Michael Senoff Interviews The King Of MLM Mr. Glenn W Turner

Michael: Hi, this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com . Get ready because here is one of the most fascinating and enjoyable interviews I’ve done to date. It’s with a gentleman named Glenn W. Turner. Now, if you’re over 50, you may have heard of this gentleman because back in the early 70s, he was like the Tony Robbins of the early 70s. He was a tremendous businessman. He built a tremendous multi-level marketing company called Koscot. There are several books written about him and he was a motivator and an inspirational teacher. He had operated over 76 corporations under Turner Enterprises. This is an hour of me going through his life story. You’ll hear the tremendous adversities he had from the time he was born to a mega success to the fall of his empire. It’s truly a wonderful story and the lessons he gives are heart-felt and you can certainly use them in your life and in your business. This is not the kind of interview you can listen to one time. My interviews are packed with content. There’s no fluff and you’ve just got to keep listening to them, so without further ado, let’s get going with this exclusive interview only found at Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com  with Glenn Turner. Enjoy.

Glenn: Hello.

Michael: Good morning Glenn, Mike Senoff here.

Glenn: Hi, Mike.

Michael: How are you?

Glenn: Good.

Michael: Good. Glenn, give me just a little bit of your background, your roots. Where did you come from?

Glenn: I was born in a charity ward from an unwed Mother in Columbia, South Carolina. My mother had a complication, scarlet fever, and the result caused me to be born with a harelip and a cleft pallet.

Michael: What year were you born?

Glenn: In 1934…Born to sharecropper parents on August 19. My mother was transported by the county to the hospital. She was unmarried. Seven months later, my father and her got married. They had to leave me in the hospital so they could do the operation on my lip and do a pallet push back. Then about a month later, I came home and for the first seven months I lived with my grandmother because my mother went to work as a waitress. Back in those days, it was a sin and a shame and worse than it is now to be born without a Father. Then I was raised on a tobacco farm in Marion, South Carolina and dropped out of school in the eighth grade and I went into the Air Force when I was 17 years old.

Michael: Why did you drop out of school?

Glenn: Well, people making fun of my harelip was my main excuse and my father and mother weren’t too educated, so they couldn’t help me. Kids made fun of me and I was always getting into fights. And then I went into the U.S. Air Force at 17 years old, my father signed the papers, and I stayed for one year as an air policeman. I got a perforated eardrum. I had it when I went in. They didn’t catch it. And they discharged me within one year, medical discharge. And then I went to Opportunity School on the G.I. Bill. The Opportunity School was run by a 72-year-old lady named Dr. Will Lou Gray, and Dr. Gray was an old maid from a rich family. They started a school for people that dropped out of high school to come back and get their high school diploma.

Michael: How did you find out about it?

Glenn: Well, the state employment office in my hometown, Mrs. Latten, was trying to get me a job. She said you’re not going to qualify for anything. You have no education. And I was 18. I had the G.I. Bill. She knew about the school and it was operated by Dr. Gray. Later the school was a gift to the state of South Carolina. I donated a $150,000 scholarship fund to the school when I got rich.

Michael: She would bring in kids and train them?

Glenn: Kids and people that were slow in school; even adults that were 30-40 years old that had missed their high school and wanted to come back and get a diploma.

Michael: Did that experience influence you to be so generous and give back to the community?

Glenn: Yes. And Dr. Gray changed my life. You’ve got to realize she was somebody. I was fortunate to be her chauffeur two months one summer and I chauffeured her around the state and I got to go in the politician’s office and the Governor’s office and ask them for funds for the school. The old Air Force base in Columbia was donated to her for a private school, the barracks and everything. It changed my life. Without it, I would have been pumping gas at a gas station.

Michael: What do you remember? What did she tell you?

Glenn: She told me, where will you be ten years from today. She says you’re going to be married to some overweight woman with ten children or on some tobacco farm pushing a plow. She scared the dickens out of me. I was afraid to look at a girl for a while there.

Michael: You didn’t want to be growing up on a tobacco farm?

Glenn: No because I always knew in the bottom of my heart that I was wealthy, money-wise and energy-wise. And I used to make a lot of jokes, get people to laugh with me and not at me like a lot of comedians do. So, I knew all kind of stuff to entertain people and be funny. And when I got out of the Opportunity School, I went to the University of Houston for a diesel engineer, a mechanic course, but I didn’t last but six months. I dropped out because I decided I didn’t want to be greasy. So, I went into the door-to-door sales of soybeans.

Michael: How did you first find that job?

Glenn: Well, a guy came out to my momma’s house and sold her a sewing machine and I was against her buying that because it cost $150. We didn’t have that kind of money because at that time we lived in a house with an outhouse out back and all that.

Michael: Was this when sewing machines first came out?

Glenn: Yes. They were selling Japanese machines. You’ve got to realize this is in 1952 and the Japanese were starting to put machines, not that I was against anything. The Japanese made…because of the war, you know. And so, I came in. The guy had Mom and Daddy all sold on buying a sewing machine. I started getting negative and talking them out of it. He looked at me and said boy you are one built kid. Said, where did you get all that muscle? I said I’m a weight lifter. I had won the third place in Mr. South in 1952. So, to make a long story short, on that issue, he bragged on me so much he sold me and then I said well go ahead and get it Daddy. I’ll contribute half of the money to it. He put the mash on me, as I call it. After he left my momma said, Glenn you’d make a good salesman. You could do what he did. He had a brand new station wagon. He probably made $40 a sale in commission, which was more than I made all week. And so, I went 200 miles away in my old black Ford that I paid $125 for selling sweet potatoes door-to-door and saved the money. And I went and worked and in the next two years I have 27 cars repossessed from me. I was fired by the same boss 26 times.

Michael: Did you contact that salesman or the office where he came from?

Glenn: No, I saw an ad in the paper. It was a different company than he was with. My attitude was up and down, I didn’t have any confidence about being a salesman, and I dropped out of the sales end.

Michael: So, you went and said you were going to give it a try. You got the job, right.

Glenn: They first advertised for mechanics at $75 a week. I went in there and he said you’re a salesman, boy. I said I can’t even talk plain, what are you talking about. So, there’s a movie on my life that tells the whole story and it shows this scene. But basically I went to work and I’d fail and I’d try and I’d fail and I’d try. It took me two years to learn how to do it and make a living at it.

Michael: Did you have any mentors back then to help you along the way, to teach you sales?

Glenn: A fellow named Jim Durham. He was 20 years old and I was 21.

Michael: He was another salesman?

Glenn: Yes, he was _____. He was a manager at 20 years old, which impressed me. He saw the potential in me, and of course, he had nothing to lose. I was on straight commission.

Michael: What was the commission back then?

Glenn: Well, if you sell a $200 sewing machine, you got $25.

Michael: Why were women buying sewing machines back then--because they could make their own clothes and it just saved them time other than using their needle and thread?

Glenn: Yes, they had a treadle and people were getting on the treadle and Singer was higher. It was $400 and ours was about half price. We had a 25-year guarantee for parts and labor.

Michael: Were you going on qualified appointments or were you knocking on doors cold?

Glenn: We’d advertise on radio and the ones that made the most on Thanksgiving would get a free sewing machine. Everybody else that was a runner up and got a $50 discount. So, we’d go out and bang on the door say you entered a contest, you didn’t win the grand prize, but you get a discount. So, we’d give them a discount. Of course, just like an automobile dealer, they give you a discount.

Michael: So, at first you weren’t that successful, but you stuck with it for about two years and then you really got the hang of it.

Glenn: I got the hang of it and I started to open my own business and I two or three businesses and I failed a couple of times in my own businesses.

Michael: What was your own business, selling?

Glenn: Selling sewing machine. And then finally one day a 19-year-old kid came into town. He was selling Holiday Magic distributorships.

Michael: Holiday Magic?

Glenn: Multi-level, yes.

Michael: Was this the first time you ever heard of multi-level?

Glenn: Yes. First time I ever heard of attitude and goal setting. First time I had heard about Think and Grow Rich, the book.

Michael: What was Holiday Magic selling?

Glenn: Cosmetics.

Michael: Was that one of the first MLMs?

Glenn: That was the first one I went with. Very big and I went in and made a quarter of a million dollars the first eight months.

Michael: You met this guy and he pitched you on it and you signed up as a distributor. What did you have to do to become a distributor back then?

Glenn: I had to come up with $5,000, which I mortgaged my furniture, my momma’s furniture and my sister’s furniture.

Michael: What was the product?

Glenn: Cosmetics.

Michael: So, you became a distributor and then you had to figure out how am I going to sell this stuff.

Glenn: Yes, I had to get some girls selling it and then I had to set up all the franchises. They weren’t franchises. They were called distributorships.

Michael: Did they have good training in the organization that gave you a lot of your confidence?

Glenn: Not really. Zig Ziglar was with them at that time.

Michael: Oh, really.

Glenn: And he had a training class, but I told him I didn’t have time to go to it because I was making $30,000 a month.

Michael: How did you basically build that company?

Glenn: I just became a public speaker and told a lot of jokes to people I knew. I had a $2,500 commission on a $5,000 check. I would take people to a meeting and put on the board how much they could earn on a sales force.

Michael: Where did you get all that confidence from--not much confidence as a salesman selling sewing machines all the way to public speaking? Where were the influences there in between that time?

Glenn: Well, there wasn’t any. I was scared to death, but the point is people liked my jokes and you had to talk to people and I like people and I don’t have any prejudice against any race or women or men, whoever does the job. So, I would just telling jokes and I would start reading Think and Grow Rich and I started coming up with some positive sayings--when you throw dirt, you’re going to losing ground--stuff like that. The next think you know I made a quarter of a million dollars. And I took $5,000 of it and eight months later I went in business for myself. The first month I did $67,000.

Michael: So, Holiday Magic was first experience in MLM. You had a great success with it. Did you become one of the number one distributors?

Glenn: I was number one and I didn’t know it. They told me that Zig was number one and I was trying to catch him. I’d already passed him.

Michael: Zig Ziglar was number one?

Glenn: Well, they said that. I was trying to pass him. They lied to me.

Michael: A lot of people in MLM hope that they’re going to get luck and get a guy like you under them to make them all the money. That wasn’t the case with you.

Glenn: No, I had nobody under me that made me rich. I had to do it myself. Later when I opened my own business I had a lot of them.

Michael: So, you found that the success came from doing the meetings and speaking to a lot of people.

Glenn: Yes. See, I always helped a man make his money back and then I dropped him. If he didn’t make it that was tough luck because you can’t hold them up forever. My theory is why let a guy that you brought in last week talk to a new person by himself and blow his sale because he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Just like why would I let a new guy at a mechanic shop that just got hired in work on your car without him intern.

Michael: So, your philosophy when you brought a new distributor in…

Glenn: Help them get their money back and then they should be trained. About 30% of them will make it.

Michael: You left Holiday Magic and you went off on your own with Koscot. Did you lose your royalty check because you went out on your own?

Glenn: I had a partner originally when I first started and I really got in to help them save their money. They got in and couldn’t make it work and I helped them make it work. And then I gave the distributorship to them. They let it go down. I was drawing $10,000 a month.

Michael: Did you have a warehouse with Holiday Magic at that time?

Glenn: No, I didn’t. I worked out of my house. Second month in Koscot, I did $147,000.

Michael: So, why did you leave Holiday Magic?

Glenn: Well, I was telling too many jokes in front of the room and they told me to quit telling jokes.

Michael: Why is that?

Glenn: I don’t know. I could never figure it out. Anyway, they lost a fortune.

Michael: So, you said screw it. I’m going to do my own thing.

Glenn: I said I can do my own thing. Twenty-two people left Holiday Magic and went with me to get it started. One year later there was seven of them still with me earning better than $10,000.

Michael: So, who helped you get it all set up? Did you start a multi-level back then? You didn’t have the computers did you?

Glenn: No, I hired a guy named Len Burch who said he was president material. It turned out he didn’t know what he was doing. By that time, I was doing it. I operated out of my briefcase to start with.

Michael: Was it a sophisticated download payout or just basically a direct sales type thing?

Glenn: You’d sign someone up for $2,000 and give them $2,000 worth of cosmetics in retail and then they had to pay $2,500 to get released from the person that trained them. So, basically they had $4,500 involved. You had a commission structure. Everybody that recruited somebody had to leave you one. The first guy that you recruited and he left to me and I made a commission.

Michael: Back then what was going on with the MLM laws?

Glenn: There were no laws covering what we were doing. They started stabbing at us, trying to make the law fit and we beat them in court and beat them in court and beat them in court.

Michael: But were they stabbing at Holiday Magic even during that time?

Glenn: Yes, they stabbed at Holiday Magic a little bit.

Michael: So, Koscot…you built that thing pretty fast, right?

Glenn: Yes. The first year I did $3 million, the second year, $33 million. Thirteen million was reorder business.

Michael: Thirteen million of that 33 was reorder business.

Glenn: What is means is they sold their first product and they wanted more.

Michael: That’s great. That’s very good.

Glenn: If they would have left me alone, I would have been the biggest company in the world. You’ve got to realize that Avon was paying 35% and we were paying 65, so they had to stop me.

Michael: Was Avon MLM at that time or just direct sale?

Glenn: No, they had direct sale. I think they bounced back and forth. But Avon was only paying 35-cents to the girls. We were paying 65-cents, therefore, they were [inaudible]. I paid $12 million in legal fees over a period of five years. I should have bought half the senators in Washington for that if I’d known what I was doing. But I was young and in just five years time I was a multi-millionaire. The second year I was worth $100 million.

Michael: What’s the tragedy?

Glenn: My wife died in 1960. She had cancer, 21 years old. I was 26 with a 19 month old baby boy.

Michael: So, how many kids do you have?

Glenn: Seven now. Married four times.

Michael: How many grandchildren do you have?

Glenn: I have seven.

Michael: That’s great. Let’s go back to Holiday Magic. This is your first taste of big money, right?

Glenn: Right.

Michael: Tell me what that’s like.

Glenn: One hundred and twenty-seven thousand my second month. The checks were coming in, $9,000 in one day. Three $5,000 sales would give me $7,500.

Michael: What do you do with all that kind of money? Do you put it back into the business?

Glenn: I bought a new Eldorado Cadillac. I’ve got the biggest home in Marion, South Carolina. The Deputy Sheriff came out and said you’re going to hell for telling people you’re making them rich. I was telling people that we were going to make it and we’re going to get out of their hick town. And the Deputy Sheriff says you’re running bootleg whiskey. You’re not selling cosmetics. I’m going to catch you before it’s over. You might as well give up now.

Michael: Were you getting scared?

Glenn: No, I wasn’t scared. The preacher came out and said liars go to hell and we need to pray about this, Glenn. Now, the preacher turned out to be a liar because I got rich and I’ve estimated over 800 millionaires came out of my company.

Michael: What’s the lesson? Why is it that one someone has a great success, there’s so much negativity and animosity?

Glenn: If somebody is less educated than they are or they feel like they’re superior to the person doing the success, they try to stop it or they criticize it because it makes them say I need to be doing more myself. So, it’s a matter of you’ve got to quit doing more. You either got to get greater and you don’t know how. They were the bankers, they were the lawyers, they were the senators in my hometown. Here’s a harelip, eighth grade dropout selling sewing machines door-to-door and all of a sudden he’s rich. You draw your own conclusion. If it were me, when somebody’s rich and they live in my hometown, I’d go shine their shoes and tote their briefcase to find out how they got that way. They say, well, I’m a banker. It’s below me to sell cosmetics.

Michael: Was Koscot…as it was growing, did you hire a law firm?

Glenn: I hired a couple of lawyers locally at first and then I had in-house lawyers. And then F. Lee Bailey became one of my attorneys, which was a mistake because they were after him more than they were me.

Michael: They were after him back then?

Glenn: Oh yes. He wrote a book that made the postal general inspectors look like Keystone Cops and it’s called, For The Defense.

Michael: Did he have that book published back then?

Glenn: Yes, before he got on me. He’s the one that got Sam Shepard off. You know who Sam Shepard was.

Michael: Yes.

Glenn: He may be one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met and he’s the most honest man I’ve ever met. He worked for me for the first year for nothing.

Michael: How old was he then?

Glenn: At that time he was about 39.

Michael: Did you ever keep in touch with him over the years?

Glenn: Not lately, but I’ve talked to him a couple three years back. He lives in West Palm Beach now.

Michael: So, when did you really start feeling the heat with Koscot?

Glenn: About eight months after I started it. I started it in August of ’67. The state of North Carolina accused me of being a lottery. And what happened, we found out later is two the Attorney Generals had gotten into Koscot and it didn’t work and they wanted their money back and we didn’t give it back to them. If I had known what I know now, I could give everybody’s money back that complained, I wouldn’t have no bad publicity. And also, I could have bought some influence in Washington and I could have gotten a lobby firm, but I thought all that was crooked.

Michael: Were you traveling all over the country?

Glenn: I was in three states a day on a Lear Jet, Thursday through Sunday.

Michael: Who organized all your meetings and everything? You were going through the distributors?

Glenn: I had a sales manager who became the president later. And then we had three divisional presidents line a third of the United States and Eastern Division and then we had 15 regional directors under the divisional, which is roughly three states apiece. California had one because it’s big and Ohio and New York and Florida. And then I had state leaders. I had about 70 of them because some states were bigger.

Michael: You had to have a good team in place because I’m sure you learned as you went on, but that’s a big organization to handle.

Glenn: What we did, we’d make one phone call on a Monday morning and we’d know what was happening, what sales were made right on down to Pocatello, Idaho. Everybody called their up-line.

Michael: Where you using computers and sending them a printout?

Glenn: We had a 360 computer that printed the text out. It was one of those big deals where you had to have an air-conditioned room just right. It cost me $40,000 a month to lease the computer from IBM. But we were modernized and we had a 220,000 square foot building, the size of two football fields.

Michael: Give me some stats on Koscot in relationship to the MLM industry. At that time, was Koscot the biggest, the best; what can you tell me about that?

Glenn: At that time we were bigger than Amway and bigger than everybody in ’63. They started four years before me. They were smarter than me. They got Gerald Ford on their side when he was a Congressman. And then they were from Michigan and Gerald Ford was from Michigan. And then they were ten years older than me. When I was 33 years old, they were 43, so they were much smarter then than I was and they knew how to play the political game.

Michael: What was the founder’s name?

Glenn: DeVos.

Michael: Were they attracting heat, too?

Glenn: They got some heat, too, but when they got heat, they got Bob Hope. They had General Hague on their advisory board. They had clout.

Michael: When you get big like that, what’s the lesson?

Glenn: You better have some political people on your side.

Michael: How do you do that?

Glenn: Well, I didn’t do it.

Michael: How did they do it?

Glenn: You’ve got to donate to the right campaign, lobbying firms, and all that. I thought that was crooked. I built a big home in the shape of castle, 50,000 square feet on over an acre. I always had a dirt road because I wouldn’t give them the commissioner or the mechanic the extra $20,000. I felt just because I was rich, could afford to pay another $20,000 I shouldn’t be better than my neighbors. You’re stupid. Pay the $20,000 and get your road paved. Your property will go up. I said it’s not right. And Mike Bailey told me one time, he said your problem is you’re so honest you aren’t real. Nobody believes it. He said if you weren’t honest, you would have been in South America or Switzerland or Ireland with the money. You wouldn’t have built your home here or your building here. You’re buying land here. So, if I thought that I was doing something wrong, I wouldn’t have stayed here.

Michael: Now, let’s go into the Dare To Be Great. How did that all start?

Glenn: It started _____ because I called Earl Nightingale and I asked him would he be my motivator. I asked Zig. Zig said I don’t think you’re going to make it, sport.

Michael: Why did he say that?

Glenn: Well, he wrote about me in his book how I was the best salesman he ever had. He thought I was a good salesman. He said running a business is a little different than being a salesman. He’s probably right, but you see, I was too dumb to know he was right. And what I did is I hired people smarter than me to run things.

Michael: Did Earl Nightingale come on board?

Glenn: No, he had made a contract with Holiday Magic, so he couldn’t represent both of us.

Michael: I just did an interview with Vic Conant of Nightingale Conant about two weeks ago.

Glenn: Good man.

Michael: His stuff was just incredible.

Glenn: Yes, well Clement Stone had that.

Michael: Did W. Clement Stone help him out?

Glenn: Yes, he’s the one that made him famous.

Michael: Oh, really.

Glenn: Yes. Put up the funds for that. I met Clement on television.

Michael: How did Clement Stone get him going?

Glenn: He put up the money.

Michael: He put up the money to get Earl Nightingale on radio?

Glenn: No, Nightingale Conant.

Michael: Oh, to get Nightingale Conant.

Glenn: The tape program.

Michael: Oh, I got you. Well, I asked Vic Conant, so is Nightingale and Conant 50/50 and he said it was.

Glenn: Yes, but Clement Stone was the man that had a magazine--I forgot the name of the magazine--that they all branch off of. Clement Stone was 17 years old when I met him. He was worth $300 million at that time. He started off in insurance, door-to-door and shining shoes.

Michael: Dare To Be Great, so how did this all come about?

Glenn: Well, Dare To Be Great, we needed something to train the people and Koscot was reaching its limit for distributorships. We only wanted to have a 7,000 population. So, we started Dare To Be Great and people were fascinated with the attitude we had. And so, we came up with a nine-day course. I turned to one of the men names Clyde Cobb, who was a nuclear engineer, 28 years old at that time and I told him, Clyde, write me a course with 12 tapes. So, he wrote one on goal setting, attitude, relationships with people, various different subjects. We now have 138 audiotapes and we have 38 video. But Clyde Cobb wrote the first course and Dr. Jasper Roo wrote the second course.

Michael: Did the second one replace the first one?

Glenn: No, we just had additional information. The second course was How To Understand Others; work with them, relate to them, and work around the problem and get them to do what you want. And then we had step number three, which was the sales course. I did most of that. And step number four was how to be a leader, leadership. And we had a nine-day class for eight hours a day. We paid a commission. We sold the course for $300, $1,000, $2,000. Each one cost a little more. The total package was $5,000 back in 1969, which is like $25,000 today. We did $300 million in sales with Koscot and Dare To Be Great. Great did $189 million of it.

Michael: Was Dare To Be Great just an additional product line for the Koscot distributors or a separate company?

Glenn: It was a separate company, but the Koscot people that left, some of them would go into that. You had the promoters and you had the retailers. Had people that set up the gas station and the guy that pumped the gas, in other words. So, Koscot people, the promoters, wanted to still promote when we closed out the distributorship, jumped over to Dare To Be Great and their wives ran the Koscot retail part.

Michael: Tell me the advantages. You have a cosmetic product and you’d have now an information product. What did you like better from a business standpoint?

Glenn: The information because we build men. The product was people. I got over 800 million that I know about and they were pole climbers, they were housewives, they were dishwashers. [Inaudible]. They didn’t become millionaires selling my courses. They became millionaires with the attitude we gave them and the training.

Michael: So, those courses changed lives.

Glenn: That’s exactly right. See, here I am talking to you, Mike, and I say Mike if a harelip, eighth grade dropout can become a multi-millionaire, why can’t you. Do you have an education, Mike? Do you have a college degree? Maybe you don’t have a college degree. Well, I don’t either. So, what’s your hang up now? It’s just unreal. Everybody I told could be great. Somebody said you’re lying to me. Everybody can’t be great. I said some of the fools believe me and they get great.

Michael: With the cosmetics, you had a residual reorders because it has to be used up and bought again, but the information product, it’s pretty much a one-time hit or you have other products that people buy. How would you compare those?

Glenn: Dare To Be Great and they sold other products. I had 78 corporations before it was over.

Michael: Gees, 78 corporations?

Glenn: Under one umbrella, Turner Enterprise. I had a tree shaking machine. I had a professional football team.

Michael: What football team?

Glenn: Orlando Patriots. It was the Continental League. It lasted about three years. We were the number one team in ten teams.

Michael: How old were you then?

Glenn: Thirty-five.

Michael: How do you handle 78 different companies?

Glenn: Well, we had nine divisional presidents. They divided the 78 under each one of them. It was a system just like running a grocery store.

Michael: You had good organization.

Glenn: Yes and I had terrific salespeople and terrific administrators at that time.

Michael: Were you a workaholic?

Glenn: Yes, I went day and night; a half a million miles a year I put on a Lear Jet, my own private jet. I had 14 aircraft.

Michael: Did you have young kids at that time?

Glenn: Yes, my wife took care of them. It’s not how much time you spend with the kids; it’s the quality. When I was playing with my little daughter, 3-years-old, I was laying on the floor with the dolls and the dollhouse for half an hour. Half an hour quality playing time is better than running around and yelling at her all week. It’s not the time you spend with your men. And the same with my executives. Most people sit there and enjoy telling jokes for 30 minutes. You say what you’re going to say in 10 minutes and get out of there.

Michael: So, you’re a believer of no wasting time?

Glenn: No. I simply hired a man and if he made a mistake, gave him another chance. If he made three mistakes, I got rid of them. I usually promoted him up and out. And if a guy left me, _____ something wrong, I usually pay him three months salary, but I paid him 30 days from now and 60 days from now, so by that time he had another job and wasn’t bitter. Otherwise he tells everybody all the problems.

Michael: The Village Where Anything Is Possible, what’s that about?

Glenn: That was a castle; 60 acres, $300,000 it cost me. Spent $4 million on building the castle. Never did complete it. Got about 80% finished and the government moved in. Finished the boathouse. It held 200 people upstairs. Had a stable I lived in for a while. It had seven bedrooms up above the horses. Later I kicked the horses out and made more bedrooms and more space. It had a tree house that cost $15,000 for my kids to play in. It had a gatehouse. Had 30 security guards in the building and the airport.

Michael: Did you bring distributors there to tour it or anything?

Glenn: Yes, I brought people out there. I built it for that reason and we had barbecues and we had our Army barracks at _____, Florida right out of Orlando where we trained them how to be positive. We had the translate equipment in five languages just like the U.N. We trained 600 women there a week. You get the women fired up, their husband has to go or she’d leave him.

Michael: So, when you’re selling an opportunity, it’s important to sell the wife.

Glenn: Yes. You’ve got to remember that whoever is the house besides the one you’re selling, you want to sell them, too, but they can open their mouth and kill the sale. I had seven women presidents back in ’72. They all made me a million dollars that year, every one of them, maybe two million. A black woman, 27 years old, was a former maid, unheard of. She’s with Uniform Stores of America now. A top man under Lyndon Johnson, a bank commissioner, he came down here and wanted me to federal charter, a bank charter and I said I don’t know anything about the bank. He said if you’d just give us $200,000, we will set you up, make sure you have no legal problems, get you the right lawyer in every law firm and I said, man, that’s crooked. That’s like the mafia. I’m not going to pay you to do that.

Michael: So, he wanted you to get a bank charter, basically buy protection?

Glenn: He was going to give me a bank charter if I’d buy protection.

Michael: And what would a bank charter allow you to do?

Glenn: I’d own the biggest bank in central Florida. I was running about $18 million a month through the bank. I said that’s crooked. See, I had a warped sense of what’s crooked, but that’s the way business is done. See, I just got rich too fast and I didn’t know what I was doing.

Michael: Did you have any mentors who are already in big business to help?

Glenn: I didn’t trust them because they’re all crooked because I figured they take my company away from me.

Michael: U.S. Senate, what’s that about?

Glenn: I ran for the Senate.

Michael: What made you decide to do that?

Glenn: Well, I was in between two mail fraud trials. The first trial lasted eight and a half months and ended in a hung jury. The second trial lasted about two and months and I defended myself and I beat them so bad they settled for a misdemeanor.

Michael: Were you totally stressed out?

Glenn: No, at that time I was young and dumb and full of piss and vinegar.

Michael: Who was defending you on the first one? Did you have a decent lawyer?

Glenn: Ed in Atlanta, Georgia. I did a better job when I did the second trial.

Michael: On the first one, what state was it with?

Glenn: I had a hung jury, so they retried me. In between the two trials I ran for the Senate and the reason I ran for the Senate was because they had a gag rule on me where I couldn’t talk about what was going on in the trial. As a candidate for the Senate, I could say anything I wanted to about the son of a gun.

Michael: Were you able to voice?

Glenn: I voiced like you wouldn’t believe.

Michael: Where were you able to talk about it now that you’re running for Senate?

Glenn: Well, when I was campaigning. Then I said when I get to Washington, I’m going to be like the fox in the hen house. The chickens are going to run. I should have kept my mouth shut and got in the Senate. I came in fourth in the democratic primary out of 11 candidates, which one of them was the president of the Senate and one of them was the president of the Florida Bar Association. I whipped them pretty good because I had name recognition. In my home county, I came in second only to the Secretary of State at that time.

Michael: How much did you have to spend on the campaign?

Glenn: I didn’t have but $30,000. They had frozen all my money by then.

Michael: They had all your money frozen.

Glenn: My opponents had a half a million.

Michael: Were your company’s frozen at that time?

Glenn: They were in Chapter 11.

Michael: Both of your companies were in Chapter 11.

Glenn: I turned it over to a preacher, who beat me out of them later. Thirteen million down the drain.

Michael: Tell me about the day that you realized everything was frozen and was going down? Where were you?

Glenn: [Inaudible].

Michael: How long did it take from the time the heat started until everything was frozen, that was done to your companies?

Glenn: Five years.

Michael: It took that long?

Glenn: Yes. You’ve got to realize one thing, money was never my object. Money just gets people excited and after I get them excited, I’d get them and then I’d teach them how to be happy, how to handle problems. The course people used that long after they lost money or they made money because if you got your attitude right, you can make it. And it was the fun of doing it more than it was getting it. I realized that I was born naked and if I died naked I’ve lost nothing. I just borrowed everything in between. Mail fraud was when they indicted me.

Michael: So, they indicted you. What did they do, just fine you?

Glenn: They indicted me and then I won the trial. I settled with them.

Michael: I see. So, it was just a monetary settlement?

Glenn: Yes, $2,500.

Michael: That’s it?

Glenn: After they changed all the laws. See, they kept me busy with the court system until they could change the laws. There were no laws. I violated no laws because everything I was doing was legal in those days.

Michael: But what did they indict you on if there were no laws?

Glenn: They indicted me for mail fraud. They can take you and if send me a letter saying I’m going to slap the crap out of Joe down the street, they can indict you.

Michael: So, they used a vague mail fraud law to indict you.

Glenn: Right, and they have a 97% conviction rate.

Michael: So, you settled. Then what did you do at that time?

Glenn: I went back and I started another company called Mind Spa, just a smaller version of Dare To Be Great.

Michael: And what did you do different this time?

Glenn: Well, I didn’t have a multi-level part.

Michael: It was just direct sales?

Glenn: Yes and then later I went into a company…my bodyguard, Ed Rechtor, who wrote one of the books about me, The Unstoppable American.

Michael: It wasn’t multi-level, so it was just direct sales. How did that go?

Glenn: It went good. Nothing like multi-level. Later we went into multi-level with him owning the company called Selling to America. That’s the one they finally got me for aiding and abetting a pyramid and I spent four years and eight months in an Arizona prison.

Michael: You started another multi-level, but you did it through some other guy, another entity.

Glenn: Well, I didn’t start it. They started it. They used my material.

Michael: But they came after you and said you were basically the…

Glenn: I spoke at two or three meetings in Arizona and this consumer protection head of America--every year they brought in one of the Assistant Attorney Generals of the consumer protection. So, he wanted to get me and everybody else. And I was already running for state Senate and I didn’t take it seriously. I went out there and they ran me through and the jury wanted to get out for the 4th of July and they convicted me.

Michael: And then you had to go away to…

Glenn: Four years and eight months. It was supposed to be seven years, but good behavior.

Michael: So, you were there a whole four years and eight months?

Glenn: Yes.

Michael: And where were you, in Arizona?

Glenn: The southeast corner of Arizona.

Michael: That was a federal penitentiary?

Glenn: No, it’s state.

Michael: Was that guy operating in Arizona?

Glenn: Yes, he was operating in all 50 states and Arizona was the only one that gave me big trouble. There’s so many different laws in each state. He went out there and asked if he was doing anything wrong. If I am, please tell me and I’ll change it. They said you aren’t doing anything wrong. And later they did it.

Michael: I interviewed a guy who made $100 million just about seven years ago. He made $100 million selling the male enhancement supplements. And the only trouble he had was Arizona and that’s where he went away…in Arizona.

Glenn: Yes, well different states--Wisconsin was bad, Michigan was bad, and North Carolina and Arizona. I was in 13 countries.

Michael: How old were you then when you went away?

Glenn: I was 53 and I got out at 58.

Michael: What was that experience like?

Glenn: The biggest problem was that I lost my family over it, my wife and then my children. Of course, they all came back later. And I kind of liked it in a way. I hate to say this, but I was handling the guards and I was handling the warden and I was handling the other prisoners. I was using my philosophy and I had no problems. You know where everybody else is getting mad at the guard, I’d give the guard a serious compliment.

Michael: You’d just treat them well.

Glenn: I was just…do unto others and you had him doing to you and I had respect and they called me Mr. Turner. There was no problem. And the inmates, I picked out the toughest guy in the yard--it was a Mexican--the toughest guy. There was a black guy, there was a white guy and I respected them for who they were and they looked after me. I wouldn’t tell them where I lived when I got out.

Michael: Were you able to work on any business while you were there?

Glenn: No, I wasn’t. I didn’t do anything while I was there. It was kind of a relief to be there. They had banged me so hard for so long. All of a sudden I had free security that I didn’t have to pay for. I had free meals.

Michael: In the other interview I did with this guy who went away, he said the same thing. He went away for about a year. He says it was really kind of a relief. You didn’t have the business pressure…

Glenn: They indicted me in 1955 and they waited two years before they tried me. I mean I starved. I had lost everything. I lost my home…everything but one home and all that.

Michael: For two years.

Glenn: I couldn’t travel out of state. They had me captured.

Michael: What did you do for those two years, the legal stuff and the trials?

Glenn: Sat around and did nothing. Read books.

Michael: Did you get depressed?

Glenn: No. I was just bored.

Michael: So, you kept a good attitude pretty much.

Glenn: I always had a good attitude. I was just bored.

Michael: Did you keep in touch with any of your old business associates or anything?

Glenn: They had companies when I got indicted. I backed out. I didn’t help them because my name, you know, I was indicted and it would hurt them. And then both companies couldn’t keep it going like I had it going.

Michael: I read the Time article. When did they do that piece on you?

Glenn: In ’72, I believe. They had a Life Magazine…11 page spread.

Michael: I saw the article on Time.

Glenn: Well, Time had one too. In ’72, somewhere around the spring, I believe. Also in ’72 is when the article appeared in the New York Times, too, and I was number four on Nixon’s hit list. They were after me in all places. The Security Exchange Commission wanted to stop Dare To Be Great.

Michael: Did you get letters while you were in jail?

Glenn: Yes, there were 12,000.

Michael: That must have been nice.

Glenn: The warden said who are these people. Is it some kind of scam you’re running? I said they’re my victims.

Michael: What happened after that?

Glenn: Well, I got out and I had one-year probation and moved in with a preacher friend of mine. Went through a divorce. Remarried. Started a nutrition company and it’s been going now for 12 years; mail order. Lately I’ve been doing some sales training for an international travel company.

Michael: Do you think the government still has their eye on you or are you pretty much old news?

Glenn: You’re the only one that’s asked me in 10 years about my problem. I probably should have had it republished.

Michael: Return of the Unstoppable American, when did you write the Turner, Turner, Turner book?

Glenn: When I got out in ’82.

Michael: Can we talk about a little bit of the stuff you teach some of your distributors, just some of the personal development stuff? You’ve got here total life power. What’s that mean?

Glenn: Well, we worked on the spiritual development. I always said see that halo around my head. They said no I don’t see it. I said you don’t have one. But you’ve got to get your spirituality in life tight and that means you and your God, not my God, not my church, but your church. I respect all religions, all churches. And then you’ve got your second thing is your mental. You’ve got to work on your mental attitude. You’ve got to clean it out first because if you don’t think right, you’re not going to be right.

Michael: Some people have just such negativity ingrained in them.

Glenn: You associate with positive people. You read positive books. Whatever you put in the mind, the most comes out. If you put in Spanish, you’re going to speak Spanish. If you’re born in Russia, you’d be a Communist 20-30 years ago. You’re born _____, you have a different philosophy maybe. So, it’s whatever you put in your eyes and ears. Whatever you put in your mouth makes your body good, bad, _____, cancer or whatever is going to happen. So, you teach people to be careful of who they listen to. You can cuss me out here on this phone. The thing I would say, well, he was so nice up to the end, or if you turn this article into a bad article, I’d say, boy he slicked off of me. Taking it personally, I’d say well that’s his point of view. If I was you, I’d do what you’re going to do; tell we teach how to control your mind, not let other people control it. If I can make you mad for one minute, I control you. If I can make you mad for an hour…if I make you mad for a day, a week, a month, a year…if I can make you recall what I did to you 10 years ago, I still got control of your mind to a certain extent. So, we learn to take back your mind because most people lost it when they two years old when their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and teachers started to tell them what they could do and what they could not do.

Michael: But it takes work, right.

Glenn: Sure it does and it takes work to mess it up. If you live around people that talk about cutting people open, doctor talk, you’ve got the mind of a doctor. You live around people that write, you’re talking about writing and punctuation and whatever you do there. Same with mechanics, you talk about it. You live around drug addicts, you talk about their drugs. Then you have your emotional controls. That’s the third thing in the book, in the back of the book.

Michael: How’s that different from mental?

Glenn: Emotional is when I can get you upset. Mental, I can feed you the wrong information. But emotional is, oh you just don’t know what happened…my husband beat the hell out of me. You just don’t know what happened to me when I was a little boy. I was raped. You’ve got to puke it out. We’ve all had problems. Emotional is the hardest one to work on, to get it situated, but it can be done. And then you have physical…take care of your body…be careful of what you put in your mouth. Watch what salt does to the body or white flour.

Michael: Were you lifting weights when you were younger?

Glenn: Yes, I was Mr. South.

Michael: So, you were pumping iron back then.

Glenn: Yes, I pumped iron up until I was about 25. I just walk now and exercise three or four times a week.

Michael: Did Charles Atlas influence you?

Glenn: No, it was Joliet.

Michael: Joliet?

Glenn: Yes. They even advertised it in the paper like Charles. He had a course for $79.95 and I couldn’t afford it. He sent me in the mail…I’m a farm boy. My daddy makes $500 a year. Then he sent me another $39.95 and next week he came down to $14.95. I had $14.95, but if I would have waited I would have got it for $7.95. With $14.95 I bought me some cement and made me some iron weights and cement block and never started smoking, never drank, and never had drugs in my life. Never touched a cigarette and never touched whiskey. I’m so excited…if I touch this stuff, I’d be jacked up about it and I’d do it too good. I’m high on life. I’m drunk on attitude. And then last but not least, is financial power. This is the last step in the book. Take care of your money. I’ll give you an example. I know a guy that put up $1,000 in ’68 in mutual funds and it was worth $88,000 last year.

Michael: How do you protect your money? Let’s say you’ve got people listening to this and they’re growing businesses and they’re starting to make some good money.

Glenn: They’ve got to set up a trust, which I did not do. I did it all wrong because I thought legally I was okay because I wouldn’t do anything wrong in my heart.

Michael: Would a trust have protected you?

Glenn: If you set up the right trust for your children or something, you’re protected. They’ve got all kinds of trusts. If have to have a trust lawyer.

Michael: What other advice would you give businessmen who are growing pretty large companies to protect themselves?

Glenn: That means they’ve got to hire the right law firm, a business law firm because it’s all geared around the law. I thought all you had to do was go into court and be honest and it would be all right, but it’s not that way. There’s an old saying, don’t let the truth mess up a good story.

Michael: Did they want your money?

Glenn: They wanted publicity. They wanted to be the guy that got Jesse James. They made a Jesse James out of me so they can draw on you.

Michael: What was the largest crowd you ever spoke to?

Glenn: Fifty thousand.

Michael: Fifty thousand.

Glenn: In India.

Michael: In India.

Glenn: And 15,000 in America. Now, that’s not counting--I won the American of the Year award in New Orleans…a college series…the best of each plays each other. And the Lion’s Club of Tampa gave me the American of the Year award on national television. There was 45 million watching that. There was about 20,000 there in person.

Michael: What’s it like speaking? You were speaking in India…50,000.

Glenn: Yes. You’re speaking to one person, the rest of them are listening.

Michael: How did you prepare for your speeches?

Glenn: I never prepared.

Michael: You went out there and just adlibbed it?

Glenn: Before I go up there, I get a feel for what’s going on and if it’s the contractors meeting, I get to thinking about a bunch of drunken contractors having a cocktail party that I have to speak to and they don’t listen. So, I always look at the crowd and I figure out the first joke. Then I give them the meat of my subject and then I finish up with heart.

Michael: You definitely had a talent for speaking to the public.

Glenn: I like people and I don’t have any animosity towards any race, creed. I’m not mad at the government. I’m not mad at the prison officials. Life’s too long not to enjoy yourself.

Michael: I haven’t seen you in action. I ordered the videotape. I can’t wait to watch it.

Glenn: I sold 3 million copies of that…1 million videos and films and DVDs, and 2 million audio sound tracks in five languages.

Michael: So, that’s a whole publishing company.

Glenn: Yes.

Michael: Information products.

Glenn: I published my last book, Turner, Turner, Turner…we’re out of print on that one.

Michael: You are. Are you selling a lot of those books?

Glenn: We sold them all, about 200,000.

Michael: Wow, you did?

Glenn: I sold 7 million books in my career.

Michael: Seven million books?

Glenn: Yes. Most of them went through our distributorship.

Michael: Selling information products and training…I mean there’s good money in that as an income stream for multi-level…

Glenn: It’s good, but it’s the hardest sale you’ll ever make because most people spend about $8.00 on attitude. They’ll buy anything else but attitude, so that’s why we used money to get them in. You can make money selling these courses and then after they take the course they don’t care about making money, but selling courses they can make money…best gas station in town. All across America my people, there were a million of them, they were running the best gas station, they were running the best taxi cab, they were the best husbands, the best wives because they know how to handle attitude better.

Michael: How is the MLM industry today? What’s your take on it?

Glenn: It’s all done by Internet, most of the successful ones…Internet and fax machines and phone conversations.

Michael: Is it as big and as effective as ever?

Glenn: It’s bigger. You’ve got over 8,000 companies out there.

Michael: So, what are the stats now? What percent will be here in five years?

Glenn: About 3% of the companies become an Amway type or use a corporation out of Utah…Herbalife…and they all had their legal problems. They just got _____ board of directors. You’ve got to pay the piper if you’re going to last, in more ways than one, not just money-wise, but you’ve got to have the right friends. It’s like a football team. If you can’t get along, don’t run it anymore. I was a long runner because I thought all I had to do was be honest.

Michael: Would you like to talk about anything that you’d like anyone to know about…any programs.

Glenn: Tell them that the tape is on the Internet and the website. I’m training for a company at the moment called Guaranteed International Travel.

Michael: Can you give your main website? If anyone wanted to see some of the old footage of your speeches…

Glenn: Glenn…to “n’s”-W…initial…-Turner.com -- www.glenn-w-turner.com.

Michael: Are you computer savvy, Glenn?

Glenn: Not me. My wife is one of the geniuses on it. She has a genius IQ.

Michael: What are you doing to keep busy today…you’ve got existing companies right now?

Glenn: Train people by phone and the Internet. We do public speaking. I speak all over. I spoke at different companies.

Michael: What do you charge for a keynote speech?

Glenn: It depends on if it’s local. If it’s local, I’ll do it for maybe $5,000 and if I have to travel a day out and a day back, usually $10,000.

Michael: I saw you spoke to the Harvard Business School.

Glenn: School of Law and I spoke at Notre Dame.

Michael: So, you spoke to all their law students?

Glenn: At Notre Dame, the market and business class. That was the best.

Michael: What did you talk to them about?

Glenn: To understand innovation from Professor Yarnell’s class. I talk to them about anybody can learn to market at school. What you’ve got to do is learn how to handle people and you’ve got to be straight and honest because if you’re honest you can take people a little bit for the rest of their life. If you’re dishonest, you take them one time, they wise up. If you give them a fair market value…the only way to do it is be honest. And if I’ve ever been dishonest, it came from my head and not my heart; a mistake I made. A government lawyer once told a jury Mr. Turner might have meant to be honest and not run the red light, but the fact he run it, you still have to convict him even though he didn’t mean to do anything wrong. That’s the law…the Federal Trades Commission in 1972. I said please tell me what I’m doing wrong. He said ask your lawyer. I asked my lawyer. He said you aren’t doing anything wrong. So, I became a ping-pong ball between two sets of lawyers. And then I looked at him and I said if you’ll send a lawyer down, he can sit at my desk--I’ve got a big desk. I’ll put another chair here. I’ll pay his salary and he can tell me if I’m doing anything wrong. Oh, we can’t do that. I said why can’t you? Why isn’t the law designed to help the American people? They wouldn’t do it. They just wanted to bang me to get the publicity.

Michael: What would you tell the average guy who first comes across an MLM opportunity…what’s important in an MLM opportunity to…

Glenn: You want to check out the credibility of the officers because if you’ve got two or more running it, you’re usually going to have problems. Like Jay van Andel and Richard DeVos is the only one I ever seen in partnership that worked real good.

Michael: Are you saying because of the nature of partnerships that they usually go down?

Glenn: Right, even a husband and wife go down…most of them.

Michael: Yes, that’s true.

Glenn: It isn’t going to take a genius to figure that out.

Michael: How about compensation plans?

Glenn: Compensation plans are important, but it’s more important to outline the payout. Most people are too lazy to work after they get involved. If they’re not going to stick come hell, recession, depression, hot water or war, don’t get involved. If you’re going to give up, give up before you start. There’s going to be a bigger reason you should give up and one reason you should stick. You’ve got to realize that at multi-level, you can go into business for $300 or nothing almost. If you go into the gas station business…100 stations failed a month at one time in Florida. And then they put them out of business…there’s Exxon…there’s some big companies.

Michael: What’s the stats like with MLM? What percent really make any money in the business?

Glenn: About 5%. Five percent of the people in the world make things happen. Fifteen percent of people watch what happens and 80% don’t know what in the hell happens and don’t care as long as they have a beer and a woman. The beer gets stale and the woman gets old. But the point is I’ve never been stuck with any product. What’s sold to me, I’m going to sell to somebody else. If they’ve worked the retail part, they can make it and everybody is a salesman because they sell their wives on marrying them and they sell their husbands on marrying them. They’re really good salesmen.

Michael: That’s the end of my interview with Glenn Turner. I hope you have found this interesting. We pack a lot of content into our interviews, so this isn’t the kind of interview you can listen to one time. I feel confident in saying that you can listen to this one almost ten times and still glean wonderful insights and wisdom out of the words of Glenn Turner.