Perry Marshall – Zero to $100k

Dear Business Builder:

15 years ago when “Google Cash” was R-E-D H-O-T and the world was in a frenzy of affiliate marketing hype, a 28-year-old came to a workshop. He had recently quit a prestigious job on the east coast. He was pulling down $1.6 million a year as an affiliate who owned neither the product nor customers.

Handsome and intelligent. Rockin’ an attitude of “What’s the matter with all those losers? Why can’t they just follow instructions and make six or seven figures like me?”

I took a close look at what he was doing; offered two suggestions:

1. “You need to turn this into a real business, instead of being a shill for somebody else.”
2. “This product you sell is flimsy and cheesy. You need to get a real product.”

He politely declined my advice, preferring to optimize spreadsheets, go on incentive trips and chase his wife around the house.

One year later I bumped into him at a seminar. He was in severe pain.

Google banned ALL of his accounts, and was tracking his IP addresses. He was struggling to keep his head above water, analyzing spreadsheets for other marketers just to buy groceries.

He was one of the LUCKY ones. At least he made good money for a little while. 

99% never make any money at all.

I went on: “Of course they also expect detailed, step-by-step instructions. Backed by iron-clad promises that it’s a fail-proof turnkey system and all you have to do is color by numbers and you’re assured showers of rainbows and unicorns.

“Those people are looking for a canned answer. There IS no canned answer. I keep getting that question and I’m sick of it. People who want a guaranteed formula for success are not entrepreneurs. They’re just MARKS for the next flim flam man who comes along!”

I then remarked: “I do have a terrific answer for them. But it’s not color by numbers and it’s not A-B-C 1-2-3. It’s for grownups.”

He replied:

“So Perry, have you ever delivered the DEFINITIVE, once-and-for-all answer to that question, so you’ve handled it once and for all?”

“I have not. I just keep giving a short answer over and over.”

“Do it. Then after that, when someone asks you the question, you’ll be able to point them to the answer. Take this course and it will sustain you to $100K and beyond.”

Crossing the $100K chasm is the toughest stretch of the entrepreneurial journey. It’s far easier to grow revenue from $100K to $1 Million than to get from Zero to 100K. ($2M to $10M is technically a lot harder than $0 to $100K, but not many people destroy their lives over it. Maybe that’s because you can live quite comfortably running a $2 million business. Even if you’re at an extremely frustrating plateau.)

I help companies grow from six figures to seven all the time. Been doing it 19 years. Can do it in my sleep. In Advanced Mastery Network and Private Client Group we grow companies from seven figures to eight, sometimes eight figures to nine.

For a long time I’ve not paid adequate attention to the Zero to $100K entrepreneur, so I’m turning my attention to this right now. The first $100K is an anvil that shatters many people. But it doesn’t have to. It’s possible to be doable or at least manageable. It also lays the foundation for everything that comes next. Which means your first moves are crucial.

BIG MISCONCEPTION: Most people believe something like, “I’ll start something that looks good…I’ll gradually get better and better and make more money…it will get harder but that’s the way business is…you have to work hard and persevere and eventually you’ll make it.”

NO!

In my 19 years of experience working with hundreds of businesses I have found the opposite to be true. There may be a bit more work but the work gets less difficult. Yes, hard work matters. But working on the RIGHT thing from the START is faaaaaar more important.

Most people need to make $100K personal income to support their families. Prior to that they won’t feel successful. This means they need an absolute minimum of $100K revenue, usually more.

To be fair, dear reader…

Bad question dooms them to wrong answer. Every. Single. Time. With 500 salesmen lined up in your Facebook feed like Taxi drivers at JFK Airport, all too ready to exploit their ignorance… hawking every kind of business in a box you can fathom.

Even very well-intentioned people who are NOT con men STILL swindle would-be entrepreneurs by default because they dispense good advice to the wrong person in the wrong situation. They pound square pegs into round holes. They only have a hammer, thus treat everything like a nail.

Almost everyone who sells a “business in a box” does this. Even the legit ones.

This is the problem:

When someone who would have become an entrepreneur burns out, goes bankrupt, throws in the towel, dashes their confidence on the pavement… because they were sent into battle with plastic swords and helmets… everyone they would have employed, sold to, bought from or influenced suffers as well.

Along with their families, friends and colleagues.

After mentoring thousands of entrepreneurs, marketers and salespeople across 300+ industries I chose to create the Definitive Road Map – the filters, the criteria, and levers – so in just a few short weeks, you reach crystal clarity on what is going to work for you and what will not.

I have consulted every kind of business you can imagine, from affiliates to furniture stores to bestselling authors to stem cell labs. There is NOT some “#1 Best Business Model” or structure or market or opportunity that butters my bread. That’s why I am uniquely qualified to provide this training.

I help you find YOUR ideal business, and pull it out from where it already exists – inside you. I have helped hundreds of people reinvent themselves across the last 15 years.

This will likely save you from years of twisted roads and financial ruin. It will prepare you for a mercurial 2024 and beyond like no other. It might save your marriage. It may rescue you from alimony payments and legal fees and fights over visitation rights. And the financial devastation that inevitably follows.

If you take the Red Pill – if you accept that there is no one ideal business, just many different flavors of businesses that COULD be a great fit FOR YOU – then entire new vistas open up because you discover there are many satisfying ways to scratch your itch for adventure. And still pay you handsomely.

It is also an effective way to take an existing business that sort-of works – a biz that suffers from “close but no cigar” – and re-align the foundations so your gears turn reliably.

When we began organizing this course, we expected Zero to $100K was only going to be for rank beginners. But as the material evolved, I realized: This is NOT just for beginners. It’s for anyone who is making a major transition and HAS to land on their feet.

The guy making $1.6 million as an affiliate needed the Zero to $100K course, because his business was a mirage. His $1.6 million income went bye-bye overnight. Suddenly he was back to zero.

It’s one thing to despise a corporate job you’re trapped in because the BS is so thick you have to zombify yourself just to tolerate the insanity… But it’s even worse when the business you built becomes a prison and you’re forced to become a soulless automaton mouthing words you don’t believe so you can hustle some customers and make your car payment.

When you hammer nails on a flimsy workbench, the nail wiggles. You end up with bent nails and a ruined project. Business is like that. When you get the foundations right it is vastly easier to sell the right product to the right client and enjoy it because you’re doing it on your terms.

Even then, there’s another problem:

When Google Cash and affiliate marketing were ALL THE RAGE (sort of like Bitcoin in 2017) and the world was in an INSANE FRENZY, how did I instantly know it was going to crater?

How did I know the 28-year-old making $1.6 million was going to take a nasty spill?

Because I knew in my bones and muscle memory what a REAL business is. The average “bizopper” does not. The bizop sellers know what paints a seductive picture in the bizopper’s mind.

…Starting with “I’m going to show you how to own your own business.” Late in my MLM phase, I began experimenting with advertising. Only because I tried that, did I deduce that I did not own legal title to ANYTHING. Once I realized this, I pulled the red lever and reached out to my upline Diamond (who was otherwise inaccessible) and asked for a phone call.

I said to him, “So… it looks like you don’t really own your own business, you’re just a commissioned representative for Amway and the Grand Imperial Poobah. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” he stuttered. “You could say that.” There was a wavering tone in his voice I had never heard from ‘superman’ before. He was nervous.

That was the day my rose-colored glasses shattered.

They preach “never trade hours for dollars.” They make you feel so superior to all those blokes washing dishes and bussing tables. But it’s really code for “There’s money laying in my neighbor’s yard but I won’t walk across the street to pick it up because that’s manual labor.”

Most entrepreneurs who parrot “Don’t trade hours for dollars” are broke. There ARE entrepreneurs who really do not trade hours for dollars (not directly anyway) but they’re always people who’ve taken the Red Pill.

Bizop promoters pump up your ego by telling you you’re a renegade, a contrarian, and a maverick…

Then they shame and excommunicate you for “not following the system.”

They preach abundance but play a zero sum game. They talk about alchemy and limitless possibilities but they play a game where there is one winner and 99 losers… and the 99 losers are the ones under their care!!!

I believe in abundance too, but the truth is: You will only walk this earth for a finite period of time, you have a finite number of hours and resources, and you only get so many turns at the wheel. Sure, wealth offers ‘infinite potentialities in the grand scheme of civilization, but for you it is finite. Your hours and days are numbered. You must shrewdly manage every opportunity that life grants you.

I would go to seminars and hang on every word of the Grand Imperial Poobah. I thought he walked on water. I aspired to someday be just like him.

His “empire” unraveled. (More like blew apart.) It left a hurricane path of carnage and broken dreams. My assessment of him today is that he was gifted with prodigious powers of persuasion, and thus fashioned himself into an insecure, immature, self-worshiping, abusive dad to 500,000 people.

(Also a functional alcoholic, I found out years later.)

You wanna waste 18 months or five years (or your entire life) running down bad roads with bad hombres?

Be my guest.

The Bizop Promoter’s #1 skill was convincing me it was All My Fault. Everything that went wrong was on me. It’s called gaslighting. You were so sure it was his fault at first… but he’s so good at convincing you it’s your fault, you start thinking he’s sane and you’re crazy.

After every confrontation you thank him for setting you straight. For the inspiration… and the motivation. You send apologies and redouble your affection, which he pretends to ignore. You thank him for being the only one who is willing to put up with you. “Thank you, sir. May I have another.”

If you keep believing him long enough, you do go crazy. You convince yourself everything is your fault.

Oh the irony, because…

(Just not for the reasons he told me.)

It was my fault because I paid him to repeatedly assure me that if I just followed his 8 Step Pattern I would become successful. I gave him money so he could drill this into my head at every weekend extravaganza. I allowed him to convince me I needed him. Without him, I was destined to be a broke loser, working for The Man like an Egyptian Slave for 40 years.

It was my fault because I believed, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, that “The System Fails Not.”

It was my fault because I bought into the oh-so-seductive illusion that someone was going to serve me the World’s Finest Business on a silver platter. That such a business would hunt me down and find me (at age 21, no less); I wouldn’t even have to “find” it! And if I just obeyed him, hung on his every word, that I would be transported to Nirvana via Magic Carpet Ride.

I got thrown down the stairs. Over and over and over.

(For some reason I was never terribly successful convincing others how much fun I was having in those trips down the stairwell.)

(INSIDER TIP: One of the more widely-discussed tactics employed by pro copywriters is the art of telling the customer “it’s not your fault”: It’s not your fault you’re fat / out of shape / ugly / broke / unsuccessful / rotting in prison / yada yada. Sure… sometimes it’s not their fault. But seriously maybe it’s because you hung around with rage-a-holics in cheap motels. Maybe you were just being naive and gullible. Zero to $100K is for people who aren’t stupid and gullible anymore because… they finally admitted they had been stupid and gullible for way too long. And they’re ready to do something about it.)

Eventually… after enough trips to the cheap motel… I learned.

I grew up.

The Zero to $100K course is for those who are finished with the Grand Imperial Poobah and primed for adulthood. It’s for people who are tired of being gaslighted, weary of excusing empty promises. It’s also for those who are wise enough never to climb on a Harley and wrap their arms around a dangerous thug in the first place.

Zero to $100K begins with an exhaustive inventory of YOU – your skills, connections, resources, and experiences – as well as your limitations and boundaries – so you safely eliminate 90-95% of the bad roads… so you never travel ANY of them. It cements your confidence. Then provides you criteria to evaluate ANY business that anyone puts in front of you. It tells you in advance what that business is going to look like, smell like, walk like, talk like.

Then it shows you how to find businesses that meet those criteria… and ALSO have intrinsic staying power.

It shows you how to invent businesses that don’t exist yet… how to harness natural forces instead of “force fitting,” no longer fueling yourself with will power and motivation… so business effectiveness flows from your natural strength and innate competence.

Because more than likely, Grand Imperial Poobah is telling you, subtly or outright, that your natural strength and innate competence is useless. Because you need what HE is selling. You need HIM.

Zero to $100K re-shapes your perception so you can see businesses that match your criteria, so that even in the most unlikely circumstances, when the right opportunity crosses your path, you seize it immediately.

Zero to 100K will advise some: “You should build a mining operation in Australia,” and others “You should be an IT consultant specializing in redundant Linux servers.”

For still others: “You should facilitate spiritual retreats in rural Oregon.”

It dials in the perfect business for you with remarkable specificity, by asking you carefully engineered questions.

If you already have a business and it’s frustrating you, Zero to $100K will force a massive re-alignment of priorities. It will give you a clear set of criteria for what to do more of, what to start doing, and what to stop.

If you’re a freelancer cranking out gigs on Upwork or Fiverr (think “race to the bottom mosh pit”), Zero to $100K will empower you to raise your fees, deliver your finest work in the shortest time, and rapidly pinpoint your ideal clients – who ask to contract with you directly for long-term projects.

If you’re a marketing consultant, agency, webmaster or solo entrepreneur, Zero to $100K will dial in the ideal role for you and show you how to interface in a hyper-overcommunicated, NOISY world.

I was conned and bitterly disappointed for the first seven years of my entrepreneurial life. To add insult to injury, the people who were ripping me off insisted on a daily basis that my failure was MY fault… not theirs. I dragged a ball and chain of failure and SELF-CONDEMNATION behind me. That ball grew bigger every single month I didn’t achieve my goals. You could hear that thing scraping on the ground every time I took a step.

I was PROFOUNDLY ASHAMED at how little money I was making. Knowing how hard I’d worked and how long I’d been toiling away, I could barely confess the size of my checks even to myself. I dreaded the end of every month because it always signaled that I’d failed to reach my goals. I hated filing my tax returns because I wondered how long I could do this before the IRS declared it a hobby. I constructed all manner of clever comebacks to deflect the most terrifying question anyone could ask me:

“Perry, how much money are you making?”

Meanwhile, our credit card balances grew larger and larger. Laura became extremely adept at shuffling the bills.

Sometimes when I was driving in my car, a little voice would whisper inside my head:

I would never inflict this on anyone.

I would quickly shove that voice into a dark closet and slide in another motivational tape. I would then arrive at my next “let’s meet for a cup of coffee” and attempt to transfer my ball and chain to yet another unsuspecting MARK.

I nearly gave myself a nervous breakdown. My wife Laura was exhausted from my endless cycle of idealization – frustration – demoralization, only to lapse into a new cycle of idealization after the very next seminar, where I got pumped up about another version of what already hadn’t worked before.

My story is an MLM Pink Koolaid story. But all the other versions are eerily similar. Real estate – direct sales – affiliate marketing – day trading – licenses – crypto – become-a-social-media-influencer – you name it.

Even climbing the corporate ladder involves a lot of hypnosis and self-deception. They all have the Bad Biker Boyfriend telling them they’d be faithful if they were a little prettier, a little sweeter, put out a little more.

“Joe, if you just had better numbers, more hours in the office, less time off, more pitches you’d be in the C Suite, have my job, make 20k more, have more bandwidth, be able to afford a bigger house. You’re so close. Just give us a little more.”

By taking this course, you will shave YEARS of bitter heartache and struggle off your journey. It will dramatically reduce the risk that you have to go back and ask for your old job back after you boldly ventured out on your own.

If you are already successful… already doing well… but looking to…

• Pivot
• Make a major change
• Foray into a new market
• Start a 2nd or 3rd business
• Buy a business
• Find a greener pasture that is really greener

…and especially if you’re a serial entrepreneur, Zero to $100K will eliminate months, even years of waste, frustration and anguish.

Zero to 100K is NOT FOR YOU IF you are already in a perfectly viable and profitable business and you know you need to just stay in your lane, ignore bright shiny objects, and grow it. Even if you’re only taking home $25K a year, Zero to $100K is not the course to help you market and scale that biz. If this is you, take 80/20 Masterclass instead.

Zero to 100K is for people who suspect or know they’re in the wrong business, are gearing up for a major change; are serial entrepreneurs; or are in circumstances that constantly bring about new opportunities which too often lead to unproductive rabbit trails and failed ventures.

Speak with our sales advisors who will help you determine exactly what you need right now.

Call Tiffany at +1.773.999.3329 or Cuyler at +1.708.552.3074.

I had a client who built a company, sold it for $10 million. That one move made him wealthy, no longer needing to work. But he still had many ambitions. He didn’t want to ride into the sunset. He sputtered around for a year attempting new projects that didn’t work. He began to question his manhood, wondering if he still had the “magic sauce.” He descended into a depression as frustration and self-doubt engulfed his soul. 

The day he decided to put his company up for sale, Zero to $100k was for him.

I’ve witnessed countless entrepreneurs lay their foundations improperly… then spend years paying compound interest on bad decisions. I’ve seen others, like Mark McShurley of Roof Simple, who resolved to do it right (he quit his job selling ads in church bulletins and spent weeks in the coffee shop architecting his plan!) and grew from $600K to over $10 million in five years.

YOU WILL DISCOVER HOW TO:

• Find businesses that are easy for you and hard for everybody else
• Take advantage of hot markets, hot trends and hot media
• Carve out a niche where you can be the undisputed #1
• Sell the way YOU naturally sell, to people you enjoy selling to
• Make maximum use of WHO and WHAT you know
• Locate blueprints and templates that shortcut the mundane
• Capitalize on your background and experiences (instead of throwing them away!)
• Propel yourself into new exciting adventures that competitors are ill equipped to replicate

As you go through the Zero to $100K process you will find that the answers are right under your nose. Your ideal business is much closer to you than you thought. It is within your reach.

(Instead of chasing it like a babe in a pink bikini on South Padre Island)

Bizop is marketers’ insider lingo for “Business Opportunities.” It is widely known to be a “hot responsive market” with “rabid, addicted customers who buy everything you sell.” Much like golfers. Or frustrated dentists having a midlife crisis, searching desperately for tricks to “retire early.”

Crack-addict buyers if you can get ‘em.

Get rich in real estate is bizop; affiliate marketing is bizop; MLM is bizop; “start your own digital agency” is bizop; franchising is big-ticket bizop; in the last few years fads like cryptocurrency also became bizop.

Literally millions of business opportunities are real. Of course they are! But the marketing profession has learned the magic words that sell empty shells to beginners and exploits those buzz phrases for all they’re worth.

ANY time you hear ANY of the following phrases in a bizop pitch…

Anybody Can Do It

Walk Away Income

Residual Income

Turn Key System

“This business has created more millionaires than…”

“The biggest opportunity on the internet right now is…”

“This is the greatest business in the world today”

The System Fails Not

Stop trading hours for dollars

Duplication

You are just one recruit / sales funnel / sales letter / etc away from getting everything you want

All you need to do is drive traffic, we handle the rest

…you need to RUN RUN RUN the other way, as fast as your little legs can carry you.

All are slogans designed to ensnare the naive… like bass fishermen know which lures catch the 20 pounders.

All these slogans are code for something else!

“Anybody can do it” is code for “Almost nobody can do it.” “And since there’s no way to tell which ONE of these 10,000 people possesses Elusive Pixie Dust Magic, we pitch this thang to anyone who can fog a mirror, whether they belong here or not. We make ‘em ALL salivate, then let the School Of Hard Knocks sort ‘em out.”

(If anyone could do it, it would pay $17/hour.)

“Walk Away Income” is code for “You will be chained to this thing for 12 years without so much as a one-week vacation. And if you ever step away, the boulder you’ve been rolling up the hill will have rolled back to the bottom by Friday afternoon.”

“Residual Income” is code for “Earn 12 cents a day for the rest of your life, or until headquarters files for bankruptcy.”

“Duplication” is code for “37,000 other people selling the exact same thing as you and competing directly with you, while holding hands and pretending to be brothers and sisters, as they sing God Bless America.”

“All you need is traffic, we take care of the rest” is code for “We couldn’t quite figure out the traffic part, so we’re going to let security guards and housewives do it for us. We’ll coach them to max out their credit cards and empty their 401Ks.”

The bizarre part is that most of these Vaunted Ideals do exist in some form or fashion. Most point to valid concepts. It’s just that 90-97% of the time, when these phrases are used in bizop sales pitches, they are cons.

So the first thing you need is inoculation against bizop pink koolaid.

Then, after that, you need to understand how to apply the above concepts in an achievable manner to a business that has a low barrier of entry FOR YOU and a high barrier of entry FOR EVERYBODY ELSE.

Once after I held a major seminar, John Paul Mendocha said to me, “Most of your people have something very interesting in common. They’ve been through not one but two failure cycles. They were in a real estate deal and wasted a year of their life in that. Then some marketing guru sold them more magic beans. They thought they were going to be Jack and the Beanstalk. But THIS TIME THEY’RE READY TO BECOME A SERIOUS STUDENT.”

And yes, there is a “rose-colored sunglasses” death trap that 80% of wanna-be entrepreneurs never crawl out of. I can’t help those who are still committed to that merry-go-round. I can only help you if you are done with that, thank you very much.

If you’re finished with that… if you desire to sidestep it entirely… or, if you are successful and want to reinvent yourself without journeying through a Valley Of Fire… then enroll in Zero to $100K and you’ll accrue a formidable set of advantages in weeks.

The minute you sign up you will immediately receive a series of self-assessment assignments.

The genesis of this was when a friend of mine was a #2 in a company. She had a desirable and fulfilling job. 15 years into that position, she returned from vacation to find she’d been ousted. While she was sipping ice tea at the beach, a firestorm of office politics ensued. A rival persuaded the board to terminate her.

He appointed himself CEO.

POOF – her job no longer existed. She was past age 50. A comparable position would easily take a year to find and require an out-of-state move.

She emailed me: “I’m living on severance and the clock is ticking. Perry, how can I reinvent myself fast?”

She did not possess any of the marketing chops many of us take for granted. She was not remotely in “Planet Perry.” I couldn’t toss her a bone like “Manage Facebook accounts.” I had to offer her a strategy that would work for her so I worked up a series of questions and gave her an outline.

She did land on her feet, and is doing incredibly fulfilling work that exactly matches her entrepreneurial DNA. Her husband, who was in the same situation as her (they were minority shareholders in that business) is similarly well situated now as a serial entrepreneur. The guy who ousted him had told him he was a weak leader. But he has since completed three Iron Man competitions. Today he has no lack of confidence in his leadership chops.