Yanik Silver - Make More, Have More Fun & Give More Back
By: Ric Thompson
Yanik Silver is an online mastermind when it comes to setting up a business on autopilot to make millions of dollars. An established Internet marketing expert, he's been in business online since 1998 and has numerous Internet products to his name. He is a self-made millionaire and is recognized as one of the leading experts on web marketing, but considers himself a "techno dunce" because he still doesn't know how to put up his own web pages. With help only from his wife, he has grown his businesses from an initial investment of $1,800 to over $13 million in sales.
He is the author, co-author or publisher of several bestselling marketing books and tools, as well as a highly sought after speaker addressing groups ranging from the prestigious Wharton Business School to international audiences of 3,000-plus. He has traveled the world telling audiences how they too can make money online, sharing the stage with experts like Zig Ziglar, Dan Kennedy and Mark Victor Hansen.
Yanik, a self-described "adventure junkie," has even founded a company that combines business with thrill seeking called Maverick Business Adventures. One thing is for sure: Yanik has ambition and knows how to live life to its fullest.
RIC THOMPSON: I'm looking It's going to be a great call, and I'm very excited to have you here. Let's face it, the topic you want to talk about today-make more, have more fun, and give more back-pretty much sums up what we all want as entrepreneurs.
YANIK SILVER: I think so. If we can put it all together, I think where it all intersects is it creates business bliss and a lifetime of bliss, really.
RIC THOMPSON: Let's start with the obvious one: making more.
YANIK SILVER: Make more money, yes. We'll start with the part where I think most people think they want the most help. Hopefully, by the end of this time together you will all see that there's a really big correlation between the other two, as well. Let's get into 'make more money'. Before we get there, I'll share just a quick minute on my story so people know where I'm coming from.
Our family actually came over from Russia in 1976 as Russian immigrants; they came over when I was two-and-a-half. My dad ended up starting a medical equipment sales and service company. Like with any family business, you pretty much end up working for your parents, and I was no exception. By the time I was 14, I was telemarketing for latex gloves; and at 16 he kicked me out and said to go make some sales.
I got a really early education in marketing and sales, even though I wasn't exactly thrilled to be working my summers in my dad's business while my friends were at the beach or whatever. I learned about direct response marketing, and that kind of turned the lights on for me. Instead of cold-calling and knocking on doors anymore for doctors, I could write a letter or write an ad, and actually have them send me money or have them raise their hand and say, "Yes, I'm interested in this piece of equipment."
Then from there, a couple years later I actually woke up at 3:00 in the morning with this idea for my first Internet business. That was Instant Sales Letters, as you mentioned. Literally, that was a homerun off the get-go. A lot of people look at that and think, "That guy's an overnight success." Literally, it started when I was 14 years old-or probably, more accurately, 16 years old.
From that success, people went on and asked me how I did it and if I could teach them how to do the same thing. That's kind of where we are right now. I'm a big believer in the 'make more money, have more fun, and give more back' concept. I do my best to walk the talk, so to speak. You'll see me doing everything from running multiple seven-figure businesses with-I was going to say with no employees, but we actually just hired our first one about six months ago-to going around the world bungee jumping.
This year I'm going off to the Olympics, and we're going to the World Cup, so I'm really trying to live my life to the fullest. At the same time we have this new mission of helping one million kids, young entrepreneurs, start their own businesses by 2020. That's kind of where I am in a nutshell, I guess.
RIC THOMPSON: That's a lot of ground to cover. There are a couple things that really jumped out, of course. Obviously, you've got huge goals with the million kids, which is fantastic. The other thing that really kind of made my jaw drop is that you're running multiple seven-figure businesses, and you've just hired your first employee. Do you do a lot of outsourcing, or do you just run things really lean and mean?
YANIK SILVER: Both. We run things pretty lean. Also, I'm a big believer in leverage. One of the keys to making more money is leverage and figuring out where you can have leverage. Leverage is really created in a couple places. It can be time, and you have to get out of this notion of trading your time for money as much as you can, figuring out how not to get paid by the hour.
A perfect example of that, Ric, is Siegfried and Roy, the famous show that was in Vegas for a long, long time. Most people look at them as the epitome of success, making millions of dollars doing what they love. One tiger-mauling, which was incredibly unfortunate, put them out of business. Compare that to a show like the Blue Man Group, which is the dudes in all blue paint who do the crazy stuff out there.
What they've done is they've leveraged the Blue Man Group, and now they have shows playing in a bunch of different cities because they can paint anybody blue as long as they know the routine. They've systemized what they're doing. I'm a huge believer in leverage, and I think that's a really important point. You can leverage yourself via time, via people; obviously, outsourcing what you stink at.
I'm a big believer in that. I don't try to get better at the things that I totally stink at because I'll only end up being kind of mediocre at best. I really try to focus in on what I'm really good at and, hopefully, where my unique ability is. That's actually a great book put out by the Strategic Coach Company called Unique Ability that people might want to check out.
Leverage your intellectual capital. I've made a lot of my money by selling information and content, so I'm a big believer in productizing anything that we can, whether it's an ebook for a couple of dollars to something more. I've sold everything from that to multi-thousand-dollar events, to $20,000-plus mastermind groups. Then there are skills. What can you do that can let you multiply yourself?
That's one of the big things that I learned really early on when I learned about direct response marketing. That gave me the skills to leverage myself. Like I mentioned, I no longer had to knock on doors for the doctors because now I could send out an ad or a letter. That's because I figured out the formula of what it took to write that. I literally created a salesperson that would work for me day and night.
Copywriting is probably one of those big skills that helps you leverage yourself. It's not right for everybody, but just thinking along those lines I think is really important to what we originally started talking about, which is to make more money.
RIC THOMPSON: For you personally, what are your strengths? What do you consider your bailiwick versus what you outsource or find other people to do? As a second part of that question, how long did it take you to find those strengths to be able to say, "Yes, this is what I, Yanik Silver, am the best at, and everything else I need to outsource"?
YANIK SILVER: It's been a lifetime of discovery. I'm a huge fan of any sort of realistic test that can help you get closer to what you're good at and where your natural abilities are. Even as far as this: When I was 16 years old one of my mentors, a guy named Ted Nicholas, talked about this company called the Johnson O'Connor Human Engineering Laboratory.
You go in for two days and you do all these natural gift assessment tests. They literally will play two different musical tones and ask you which one is higher or which one is lower. I totally sucked at that. I was in the five percentile, which is pretty bad. There was other stuff. They had something that they call Ideaphoria, which is coming up with ideas, and they've it quantified by this writing exercise and how many ideas you come up with in a set time.
I was in the 95th percentile. By slowly narrowing my strengths down, it really helped get me in a position to figure out what I like to do. Also, it's evaluating whether I get energy out of this thing. Do I get happiness out of it? Is it a chore? Is it a pain in the butt? Is it something that I'm good at, but I really don't like anymore? Believe it or not-and maybe you've experienced this too, Ric-our natural abilities or unique abilities kind of shift over time.
Originally, if you asked me that question five or six years ago when I was really going strong with just the Internet company, I would say that my unique ability is copywriting, for sure. Now it's not that case anymore. I've really honed in on the fact that I'm great at the idea part; I'm great at taking a step back, like zooming out just a little bit farther than most people would, but not zooming out so far that it becomes unrealistic, like an ivory tower kind of thing.
It's just zooming out enough to get the big picture, and then creating a unique spin on something right there. That's where I've really excelled. There is also the ability of asking the right questions, and we'll talk about that in a second too. I try to outsource everything I can. That first real employee that I just hired is a person who complements me because he's more the operations person.
He takes all the crazy ideas I have and makes them into a reality. I think that's really important to figure out what you're good and what you stink at. Don't feel that guilt that you have to be well-rounded; you don't, necessarily.
RIC THOMPSON: I have a quick question for my own personal gratification. How did you find your operations guy?
YANIK SILVER: I wish I had better advice on that. That actually came as a referral. I guess that's probably the best advice out of that; the salient point out of that is I just put it out to my network, "I'm looking for an operations person." There's something that I just recently started doing, and this might be way beyond what some people listening to this are thinking.
However, it's been interesting to me, as we've grown from a kind of one-man band originally out of my one-bedroom apartment, which sounds like an infomercial, to now really trying to create something pretty cool with the Million Young Entrepreneurs, and we have some other pretty big goals. I decided to look first for culture and find someone who matched the kind of culture that I wanted to create in our company.
I've sat down and really figured out our five DNA pieces to our companies and the people we want to bring in who share this kind of culture and who share this DNA. That was the first part, and then hiring for skills, second. It's kind of interesting. This has really evolved in my thinking, and it's really come from hanging out with people like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.
It's also come from reading books like Tribal Leadership and other things like that. If you're just starting out, it may or may not be what you want to start off with, though Tony Hsieh would argue that you want to get that first, even when you get going.
RIC THOMPSON: Yes, he talks about that a lot. You mentioned something about asking the right questions. Do you want to jump in to that?
YANIK SILVER: Thanks for bringing it back to that; that's perfect. I really believe that questions are the key. You ask any question and you're going to get an answer. You ask the right question or a big enough question, and you're going to get a big enough answer. That's literally how I started my first Internet business. I asked myself a question something like, "How do I create a fully automatic website that makes me money while I sleep, is an incredible value for people, and isn't just an ebook."
I wanted to differentiate myself even at that early stage and try to do something a little bit different. That's literally at 3:00 in the morning when that idea for Instant Sales Letters popped into my head. I believe the questions create and they open up opportunities. If I look at something and my first exclamation about it is, "I can't do that," "I can't afford that," or "There's no way I can make that happen," you've automatically just shut off every single creative option you can come up with.
When you start asking yourself, "How can I…?" "What can I… ?" "Who do I know that can help me get there?" or "Where can I go to find this?" it just opens up the opportunities and opens up different ways of doing that. Literally, I might sit down with a legal pad or my journal or somewhere, and put the question at the top of it and then just start writing answers.
Your first couple answers are basically going to stink. Maybe they won't stink, but they'll be pedestrian, sort of normal, typical responses. When you really dig deeper and you get into seven, eight, nine, 10 and 12, that's when you'll get some really creative, interesting solutions. At the same time, your brain, your subconscious, is working on this. That's why, much to wife's chagrin, I keep a journal by my nightstand.
She's a super-light sleeper, and I try to be as courteous as I can, but I can't help it. I'm a big believer that if you don't write down an idea it's going to get away. Capture it somehow. If I have my cell phone with me, I might leave myself a message or text myself. You have to do something in order to capture it. Literally, in the middle of the night I'll write stuff in my journal where. It's completely pitch dark, and I'm hoping I'm not writing over something else. It's pretty funny.
RIC THOMPSON: When the muse strikes you've got to listen.
YANIK SILVER: You have to. What is also does is it clears your head for other stuff. Maybe it's not going to be the absolute best idea or the best solution to that initial question or problem, but now instead of it all just kind of rolling around and jumbling inside your head, you've cleared out that psychic RAM, so to speak.
RIC THOMPSON: I have a quick comment here. A lot of people you talk to in the Internet marketing space are very much focused on tactics and how-to. Basically, you as the entrepreneur have to keep yourself busy, right? A lot of what I'm hearing from you is more strategic, more thought-based. Your hard work is a lot of thought; you do a lot of thinking and heavy lifting that way.
YANIK SILVER: Yes, I'm a big believer in the fundamentals. Maybe it's just from the way I've transitioned from typical direct response into Internet marketing. Maybe that's where I get that from. I really learned the foundations from mail order people from the turn of the century. Literally, I would go back to books written in the '20s and '30s and '40s. I love studying that stuff and getting the foundation right.
I think the foundation never changes. I think the strategies are important, but I think tactics can change. If someone is talking about adding video or a different sort of order button or whatever the case is, I like that stuff; I love it. At the same time, that's not the big picture, or at least slightly bigger picture. I'm a big believer in the fundamentals.
RIC THOMPSON: For instance, a video comes out and everybody's using video for everything. Those are the sorts of things that you automatically outsource. Is that the way it works for you?
YANIK SILVER: Yes, if it doesn't fit my skill set, I try to outsource it as much as I can. My skill set definitely isn't project management, either.
RIC THOMPSON: To be clear, then, you've just hired your first employee. Up until now you had some sort of team of outsourcers.
YANIK SILVER: Yes, right. We have a tech guy who's on retainer because I cannot put up my own webpage if my life depended on it. That's another thing that a lot of people get hung up on. They start, like I said, trying to get better at the skills that they're not good at or are mediocre at. Regardless of how much I might want to learn HTML or web design, which I don't, I realize that my higher leverage is hiring somebody who can do it for $50 or $75 an hour when I could be off striking relationships, deals, thinking of new products, or whatever the case is that's worth more to me that $50 an hour.
RIC THOMPSON: Again, going back to that point of leverage. At the end of the day if you can pay somebody $50 an hour, if you do that work you're only worth $50 an hour.
YANIK SILVER: Exactly. A lot of us are stuck in stuff like that. We're stuck in our email or we're stuck frittering away time on a bunch of stuff. Not that I don't have days when that happens-I'm by no means perfect-but you really want to stop and think, "Is the best use of my time?" I'm a big believer in the 80/20 rule, which most people know as the Pareto Principle. It's pretty simple rule, but it's a profound concept when you start applying it.
It says that 20% of your activities lead to 80% of your revenue or your profit. Conversely, 80% of your activities lead to 20%. It holds true for a lot of different areas. For instance, 20% of your customers give you 80% of your profits, typically. So there are a lot of ways of looking at it. This really struck home for me, Ric. My wife and I have two little kids that are, right now, four-and-a-half and two-and-a-half.
When they were born I pretty severely limited the hours that I could work and the things that I was doing. I had to evaluate where the best use of my time is spent. It's really transparent when you start looking at it that way and start thinking about activities. One of my friends-he's also a business coach of mine-talks about having just the top five, and that's another way of getting to that 20%.
It could be the top-five for the day or the top-five most important critical items. It could be the top-five for the week; that's what I've started doing now, and we've done that with our team as well. The top-five for the week gets you focused, hopefully, on the stuff that's most important, the stuff that's going to make you more money.
RIC THOMPSON: That's fantastic. I hope you listeners jotted that down really quickly, because that little tip of advice is gold: having a top-five for the week and saying, "If nothing else happens, if these five things happen it's a very successful week," which is fantastic. The other thing that makes me wonder about this is that you talked in the very beginning of the call, Yanik, about how this all ties together. If you're controlling what you do, you're limiting what you do, and you're focusing on what your strengths are, to me that says that leaves more time for other things.
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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