A few brief thoughts about thriving in our current economy….and, why the Extreme Success Academy is essential for your success…
with Stephen Oliver and Dan Kennedy.

Stephen Oliver:      Hey, let me get you to address for our members a couple of things before we have to run.  We have as you know, our Extreme Success Academy, which you helped coin our name here for us and we have many people you know on the agenda, obviously myself, Rob Colasanti, Toby Milroy, but we have Lee Milteer here whose our Performance Coach for our “Peak Performers” and  and “Inner Circle Members,” Paul Hartunian, on  public relations and publicity, Chris Hurn, Terry Bryan on Real Estate and a whole line up of martial arts superstars (Jhoon Rhee, Jeff Smith, Joe Lewis, Stephen Hayes) that may not be in your realm.  What would you tell our members about the value of that type of training and specifically this type of line-up we have coming up.

Dan Kennedy:            Well, you’ve got some great speakers, of course.  Significantly, you have a mix of people from inside your industry and people from outside your industry and every industry, every field, every profession tends to drift toward intellectual incest.

The delusional belief that, you know, that the school business is different, that my business is different and our problems and needs and opportunities are unique and so everybody tends to sort of wind up in a circle looking at each other and no business or income breakthroughs ever occur in any business through that process.  At best you can get incremental improvement from looking at each other.

But, the breakthroughs come from turning in the opposite direction and looking outside at what others are doing in other fields that can be transferred and applied and so the exposure to leading experts in specialized areas of advertising, marketing, sales and management who have been brought in diverse experience with a number of different business categories, professional practices and so forth, like Lee Milteer, Paul Hartunian, Chris Hurn, Terry Bryan etc is extremely important.  So, the combination of that opportunity as well as the opportunity to hear from and network with stars and highly successful school owners and that is essentially is like two events in one so it’s pretty time efficient and money efficient, but it is absolutely the right mix.

STEPHEN OLIVER:                 You bet and we are excited to have all of our “Inner Circle” members.  We are going to have twenty school owners; anywhere from half a million up to about a million five and the individual school performance and they really are not the usual suspects.  They are the guys behind the scenes.  You may not have ever heard of them before, but they are really down in the trenches really doing it on a day to day basis, so I think that is going to be very useful as well.

DAN KENNEDY:            Well, you know, the timing is important.  We are in what I call the transition to the new economy and during that transition probably everybody has noticed that there is some adverse things going on and one is that people who have had their kids in five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten organized activities are going to be making choices.  I even noticed the other day, Michelle Obama talking about spending $10,000 a year on all of the organized activities that the two kids are in and you know, they are in ballet, they are in this, they are in that and people like her husband has no idea how much all of this costs.

STEPHEN OLIVER:            You bet.

DAN KENNEDY:            So, you know, it’s pretty important to make sure that yours is one of the chosen ones and so competition now is going to be a little different than competition has been a year ago or two years ago or three years ago and so, at being more adept than ever at making your case, at presenting this not as an interchangeable choice left to the child of what do you want to do this summer, what do you want to do, you know, do you want to swing a bat, do you want to shoot a ball, do you want to ride a skateboard, this is more important and significant than that, making the case that it is different, being able to do that, being able to do a better target marketing job, to briefly plug the other new book of mine that’s out, No BS Marketing to the Affluent, really speaks to that issue of doing business with those least and last affected by recession.

STEPHEN OLIVER:            Absolutely.

DAN KENNEDY:            At being able to better communicate with the students, parents of students, community leaders and other influencers, again so that what you do is viewed as having much greater significance and importance than a lot of other things.  Being able to manage your business, now more efficiently, more effectively, again, you really can’t afford now to have whoever’s at that front desk blowing a prospect, undoing a very good presentation that you just did though some casual off-hand remark or wondering off to reservation in one way, shape or form.  So all of these things now have heightened sensitivity and importance.  The game is going to require more intense performance in order to be successful and that’s all the more reason to get on a plane and come to the academy and sort of recharge batteries, review best practices and strengthen the game plan.