Announcer:

Are you ready for an open discussion with the best of the best and the best of what's next? Welcome to the Tony DURSO Show. Join in on a great conversation today with some of the world's great influencers, as they showcase great advice and techniques that made them the game changers they are today. Now here's Tony DUrso.

Tony:

Welcome. I'm your host, Tony DUrso. I interview some of the most successful people in the world, and I thank you for joining us. This show is dedicated to helping you turn your vision into reality, and we are the number one show on the Voice America Network. We're going to talk with Shel Horowitz about Crisis Opportunities Now, and as you know, my interviews with the world's elite entrepreneurs are all about helping you launch your new business or take your business to the next level. Sometimes the penny drops with the right information for you to start something profitable yourself, or help you do your job a whole lot better. I love to help you, and I love to hear how these world-class interviews are helping you. If you want to help me help more people and help get my show to those that need to hear this in the world, please consider giving me a review. The easy way is to go to Apple podcasts or go to ratethispodcast.com/tony . A kind five-star review helps grow and support the show. Today's show is about Crisis Opportunities Now with Shel Horowitz. Let's see what we can learn today. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary recap of what we went over, so stay tuned for that. Founder of Going Beyond Sustainability, Shel Horowitz works with companies to find the sweet spot where profitability meets environmental and social good, helping to create, identify, and market products and services that turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, catastrophic climate change into planetary balance, and pandemic disease into global health. Here we go. Hi, Shel. Welcome once again to the Tony DUrso Show. So great to have you with us.

Shel:

Great to be back with you, Tony.

Tony:

Shel, I'm looking forward to finding out much more about crisis opportunities now. The world needs it so much, but before we get into that, I want to follow your journey to success, introduce you to our newer audience, and let's find out more about you. How did it all start for you? What's your backstory?

Shel:

Well, it goes back a while. I'm 63 years old, and I have been a marketer since I was 15 and an activist since I was 12. Which would you like to hear about first?

Tony:

To me, you're known as a big speaker. You speak all over the world. You've written 10 books. You've written several books with one of the most famous marketers in the world, Jay Conrad Levinson.

Shel:

Yeah, I've done two with him.

Tony:

And we're going to talk about your latest book in that series a little bit later on. How did you get into marketing, branding and all those good things that you do?

Shel:

Okay. Well, as I mentioned, I started with activism and I got into marketing and journalism in order to promote activism. So, I was a high school student in New York City and we had a couple of different newspapers. There was the official student newspaper, but then there was also an unofficial newspaper that was put together every ...I think it might've been once a month or every couple of weeks by a bunch of the fairly few right-wingers in the school. I was a left-winger and they ran my stuff with disclaimers, but they ran it. So, I would do things like go to peace demonstrations and write them up, and they would publish them in this little newsletter that circulated throughout the college campus with about 3,300 students. New York city schools are big. That was actually one of the smaller public high schools in New York, and I loved writing. So writing was really my jam very, very early. And when I got to college, I got onto the real student newspaper and started writing for it and got to cover some really interesting things on campus. And then I got my first ever paying writing assignments when I became what's called a stringer for the nearby metropolitan paper in Dayton, Ohio. I went to school in a tiny little village called Yellow Springs, and I was the Yellow Springs town correspondent, so I would go to town council meetings and school board meetings and write them up and get paid $3 an hour for sitting in those rooms. Actually, my housemate was their stringer for the college. So, I learned to be a really fast writer because I would get home and there were eight of us living in a house with one telephone. This is 1975. It's hard to imagine - one telephone, eight people - but that's what we did. I knew I had to get my story written before he got his, because the way we submitted the stories back then was we dictated them over the phone into a tape recorder. So, if I didn't get there first, I was going to have to wait a half an hour for him to dictate his story, and I'm a morning person. I would be wanting to go to bed by then. So, I just learned to be a fast writer and it has served me well. Fast forward a few years - done with college, settled in Western Massachusetts in 1981, had no job when I came here, so I started a little business. It started as a typing service and fairly quickly started involving some writing components, doing press releases, resumes, different kinds of things like that, editing but not writing people's school papers, and again, it just really attracted me. I had already done one book before I moved to Western Mass. I got very, very lucky. I was writing for... I was reviewing books for a literary agent and determining which books he should take on, or at least give a second look to. There was a lot of writing involved with that. And in the middle of that experience, the Three Mile Island accident happened. This agent happened to have coauthored a book that I used in a school paper several years earlier about whether nuclear power was a good idea and the answer is no, it's not. So, he knew of my interest. He knew I had read his book and then after Three Mile Island, he landed himself a contract to update the book, and he was a busy guy and he threw that to me. So, I was 22 years old and all of a sudden, I had a book contract. Book came out when I was 23 and it was the first of 10 books, and the only one I've done specifically on a technical scientific issue like that, although several of my marketing books have a lot of content related to the marketing of green technology. It was a slow and many headed process. Meanwhile, I was starting to build up my clientele, writing press releases, writing book covers, still writing resumes and writing became dominant. And then I guess it was around 2004, 2005 that I started being asked by my clients to bring their self-published books through the production process, so that became a piece of it too. Then in 1999, a developer announced that the mountain next to the mountain behind my house - the mountain behind my house is a state park called Skinner State Park, also known as Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and the mountain next to it, he decided he was going to about 40 luxury homes going all the way up to the top, ruining the view from the State Park. And while all the experts were crying, oh it's terrible but there's nothing we can do, I went out and organized a movement that stopped him in 13 months flat. And then I thought, well, gee, I've just done this campaign where I took everything I know about marketing and brought it into my activism. What pieces of my activism can I bring into the marketing side? And that's when I started looking at green and socially conscious and ethical and just more aware businesses, just the kinds of people I wanted to market for. And so, for most of the last two decades, that's been my focus on the marketing side, and it's really been nice to integrate these two halves of my life, the activist and the marketer and braid them together. So that's the very short version.

Tony:

Shel, that is very fascinating, and what's that purpose? It appears that everything hinges on your desire, your activism here. What's the purpose? Where were you trying to go? Where are you trying to go with this, and why?

Shel:

It's always been in my makeup to try to make the world a better place than I found it, and that has taken many, many forms over the years. It started with peace activism in the mid-1970s when I was a high school student. These days I'm doing a lot of stuff around immigration justice and in between, there's been like a dozen different issues that I've been involved with in some significant way. Affordable housing was one and greening the world, environmental stuff has been a concern of mine going all the way back to the first earth day in 1970, and I joined my first environmental organizations in 1971. As I learned more about the bad news about nuclear power and the good news about safe, renewable, clean energy, I started to put a lot of energy into that, and several of the books that I've done have focused quite a bit on that because that's really the future that we need to have. If we rely on dirty coal and if we rely on unsafe nuclear, and if we rely on fossil fuels that not only pollute, but then you're extracting a resource that we don't have infinite supplies of, then you have an economy eventually that's going to crash down. You're going to have people having very poor health effects, a lot of negative stuff and all of that can be avoided. The interesting thing, Tony is that in the last 20, 25 years, what we know about how to do clean energy is so much greater than what we knew then, that it's becoming price compatible with fossil fuels and it's long-term. It's much, much better. For one thing, you're not buying the power supply every time you get your oil tank filled. You buy it once and whatever mechanism you're using, whether it's solar panels or whether it's geothermal or whether it's wind or whatever it is, you put it up and then it's there and it lasts for 15 or 30 years before you have to do much to it.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Tony:

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Shel is the best-selling, multiple award-winning author of 10 books, most recently “Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World” and internationally acclaimed for his writing, speaking, and consulting on social entrepreneurship and green business profitability. All right, and now back to the chat with Shel.

Shel:

So that means that the homeowner or the consumer or the business owner gets to lower their net costs. You have a capital expense, but then it's paid out, amortized over time, and then it's done, and the money you were spending goes on to other things. I'll give you a great example of this. Everybody's familiar with a very tall building in New York called the Empire State Building. When the Empire State Building was built in 1931, oil was pretty close to free so they didn't design it for energy efficiency, needless to say. They designed it to be a glorious tall building, the tallest building in the world and to be a monument to capitalism. So, in the 2000s, there was a project to renovate and retrofit the Empire State Building. It was not cheap. It was $13 million, but it was slashing three and a half million dollars a year off their energy bill, which meant that it had a three-year payback or a 33% ROI. When you have numbers like that, why would anybody go for fossil fuels that have an ROI of basically zero?

Tony:

I remember the days back in Chicago as a kid, we had coal. Back then, it was a big thing to have coal. It's changed so much, and now of course we're into our electricity and whatever, but now there's solar out there. In California where I live, there is something new that - not something new, but I believe it's the year 2030, there's a mandate, no more gas burning cars. The world is changing so fast. We're not even sure which way it's going, but we know that as things are now, the electric cars, they have some issues, what the future holds. It's just moving fast.

Shel:

Yeah, it is. And I remember coal being shoveled in the basement of the Bronx where I grew up. I remember coal trucks delivering goal, and it's amazing. My house actually, I live in a very old farmhouse, built in 1743 on a working dairy farm. My neighbors have 600 cows and we actually heat our house and get our hot water from hot water generated by cow poop and restaurant food waste.

Tony:

That's absolutely amazing. We're talking about crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz and you can find Shel at goingbeyondsustainability.com. Shel, I like to get into your vision path now, and let's begin with our show title. Why do you see this current crisis, this pandemic as an opportunity? Let's talk about it, and then we'll get into some of the opportunities.

Shel:

Okay. Well, climate activists Tony, have been hearing for decades oh, it's too hard. We can't pivot. There's too much invested in the old ways of doing. Well guess what happened in March 2020? We discovered that not only can we pivot, but we bloody well had to. Everything pivoted; everything shifted so that proves to me that the activists were right all along and we can do this. Now my whole approach through the business world has been for many years to show that this is actually more profitable, but it really helps when you have a situation that says the old way is not acceptable for even one more minute. We have to change now. So, having done that, having completely reinvented almost every aspect of society, why should we stop there? Let's look at the things that are not working as well as they could be, whether it's energy systems or whether it's healthcare systems or whatever and let's reinvent them. Let's take this grand opportunity where the world stopped and put it together differently.

Tony:

I know that there are so many opportunities. There are businesses that make millions and millions of dollars as a result of this pandemic, as a result of this crisis. Simple case in point, I'm trying to remember the type of industry. They usually would have a small handful of people at their meetings. Now because of the issues out there, they're on zoom and they're having hundreds at a time. I mean, it's affecting business. If it's done smartly, it's making a lot more business for people than they ever thought.

Shel:

Yeah. And even in my own personal life, we had our very first zoom Passover Seder this year, and normally we get family members coming from the Northeast to our house and we have a lovely event. This time we had people from 9 States, 1 in California, 1 in New Mexico. My dad called in from Florida. People who would have never come to a real in the flesh Seder were able to come. I'm actually doing an interview in the next couple of weeks from when we're recording this one that I've brought in two other panelists to co-guest with me at the request of the host. And one of those people is a kid in San Diego who I met because I was at a pitch night for the San Diego Conscious Capitalism Group. Now I live 3000 miles away. I would never go to that group in person, and there I was and the 16-year-old kid is pitching this amazing remote charging system that works on pretty much any input. You can hand crank it. You can run it off solar, you can run it off wind, you can run it off hydro, just dipping it in stream, and he was pitching this and I contacted him afterwards and struck up a friendship. And then about a week later, this radio host who I've known for many years sent me an email saying, I'd like you on the show with two people that you choose. So he was one of the ones that I chose. So, we're looking at three generations and 3000 miles to do a show that would not have been possible by my going to the local studio where he hosts.

Tony:

And on the flip side, we have a good amount of people who have lost their business, lost their job, and there are some very unfortunate circumstances, and I'm hoping that a lot of these people listen to this and get some ideas and that we share some ideas of what people can do. And I know I'm talking a big wide swath here, but I really want to give some really good ideas and get things going, because done right, regardless of whatever society does, one can still come up with a very good living and sustain it.

Shel:

Yeah. It may take some thinking. It may take some reinvention. People like Seth Godin, who've been preaching this for decades that sometimes you have to figure out what isn't working and how could it work better instead, and you might need to brainstorm with some friends. And while I would feel very sorry for somebody let's say in the event planning business right now. My younger child is a professional musician. It's a very hard time to be a professional musician. There are no gigs, but there will be something out there. Actually, they started doing some childcare and teaching for a kid who would normally be in the public schools as one of the ways they pieced together a living. That was an opportunity that opened up and they seem to really like doing it. So, who knows? That might be a whole new career path that wouldn't have been explored otherwise, but we are a very creative and resilient species, Tony. We have a long history of figuring out how to do things better than they were done before, and this is part of that. Some industries - let's face it - I don't know about you, but I don't have a lot of friends in the buggy whip business right now, but even that hasn't gone away completely. There's a very, very small market for those fancy carriages in the tourist areas that are horse-powered, but not enough to support tens of thousands of people as it was 150 years ago. We've seen over the last 30 or 40 years, we've seen how many changes the internet has made, how it's made some industries completely obsolete and built up whole new ones, so those trends will continue. And now the technology that we have at our disposal is so amazing. I think about how much suffering there must've been in 1918 with the flu pandemic. They didn't have Zoom. Most of them didn't have telephones. It was a very lonely, isolated time, and somehow, they managed and then society went on and many new innovations happened in that time.

Tony:

We learned from the past, and we have so much more available to us now. For example, your son musician, I would think it's such a big business now to get people from all over the world on camera, on a FaceTime, on a Zoom. Why not have Zoom concerts? Why not?

Shel:

They have to work out the sound issues with Zoom concerts, I've attended a few of them and they're not satisfying. But what is satisfying is that I've been listening to performances from the great theaters and orchestras of our time and the great performers of our time. They were prerecorded, and I think a lot of these people are getting a lot of new fans.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

Tony:

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Announcer:

You're listening to the Tony DUrso Show with special VIP guests. We'd love to hear from you via email. Be sure to send questions and comments to Tony@tonydurso.com. Now back to Tony and his guest.

Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. TEDx talker and international platform association certified speaker, Shel is known for upbeat, engaging delivery, colorful visuals, and involved audiences, giving popular talks like “Impossible is a Dare” and “Making Green Sexy” at major conferences. And now back to the chat with Shel.

Tony:

Shel, I want to also talk about making businesses socially responsible as part of this. And you say that it's really too hard or can be too expensive, and I'd like to kind of go into what do we mean by "socially responsible" and what kind of solutions do we have for these people who are out of a job, or have lost their business and kind of help give them some ideas that can stimulate them?

Shel:

Okay, well, first of all, I'm not the one who says it's too hard and too expensive. That's what I hear in the business community. And that is why I have focused my outreach on the idea that there's profit in it, that you can find or develop products and services that make a profit and a difference. And I'll give you some great examples. I don't know what you know about kerosene lamps. I think we probably talked about this when I was on your show a couple of years ago, but kerosene lamps are toxic. They're flammable. They give lousy light and of course you have to keep buying kerosene. So, if you are a $25 a month household in some remote part of Africa or Asia, the $2 a month you're spending on kerosene is a huge piece of your income going down the drain, never to be seen again. So, there are a number of companies in this space. One in particular is called d.LIGHT. That's a lowercase d.LIGHT, and they provide solar lamps that are LED bulbs, so they're really efficient. The power source is the sun so there's no kerosene involved. They sell them on time payments. So that same $2 a month that we're paying for kerosene, maybe for the first 10 months, they're paying off the lamp. And then after that, that cost goes away and they have 10% more disposable household income. And meanwhile, they're providing jobs on the ground for people in those communities to sell and service the lamps, and they're providing a much better quality of life. So perhaps the parents can start some sort of evening cottage industry after a day in the fields, and perhaps the children can see better and do their homework better and get better grades and eventually better jobs. And this $20 lamp paid off over 10 months at $2 a month becomes a ladder out of poverty. I think that's really exciting. This is a profit-making company. There are many, many profit-making companies that are doing things like that. Patagonia, the clothing company. They've always been a leader in social responsibility, and at one point they even ran an ad saying, don't buy this jacket. They're the only clothing company I've ever heard of that told people not to buy their product unless they really needed it. So, they do everything they do with very environmentally responsible, not only materials, but processes, and this is important. In manufacturing, you've got the two pieces. You've got the stuff you're using to make other stuff, and you've got the way you make it. So, by looking at greening these assets, both aspects, the interesting thing is the process often saves a great deal of money for the company; it's cheaper to do the right thing. You're not paying huge fuel costs. You're not paying huge waste disposal costs. You look at something like the traditional way to do manufacturing is you take a hunk of material, whether it's steel or wood or whatever, and you carve away the pieces you don't need until you have the piece you do need leftover, right? Well, think about the 3D printing model. That's a completely different process. It's additive, rather than subtractive. You start with a layer of something, then you add another layer and another layer and another layer until you have exactly what you need. No waste. That's revolutionary!

Tony:

Very!

Shel:

20 years from now, that's probably the way much manufacturing will be done. There are issues right now with economies of scale and the cost of the machines, but that'll all change. And the other thing that will change is the small 3D printers will be in your kitchen, in your household. And if you need something, instead of going online and ordering it, you go online and order a blueprint, you feed it to your printer and then half an hour later, it's there.

Tony:

I know. We didn't think of the internet 20, 30 years ago like this. So something like that while it's a hard concept perhaps for some, it very well could be the order of the day in the next 5, 10 years.

Shel:

Yeah. I think that's going to be as revolutionary as the internet was.

Tony:

There's so much could be done on a 3Dprinter right now. They're even doing 3D printing of food.

Shel:

Yep! Some kinds of medical devices. If you need a prosthetic, isn't it better to be able to feed your own dimensions into the machine and get exactly a custom-tailored unit rather than buying one off the shelf and hoping it fits?

Tony:

These are really good suggestions and these are really good points. What else, what other types of solutions do we have there to stimulate people who they need to expand, they need to grow? And I know we're covering a huge, huge area, but I just want to be able to stimulate people. I guess that if this show is able to stimulate a good group of people, I would think that that would be a job well done.

Shel:

Sure. Well, I'm going to tell you a story about another radio interview I did several years ago, and I was riffing about how any business could find a way to profit by doing the right thing in the world. I'm talking about addressing, not just the pandemic, but hunger, poverty, racism, climate change, and even war. So he said, okay, what would you do for a pizza shop? And without having ever been asked that question before, without ever thinking about it before, I started riffing immediately that if I were the pizza shop owner, I would recruit a small group of youths from a local inner city poverty district high school, and I would teach them how to grow tomatoes and garlic and oregano and onions, and I would teach them how to make pizzas. I would teach them how to sell pizzas to kids at their school. They would go in with their order forms on Friday and then Monday or Tuesday, which is going to be a really slow lunch day for a pizza shop, they get their pizzas delivered to the school and look at what you're accomplishing. You're feeding good, nutritious organic food to the students instead of junk food. You're teaching entrepreneurship; you're teaching survival skills like gardening. You are creating a profit on a day that is normally so slow that many pizza shops don't even bother to open on a Monday afternoon. And so, it's like a four-pronged win. I find that when you look at these kinds of solutions, you often find multiple wins. One of my heroes is a man named Amory Lovins, an energy visionary who has been writing books since the 1970s on how to get to a deep sustainability economy. He was involved in that Empire State Building retrofit, among many, many other projects, and his own house was built in 1983 or 84 in the cold Colorado Rockies. In fact, just outside of Aspen. Tony, what is Aspen's biggest industry?

Tony:

Skiing, of course.

Shel:

What do you need for skiing?

Tony:

Well, you need ski gear, right?

Shel:

Yes. But you also need something underneath the ski gear.

Tony:

You need your skis. You need your snow, of course.

Shel:

Yeah. And what do you need for snow?

Tony:

The good snow weather.

Shel:

Yes, it has to be cold, right?

Tony:

Very!

Shel:

So here he is at a house in Aspen, Colorado where the industry is based. The entire economy is based on it being cold. He doesn't have a furnace. He doesn't need a furnace. That house is so well-designed that it keeps a steady temperature in the comfort zone all year round. It's not hot in the summer and it's not cold in the winter, and it's all through passive energy improvements and this house paid for those improvements in terms of saved energy and keep in mind, we're talking 1980s when energy was much, much cheaper. In... I forgot ... I think it was a year, five months. I forget. Anyway, it was a very, very short payback period. And it's a big luxurious house. I've been there. So, if we could build essentially a net zero or net positive energy house in the early 1980s, why are we still building the traditional stick-build, energy-inefficient facing in the wrong way, not oriented to the site piece of crap that so many people want to plop up and sell and then leave before the house falls apart in 10 or 20 years?

Tony:

Shel, that is astounding. And why do you think it's not that way now? Why is this other stuff being pushed on everybody?

Shel:

Oh, maybe partly because Amory is a scientist and not a marketer, but he's got some great Ted talks though. Amory Lovins. He's done at least two, maybe three, and they're great. It's really about what's possible, and one of my favorite quotes is from Mohammad Ali. I'm going to actually read it to you because it's so good. "Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given, than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing." I liked that quote so much that I called my own TEDx talk impossible as a dare. So, if you reject that opinion, if you say it's possible, let's figure out how to do it. You get a very different set of questions. You get a very different set of answers. You get a very different set of results. It's just like gratitude. If you walk around all the time looking for things to be mad about, oh you'll find them. But you can also look around as I do looking for things to be grateful about. I have kept a public gratitude journal on Facebook since March 2018, every single day I have covered. And no matter how rough the day is... The day my stepfather was killed by a motorist, I dedicated the gratitude journal to him and talked about how grateful I was for the 50 years he was in my life and what I learned from him. So, it's a very, very different way of looking at the world.

Tony:

Where can we find your Facebook page for that, by the way?

Shel:

Under my own name.

Tony:

Okay.

Shel:

Shel Horowitz. SHELHOROWIT like Tom, Z like zebra. And every day there will be... Well, I shouldn't say every day there'll be a gratitude journal because sometimes I write it in the evening and post it, and sometimes I write it the following day, but within every 24-hour span, every day gets covered. And within every 48-hour span, unless I'm traveling to a place that has no good internet and I have to stock them up for a few days, there'll be at least one post, usually more.

Tony:

The more I speak with you, the more I learn about you, Shel. You never cease to amaze me.

Shel:

Thank you.

Tony:

This is the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Just ahead, the chat continues about crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz, but first it's time for us to take a short break. See you back here in just a moment.

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Tony:

All right. We're back on the Tony DUrso Show where you can learn from the wisdom and success of others to help you move on your vision path. Today's show is crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz. At the end of this interview, I'll give you a summary of what I got out of this, and I'll share some pointers with you. Stay tuned for that. Frequently interviewed in major media, Shel has been profiled and quoted in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Entrepreneur, ABC News, BBC News, Voice of America, NPR's Marketplace, Boston Globe, the Tony DUrso Show and dozens of others. And now back to the chat with Shel.

Tony:

And I believe cause I'm feeling it, but I just feel this excitement about helping the world, helping the audience, the people listening to stimulate and get them some good ideas here. And I think we've covered some good things. Dear audience, listen to this again. There is so many what we call takeaways and golden nuggets and jewels that Shel has given us. There's a lot of good stuff here. If you are hurting or suffering, it can be turned around very swiftly, based on some of the areas that you may want to go into. So, there's some really good points here brought up in this interview and I urge you all to listen to this again and see if you can help find that a-ha moment in one of the things we've spoken about to help you take care of your situation and bring up your scenario. And of course, feel free to reach out to us and see how we can help. And with that Shel, are there any other opportunities that you see as a result of the current world situation?

Shel:

Certainly, but I do want to seize the opportunity you just handed me to say that you can also get a lot of inspiration at goingbeyondsustainability.com, and of course, in my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World that I co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson, the guerilla marketing man. So opportunities are under every rock and tree. Ideas are under every rock and tree. I actually have a folder of research for a book that I pitched some years ago and didn't find a publisher for it and didn't want to publish it myself, called How to Find your next 10,000 ideas. My wife challenged me once - we were walking in the woods and I said, I bet in the next couple of hundred feet, I can find 20 ideas, and I think I found 23. I can go through a newspaper and I can find ideas popping out at me on almost every page. So you just have to tune in to letting those ideas surge over you and noticing them when they come. They'll say hello, but if you don't say hello back, they will leave again. That doesn't mean you seize every idea and run with it. Some ideas are not worth pursuing or you're not the right person to pursue. But if you have, let's just say you have a low number. Let's say you find 10 ideas per day. And so, in a month you have 300 and out of those 300, maybe there's two that really speak to you and you want to pursue them. Well, that's going to be a couple of dozen in the course of a year that could change your life.

Tony:

I like that. Make it a habit, everyone to put down some ideas of what you can do. And instead of reeling back from the blows of what's happening, come up with ideas on a regular basis. See if you can do 10 a day and then pick some of them and go for them and put them together. You may very well surprise yourself with something very successful.

Shel:

Yeah, and again, we're very resilient; we're very inventive. I think of my own childhood. By the textbook definitions, I had a pretty unhappy childhood. I was raped on the streets by a stranger in the Bronx. My parents were divorced. My sister was brain-injured and was institutionalized. And yet somehow, I turned into this very positive person and it wasn't a coincidence. It was actually a conscious decision. In my early 20s, mid-20s, I made a conscious choice to have a happy life, and I have to tell you, it is the best decision I ever made, even better than the decision to marry my magnificent wife, and we've been together now 41 years.

Tony:

Kudos to you on that. That's excellent.

Shel:

Thank you. Yeah, we celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary in October 2020.

Tony:

You know Shel, some people when something hurts them, or very bad, let's say, happens, they can get really stuck into it, but you decided to pull out of that. And I think that that decision is key. It doesn't take away the hurt, the pain, the bad things that have happened, but from there it pivots and you start going more on a road of success as a result.

Shel:

Exactly. Yeah. So much is about mindset. Henry Ford, who is not somebody I otherwise quote, but he did have this one brilliant quote. This is as close as I can come to his exact words. "Whether a man thinks he can do a thing or whether a man thinks he cannot do a thing, he's right." Okay. Of course, now we have to degenderize that language and we would say whether somebody thinks they can do something or whether they can't, they're right. But it is so much about mindset. It's the same mindset that Mohammad Ali was talking about with that wonderful quote about impossible.

Tony:

I love it. And Shel, as mentioned earlier in this episode, I wanted to make a point and talk about your latest book, so here we go. Your 10th book is called Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, and you wrote that with the bestselling co-author, who I believe has written more than a hundred books, and you've got so many endorsements on this, such as Chicken Soup's Jack Canfield, Purple Cow author Seth Godin.

Shel:

Cynthia Kersey, the author of Unstoppable and Unstoppable Women, Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet, and a whole bunch of books about food and democracy. And then two marketing guys, Ken McArthur and Yanik Silver. Yanik has a book called Evolved Enterprise that he generously let me reprint a chunk of, which is another book about social entrepreneurship, and it's a book I highly recommend. Of course, if you're only going to get one, then get Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. But one of the things I love about the book industry is it's elastic. You do not meet people who are golf fans who have one golf book. You do not meet cooks who have one cookbook. You do not meet green marketers who have one green marketing book. So it's not like buying a car or a house where one can serve you for a long time. And that was one of the things that always has attracted me about publishing. So pick up Yanik's book and pick up mine too, or pick up mine and see if you like that piece of Yanik's book that's in there, and then you might want to get his.

Tony:

Shel, for the audience, let's define what is guerrilla marketing, and then go into how does that help heal the world.

Shel:

Okay. Guerrilla marketing is being quick and nimble and sometimes it means entering and leaving a market again before the big dogs even notice you're there. Finding a way to differentiate yourself and doing it with ways other than simply buying your way in with a lot of advertising. It is many headed. There's a thousand different ways to do guerrilla marketing for any one business, and many thousands of ways if you look overall, but it's about making an impression and the impression is tied to wanting to actually create the action, whether it's making a purchase or signing a petition or whatever it is. And again, the impossible part is not impossible. I mean, I was told when we saved that mountain, that that would be impossible, and it was not only not impossible, it was actually fast. I thought it would take five years.

Tony:

When you saved that mountain, did you know that that was just an opinion that it was impossible?

Shel:

Oh yeah. I never accepted the impossible for that. I have accepted it for some other things. I think it is impossible that I would ever be a world-class sewing expert. I'm a lousy sewer.

Tony:

Shel, speaking of that in a way the future, what are you looking to accomplish in the next few years?

Shel:

Well, I really want my legacy to be that I helped create the wave of change that businesses started to do the right thing because businesses realized that they could benefit from it, and that one of the ways they can benefit from it is actually making money on the products and services that make the world better. That is a seismic shift, Tony, because we've been told so often everything's has to be all about the bottom line, and this other stuff doesn't really matter. And the reality is it matters a great deal. Interestingly enough, let's look at ... okay, we know enough about marketing that this is not going to be news to you, but it might be news to some of your readers that depending on which studies you read, it takes anywhere between 5 and 10 times as much investment to bring in a new customer from scratch as it does to bring back an existing customer. So, when you make your customers happy, they come back to you and you're paying zero to market to them. And then even better if you make them really happy, they tell their friends. It used to be that the maxim was that if people liked you, they would tell 3 friends and if they hated you, they'd tell 10. Well, ask United Airlines how many people have watched the video United breaks guitars? Last time I checked; it was several million. That's not the kind of publicity you want if you're an airline, but they had a customer service snafu, and instead of making it right, they dug in and made it worse. And they did this to a musician who had a fan base and BOOM! But the nice thing is if you do right by the world, think about all the people singing the praises of Patagonia or Ben and Jerry's, or some of these other companies that have figured this out. It's revolutionary. And so, if your customer brings you more customers, then you're paying zero for those. And when are they going to bring you more customers? When they feel like - number one - you've treated them right, but - number two - that you're in there for a higher purpose, that you're not just about raking in the dollars and putting them in the cash register, that there's something else that you're doing with your business. There's some other reason why you have that business. And you see these great companies out there that are making inroads on hunger or poverty or war or racism, and it's just phenomenal.

Tony:

Are there any personal habits that contribute to your vision success that you feel have really helped you get to where you are?

Shel:

Well, I would say that one thing is this gratitude journal. That's only been for the last two and a half years, but that has definitely .... I go around looking for things to be grateful for and photographing them so I can remember them at the end of the day or the next day, that keeps me open to positivity in my life.

Tony:

Shel, these are great points, great items. Thank you so much Shel. And once again, we talked about crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz and you can find him at goingbeyondsustainability.com. Say that one more time. Go to goingbeyondsustainability.com. Thank you so much, Shel.

Shel:

Been a pleasure.

Tony:

Hey, fellow entrepreneurs. Thanks for hanging out with me while I featured an elite entrepreneur who took his vision to reality. I'm sure this was as inspiring for you as it was for me to do this interview. We learned some great crisis opportunities now with Shel Horowitz. He got into marketing and journalism in order to promote activism, and now multiple years fast forward, I'm hard pressed to say which one he is the better at. He's famous and world renowned in both. I was laughing at how he became a fast writer because he had to beat everyone to the phone to call in his story. Isn't it amazing how life lessons mold us into something great and unique? And now look at him - quite the writer! I'm reminded of how I took a job as a typist because I wanted the job and I didn't know how to type anything and never touched the typewriter before. I got a library book and practiced until I was the fastest typist at the company. I am very impressed at his purpose of wanting to make the world a better place than how he found it. That's powerful. Think about it. We don't hear that enough, and it's one of the best purposes I've ever heard. I think you can get a ton more leverage, actually a ton more mileage on anything you want to do with a purpose like that in mind. Try it! And now with the current issues going on in society, we have to think through what we're doing on a much deeper basis. As Shel quotes Seth Godin, "sometimes you have to figure out what isn't working and how it could work better instead." Brainstorming with your friends and associates is an excellent idea. And if you don't get the right solutions, keep on brainstorming or maybe join a mastermind group. There are plenty of them around. Another way to look at things is if you are really stuck at trying to earn a living because of being blocked. Have you thought about teaching? Shel's child is a professional musician, and with gigs being tough to get new opportunities came up. They are doing childcare and teaching as some of the ways to deal with current issues. Can you come up with 10 new ideas a day? I'll bet you can. There's so much more I got out of this interview. What did you get? I'd love to know how you use this information to help you in your business or career. Did this interview give you any ideas for your business? Did it stimulate you to take some action? Please share and grab hold of your vision. Decide you're either going to start something great or take it to the next level. You have to decide first. It always starts with a decision and you can get my Vision Map to help you along the process. The eBook is at tonydurso.com/books. I created my empire just a few years. That's all it took. I had the Vision Map as my guide. You can do it too. Let's help you move on your journey to success. Once again, please consider supporting the show with a nice review. Just go to ratethispodcast.com/tony. Thanks, and remember: just take action. Success awaits those who persevere and remain steadfast despite the odds. Sow good seeds, do good deeds and join me on the next episode of the Tony DUrso Show.

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