If you are in the business of selling information – coaching, seminars, audio programs, books, etc. then there is a very good chance that you and the world-famous, afro-sporting artist Bob Ross have more in common with each other than you thought you did.
Bob became one of the biggest stars in the history of Public Television as host of the most popular art shows of all time, The Joy of Painting.
In the early 90’s this show expanded from the United States… to Canada and soon after started being translated for Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Turkey, Iran, South Korea, and Japan.
In Japan, they refused to lower the soundtrack for the interpreter being doing so would negate his voice. Proof that his sincerity translated.
His PBS show became the centerpiece for what blossomed into a $15 million business that sold Bob Ross-approved palettes, paints, brushes, mighty easels, classes, and certifications for others to teach his classes.
Even after he started selling his own branded painting supplies, Ross remained focused on teaching students.
Personal lessons could be had for $375 an hour, and gifted students could train to become Bob Ross-certified art instructors.
All over the country, small businesses sprang up as Ross’ successful former students sold classes and took on students of their own.
Bob Ross died of lymphoma on July 4th 1995 at the age of 52.
30 years after his death 90% of the country can still watch his show on Public Television.
Also, as of the day I’m writing this, anyone who has Netflix in the U.S. can watch his show there as well.
Bob was never replaced by another painter for the show after he died. His business partners believe this was the smartest decision they made. His legacy refuses to die.
Many people have imitated him but no one has ever duplicated the effect he has/had on young, old, and middle-aged people.
Today, we’re going to look at the journey Bob Ross went on to build a $15 million-dollar business and how his path to success mirrored some of the principles taught in the Dan Kennedy Influential Writing workshop.
We’ll start by focusing on how Bob’s success story was rooted in this principle…
Cultivating a Fan Base That Is Fascinated By You
You don’t really influence others as an object of their interest.
You influence them by being an object of their fascination.
Larry King has said that you can’t enjoy baseball unless you’re a statistician.
True baseball fans get joy out of crunching stats and memorizing them and later recalling names and baseball experiences from the past. A casual fan just goes to games to be a part of the experience of doing something.
Fascinated people can spot the casual fan a mile away.
People who are casually interested in you, have little to no value for you.
People who want to know what you do, why you do it, and how you do it are fascinated and they are incredibly valuable.
This is why making certain disclosures in any and all of your marketing is so important.
And in the same light you want some mystery to be held in the minds of your fans so that they’re always on the quest to fill in blanks.
Fascination comes both from disclosure and hold back.
You’re aiming to get people to have a similar level of fascination with you that they have with the fiction characters they’re in love with.
You essentially want to be a fictional character.
Some people pride themselves on not reading fiction but this is a huge mistake. It’s hurting you big time to think you’re in the non-fiction business.
You Are In The Fiction Business. Over. Period. Done.
Most people never do anything with what you sell them or… with what teach them for free so therefore their experience is fictional.
They dream big, but don’t do big.
They actually believe they’re doing something by just buying your stuff.
Confusing the activity of purchasing for accomplishment is the place most of your customers feel at home in.
It’s good for you to know this.
It’s an ugly truth… but it is the truth no less.
And if it wasn’t the truth, no info marketer would make any money because no one has ever gotten rich purely on a list made up of only buyers who take action.
There’s not enough doers in any market to support an information business.
Let me ask you something…
Do you know what most of the best copywriters have in common?
One thing is that they’ve had face-to-face… nose-to-nose… toes-to-toes sales experience.
The other thing most of them have in common is they read a shit-ton of fiction novels.
Some even take stabs at writing fiction novels.
Dan has tried to write fiction novels. John Carlton has tried to write science fiction. Gary Halbert loved mysteries and tried to pen them.
It is easy to make the connection between copywriters and in-person sales experience.
But what isn’t quite so obvious to the average person is their infatuation with writing that most people consider to be time-wasting trash.
What is it about the dark arts of masterfully written fiction do these copywriters find to be so appealing?
The answer to this question is rooted in the following one…
How Fascinated Are Your Perfect Prospects And Customers With You?
Do people ask you personal questions?
Do they ask you philosophical questions?
Or… does all your correspondence with fans, prospects, and customers fall under the lines of mechanical and practical business questions your assistant could answer?
If your assistant can handle the entirety of your mundane correspondence your market is NOT fascinated with you.
That is not good because FASCINATION is the way that keep yourself from being commoditized by the market.
When people see that they can easily get answers to their problems in plenty of other places on the internet… and enjoy the process of doing so far more than they do with you… this spells trouble for your business.
Arousing fascination begins with carefully cultivating your personal narrative.
Your Personal Narrative Is Vastly Different Than Your Resume of Qualifications or Credentials… and Is Vastly More Compelling
Most people try to influence based on resume instead of their personal story line.
Bad idea.
Your personal narrative establishes what you’re about and what you represent and you want this to be simple.
More than your resume, your personal narrative is what gives you the authority to tell people how they should be conducting themselves.
Telling people how they should be behaving is the business you are in.
At Dan’s workshop, he pointed out that even the person there who was in the business of selling hydraulic equipment – a commoditized product – is in this business.
But when you tell an audience what they should be doing, their immediate question is…
“Why do you have the right to tell me what to do?”
Most people know their market is wondering this to themselves and their answer to this question is to slide their resume across the desk but this effort by itself won’t cut it.
This entire conversation we’re going to have right now will tell you precisely why this is so.
What’s very cool about personal narratives is that they can be written and re-written at will.
Fortunately for you, people have very short memories and are very receptive to the narrative you put in front of them.
Especially if it resonates with who they believe themselves to be now or… want to be like in the future.
The majority of people don’t go over the narrative you put in front of them last year and compare it with the one you’re telling now.
They’re perfectly fine with ditching the old one and accepting the new one told to them as long as the new one is appealing.
Former Vice President Al Gore is great example of this . . .
Snubbed By The Clintons… Shamed Publicly For Lying About Inventing The Internet…
To Proving What Scientists Couldn’t About Global Warming… Wining The Nobel Peace Prize… and Winning An Oscar
This seminar was taped during the election year when Obama was voted into office and Dan flat out says that based on this shift of Al Gore’s personal narrative, he thinks Gore would’ve been unstoppable and could’ve become the President had he opted to run.
Al Gore re-invented himself brilliantly and everybody has pretty much forgotten about what a dork he was.
What If I Haven’t Been Vice President, Invented The Internet, and Won an Oscar… and Instead I’m Just a Boring, Every Day Person?
Think sitcom T.V. here.
Seinfeld is the show about nothing. Certainly nothing exotic. On this show, the stories aren’t about hair-raising detective heroics, scandalous housewives, or doctors saving patients in the emergency room.
The most enduring sitcoms tell stories that EVERYONE can relate to.
You don’t have to have any decimating health ailment you battled and overcame; you don’t have to been raised in a cave with bears in China, and you don’t have to have gone bankrupt multiple times and gone on to become a millionaire to have people fascinated with you.
Fascination has more to do with giving people ways to connect with you via disclosure than it does with bragging about a dream life. And just as winning sitcoms keep you addicted to them by continually revealing as they evolve, you can do the same.
You Need To Be Clear About Who You Want To Fascinate
Another book that speaks brilliantly to this topic that Kennedy tells everyone to go out and get is “Sham”.
It’s about the success industry and he believes they called it about 80% right on what influential people do to become influential and stay influential.
For example, they talk about how Dr. Laura was very good at making it known what she stood for.
She was clear at who she aimed at being accepted by, going as far as to offend the militant feminists. She did this with the in-your-face sentence uttered every day at the start of her show after she introduced herself . . . “and I am my kid’s mom.”
In the book they say the following…
“What to make of a doctor who isn’t a doctor… an Orthodox Jew who isn’t an Orthodox Jew… a crusader against pornography whose naked come-hither image is splashed all over the internet… a critic of pre-marital and extramarital sex who’s indulged in both… a champion of family values who was so far removed from her own mother’s life that she didn’t even know it had ended until months later.”
This book points out how MASSIVE actual conflict with personal positioning never mattered.
Think of how this similar conflict was present in the lives of experts like John Gray, Rush Limbaugh, Marianne Williamson, and Barbara DeAngelis.
One of the commonalities you’ll find in people who become a somebody, whether they are the real deal or not, is they do a marvelous job of conveying upon themselves grand and great importance.
They shift everyone’s attention to the fact that there are ground breaking, life-changing, radical, and revolutionary things being done by them.
It’s all about self-proclamation.
There are many a guru who have no background, no resume, no credentials, no anything to support their position.
The thing that mattered most was they decided to be seen in a certain light and fully committed to marketing themselves as such.
If you question this idea that your resume can be completely irrelevant when it comes to influencing people, look at the fact that we here in America have never elected the best qualified person by resume to be the President of the United States.
Dan Kennedy believes that with the exception of George W. there’s pretty much nobody that has been put in the White House based purely on their credentials.
You’ll also notice that when people do try to run on their resumes, they get their ass handed to them.
The fact that it doesn’t work here, in one of the most visible positions on earth should make it clear that it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as people think it does.
Does this mean that you fake it?
Nope. Most of the people who attempt to do this implode on themselves under the immense pressure of faking it.
What it does mean is that you have to rid yourself of the desire to be overly dependent on your resume and any stubbornness related to giving it more importance than it is due.
You make yourself up based on what you reveal about yourself.
Your personal narrative is MOST persuasive and it exists separate from your certifications and degrees.
Two Things That People Who Have Massive Influence Do…
1. They Over-simplify
Complex ideas are not welcomed.
Think about politics again and how the guys who try to talk to the public about specifics in policies don’t get paid attention to and are handicapped by their need to give dissertations.
You want to master over-simplification.
Tony Robbins, Suze Orman, and Gary Vaynerchuk are all criticized by all the unsuccessful “professionals” for doing this. These three mega-influencers all laugh their way to the bank.
Influential writing isn’t about doing a better job of explaining shit. It’s about doing a better job of simplifying things. They are not the same. You’re not going so much for understanding as you are for acceptance.
2. They’re Good At Bundling Their Message Within a Feel-Good Wrapper
This means that people end up deriving pleasure from what they’re hearing and reading about themselves – even the stuff that beats them up for their naughty behavior.
Of course, you need to be able to tear people apart but you’ve also got to be able to put them back together.
The stern but loving parent style of messenger allows you to do this easily.
The Building Blocks Of Personal Narratives
You want to give serious devoted attention to thinking about what your personal narrative is now vs. what it should be.
There are some sources from your life experiences that could prove to be incredibly useful to you. And there’s some shit that won’t be useful at all.
The key is to not overlook or down play the valuable stuff.
Think about Bob Ross here and the fact that the progression of painting landscapes doesn’t vary.
Bob is going through the same exact layering progression every single time.
Also, the rules of painting water doesn’t change… the rules for painting trees doesn’t change, the rules for painting skies don’t change… etc.
The same scene progressions and the same rules are on display in every episode.
This means that the chances are high that after you’ve watched 20-30 episodes and you’ve bought 2-3 of his how-to books, you know pretty much everything Bob knows about painting landscapes with a wet-on-wet technique.
And yet raving fans can admit that even though they could tell you what he is going to next… BEFORE he did it… because they’d been tuning in for so long… watching him never got old.
Why?
Because he made it a point to reveal real-life tidbits about himself and his personality while he was going through those same rote motions.
As you continue reading you’re going to see how THIS was THE critical X factor that propelled him to icon status.
You’re going to see how this decision made it impossible for anyone to challenge his throne.
We’ll start out by looking at some of Bob Ross’s life experiences that many people learned about him while watching him paint.
As you’re reading through each of them, consider how many of these experiences you have in common with him or that you can relate to…
->>>Dropped out of school very early
Clayton Makepeace and I have this in common with Bob.
In one of his shows he’s demonstrating how to paint a sky by doing little X strokes across the canvas and he says, “Just like my teacher used to do all over my papers in school.”
That’s all he said. No long story. No big speech.
One sentence was all that he could afford and it was all he needed to create deep resonance with everyone in the audience who fell into the 80% of people who were B or lower students in school.
Just the other day I was listening to Oprah’s Master Class podcast that featured Whoopi Goldberg and Whoopi talked about how she wasn’t good at doing school work because of her dyslexia, which teachers even knew about back then.
For hundreds of years if numbers and letters didn’t appear right to you, you just thought you were crazy and kept your mouth shut about it. People with A.D.D. did the same thing.
You suffered in silence as people looked at you like you were stupid and lazy because you didn’t do your work. You were cast aside by teachers and herded into the “slow kid” room where you were spoon-fed dummy curriculum and essentially baby sat for the day.
People who were previously only aware of Whoopi based on watching her in movies are now bonded closer to her as the result of hearing her talking about this chapter of her life for two minutes on this podcast.
I can relate to her story though because my brother who was a year younger than me got stuck in the slow-kid room for what I think would be diagnosed today as A.D.D.
Unlike Makepeace and Bob Ross who dropped out of school to help their family I dropped out at the start of the 12th grade for a different reason.
Over the summer I had gotten a job in construction and fallen in love with getting paid a few dollars more per hour than the minimum wage I’d previously been earning while washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant.
I wasn’t amazing at anything school-work related but I didn’t have any mental challenges that people like Whoopi did.
At the time, I was attending an alternative high school (read: a school for at-risk youth) and I didn’t have any illusions about going to college.
The company I was working for had agreed to let me work half-days when school started again which I did.
But construction is nothing like a plug-and-play job where you’re just filling in a hole in the schedule like at a call center, for instance.
It’s a physical labor-oriented team work setting where everyone has a role and it didn’t take long at all for me to feel like I was letting my team down so this guilt along with the increased wage made it an easy decision for the 16-year-old version of me to leave school.
->>>Joined military when he was 18 and spent half his life in the military
->>>Worked in a profession that was painful to leave, yet painful to stay in
Bob Ross felt that his job in the military ran against his natural temperament.
He hated being the guy that was expected to scream at you when you didn’t do something right.
He promised himself that if he ever left the military he’d never shout again.
To alleviate some of the psychological strain he was under Ross took up painting in his spare time.
->>>Started part-time:
Bob was a part-time bar tender and he painted landscapes on gold pans (metal pans people used when mining gold back in the day) in his down-time.
Somebody must have told him that his paintings were good enough to sell and this inspired him to start selling his paintings to tourists who came to the bar.
->>>Taught his son to paint from when he was very young
Claims his son talks better in front of an audience than he did and paints better than he did.
His son eventually became a Bob Ross Certified Instructor and made appearances on his dad’s show.
->>>Second to Painting, Bob Loved Wildlife
Bob’s family was far from wealthy when he growing up.
Wild creatures/animals served as toys for him to play with.
As a kid he had every pet imaginable. Living in Florida as a kid who loved to play outside, this gave him access to tons of creatures/critters.
Later in life when his success allowed, he was committed to rehabilitating injured or orphaned animals and would build elaborate cages for them on his property.
->>>Charitable With His Talent
Bob WAS the show.
No one could replace his unique IT factor and the networks knew he had them by the balls because of this.
He could have easily included a clause in his contracts that said he would be allowed to sell all the paintings he did on the show and keep the majority of the profit.
But he didn’t.
Instead, Bob let all of his paintings be auctioned off by PBS in order to give back to the medium that made it possible for him to become a celebrity and that also produced other forms of uplifting television that he believed in.
One time they had a televised fundraising event where Bob did a painting live and auctioned it off, the person who bought it called and asked him if he’d wait there so she could meet him.
This woman drove for an hour to get there.
She was older woman on a walker and when she met him, she cried and said, “I don’t have too many good days anymore but when I watch your show, it’s the best part of my day and I just want to thank you for that. That’s why I had to have your painting.”
Bob thanked her, hugged her, and said, “That’s why I do this.”
Within The Teaching You Reveal Parts Of Yourself That Your Perfect Prospect Wants To Relate To
The idea of the host of a show speaking softly, having no live audience, and having a ghetto ass amateur set is supposed be TV Death.
TV isn’t supposed to put people to sleep.
It’s supposed to jolt them upright with lively and loud action. The worst thing for 99% of television hosts was silence.
Bob intentionally engaged in a one-on-one conversation with the viewer…
“I only talk to one person when I’m filming and I’m really crazy about that person. They feel like they know me and that I know them.”
~Bob Ross
While painting and with the camera rolling, over the span of over 400 episodes of The Joy of Painting, Bob talked about where he grew up, animals he had, stories about these animals, stories about imagining clouds being different objects with his brother, stories about his mom, stories about being a carpenter growing up, stories about his son painting since he was born, he talked about not being good at school, talked about growing up in Florida and moving to Alaska and seeing snow for the first time when he was 21, and much more.
Think about how severely handicapped Bob was being that he had to race against the clock in every episode to finish the painting as he had a hard deadline to meet.
Think about how he had limited space in his instructional print books because extra paper and ink cost more money.
People raised on the internet don’t appreciate these limitations at all because all they know is the internet reality where you can take as much time as would be completely effective when talking about yourself online.
The wrong idea to have about this is that you need to talk about yourself in-depth and at length.
You don’t.
But you do need to generously sprinkle.
And when you do this, it totally helps you ignore this thought if it ever comes to your mind…
“Ain’t Nobody Got Time To Listen To You Blab About Your Life”
In the workshop, Dan Kennedy recalls an interview he was listening to on the radio with the fiction author Dean Koontz.
Dean had a new dark horror novel coming out and was doing his rounds of interviews to promote it. Dean spent fifteen of the twenty minutes of this interview talking about his dogs. Dan thinks there was a reason for this.
The segue into talking about dogs came as a result of a dog being in the book but the discussion wasn’t about that dog.
It was about dogs Dean had as a kid, the golden retriever he has now, and the golden retriever rescue group he’s a part of.
You might be tempted to ask, “Why would he sabotage his book promotion interview talking about this bullshit instead of pitching his book?”
The reason is because personal narrative sells better than product does.
The unenlightened person may think Koontz was an idiot for doing this and that he doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.
Kennedy believes the opposite of that.
He believes Koontz was savvy enough to know that he needed to work the human connection angle.
There’s a lot more people who own dogs and like them than there are people who are currently addicted to reading his novels so Koontz sees this relatable topic as an opportunity to convert some people, who wouldn’t otherwise, to take the first step in becoming a fan of his by reading one of his books.
And the side benefit of this is that the fans who have read all of his books will love getting to know this stuff about him.
Far too many people overlook the richness that lies buried in their personal stuff going all the way back to their childhood.
One example Dan cited that was on display at the time this workshop was recorded was the presidential race where the late Senator John McCain was trotting out his P.O.W. story.
Well, this story is most relevant to active military members or military veterans.
This is a sizable segment of the voting public but Kennedy pointed out that POW stories are not all that useful to McCain anywhere else because people who haven’t been in the military don’t have any kind of personal connection to it.
This means he needs more stories for mixed company settings.
One of the guys at the workshop was telling Kennedy about a story of their dad doing something heroic and Dan points out that his personal story is far more useful in a marketing piece being put in front of a mixed audience than McCain’s is because the number of people who have fathers FAR outweighs the number of people who have either served in the military or… had a family member who saw action on the battlefield.
People might tell one or two stories about their father.
Kennedy says you should have an arsenal of 20-30 of them you use.
And the main thing to remember with these stories is that you never tell a story without a point and you never make a point without telling a story.
Even the testimonials you use should be story based.
Dan talks about how when he doing an infomercial for Shed Shop (back yard sheds), they used a testimonial of a woman telling the story of her always wanting a doll house and never having had one . . . until she found Shed Shop.
Her story has shit-nothing to do with how the sheds are built and how many years the company has been in business or any of that. The value of her testimonial lies purely in its ability to make a personal connection with the perfect prospect.
There’s a shit-ton of people out there who always wanted a new bike and never got one, who wanted a new car but never got one, wanted a pony but never got one.
The punch line to this story is her getting to finally say, “FUCK YOU (INSERT – DAD, WIFE, BROTHER, FRIEND), I’M GROWN UP NOW AND I’M THE BOSS AND I’M GETTING ME A SHED!”
You could find a story with this same punch line and replace the word “shed” in that sentence with your product and service and you’d be working with some extremely powerful material.
So, with Bob Ross’s perfect prospect… they could’ve been denied art classes their whole life by their parents and spouse… and now they’re newly divorced and they’re gonna say, “FUCK YOU! I’m going to Bob’s class and nobody can say shit because I’m grown up and independent now!”
You want to find a way to connect with the idea of people being refused something they desperately want, couldn’t get it, didn’t get it, and now they’re presented with the opportunity to get it.
This is the angle that let’s us connect with the part of all of us who lusts for that feeling of, “I don’t answer to anyone. I do what I want.”
Most people are not good at pulling personal narratives out of themselves. If you can find a partner that can help you by asking you questions, they might pull useful information out of you.
You Want To Cultivate a “Personal Asset List” and Turn That Into a Checklist
You’re gonna see a short list of Kennedy’s there and you’ll see that Dan’s idea of an asset is different than what you may believe.
For instance, Dan mentions not having “alcoholism” on the list and how most people wouldn’t think of this as an asset. He does.
The reason he does is because there’s a huge percentage of the population who has or has had a drinking problem.
Everybody has somebody in their family who has some kind of drinking issue. This is grounds for connection. This isn’t an asset when you have it but when it’s in the past, something like this can go on your asset list.
Normal/average people don’t look at certain experiences they’ve had in their life in ways that are resourceful.
You and I know this.
Good experiences are often overlooked and horrible ones are often hidden away in the closet for no one to see because reliving shame and embarrassment is a priority in most people’s lives.
You my friend, play on a whole different field.
You recognize that all of experiences serve a purpose and because we give empowering meanings to our experiences… what others consider trash is our treasure and what’s good can be magnified and enhanced.
What you may or may never have done for yourself though is take an inventory and I’m going to invite you to do this yourself but before you do I want to give you a quick list of what Dan considers to be his assets, which most people would consider to be blemishes they would want to conceal…
“Asset” Examples – Dan Kennedy’s personal list
->>> Stuttering problem
->>> Dad was rich, then poor
->>> No college education
->>> Two cars repossessed in the same year
->>> Bankruptcy
->>> Diabetes
->>> Divorced twice and his 2nd wife is now his 3rd wife
In spite of having this seemingly ugly list of “assets” here’s a short list of what he has accomplished in spite of having them…
->>> He was a grown adult who stuttered and overcame this humiliation to go to become one of the highest paid platform salesmen in the world
->>> He went bankrupt and now he’s wealthy
->>> Never went to college and now he’s the trusted adviser of many MBA’s and CEO’s and he’s a successful author
One thing Dan points out was the fact that people need to know your origin story in order to become full-fledged raving fans who totally buy into what you’re selling.
An example of this was Bill Glazer’s story of going to bet on a horse with Dan and walking away his business partner and owning half of Dan’s business.
Dan points out that one indicator of a useful story is if it can have a compelling headline…
So, if you take Bill’s story from above into consideration, you could easily come up with a headline like…
“I Went To The Races To Bet On A Horse And I Wound Up With A Business”
People can read this headline and wonder what the hell you’re talking about and want to read more.
Now Let’s Take a Look at Bob Ross’s Origin Story…
Inspiration Strikes Seeing Someone Else Doing What He Loved
One day at the bar, in 1975, the channel happened to get turned to public television and there on the screen was the show “The Magic of Oil Painting” which was hosted by a German man named Bill Alexander.
Bob was familiar with painting landscapes which Bill did but his “all at once” style of painting was new to him.
Alexander called this the “wet on wet” technique.
This method allowed you to paint layers on color on top of each other and blend them right on the canvas whereas traditional oil painting requires you to wait for each application to dry before a new color.
This is a user-friendly technique because it allows you to paint quickly and if you make a mistake, you can easily blend it away which gave birth to Bob’s saying, “We don’t make mistakes. We only have happy accidents.”
He talked about Bill teaching him this technique and feeling that it was a precious gift he’d been given.
The biggest gift for Bob was that this style allowed him to paint “before the bubble burst” and get his painting on the canvas before he lost his idea.
He Tracked Down The Master and Studied With Him
It took him a year to track down Bill Alexander for the purpose of getting the chance to be mentored by him.
This led to Bob being offered a position as a Magic Arts traveling instructor.
He accepted this invitation and retired from the military after 20 years of service which would have put him around the age of 38-years-old.
He left Alaska with his wife’s blessing and $1,000 dollars in his pocket to either make his fortune… or fail spectacularly.
If it didn’t work out, he’d come back home and settle again into “a real job.”
Lucked Into a Person Who Believed In Him
While traveling across the country teaching classes for Alexander he met Annette Kowalski.
Annette was mourning the loss of her child. Her husband was willing to do anything to try and lift her spirits.
Like Bob, she had fallen in love with Bill Alexander from television so her husband told her he would drive her hundreds of miles to Florida so that she could take his class.
But to her great disappointment, when she called to sign up, they told her that Bill had retired and now some guy named Bob Ross was teaching the classes.
In spite of this terrible news, she signed up for a five-day seminar and during the seminar would quickly come to feel the calming affect Bob was having on her. His demeanor was mesmerizing.
Annette and her husband took Bob to a hamburger joint and told him that they wished he would come teach classes up in Washington D.C. and he agreed to do so.
This meant quitting this gig with Magic Arts and forming a partnership with the Kowalskis.
Hardly an Overnight Success – Getting a Nasty First Taste of What It Takes To Run Your Own Business
The idea of teaching his own classes and making more money for yourself sounded amazing.
But Bob was quickly given a rude awakening as to how difficult it can be to rustle up customers when you didn’t know shit about advertising or marketing.
To make matters worse, his business partners didn’t know shit about advertising or marketing either.
This was the opposite of being an employee working for Bill Alexander where all Bob had to do was show up and teach full to capacity classes.
This task was made even more difficult by the fact that Bob Ross had zero reputation in the market. He was just some nobody who was claiming he could teach you to paint as far as the public was concerned.
One of the tactics he and Kowalskis tried was to get malls, art supply stores, and other retail spaces to let Bob come in and do demonstrations that would hopefully draw customers for their workshops from the people who happened to wander in the store that day and happened to stop to watch him paint.
These Hail Mary, hoping-against-all-odds attempts didn’t work.
They ran newspaper ads and they still couldn’t fill up classes.
One time, only one person signed up and instead of calling the class off, Bob taught the one person.
The guy ended up being a business man and I imagine the topic of them not being able to fill up classes due to not knowing what the hell they were doing and being on a shoe string budget came up.
This man ended up offering Bob a million dollars in funding and in exchange for this, he would get 40% of whatever they brought in moving forward.
They turned the offer down and decided to keep going it alone.
Many times, the topic of throwing in the towel was brought up… but never by Bob.
He never wanted to quit… even when they’d made it big and one of his business partners wanted to cash out.
And when they turned this proposition down, this meant continuing to boot strap and live lean.
In an effort to conserve funds, Bob decided to perm his straight hair in order to save money on getting haircuts. He hated this look and loathed the fact that even after they hit it big, he was stuck with the hair because it had become a trademark of sorts.
Bob believed that if you do what you love, the money will come.
But up until this point, this belief was yielding hardly fruit.
They needed something different.
Endorsed By The God In That Realm
In 1982, Annette Kowalski went out and asked Bill Alexander if he would shoot a commercial with Bob and Bill agreed to do so.
Bill was getting out of the business and in the commercial they depicted him passing the torch to Bob.
The recording of the commercial wasn’t in a format regular TV stations could air so they went to the local public television station, WNVC, in Virginia and asked them if they could convert it to a format they could use.
When the people at the studio watched the tape and saw Bob painting, they were so impressed that they asked if Bob would be willing to do a TV series with them.
This was the birth of The Joy of Painting With Bob Ross.
The concept for the show would be him starting with a blank canvas… and within 30 minutes he would have a finished painting the two of you had worked through stroke-by-stroke with each other.
Bob believed in creating an evergreen look with his clothing believing that shows could be shown over and over again in the years to come and wanted his clothes to not be a distraction even 30 years from the time the show was taped.
It Ain’t Easy…
Series 1 of the show aired on stations on the East coast but the viewership wasn’t all that big. It might have aired on 50 stations.
In fact, the audio and video of Series 1 was so shitty that it was never aired again.
The network cancelled the show.
This meant that Bob didn’t have a show that would help him fill his teaching classes.
But one smart thing they did was to start looking for the cities where Bill Alexander’s show had been popular and go offer classes in those cities.
WIPB.TV was a public television studio in Muncie, Indiana that resided in an old house.
Bob, out of necessity, just approached the person running this studio and told them they were doing demonstrations at the mall that week and wondered if the studio could give them any promotion.
The studio sold them air time and showed his commercials before and after Bill Alexander’s shows had aired.
They also bought ads during the Phil Donahue show which aired in nearby Chicago.
These ads paid off by filling up their classes which got them thinking that this little station in town might be a place to continue shooting their show…
When Bob presented the idea of him being able to complete a painting in 26 minutes on film, they asked him how many paintings he could do.
He asked them how many did they want?
In three days, they shot 13 episodes.
They wanted to try to get the show more exposure so they pursued a national distributor. The distributor liked what they saw and green-lit the show.
In 1984, when Bill Alexander was getting out of the game, they designed a campaign that was a more elaborate show of Bill giving Bob Ross his blessing and lovingly passing on his legacy and technique to him.
By this year, the show could now be seen on 75 stations, in most parts of the country, but there were still some stations that didn’t run it.
At this time Bob was still teaching classes and whenever he got to a city that didn’t air the show, he would give the attendees the number of their local PBS station directors and tell them to put in a request for them to air it.
This contributed to him eventually being aired on 300 channels across the United States.
To this day, his show runs on almost every station in the country… something like 95% of stations which is the highest of any of the art programs.
Having a High Motor and Strong Work Ethic
Now that Bob was distributed nationwide, Bob was on the hook to create a new series every quarter.
At this time, they started taking around a week to shoot all 13 episodes.
And all of the shows were filmed live-to-tape. The only time edits happened was if there was a technical difficulty.
He would eventually finish 30 series worth of content in the house used as a studio in Muncie which equaled almost 400 episodes.
If you watch him paint during an episode, he painted like a bulldog.
His demeanor was calm and collected but he was moving quickly. His style of painting on screen was the epitome of the saying, “Be quick but don’t hurry.”
Who Can Best Identify With Bob Ross’s Origin Story?
If you said, entrepreneurs or people who grew up watching their parents run a small to medium-sized business, you would be exactly right.
Maybe you already knew all of the above about Bob.
I didn’t.
Discovering the fact that Bob was a successful marketer makes me love and appreciate him EVEN MORE than I already did.
And here’s why Bob gets extra-credit with EVERYONE (not just entrepreneurs) in his audience if he were to briefly talk about the years when he was a floundering nobody in his business journey…
People love rooting for an underdog who defies the odds and wins.
People love the story of a small-town boy who made good.
People love hearing about a celebrity’s humble beginnings and seeing that this person hasn’t gone “Hollywood” and forgotten where they’ve come from.
In reality, he gets MORE credit and admiration for his business success from the Average Joe because he’s NOT a business person in the classic sense of the word – not a slick salesperson, no business degree or story about dropping out of school… “from Harvard”, not some polished CEO who clawed his way through the C-suite.
His situation is what ALL experts who hate sales (and regular people who think it’d be cool to “be your own boss”) wish would happen to them… things just falling into place in spite of them being complete novices to the idea of marketing and advertising.
Bob’s humble talk about his business success would create a completely different perception than someone like Donald Trump talking about their business success.
These realizations are invaluable and can be had by thoughtful disclosure… letting your audience get to know how you came to be where you are today.
Now what follows is an awesome side benefit that you get when you strategically layer stories into your marketing and advertising…
Stories Prevent You From Jumping To The Sale Too Soon
The selling process is similar to the process of getting laid in that moving too slow can often yield better results than moving too fast.
People who have a sales background have a tendency to want to get to the pitch too soon or to sound too salesy even while they’re aware that they need to slow down.
These are the people who do the brute force and lazy kind of selling that gives the sales profession a bad name.
You can screw this up in print/pixel advertising and marketing just as easily as you can in person.
Entrepreneurs who have zero background in sales at all… but then hear some guru telling them that the only way they’re going to succeed is by adopting a philosophy like, “a sales email a day will keep bankruptcy away”… also end up falling into this same trap.
But instead of doing some aggressive approach… they jump to the sale too soon with a mousey plea that gets shut down the same way as the pushy pitch does.
The best result you can ever have in selling is when people feel like they’ve figured out you’re the solution and they’re moving toward you rather than you showing up un-invited on their doorstep and trying to smooth-talk your way into their wallet.
Kennedy loves a multi-media approach to prospecting but he’s always reluctant to put a telemarketing step early in the process rather than late because your customer has more long-term value to you if they feel like they called you to solve their problem and they’re coming to you to rescue them.
Just as you know in your gut the difference between porn photography and nude art when you see it… you and the prospect knows when you’re getting to the pitch too quick.
Think about the difference between the impersonal feel of 30-second ad for a local art supply store… and the 26-minutes of time spent with Bob Ross watching him paint a landscape.
You need a messaging-style that allows people let people connect with you and realize you’re a real person so they can feel good buying from you, like they’re buying from someone they are happy to give money to.
A super star National Sales Manager for World Book Encyclopedias always said, “The best encyclopedia salespeople always tell four stories before they do any kind of trial close.”
This was his rule he had for everyone he coached – you gotta hold yourself back from trial closing until you’ve told four bonding stories. He knew that until you got them on your side, even the best presentation of benefits wouldn’t work.
And this is precisely why Dan Kennedy Isn’t a fan of having marathon lists of bullets in the sales letters he writes for his clients.
Dan Kennedy’s sales letters for clients don’t follow the traditional three-pages long lists of bullets.
If he uses bullets, say in a direct mail piece, he’ll put them in their own place, separate from the sales letter.
If he’s selling a seminar with multiple speakers, he’ll do the same thing so that the pitch doesn’t get interrupted.
What Dan has noticed being a commonality with smart direct marketing companies like Boardroom who use mega lists of short bullets is that what’s being offered is almost never sold by a personality that the reader has a personal connection with.
You’re just buying information from a faceless corporation. It’s like buying from IKEA.
If you look at legendary direct response advertising pieces like, “Book Of Inside Information” these magalogs are not written in a personal letter from you to me manner. Instead, the tone is more of a neutral, institutional voice.
You’re not hearing from the editor who’s your buddy.
You’re not hearing about the story of how all these insights came to be gathered in one place.
You’re just paying for snippets of info like… “Foods never to eat on an airplane,” and “What the IRS doesn’t want you to know,” etc.
When you’re doing Kennedy style selling huge lists of bullets can get in the way of conversational selling.
Think of it like this…
The episodes of The Joy of Painting were un-interrupted. No commercial breaks. Just you and Bob talking for the entire episode.
The opposite of this is network television shows where 9 minutes of a 30 minute show are devoted to an array of 30-second advertisements where people barge in wanting to hurriedly sell you everything from breakfast cereal to snow tires to vaginal douche solutions.
Two completely different selling approaches.
You know which one of these approaches feels more nurturing to the prospect.
Your Competitors Will See You Doing All This Stuff And Will Think You Are An Idiot; Do It Anyway
When Dan was working with “Gold By The Inch”, the man who hired him had a direct mail piece that he sent to a lead that was a full color catalog of all the different gold displays, a price sheet, and a one page sales letter that gave a bare bones overview of what was on offer.
The letter sucked.
It just told you they’d been in business for this number of years and how you can buy the stuff for this much and sell it for that much.
Now, just in case you’re unfamiliar with Gold By The Inch, here is a quick overview from their site of what this business is…
This jewelry business opportunity is easily operated by one person, and you can make money the very first weekend. Expect profit margins of 300-700% on every easy sale that you make.
You’ll make mostly bracelets, necklaces, and anklets, but you can also make bikini chains, beeper chains, pet collars, eyeglass safety chains, boot and shoe jewelry and many more. You can make any size chain for any purpose and you don’t have to invest in large quantities of ready made chains to do it. You also have the peace of mind that every chain sold is supported by our written lifetime replacement guarantee.
Chain by the inch works well at fairs, festivals, flea markets, malls, home parties, and tourist shopping areas. We have everything you need for a very small investment.
So, as you can see the perfect prospect is a person who is a fan of small scale, do-it-yourself “business opportunities.”
Kennedy was hired by this company and he proceeded to write a 12-page sales letter that mostly told the owner’s story – “How Gold By The Inch Came To Be . . .”
He did this because it turns out that the owner’s story was the perfect prospect’s story.
The owner had 49 failed businesses prior to this and they put in a picture of the owner next to a wall where he had all the business cards from those businesses tacked up.
They told the story of him going to the swap meet for the first time with his little homemade display of the chains to test the idea, how he made $55.00 on his first day… the excitement of seeing his idea actually work… people actually handing him money, etc.
Kennedy had something like eight different stories in that sales letter and the response went through the roof.
Kennedy ended up being a hero because he ten times the business… the closing rate skyrocketed… and the average order size doubled.
None of Gold-By-The-Inch’s competitors vying for these same biz op customers followed their lead.
Kennedy thinks everyone who saw what he was doing probably thought his client was an idiot.
But at the end of the day, him and his client were sleeping as soundly as babies as the result of having their marketing and advertising being incredibly profitable.
END OF PART 1
I trust that since you’re reading this now, you have a better appreciation than the average person does for the power of using your personal narrative in your marketing.
Perhaps, you have also discovered some things you have in common with Bob Ross that you didn’t know you did until today.
In Part 2 of this piece we’ll be delving into my notes on five additional Dan Kennedy Influential Writing workshop strategies that Bob Ross used to turn himself into a global superstar.
Talk soon,
Lewis LaLanne