Ridiculous business growth tips from a drug kingpin
How much history's most feared drug lord spent on rubber bands. And one important lesson you can learn from him to help grow your profits and sales.
This morning I woke up lazy, so decided to spend some time just browsing the Internet like in the old days...
After a few scrolls and clicks, I found myself reading an article titled "29 Absolutely Ridiculous Facts About Pablo Escobar, History’s Most Infamous Drug Kingpin".
Pablo Escobar was definitely a Very Bad Guy...but he was also a very successful businessman.
In fact, at the height of his success, "Escobar spent around $2,500 a month on rubber bands used to hold his money".
My back of the napkin calculation say that comes to roughly $125,000,000 in cash coming in.
One time, while hiding from the police, his daughter got sick. To keep her warm, he burned about two million dollars.
His earnings peaked at about $30 billion per year, and was featured in Forbes billionaires list "seven years in a row beginning in 1987 and peaked at number seven in 1989".
He did all of this in an extremely competitive, cutthroat (literally) market, and coming from a relatively poor background (his mom was a teacher, and his father a farmer).
But the one thing that I found so surprising about Pablo Escobar was how popular he was in his community.
More than 25,000 people attended his funeral. In Columbia he was loved by the common people.
He was known as Robin Hood, because he distributed so much of his money to the poor people in his community.
This is an important business growth lesson:
Your community - the community that your customer belongs to - is a hidden marketing asset that most businesses overlook.
If done right, you can leverage the community organizations that work with your ideal customer to create a constant stream of warm prospects, free publicity, and even direct sales.
In today's email newsletter, I shared 4 ways that you can use community outreach to grow your business, without spending more on marketing.
Becoming involved in your community not only increases your profile, makes you feel connected...but it can also be extremely profitable.