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What is one of the most important success principles?

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The most important success principle for me has always been to say what I mean and mean what I say. It’s very important to come from a position of honesty and integrity and to do things that not only create value for you, but also for those around you. You don’t go into it dependent on the outcome, whether it will be reciprocated or not. If the value is reciprocated, they are the type of person you want to work with. If the value is not reciprocated, you have saved yourself months of time dealing with someone you don’t want to work with. You give up a little bit upfront, but that just comes with honesty and integrity and knowing that you’re creating value for those around you.

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Do you have a value-offer model for some of our business owners who are listening today? Any suggestions for those people who have been offering something that isn’t working, that’s not getting them the leads they were hoping for?

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There’s no specific “X plus Y equals Z” formula for this. For us, we have free intro seminars, which are a sales tool, but our clients get the value of three to four hours of class. They learn in our selling arena. There’s a lot that they can take out of that. We give them a preview of what we’re going to teach. In order for you to give the value upfront, you have to have a product or program that you really believe in. Then you can stand behind it 110 percent because, in order to be convincing, you have to be convinced. Once you’re convinced, you can sit there and be as high pressure as you want because you believe in it. If you’re making logical sense and it’s something that is genuinely going to help the person you’re standing in front of, then you’re on the right path. So for the business owners, I think you just have to tip that value scale so it’s a no-brainer. You want to give them $1,000 worth of value for only a dollar.

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Sign me up! The interesting thing, and where we seem to be moving, is that you just can’t have that me-too product or service anymore. You have to offer something that you know is unique. You create something that you know stands out because you designed it to capitalize on your own strengths and the needs of the people you’re serving. So you are convinced it’s the best thing out there.

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Let’s go way back, before The Art of Charm was this huge, international service that it is. You guys were just starting out. You didn’t have all these products and freebies that you could offer. How did you offer value then?

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We always had the advantage of our intellectual property, which was the curriculum that was created. Nowadays, what’s going to sell the best is a knowledge-based product. Something that you can give the knowledge away for free. That’s what blogs and all these web sites online are for. People are visiting them for the content – to be entertained or to learn. Lucky for us, we had something we could teach people. Even to this day, our web team worked on barter. Tens of thousands of dollars was traded as credit toward programming for stuff that we teach. Our programs are high price-point. We’ve probably bartered with 75 percent of the vendors that we work with. They all wanted to take our programs. If you have something that people genuinely want, you cannot fail. We go on our podcast or the forum and ask our people what products and programs they want. You have to build a community, a base of followers, who are in line and in tune with your message. If your message is something that is contagious and it’s something that they want, and they know their friends and family want, then you have no place to go but up.

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Thanks Benjamin for your words of wisdom!

In addition to The Art of Charm, you can listen to Benjamin on the PickUpPodcast.

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We can’t thank you enough for reading our post today, but we’ll do our best! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

There’s a group of people who actually believe their lives will get better this year. Can you believe it? Join us next time to find out who they are. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

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Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00338-022509.mp3

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(Image in today's post by hisks)

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Jordan, you have such an interesting story. You went to law school and got this great job on Wall Street, but you still weren’t happy?

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One of the things that people fail to realize is that money definitely does not make people happy. I saw all these people making millions of dollars a year and they were miserable.

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What got you to say enough is enough? And how did you come up with the idea?

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I had been doing Pickup Podcast in law school, as a service to give back to people who had taught me a lot of social dynamics skills. It was a really fun hobby because I had wanted to be on the radio since I was about eight years old! By the time I started actually working on Wall Street, I was making quite a bit of money selling products – other people’s video sets, e-books and things like that – on Pickup Podcast. I was also getting advertising revenue. Then I hired a couple of great coaches because we had so much demand from people who wanted to learn more. The coaching thing really took off. We hired a Corporate Director to do the corporate things – organize our business and finances – that I was having trouble doing. So by the time I’d been on Wall Street for just a few months, The Art of Charm was taking off so much that I was already wondering when I could be completely sufficient. Then, due to the mortgage crisis, the law firm I was at offered a severance package if we wanted to leave. I volunteered, got the buyout, and got the heck out of there!

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So between the job you had, and the money you were making from Pickup Podcast, you were able to hire and retain really good people. Everything just kept growing and then you were able to cut the ties.

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Yeah, I didn’t want to cut the ties with my corporate job until we were pretty sure that things were going to take off and be self-sufficient. Of course, it also didn’t hurt having that nice Wall Street income being funneled right back into the company to help things grow as well.

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Jordan, things just keep happening for you. You now have a show on Sirius Satellite Radio called Game On. Tell us about that.

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That was a “leap and the net will appear” type thing. We were invited to go as guests on another show on Maxim Radio. They didn’t like us at all. They thought we had no idea what we were talking about and there was no way to teach somebody to be successful socially. So we challenged these hosts, on air, that we could help their producer more in eight weeks than they had done in eight months. After eight weeks, he had changed so much. We went back on their show and they ate their words and apologized to us. Everybody in the office thought the producer had improved so much that we must be up to something. So they sent a memo to the executives at Sirius Satellite Radio who offered us a trial show of our own. We did the trial show and just knocked it out of the park. So they offered us our own show on Maxim.

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Now, going back to the coaching, Jordan, I just have to ask – was Will Smith one of your coaches?

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No, Will Smith was not one of my coaches. It’s funny, though, that people do mention that because my co-host, A.J., is friends with the person who actually wrote Hitch. So it’s largely based on what we do here at The Art of Charm.

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It’s a great movie … and it introduces you to the art of charm.

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In a lot of ways, yeah, only we don’t teach how to go after that specific girl. We teach people how to be more socially successful in every aspect of their lives. It’s not necessarily going after that one girl; it’s going after life.

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Is there anything else you’d like to leave with our listeners … anything else for those entrepreneurs-to-be?

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Don’t think that you need a special skill set, connections, or even have done it before, to make a successful business happen. You need to be willing to leap and wait for the net to appear. By that, I mean work really hard because, as we know, the harder we work, the luckier we get. So it’s all about starting – starting with your drive and your passion. Once you’ve found it, take it to the limit. Don’t be afraid to go after what you really want, especially young people. You have the idea now. You have the drive now. Don’t worry about being safe and getting a job first. You have your whole life to take a job that you don’t necessarily want. So you might as well go out and create the lifestyle that you want right now.

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That’s a great point. I love that advice, except for the hard work part!

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It really isn’t that hard of work when you are doing what you love every single day. I work a lot of twelve-hour days, six days a week here at The Art of Charm. I don’t even notice it a lot of the time. People were asking me what I was going to do for my vacation and it hadn’t even occurred to me that I needed one!

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Thanks, Jordan, for sharing your story with us!

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Check in next time to find out about something that neither men nor women seem to want as much as we might think they do. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

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Direct link to audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00244-101608.mp3