And I realized lead generation through direct response marketing and crafting an irresistible offer is awesome. But if you don't know how to sell, if you don't know how to convert someone from a lead or a prospect to a paying client, you're screwed.
Back when Q was falling when Lorenzo went up and so I was banging with a gang in instrumental
Being broke sucks. And I think we could all agree that if being broke sucks, then we want to learn how to not be broke. Guys and gals, welcome to the Bedros Coolion Show. I'm Bedros Coolion, and today's episode is exactly about that, how to not be broke. And this came from a post that I put up recently where I just kind of vaguely talked about my time as an immigrant in this country growing up and what being broke felt like, where I had no options, I had no hope, I had no
I have freedom in terms of doing what I want and the way that I wanted to do it. And then there was so much dependency on the system, right? Like local government, federal government, like, you know. And it's not fun, man. So imagine this. You know, we come to the United States, my family and I come to the United States at that time. I'm a kid, elementary school age. And it's not a fun place to be when you're living in Section 8 housing.
On top of that, you've got grownups yelling at my parents, telling them to go back to your own effing country. You don't belong here. You're taking all of our American jobs. And then when I started to go to elementary school, I don't know if they have these anymore, but I had a lunch pass. And so it was like this little laminated paper card that pretty much is like the scarlet letter that says,
You are broke and you're a foreigner and you're poor and you gotta go in this line and get your free lunch, which is cool.
Like I'm grateful for all the assistance the state and federal government gave us. But that also made us feel like we don't belong here, right? And that you are a nuisance. And you're being told you're a nuisance. Go back to your own country. You're taking our great jobs. And I remember thinking like, what kind of jobs are my mom and dad taking? Like my dad's pumping gas at a gas station. He's delivering newspapers in the middle of the night. My mom was working as a seamstress.
Like, they weren't taking the great jobs. They weren't working at fucking, you know, Microsoft developing code and shit. So anyways, and so as I'm growing up, I realized like, I don't like being broke. I don't like not getting the things that I wanted. And it wasn't like I had any great demands of my parents, but like my friends had some basic GI Joe action figures. I wanted one and I wasn't able to get it. Then I got into watching WWF, currently WWE,
and I wanted like a Hulk Hogan action figure and we didn't have enough money to get it. And so I remember, you know, asking my friend if I could have one of his action figures that he liked the least, which ended up being the Iron Chic. If any of you remember WWF back in the day, Iron Chic was the heel. He was one of the heels, the one of the bad guys and Hulk Hogan was one of the good guys and I wanted the Hulk Hogan
action figure. But all that to say that as you continue to grow up and you're broke, you realize you don't have a lot of options in life, man, like where you live is determined by other people. What you wear, the quality or lack of quality of the food that you eat,
your safety and security you're living in communities that aren't so safe and secure and then i remember thinking like i don't want this for my family as i grow up and have a family and so i made it my mission like i don't want to be broke i want to be rich not because of the nice cars and elaborate vacations and and you know fame all of that was like
secondary, tertiary, right, to me. The number one thing was I want to be able to have control over my life. I don't want to be told what to do. I want independence, not dependence on the government. And more than that, I want it safety, security, and certainty, like money buys you certainty. So
I started to figure out, like, what is it that I can do? If I continue to grow up and go the path of working for someone, I'm probably not going to have the freedom, security, and independence that I want, which meant that I had to figure out how to work for myself and make a lot of money to be able to not only take care of myself, but of my mom and dad, of my family, right? Because I really felt indebted to them because they brought me to the United States.
And guys, maybe you can relate. Like, maybe you can relate. Maybe you feel not only do I have to take care of myself and my immediate family, but I have to take care of my parents, my siblings. You have maybe nieces and nephews. Maybe you have grandparents that you want to take care of. They've been good to you and you want to do good for them. And you can't do that if you are broke yourself and you're struggling to get by in a job or a career that you hate and despise, right?
And so I started to think about what does someone do to get rich, to develop financial freedom? And I kind of uncovered as a young man this process that I want to share with you and it's just kind of a six-step process, right? So the first thing I figured out was, you know, you got to be able to solve problems. Like the people who make money are good at solving problems for others, right? So others have problems in their life and the problem might be
they don't know how to find a date, right? So there's dating coaches or they don't want to mow their own lawn and so there's lawn services, right? Or they don't want to clean their own house. There's cleaning services or they don't want to lose weight on their own and learn how to work out on their own so there's
personal trainers right but essentially I figured out that money is made when you are able to solve problems that people have in exchange for money and then I realized through just kind of watching how people
make the most amount of money and I realize, oh, those who make the most amount of money solve the most complex of problems, right? So if someone's got, let's say, a heart problem, a brain problem, and they need that heart problem or brain problem fixed while they're going to go to a brain surgeon or a heart surgeon.
and people who specialize in complex problems can charge a lot more to solve those complex problems. So step number one, you have to understand the secret to creating wealth and getting rich is to be able to solve problems for people that they don't want to solve themselves.
And if you can solve those problems on a mass scale, you'll make money. And if those problems are complicated and complex to solve, meaning there's less people out there solving those problems, the less people there are out there solving those problems, the more money you can charge to solve the problems, right? And so that is that. So once I realized that, I said, all right, well, what is the problem that I want to solve? For me, I realized that I need to develop step two, a high value skill.
a high value skill that solves a problem. And for me, that was simple, personal training. We all probably know my story, but it's worth sharing it. I was a fat kid all throughout elementary school, junior high and high school, part of high school. And so as I met,
My friend Dave in high school and he was on the high school football team and Dave taught me how to work out and I lost weight the summer of the summer right before senior year. I lost like 25, 30 pounds and then I come back.
Senior year and I'm leaner. I'm more muscular. I'm in better shape and all of a sudden I have more confidence and I thought I was going to ask Nakaya out to the prom because I knew that if I got in shape that she might notice me and that if I asked she would say yes and
And while she did notice me, I just didn't have the nerves to ask her out. So I never made it to the prom, but fitness changed my life completely. So after high school, for a little period of time, I went to smog technician school because my dad was like, hey, look, if you're not going to be a tailor, like I am, right? Because that solves problems. You can go work at a tailor, like a Macy's or some kind of a big department store and work for them as a tailor. People buy clothes from them all the time. They need them altered.
And he was like, you could do that, or you could take over my little tailor shop. And I was like, man, I don't want to be a tailor. I knew that was not my thing. And I was like, wow, I like cards. So.
I could be a smog technician. He said, you can go be a smog technician. You like cars. You'll be working with cars all day. What's really cool about that is in Southern California, people need to get their cars smog checked. You're the one who's working with cars all day long, making sure that they pass emissions. You can do that all day long, but I also realized again, that's not something I want to do. I want to work with cars. I want to have cars. I want to have lots of expensive cars. I love the cars that I have now.
I don't necessarily want to work on someone's broken down jalopy and you know stick a probe in the tailpipe just to be able to Tell them whether they're gonna pass emissions or not like that's not that wasn't my goal But what I was passionate about was when I lost weight that that summer before senior year in high school
Dude, my confidence transformed, my self-esteem transformed. I felt a higher level of self-worth when I got fit and lost 30 pounds of fat. And I was like, I think I want to be a personal trainer. And I think like if I was in a gym working all day long, solving problems for people because the problems they had was they didn't want to commit to figuring out how to train right and eat right and hold themselves accountable. So I could do all that for them.
I could train them, I could make a nutrition plan for them, and I can hold them accountable to working out with me three to four days a week as a personal trainer, right? And that's how my personal training career started. And while I enjoyed that, I also realized
All right, well, this is cool. I'm training time for dollars, but I still don't have enough personal training clients. I was willing to trade time for dollars, at least in that early 20s, right, in my early 20s. But I didn't have enough personal training clients. And that's why I also worked as a bouncer at a gay bar, right? Because the gay bar paid more than the straight bar did. And the reason the gay bar paid more than the straight bar was because most
Every weekend, skinheads would come and they'd wait outside of the gay bar in the parking lot. The place was called Oz. It was in Boynton Park, California. It was like a steakhouse slash bar that would convert Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights into a gay club. And these skinheads would come in the parking lot and they'd wait for the nightclub to give out at two in the morning and then they'd start gay bashing, right? And so it was our job as bouncers.
who worked there to make sure that all the patrons got to their cars safely without getting their heads bashed in. And so we'd find ourselves getting into fights all the time. And I'm like, fuck man, I just want to be a personal trainer full time. I don't want to be a bouncer, work until two in the morning, three in the morning.
getting into fights. And then I also worked at Disneyland, right, as a busboy. And I didn't want to do that either. That wasn't like something I had a passion for. And so I knew that I had to learn step three of making money, which is I had to learn how to market, right? And actually I learned that from my first mentor who happened to be one of my personal training clients. His name is Jim Franco. You've heard me talk about Jim Franco before. And Jim Franco is a wonderful human being.
I was in my early 20s, probably 23, 24 years old, and Jim Franco was like, hey man, as a personal training client of yours, I got to tell you, you're pretty bad at making sales and marketing. You don't have enough clients. This is why you're working as a bouncer.
on weekends, and you're working as a busboy at Disneyland in the evenings. You keep telling me that you want to be a full-time personal trainer, but you're not marketing yourself. I'm like, dude, I don't even know what marketing means. Since he was a personal training client, and since he had a very successful business, he was making millions of dollars in the automotive software industry, he's like, you have to learn direct response marketing. I was like, I'd never even heard of the word direct response marketing.
And he goes, if you can learn direct response marketing, and if you can create an irresistible offer, you can get a lot more of these gym members in this big box gym that you work in to become personal training clients of yours, right? So he started to coach me and mentor me on how to market and how to
drive leads interest and how to craft an irresistible offer and you know direct response marketing the best way to describe direct response marketing to you But you guys should all do the research if you want to get you know
get to a place of financial freedom and wealth and become rich, like step three is marketing, right? You have to learn marketing. And direct response marketing, the best example of it is when you're watching television and there's those infomercials, right? They're selling a weight loss pill or the Ginsu knife or some kind of a car wax or what was that gorilla tape or some kind of tape that, you know, the guy like saws the boat in half and then he tapes it together and then he's on the lake like,
Bang, hauling ass down the lake and the little fucking boat's not even sinking because he taped it together with this like gorilla tape or whatever the fuck the tape was. But I share this with you because those are direct response ads, right? They have a way of developing those ads to get your attention, interest, desire, and then they give a call to action. It's called IDA, attention, interest, desire, action.
And so once I learned the formula for direct response marketing, I was able then to use direct response marketing in that LA fitness gym that I worked in to start getting people's attention, right? My marketing strategy was, hey, get a free body fat test. I'll give you a free body fat test until you exactly what your body fat is currently and
what it should be for your age and gender. And then I'll give you an idea of how you should be eating and how you should be training to achieve your desired body fat percentage, right? So that had a big marker board sitting out in the gym. And I would tell the marker board pretty much said, I'll give you a body fat test. And I'll tell you exactly where you should be. And I'll show you how you can get there absolutely free. And then when I would
get people to go, hey, I'm interested in this. I body fat test them, right? And then I would sit down with them and say, hey, here's what your training and nutrition should look like. And oh, by the way, if you don't know how to do all of this stuff, I could do it for you. Like I could be your personal trainer, hold you accountable, keep track of your nutrition, guide you through your workouts. And we could do this for six to 12 months to help you reach your goals. And oh, by the way, I'll give you 30 day unconditional money back guarantee, right? So you'll work out with me for a full 30 days once you've paid me.
And if you decide that you're not happy with the results that you're getting, I'll give you your money back. That was the irresistible offer. So direct response marketing got their attention and got me in front of them. And then the irresistible offer was something that they were like, wait, you're telling me if I work out with you?
For a whole 30 days, I can test drive you. And if I don't like it, I can get my money back. Yeah. And so all I did is make sure they like it because I delivered on my promise. And then they not only stuck with me, but they would also start referring people to me, right, which was awesome. So well, once I did that though, I also realized I got to get better at selling. So step four was, all right, I got the leads.
and I've got an irresistible offer, but when I get an objection like, well, I need to think about it or I need to look at my finances or I got to talk to my spouse, I would go, okay, go think about it, talk to your spouse, go look at your finances. And I'd let them walk away. And I realized lead generation through direct response marketing and crafting an irresistible offer is awesome. But if you don't know how to sell, if you don't know how to convert someone from a lead or a prospect to a paying client, you're screwed. So I then had to develop
My ability to sell, to influence, to persuade, to overcome objections, and to get that close. And once I developed those skills, all of a sudden, the direct response marketing compounded by a proven sales system that I had crafted
was just converting people into clients left and right, which then, by the way, created a new issue, which then I had to solve that issue, right? So going on to step number five, my business grew, but then all of a sudden, I got kind of guys quick interruption to the Bedros Coolion Show. I took some time to go to the local Jew stores here in town, and I bought all these different ginger, turmeric and walnut shots.
Now they range anywhere from $3.69 all the way to $4.05. And to be honest with you, they all suck. Why? Because they do not have anywhere near the wonderful ingredients of the Trulene Wellness Shot. First of all, to build your immune system and keep your immune system strong, Trulene Wellness Shot is packed with vitamin C, vitamin D, and zinc. And also to help you fight off inflammation, it is packed with turmeric, ginger, and black pepper. And to keep you hydrated, Trulene Wellness Shots have sodium, potassium, and magnesium.
This is the ultimate morning supplement. Just take one packet, pour it in four ounces of water, and shoot it, and you're good to go. Best of all, $1.69 per packet instead of twice the price of those other inferior ones. I want you to get 50% off your first 30-day supply. So go to trulien.com, use my name, Bedros, and you can get 50% off plus free shipping, a 30-day money back guarantee, and $1 gets donated to Shriners Children's Hospital.
Best of all, if you like the Trulene Wellness Shots, and I know you will, like thousands of other people who are part of the Trulene Tribe, every month will send you a new supply at 20% off free shipping. So go to trulene.com, use my name, Bedros, and get your 50% discount code before it goes away. Back to the show. Because if I'm trading time for dollars, I could only train so many clients. And now,
I know how to get leads, I know how to convert them into clients, but I don't have any more time to train people without taking away from my own quality of life, my own sleep, my own self-care. And so at that point, I had to realize, like, shoot, I need to learn to scale myself, clone myself, right? And that's where I started to learn about scaling. And scaling is a byproduct of multiplying yourself or your efforts through others.
people and processes, right? So can I hire other people and can I develop processes to be able to scale myself and my efforts so that they can start doing the things that I'm doing so that I can keep running my direct response marketing?
and my irresistible offer and my sales process to now fill them up with clients. Can I get people, employees who are going to be personal trainers, teach them the processes that I use to get people in shape and then have them deliver the service and do some kind of a revenue share with them? Well, sure enough, I was able to, which then of course created a new problem because as you get people and you get more processes and your company grows, at that point I became a company. I went from basically
Owning a job, right? I used to have a job, but then I owned a job and was self-employed. But then you start hiring people and developing processes. Now you kind of become a business owner and you become an entrepreneur.
And you realize that you have a tiny little company of like three personal trainers and a little assistant who was doing like, you know, calling new gym members and scheduling them for a free body fat assessment and then telling them about how we can help them identify their body fat, body fat, tell them what their new body, their desired body fat should be and then help create a formula, a process, a blueprint to get there, right? And so now I had like four employees and I realized, holy shit,
Things are coming to a screeching stop because now I'm dealing with a lot of people issues, right? Like to get rich, I realized I'm now dealing with people issues. And if I'm dealing with people in process issues, because my company is growing, I now have three personal trainers and an assistant, a front desk person, I got to learn how to manage these people, right? And that's where leadership comes in. Because as a leader, your job is to manage people.
It is to manage expectations to set KPIs key performance indicators so that each of your coaches know what winning looks like. How many clients should be they be training? How many referrals should they be generating each day, each week, each month?
What is the rate of results the clients should be getting? How many calls should the assistant be making? How many appointments should she be setting? How many of those appointments is she confirming that they're going to show up the next day so that I can go through the sales process, right? And as I was getting busier with the marketing, I needed to find a new salesperson. So now there's more people issues, right? So then, so step six is really when your business comes to a screeching stop as you start scaling people and processes,
you realize the thing that's going to help you break through that next level is leadership. And this is what we're not ever taught, right? Like how to be a great leader, how to communicate, how to cast a vision, how to develop other leaders, how to develop.
clone yourself in others because that's what a leader does. They delegate, they manage expectations, they manage different personality types. If you have 567 people working for you, you probably have 567 different personality types. All of them need to be communicated too differently. All of them need to be on the same page.
We all need to be rowing in the same direction, which is the vision that my company has. And I need to be a better communicator in actually communicating my vision for the business and the desired outcome so that they can all either do it or they could leave if they don't want to do that, right? But in the absence of great leadership, your business grows to a certain point and then it stalls.
right and you realize like man I'm hitting this wall and I can't break through no matter what if you have grown to a place where you have a handful of employees and you have some processes and you're hitting a wall and you just are dealing with a lot of friction and frustration odds are you're dealing with leadership issues and you need to develop leadership muscles so you can be a better communicator
You can be a better decision maker, a better problem solver. You can set key performance indicators. You can manage personalities and expectations. And of course, you know how to cast a vision and then develop a team so that team can replicate your efforts and actions and you can continue to grow. And that's how I ended up actually opening up my first gym and then ultimately scaling it to five other gyms, right? Because I was able to replicate myself five times over.
and the coaches inside of each of those gyms and then ultimately ended up selling those gyms and they later became the blueprint for what became fit body boot camp right this international fitness franchise that we have with hundreds of locations worldwide and so you know fit body boot camp is a byproduct of me learning.
Those six things. Number one, figuring out that people have problems and our job is to solve problems that people have in exchange for money. The more complex the problems, the more money we can make, right? So the more complex problems you can solve, the more money you can make.
Step two is to develop a high-income skill. For me, it was personal training. There's so many high-income skills that you can develop. Running ads on social media, because business owners have a problem and they don't know how to run ads. You could be the one running ads. Salesmanship is a high-income skill. Leadership, learning how to lead other people's companies for them is a high-income skill.
There's so many high income skills out there, right? Knowing how to put out great videos and podcast episodes that capture people's attention. Get them to want to listen. Get them to want to share your episodes. By the way, if you're getting value from this episode, please do me a favor. Like it. Subscribe if you're on YouTube and take a screenshot. Share it on social media. Drop the link to it, man, so other people can get the value from this. That would mean a lot to me, right?
But you've got to develop the high-income skills. Then you move on to step number three, which is understand marketing, lead generation prospecting through direct response and developing an irresistible offer. Then you go to step number four, which is now that you have a direct response lead generation process. And you've got that irresistible offer. You've got to convert those leads into paying clients, which means you have to learn to sell.
And if you can sell and convert people into actual pain clients and customers, you're now making more money. But you can only make so much money. So step number five, you have to learn to scale yourself through others, right? That's where you start creating people and processes. You bring on people who you can replicate yourself through and processes so that they can run the processes and the systems and replicate the same outcome that you did.
And then as you want to continue bigger and bigger and bigger, you have to turn into a leader, right? And that's step six. And if you develop yourself into a great leader who can communicate, who can lead, who can manage, who can cast a vision, who can problem solve, who can delegate, who can deal with different emotions and temperaments, man, now you have developed such wealth, like generational wealth. And all of this, by the way, is a 10 year journey.
It was a 10 year journey for me, right? So like 24 to 34 is where I started doing this. Yes, ideally you want to just solve problems for people and make money. And if you just decide to stay a one person show, you can do that all day long and make yourself good income, probably a couple hundred thousand a year as a one person show.
doing that. But then you don't have the luxury of going on vacations, making more money, even the luxury of getting sick and actually staying in bed and healing because you're the one that's producing. So you have to do the other five things in addition to that high income scale or problem solving so that you can scale and build an organization that makes money for you while you are
a visionary growing other income streams and growing a personal brand and casting a vision
as technology changes and as new opportunities come up, because think how much things have changed since I was 24. I'm 50 years old now. Today, we're marketing not just through direct response postcards and things like that. We're still using direct mail, but the lion's share of our marketing efforts is through platforms like this, podcast, YouTube, social media, right?
evangelical clients and customers talking about fuel hunt or trulene supplements or fit body boot camp like we can take a message that someone has and run it as an ad if if somebody bought trulene wellness shots and they used it and they were around a whole bunch of sick people and they never got sick and they were able to persevere and push through and continue working because they never got the cold or the flu and they
They send us a post or a DM and they share it and they tag us on it. We can take that and we can amplify that message using Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok ads, YouTube ads. We can literally get more eyeballs on it and then drive traffic to a direct response website like truling.com where now the site has all the conversion elements to make that irresistible offer and bring on board clients and customers.
And so what's really neat is you as the visionary can now become more of an artist, right? You can go, all right, what is it that I want to do next? Now that I'm not broke, I've solved the problem of not being broke. I've got multiple income streams. I got people and processes in place.
How do I want to serve humanity? Do I want to create some kind of a charity or a cause, right? Where I can do more good for humanity? Think about how many people out there say, man, I want to help humanity. I want to do right by people. I want to donate. I want to do good. But then what exactly are they doing?
They're too busy working in the trenches to be able to go out there and do things like I'm able to run things like the Squire program and Masogi and have experiential events and live events and I'm able to do all these things and be out and about in the world and you speak in events because
I have created leaders now who are able to run my multiple companies. They are people who run the processes because they are fully bought into the vision and they're being compensated well because they themselves see themselves as leaders. And they are excited about the mission that we're on. And that's why I say this is a 10 year journey. And if you're willing to go on this journey, man, it will be fucking transformational for you. Entrepreneurship is the greatest journey that you can go on because not only does it solve the problem of not having money,
But it teaches you so much about yourself. I really believe entrepreneurship is also one of the highest levels of personal development. It's like one of the highest forms of personal growth because you see how much shit that you can deal with, how much resilience you will develop, how much emotional capacity that you have, and how much mental toughness you can create. And all of these things are muscles. And if you are training your mental, emotional, financial, resilience muscles, they will grow.
And entrepreneurship puts you in the ring to have that resistance that you're going to push through over time. And as long as you don't give up, you don't quit and you don't back out and go and be an employee for someone, you're going to stay in the fight. And as a byproduct, you're going to grow and develop as an individual. And financially, you're going to create freedom for yourself that no job, no career could ever compete with. And guys, if you want more
information like this and you want to be around people who are driven just like you are in terms of making more money, having more meaning and higher levels of self mastery. I want to invite you to BK Live. Bedros Coolion Live taking place May 31st in beautiful Anaheim, California at the Grove Theatre, the famous Grove Theatre.
Mark those dates on your calendar, when the website goes live, and we are selling tickets, there are three levels of tickets that you can get, and any one of those levels will give you a life-changing and transforming information, or experience, I should say. But in the meantime, remember this, that averages the enemy, that success is your responsibility, and change can take place in an instant if you are willing to flip the switch. I'll see you next time.
Back when Q was falling when Lorenzo went up and so I was banging with a gang in instrumental