This deal was going nowhere until I had a brilliant idea after reading a JV project that was written by my favorite author Jay Abraham.  It suddenly occurred that the last three years of trying to make this deal work had been done all wrong.  So with a little help from Jay we changed the approach and hopefully the result.  This project because it has not been completed has many proprietary elements to it which can’t be discussed yet.  What we can say is that it involves many members of the Baseball Hall of Fame and in six years when the project is complete could exceed 9 figures in total wholesale sales.  The project is massive and has never been done before.  It has monsterous upside potential and will surely be the largest payday for many of the Hall of Fame athletes involved since leaving the game.  We will keep you posted on how we got in the middle and how we solved a major three year stumbling block to completion.

• This project required building a list for the Yosemite Mariposa Tourism Bureau
• This was a different twist to an old problem
• The money is in the list but without a list there is no money

 In this project we were hired by the Tourism bureau to build a list for Yosemite prospects.  Believe it or not Yosemite has been declining each year in terms of visitors to the park.  Our job was to put together a plan to spike Bay Area interest and get people to the valley once again.  We did this by first building a SuperBlog ™ for Yosemite.  The SuperBlog we conceived and build for a few destination clients in the last year.  To go see what a SB looks like go to www.yosemitemariposa.com and take a look around.  Anyway we tied the SB to a radio promotion in the Bay Area offering a bunch of prizes just for going to the squeeze page and providing us with first name and email address.  It was a killer promotion which had over 12,000 people opt-in for the promotion.  In fact the powers at the Yosemite Mariposa tourism board have told us it is the most successful promotion they have ever done.  We all know what you can do with a list and this is a great example of thinking outside the box and really ramping up a killer promotion quickly.  We did the entire promotion including the building of the blog, making the radio ads and getting it on the radio in about two weeks time.  I’m sure that would be a record in anyone’s book.  In this TollGate project we were paid as consultants on the project

 This is an all around great story for a great cause.  The cause was helping raise awareness for breast cancer.  The recipient of the funds was www.curebreastcancer.org founded by Dr. Ernie Bodai.  In a few short moths we produced over a million bands and were able to give a sizable amount of money to his charity.  This was a real feel good deal that worked extremely well and helped in raising much needed funding for Dr. Bodai and his organization.  The three person crew assembled to put it all together was able to open over 2,000 retail accounts in just over six months.  I would love to work on another project like this in the near future.

 This was much more of a challenge than I ever dreamed.   It was in the very early days of high tech and few people understood high tech.  Even fewer wanted anything to do with it.  Had I known what I now know I would have never got involved with this project.  Timing was about 5 years to early.  Not all deals work out and this is one that didn’t work or even get close to working.  This was a license deal to place free interactive kiosks.  The only problem was nobody knew what they were or how they worked.  That included the developers who blew though $500,000 only to tell the company that they couldn’t make the software to run the programs.  So the moonlighting trio from Intel packed it in and left the company stranded.  While the overall concept has since been proven many times over the company was just too early to market with a concept that the ordinary person did not understand let alone know how to make it work.  Great idea bad timing.

 So not knowing any better I set out to do just that and gave it my all for 18 months.  In just 18 months I had turned one of the worst performing offices out of the 20 or so California offices into one of the best performing offices.  How did I do that?  I used and put in place various tactics that brought in more agents, moved to a large office space (got to think big to get big), hired an ex-athlete to be the company spokesperson but most importantly I ran the following ad.  “Think you can’t qualify for a home loan…think again.  Think you don’t make enough money…think again.  Think you have too much debt…think again.  Stop thinking and call us today.”  This ad was so successfully that we had to turn of the phones.  We had 100’s of people calling us for weeks.  In 18 months we went from a paltry 5 million in originations to over 40 million.  Finally a success in a field outside my niche.  Nothing could stop me now or so I thought.

 This was the Wild West to say the least.  The characters were as wild as the creators or visa versa.  The rights were secured by a no name company on the East Coast.  Not only was there no name there was no money.  What the heck it’s time to think way outside the box.  I hooked the company up with a printer who decided he liked the project so much he fronted all the money to do the printing.  Talk about a win win deal.  Anyway the product was produced and sold nationally at many leading retailers including Music Land.  Sales were in the $400,000 range with a nice profit margin and everyone was happy except maybe Cartwright.

 In this particular deal I was contacted by Yosemite to source the manufacturer and also implement the entire Yosemite Park phone card program. This was a tough deal simply because of the entire infrastructure surrounding the National Parks.  Unless you have worked directly with the parks you will never know all the rules, requirements and regulations they have in place.  It took a lot of the fun out of the deal.  The process was long and complicated and required tons of man hours beyond any budget in place.  While the program never made us much money it was one of the more enjoyable deals I have every put together and would repeat it in a heartbeat.

Here is a simple fast and easy way to put together profitable Tollgate deals.  In fact just yesterday I did three maybe four deals in just one afternoon.  How and where did this all happen?  I simply went to a trade show that featured hunting and fishing.  There were hundreds of booths so the job was fairly easy.  I simply looked around for new products that I thought might need some marketing help (you know the guy sitting in the small corner booth and nobody around).  Once I had a few targets I approached them and asked them one simple question.  Do you have all the business you can handle?  There answer each time was the same-no.  So after some small talk I grabbed a business card and then went looking for the big fish in the pond.  There were dozens of them but I tried to be very selective about who I approached so as to not waste my time.  After a few misses I struck gold with two large business owners with large lists.  Now I will go back and see what type of deals I can put together.  One insight here: with the economy less than robust, approaching people was extremely easy.  I think you’ll find the same.  Oh and the one big deal I did…well I’ll leave that for later after the contract is signed.

          Our largest payday came strictly by accident

• I was reading a newspaper article about this hot new company in Oakland, CA who had started an MLM selling phone cards
• I called them up and they asked to see me.  So I visited them only to find out that they were…

 One really rocking company about to explode into the market place.  Now I knew a little about MLM companies and always stayed away.  This company seemed different.  I meet with the then person in charge of sourcing all the products and after about 45 minutes said that he wanted me to run the entire new product sourcing division as a middleperson.  I must have sold myself fairly well as I wasn’t even sure what there business model was or if they even had one.  Anyway before I knew it I had put together over 60 deals for them as the Tollgate Keeper.  I arranged, through another phone card manufacturer, to produce millions of phone cards for them.  I also assisted in getting an NFL retired players license.  In addition I also put together a National Parks license for them.  When it was all said and done I had put together 60 or so deals outside of phone cards.  We did apparel, autographed sports memorabilia with my now growing fleet of retired athletes, salad dressings, pastas, sauces, spices and a whole slew of other private label products featuring the founder’s picture on each and every product.  He loved it and we all loved the money.  The end result of our efforts produced 10’s of millions of dollars in sales all from me being in the middle.