research for them which we talked about earlier and vet and validate their idea and sketch out a baseline marketing and impact plan for their idea And they’ll give them some confidence on whether this is a good idea to go down that road of doing a book or not.
I’ve advised a good chunk of people, maybe 23% of people you don’t need a book for what you’re, what you’re telling me you want to do. Don’t bother, you don’t need that or not. Not right now, maybe do that like next year right now we need to focus on income or you know, building something else or serving your audience versus a lot of things have to happen before we get down the path doing a book. So this is the system that we put together is a way for people to understand if they should do a book and when and the best way to make it work for them and they can go to a separate sideboards go dot real bestseller dot com and they fell to reform click thing for an appointment and we spend 20 minutes on the phone and go through it with them and the walk away with something that’s tangible customised and will help them one way the other to know if and when they should do a book. Sounds interesting. Yeah. You said that you were a contrarian and from one contrarian to another. Do you know why you’re a contrarian? Well, according to Malcolm Gladwell or is that no Adam Grant.
It’s because I’m the last born and the third born child has a much higher propensity to be outlier. you know that type of personality fucking the system, you know, going against common sense or common flow. I just, I’m like no, I want to do so would be different. I’m going to do things differently because you know, if you do what everybody else does, it might work. But then again you get lost. So especially it comes to marketing, it’s not just standing outstanding. It’s not enough Pet rock stood out, but it wasn’t long term, standing out with utility is what I focus on a consistent basis. Well, thank you very much for the value today. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. It’s good to have interesting guests. Thanks appreciate it. And just I know you’ve embedded the giveaway but other than that was the best place for people to find you. They can go to dougcrowe.comments within the dougcrowe.com. That’s where I spent most of my time.
I don’t go on the other platforms very often. you can find me on LinkedIn or dougcrowe.com or if you want that free assessment go to realbestseller.com. Well, I was half expecting you to say, I don’t do social media, so you won’t find me there. You won’t find me there personally. My assistant will probably be connected on LinkedIn and she will be able to chat with you a little bit and then we’ll decide if it’s worthy of the conversation. But I generally talk to everybody. I’m not so hard to get a hold of really.
All right, well, thanks Doug.
Thank you.