Perry Marshall’s Wisdom, Part 1: Notes and a Personal Collection
Perry Marshall has reshaped the way I approach business. Lots of people preach thinking outside the box, but Perry demonstrates that the box is an illusion altogether — what counts is finding problems worth solving, earning equity in a business, and converting that into market dominance. His Rosetta Stone sales letter deserves a careful read, particularly the part about the equity strategist (and yes, I know John writes most of his copy). The end goal, in Felix Dennis’s words, is Ownership, Ownership, Ownership.
Take Perry’s ideas to heart and ask yourself how you can own a market, a business, or a niche — or even gain equity in an exceptional company. A few of these notes are scattered and read almost like stream of consciousness. Don’t let that discourage you.
Which “ordinary” asset do you already own that is really extraordinary? Answer that, and tacking a few zeros onto your income may be far more achievable than it seems. These days, what you decide to ignore matters more to your success than what you focus on.
Books Worth Reading Five Times
Perry’s short list of books he’s read five times over: Proverbs, The Star Principle, Koch’s Simplify, Magnetic Marketing, and 21st Century Evolution by Shapiro.
My own five-time reads: 80/20 Sales and Marketing, Scientific Advertising, and The Art of Learning. So here’s a simple question for you: which books have you gone back to five times?
The Most Powerful Money-Making Question
“What assumptions am I making that I don’t even realize I’m making?” And: which rules am I following blindly that someone ought to break?
I remember Dan Kennedy noting that a person could nearly dominate a market just by listing all its sacred cows and then doing the opposite. There’s a lesson there. If you want an interesting story, dig for the truth.
Nearly every business problem boils down to working on the wrong side of the 80/20 equation — and the opposite holds true as well.
The 80/20 of a Market
Of 100 businesses, about 20 are winners, 4 are game changers, and 1 is a juggernaut. What I eventually understood is that everything in marketing and business — every good piece of advice and every best practice — has an 80/20 explanation for why it works. It became my ultimate simplifier. Whenever I got stuck, there was nearly always an 80/20 answer to the question I was asking. For the next five years I baked 80/20 into everything I did.
As the AES interview put it: AdWords tigers are the last to starve in the jungle.
My take: learn media buying. Get specialized in Google Ads or the GDN. Leadshook is a solid starting point. Most gurus quietly borrow from Justin — he’s your favorite guru’s favorite guru, and he put retargeting on the map in direct-response online marketing. You have to be relentlessly, ruthlessly selective with your time and with how you consume information.
Remove Yourself From the Business
The goal: gradually remove yourself from your business until it’s worth more without you than with you. Every major project you begin from now on must not have you at the center. Put another way, project minus you must be more valuable than project plus you once it’s finished. That’s your new rule — no breaking it, cheating on it, postponing it, or rationalizing it.
My insight: don’t mistake activity for accomplishment. Almost everyone has at least one passion where they’ll gladly spend irrational amounts of money. And the things holding you back in business are the same things holding you back in the rest of your life.
Good marketing isn’t sleight of hand. Good marketing backs up truth with persuasive proof. Say it louder for the blackhats, cloakers, and account farmers in the back. #cloakgang
Be a Big Fish in a Little Pond
You can’t be any kind of fish in a puddle. Many markets and passions have no money in them — just because something interests you doesn’t mean it can be profitable. Here’s a 30-second, oversimplified sanity check: how many Google advertisers are there? I typed in “sociology” and found zero. Not promising. “Drumming” returned 6 advertisers with 5–10 cent clicks — hardly better. A market with $1–10 per click and 50+ advertisers, on the other hand, means there’s plenty of money for a shrewd marketer to capture.
Sell results, never air — paraphrasing Perry Marshall.
To wrap up this section, as both Perry Marshall and Jay Abraham say, innovation rarely comes from inside an industry. So:
- Adopt successful practices, strategies, and tactics from one industry and bring them into yours.
- Find someone in the corporate world and apply some of what they do to your business.
Combine two or more separate ideas and you might end up with a star business. Let’s dig deeper.
Stop “Optimizing” Your Web Pages — Optimize This Instead
You don’t win by optimizing web pages. You optimize thought sequences through the lizard brain. It cares about:
- Contrast: how is this different from anything I’ve seen before?
- Color: does this make me sad, mad, happy, joyful, sorrowful, regretful?
- Dimension: where does the relative size of elements steer my attention?
- Movement: what’s next? And next? And next? Is it in the right order?
- Separation: how do you use space?
- Eye tracking: what do your eyes see in 0.4 seconds? What message sails instantly and imperceptibly past consciousness into the deep recesses of your being, bypassing all rational thought?
Double your bid prices and you 4x your traffic. Your landing page isn’t just a bottleneck — it’s a compound-interest lever.
Perry’s Review of Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Manager
“What is scarce is rewarded. Hard work is not scarce. Long hours, sadly, are commonplace. Loyalty to an organization is neither scarce nor, regrettably, reciprocated. Business school degrees are almost ubiquitous. The tools of analysis — spreadsheets, discounted cash flows, snazzy presentations — are available to all. Even money is not really rare anymore. Everything is a commodity. Everything except individual inspiration and innovation.” — Richard Koch
Becoming a marketing master means constantly sharpening your USP — your Unique Selling Proposition. Constantly. Not just for your product, but for your company and, above all, yourself. It never stops, not even for a single day.
The only way to be the one is to focus on the 1% of tasks you do better than nearly anyone else, and build a team where the same holds true for every single member. One thing is in short supply: people who have fully developed and expressed their God-given USP. The great news is there can never be too many.
My insight: The 80/20 Manager is a great book if you lead a team, run a company, or want to work less by applying 80/20 at work.
Perry’s webinar with Adam Libman: #1 Effort does not equal reward. #3 Wealth through equity — how the rich get rich. Get equity, not cash — Warren Buffett.
The Star Principle by Richard Koch
Pick up The Star Principle book by Richard Koch. Here are the three 80/20 takeaways from the book:
- Only invest in a company in a market growing by 10% or more per year.
- Only invest in the #1 company in that market — the #1 company has a much bigger advantage than most realize.
- If you aren’t #1, redefine your niche or carve out a niche within the niche where you are #1 (invent a new category).
My insight: I feel sorry for the skimmers. The Star Principle is golden. You can apply it to picking affiliate offers in a vertical, to dating, and even to choosing a market to enter in different ways — consulting, building an agency, and more. If it’s a growing market and you find a niche within the niche where there’s demand, camp out there, because you have a much better chance of success with less effort.
A star business is the #1 business in a niche where market growth is 10% or more per year. “Once you’re in the lead, it’s easy to maintain the lead.” This can work in an emerging market with no clear leader as well.
Keep Exploring
Keep going with more of my notes and resources:
These notes are meant to be revisited, not skimmed once. Pick one idea — owning a market, removing yourself from the business, or optimizing the thought sequence on your landing page — and put it to work this week. Then come back for the next part of the collection.