579 – Keeping stuff can be a good thing: Tom talks Business Hoarding

Episode 579 – Business Hoarding
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 579 of Screw the Commute podcast. Going to talk about business hoarding, and I'm probably going to get some flack for the ideas I present in this episode on the value of business hoarding. But I'm used to getting flack. I mean, I'm so used to seeing these people that are broke telling you, Oh, gee, you know, you should clean out your total email and you should do all this stuff and you just throw away things and everything. Get the clutter out of your life. I mean, I got emails back from 1910. I mean, and occasionally I'll need one of them that I couldn't have if I threw it away, I'd have been screwed over. So no, I don't believe in that. And everybody does their own thing the way they do it. But I'll tell you what, I'm kind of known as a packrat. Now, I decided to look up the definition of packrat. It's a rat like rodent. I guess that describes me that accumulates a mound of sticks and debris in the nest hole and is native to North and Central America. And then. And then the secondary definition is a person who saves unnecessary objects or hoards things. Well, here's what I have to say.

[00:01:55] Screw you, Oxford dictionary people. I probably made more money than. I don't know. Three of your top executives all put together. So anyway, in today's episode, I'm going to combine my experience with things that I learned from others by showing you about business hoarding and and also just because you hoard a bunch of business material. You know, I actually did this stuff and proved it. It works before I reported about it. I just didn't report about it. Like a lot of these people teach in pro speaking, which is what I'm going to concentrate on today, because that's my best example of this hoarding. Can I get people that, you know, that didn't make 10% of the money I've made speaking and they're telling you how to be a pro speaker, you know, so. So I believe in doing this stuff before you actually teach it or sell products or do things with it. But the material given to you from all these sources can just be massively powerful for you. And I'll give you exact examples of this as we go. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 578 That was Magic Mike. And that's not Mickey, it's Missy, which is abbreviation for Microphone. This is a guy out of Singapore who produced over 1500 podcasts. Now Singapore, I just love. It's the cleanest place I have ever been in. I don't think they hoard things down there.

[00:03:25] And what was cool water means money to them. And so I got my picture taken in front of the largest fountain in the world. So that was a lot of fun. Anyway, that was episode 578, and any time you want to get to a back episode, you just put in the episode number after screwthecommute.com, slash and then that would be 578.

[00:03:48] All right, let's get into business hoarding. Well. What I do and what I did was I collected all the things on a specific topic, which in my case was. Public speaking and professional speaking. I mean, When I lived in Maryland. I rode my bicycle to all the the used bookstores. And I'd have bags of books hanging off my handlebars, getting home. And then then I would read them carefully and take notes to them and underlying them and make all the find all the cool tips and tricks from, you know, back 100 years even. I cut out magazine articles and cartoons. Now you've got to be careful with cartoons. You can't really. Project them in a paid speech because that would be copyright infringement. But here's the thing. You can recite them. You can just tell what you saw, and there's no trouble with that. For, for instance, I saw this cartoon with Superman and he was he was in bed with this girl and the girl was all distraught and she's crying and, you know, really upset.

[00:04:59] And the caption was, I can't help it. I'm faster than a speeding bullet. So. So I use that one a lot. But, you know, there's no copyright trouble with that one. But anyway, I collected cartoons, articles, magazine articles, everything I could find on public speaking. Now, what this does is it gives you ideas for other products and services that you could create from all this hoarded knowledge that you gained. So one of the things and these aren't in any particular order, but one of the things was how to make a fortune. Speaking at fundraisers, if you want to get a copy of this, you can go to screwthecommute.com/fundraiserdeal. It's only 97 bucks and you could make a whole career out of what I teach you there. And this. This came about and that. I kind of invented this because, I mean, people for ages have been speaking at fundraisers, but most of them are just trying to I mean, they're doing good for the group, of course, but they're hoping that somebody in the crowd sees them and hires them. No, that's not the way I do fundraisers and I've done over 100 of them. And when I go, I make money and they make money. We split the money from the proceeds. And I kind of invented this whole system on how to do this and and where to do it and how to get meeting rooms for free and all this stuff.

[00:06:30] I mean, I've saved groups from going bankrupt. I mean, I built playgrounds and things. And and there's another interesting thing. I've spoken at places where they have a mandate, where they only have a speaker one time. The speaker is not allowed to come back. I spoke there three times. See when you're making money for the group. I mean, a lot of the rules kind of go out the window, right? So you could make a whole career out of just this one idea. So that was how to make a fortune speaking at fundraisers. And also the way I sell it when you go to a fundraiser deal, it's just the way that the to pay. There's no sales letter there. I sold this through a webinar, a free webinar, which you're welcome to watch it. TomAntionwebinars.com. But anyway, it was a spin off of all this immersing my mind and surrounding myself with hoarded products that had something to do with public speaking. Not necessarily product could be articles or like I said, cartoons or whatever. So then I started thinking, all right, what else is speaking related that people need help with and not necessarily pro speakers. I thought, you know, the pro speaker market is relatively small, but there's millions and gazillions of people out there that have to speak sometimes.

[00:07:59] And one of the things I came up with is eulogies. They have to speak at eulogies. And these are people that are not pro speakers. Probably they don't want to speak. They don't have anything to do with it, but they have to do it or they want to do it for their dearly departed. So I came up with the book instanteulogy.com and I found all the simple techniques that you can use to speak when you're not practiced at it. And I made a template that they could just fill in the blanks with nice quotes and, and sayings that I also put in the book from my quotation books, you know, so just beautiful thing. And it sold 42,000 a year for nine years straight, that book. And then I thought, well what, what other places are similar to that that unfortunately people didn't die but or fortunately people didn't die. And I came up with wedding toasts and wedding speeches. And sure enough, I went to my horde and there was all kinds of information on toasts and and speeches, and I just applied it to weddings. And those two books sold 72,000 a year for nine years straight. So. You know, all came from the hoard. It would have been way more difficult for me to create those books had I not had this big library of information, some on my computer. And most of it were books that I had gotten on public.

[00:09:36] I have several hundred books on public speaking. If you come here to my retreat center, you'll see the section. I have three libraries in the retreat center and you'll see the section on public speaking is just enormous. Then I came up with something that wasn't related to the weddings. I mean, excuse me. It was related to the weddings, but it had nothing to do with public speaking. So I spun off a book called Wedding Receptions. And you know what? It didn't sell that well because there's just a million magazines on weddings and stuff. So what did I do? I split it up into a bunch of wedding reception tips, made a wedding reception website for almost nothing, and put Google AdSense in there to get some revenue out of that book. So it didn't sell anywhere near the other ones, but it still brought in money and it costs nothing to develop. It was just a spin off of the wedding toasts and wedding speeches, and the wedding reception site sold helped sell the wedding toast and wedding speech books. So it's all kind of interrelated. Then I thought, you know, let's go deeper into this. And so I said, you know, there has been a lot of great famous speeches in the world. So I came up with world's greatest speeches, and I just collected a lot of these kind of public domain speeches from way back, even Patrick Henry and, you know, all these people.

[00:11:09] And I put them on. There was so many of them. I had four volumes and I sold them. Volume one, volume to volume three. Volume four. Or you could buy the whole set. So did that for years and years and years. And then, you know, people were bugging me for more more of me and, you know, personal training. So I came up with a speaker mentor program. And so that's very popular. But one of the biggest moneymakers was the you know, after I had done and gathered all this information and I, I, you know, used it on stage. I mean, you know, now 3000 more than 3000 speeches. I lost track years ago. I created the Wake Them Up video professional speaking system, and this was like a compilation of product. So it was it was a seminar. I did an all day seminar, broken up into videos on DVDs. And the Wake Him Up book, which is it's kind of the classic of this is what I started with and colleges have used it in their classrooms and things like that, and it still sells to this day. And I threw in some consultations with it. And that sold $30,000 a month for years. It was about a $1,000 system nowadays. We're going to be taking it off DVD and putting it on just digital and bring the price down for people.

[00:12:35] But still, it's been selling for years and it's what we call evergreen product because it doesn't change as much as the Internet stuff. Some of the things techniques I use I've been using since my speaking career started. An entertainment career started in 1988. Same technique. But people are still rolling in the aisles, laughing and crying from stories and, you know, doing all this stuff. Hopefully not crying because I suck so bad onstage. So then I came from an entertainment background and it was really funny. I did over 1000 comic presentations in my entertainment company. I wrote custom humor, pretty much a professional comedian. So people want to know, how can I be more funny? So I came up with the Make Them Laugh system and that was an audio that's been selling 28 years. I created a 28 years ago and it's before the internet. Well. Hey, I must be. I forgot. It's about 30 years ago I created. But the techniques are all is still the same to make people laugh. People are people. They have to be more careful now to be politically correct. But still, the same things make people laugh as they did 100 years ago. Are the same techniques, I should say. So that was the audio. So then a couple of years ago, I brought it out on video because I did a webinar on it and and I wanted people to be able to see the visual parts of the humor.

[00:14:10] So then that is a webinar that sells called To Make Them Laugh webinar. So folks, you see all these things came from me hoarding public speaking, living it, doing it, actually doing it so I'm credible. And all these products and services and millions and millions and millions of dollars of revenue came in from hoarding. So when people tell you to throw stuff out. Right. Just think about that before you toss it in the garbage or, you know, delete it from your computer. Then I thought, well, how can I get some recurring revenue from this and cater to to folks that can't afford my bigger stuff. So I came up with amazing public speaking membership site. It has over 475 short video clips from all aspects of public and professional speaking. It's $97 a year and $13,000 came in the first day it opened. All right. Because, you know, the people that couldn't buy all my bigger stuff were able to get access to that. And there was no consultations involved. I just loaded all the stuff up literally other than keep maintaining the site, you know, for security, things haven't touched it in. I don't know how many years. I mean, long time, right. So this is again, back from the hoarding. This is all this material put out in different products and services and ideas that I got from hoarding all this stuff.

[00:15:47] Then I thought, how can people really get some hands on training people that are really serious pro speakers that really want to see how it's done at the highest levels. And when I say highest levels, there's not many people that aren't like super celebrities. That have made as much money speaking as I have because. I really got it down and I act like a pro. I mean, you can look at my how to maximize the value of any speaking engagement. That's a Tom Antion webinars. You'll see all the little intricate things that I do so that when I hit that stage, it looks smooth. It looks, you know, I'm like, right there with you. It's funny, it's serious, it's a good information. And then people buy my mentor program, which is big money stuff. But anyway, so people were wanting really a lot of very serious speakers wanted that. They wanted to be able to see that, how that worked and get on the inside and they had enough money to pay for it. So I created what we call pro speaker junkets, and that's where people would go to one of my speaking engagements and shadow me. And if our travel could line up, I flew with the person and train them what to do to prepare on the way. And when we got to the hotel, I showed them how to get my handouts made locally and how I check all my products that were shipped in advance and how I check the meeting room well in advance.

[00:17:21] And I mean just everything that I do before I hit the stage to hit a home run presentation every single time, how I set up my table in the booth or if they have a trade show. And and if I could, I get them on stage for a couple of minutes, even just to interview them a little better, ask them a few questions. And then we traveled home and I debriefed them and showed them the follow ups. So. So you see, all of this stuff came from business hoarding. All right. So. I immersed myself in public speaking related stuff and and also that includes speeches in the news. I forgot to mention that if I saw something on television that they mentioned so, so and so spoke at this college and this was really great. And I, you know, try to go get it on YouTube and see what they said and techniques that they used and put it in my hoard. I was even asked to critique the president on MSNBC on his speech to Congress. All right. So this is what can happen to you if you business hoard, grab everything you can on your topic. And I mean, you you refer to things that you've seen in your books, even if you don't believe them.

[00:18:42] I have a student now that said, well, why should I do you know, look at these other people in their books. Well, because you can mention their book that makes you look more credible and more learn it on your topic and then say what you agree with or don't disagree with. And if they're a big celebrity, then you kind of ties a little you know, you can piggyback off of their celebrity a little bit. So anyway, that's business hoarding. So, hey, if you want to be like me and hoard everything and when you see my retreat center, you'll see, Oh, he's a hoarder, that's for sure. But anyway, if you want to see my retreat center, join my mentor program. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique program ever on Internet and digital marketing. Didn't talk much about that today, because I really that's one thing about the public speaking. Everybody hates public speaking. A lot of people teaching how to make money stuff, which is what I do now. In addition to the teaching, the public speaking came from the hardest sell on earth. So, you know, I made a fortune on selling public speaking and professional speaking related stuff, but everybody hates it. It's a tiny market and I was still able to do it, which is adds to my credibility on, Hey, if you can sell the hardest stuff on Earth, easier stuff to sell, he should be able to teach me.

[00:20:09] So that's the way you have to think about this. I mean, I come from credibility and I teach that to my students. You have to be credible to make the largest amounts of money. I mean, you can be a rip off, but I mean, you'll eventually get torn, taken down or arrested or something or word will spread. What a piece of crap you are. But if you can build this credibility, hoarding will help you do it. And I will help you make an online business. It'll just be fantastic for you and your family. Teach you how to create passive income. You have all these unique features. You get time in my TV studio where we shoot videos for you and do all the editing and graphics for you. And you have an immersion weekend here at the retreat center where you actually live in the house that'll be opening up as I don't know exactly when, because this pandemic stuff is driving everybody crazy. But still, most people don't come for at least four months after they join the program because I don't want them here deer in the headlights the whole time. So we start training you immediately when you join. So check out the details. That's greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I think I'm going to go hoard some stuff. Yeah, that's what I'm going to do. Catch you later.