विषय - सूची
Copycat Marketing Book Summary – You will learn Copycat Marketing strategies from this summary. You will learn how to create wealth by working smarter, not more complicated, and leveraging your way to the top by franchising and investing. Finally, you will learn about the “pyramid system” to create wealth without investing much money.
Who will learn from this summary?
- Employees and Self-employed persons
- Anyone seeking to increase their wealth and become financially independent
Author
Burke Hedges is a successful entrepreneur, marketing trainer, and best-selling author. He used to be a minimum wage earner, but Burke read a book that changed his life. From there, he became a top salesman and started his own company. Burke now offers marketing training to help people succeed just like he did.
Copycat Marketing Book Summary
Why should You read this?
Once, there was a business manager in his 40s who was struggling with money. He made an appointment with a financial advisor to give him some advice. He went to the financial advisor’s office only to find two doors, a door that had “Employed” written on it and another door that had “Self-employed” written on it. He opened the door that said “Employed” because he was employed. When he opened it, he was greeted by another two doors, one was marked “makes less than $40,000 a year” and another door that was marked “makes more than $40,000 a year”, he made less than $40,000 a year, so he opened that door only to find another two doors, one marked “saves more than $2,000 a year” and the other one was marked “saves less than $2,000 a year”, he opened the latter since he only had $1,000 in his savings account. After opening that door, he found himself right back outside the office from where he first started!
The moral of the story is if you keep choosing the same choices that lead you back to where you started, you’ll never move forward, you’ll always find yourself going right back to your first step. The only way to move forward is to choose different doors to get different results. Do you want to know how to do that? Then read this summary.
Chapter 1: We Live in a World of Copycats
If there’s one thing we’re all good at, it’s copycatting. The question is since we copycat almost everything, why haven’t we found a way to copycat creating wealth? Copycatting starts from the day we’re born, we copycat the language of our parents, then we copy their moves, and their lifestyle, after that, we go to the school where we learn to write by copying letters. When we want to learn how to drive, we pay an instructor to teach us how to copycat him, and the better we copycat our instructor, the better we are at driving. However, like anything in life, copycatting has its downside: just because we all copycat something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing, take that into consideration when you find yourself copycatting a bad habit – what if the person you’re copying is not right? Look at this story: a man had a shop where he sold clocks.
Every day an old man would pass by the man’s store and look at the clocks, take out his pocket watch and then leave. The store owner got curious, so one day he went out and asked the old man what he was doing. The old man replied, “I blow the quitting whistle at 5:00 each day, and I want to be sure it goes off exactly on time.” The store owner laughed -he couldn’t help it -after he stopped laughing, he told the old man that actually he was the one setting his clocks every day at 5:00 to the old man’s whistle! They both were copycatting each other, they both thought the other person was right, and their assumption was wrong.
So, the answer to the question, “Why haven’t we found a way to copycat creating wealth?” is because we have been copycatting the job track, not the wealth creation track. Why is that? Because most people assume that a job is the only way to make their financial dreams come true. Do you really want to copycat the 95% of people who are on the job track and probably get broke by the age of 65? Or, do you want to copycat the 5% of people who are on the wealth creation track and will become financially independent or even wealthy by the time they’re 65?
Chapter 2: What’s “True” wealth?
True wealth isn’t just the ability to buy things, true wealth is the ability to be free. True wealth is having enough money and enough time to do whatever you want, whenever you want. But, be careful here – having enough money is NOT enough, you’ve got to have enough time, too. Lost time can never be gained back, there are lots of highly paid doctors or engineers, but if you ask them if they’re truly free, the answer would usually be “No”, because they feel trapped. They know that if anything happened and they had to quit, they wouldn’t survive living the same lifestyle they were accustomed to.
This is called income creation, income creation is when you trade your time for money. You literally earn nothing unless you personally do the work: it’s a trap, or as the author likes to call it, “Time-For-Money Trap.” Income creation is temporary. Income creation does not last; once you stop working for any cause – let’s say an illness left you unable to work – how are you going to afford to live? I know you won’t be able to. Well then, how can you afford to live a luxurious life without being dependent on you going to work? The answer is residual income; residual income basically keeps earning money whether you show up to work or not – sounds fictional, huh?
Well, fortunately, it’s not fictional. Consider ‘John’: John lived the last 40 years, saving about 10% of his income and wisely investing it. After retiring, he had more than a million dollars invested. These investments earn him 10% per year (4100,000) without him doing any work. Now, that’s true wealth.
Chapter 3: Trading your time for money
These days, we have a 50/50/50/50 plan: we work for 50 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 50 years, and when we retire, we get 50% of what we used to make. The problem is that what we used to make wasn’t even enough. Imagine if it’s only 50% of it, what will we do when we retire?
This is the basic example of linear growth. To simply calculate linear growth, we use the following equation: H (hourly wage) x N (number of hours worked) = I (income)
It simply means you get out only what you put in, and if you didn’t put in enough, you won’t get out enough. Let’s look at an example to explain the limitations of linear growth. Consider two people with two different jobs; let’s name the first one, John. John sells flowers. He earns $10 an hour (after removing the money he has to spend on transportation from and to his work). If he was lucky enough to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, he would earn $600 per week. If he worked 50 weeks every year, he’d earn $30,000 per year. That’s not bad, and most people wish they could earn that much. However, that $30,000 a year is John’s maximum income, he can never make more than that.
Also, he doesn’t get to spend enough time with his family, he never really takes a break, and his income is based on linear growth, so he only gets paid once, and once he gets paid, he’s back again in the race. He has to trade his time for money again to earn enough. The second person is Mark. Mark is a general practitioner of medicine, he earns $150,000 a year; that’s a lot. However, he still has to work 10 hours a day, 6 days a week – he’s a prisoner of his own work: he gets back home tired, unable to spend time with his kids, and he isn’t exactly living the life he has always wanted. That’s the problem, no matter how much you make, whether it’s $30,000 per year or $150,000 per year, once you stop working, you earn nothing.
A company’s CEO earns a lot, maybe even 3 million dollars a year, while his employees only earn 20,000 dollars a year; why is that? That’s because the CEO knows how to leverage his money; his employees are his leverage, he’d rather earn 1% of 100 employees’ effort than earn 100% of his own effort, and that’s leverage. However, it’s not enough to have leverage, and you also need to know how to use that leverage. Otherwise, it’s useless. That’s what we’re going to learn in the next chapter.
Chapter 4: Work smarter, not harder
Let’s go back to August of 1888: Asa Candler purchased the exclusive rights for a carbonated fountain of a drink called Coca-Cola for $2,300. It was a huge success. Almost every drug store had a fountain of that drink where people could come in and drink a cold Coca-Cola for 5 cents. However, one day, Candler made a decision that literally changed history; one day, a friend of Candler’s walked into his office and offered to give him advice for a small fee; after careful thinking, Candler paid him, and his friend came closer to him, and whispered, “Bottle it”.
That’s it! Before bottling Coca-Cola, people had to go to a drugstore every time they wanted to drink Coca-Cola, so, the profits of the company were solely based on how many people wanted to spend enough time and effort to go all the way to a drug store to drink their Coca-Cola, however, after bottling the drink, leverage was created: the company leveraged time, effort, and location by bottling their product. Once they bottled it, anyone who could buy a 6-pack, for example, basically had the Coca-Cola fountain at his own house! That’s leverage, leverage is your way to work smarter, not harder, or in other words, how to make a lot more money in a lot less time.
Leveraging your way through franchise:
The franchising business has gone pretty far these days. Almost 60% of America’s goods are supplied by franchises. It’s good business, but there’s a huge downside to it: the start-up cost, for one. Most people do NOT have 1 million dollars to start up a McDonald’s franchise, for example, and to make things worse, you probably won’t be truly wealthy franchising only one shop, you’d need multiple shops. The good news is that there is an alternative to the franchise system that has a start-up cost of as little as $500. You can literally get paid 1,000 times for the work you do once instead of getting paid once for the work you do 1,000 times. How? Let’s see in the next chapter.
Chapter 5: Exponential Growth
Osceola McCarty was an 88-year-old who had a tough life. Osceola used to wash and iron the neighbor’s clothes to earn a living, she used to charge $2 per bundle, and then after WWII, she increased her prices to $10 per bundle. Even after raising her prices, the best she could make was $9,000 per month. At the age of 40, she started saving some money, and over time, her savings kept increasing. Then, in the summer of 1995, she donated $150,000 of her money to charity. Now, how could a woman with a below-average income donate that amount of money?
She would take a few portions of her money every year and invest it in something. She didn’t spend it, she invested it, this is called compounding. To explain more, if 25 years ago you had invested $10,000 in Xerox, your $10,000 would have turned into 40 million dollars today! That’s the alternative to franchising. Franchising itself is good, but you need a lot of money to get started. However, compounding doesn’t need that much, you can start with the least amount of money yet make a huge profit over the years. So, how can you make a huge profit out of a small amount of money without having to wait a lifetime for your small fortune to grow? Network marketing is the answer, and we’re going to learn about it in the next chapter. But first, let’s talk about synergism.
Chapter 6: Synergism: Marriages.
Ernest Hamwi was doing his best to sell waffles at the 1905 World’s Fair. He kept promoting his product, but no one would buy from him. To make things even worse, people would line up at the store next to him that sold ice cream. Then, one day, the ice cream store ran out of plates and asked Ernest if he could lend them some. Ernest didn’t have any plates. However, he had his waffles, so he decided to try to roll his waffles in a way that could hold the ice cream, thus creating an ice cream cone. People loved it and the ice cream cone became famous worldwide today, it’s the world’s favorite snack.
The ice cream and waffles story is the perfect example of the concept of synergism, two good products or concepts that had nothing to do with each other, when combined, created a great product or concept! Now, imagine you were in charge of creating the perfect synergism of wealth creation. You would create a very powerful synergism that would touch everyone on this planet, an affordable and duplicatable synergism that would be available to everyone. Well, the truth is, it’s simple, and it is the marriage of franchising and exponential growth. What is the result of this marriage? Network Marketing, The Ultimate Synergism.
Chapter 7: Network Marketing
Duplication is the key to making franchising succeed, and compounding is the key way to create true wealth, so let’s combine both! When we combine the two, we get Network Marketing. Network Marketing is a simple system that works by joining a company that gives you a product to sell, and you receive a percentage of commission when you complete a sale. 25% commission on a sale may not sound like much, however, if you get one person per month and teach him how to sell the products, too, then you have also increased your commission for each of their sales!
This is called a pyramidal structure: the more people you get involved in selling a product, the more you’re going to make, and that is how to copycat your way to wealth. It’s just like franchising, but instead of having to spend millions of dollars to start up, you spend a lot less, and instead of having to manage your work every day, you simply work from home.
