2006 - the 700 million dollar man

But working
with Gary changed all that. He forced me onstage, kicked my
butt to go after larger and more ambitious goals... and refused to quit
badgering me until I finally started the Rant newsletter, and started giving my
own seminars.

That’s the kind of guy he is. Never happy to
see anyone settle into a routine rut, where life can be slow and normal and
uneventful.

Screw that.

Life around
Halbert is NEVER normal.

The education in marketing and salesmanship
(and, yes, writing copy at a more visceral and more effective level) that I
received while working with Gary was dangerous... jam-packed with evil adventure...
and the most fun I’ve had in business.

It was also
worth millions of dollars and more.

He was a vicious mentor. And plopped me
behind the “Big Desk” in his Sunset Boulevard office way before I was
ready -- it was sink or swim, and as my head exploded with the work load he
piled on me I realized that the head growing back in the ruins of my
shoulders was an advanced, and much more savvy, version of my old self.

Co-producing
his first huge marketing seminar nearly killed me. That’s not a joke.
But pulling that event off changed the way seminars have been produced ever
since.

And I went on to share the stage
with Gary for a couple of dozen MORE seminars, each one more outrageous
and more challenging and more growth-forcing than the last.

We were dancing as fast as we could on the
shaky cutting-edge of every major marketing breakthrough of the last
twenty years.

We wrote
some of the very first infomercials... back when sharp direct
marketers were picking up late-night scrap time on the new cable networks for
nothing (literally sometimes for free), filming hour-long pitches in the
afternoon and running them hours later. No one in the “normal” business world
even suspected the wealth locked up in those sloppy “wee hour”
infomercials.