A long time ago, in a chair very very near away, I read a story about a guy who bought the Brooklyn Bridge.
Well, he bought the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge, which were due to be replaced with new, brighter, more energy-efficient lights.
And then, some time later, one by one, the same guy sold the same lights, at a profit.
This guy, name Joe Pilato, flips random stuff for fun, because the business is not really all that great.
Pilato bought 123 of the Brooklyn Bridge lights for about $4.3k, and and he “made in total” between $13k and $14k. It’s not clear if that’s profit or revenue because it took Pilato a year to offload the lights — and along the way he had to pay for storage, transportation, cleaning, and even marketing.
But do the numbers really matter?
That snippet, “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge (lights),” was good enough to get Pilato featured in a national magazine (one of a few still left with circulation of millions).
It will be a tagline he can use for the rest of his natural life to sell himself and his “flipping insider” knowledge if he were to create a bizopp course out of it, or a book on the matter, or if he wanted to get featured on podcasts or when Oprah does a segment on flipping (yeah right).
The point being:
A notable, simple, fascinating tagline, which is actually based on a pretty lousy reality (the numbers again are maybe $5k in profit, over the course of a year, and are completely unscalable), is worth more in positioning gold than an unremarkable, complicated, unglamorous summary of a genuinely successful project (“I flipped a beat-down house in Towson, MD, in just 4 months and made a profit of $67k, and that was just one of five such projects in the last year”).
He who has ears, let him hear.
Meanwhile, one thing I didn’t realize until pretty recent (I’m a slow learner, and much isolated from the world) is that “the guy who sold the Brooklyn Bridge” is such an effective tagline because it’s actually been used to describe a number of famous con men over the past century.
Con men have legitimately been selling the Brooklyn Bridge, often for cheap, to very gullible newcomers to New York, who were hoping to get something for nothing, but who ended up getting nothing for something.
That’s a bit of research that that didn’t make it into my new 10 Commandments book.
But there is a lot in that book about con men, and about valuable and even legal marketing and business and persuasion lessons that can be extracted from their sneaky and deceiving ways.
If that’s something you can imagine finding interesting: