Overdeliver

“Overdeliver” by Brian Kurtz provides valuable lessons, which apply both in our professional as well as our personal life.            

I guess one book cannot be everything to everybody. We have an innate urge to place a label over something so we can wrap our minds around it. We feel the urge to classify things so we can understand them. One book cannot be everything to everybody. But one book can be something for somebody.

Breaking the barriers for everything you do can be the only way for learning. Taking from one field and applying it to another, mixing up ideas, toying with subjects, experimenting… In one word living. At the end that is what makes a business a way of life. The only way to succeed.

Even though “Overdeliver” is meant to be a book about being successful in the world of marketing, it doesn’t stop there. Just as James Webb Young underlines in his “The Technique of Producing Ideas”, the teachings from one great man can be applied just as well in any other field. No matter whether you are an entrepreneur, who wants to increase his business or you are a salesperson, who wants more clients, or you are a parent, who wants something from and for his children, the principles are the same. 

If you are wondering why you should listen to what Brian has to say is easy to follow his career. His experience gathered while working at the Boardroom Reports, under the guidance and watchful eye of Marty Edelston speaks for itself. He went further on hosting The Titans of Direct Response Event in 2014 and used it as a springboard to brand everything he did after that, through Titans Mastermind, Titans Master Class, Titans DVDs, and Titan Marketing.

If there was one thing you were to take from this book is that “the list”, as Brian calls it, is the most important thing that matters. He uses the word “list” to refer to the customers. Not to his or your business but to every business out there.

The customers

are the ones who make or break your business. That is the reason why it’s number one on Brian’s priority list. That is why it should start and end with everybody’s priority list. He dedicates the most space of the book to the list. It’s the only way for you to understand its importance not to Brian only but to every person who does business, whether he or she is in direct response marketing or not.

Find out everything there is to know about your customers, and you have the key to everything. Listen to where they take you. Watch their actions. Study their language. Earn their trust, but never betray that trust.

There is no other form of copy to write for your customers but meticulously excellent. And there are no greater people to deliver it than the ones holding their copy to the level of excellence. Having worked with the best in the business, he went even further to describe the main ingredients that make a copywriter the greatest. Words like hunger, curiosity, smarts, passion, understanding direct marketing principles, humility, and generosity are the best attributes that make a copywriter in Brian’s books.  

Experience everything that makes your business:

from taking customer calls to making an offer. From choosing the copywriters to deliver your message to how to organize a fruitful business dinner. Nothing is left out from the parts that make up a great service delivered. There should be no untapped ground, no unturned idea. As he puts it: look even in the waste bin for forgotten ideas and there might be a chance to strike gold. Twist everything inside out. Exhaust every possible avenue. Then come back and do it again. With more delivery, with more passion. Just with more … everything.

There is no place so high that you can say you’ve done it all.

Even after so many years of experience, you must stay open and accept your limitations as a human being and as a businessperson.

Be ready to learn from places you never thought you would learn.

Practice what you know it’s working but experience something new at the same time.

Be humble in your endeavors and surround yourself with valuable people, true friends, who will always keep you in line when you think you get too big for your britches.

Takeaways

It’s an easy road, from the beginning to the end of the book, because Brian turns everything into a story hard to forget.

In the story of our lives as business people and human beings, we all need the stories that Brian Kurtz has to say and the messages they “overdeliver”. Even if you take one thing, one story, one example, and it’s not a wasted read. Not by a long shot.  

Live your business as you live your life:

with utmost dedication, giving the best even when you receive nothing in return. Making today count and remember what you leave behind, in the lives of every person you met or spoken to, no matter the medium or the circumstance.

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Overdeliver

0.00

10.45

Ease to read

4.9/5

Originality

4.8/5

Reader's preference

27.2/5

Overall impression

4.9/5

Pros

• Accounts from a vast experience as a direct response marketing professional
• Many principles are to be applied in every day life
• Overdelivering is a brilliant concept in everything we do

Cons

• Repeats ideas but only for emphasis purpose

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