A few weeks ago I received tickets to a free seminar put on by Grow Rich, Stay Rich. They were trying to sell me the know-how to make a fortune in real estate and the stock market - in just a few hours a day.

I have no interest in outfits like this and normally would never have attended. But besides wanting something to write about, I had recently twisted my ankle and was still a bit gimpy. It helped that it was in the high 90’s and I don’t have air conditioning, whereas I guessed correctly that the Bellevue Hyatt does.

Today I’ll give some background and a brief speaker evaluation. In coming articles I’ll dig into what all of us can learn from him - relating to speaking, not making money!

When you go to the company’s website, the first image you see is a shark. It is supposed to mean that you’ll be eaten if you’re not careful, but it seems the way you don’t get eaten is by being a shark yourself. From what I can tell, Grow Rich, Stay Rich (GSRS) makes its money through seminars and through subscriptions to other financial services like looking up tax liens. At the free seminar in Bellevue, we were introduced to the basics of three wealth generation techniques as a sampler for a coming $49 three day seminar. You learn how to do pre-foreclosures - you show up three days before some schmuck loses their house and offer a crust of bread and such. Then you learn tax liens (legalized usury, interest up to %50) and finally using charts to track the stock market. The focus of the talk was trying to get us to come to the $49 seminar where the really hard sell will come, which we had to sign up for that night.

My specific feedback for him in terms of his presentation:

Good:

• A lot of energy.
  
• Used PowerPoint extremely effectively. For an hour and half talk he had about twenty slides, all of them in bright color and many with cool animations. The screen turned off automatically but came on in an instant when we wanted. Most of the time we looked at him and not screen.
• Maybe I’m a sucker, but I did find him sincere. If he is a con artist then so much the better for him for tricking me.
• Had a cute anecdote about his 10 year old daughter tricking him into letting her start a babysitting service. This was a story about people going out and making things happen and entrepreneurship so tied nicely into the theme.
• Humility - Told horror story of dot-com implosion and how much he lost in the market - more that he had made using the program, in fact.
• Related reasonably well to the audience. He had come to a talk like this years before and kept saying, “I was in 2nd row, 2nd seat” and pointed at woman there.

Suggestions:

• Fast talker I- I’ve never heard someone talk this fast other than that guy announcing horse races. He does this on purpose - he gives me an idea and doesn’t give me enough time to think about it. Still, it gave me a headache and won’t work anywhere but direct sales.
  
• Fast talker II- He would ask rhetorical questions and not pause. The worst was the leading personal question - it went like “Why are you here today write down your reason now now come on now you’re here because you want money so write that down write down you want money.” This really straight out annoyed me and would have turned me off to him had I not been there as a TM in the first place.
• Fast talker III- When telling the cute story on his daughter he slowed down a lot but not anywhere near enough. It did answer my question though of whether he could speak more slowly if he wanted to.
• He had a couple flubs on facts, I think because he was going so fast and not for dishonest reasons (because facts were immaterial mostly, though on one his dates were really confused and made me scratch my head).
• He shouldn’t say “friends” during his talk - as in “this is a great product, friends!” For the most part the delivery was modern, but the “friends” business was very 19th century.
• He had a really rude way of saying “don’t interrupt me” which will get its own post.
• The story about the daughter was in the middle of the speech. It was the “money shot” and should have been saved to the very end or at least closer to the end.

As far as the company GRSR itself — look, I’m no socialist. I work for Microsoft, which some think has somewhat aggressive business practices. But at Microsoft we build things and don’t profit from others’ failings.

In my next post I’ll explain why I’m not really competent to do evaluate any of this - note how it’s not stopping me.