Book Marketing Breakthrough 05 - Discover Your Native Entrepreneur

In 1956, Earl Nightingale became an overnight millionaire at age 35. But not without some help from a recording gone viral - and an insurance company office manager named Jean...

Dec 23, 2024

Jean, the office sales manager, had a huge problem. She managed a small insurance sales force for Earl Nightingale. And they all looked forward to his weekly talks that motivated their sales.

But Earl had recently departed on a long sailing trip with his family.

He'd left her a small stack of LP records, each with its printed transcript. And that was supposed to keep their salesmen motivated, and those sales going while he was gone.

This was Spring, 1956. There wasn't any real way to be in touch with him again until he was back in harbor, some months later.

Meanwhile, getting her sales staff to meet their sales quotas was all over to her.

Alone.

- - - -

Earl Nightingale was at a new height of success. By then It had almost become routine for him.

Earlier, In 1948, he'd come to Chicago to audition at the CBS radio station and was immediately put under contract as an announcer. His voice was heard all over the Midwest.

In March of 1950, he resigned from CBS to produce and voice a 15-minute daily commentary for WGN. Meanwhile, he'd also become the voice of their popular Sky King radio show.

In only a few years, he'd expanded into dual morning and evening shows, plus a regular TV program. And part of his arrangement was to share in the advertising income. Later, he also bought a small insurance company franchise.

During this time Nightingale also discovered his love of sailing. Not long after getting his own sailboat, he decided to take his family for a fishing vacation for six to eight weeks.

While he first arranged things for his shows to continue in his absence, he finally came over to his insurance company.

Jean, his office manager there, was concerned, “Well, every Saturday, you normally train the salespeople and you're going to be gone for eight weeks. Who's going to motivate the salespeople every single week? We need to keep our people excited.”

Earl replied calmly, “Okay, I'll record something and then you can have them listen to it while I'm gone.”

Later, he recounted how he did this:

“In the spring of 1956, I was asked to put the essence of what I had learned during those many years of assiduous reading and research into a rather short essay. Because my working career involved both writing and broadcasting, I was to then record the essay for the possible benefit of others.

“I thought about it, turning the ideas over and over in my mind. Finally, I asked myself, ‘What would you tell your children if you found you had only a short time to live? What advice could you pass on to them that would assist them in living highly productive, very successful lives?’ I awakened at four the next morning with the answer to that question clearly in mind.”

He got up and wrote down his ideas, and by noon the following day, had recorded the essay. He called what he'd written and recorded The Strangest Secret.

That half-hour talk fit on two sides of a 78-RPM LP vinyl record. He got 40 copies pressed on vinyl records for the salespeople, along with a little booklet for each that contained its transcript.

When he brought these over to Jean, he told her, "Next week when you do your sales meeting, give them this as a gift. Then everyone can listen to it."

And she recalled those words while watching him load his family on-board his small sailing boat, loose the moorings, wave goodbye, and then pilot his boat out of the harbor.

They'd be gone about two months, somewhere in the Caribbean, completely out of touch. Now it was up to her.

- - - -

At the next sales meeting, she played the record for her sales team. Everyone was amazed and excited. She handed out the records and booklet to them.

Those salespeople took that gift home and played that record for their families. Their families loved hearing it, and thought the record was amazing. Of course, they told their friends. Who told their friends.

Meanwhile Jean decided to give a copy to the radio station that Earl made his success on, and they listened to it. They also thought it was amazing. Someone there got the idea, "Hey, Earl's not here. Maybe we should play this for everybody.” And so they played it on the radio. It was overwhelmingly popular, so that radio station started playing it regularly. All of a sudden everyone who heard it started calling the radio station and asking if they could get a copy of this record. Of course, those callers all got referred to Jean.

At the sales office, Jean began fielding this tide of calls that occurred every time the record was played. They were all asking for a copy of the record.

But she thought this through, "We only had 40 copies. And those are all gone." She tried going back and forth in the office, answering the calls, trying to tell them all “no” - which didn’t go over well.

Jean finally got so frustrated that she decided, "Okay, I'm going to order a thousand copies. We're going to charge a premium. That way we can at least make some money on this."

She ordered a thousand copies and they started shipping them right out of their office. All the insurance salespeople became fulfillment people, taking the orders, collecting money, and shipping out records.,

Jean's job was now just printing and shipping out these records. When they get close to running out, they'd print some more and ship them to fulfill the orders. As more people heard the record, the orders just kept coming in. It's getting bigger and bigger.

Now, think about this: This happened in the days when radio had more listeners than TV had viewers, and the Internet was still decades away. This is with no direct-mail campaign, no promotion otherwise. This is 100% word of mouth.

It went completely viral back in those days. Consider how hard it was: You had to hear it play on the radio, and then find the phone number for the radio station, then they had you call into the insurance company sales office. Then you had to mail them a check (this was before credit cards.)

The demand just continued to grow. Jean printed 10,000 more, and those got sold and delivered almost instantly. So after that, they began printing them in volume and ordering before they ran out.

This was happening for the entire two months that Earl was fishing down in the Caribbean. And Jean's thoughts kept going to two things, "He's going to fire me. No one's selling insurance any more. This is all going under." She stressed out about the whole thing.

Earl's gone for nearly eight weeks, completely out of touch. He had no idea this was even happening. He's with his family, they're having a good time. No one knew where he was, but everyone is talking about that recording. There was even a newspaper article where everyone's trying to find Earl Nightingale. That was the headline of the newspaper, "Where's Earl Nightingale? We Can't Find Him."

When a reporter finally found out where and when he was coming back in, they put out another front page headline, saying, "We Found Him, He's Going To Be In Port Here."

That day finally arrives and all these newspaper reporters, along with everyone else, show up at the pier on the day when he's coming. As he pulls closer to that pier, he sees that there are news reporters and cameras and a huge crowd on the main pier.

When Nightingale finally finished mooring his boat securely, he stepped onto the floating dock attached to the pier and found the harbormaster was waiting for him there. All these flash bulbs are going off and reporters are jockeying for position at the edge of the pier. Police are there, too – keeping the crowd under control and safe.

The first thing Earl asked the harbormaster was, "Am I being arrested?" To this, the harbormaster smiles and replies, "You should probably call Jean and talk to her."

So Earl got to the nearest land-line and called Jean. She's thinking, "I'm in big trouble." So she flooded him with the short version about how all this happened. Earl just smiles and tells her, "This is great, this is great!" He's now all excited. He'd had no idea.

Once Earl got back to the office, he got the complete story. During that period of time while he was at sea, they had sold 200,000 copies of this record in a few weeks. Over time, the recording would end up selling over half a million copies. It became the only record as a spoken word album to go gold and then go platinum.

What is even more remarkable, Earl went on this boat trip hoping that someday, by the time he's thirty-five, to become a millionaire. And between the time he left and got back, he'd become that millionaire – just before his thirty-fifth birthday. And all with no organized marketing, no budget, no anything – just this viral word of mouth.

- - - -

Nightingale credited Napoleon Hill's “Think and Grow Rich” for the core concept behind that recording – one which he had applied and tested as an entrepreneur ever since 1950 when he first found a copy of Hill's book in a Chicago bookstore. That phrase: “We become what we think about.”

He had already moved from being a contracted employee to becoming a contracted radio host for regular shows – a position that enabled him to secure advertising for his own shows, which then paid him directly.

Shortly after, he bought an insurance firm and ran it profitably.

After his viral 1956 hit, he retired from radio. And his successes just continued from there, including writing and delivering nearly 7,000 “Our Changing World” radio episodes over 28 years.

Nightingale's story is one of a person taking an interest, developing this into a talent, and then leveraging that ability into a life-long entrepreneurial pursuit.

All from his own initiative and follow through.

His entrepreneurial efforts led him to being a founding partner with an international corporation, which itself created and still leads the recorded personal development field. All from word of mouth for a particular offer that turned viral.

Principles of Native Entrepreneuring

Dissect that story for yourself:

1) Offer: Nightingale built a word-of-mouth-ready recording, and created a record and transcript-booklet ready to consume.

2) Audience: He also had an established audience through his radio shows.

3) Promotion: His manager then gave a copy of that record to both their salespeople (word of mouth) and to his radio station that played it regularly due to its popularity.

4) Fulfillment: His manager then shipped that offer at a premium price to all who called in, using his salespeople for fulfillment.

5) Entrepreneurship: The demand built and was met – such that he was later able to build an additional business out of it.

- - - -

So we next want to understand how to market through word of mouth – the hardest and most expensive advertising, at least by reputation...

How This Can Help You

This course evolved while I was wrapping up the first three books in this series - and became part of the fourth book (see below.)

In that fourth book are three mini-courses — this is just the second lesson of the first course in there. The reason for this last book is to give you actionable material to get you started simply. And speed your own progress.

Coming soon should be a chat thread on this course, where you can ask me anything about what I cover here. Meanwhile, DM me with your questions, or leave comments below.

And you can always buy me a coffee…