Iwas visiting a client last week and we got talking about business.
We got rapping about marketing, lead generation, business mindset and lots of other juicy stuff.
It was a chat that was precipitated by my clients quite frankly huge collection of “business” books he had in his office. Now I consider myself well versed in most decent business books of significance, having at least heard of most books of note, but this particular collection failed to ring any bells.
So I took a closer peek.
“Aha”, I thought to myself..
No wonder I hadn’t heard of any of them.
On closer inspection it turned out they were the last sort of books ANYONE should be reading if they have any entrepreneurial ambitions whatsoever.
They were my client’s reading material for a business degree that he completed a few years ago, a piece of paper that cost him around €30k for his troubles, and, by his own admission, hadn’t even brought him “so much as even one cent in revenue.”
Unsurprisingly.
Dry, stuffy and chunky textbooks only good for mindless regurgitation by hapless 20 year olds desperate to get that 1:1 that brings them closer to being just another cubicle drone.
Great material you can use to slither up the corporate ladder and sound intelligent in pointless meetings, but a chocolate teapot for anyone who wants to really know business and make some moolah.
Not even so much as one book on how to get customers.
Nothing on how to attract leads into your business.
Copywriting and prospect persuasion? Not a sausage….
You see, being taught business by some professor who has never known the highs and lows of what running a business is really like, is like being taught to have sex by a spotty 15 year virgin.
Neither are qualified to teach anything to anyone about their subject of “expertise”.
Now they might like to think otherwise, but unless they’ve lived it, their talk is cheap.
Silly as it is to listen to either to those people, it’s really no different to getting a non-sales orientated web designer to build your most precious marketing asset of them all, your website.
You star performer in your marketing arsenal, and most would have it dressed up like a peacock strutting itself on Dollymount Strand on a hot summers day.
It might be a fine sight to behold, but a beast like that will bring you nae sales, chico..
On the other hand, there exists a type of website that has burnt all them bullshit business books and decided to do one thing and one thing only: sell.
It doesn’t take any crap from no one, but it does understand what it’s visitors are going through, it tries to understand their pain, and it give them the solution.
It’s clear, simple and to the point.
While the eggheads are still trying to work out the macroeconomic significance of increased customer retention, a direct response website has your prospect sold and moving on with their lives, with their pain relieved and their problems solved.
Those who know will be scurrying along furiously to grab themselves a website that attracts prospects like bees to honey and converts like crazy.
Are you one of those people? One of those who know?
Stay hungry,
Keith “Burn Them Business Books” Commins
P.S. There’s no better clip that sums up the difference between real world experience and taught knowledge than the clip below from 80’s movie “Back To School.” It stars Rodney Dangerfield as a high falutin’ businessman who decides to return to school to be closer to his son, and ends up starkly illustrating the difference between academia and the real world in this brilliant scene.
Have it at..
Real World Vs Academia, Exposed!