Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:54 — 24.6MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Spotify | Amazon Music | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
Lee dropped additional nuggets of sales and marketing goodness in the EXTENDED Interview. Be sure to click here to access all of our great extended interviews, transcripts and more within our Insider's Club.
You can try it for the entire month for only $1.00!
[button link=”https://baconpodcast.com/dollar-special/”]READ MORE >[/button]
Expert Insights on Internet Marketing
Lee Collins is a business and marketing growth strategist in Atlanta, Georgia. He got his start in marketing in 1999 working part-time from his home office and has generated just over $300 Million in product sales and profits for his marketing students, clients and strategic partners. All without any outside funding.
A US Air Force veteran trained in systems and Information Technology, Lee leveraged his technical and leadership training to earn VP and senior management positions with Bank of America and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) responsible for national and global operations and infrastructure.
At the age of 38, Lee became a best-selling author and began sharing his message on stages around the world to thousands of people in 14 countries.
On March 7, 2014 Lee’s entire world changed when he survived a massive widow-maker heart attack. In gratitude, Lee turned his focus to a path of service in leveraging his many years of experience to helping others achieve greater success in their business and life.
Today Lee enjoys building direct response sales and marketing systems for qualified clients, while also working alongside his partners in Ruthless Marketing and mentoring a select group of private coaching students.
Lee believes in living a No Hassle Life and creating repeatable processes that produce profits. He is well-known as the “success catalyst for the inspired entrepreneur” but just likes to consider himself “The Probability Enhancer.”
He married the love of his life in 2014 and enjoys his free time practicing martial arts, camping, writing, playing Native American flute and pursuing spiritual studies.
Podcast Transcription
Brian Basilico: Hey, everybody. I am super excited to have my first guest, Lee Collins, back on again. Lee, the first time, if you haven't listened to his podcast, we talked about what was internet marketing. It was kind of really getting into the basics. But now we're going to get a little deeper and talk about strategy.
So Lee, man, how are you doing?
Lee Collins: I'm doing great, Brian. How are you today?
Brian: I'm fabulous, dude. So let's start off again with a back story and one of the stories that we didn't get into last time was you had a little health issue, and it changed your life and perspective. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
» Expand To View More - Click Here
Lee: I did, yes. I actually had a widow-maker heart attack, so it's a big one. It's the one that you have 2%-5% chance of living when you have this one happen to you. The quick nutshell story of it is I got up that morning and I went to Jujitsu class. It's the first class I've been to in a while. So when I felt a little bit tired after class, I thought that I just haven't been in a while so my body just needs to get reacclimated to the training. But on the drive home, I started to feel what I recognized as symptoms from a heart attack. I've been a caregiver for some of my older relatives when I was young and in being that person, I knew the symptoms to look for – the numbness of the arm, the tightness and the pain in the jaw, those kind of things.
I actually showed up at my apartment. My son was staying with us for a little while at the time, and I was running a company – we're going to talk a little bit about that probably later on. I was running a company downtown Atlanta, so I said to my son, “Can you get dressed and go down at the office with me today? I'm not feeling well, and I think I may either be having a slight heart attack, or I have the symptoms of possibly a bigger one coming on later.” So we got dressed, and being a good southern boy, Brian, my mama always taught me to have clean underwear no matter where I went. I just finished Jujitsu class, so I was sweaty and dirty. I took the time to take a shower, put on clean clothes. We drove downtown. By the time we got downtown to the office, I was feeling pretty crappy. So I said, “I'm going to go to the doctor.” What do I do as a guy? As I guy I say, “Hey, maybe I just need to go lay down.” My son “No, you should probably go to the doctor. You're not looking well.”
Went to the doctor's office and had the heart attack in the doctor's office. It was coming on, coming on, coming on. I was waiting for them to just have an opening for me because what do I do? I did the other typical guy thing, and I just went to the doctor and said, “Look, I'm not feeling well.” I didn't say, “I might be having a heart attack” which would have been what I should have done, instead of, “Hey, I don't think I'm feeling well.” So I had to sit and wait. The entire time frame from all this to happen was about 10 o'clock in the morning until about 2 o'clock when they finally got me to the back. Again I was in the doctor's office, started having a heart attack, they rushed me to the ER, and that's actually where I found out that I had 100% blockage of my main artery. It was the widow-maker, the big one so yes, it was very interesting.
The thing that I really attribute to staying alive the entire time was I was meditating, and just really keeping my focus, and just really focusing on staying calm. The only time I started to get out of control with my heart rate or anything was when they were asking me my address because, of course, they wanted to bill me for everything, so they wanted to know where I lived. When they asked me for my address, I got a little irritated at that, because I was dying for all intents and purposes. There's a 2%-5% chance of living. So I asked my son just take care of that.
I had a couple of critical points within the entire event that I think was a big mistake. One, my wife Natalie, she was out of town for the weekend, at a retreat, and she was six hours away. Of course, I didn't want to bother her with the fact that I might be dying, and so I didn't tell her anything until they wheeled me into or about to wheel me into the room where they were going to do the stent and everything for me. So I told my son I said, “Hey, Natalie's in Florida. I'd like you to give her a call. Let her know what's going on.” And again keep in mind this was between 10:00am to 2:00, so in four hours I hadn't given her any indication of what was happening.
I said, “I'd like you to tell her this, that if I die…” because I knew that I had a chance of dying, and I said, “If I die, tell her that she should stay there in Florida and do her retreat, because it's very important to her and her career, and if I'm dead, she doesn't need to come here, because I'm dead. It's okay. If I live, tell her also that she doesn't have to come back from Florida, because I'm alive, I'm in a hospital and I'm well taken care of.” He just looked at me, he's 21 and he said, “I'm not telling her that!” I'm like, “Okay, just tell her whatever you want. I'm going to go and get this taken care of.”
They finally put me in the back. I'll tell you what, Brian, it was a very life-changing experience for me. There are people that I meet at seminars and events nowadays who, one lady in particular, she met me in the hall and she said, “Are you Lee Collins?” She recognized me, but I have a beard now. I didn't have a beard before. I said, Yes,” and then she said, “Are you the Lee Collins who had this product and did these things?” And I said, “Yeah.” She's like, “Well, I just want to let you know I like you a lot better now than I did then. You just have a totally different way about you.” I said, “Well, thank you for recognizing that.” We talked a little bit about how it changed me.
I don't really think that the heart attack changed me, but it allowed me to release all those things that had changed me into the person that I didn't even like sometimes, allowed me the opportunity to be reborn. I felt that I was reborn on that table. The minute the doctor opened up my heart valve and gave me that rush of blood I felt like I could run a marathon. It was the most amazing thing that I'd ever felt in my life. I actually said, “Wow! That feels good!” I said it right there on the table. He said, “Mr. Collins! You're gonna need to calm down, because I'm still trying to save your life! We're not out of the woods yet.” So I said, “Okay.” So I calmed down, and I just watched everything happen on the monitor. I was fully awake the entire time. Again, it was just like breathing new life into me.
My wife, Natalie, she actually drove the six hours back, and on the trip, she called me, and we spoke for a few minutes, and this was probably critical here, number six or 10 of the day at that point when I told her this, she was very frantic, very upset, and I said, “Natalie, it's all okay. It's going to be fine. But I just want you to consider…” Before I say this, I'm going to say that I just wanted to try to get her to smile. I said, “I just want you to consider the fact that when you leave the town, you break my heart.” I'll tell you this, she didn't think it was very funny then,
Brian: No.
Lee: and over a year later, almost two years later, she still doesn't think that's funny. But I was under the influence of medication, painkillers and stuff at the time. I attribute it to that, but I was just trying to make her smile. Let her know that everything was okay, to just drive safe and when she got there, everything woul be fine. But yes, when I tell people about the heart attack and I tell them about the experience, the first thing they'll usually say is, “What?” They say, “Oh, no!” And they put those feelings out. To me, those are negative feelings. I encourage people to look at it the way that I do. That was the most interesting day of my life and really allowed me to step into – been in more integrity with myself and being the me that I really wanted to be all along.
Brian: That's awesome. I've heard a lot of life-changing stories where events like that really do reinvent you in a way.
So from a business standpoint now, you're working obviously with a lot of large companies, and you're doing a lot of big deals. I don't know if that was a transformation point where you started to say, “You know what? I need to take control of my own destiny.” Was that when you started to say, “I needed to reinvent myself as a business person” too? And how did you do that?
Lee: It really was because for the last five years prior to that, I'd gone through this very, very big divorce in 2010 and ended up having to shut down all of my businesses. While I was trying to decide what I wanted to do for me and for my businesses again, I just naturally did what I did best which is help people with their businesses. The claim to fame that I have is I can basically walk into any business. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of businesses, large and small in over 42 different industries since 1999. Because of that experience I can walk into pretty much any business and help them increase wherever they want to increase.
So if they want to double their business in six months, that's really been kind of a specialty that I've had. I actually quadrupled one person's business [inaudible] within one single month, so it's just a skill set that I have. It's not being braggy, or boasty or anything, but I can just feel what the business needs. We sit down, we look at all the stuff and then I can just see where they need to go and what they need to do. I think the specialty is finding the places where they're missing money.
But, yes, really what it did for me is just it really showed me that I enjoy working with these big businesses, maybe I work with one or two a year, but what I really want to do is focus on me and focus on individual consulting and helping the little guy get to where they want to be, versus helping these giant corporations and double their business, or add a zero or whatever.
Brian: So with these small businesses, let's say some of these making the six figures, and they want to increase. Obviously low six figures $10,000 a month. They want to get to $15,000, or $20,000, or $30,000 a month – what are some of the major hindrances that people are missing that they really need to think about in order to get to those places?
Lee: One of the biggest things I always run into is people are trying to do too many things at once. They look at success stories like Richard Branson and even Trump. Love him or hate him, he's got a lot of stuff in his pipeline, but one of the things they look at is all of the different things these people are doing. The problem that they normally don't do is they don't consider the fact that Branson did one thing at a time. He got his airline business, for example, going to a point where he could hand it off to leadership that could carry it forward from where his vision had taken it, and then he moved on to something else. He didn't try to do 20 things at once like most small business owners try to do.
I am very, very keen on focusing on one thing. Until that thing takes off, then you can focus on other stuff. That's not to say that you can't have things on the side that you also work on, but one of the biggest things that small business owners have working against them is they don't really have the training that it would take to have the discipline to work on multiple things at once. I don't know if we've ever spoken about this, but I really don't believe in multitasking. Computers can multitask, because they're multi-threaded devices. Humans aren't multi-threaded devices. We really can't multitask.
As an example of that, one of the arguments I got from someone was, “Well, Lee, I can walk down the street while chewing gum and reading my phone at the same time.” My definition of tasking is putting 100% of your effort into it. If you're walking on the street, you can do that almost automatically, same with chewing gum, and if you look at our environment nowadays and see the people who are haphazardly walking around, oblivious to what's going on around them, you know very well that you can't look at your phone and pay attention to what's going on around you at the same time. So, multitasking is like one of the biggest lies that anybody has ever been told because you really truly can't do that. So getting involved in too many things is a huge obstacle for people.
Brian: So with the person that you're able to quadruple their business, what kind of things were you able to convince them to do? What did they have to do to get to that point?
Lee: The big thing was focusing on the backend. They had a great frontend for their products and services, but they didn't have any kind of backend at all. I have this process that I call the “backend of no escape.” It's actually called the “Badass Funnel of No Escape,” if I can say that on your show. But really what it's about is having a complete sales system that walks them not only through the frontend, but also encouraging sales on the back. Now there's plenty of people who can tell you they have an offer on the thank you page, but we tend to do things just a little differently than some of that. That's very basic. The funnel of no escape process is about a 90-day system that follows up with people in multiple ways.
One of the things we did is I implemented the funnel of no escape process into their, into their sales system so that they could have multiple upsells, multiple offers and done in such a way that it didn't seem intrusive to the initial buyer.
Brian: Wow. So with this kind of process and stuff like that, I think that's one of the things that a lot of people fall prey to is that they say, “Okay, focus on the funnel.” There are certain people out there that are funnel-hacking and there's other people out there that do product development, there's other people that are trying to help people to grow their list and do all these other things, but it really is all about having a system. Right? It's all about understanding how all those pieces work together, and I think that's one of the places that people kind of stumble.
Lee: It is and the first piece I learned about systems and I've heard many people use this as an example was – I worked at McDonalds as a teenager. I only could stay and work in there for about a month, but what I learned in that month was about the systems. Now with the systems, teenagers can run a multimillion dollar business and do it by looking at pictures on the wall. That's fantastic. But then when I went in the military I learned, “Wait, this is all about systems, too.” I was known as a tech controller or a systems controller in the military. So everything was about systems, everything was about having a process and that's really one of the strengths I bring to these larger corporations.
I even bring sort of the big business thinking to the small business I work with as well because I help them from what I call “Standard Operating Procedures” and that's terminology I bring from the military that you need to have a daily, a weekly, a monthly task list of what you do and you need to have each of those tasks broken down into a standard operating procedures which is the how-you-do-it part. Once you have those, it's really just a matter of ticking off the boxes every day and getting the stuff done.
Forever I've always said even when I was working corporate jobs, that it doesn't take everyone eight hours a day to do eight hours worth of work. And surely when you have a system where you have your daily, weekly, monthly processes, that's just ticking the box off and making the things happen. You can dramatically improve your efficiency by taking two to three hours to do what normally took you eight hours to do before.
Brian: Love it.
Lee, again, just blew me away. Great content, I know the audience is absolutely going to love it. So, how can people contact you if they want to? What's the best way for them to get a hold of you directly?
Lee: The best way is just to write to my website Ruthlessmarketing.com or if you just want to know more about me, you can go to Lee-Collins.com. You can reach everything through Ruthlessmarketing so I encourage you just to go there.
Brian: Cool. All right, man, well once again I so appreciate you. I appreciate your time and you always deliver over and above what I expected and I hope my audience appreciates you and your time as well. Thanks so much for joining us, man. This has been great.
Lee: Thank you, Brian. I had a lot of fun.
» Close View More - Click Here
