Two Incredibly Easy Ways To Make Your Security Products and Services Unique
Discover The Secret “Lure” To Being The Big Fish In A Small Pond
There are literally hundreds of small fishing holes, within 5-10 miles of your office, that you can go fishing in for new clients…anytime you’d like.
Do you want to learn how to zone in on specific target neighborhoods…prime fishing waters… where you can dominate the market with your targeted security marketing messages…you’ll realize the greatest selling potential with these strategy – learning how to catch “fish” at will!
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BONUS HANDOUT In This Month’s Issue Of The Smokin Security Newsletter: Get A Client Handout, Used For Pre-Selling Your Services, That Offers The Best Customer Guarantee Ever Written….It is so Powerful That I GUARANTEE You’ll Get the Job on This GUARANTEE Alone!
This incredible handout is one of the first pieces I ever created for a private security client of mine, and it closed over $30K, in an access control project, on it’s first use. It’s designed for pre-selling security and low voltage services…mail it out prior to conducting your security audit and watch the doubt and skepticism go away and a new level of trust, faith and confidence, in you and your services, develop in your prospect! Believe me, you get more service if you guarantee something up front.
BTW: This handout, with it’ s stellar guarantee, can be tweak for locksmiths, CCTV installers, Electrical Contractors, Home Automation Experts, Fire Alarm Installers, Satellite Yahoos, GPS Installers, and so on.
Check out the audio clip I left for you to listen, that will teach you the science of how to “lure” monster fish (a.k.a. customers) in any body of water and easily hall them in! I’ve also included some sample “fishing maps” (from all over the USA) showing you the most lucrative “waters” of where affluent clientele swim. Also check out the security guarantee handout on my blog.
TTYS
Big weekend for New England, Celtics take on the mighty King James and the Cavaliers while the Bruins battle with the streaking Flyers!
Have a Gr8 weekend!
The Thrill of Protection (Great Sample Security Ad Inside!)
Turn out all thoughts of doubt and of trouble. Never tolerate them for a second. Bar the windows and doors of your mind against such thoughts – as you would bar your home against thieves who would steal your treasures.
What greater treasures can you have than faith and confidence in your own abilities to close more security sales in a down-market and the proper security marketing tools to take you there?
Face The Storm
Any security dealer or security sales rep can feel safe in a harbor (The waters of 2007), but real joy and victory comes to those who sense that they can captain the ship during a storm.
Here’s a snippet of a great ad, that’s in this month’s Smokin’ Security Newsletter. It’s designed for pre-selling security and low voltage services…mail it out prior to conducting your security audit and watch the doubt and skepticism go away and a new level of trust, faith and confidence, in you and your services, develop in your prospect!
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Security Maverick Coaching Club TM
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Slap one of these bad boys on each vehicle, fill them with your business cards, and instantly turn your vans into 24/7/365 selling machines! I have been using these on my work vehicles for almost a year now and still can’t believe how many cards are taken and how many sales calls I get from them! It’s like having a security sales rep permanently “gorilla-glued” to the side of your vans handing out business cards all over town!
So, if you want to dramatically elevate your game, I urge you to check out one of my three Premier Pocket Packages – Platinum, Gold and Bronze – and start using Vehicle Card Pockets TM today!
Who’s looking for a way to market to new homeowners that’s cheap, easy and effective, without needing any special marketing skills, lots of coin or know-how to employ?
Use my outrageously easy marketing system for New Homeowners (the new residents who are moving into your area by the hundreds each month) and double – even triple – your new installs overnight!
If you’ve been scrambling around your office looking for a way to increase your security installations, then you’ve just found it!
Here’s why: For the first time ever, I’m revealing the secrets to how I get “new mover” security installations without breaking a sweat. So, why should you follow my lead and go after new homeowners? Well, these nomads are worth on average, $1400 per installation – plus years of RMR (re-occurring monthly revenue from monitored accounts). And I only spend a few bucks to get them!
My complete New Homeowners Marketing System is guaranteed to bring you in a boat-load of security leads. I created and implemented this system in my own security business (see, you get FREE R&D here because I’ve done all the testing and tweaking for you!) and, over the past 16 months, have increased my residential security installations by 92% using it!
My complete approach beats the pants off of every other approach currently out there!
This system is so unconventional that none of your competition is doing it and won’t even see you coming until after the damage is done and you’ve reaped all the hay from the harvest!
Draft Your Technicians The Way The NFL Drafts Players
The NFL draft is in full swing and my favorite team, the New England Patriots, needs a lot of help this year getting great new players so they can get another shot at the Super Bowl.
So far, we’ve selected CB Devin McCourty, out of Rutgers University, in the 1st round with the 27th pick. We do have some serious competition banging down our door in the AFC EAST division with the NY Jets and the Miami Dolphins – both of which are already making some clutch off season acquisitions.
I think if you chose your security technicians that way the NFL scrutinizes and chooses it’s new players from the draft, you’d end up with A-List technicians.
Let me explain:
NFL Draft
The draft is where NFL teams select players from the pool of available college athletes. Each team takes turns picking players they hope will positively impact their football team.
What head coaches and general managers look for in players is similar to what you should be looking for in new technicians.
By examining how and dissecting the common denominators that make a football player successful, you can parralel these traits for selecting your own technicians and installers.
Building A Dynasty
Here are eight (8) key leverage points to ponder in determining how to evaluate talent for selecting new technicians…and building your security Dynasty!
Attitude – Your players need to fit your system and your mindset: If your techs aren’t offensive about creating a “WOW” environment for your clientele, then cut them and let them get picked up by your competitor off the wire. Your techs NEED positive attitudes!
Background - Coaches all worry about their players’ character and make-up and what they have done in the past. You should have the same concerns about your technicians. Make sure that you do a CORI check and also check on their past employment record.
Longevity - Some players are a flash in the pan, prima donnas, super novas, or think there sh*t don’t stink. You need a stable workforce of high quality techs that are polite, couteous, and have good personalities and that will stick around.
Position/Needs - Every team needs balance which is why coaches often “draft for need” passing on the best available player and selecting a player they can cross-train in multiple areas. You should not select techs by skill alone. Finding someone with the right personality/attitude, and background (who will stick around for a while) and who is cross-trainable would be most advantageous for you and your company.
Size/Speed - You can’t have techs that are 500 lbs…how are they going to get up into an attic’s crawl space. Nor can you have a guy that’s 150 lbs walking around slow as molasses. You need techs that are fit, nimble and can hustle…just like great football players!
Smarts - Good, fundamentally sound technicians clean up after themselves and make sure everything is tye wrapped nice and neat and all the devices are labeled…and the great techs are up-selling while they work!
Workouts/Scouting - The pro football teams test, prod, and research players, themselves, before they make their selection…you should, too! Have potential techs come in and program an alarm panel and burn a CD off of a DVR and call tech support with a known question. Make damn sure they know what they’re doing before you hire them.
Not For Long
The National Football League is often referred to as the “Not For Long” league. If you can’t develop and maintain your techs and they’re always jumping ship for another buck an hour or more, you’ll always be agonizing about it and having sleepless nights staring up at the ceiling in a cold sweat.
You have to develop a security business that “works for you and not against you.” If you can’t take off for 10 days on holiday (I like saying “holiday,” it sounds so English and is much more appealing then vacation) then you don’t have a business…you have a glorified job!
P.S. Your technicians, that you deliver to your customers’ doorsteps, are your product and nothing else. They represent who your company is what you’re all about. If they fail you, you’re doomed!
Art of the Steal: The World’s Most Ingenious Thief
Here’s a very interesting article from Wired Magazine that’s worth a read. The story features Gerald Blanchard who was like a “criminal Rain Man” who involuntarily sees risk probability at every turn, he possessed a savant-like ability to exploit security flaws. Gerald Blanchard could hack any bank, swipe any jewel. There’s no security system he couldn’t beat.
His theft career started when he was a six-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg, Canada. The family couldn’t afford milk, so after a lengthy period of dry cereal, Gerald spotted recently delivered milk on his neighbor’s doorway. He snuck over in between cars and snatched the milk. Gerald said his heart was pounding and the milk tasted even sweeter….after that, he was hooked.
Read how his career evolved into ATM and bank burglaries and then a European castle heist. He broke into a Viennese castle (by parachuting onto the roof) and stole the Koechert Diamond Pearl (better known as the Sisi Star) – a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. The Sisi Star was contained in a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a small feat for Gerald.
Criminal Virtuoso
Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.
Find out how Gerald conducted his thefts and averted the police, that is, until two keystone cops interrupted his career. It’s a must read. Click here if you want to see what this guy looks like! By no means are we glamorizing what he did, the guy is a criminal.
Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief
by Joshuah Bearman, Wired Magazine
“The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.
A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just another twentysomething on vacation with his wife and her wealthy father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of Versailles, his father-in-law’s VIP status granted them a special preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection. And there it was: In a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind bulletproof glass, on a weight-sensitive pedestal — a delicate but dazzling 10-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous pearl. Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try to take it.
The docent began to describe the history of the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star — it was one of many similar pieces specially crafted for Empress Elisabeth to be worn in her magnificently long and lovely braids. Sisi, as she was affectionately known, was assassinated 100 years ago. Only two stars remain, and it has been 75 years since the public had a glimpse of…
Blanchard wasn’t listening. He was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he has a savantlike ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn. And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he couldn’t fence the piece, which he did hear the guide say was worth $2 million. Still, he found the thing mesmerizing and the challenge irresistible.
He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the star’s chamber. (He even coyly shot the “No Cameras” sign near the jewel case.) He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move — albeit very slowly — inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its size. He also noted the armed guards stationed at every entrance and patrolling the halls.
But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who was game for a mercenary sortie and would help Blanchard procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.
Aerial approaches are a tricky business, though, and Blanchard almost overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four stories by grabbing a railing at the roof’s edge. For a moment, he lay motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute, retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column, and lowered himself down the side of the building.
Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than 1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he would disappear behind the massive curtains.
The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn’t register that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that covered, too: He reached into his pocket and deftly replaced Elisabeth’s bejeweled hairpin with the gift-store fake.
Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard’s pocket and he was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his parachute was later found in a trash bin, no one connected it to the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks before anyone realized that the jewelry had disappeared.
Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term, the Blanchard Criminal Organization. Drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal virtuoso.
“Cunning, clever, conniving, and creative,” as one prosecutor would call him, Blanchard eluded the police for years. But eventually he made a mistake. And that mistake would take two officers from the modest police force of Winnipeg, Canada, on a wild ride of high tech capers across Africa, Canada, and Europe. Says Mitch McCormick, one of those Winnipeg investigators, “We had never seen anything like it.”
Like a criminal Rain Man, Gerald Blanchard possessed a savantlike ability to exploit security flaws.
Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a 6-year-old living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn’t afford milk, and one day, after a long stretch of dry cereal, the boy spotted some recently delivered bottles on a neighbor’s porch. “I snuck over there between cars like I was on some kind of mission,” he says. “And no one saw me take it.” His heart was pounding, and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual. “After that,” he says, “I was hooked.”
Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name, Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn’t look the part — slim, short, and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates — but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in reform school. “The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom VCR,” recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard’s teachers. Flanagan thought he might be able to straighten out the soft-spoken and polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his home-mechanics class.
“He was a real natural in there,” Flanagan says. Blanchard’s mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart. Despite severe dyslexia and a speech impediment, Blanchard “was an absolute genius with his hands,” the teacher recalls. In Flanagan’s class, Blanchard learned construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics. The two bonded, and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard, driving him to and from school and looking out for him. “He could see that I had talent,” Blanchard says. “And he wanted me to put it to good use.”
Flanagan had seen many hopeless kids straighten out — “You never know when something’s going to change forever for someone,” he says — and he still hoped that would happen to Blanchard. “But Daniel was the type of kid who would spend more time trying to cheat on a test than it would have taken to study for it,” Flanagan says with a laugh.
In fact, by early in his high school years, Blanchard had already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue more lucrative opportunities, like fencing tens of thousands of dollars in goods stolen by department store employees he had managed to befriend. “I could just tell who would work with me,” he says. “It’s a gift, I guess.”
Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits, and his huge piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an entire RadioShack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. “She looked the other way,” Blanchard says. “And I tried to keep it all from her.”
Around this time, Blanchard was arrested for theft. He did several months behind bars and was released into Flanagan’s custody after the older man vouched for him at a hearing. “He was great with our own kids,” Flanagan says. “And I still thought he might come around.” But Blanchard’s burgeoning criminal career was hard to ignore, as he often flaunted his ill-gotten gains. “I wasn’t surprised when the FBI came knocking one day,” Flanagan says. “He’d pull out a fistful of hundreds and peel one off to pay for pizza.”
In April 1993, Blanchard was nabbed by the cops in Council Bluffs, Iowa, for a suspected car arson and brought back to police headquarters. “They kept me in the interrogation room past midnight,” Blanchard says. “And at a certain point, I managed to sneak into the next room and slip through the tiles into the ceiling.” Undetected, he heard the cops run down the hall, thinking he’d gone out the fire escape. After waiting a couple of hours, Blanchard lowered himself down into the mostly empty station, stole a police coat, badge, radio, and revolver. After leaving a single bullet on the desk of his interrogator, he took the elevator to the main floor and strolled right past the front desk on his way out of the station. He hitchhiked at dawn back to Omaha on the back of a motorcycle, holding his purloined police cap down in the wind. “Why are you wearing a uniform?” the driver asked. “Costume party,” Blanchard said as the sun came up. “Really fun time.”
The next day, Blanchard was re-apprehended by a SWAT team, which had to use flash grenades to extricate him from his mother’s attic. But he surprised the cops by escaping yet again, this time from the back of a police cruiser. “They got out of the car and left the keys,” Blanchard says. “There was no barrier, so I fiddled with the cuffs until I got my hands in front of me, locked the doors, slipped up front, and put it in gear.” The authorities gave chase until Blanchard swerved into a steak-house parking lot, fled on foot, and was finally recaptured.
This time, Blanchard served four years and his sentence came with a deportation order attached. In March 1997, he was released to his Canadian homeland and barred from returning to the US for five years.
“After that,” Flanagan says, “I heard from Daniel once or twice a year, thanking me for what I had done for him.” Blanchard sent pictures of himself vacationing around the world, on exclusive beaches, posing in front of Viennese castles. He said he had his own security business. “I wanted that to be true,” Flanagan says. “But I had a hunch he was more likely in the anti-security business.”
In 2001, Blanchard was driving around Edmonton when he saw a new branch of the Alberta Treasury bank going up. His internal algorithm calculated low risk, and he began to case the target meticulously. It had been three years since the Sisi Star theft, and it was time to try something big and new.
As the bank was being built, Blanchard frequently sneaked inside — sometimes at night, sometimes in broad daylight, disguised as a delivery person or construction worker. There’s less security before the money shows up, and that allowed Blanchard to plant various surveillance devices in the ATM room. He knew when the cash machines were installed and what kind of locks they had. He ordered the same locks online and reverse engineered them at home. Later he returned to the Alberta Treasury to disassemble, disable, and remount the locks.
The take at this bank was a modest 60 grand, but the thrill mattered more than the money anyway. Blanchard’s ambition flowered, as did his technique. As Flanagan had observed, Blanchard always wanted to beat the system, and he was getting better at it.
Blanchard on his birthday with a small electronic device that he built. Blanchard’s mother remembers that even as a toddler he could take anything apart,
Blanchard targeted a half-dozen banks over the next few years. He’d get in through the air-conditioning ductwork, at times contorting his body to fit inside really tight spaces. Other times, he would pick the locks. If there were infrared sensors, he’d use IR goggles to see the beams. Or he’d simply fool the sensor by blocking the beam with a lead film bag.
He assembled an arsenal of tools: night-vision cameras, long-range lenses, high-gain antennas that could pick up the feeds from the audio and video recorders he hid inside a bank, scanners programmed with the encryption keys for police frequencies. He always had a burglary kit on hand containing ropes, uniforms, cameras, and microphones. In the Edmonton branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, which he hit in 2002, he installed a metal panel near the AC ducts to create a secret crawl space that he could disappear into if surprised by police.
Such evasive action was never required, however, in part because Blanchard had also memorized the mechanics of the Mas-Hamilton and La Gard locks that many banks used for their ATMs. (These are big, complicated contraptions, and when police later interrogated Blanchard, they presented him with a Mas-Hamilton lock in dozens of pieces. He stunned them by reassembling it in 40 seconds.)
Blanchard also learned how to turn himself into someone else. Sometimes it was just a matter of donning a yellow hard hat from Home Depot. But it could also be more involved. Eventually, Blanchard used legitimate baptism and marriage certificates — filled out with his assumed names — to obtain real driver’s licenses. He would even take driving tests, apply for passports, or enroll in college classes under one of his many aliases: James Gehman, Daniel Wall, or Ron Aikins. With the help of makeup, glasses, or dyed hair, Blanchard gave James, Daniel, Ron, and the others each a different look.
Over the years, Blanchard procured and stockpiled IDs and uniforms from various security companies and even law enforcement agencies. Sometimes, just for fun and to see whether it would work, he pretended to be a reporter so he could hang out with celebrities. He created VIP passes and applied for press cards so he could go to NHL playoff games or take a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with racing legend Mario Andretti. He met the prince of Monaco at a yacht race in Monte Carlo and interviewed Christina Aguilera at one of her concerts.
That’s where, in July 2000, Blanchard met Angela James. She had flowing black hair and claimed to work for Ford Models. They got along right away, and Blanchard was elated when she gave him her number. He sensed that the teenager was “down with crime” — someone he could count on for help.
Blanchard liked having a sidekick. James was a fun, outgoing party animal who had plenty of free time. She eventually began helping Blanchard on bank jobs. They’d tag-team on daylight reconnaissance, where her striking looks provided a distraction while Blanchard gathered information. At night, she’d be the lookout.
Though they were never involved romantically, James and Blanchard traveled together around the world, stopping in the Caribbean to stash his loot in offshore accounts. They camped out at resorts in Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos islands, depositing money in $10,000 increments into some of Blanchard’s 13 pseudonymously held accounts. The money in the offshore accounts was to pay for his jet-setting lifestyle. The money back in Canada would bankroll his real estate transactions. The funds sitting in Europe were there, well, in case anything happened to him.
After midnight on Saturday, May 15, 2004, as the northern prairie winter was finally giving way to spring, Blanchard walked up to the front door of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce in the Mega Centre, a suburban development in Winnipeg. He quickly jimmied the lock, slipped inside, and locked the door behind him. It was a brand-new branch that was set to open for business on Monday, and Blanchard knew that the cash machines had been loaded on Friday.
Thorough as ever, Blanchard had spent many previous nights infiltrating the bank to do recon or to tamper with the locks while James acted as lookout, scanning the vicinity with binoculars and providing updates via a scrambled-band walkie-talkie. He had put a transmitter behind an electrical outlet, a pinhole video camera in a thermostat, and a cheap baby monitor behind the wall. He had even mounted handles on the drywall panels so he could remove them to enter and exit the ATM room. Blanchard had also taken detailed measurements of the room and set up a dummy version in a friend’s nearby machine shop. With practice, he had gotten his ATM-cracking routine down to where he needed only 90 seconds after the alarm tripped to finish and escape with his score.
As Blanchard approached, he saw that the door to the ATM room was unlocked and wide open. Sometimes you get lucky. All he had to do was walk inside.
From here he knew the drill by heart. There were seven machines, each with four drawers. He set to work quickly, using just the right technique to spring the machines open without causing any telltale damage. Well rehearsed, Blanchard wheeled out boxes full of cash and several money counters, locked the door behind him, and headed to a van he had parked nearby.
Eight minutes after Blanchard broke into the first ATM, the Winnipeg Police Service arrived in response to the alarm. However, the officers found the doors locked and assumed the alarm had been an error. As the police pronounced the bank secure, Blanchard was zipping away with more than half a million dollars.
The following morning was a puzzler for authorities. There were no indications of damage to the door, no fingerprints, and no surveillance recordings — Blanchard had stolen the hard drives that stored footage from the bank’s cameras. Moreover, Blanchard’s own surveillance equipment was still transmitting from inside the ATM room, so before he skipped town, he could listen in on investigators. He knew their names; he knew their leads. He would call both the bank manager’s cell phone and the police, posing as an anonymous informant who had been involved in the heist and was swindled out of his share. It was the contractors, he’d say. Or the Brinks guy. Or the maintenance people. His tips were especially convincing because he had a piece of inside information: One of the bank’s ATMs was left untouched. Blanchard had done that on purpose to make it easier to sow confusion.
With the cops outmatched and chasing red herrings, the Winnipeg bank job looked like a perfect crime. Then officials got a call from a vigilant employee at a nearby Walmart, which shared a large parking lot with the bank. He had been annoyed at people leaving cars there, so he took it upon himself to scan the lot. On the night of the break-in, he spotted a blue Dodge Caravan next to the bank. Seeing a dolly and other odd equipment inside, he took down the license plate number. Police ran it. The vehicle had been rented from Avis by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard.
Blanchard’s use of his real name was as careless as the fingerprints police found inside the getaway van recovered by the rental company. Soon the cops were on his tail.
Because of the heist’s sophistication, the investigation fell to Winnipeg’s Major Crimes unit. But Blanchard — now divorced and living with his girlfriend, Lynette Tien — learned that he had become a suspect, so he stayed out of their sights. Two years passed, and many of the investigators who had dealt with the initial leads retired or were transferred.
The case went cold until early 2006, when Mitch McCormick, a veteran officer in his fifties, started working on major crimes and decided to take a look at the unsolved robbery. Intrigued, he called his longtime colleague Larry Levasseur, a wiretap ace who had just been transferred to the Commercial Crimes division.
One night in early February, McCormick and Levasseur sat down at the King’s Head bar, a favorite local police haunt. Levasseur went through several pints of amber ale, and McCormick had his usual double rye and a Coke tall. McCormick filled him in on the Blanchard leads and gave him the case file to take home.
The two were interested, but McCormick’s boss was skeptical. Why spend money chasing a criminal who was committing most of his crimes outside their jurisdiction? Eventually, though, the two stubborn cops made such a fuss that the department brass relented. “But we got no resources and had to put together a task force out of thin air,” McCormick says. “It was like the set of Barney Miller. We knew it was bad when we had to buy our own Post-its.”
They quickly started filling up those Post-its and arranging them on a corkboard, mapping Blanchard’s sprawling network. The case was overwhelming, but they eventually unraveled his tangle of 32 false names. Their preliminary checks also showed that Blanchard was a person of interest in many crimes, including the unsolved theft of the Sisi Star nearly 10 years earlier. They assembled roughly 275 pages of documentation, enough to persuade a judge to let them tap Blanchard’s 18 phones. Now they were in business. They were taking a professional flier on this case. They dubbed their investigation Project Kite.
Usually wiretaps are a waiting game; cops will listen to secretive organized crime syndicates for years, hoping for one little slip. But Blanchard was surprisingly loose-lipped. The second weekend the wires went live, McCormick and Levasseur heard him directing a team of underlings in a product-return fraud at a Best Buy. More scams followed. They heard him wheeling and dealing in real estate. They listened in as he planned his next bank job. They learned about a vast network of sophisticated crime. For a smart criminal, McCormick and Levasseur thought, this guy sure did talk a lot.
Then, on November 16, 2006, Blanchard got a particularly intriguing call.
“Hello, Danny,” a man with a thick British accent said. “Are you ready? I have a job for you. How soon can you get to Cairo?”
McCormick and Levasseur listened with astonishment as Blanchard immediately set about recruiting his own small team to meet up with another group in Egypt. Blanchard referred to his contact as the Boss — he couldn’t pronounce his real name — and explained to his cohorts that there was money to be made with this guy.
James was in. But her parents were in town visiting, and her mother didn’t want her to go. James put her mom on the phone so Blanchard could talk the woman into giving her daughter permission to join him in a criminal escapade across the globe. “We’re going to make a lot of money,” he said. “But don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”
Several of his regular guys couldn’t make it, so Blanchard called his neighbor, a Congolese immigrant named Balume Kashongwe. When Blanchard explained the job, Kashongwe volunteered right away. With his team assembled, Blanchard thought, “This is going to be easy. What could go wrong?” Just a few hours after the Boss’ call, Blanchard, Kashongwe, and James were in the air, en route to Cairo.
Blanchard had first met the Boss a few months earlier in London at an electronics store. He could tell they were kindred spirits by a glance at the Boss’ purchases: eight DVR recorders. Blanchard knew you didn’t buy a load like that for anything but surveillance. The two struck up a conversation.
Later that day, a car arrived to take Blanchard to a London café, where the Boss and a dozen Kurdish henchmen, most from northern Iraq, were waiting in the basement, smoking hookahs. The Boss filled Blanchard in on his operation, which spanned Europe and the Middle East and included various criminal activities, including counterfeiting and fraud. The latest endeavor was called skimming: gleaning active debit and credit card numbers by patching into the ISDN lines that companies use to process payments. The group manufactured counterfeit cards magnetized and embossed with the stolen numbers and then used them to withdraw the maximum daily limits before the fraud was reported. It was a lucrative venture for the Boss’ network, which funneled a portion of its take to Kurdish separatists in Iraq.
Living up to his new nickname, the Boss gave Blanchard a trial job: taking 25 cards to Canada to retrieve cash. Blanchard returned to London with $60,000, and the Boss was pleased. He found the younger man charming and steady as well. “We have something big coming,” he told Blanchard over dinner at a Kurdish restaurant. “I’ll keep you posted.”
With that job now at hand, Blanchard’s crew arrived in Egypt and checked into the Cairo Marriott Hotel & Omar Khayyam Casino, settling into a couple of suites with sweeping views of the Nile. The next day, three men Blanchard remembered from the London cafè showed up. They brought roughly 1,000 pirated cards, which the group immediately started using in teams of two. Kashongwe and the Kurds from London blended in easily. Blanchard and James bought burkas in the souk as disguises. The Boss directed operations from London.
They went from ATM to ATM for 12 hours a day, withdrawing Egyptian pounds and stuffing the bills into backpacks and suitcases. Blanchard and James folded their cash into pouches hidden beneath the burkas. And as usual, Blanchard filmed the entire adventure: the wandering through Cairo’s Byzantine streets, the downtime in the city, the money pouring in.
Back in their bare-bones Winnipeg office, McCormick and Levasseur were monitoring their target’s email accounts and calls back to Tien, who was managing travel arrangements and other administrative details from Blanchard’s condo in Vancouver. The Canadian cops were stunned. They never imagined they’d come across anything this big. They learned about the loot piling up 4 feet high in the suites at the Marriott. And then they learned that everything had gone to hell.
In the course of a week, the team collected the equivalent of more than $2 million. But the individual ATM payouts were small, so after a couple of days Blanchard sent Kashongwe south to Nairobi, Kenya, with 50 cards to find more-generous machines. Kashongwe had no cell phone, though, and he went suspiciously incommunicado. Soon it became clear that Kashongwe was AWOL. Blanchard wasn’t happy. And neither was the Boss.
Blanchard was in over his head. In his many years of crime, guns had never been involved. The Boss, however, seemed inclined to change that. Blanchard promised to track down Kashongwe. “Good,” the Boss said. “Otherwise, we’ll find him. And he won’t be happy when we do.”
McCormick and Levasseur listened to the calls in and out of Cairo as temperatures rose. They could hear Blanchard calling Tien back in Vancouver, trying desperately to reach Kashongwe. He called Kashongwe’s sister in Brussels and his brother in Ottawa. He sounded frantic at times. But Blanchard had no luck; Kashongwe had vanished.
Things took another turn for the worse when the Boss told Blanchard he couldn’t leave Cairo until the missing cards were accounted for. Two more men arrived to “keep an eye on things.” The Marriott suites had turned into a hostage scene.
But Blanchard’s natural charm worked on the Boss, too. He took full responsibility, promised to personally pay back Kashongwe’s share, and calmly argued that James didn’t have anything to do with the double cross. The Boss eventually told his men to let James go. Then he agreed to let Blanchard travel to London to smooth things out in person. “I’m pretty honest about that kind of thing,” Blanchard says. “And the Boss could see that I was taking responsibility for my guy.”
The two decided to set aside the Kashongwe problem in the interest of business. The Boss’ men would meet Blanchard back in Canada with a new batch of cards. “After all,” Blanchard says, “why fight when there was more money to be made?”
On December 3, 2006, Blanchard landed in Vancouver, where he immediately rented a car and drove straight to a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia, 65 miles east in Chilliwack. He’d started prepping to burglarize the bank before his trip. The Kashongwe fiasco ended up nearly costing Blanchard money, and now he was after a sizable payday. Chilliwack was good for $800,000, he figured, and he would work through the holidays to get it done.
McCormick and Levasseur had both been on duty during the holidays before, but never had a case so consumed them. They were spending 18-hour days in their makeshift headquarters or at the King’s Head, poring over transcripts and evidence. They got no overtime pay. The strain grew, as did the pressure from higher-ups.
Lucky for them, Blanchard’s disarray was compounding his mistakes. As soon as he touched down, McCormick and Levasseur picked up Blanchard live, discussing Cairo, his next bank, and the potential whereabouts of Kashongwe. While Blanchard was en route to Chilliwack, they listened to him and the Boss discuss details about the arrival of a team in Montreal the next day.
McCormick and Levasseur called officials at the Montreal airport with names and flight information. As the targets strode through the airport, the cops swarmed in. The team was detained, and police seized dozens of blank credit cards, a card writer, and computers overflowing with evidence that filled in the blanks on the Cairo operation. To top it off, the hard drives also contained some of Blanchard’s comprehensive amateur crime video of that job. Now the police could not only hear him talking about crimes, they could see him committing them.
The Boss phoned the very next day, panicked. But the call caught Blanchard at an inopportune moment. “I can’t talk right now,” Blanchard whispered. “I’m doing my thing inside the bank right now.” It was 12:30 am, and Blanchard was crawling through the bank’s ductwork.
“Listen, my guys got arrested in the airport, and I need to find out why,” the Boss said. Blanchard was making his way painstakingly through the air vents, en route to the ATM room. His earpiece was taped in and the phone was on auto-answer, in case he got a call that the police were nearby. “What’s going on with my guys in Montreal?” the Boss demanded. “They got pulled in!”
“I have no idea,” Blanchard said softly. “But it’s too much of a coincidence that customs knew. The phones must be tapped.”
The Boss pressed on, asking for news about Kashongwe, but Blanchard interrupted. “I’m looking down. There’s a security guard down there right now,” he breathed. He was deep into the building, making it hard to shimmy his way out in case he needed an emergency escape. “I have too much invested in this job,” he said. “I have to go.”
“We need to fix this, Danny,” the Boss said.
As Blanchard whispered back, McCormick and Levasseur were triangulating the call’s location. Now they knew Blanchard was targeting Chilliwack’s Bank of Nova Scotia. In late January, investigators from Toronto, Edmonton, and Vancouver as well as provincial police and the Mounties had joined McCormick and Levasseur’s small operation. “Project Kite was ready to be reeled in,” McCormick says.
At 4 am on January 23, 2007, more than a dozen SWAT team members swarmed Blanchard’s Vancouver condo, where they found Blanchard and Tien. Several other search warrants were executed simultaneously across Canada, turning up half a dozen accomplices, including Angela James and Blanchard’s cousin Dale Fedoruk.
Blanchard was busted. At his various residences and storage facilities, police confiscated 10 pallets of material: 60,000 documents, cash in various currencies, smoke bombs, firearms, and 300 electronic devices, including commercial card printers, card readers, and all manner of surveillance equipment. In his condo, police discovered a hidden room stocked with burglary kits and well-organized, itemized documentation of all Blanchard’s fake identities. He was initially charged with 41 crimes, ranging from fraud to possession of instruments for forging credit cards.
The Boss called Blanchard in jail on the prison phone. “Why you, Danny?” he asked. “Why would little Winnipeg go to all that trouble? You must have upset the establishment. It’s like we say in England: You fuck with the Queen, and they fuck with you.”
As McCormick and Levasseur listened in, Blanchard said it wasn’t the establishment, or the Queen. “It was these Keystone Kops out here in Winnipeg.”
Blanchard says that he could have escaped from jail again, but there was no point. The police had all the evidence, including 120 video- and audiotapes detailing everything. They’d just find him again, and he was tired of running anyhow.
Blanchard refused to make statements about any of his associates, but he eventually decided to cooperate with authorities about his own case. “He’s a flamboyant guy,” McCormick says. “And an extrovert, recording everything. Some part of him just wanted to tell his story.” He had another incentive, too: Revealing his methods, which would help the banking industry improve its security practices, could earn him a lighter prison sentence.
The first day that Levasseur sat down with Blanchard in Vancouver, the investigator felt like he “was talking to a wall.” But in later interviews, Blanchard became more courteous and helpful. Finally, after some negotiations through his lawyer, Blanchard offered to take them to the Sisi Star. “It’s right here in my grandmother’s basement in Winnipeg,” he said. Blanchard had tried to steer clear of his family since his arrest; he didn’t want to embarrass them further. But now he had to call. “I need to come to the house,” he said. “And I’m bringing the police.”
Blanchard, in handcuffs and leg shackles, hugged his grandmother at the door and took McCormick and Levasseur directly into the basement. He disappeared into a crawl space with Levasseur. It was quiet except for the sound of them grappling with the insulation. Eventually, Levasseur removed a square of Styrofoam and pulled out the star.
They brought it out into the light, where the detectives marveled at the beauty of the piece. They’d never seen anything like it. That kicked off nearly a month of debriefing. The cops had gotten some stuff right, but Blanchard set them straight on the rest. “Never in policing does the bad guy tell you, ‘Here’s how I did it, down to the last detail,’” McCormick says. “And that’s what he did.”
After spending so much time chasing Blanchard — and then talking to him — McCormick and Levasseur developed a grudging regard for his abilities. And Blanchard grew to admire their relentless investigation. Like a cornered hacker who trades his black hat for white, Blanchard took on a new challenge: working the system from the inside. He provided such good information that McCormick and Levasseur were able to put together an eight-hour presentation for law enforcement and banking professionals. “When those guys hear what Blanchard told us,” McCormick says, “you can hear their assholes pucker shut.”
Blanchard’s full participation came under consideration when he pled guilty to 16 charges on November 7, 2007. He agreed to sell his four condos and pay restitution to the Canadian government. And he was willing to take a longer sentence for himself in exchange for leniency toward his coaccused, whom he refused to testify against. None of his partners served jail time.
Blanchard also surprised the court by having his lawyer issue an unusual statement: an expression of gratitude for being arrested. “My client wishes to recognize that this huge lie that he had been living could now finally fall apart.” It added that Blanchard was looking forward to moving on. “He recognizes that the men and women of the Winnipeg Police Service made that all possible.”
Instead of the maximum of 164 years, Blanchard got eight. And then last summer, after serving less than two, he was released into carefully guarded probation. He now lives in a Vancouver halfway house, where he is prohibited from going anywhere near certain types of surveillance equipment and talking to any of his former associates. One of the people he can call is Randy Flanagan, his old mentor from high school.
“He filled me in about the past 10 years,” Flanagan says. “I was surprised, but not that surprised, about what our little former son had been up to.” Blanchard told Flanagan he wanted to turn his life around. Working with McCormick and Levasseur had convinced him that he could become a consultant to the banks. “Who knows?” Flanagan says. “Maybe he will get that security business he talked about off the ground after all.”
The judge had a similar thought during Blanchard’s plea hearing. The banks “should hire him and pay him a million dollars a year,” he said. And right before sentencing, the judge turned directly to Blanchard. “I think that you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life,” he said. “Although I’m not prepared to sign a letter of reference.”
Increase Your Residential Security Sales Mojo
It’s going to be a 3day weekend with Patriot’s Day. This Monday we are planning to take the kids down to see the start of the Boston Marathon, which starts in Hopkinton, MA. This race is barrel of fun, if you’re ever up this way you should check it out…
The race is on to get more residential security sales! Here’s a great program that can help you finish first…
Increase Your Residential Security Sales Mojo
If you want to bring in new residential clients fast, then I have a great new homeowner attraction marketing program that you should get your hands on…there isn’t anything out in the market like this program…I gua-ran-tee it! Here’s the skinny:
Alarm Dealers Program – The Ultimate Residential Security Sales Kit: How To Get New Homeowners To Line Up…And…Beg You To Take Their Money!
Who’s looking for a way to market to new homeowners that’s cheap, easy and effective, without needing any special marketing skills, lots of coin or know-how to employ?
Use my outrageously easy marketing system for New Homeowners (the new residents who are moving into your area by the hundreds each month) and double – even triple – your new installs overnight!
If you’ve been scrambling around your office looking for a way to increase your security installations, then you’ve just found it!
Here’s why: For the first time ever, I’m revealing the secrets to how I get “new mover” security installations without breaking a sweat. So, why should you follow my lead and go after new homeowners? Well, these nomads are worth on average, $1400 per installation – plus years of RMR (re-occurring monthly revenue from monitored accounts). And I only spend a few bucks to get them!
My complete New Homeowners Marketing System is guaranteed to bring you in a boat-load of security leads. I created and implemented this system in my own security business (see, you get FREE R&D here because I’ve done all the testing and tweaking for you!) and, over the past 16 months, have increased my residential security installations by 92% using it!
My complete approach beats the pants off of every other approach currently out there!
This system is so unconventional that none of your competition is doing it and won’t even see you coming until after the damage is done and you’ve reaped all the hay from the harvest!
Three Mistakes Being Made in the Way Security Installers Market to New Resident!
The first mistake being made is using “Me Too” advertising. It shouldn’t shock you to learn that you won’t be the only security installer trying to solicit the new homeowners!
Yet I’d say 95% of the letters, postcards, and offers received by the new resident looks…
Identical!
If your competitor says he installed XXX systems, then you put that in your ad, too. If he says he gives a FREE ESTIMATES, then you put that in your ad, too. Whatever he does, you cry out: “Me Too.”
Here’s the problem: Do what everyone else does, and you’ll get the same poor results. What I’m suggesting is a totally, radically different, bold, new and a unique approach… that makes YOU stand out from all the other people sending them security offers.
The bottom line is that I have discovered several ways, a system actually, for “leap-frogging” over your competition and leaving them in the dust when dealing with new residents.
The second mistake being made by virtually everyone…
…is that they’re only contacting a new resident ONCE instead of viewing this as a multiple step, multi-pronged marketing sequence.
95% of those security businesses chasing new homeowners never send a follow up after the first letter! Do you realize the opportunity this creates for us?
Let’s put it this way. We would all like to send one piece of mail and get a new client every time. However, it doesn’t work like that. There’s something called a Sine Wave. This is a wave that goes up and down.
Some days your prospects are going up the sine wave and they think they don’t need a security system right now. Other days, they are heading down the wave and your letter arrives at “the perfect time.”
You never know where they are on the sine wave. This is why you must, I repeat MUST, think in terms of a multiple step campaign vs. a one step. It will mean the difference between pathetic results vs. spectacular results. Guaranteed!
The third mistake security installers make getting new movers…
…is by not realizing that some of these clients had a security system in their previous home and they are LOOKING for a new one.
You need to make it easy and enjoyable for them to find a new security company - that they can trust!
So, how do you go about doing all this? Easily…believe me. It’s all outlined for you in my New Homeowners Marketing System.
If you want big success with New Homeowners then you must do things completely DIFFERENT from the way everyone other installer is chasing these folks. I have created a breakthrough approach that is DIFFERENT, NEW, and that is very ATTRACTIVE to the New Residents.
Here’s Just A Few Juicy Tidbits You’ll Discover in this Marketing System for New Residents!
1. My complete “New Homeowner Marketing System” that beats the pants off of every other approach currently out there!
2. My secret direct cheap source of finding New Resident names. Frankly, this alone is worth 10x’s the investment.
3. Do you know what every New Resident REALLY wants out of a new security installer? I’ll tell you! This is “make or break” stuff.
4. What to say and how to handle the new resident so that they breath a sigh of relief when they get your marketing pieces!
5. You’ll also learn how many marketing contacts it REALLY takes to get a stream of new clients … and… I show you and provide you the exact pieces I use in each step of my marketing campaigns!
6. Would it shock you to learn that… just two or three sentences is enough to get the new homeowners attention? Wait till you see this trick up my sleeve!
7. I’ve found that Gift Certificates can work powerfully well, but only when used THIS special way!
8. How to use a simple postcard to sift, sort, select and snag new movers without being an annoying pest!
9. How I easily do a weekly mailing of 100 letters and still stay on schedule with clients. This lesson is worth its weight in gold!
10. Discover the best day to mail your letters!
11. How long to make your expiration date – and yes, you need an expiration date/ deadline date for them to take action!
12. Ok, I’ve saved the best for last. How I use a dirt cheap “irresistible gift” to magnetically draw these new residents to my office like moths to a flame. (This gift is something totally out of the ordinary and unexpected! Which is why it works so well!)
In fact there’s so much more I could go on and on for pages… but I think you’re getting the point. The bottom line is that this system will teach you how to market to New Homeowners that blows all others out of the water, and I’m using this system EVERY DAY myself.
Ok, by now you MUST be wondering…
What Kind of Money Can Be Made from new Homeowners?
For me a new resident is worth about $1,400 plus monitoring and future referrals. The marketing cost to implement my New Homeowners System is not even 10% of that! So the R.O.I. on New Homeowner marketing is absolutely…
ENORMOUS!
If you can’t make at least 10:1 ROI from my system, then you must be doing something wrong! But this brings up another question you might have which is…
With an ROI this big, what are you charging to get my hands on Your “Outrageous New Mover Marketing System”?
A lot less than we should that’s for sure! We’ll rush deliver my The Ultimate Residential Security Sales Kit for the low price of only $497.00. Folks, this is a bloody steal and you better take me up on this great low price before I change my mind!
Here’s how to make it happen…
Listen. I hope you can see how passionate I am about helping you succeed in big ways. I know how this program can IMPACT your bottom line!
Nothing beats it and it totally changes everything in the way you market your security services. Trust me, adding one more profitable “pole in the water” increases your profits, reduces your expenses and gives you a great stable of secure business for years to come.
In addition, don’t forget: Many of these new homeowners are going to eventually hook up with a new security installer…it’s only a mater of time.
It’s either going to be you or someone else. It may as well be you!
I personally invite you to order this today. You won’t be disappointed! Click on the The Ultimate Residential Security Sales Kit
Discover The Secret “Lure” To Being The Big Fish In A Small Pond
How to Own Your Local Market With
Saturation Mailing
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This is a “fishing hole” in Alpharetta, GA. There are just under 500 residential deliveries/homes with an average home value of $338,000 and an average houshold income of $82,000
Discover The Secret “Lure” To Being The Big Fish In A Small Pond
There are literally hundreds of small fishing holes, within 5-10 miles of your office, that you can go fishing in for new clients anytime you’d like.
These Darn Fishing Holes Are All Over The USA
Big Fish Little Pond Strategy
To give you the big fish in a little pond strategy… I’m talking about how you can use postal carrier routes combined with neighborhood saturation mailings to wickedly improve your targeted direct mail response rates, so that you can save money, and maximize sales and profits!
- How to reach your ideal prospect through cost-effective direct mail.
- How to save a boat-load of money by doing saturation mailings- lowering your postage costs by by 50% or more!
- Discover how mapping and demographics are the secret “lure” to successful direct mail.
- Automatically attract and target any schools of “monster fish” in any body of water and easily haul them in.
- And, much, much more!
Don’t you hate it when you’re watching other security dealers and low voltage installers catch more fish, hand over fist, than you and you ain’t catching squat? You don’t need to watch that nightmare anymore!
Do you lay awake at night dreaming about catching a monster school of fish that will double your fortunes overnight?
Secret Weapon “Lures”
Knowing how and where to fish for only the biggest and best fish in your local pond will lead you to domination of your local market and an incredible income explosion!
This third pond is in Litchfield, CT. This neighborhood has 438 residential delivieres, an average home value of $538,500 and an average household income of $62,000.
Two Little Words That Will Close More Security Deals
I want to share with you a really cool quote that my brother Gerald gave me the morning that my parents drove me to the Mass Pike (Massachushetts Turnpike) entrance in Millbury, MA. It was my first day of enlistment in the U.S. Air Force and I was to meet my Air Force recruiter “TSGT Chuck.” He was taking me to the MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) in Boston, MA for processing.
I was so excited to join the Air Force and be out of the house and away from my parents’ supervision (away from the Irish apron strings!) At the time, I didn’t realize how the Air Force would change my way of thinking, forever. I was young and gung-ho and ready to take on the world….and still am (okay, maybe not so young!)
I really didn’t pay much attention to the quote Gerald gave me. It was something one of his school teachers gave him and he had it hanging on his bedroom wall. I glanced at it a few times, but never really read it.
LackLand AFB – 1981
When I got on the plane to fly down to boot camp, I finally took a moment to read the quote and was blown away by it’s message. I read it so many times, that I burned it into my subconscious mind!
I did, however, lose the quote when I was in boot camp at Lackland AFB in good old San Antonio, Texas. It probably got lost when the DI’s (Drill Instructors) were throwing our civilian clothing out the windows of the barracks. Thank goodness I memorized it!
Around Tuesday of this week I was thinking up the content of today’s blog post and this quote poped into my head, and I said to myself, “self, why don’t you see if you can do a little research and see where the saying came from?” and so I did! Here’s the quote and the source.
The Miracle of Your Mind
The mind is incredible. Once you gained mastery over it, channeling powers positively for your purpose, you can do anything. The secret is to make your mind for – not against – you.
This means constantly being positive, constantly setting up new challenges you can meet -either today, next week, or next month. “I CAN’T…” Should be permanently stricken from your vocabulary, especially the vocabulary of your thoughts. You must see yourself always growing and improving.
This quote was made by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his book Arnold: The Education Of A Bodybuilder
I was wicked surprised to find out that this is a quote from “Ahrnauld” a.k.a. “The Governator.”
I CAN
“I CAN” should be the main thought upstairs in your CPU and the main phrase in your vocabulary. Think of the leg-up you’d have just by doing this…everyone else is thinking “I can’t” and you’ll be channeling positive energy which begets positive results!
Here’s some other affirmations that you should be using…
* I CAN increase my raw, natural energy
* I CAN create world-class customer service
* I CAN rid my local town/city of vandals, thieves, crack-heads, employee theft, etc.
* I CAN become the local security guru(TM)
* I CAN send out a client newsletter that will put an iron-wall around my client base
* I CAN send a WOW pre-sales package that will pre-sell my services before I show up at the client site
* I CAN perform a WOW follow-up service after the install that will knock my clients’ socks off and create even more word of mouth advertising
* I CAN leverage my client base, with a referral program that will create more word of mouth selling for me.
* I CAN create a robotic security selling system that works 24/7/365 even while I’m on vacation or sleeping or napping in my hammock out in the back yard
* I CAN treat my techs and office staff with the utmost respect and care and leverage my employees by creating a up-selling system that provides them with perks
* I CAN initiate an SEO (search engine optimized) website that will get me on the first page of Google and attract and capture prospect contact info
* I CAN network with the big-wigs in my area for better, higher-quality leads
* I CAN create maximum value for my clients
* I CAN create a business that isn’t LAME(TM): Lifeless, Annoying, Money-less and Exhausting
* I CAN create an ESP Style(TM) security business: Easy, Successful and Profitable
Your belief system is the only thing that slows you down. You need to get on the “I CAN” bandwagon and rock your world!
Now Go Dominate Your Security Market!
Life or Death For Your Security Business
What I’m about to share with you in this email are bits and pieces (talking points) from a security marketing seminar that I host and attendees pay pay big bucks for! It’s some pretty important stuff, so pay attention…your getting lots of FREE info here!
Critical Success Factors (CSF)
This is the life or death of your electronic security business and or career. There are about 5-7 of these factors in your work. You need to grade them on a scale of 1-10 and work on any that are under a 7.
These factors are things like selling, prospecting, identifying new security markets, client retention, learning new technologies, sales and marketing.
Your strongest CSF sets the height bar for the others to reach.
This leads to the The Theory of Constraints that says there is always something you’re doing or not doing that determines your speed. What bottlenecks or limiting factors are in your business or life? What are the constraints that determine how FAST you succeed? How long does it take you to get through these choke-holds?
Is it getting a client referral system up and running? Creating a service maintenance agreement program? Starting a client newsletter? Selling a managed access control system? Or creating a direct mail piece promo for biometric eye scanner? Up-Selling?
80% of constraints are internal and only 20% external. This means that most of you bottlenecks are there because of you just not doing something, cuz you’ve gotten lazy about it, or haven’t taken the time to learn something or paid a pro to do it for you.
You need to ask yourself what it is in you that’s holding you back. Is it marketing? Selling expertise?
It’s usually lack of a skill or quality that’s the problem.
Ask yourself… “What’s one skill, if I had and did it in an effective manner, would have the most profound impact in my business?”
Maybe that’s what you should be learning…
You have to have courage. Risk-taking. There no guarantee of success. Just do the things you fear and the death of fear is certain.
Is it cold-calling? Knocking on doors? Hiring a sales rep? Sending out a newsletter? Sending multi-step direct campagin to high-end home owners?
What ever it is that’s holding you back…. Just do it!
Do You Have a Pension?
Do you have an adequate pension fund? Are you banking everything on selling your monitored accounts?
Do you realize that by putting $100 bucks per month for 45 years at just a meager 10% interest ends up as $1,118,00.00. That’s a decent retirement for pocket change. (For my younger readers this should excite you into getting started) For the older bucks maybe we need to start putting a little more away each month.
Parkinson’s theory says that expenditures rise to meet your income. You must violate this principle to build real wealth. Drive a wedge between this trend.
Don’t automatically buy a more expensive car because you make more money. Don’t buy the most expensive castle.
When you start making more money, the first thing you must do is take some of that increase and funnel it into savings and investments.
You want to detrimine what your “Run-Rate” is. If you liquidated everything you currently own how long could you live?
Accelerate Your Earning Power
Here are a few things that you can do to contribute to your earning power and thus your run rate…
- Continuous learning. The key to the future belongs to the competent.
- To earn more we most learn more.
- Invest 3% of your income in your own personal development. The payoff is 40-50 times the investment
How Can You Do This?
- Read 1 hour per day on sales and marketing or newfangled security technologies. By reading 1 book per week, 50 books per year, 500 in 10 years. You’ll be a world-famous security guru (TM)
- Attend every seminars and trade shows you can get to.
- Listen to CD’s on sales marketing strategies.
By listening to CD’s in your car or van you can be the very best. In one year alone you can listen to 500-1000 hours in your car. That’s 3-6 months of a 40 hour work week and 1-2 university semesters.
Formal Education vs. Self- Education
As the late Gr8 Jim Rohn used to say, “Formal education gets you a job, self-education will make you a fortune.”
It’s easy to do and it’s easy not to do…so what are you plans?
The Power of An Easter Egg Hunt
Nana and Papa Maunsell with all their grandchildren.
It’s going to be gorgeous up here in Massachusetts (in the 80′s) for the Easter weekend…a rarity in these parts!
On Sunday, I’m having my whole family over on for Easter and we’re going to have a massive Easter egg hunt on my front lawn. My wife has stuffed over 150 eggs with candy! My parents get a kick out of watching all the grandkids running around filling their baskets with pretty-colored eggs.
I remember back when I was a little tyke and would jump out of bed on Easter morning and scavenge my parents house for Easter eggs. My favorite Easter eggs were stuffed with Swedish Fish, Hershey Kisses, and Milk Duds.
Today the Easter eggs that I look forward to receiving are not chock-full with candy (who am I kidding, I still like candy filled Easter eggs), but are quotes of wisdom that can be used to illuminate the nooks and crannies of your mind, and take your thinking to a new dimension.
Theater of the Mind
If you were with me, right now, inside my writing room, you’d see my walls are plastered with with pieces of paper that include quotes, ideas and prompts, that I’ve collected over the years, and use for writing tidbits. These pieces have also helped me with my business philosophy. I call my writing room “the theater of the mind room.” Walt Disney had an enriched room like this where he’d house his ideas and storyboard his projects.
So are you ready for my little Easter egg hunt? I’ve filled colored my favorite colored eggs with quotes of security marketing and business-building wisdom…so let’s go hunting!
My Favorite Easter Eggs Colors…
Lilac Easter Egg - In business your only as successful as the options you selling, you don’t want just one sales rep handling all your sales or one media (e.g. only using Yellow Page ads) for attracting new prospects to you business, because you will not be in control of your own destiny.
Mocha Easter Egg - Customers and clients cannot buy from you if you do not tell them what is for sale.
Teal Easter Egg - To become a security industry leader, you’ve got to see the future before it arrives.
Cyan Easter Egg - Even your WORST competitor has one or two ideas from which you can benefit.
Raven Easter Egg – Your techs and your office staff are your products and nothing else.
Purple Easter Egg - True entreprenurial genius is getting customers and making sales without having to use a whole heck of lot of capital to do it.
Orchid Easter Egg - Courage is the battle of life…this is a quote from my Dad! You need the “Wizard of Oz” management skills today – brains, courage and heart!
Royal Blue Easter Egg - When you master your security marketing, you’ve mastered your whole business life.
Cardinal Easter Egg - Promoting your security services should be a consistent part of your daily business activity, whether you need new clients or not.
Mango Easter Egg - If your security business depends on you being there, you don’t have a business – you have a job.
Lavender Easter Egg - Always do more then you get paid for. Jim Rohn
Sea – Green Egg - There is only one reason for not being wealthy and independent, and that’s neglect. Failure is subtle.
Jade Easter Egg - Most people fail in life cuz they major in minor things! – Tony Robbins
Citron Easter Egg - Don’t be a cheapskate in acquiring knowledge that can make your business grow. If you wish to succeed and remain successful, you must be a student for a lifetime.
Pewter Easter Egg - You are exactly where you really want to be.
Goldenrod Easter Egg - You are measured by the size of the problem you can solve.
Fuschia Easter Egg – The challenge is not merely to outdo your competition, but to outdo yourself!
Chartreuse Easter Egg - Most security dealers and electronic system installers look at there company as a source of income. They forget that it’s a major ASSET…probably their most valuable and, like any asset, it needs to be maintained.
Coral Easter Egg - There is no passion to be found in playing small in settling for a life that is less then what you are capable of living.
Hope you found an Easter egg or two that you can use!
Have a Gr8 weekend, and I’ll talk to you soon!
