Hey everyone!
Wow this Blog post has taken on a life of it’s own! Not just here but all over the net in forums, email blasts, tweets, other blogs…
So I decided to add some clarity that i think will help everyone, especially since a lot of the new replies coming in are from folks new to our little community here who might not have as much context on what this community is all about…
First off, I am Kelly’s business partner, so I am biased. But Kelly’s earned my trust through years of honesty, value and integrity, which I have witnessed first hand.
I also want to thank all of the folks on both sides of the debate here for the passion that’s gone into each post because I don’t think there’s a single person here posting out of spite…
As in: I sense the palatable desire here for industry wide integrity, and Kelly and I both applaud that motive.
So even if you think I might be jumping on what you’ve said as you read my lengthy post here, it’s NOT because I’m trying to humiliate anybody.
The primary distinction that I thought might have been missed is that this:
Kelly’s Blog post on his site is about an evolution in the way he does business and nothing more…
Some folks might have, again understandably, gotten the impression that since Kelly was in a very reflective place when he wrote that Blog post, that he was admitting to rubbing his hands together greedily like Monty Burns, the iconic corrupt nuclear power plant owner from “the Simpsons”, and cruelly extorting helpless customers for every penny they were worth with an evil cackle, and then clubbing baby seals for fun or whatever 
The reality of the situation, and I’m going to give you my take from what I personally witnessed behind the scenes, was that because of the Rich Jerk persona there was necessarily a layer of outsourcers or employees between Kelly and many of his customers, preventing him from getting live feedback on how they were performing ESPECIALLY when it came to his coaching floors and also somewhat with JVs.
(Though of course that’s always somewhat the case with JVs…the best you can do is carefully research the offer and then follow up with your customers to find out if they are getting results…and nobody I ever met researched as much as Kelly, and I personally worked with hundreds of top affiliates…then after the research and the promotion, you make a decision as to whether to promote again or not based on those results. Kelly did this and the times when his customers weren’t getting value he refused to promote again…even when threatened by his former JV partners with refusal to pay Kelly’s outstanding affiliate commissions…if you read between the lines here you’ll know who I’m talking about, and you’ll remember that unlike most top affiliates Kelly avoided repeating his errors with unscrupulous JVs.)
As far as the coaching floors were concerned, I personally traveled to Las Vegas with Kelly several times as he spot checked the phone sales floors to make sure that they weren’t turning into “Boiler Room” situations…and he repeatedly secret shopped the sales floors as well (oddly enough he would make up a fake order and insert a phony name along with his cell number so that the salesman wouldn’t know, and he would listen to their “pitch”).
When he found abuse, just like with the JV situation, he would fire the phone coaching sales floor and start from scratch.
That said, as he mentioned in his Blog post, Kelly was still highly dissatisfied with the outcome in too many cases, and was constantly bothered by his lack of direct 1-on-1 feedback with his customers.
He was totally sure of the value of his Rich Jerk ebook because he had personally seen so much success from it both in his Rich Jerk forum and from customers he spoke with one on one. But he started to realize that the disconnect between himself and the coaching situation BECAUSE the Internet really is such a golden opportunity for folks to build legitimate organized businesses, and there was no reason not to take things to the next level…
While Kelly didn’t have authority to “pull the plug” or call all of the shots with the Rich Jerk situation, because there were other investors, who together could assert majority control over the business, he did work very hard to assure quality…and in a move that I greatly admired, when he realized that there wasn’t any way for him to bring things up to the standards that he envisioned, he silently bowed out of major involvement and began anew with a blank slate to help evolve the way Internet marketing is taught…including creating a personal one-on-one situation between himself and his new clients.
This evolution with Bring the Fresh removed all of the barriers for Kelly to get raw feedback from his customers, and put him in a position to provide not only encouragement but an “over the shoulder” walkthrough of the live businesses that he’s currently building for his customers.
We’re now very proud of the success that our new customers have had…for instance one of our newest BTF customers now boasts the top ranking for a search term that has 22,800,000 pages and an average PPC price of $5…after 3 weeks with us!
(And that’s after the same customer bought a prominent $800 per month SEO training program that only allowed him to pick up a few longtail keyword terms.)
Kelly is very proud for the success that his Rich Jerk customers had, and all of the appreciation he’s gotten because of it.
On a candid note it’s been a joy for me to be Kelly’s close friend and business partner.
Kelly’s not just a smart and funny business mind, but he’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and he’s a loving and playful father to two joy-filled kids.
He’s also the most raw and honest person I’ve ever known…
…The first time I ever talked to him at a party that somehow turned into a JV mastermind 5 years ago, I asked him how big his list was…and he said “Who cares, everyone lies anyway.”
I was hooked on the spot!
…But that said, it’s very understandable to me when some folks mistake his raw honesty as being the actions of a man on death row who only has a short time to live and wants to make his peace! But I’ve actually found his honesty to be so refreshing once you get to know him that now I can’t imagine life without it.
(Besides, what’s wrong with living like you were dying?)
One thing for folks who haven’t gotten to know Kelly just yet:
He’s got a sharp wit and he’s a true sarcastic.
As in: the Rich Jerk was a joke. Kelly didn’t think he was better than anybody else. He was poking fun at all of the Tom Vu clones out there on the Internet.
Undoubtedly some folks will read this post and still feel riled up, and I accept and respect that.
Kelly’s sense of humor isn’t for everyone…and everyone who ends up loving Kelly as I love him doesn’t necessarily start off that way.
I also think that it’s hard for some folks to accept that Kelly’s Blog really is “off the cuff” and that he didn’t plan any of it, including the post that has so many folks feelin’ froggy here today =)
My point is that what individuals are seeing with Kelly is an evolution and nothing more.
We’ve been in business online for a collective 20-years, which is pretty good for a couple of guys in their early 30s, and as we experience new things we try to integrate them into our business and into our lives…
A final example has nothing to do with online marketing, but with diet:
I know one guy who springs back and forth between eating loads of sweets and potato chips and sodas and such, and trying to go 100% raw food with diets…and unfortunately when he tells me he’s on a diet I kind of get the feeling in the back of my head “here we go again.”
Kelly, by contrast, has always taken relatively good care in his diet ever since his early days as an actor.
But he also continues to evolve his diet slightly every year towards more raw veggies, fresher more humane food, and cutting down on processed foods with lots of salt, sugar and the like.
The result is that when Kelly brings up a new recipe he’d like to try out, it usually lands on a plate in front of me within a few days…
That’s a good parallel for the way Kelly operates in business, and it’s one of the big reasons why I’ve chosen to partner with him and not with other folks who have offered to work with me.
The last thing I’ll say is that, in the interests of keeping things down to a dull roar so folks can zero in on the many other valuable tasks for building their business, like generating traffic through the free SEO methods that Kelly’s shared in his earlier posts on this Blog, I invite you to write me or call me personally if you have questions or concerns because while I’ll certainly answer you in public here, it might help a bit to keep everyone focused on providing value to their customers in the online businesses they are creating with the help the members of the extraordinary community that’s crystalized here.
=)
It’s all happening,
Mike Long
mikelongmagic@gmail.com
858-699-2747
Edited: March 13th, 2010