The Bruce Lee Of Revenue Generation With Erik Luhrs

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Erik Luhrs is known as the Bruce Lee of Revenue Generation and is the Creator of Revenue Kung Fu. He works with entrepreneurs, experts, leaders, and founders, helping them move beyond whatever holds them back so they can rapidly grow their business and achieve their desired outcomes. Erik joins John Livesay on today’s show in a discussion about the importance of being happy and the connection between our mind, body, spirit, and wallet. He also walks us through the four levels of going from living to lifestyle to legend to legacy.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The Bruce Lee Of Revenue Generation With Erik Luhrs

Our guest is Erik Luhrs who is the Kung Fu Revenue Generator. We talk about the importance of being happy because that’s what freedom is and that’s what people want. There’s mind, body, spirit and wallet connection. He walks us through the four levels of going from living to lifestyle to legend to legacy. Enjoy the episode.

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Erik Luhrs is known as the Bruce Lee of Revenue Generation and is the Creator of Revenue Kung Fu. He works with entrepreneurs, experts, leaders and founders who are driven by a purpose, mission or vision that far exceeds their current level of success. He helps them to move beyond whatever holds them back so they can rapidly grow their business and achieve their desired outcomes. Erik, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

Let’s start with some journey. You get to pick childhood or school. What made you decide that you wanted to brand yourself as Revenue Kung Fu and martial arts?

I’ve studied about eleven different martial arts. I have several different black belts. Martial arts has been a large part of my life. I got the nickname The Bruce Lee In Revenue Generation. It originated with a client years ago. He gave me the nickname The Bruce Lee of Sales, which I sat on for a year because I said, “I’ll try to have the confidence to back that one up.” After a year, I put it up on LinkedIn and doubled my connections in about 1.5 weeks because I had stuck to The Bruce Lee of Sales. It evolved as I evolved. First, I created The Guru Selling System and evolved into lead gen. I developed Subconscious Lead Generation. I’ve evolved to positioning. I developed Peerless Positioning and all these different systems.

[bctt tweet=”People buy happiness because it represents freedom.” username=”John_Livesay”]

My nickname evolved from the Bruce Lee of Sales to the Bruce Lee of Sales and Lead Generation to the Bruce Lee of Sales & Lead Generation & Positioning. I was like, “That’s far too many ampersands in this nickname.” I shortened it to Revenue Generation. I’m like, “I’m done. That’s it.” I’ll probably change it but for now, that’s what it is. Revenue Kung Fu came out of all that because Kung Fu means a skill acquired through perseverance. It doesn’t mean kicking butt. The people that I work with, their discipline is to increase the revenue for themselves and their company at least initially.

There’s something in martial arts that’s about being aware of your energy and your spirituality. You mentioned something when you’re talking about all your other creations and iterations that involve some subconscious things. To me, this is what makes you stand out from other people that say, “I have a system to help you generate leads.” Let’s go there because I love to go there. My first book years ago was all about how to take metaphysical principles and apply them to selling like not taking rejection personally, like The Four Agreements, don’t take anything personally, not being attached to results. Many of us and sales are attached to the results. Staying in the moment and out of your head, and all those things. Nobody was trying to connect those dots many years ago. It’s fun to meet a kindred spirit who is bringing that in proudly and not sneaking it in. My question to you is, how do you help people? Do you start with mindset stuff? Are you able to help people figure out what their blocks are even if they don’t consciously know what they are?”

I studied a lot of different things. I’ve studied Neuro-Linguistic Programming and was a master practitioner level and mind control. I’ve read up on Psychology and studied other behavioral systems, towards the metaphysical, multiple forms of meditation, self-hypnosis, self-discovery and all of that. When you initially meet people, their initial fallback is to put up a facade instantly.

We have our masks. We don’t feel safe.

It’s what I want you to see me as. Most of the time they’re failing miserably, they just don’t realize it.

“You look scared and petrified.” It’s those kinds of things.

 

A narcissist is perfect or somebody like a conman. Everybody else is like, “I’m like a god right now.” You’re like, “This guy sounds like a wet bag of kittens.” When you let people go into themselves and if you open the space for them, they will verbally and energetically give you an idea of where they are. Ultimately, what people want is to feel better. They want to be happy. As Abraham Hicks said, “Everything you want, you want because you’ll be happier.” Ultimately, everybody wants happiness.

When I’m speaking with somebody, I have the subconscious piece. You and I spoke before that I have the psychic piece going on too, so there’s that aspect that I’m picking up. I’m picking up their unconscious, subconscious and superconscious pieces. My entire desire is to simply say, “Here’s what I’m getting from you,” and putting that back to them. A lot of times when you hit people, they will be saying, “Here’s what I want. Here’s the mission I’m on.” I’ll say, “Okay.” The more you talk, all I keep seeing is this knot that’s tying itself tighter and tighter. I feel constricted as if all of these ribbons that are tying themselves are limiters.

That’s what I’m picking up and what that means to you. All of a sudden, when you give them that mirror they didn’t look in this morning. They look at the rose-colored mirror and, “Here’s the real mirror.” They go, “I do feel like this thing I’ve been selling for five years isn’t what I’m into anymore.” They will start talking. They will verbalize the ribbons. That’s when it’s like, “We’ve deconstructed what you’re putting out there. Where do you want to go with that?” I could say, “It’s been 30, 45 minutes. You have this epiphany of yourself.” Sometimes people are like, “I’ll go back and read some more Eckhart Tolle or something.” “Have fun.”

Other people are like, “I still have six years of therapy that I paid for so maybe I’ll double up on those sessions.” The people I work with are the people who have a much bigger vision of what they want to be, do, have and experience in the world, in life as far as beyond where they are. Those are the people that I’d like to help. They’re committed, motivated, action takers and implementers. They give into that. They’re like, “I see that there’s more to me than this physical stuff. I want to dive into that because I want to experience myself as opposed to trying to create a Facebook-worthy life.”

You’ve touched on a couple of things I want to go into. One is a Facebook life is another form of a mask. All the research has shown that you get more depressed the more time you spend on social media looking at people’s posts because your brain doesn’t constantly remind you, “This is a moment in time. This is the best of the best of their day. Their whole day is not this happy.” You look at all the things they’re doing that you’re not doing.

[bctt tweet=”Go from living to legacy.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Good marketing has the ability to make people feel you’re in their head. The way I talk about it is when you tell a story that other people see themselves in, they’re pulled in. Your ability to create a metaphor describing a feeling you’re getting from someone, in this case, the ribbons, people can then describe what that means to them. It’s a door that allows them to open up and say, “Now that I have a metaphor and visual to what I’m feeling, that helps me figure out those feelings and express them in a way that without them metaphor, I didn’t even know where to start.”

Whether it’s intuition or starting a revenue plan, because you’re also into systems, you toggle back and forth between the feeling and the analytical part, if you can help someone figure out what their mission and purpose are and figure out a way to express that in such a way that it resonates with potential people who need that, that makes perfect sense to me why you would earn the title of being The Kung Fu of Revenue. If we zoom out and think of money and revenue as energy, Abraham Hicks certainly talks about that. Most people don’t realize that.

I remember being interviewed to give a sales talk to a company. It was between me and two other speakers they were interviewing. A couple of days after, I got an email from the speaking agent and said, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” Rarely do you see it that clear. That’s what we’re selling, our energy. We think it’s our book, the content, the structure or whatever else it is. At the end of the day, it’s always energy. The woman said later, “I felt good talking to you in the interview that I figured if you made me feel this good, you’d make all 300 people in the audience feel that good.

That’s what you’re also offering through a systematized lens from people who are like, “That’s too woo-woo for me.” You’re like, “It’s okay and here’s how to apply it to a system so there is some structure to it.” From an awareness standpoint, I thought that alone is how I describe what you do to people. That’s why you got many requests to connect because the subconscious is seeking it out whether we’re consciously seeking it out or not.

You opened up a rabbit hole. Because everybody wants to feel happy and we’re in physical form, we get pulled to search for a solution in physical form. Nobody ever goes on the internet and says, “I need a guy to help me get in touch with my beingness so I can become a billionaire.” If that was the case, my phone would never stop ringing. People go on online and they say, “I’m looking for a great Facebook or LinkedIn strategy or get more leads in my pipeline,” the generic things. The power of a story or a persona, because you’re talking about selling, the energy piece is that you weren’t even selling. What you were doing was compelling because for the person who is going to say, “I liked your energy,” you were an avatar.

They saw something in you that they lacked and truly desired. They couldn’t give voice to it because it’s not something that’s shown to them as, “Go look for this solution.” They simply sat there and some primordial beneath the surface part of them said, “I don’t know what the hell this guy is doing but I can’t look away. I can’t stop listening. I can’t take my eyes off him.” That person is aligned with their source. They’ve aligned their source with their beingness and their real-world and physical-world pursuits. That alignment makes you so much more powerful than any would-be competitor. You don’t have a competitor because everybody else is coming in there and they’re doing the five tactics for a great speech BS.

 

You come in there and you’re like, “I’m going to be me,” like a beacon. All of a sudden, it’s like the sun walked into this conference room. Even though I’m going to go blind, I can’t look away. What kind of money that person can make is unbound. Very quickly, it goes beyond money because money then becomes effortless. You make money by showing up. These people throw money at you and they don’t even know why. They’re like, “I will keep paying money to be around you.” It’s because you’re at a higher state of evolution. You’re in a state of freedom that they don’t possess yet. They hope that by buying your products, services and time, and being in your vicinity that they will become you. They want to be what you are.

The beauty in what you’re doing is true leadership because nowadays influencers are like, “I’m on YouTube and I’m on Instagram. I’ve got 1.2 million followers. Here’s Happy Dappy Energy Soda. I made $120,000 for showing this candy.” That’s not leadership. That’s pitching people. Anybody can be pitch people. You can pimp yourself enough, beef up and have followers. The people who make a difference in this world are true leaders. A true leader ultimately wants to free people from their limiting beliefs. When they see you living that higher energy, that freedom, their subconscious puts 2 and 2 together instantly, “I want freedom.” That’s what everybody wants. Happiness is freedom. They look at you and say, “He’s happy. He’s free. I want to be him. Whatever he’s selling, I’ll buy it.”

Sometimes freedom is the ability to be spontaneous at the moment and connect with whoever you’re talking to. One of the things I do is help fix people’s elevator pitches in five minutes. I have a process to do that. More than most people, you could relate to this. People have said to me, “How do you know what to say? How are you able to listen to someone and describe what they do, and then turn it into a two-minute or little story that taps into the pain points of the people they’re helping or what life is like after?” I don’t have an answer for them.

I get out of the way and all the training and whatever comes up, I’m able to say whatever it is or intuitively pick up on, “I’m guessing this is what your clients are feeling and thinking, and why they need what you do base on what you said to me.” If you say it that way, then people will be intrigued to ask you questions and want to know more. I’ve had an experience of that multiple times. The more it happens, the more we trust it. The same thing is true of coincidences as well. We can go, “That was a freak coincidence,” versus, “Maybe this is something I should look at and change in the way I’m living my life or how I’m approaching things.”

That’s serendipity.

[bctt tweet=”Ultimately, everybody wants happiness.” username=”John_Livesay”]

A lot of people don’t want to give any credence to that. You have this wonderful phrase about mind, body, spirit, wallet. I love it because it creates an unexpected little twist, which is what storytelling always has. What is it that you see people make the mistake when they’re trying to grow their business? Is it they don’t feel worthy enough or smart enough to charge a certain fee? Do they compare themselves to other people and feel less than or they don’t have a big enough reason besides making money to do it? I’ve seen all of that going on but I’m fascinated to hear your perspective on this because this is your niche. You’re dealing with all of it. Maybe everyone has a different challenge. Do you constantly see that the baseline is the mindset and then we fix other things from that?

In my construct, there are four levels of people from the past. Level one is living, which is getting from $0 to $100,000. The $100,000 to $1 million is what I call lifestyle. You’re changing and improving your lifestyle. $1 million to $10 million is a legend. You now want to experience more in the world and have more fun and impact. $10 million and up is what I call a legacy. You still got all three behind you but now it’s like, “What am I going to leave behind?”

Nobody loves alliteration more than I do. Let me just repeat it for everybody, living, lifestyle, legend, legacy.

That’s your evolution. It all depends. Most people reading this will fall somewhere between living and lifestyle. In living, those people need to focus on strategies and tactics. They need to get something going. A lot of times, they don’t even know what they’re trying to do. It’s clarity on what you’re trying to do, then going out there, taking some action, getting your bruises and making mistakes. Once you get past the living piece and say, “I’m in the lifestyle,” what I see as the biggest mistake is that lifestyle people will go back and they’ll go straight to the tactic level. They’ll still go online and look for, “Scale your business with better Facebook Ads. Grow your list with YouTube videos.” These are all viable and valuable tactics, strategies and applications. You will do them.

What’s happening is that those people have a hidden evolution point, which is effort. They get to that low return on investment and diminished returns. They’re saying, “The harder I try, the less stuff happens and I’m getting diminishing returns.” Once you achieve that level, the clarity that should come through at that point is no longer about effort. Look at the Math, “Every hour I busted my ass, I used to make $500. Now I bust my ass, I make $250. If I pull back, I can make $500 and I’m making more than if I try harder. I need more than 40 hours a week and I do 60. Something’s wrong here.” At that stage, it’s no longer about effort, it starts to move into existence. Who am I being? It’s this be, do, have.

The living people are all about, “What do I do?” If you keep trying to do more, the universe will happily give you more crap to do because you’re asking for it, “What do I do now?” “Here are YouTube stuff you can chase. Here are LinkedIn strategies you can chase. Here are networking strategies you can chase.” When you turn around, slow down and say, “Who am I trying to be? Who do I want to be? Am I evolving towards that vision of myself or am I trying to grow a smaller vision of myself that can’t fill the next stage of me?” I’ve reached the end of stage one, which is tennis ball size. Stage two is volleyball size. What got you to tennis ball size is not going to get you to volleyball size.

 

Sometimes in Corporate America, people get promoted and they have no training on how to be a leader. They try to act like a salesperson still and it doesn’t work. That’s valuable to realize that you can’t keep pushing as hard as you were when you’re at another level and expecting the same outcomes. The awareness is the first step, “This isn’t going to work anymore and yet I haven’t a clue what to do that will work.” That’s where you come in.

Few people have gone and started doing the work necessary to evolve themselves. They need outside guidance of some sort. I’ve acquired it. To be honest, it wasn’t even that I went out looking to acquire it. I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me for years. I was successful but I’m not getting the results that I wanted. I fussed around and I studied all these different modalities. That’s why I went from sales to lead gen because I thought, “This will be the thing.” I mastered lead gen. I was like, “It’s still not moving the needle the way I want to. I better go learn positioning.” I’m mastering these things and creating these systems.

Finally, it wasn’t until I stopped. I was about to go do a brand position because that was the next step up. I said, “I’ve done sales. I’ve done lead gen. I’ve done positioning. I guess branding is next.” I was looking at my clients and the ones I had created miracles with but I was also looking at myself. I said, “When was I accelerating and the happiest?” It was when I was doing this deep work. “When was I making the most impact in life, income, joy and everything for my clients?” It was when I was working on the deep stuff. What’s the deep stuff? It’s beingness. The light bulb went on and as quickly it was like, “Oh, crap, how do you market beingness?”

It’s like, “I’m going to teach you how to breathe unless you’re in a yoga class.”

Ultimately, as you’ve discovered, you learn the tangible. People need a physical outlet for it. That’s where Revenue Kung Fu came from. I agonized because it was like, “How do I fit this into something that people can wrap their head around and be desirous of at the same time?” I was like, “They want the revenue.” In Kung Fu like in the Shaolin Temple, which is where Kung Fu which is Wushu came from, the monks studied martial arts not because it was an aspect of Buddhism. Before they studied martial arts, they were fat and out of shape and they fell asleep every time they tried to meditate for longer than 30 minutes.

[bctt tweet=”You make money by showing up.” username=”John_Livesay”]

When they started studying martial arts, they got healthier. All of a sudden they’re like, “I could meditate longer. I can have more enlightenment.” They put even more effort into the physical and they got these incredible results. They started doing these superhuman things like jumping 10 feet in the air, doing split kicks and knocking two people off horses. They were things that most human beings can’t do physically. Why? Conversely, it’s eight hours a day of martial arts, but then it’s eight hours a day of meditating. The deeply they went into themselves in the nonphysical, the more the physical expanded.

It’s the same thing for revenue. The deeper you go into yourself, the Kung Fu inside you, then the Kung Fu of your revenue expands as well. It’s that duality and that synopsis. That’s basically what it’s all about. You say, “How does something as vain as revenue mix with something as deep and meaningful as Kung Fu?” You have to do something in the physical world to embody what you’ve been doing in the metaphysical or your internal world.

If you want to have things clear, clear your mind through meditation or whatever and don’t live in a cluttered environment so it all matches. It’s another way of saying that. Do you sometimes see people that have some clarity and they’re well on their way to going from living to lifestyle, they’ve got some momentum, they’re having month after month of progress and all of a sudden, nothing seems to work and they haven’t changed anything? They’re getting a lot of noes all of a sudden or things that were going to happen fell out, and nothing new is coming in. It’s like, “What happened?”

Logically, it’s confusing because it’s not like lead gen. Things changed or something. It’s more of an energetic thing. First of all, I want to check in and go, does it happen often? A lot of people fear, “This can’t last forever.” You have a belief system and that scarcity can be part of it. Is it something that the person is subconsciously fearing that’s causing that to suddenly get a bunch of noes everywhere they look? Have you seen that happen? What do you think is 1 or 2 reasons usually?

The way that this works is if you can visualize. Coming from your highest level, you’re connected to the source. Let’s paint a picture. The source is at the top. That funnels down into you and your beingness, your mindset, your brand, your positioning, your go-to-market and your sales. You’re using all this energy. All this powerful energy is focused on creating all of these sales. We look at it as a funnel. It’s funneling all the energy down to this point of creating the sales and all of a sudden, “Now I have exploding sales.”

The fact of the matter is that it’s not like that because after the sales start expanding, the piece that a lot of people let go of or don’t even initially adapt is at the bottom or beneath this spiral or this funnel is another step, which is trust. That trust would circle you all the way around back to the beginning, to the source. What happens is when you start getting more money in the bank, your amygdala, that little thing at the top of your throat, right at the bottom of your brain, will get excited for a minute. It goes, “More money is coming in. What if it stops coming in?”

 

You had a few hours, a few days or a few months of happiness and you ignored it long enough, but it gets a moment. The amygdala’s only job is to terrify the crap out of you because it was designed to save you from saber-toothed tigers, bears and stuff when we were primordial humans. Now it’s bored. It can’t watch Netflix. It doesn’t have cable or internet. It doesn’t have anything else to entertain it and it’s only got one button in it and that button says, “Scare the crap out of you.” It keeps pushing that button because there’s no bear. There’s no car swerving in front of you to kill you. It’s got nothing else to do. We revert back and the amygdala takes over and it’s going, “You’ve got to put money away or you better close this deal. You were talking about buying that next house. You haven’t put it into your 401(k).” It will pull everything that it can to throw at you.

“Interest rates are going up.”

It’s anything. It’s like, “Your ex-girlfriend is doing better than if she would have married you. You suck.” It’s the stupidest crap. It will throw everything and it’ll say, “I’m just being logical.” You buy that BS. All of a sudden, your trust in your true self, in your source in this unbound energy gets hijacked. That’s why they call it an amygdala hijacking. You can look it up. This little, 1 x 0.5-inch piece of flesh in your skull takes over and makes you think that the sky is falling. It will cloud your entire concept of reality. When it does that, you begin to lose faith in your source, which means you begin to lose faith in yourself. The amygdala couldn’t be happier because the amygdala thinks it’s helping you. That’s the sick part of this. It’s like a fatal attraction that’s stuck in your skull. It thinks it’s trying to help you because it is. It was designed to save you, but because it doesn’t have Netflix, it’s like, “I’ve got to save you from whatever you perceive.”

I’ve never heard anybody say it quite like this. You’re talking about sales funnels, loops, and all the paths to keeping energy moving, whether it’s Abraham Hicks, focusing on what you want, not what you don’t want. Of all those things in a funnel or a loop, trust is the most important part of it to keep that energy circulating. That trust gets shaken, scared or unfocused. That makes total sense because you start to get a little confident, a little cocky, and the internal self-critic pipes up, “Who do you think you are?” You go, “Maybe I am the source of all this and that’s scary,” as opposed to trusting being part of the source. It all gets wobbly from there. It’s what I’m hearing. That’s so helpful.

Let’s sum up what it is you are offering the world. It’s a new way of thinking of success, figuring out where you are on that alliteration from living to legend to legacy, and how the skills for one need to go to another place. Your awareness of money being energy, and what’s holding you back that you’re not seeing for yourself. You’re able to hold up a mirror to people. You’re able to meet them where they are and get them where they want to be. Would that be a fair assessment?

[bctt tweet=”The people who make a difference in this world are true leaders.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Bruce Lee said, “It wasn’t the daily adding to. It was the daily stripping away or hacking away the nonessential.” Inside of you is the brilliant human being you desire to be. All I want to do is help you to hack away the limitations because when you were born, you were still connected to the source. Ultimately, if you can get back to that childlike nature, you can manifest anything you want in this world because you could. When you were a baby, you could manifest anything. You didn’t want anything because you were part of the uterus. Getting to that and stripping away so that you can have that in your business, life and energy. My job is to help you facilitate that.

If people want to reach out and find you, Erik, what’s the best way to connect?

You can go to my website, ErikLuhrs.com. If you want to find more testimonial, information, all my videos and such you can go to LinkedIn and type in my name or type Bruce Lee of Revenue Generation. I’m also on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, the usual suspects. Last but not least, if you Google me, I come up all over the place.

Congratulations on having a brand that is memorable and that people want, that also allows them to equally understand what you do and who you help. I am excited to continue to watch you soar and watch you help others. Thanks for being on the show.

Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Erik Luhrs
• The 7 Most Powerful Selling Secrets: Soar Your Way to Success With Integrity, Passion and Joy
• LinkedIn – Erik Luhrs
• Instagram – Erik Luhrs
• YouTube – Erik Luhrs
• Facebook – Erik Luhrs
• The Four Agreements
• https://www.Amazon.com/Erik-Luhrs/e/B004SNT0X8%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: limiting beliefs, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, power of a story, revenue generation, showing up, true leaders