If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
If you haven’t seen Rogue One, I suggest you go see it. George has been around for a while now. I didn’t know he wrote the Indiana Jones movies or American Graffiti. He’s got a lot of hits under his belt.
Here’s the thing about Star Wars, the business. It makes money 24/7. When you think of Star Wars, people think of the movies. Here’s where the real money is going to be. It is going to be in Star Wars toys. These toys sell year-round. When the movies come out, sales go through the roof.
Merchandising is a huge way to make money. All of the toys and merchandise that are legitimate are licensed through Disney. George Lucas is worth more than Trump. He’s worth $5.1 billion. Now this is self-made from scratch.
What you need to recognize is there is long money and short money. This encompasses so many phases of business, it is ridiculous. Five of seven of Lucas’s movies are among the top 100 highest grossing movies in North American box offices.
When people are looking at building businesses, they are looking at building them in a vacuum. This online thing is just going to get bigger and bigger. We aren’t even close to where we are going to get making money online.
If you look at people who are unshakably rich, most of these people have gotten rich through a combination of things. Let’s talk about Bill Gates. He forced his software to be inside the hardware. IBM went wrong because they thought the money was in the hardware. Microsoft thought the money was in the software.
Apple thought the money was in the hardware, but got into both games. Apple almost went out of business, and then they came up with iTunes, iPod and then the iPhone. It was iTunes that saved their bacon. It was a completely new and unprecedented revenue stream. iTunes was a game changer. The iPhone was a game changer. The iPad was a game changer. That’s why Apple became one of the top ten international companies in the world.
One of the things I like to do is look at people pre-internet. While all of us are connected via the internet, what is interesting is most business is still done offline.
I’ll just tell you, I am a digital citizen. I like making money from digital products. But the fastest path to making money is something physical. That’s one of the fastest paths.
Physical products require less trust. You can create a website of your own, put your name on it and run some traffic there and make sales because the customer has been educated.
The best way to consistently make money online is to develop an audience and a relationship. By doing this, you will get repeat customers. For example, Star Wars has developed a relationship with me. I have seen all the movies and bought stuff. By developing a relationship, you get lifetime value. I may have literally forked over $10K on Star Wars stuff over four decades.
Each time they have a Star Wars movie come out, people with a relationship with these movies go see them and also influence others to go see them. When I saw Rogue One, I thought it was a great movie. I put on my Facebook page that you need to go see it. Now, I’ve paid them money and I am encouraging other people to pay them money. This is the beauty of building relationships.
Once you build relationships, you also build leverage into other relationships. Let’s go back years and years ago to early eBay and Amazon. Back then, when we sold someone something, about 50% or 60% of the time, people left feedback. We complained because it wasn’t 100% of the time. If you reminded someone gently, then they would leave feedback. The feedback went down to about 30%. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average feedback rate wasn’t around 10% now.
I think the genius of George Lucas and the Star Wars franchise was the multiple relationships that they have built over generations. It’s just going to keep going. I’m thinking about buying all the Star Wars movies and watching them one weekend back to back. That’s relationship building.
Star Wars almost didn’t happen. That’s the wild thing. Both Indiana Jones and the Star Wars franchises had major merchandise. That provides ongoing money. I want you to think of the movie as the launch. So, you have the launch of the movie, Pay-per-view, CDs and the toys. If they do it right, they make money each quarter of the year. It’s amazing the opportunities we have when we do this kind of stuff.
You should study people who have made money in very hard businesses. Movies are a hard business. Movies have always been a hard business. One of the things I know about Lucas is he maintained control until he sold to Disney. He did it his way.
If you are looking to enhance your business game, forget about The Secret and a lot of these guys online because this is the thing. I am a small businessman who learned how to make money in hard times. So how did I get to this point? I look at George Lucas. I look at Reginald Lewis. I read those old business management books.
If you are a creative person, you can leverage the internet. Some kid’s probably going to make a science fiction film or something in their basement. They’re going to go online and they’re going to learn SEO and internet marketing and drive massive traffic to their website. Then they will sell that movie and make millions of dollars selling their own product. That’s where we are.
The thing you must always consider when making your money on a platform is that they are always changing the rules and it impacts your money. Part of the problem with following some of these formulas and courses is they don’t work as things change.
That’s why I always stick with basic business principles that don’t change. You’ve got to have a product. You’ve got to have an audience to sell it to, and have a way to let them know about your product.
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