If you’ve been a Dave Dee follower for some time, you might think you know this story and not read it. That would be a mistake because I’m taking it in a different direction than in the past.

Thirty-something years ago, a young Dr. Dee would spend a lot of time studying and practicing the art of magic. I would read books, watch VHS videotapes, and listen to cassettes, all about becoming a better magician.

In my mind, I was going to become the next David Copperfield  (Actually, Doug Henning, but I’m not sure if you’d know who that was).

Guess what I did NOT study.

Give yourself a prize if you said the business part of “show business.” I was under the false belief that if I became an excellent magician, shows would start flowing in.

Then I heard Dan “The Man” Kennedy say, “It’s more important to be a master marketer than to be a master of your craft.”

That thought hit me like a ton of bricks. In fact, at first, I didn’t want to believe it, so I dismissed that “eternal truth,” but the seed had been planted into my thick skull.

It wasn’t until I became desperate that I decided to embrace the idea of changing my focus from being better at my craft to becoming a top-notch marketer. Instead of continuing to be a serious student of magic, I would become a serious student of marketing.

By “serious student,” I mean I studied direct response marketing as if my life depended on it. And in some ways, it did. I read, listened, watched, and took notes from a wide variety of experts. Most importantly, I followed Jim Rohn’s advice of taking “massive action.”

With the meager marketing funds I had available, I bought rolls of stamps, wrote terrible lead-generation letters, and sent them to prospective customers. I placed tiny ads in local parenting magazines with nothing more than the headline “Make Your Child’s Party Unforgettable,” along with a couple of lines of copy and my home phone number. I did free shows at daycares in hopes of booking future gigs. The bottom line was I did as much as I could with the resources I had available to me.

Most of what I did didn’t work because my execution wasn’t that great. But, I realized that the only way to get better at marketing was to start doing it. I understand that you won’t be good at something the first time you do it. (That eternal truth holds for everything. For example, the first time I performed a new magic trick was nowhere near as good as the 100th time I did the trick.)

Most of what I tried didn’t work, but there was a slow trickle of results. I could have been impatient, quit what I was doing, and jumped to the next new thing in search of that elusive “home run” out of the gate. Fortunately, I didn’t do that. Instead, I kept working on getting better at implementing fundamental principles. The better I got at that, the better my results were.

The rest of the story is that within three months, I had to increase my booking by 733.33 %  (I used this calculator to figure that out!) That seems lightning-fast now, but at the time, when I was in the thick of it, it seemed slower than a herd of snails traveling through peanut butter.

Here are the four eternal truths of my little tale:

#1  To make more DEEnero, your focus needs to be on marketing and sales, not getting better at what you do.

#2  Take massive action, doing all you can with what you have.

#3 You won’t master something the first time you try it.

#4  Be patient. Results take time when you are doing something new.

Kick butt, make mucho DEEnero!

Dave “Still a Serious Student” Dee