PART III: KENDRICK MERCER ON DEVELOPING THE DREAM
This video was shot at Mercer Advisors annual client convention in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, on April 29, 2011. Kendrick Mercer was invited to deliver the keynote speech.
"What if this plane split in half and either we could just be in total fear and cling to our seats for the rest of our life, complaining and bitching, or we could just leap off and fly the rest of our lives?"
That was the question Kendrick Mercer asked a woman seated next to him on a plane to Honolulu after his boat trip. He hadn’t realized how much he’d already changed by then. Or how powerful the new state of being was that he was centered in after his Long Bow sailing adventure.
The woman was silent after he spoke. When they were debarking the plane, she tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Thanks.”
Back home, Kendrick decide to set up his own company.
“I decided what I wanted to do was to set up a firm that was going to educate people, and I came up with the phrase basic training. I was going to put people through a two-day experience. I was going to require them to bring all kinds of work from all kinds of information. I wanted them to bring in their families if they wanted to, because what I found in the old company with my clients was that although most of them came with me, was that, well, once I set up their finances they couldn't run them or they didn't run them accurately. They wasted money and they didn't do it efficiently or tax efficiently. Eventually, I had to take over.
“I moved to the new firm and hired a couple lawyers who were supposed to be business lawyers, and they had a lot of trouble teaching what I was teaching clients. People were coming from out of the state to see me through word of mouth promotion from physicians and dentists telling other people what I was doing. I started getting more and more clients, but then it was getting stacked up where I'd have a three-month backlog, because I just worked with one client, one family, at a time for two days, and then I'd do the next one.
“Then I had one of my great ideas: to hire clients that I'd trained and worked with because they really knew the material. These attorneys couldn't do it, but my former clients had already been through it and knew every step. They came in and did brilliantly.
“Then interestingly, a client who was an orthodontist from Florida came and did the program. He said, ‘This is so fabulous. I would like you to come to Florida and talk to a few of my friends.’ “I said, ‘I don't know. I don't know that I want to do that.’ He said, ‘I'll pay all the way. I'll pay your bills. It'll just be a few friends, and we can spend a couple days together.’ “I said, ‘Okay, that sounds great.’ “The time was coming, he called up and said, ‘I've got you set. You're going to talk for two days.’ I didn't think I could talk for 30 minutes, much less two days, about anything. This scared me. Yeah, fear was a great factor in bringing me. Terror was more like it.
“But then that wasn't the worst of it. He called me about a week before I came, and said, ‘Okay, a few of my friends are, there's actually 40 of my friends that are going to be there,’ and that scared me because I just wasn't used to talking to that many people.
“Part of my whole theme was so when people came, this was going to be the safest place. They would feel more love here than any place else. And as a matter of fact, every day before we started the day, I'd do a talk and I would ask, ‘Who's coming?’ saying, ‘I want these people to be treated so well that they hesitate to leave because they face a harsher world.’ That was the theme. I've really taken care of people. It's my ability. Because of the harshness of my early life—being abandoned by my parents and elder brother—I’ve always wanted people taken care of in every way. We would pick them up in a Rolls-Royce and taking care of them, nurturing and feeding them. It was just a fulfillment of part of my life to be able to do that.
“Soon I was getting clients from all over the United States and Canada, so I felt I was ready to move to a place that people would love to come to more than rainy Eugene, Oregon, which took two planes to get to and the chance of getting rained on was about 100 percent. A client of mine did research to look at different places. I said, ‘I want to be in Bermuda, San Diego, or Santa Barbara. Please research those,’ and he did. Came back with the results and I decided to go to Santa Barbara. That was a phenomenal shift that I made.
“In the process of setting up a package where people would go through basic training, and I'd make you walk over broken glass. I mean, first I made you bring a whole bunch of information. I made you pay a huge fee, an enormous fee, which was important to me because my economic freedom was critical to me. Then, we put you through two days of extreme torture. And then I gave you a long list of things you had to do when you got home.
“One of the things I had you do was to bring a list of every single thing you owned. I went through every one of them with you, and asked, ‘Does this add meaning to your life?’ If the answer was no, the order was you had to sell it and put the earnings into something else that would move you toward economic freedom.
“Then we followed up and made sure you made those changes. “The neat thing about all that torture was that people who were committed enough to make those shifts and changes absolutely made my company famous because the process worked.” View Part I View Part II View Part IV THE MERCER MINUTE is a new email newsletter from The Kendrick Mercer Company that will help you reconnect with Whole Self in 60 seconds or less. Over 50 years of working with thousands of people on leading fulfilling lives has proven that our natural human consciousness is our most effective guide. Got a minute? Sign up below.
