I grew up in Toronto, and there was a guy everybody knew.
Russell Oliver.
He became famous…and very rich…with four words:
I buy your gold.
That was it.
He blanketed Toronto with radio and television commercials saying, in his booming South African accent:
“I’m Russell Oliver and I buy your gold.”
Old gold. Broken gold. Gold chains. Gold teeth. He didn’t care.
If you had gold and wanted to sell it, Russell Oliver was the guy.
I was thinking about him in April of 1997 because I was studying copywriting and becoming fascinated with how much power you could concentrate into just a few words.
Jeffrey Lant had already given me his four most important words:
You get benefit now.
And I started noticing that the best descriptions of things often follow that same pattern.
Stop Your Divorce.
Get More Leads.
Convert More Leads.
Original Pencil Portraits. $99.
You don’t have to explain what any of those mean.
The right person sees those words and immediately thinks:
“That’s for me.”
Stop Your Divorce is probably my favorite example.
Those three words have literally been worth millions of dollars.
Because they perfectly articulate what a very specific person desperately wants.
That’s why I think one of the highest-value things you can do is spend some time thinking about the three or four words that most clearly describe what you do for someone.
It may take pages and pages of thinking to get there.
You may have to deeply understand what your prospects want, what they’re thinking about, and what they’re hoping will happen.
And after all that work…
you may only have three words to show for it.
But those three words can become the anchor for everything else you do.
If you get them right, the right people lean in.
And if you get them wrong…
it may not matter what you say next.