Transcription
In this video, I want to talk to you about a time where I completely bombed a stage presentation. One of the most important lessons that I've learned from it has made me a lot of money since then, um, and has protected my reputation and gotten me a lot of goodwill. So, if you've ever like not known what to do or what to offer people, or, hey, should I try and use this as an opportunity to build goodwill or forge a relationship, or should I try and, you know, sell something or get a margin on this, I want to tell you a couple different stories that kind of all illustrate the same point that I've learned over the last few years. All right. And so, um, one of my favorite, uh, kind of like bullets on this that you can you can write downer is, uh, no half measures. Right. Uh, either sell or don't sell, but don't be in between.
And so the first time that this kind of happened for me was I was uh asked to speak at this kind of high-level uh mastermind, which happens relatively frequently, um, but this one in particular was a it was a fitness-related one. Um, and uh, for me, when I have presentations and stuff, I usually spend a long time preparing. Sometimes I'll make a product; actually, that was the only time I made a product, but I spent a long time on the presentation, so it's usually a big deal for me to say yes because it's like I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to do a lot of work on my side. Um, and so anyways, I had this uh this this this presentation in this pitch that I had made for a product that we had made specifically for this audience. And when I got there, they had given me a three-hour time slot. All right, which is insane. And I think part of that was because they just wanted to have me talk as long as possible, you know, for their audience because they thought it would be valuable. And so, for whatever reason, I agreed. Um, and the thing is is like you can't pitch for three hours, or maybe you can, but you can't straight pitch for three hours, right? And so what I decided to do is just provide, you know, a lot of value. You know, near the end, after two and a half hours, I was like, I'll just kind of mention what we have going on, right?
And so I get up there. First off, uh, the the audience size is one-third of what was what I was told, so I was like, okay, that's a little bit different and disheartening. I go and I, you know, piece by piece, I'm doing Q&A with the audience, all that kind of stuff, right? And so as we transition, um, or as we as I transition to the pitch part, right, I uh I pull up the the slide deck that's normally a, you know, a 90-minute slide presentation um with a pitch and an offer and everything, and I went through it and I was like, yeah, yeah, we talked about this, and I'm going through the slides, right, like like super fast, just being like, yep, and this you guys don't need me to tell you the story, right? You should understand this, boom boom boom. And then at the very end, I I basically make the pitch, right, without any kind of pre-frame, and I go through it just like really fast and kind of half-assed, and um I bombed. It was horrendous. It was horrible because I had so much speaking time; they didn't take me off stage because I still had like time left. And so I'm sitting there on stage having made the offer; no one's moved, and then people were and then all of a sudden, a hand starts racing from the audience with with questions. And I had never sold anything that was cheap in my life, so this was a two-thousand-dollar thing. It was literally the first time in my entire life at first on anything below 16,000, um, you know, which is which was, you know, for our into the fitness space, right? I thought this was like a no-brainer; it's two grand; either, I mean, just buy it and then make a ton more money because it's it's stupid, right? I started having people be like, hey, can I can I do a payment plan on the two thousand dollars? I remember being like, if you need a payment plan, then uh don't buy it, and next question. And someone's like, I feel like um, you know, the supplements that you have are against my my goodwill because we I only promote vegan things, and I was like, cool, then don't buy it. And this is how the questions start unrolling like this vibe, this toad, right? And you could just watch the plane just going towards the ground on fire, burning, right? I do this for like 30 more minutes, all right, of Q&A of me just getting increasingly annoyed because, hey, there's only like 30 people there, which there was supposed to be a lot more than that, anyways.
And so I remember the feeling I had afterwards, which was just like anger and embarrassment and just like, you know, humiliation, all of those, you know, at once. And mind you, like at the time, and this is then, right, we were doing about four million a month, all right? And so when I had some people were like, well, how do we know it's gonna like gonna work for a fitness house like I have 4,000 freaking locations here like that use this licensing model; I paired it down just for you guys so that you can use the materials at a at one-eighth the price; this is not a discussion, right? So anyways, I remember sitting there and in the pain of the moment and the humiliation, I was like, what am I going to learn from this? Which may be in and of itself something that you might be able to take with you, but like whenever you have those like super emotional moments, right, I know from my conversations with Dr. Cashy that when you have extreme emotions, you're actually in in hyper-learning mode. PTSD is where you're basically you turn your brain on and it goes into hyper-learning mode because there's trauma that is going around you, right? And or, you know, there's it's a traumatic experience, which just means super heightened emotions. And so what happens is your brain says, learn from this, right? And then it starts ingraining these things so that when you hear loud noises, then you get amped and then etc., right? And so it's the same kind of thing. So if you have these emotional moments, this is for me, this is what I do is I try and think like, what am I going to try and ingrain in my brain right now because I have an opportunity to hyper-learn something in these moments. And so the lesson I learned, and I'll tell you another story in a second that really drove this home: no half measures; either pitch or don't pitch. All right. So if you go into a business meeting or you go to a conference or you go to a whatever, right, either ask hard or do not ask at all; there is no half-assed asking. All right. And this is a lesson that I have learned hard. I actually had one of my uh one of my exacts; he ended up pitching this is, you know, now that we've moved ourselves out of that business and now we're just on top of it; one of the the execs in my gym business, he half-pitched something to our audience; he like half-pitches like, you guys don't need me to do the scarcity thing, right? You guys don't need me to do these guarantees, right? You don't need me to do these actually these bonuses, right? And I was like, what are you doing? I remember because the I was like, that is how you pitch; you're saying that they don't need all the things that persuade them. He's like, well, they know because we teach them how to do this stuff. And I was like, yeah, but like people still need it to make decisions. And so he bombed that, and he learned the lesson himself. So my goal is that you don't have to bomb it uh to learn the lesson, right? And so let me tell you the upside of this; here's the flip side, right?
So I talked about just now how you can how like no half measures; either pitch or don't pitch, right? Don't go in the middle. I think one of the one of the things that's difficult for entrepreneurs is to know when to make the ask, right? So it's like, okay, well, if I'm either going all in or all out, well, then how do I know when to do which, right? And I would say that most times I have been better served in my life by holding back my ask. And what I mean by that, and this is like a super life hack, so for those of you who are who are who are perseverant and focused on what I'm saying right now, then take this in: if you get to a point of goodwill, if you keep giving and keep giving and keep giving, you don't need to ask ever; you will just get. So there's there's the commonly, you know, told like, you know, uh, jab jab jab, right hook, right? Give give give ask, right? But I will I would postulate that there is another one that is even more powerful, which is give give give give give give give give get give give give give get give give get, right? Is that people will just start handing things to you because humans are reciprocal in nature; they believe that if they are getting something at a certain point, they must reciprocate somehow, which is why the spammers who copy my name on this channel do so well with my channel because I don't ask for anything from Mosey Nation. So, by the way, just another disclaimer, I will not DM you or put you on WhatsApp and ask you for cab fare or ask you to buy something; everything that I have is free here, so just FYI, just as a reminder to everybody. And a lot of the best things that I've had happen in my life have come from goodwill. And so I think the biggest difference between big business owners and small business owners is that they do not understand and apply the concept of goodwill, right? And I'll do an entire thing on goodwill next time because it's a deep topic that I love talking about, but right now in your business, you have the opportunity to provide things for your audience, and if you can continue to provide them and have the patience to wait for the ask, you can actually make significantly more money. All right. And so the thing is is if you're going to make the ask, which means if you're going to withdraw from your your relational capital, right, the goodwill that you have in your audience, if you're going to make the withdrawal, then ask and ask hard and mean it; it's not the time to make it a nickel here, a nickel there, a nickel there, right? It's so much better to just keep investing, keep over-delivering, and then when you ask, make it known that you are asking. And that is one of the biggest lessons that I have learned over time in business for me is that it is so much better to give and keep giving and keep giving, and oftentimes you will get. And if you pitch, which you if like the idea is to ideally never even have to because you should be getting so much, but if you if you must pitch, then pitch like you mean it, right? And don't have assets. So anyways, that was a story of my bombing; I hope you uh found some humor in that uh for my humiliation. Um, Mosey Nation, love you all. Uh, my name is Oxford Mosey; I have I I own acquisition.com, which is a portfolio of companies, so if you enjoyed this, hit the subscribe button, and I will see you guys in the next video. A lot of people are broke, and I don't want you to be one of them, which is why I make this channel. Keeping awesome; lots of love; bye.