[00:08] Starting a new venture? Business stagnating?
[00:45] Recession hit, my businesses crashed. What could I do?
[01:08] Starting from scratch
[01:20] Writing a book – reinventing myself
[01:45] Radio Show – growing the business
[03:04] Generating leads from the book
[03:54] Business explodes
[04:23] Millions of dollars in income
[04:44] Move to California – start Best Seller Publishing
[05:20] Publish, Promote, Profit
[06:18] Contact info
Starting a new venture? Maybe your business, consulting or speaking career is stuck in the mud. I’m Rob Kosberg with Best Seller Publishing. You can find us online at bestsellerpublishing.org. In the next few minutes, I want to share with you how I took a brand new brick and mortar business from zero to over a million dollars in income in less than 18 months. Stay tuned and we’ll talk a little bit about it.
You see, up until 2007, I owned three different businesses in the real estate industry. I owned a real estate company, a mortgage company and I was also a licensed title agent and owned a title company. Those three companies were doing over two and a half million dollars in income for me and my business partner. But then in 2007, you know what happened, the financial crisis hit and it crushed us. Those same three businesses that were doing two and a half million dollars a year in income I closed the doors to in early 2008. There I was in 2008 trying to figure out a way to re-invent myself, to start from scratch.
What I knew was the financial services industry, but honestly, I didn’t have the stomach to rebuild a real estate or a mortgage company. I had been in it long enough and wanted to move away from it. That’s where Life After Debt came in and when I began thinking about and really considering writing a book to re-invent myself. One of the things that I did with my book after I launched it was I decided to send it to several local area radio stations. You see, I was testing some radio ads at that time, spending about 500 bucks a month and receiving little to no return on that investment.
I had spoken to several of the managers of these radio stations to let them know about my expertise so I sent them all copies of my book Life After Debt, letting them know that I was an author and I was a financial expert. One of the managers of the radio stations suggested that I start doing a local spot called All Things Financial that was just going to be a minute or two on Friday and we would discuss or I would share some financial wisdom in a certain area just as some content for their listeners.
Well, it went really, really well. It was very successful. It was received really well. Remember, we were in the midst of the financial crisis. This was 2008-2009 and things were still pretty shaky at that time. A lot of people were dealing with debt issues. They were wondering what to do. In South Florida where I was at that time, the real estate market had collapsed. Property values had dropped by 50%. People had just tons of questions about all these things. Well, that two-minute spot that I started doing weekly grew to 15 minutes and then a 30-minute show and then from there within one year, I was doing four hours a week of live radio on the air.
It was a call in show so I would share 15 minutes from some content of my book and then people would start calling in. What we did is we used my book to generate leads for our business. We would let people know that if they want to call in and ask a question on the air, we would mail them a free copy of my book Life After Debt. If they didn’t want to comment on the air, then they could just call in, leave their name and address and answer a short survey and we would also send them this book.
Well, as you might imagine, we got dozens of leads every time we ran our show. When I was doing four hours of live radio a week, I would get sometimes hundreds of requests for my book every single week. My sales staff, which I now had, and myself would follow up with these people and see if we could help them and serve them by helping them in their financial crisis. As I said, the business exploded due to our use of the book and lead generation. We then went and started doing some pay per click, advertising on Google. We also did social media.
We did everything centered around my book which then became very popular, hit best seller status. In fact, the book has been sold about 25,000 times over the last five years since it was launched. That’s not a whole lot honestly relative to some other big named authors, but the reality is for me, it meant millions of dollars in income because we’ve been able to serve my ideal client through the use of my book, my bestselling book Life After Debt.
From there, about three years later as my business was rolling and I was really steeped in my financial services company all over again, I made a crazy decision. I actually decided to leave my financial services company and move to Southern California. I still ended up being the face of the company, generating leads for it, but after many years in the financial services filed I said, “You know what, I really want to start helping people to do the very thing that I did, re-invent themselves if they’re interested or to get their business that stuck to really explode to the next level, the very thing that I was able to do with my book.
The cool thing was as we were helping business owners with financial issues with my company, many people would come to me and say, “Rob, I had never heard of you before. Then I heard that you were an author. Then I heard you on the radio. Is that something that you think could help me grow my business?” Little by little, going back almost four years ago, we started helping business owners to publish, promote and profit from their own bestselling book. About that time is when I decided, “I want to start focusing on this completely.” I decided to move my whole family to Southern California, beautiful place, where we wanted to live.
I would still be the face of my financial services company, which by the way just sold about four or five months ago, pretty fired up about that and to start Best Seller Publishing and help coaches, consultants, speakers, authors and business owners and experts to write their own bestselling book, to publish it, promote it to bestseller status guaranteed and to profit from it. If you’re interested in learning more about our process, you can call our office in Pasadena. That number is (626) 765-9750. You can email me rob@bestsellerpublishing.org or just go to our website and you can see tons of testimonials, of books that we’ve done for other clients.
You can fill out a form to get a strategy session with me or one of my project managers. You can do all that at bestsellerpublishing.org. I hope this was helpful for you. It’s always good for me to tell the story because it’s the real thing, it’s what really happened, almost accidentally. I did not know a book would do that for me, but wow was it amazing. Hopefully, the same thing can happen for you and your business. Thanks again. I’m Rob Kosberg. We’ll talk again soon.
