2006 - the 700 million dollar man

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.

We were among the first to divine the goldmine
of the “900” toll phone numbers (before they were taken over by the sex
industry, even).

And when I wrote a long-copy ad for the Web in
the early 1990s, there was NO ONE else even dabbling in the medium.

Gary and I have remained close friends, though
I could never work with him again. My heart can’t take it anymore.

Many people out there claim to be “action
central” in the marketing world... but Halbert really IS.