Each year, the Chick-Fil-A restaurant chain, famous for its tongue-in-cheek ads featuring cows urging folks to “eat more chicken”, has a Cow Appreciation Day. Customers who come in dressed up as cows eat and drink for free. Anybody wearing anything with a cow pattern – hat, cap, shirt – gets a sandwich free. Last year, 400,000 people came in dressed up as cows.

The guy who started this chain was a bona-fide Renegade Millionaire. Even though many of their shops are in malls, they’re all closed on Sundays nationwide because he believes in rest and time with family on the Sabbath. If a mall won’t let them close, they don’t go in the mall at all. Hasn’t hurt them. In 2011, at mid-year, they were up system-wide by about 12% in same store sales vs. prior year. The chain is growing; the company is profitable. I believe it’s the founder’s son running the show now. I saw him on Fox-Financial, cheerfully and goofily dressed up as a cow, pitching Cow Appreciation Day.

A lot of people let ego, often undeserved ego, stand in the way of achievement. They envy others their wealth, but aren’t willing to totally put themselves out there to get it for themselves.  On the other hand, a lot of people operate without underlying principles and a strong navigational system, so they are easily blown off course.

The folks running this particular company have clear, firm values. One is that customers have fun. That’s something missing from too many businesses: nobody’s having any fun. The experience of being a customer is, at best, ordinary; at worst, terrible.

I like to ask business owners what their business is about. What they’re doing. Small-thinking shopkeepers always answer in terms of core deliverables. We clean carpets, we cut hair, we sell insurance. Slightly more sophisticated students of marketing tend to give boilerplate marketing message answers: we help people protect their financial futures. Executives at big dumb companies usually quote the vaguest of mission statements. But there’s little juice in any of that.

At one point, Trump set out to change the skyline of New York City. Well, that’s something. When you tell people that’s what we’re all about here, you can capture their imagination. That has juice. I set out in 1975 to introduce more people to ‘success education’ than any other person or company ever had, and I believe I’ve done that, although I’m not quitting just yet. That has juice.

And it’s navigational; you can ask about everything you might do, is it fulfilling that purpose?  It’s good to be about something significant and inspirational. Then, when somebody asks you what you do, and you tell them, they get that you’re about something interesting and will want to know more about it, may be interested in helping you, or being a part of it somehow, if only as a customer.

One of the essential ingredients of the Magnetic Marketing® that I’ve taught is creating something that is magnetic. Most businesspeople are thinking too much about how to sell their stuff – not enough about to make it and themselves magnetically attractive, so the selling of stuff occurs naturally.

– By Dan S. Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, from-scratch multi-millionaire, speaker, consultant, coach, author of 13 books including the No B.S. series, and editor of The No B.S. Marketing Letter. FOR A SPECIAL FREE GIFT FROM DAN FOR YOU including newsletters, audio CD’s and more: visit: www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com

Behind every great entrepreneurial success story that everybody knows, there is an untold story – and it’s usually more interesting and a lot more instructive. They all tend to have a few common elements, though. One of which is ugly grunt work.

Years back, I spent some time with Bob Stupak, a true Renegade marketer. He took a one floor, slots only dump at the downtown end of the Strip and built it into the big, tall, flashy Vegas World Hotel & Casino, now The Stratosphere – without taking on debt, building it one floor at a time as he had the cash to do it; generating the cash by mail-order selling of pre-paid $399 vacation packages.

His full-page ads for his Vegas World package featuring 2 nights’ lodging, meals, drinks, shows and $1,000 of ‘house money’ to gamble with for $399 were seen everywhere: Parade Magazine in Sunday newspapers, Playboy, TV Guide. People on certain lists received elaborate direct-mail pieces selling the package, and over several years, millions of those sales letters were sent. His was and remains the only Las Vegas Strip hotel literally built by direct-response advertising. Now, the untold story: where Bob got the two most valuable prospect lists he mailed most aggressively to…

Every guest got a fancy welcome package, which included four full-color postcards with a photo of Vegas World and a display of One Million Dollars In Cash on one side. They were wrapped with a note telling guests to address them with notes to friends back home and drop them in the specially marked mail slot in the lobby, and Bob’d buy the stamps.

He did not mention he would copy down the names and addresses before mailing out the postcards. He did not mention that he would soon afterward mail a letter telling these folks that they were invited to get the same great vacation their friends had recently enjoyed for just $399, plus get a free spin of the Million Dollar Slot Machine and be guaranteed to at least win a diamond-like ring or a little color TV or some other nifty prize.

He mailed these prospects repetitively and persistently, and told me that he converted upwards from 20%. So, if 300 guests turned in 4 postcards, that’s 1,200 fresh prospects every couple of days, about 15,000 fresh prospects a month for which no cost was incurred in acquiring them but a postcard and a stamp, and how could you get better prospects?

His other method of list-building was nearly as ingenious, and just as troublesome. Its details don’t matter, to make the point: Renegade Millionaires go to trouble to accomplish their goals that most people won’t. That’s the untold story of extraordinary achievement. Nothing elegant, nothing efficient about Bob’s system. Just effective.

I am 56 years old and I imagine my perception is skewed by age, but I still don’t think I’ve ever seen as many people in search of the mythical Easy Button at any other time of my life. The explosive proliferation of accessible technology has acted as gasoline on this fire.

But it doesn’t change the fact of society’s money pyramid: 1% rich at the top, 4% doing well, 15% doing okay, 80% doing poorly – principally because the 1% are willing to do a lot more, and a lot more troublesome stuff than the 80% are. While the 80% are hunting for Easy Buttons, the 1% are working.

– By Dan S. Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, from-scratch multi-millionaire, speaker, consultant, coach, author of 13 books including the No B.S. series, and editor of The No B.S. Marketing Letter. FOR A SPECIAL FREE GIFT FROM DAN FOR YOU including newsletters, audio CD’s and more: visit: www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com

My father told me that the reason doctors whack babies on the ass immediately after they are born is to communicate a fundamental truth they need to know to survive: outside the womb, life is tough. (Do doctors still do this? I don’t know. I’d guess not; today, it’d be viewed as infant abuse and threatening to the tiny soul’s fragile self-esteem, like, say, playing dodge ball and keeping score a bit later in life. But in 1954, the year of my birth, the Doc at Deaconess Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio delivered that whack.)

Everybody is presented with countless opportunities to quit.

We stumble into places far most hostile than we anticipated – my daughter’s full term in the Peace Corps, in some godforsaken jungle with rats on her tin she’s roof, peeing through gaps, that leaps to mind. We sign on for things that quickly seem more challenging and difficult than we’d hoped for – maybe putting to use what is being provided to you by the publisher of this; maybe putting together furniture from IKEA.

We walk into a dark alley, perhaps stupidly or ignorantly or arrogantly, figuratively of course, and then get the crap beaten out of us, literally, and limp home, humiliated. The list of celebrated, influential and rich entrepreneurs with at least one embarrassing bankruptcy or very close call, past and contemporary, is long, long indeed. I, myself, am on the list, and in very fine company.

And if the doc’s message is true, that life is tough, life for those who claw their way to the peak of the business success and money pyramids is even tougher. Entrepreneurship is all about managing a never-ending in-flow of crap, and diligently looking for the pony occasionally in it; about converting adversity to opportunity when you can, and not being overly troubled when you can’t. And, of course, not quitting.

Quitters are very uninteresting.

What’s interesting and instructive is those who are unabashed, who are quickly resilient, who achieve redemption, who have a greater and grander next act. Over the long haul, this ‘resiliency’ may be the single most important of all personal characteristics. How well you can take a punch. How quickly you can recover. How you can weather storms of criticism or humiliation. How adept you are at reinvention. How courageously and creatively you respond to difficulty.

If you want to cultivate a characteristic, this is the one. And one way to do it is with little stuff. The day to day. A lot of people are easily derailed. Easily put into a funk lasting hours or even days. Easily compromise their agenda. The breeze from a missed punch is sufficient to send them to the canvas. They wonder why they don’t get more accomplished. It’s “their glass jaw.”

At least be honest whenever you quit – especially if your reason is “gee, where’s the Easy Button, anyway? Don’t see it here. I’ll go look over there.”  That kind of quitting isn’t about the place you walked into, the activity you started, the toolbox you opened up, the learning curve and time required. It’s about YOU.

– By Dan S. Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, from-scratch multi-millionaire, speaker, consultant, coach, author of 13 books including the No B.S. series, and editor of The No B.S. Marketing Letter. FOR A SPECIAL FREE GIFT FROM DAN FOR YOU including newsletters, audio CD’s and more: visit: www.FreeDanKennedyNewsletter.com