If you love Tai Lopez, you're going to hate this video because today I'm breaking down real business development secrets and I'm contrasting them with fake guru red flags. That's right, I'm blowing the lid off of the fake gurus. Join me for this episode of The Inside BS Show.

The first fake guru red flag. Fake gurus have aspirational trappings all around them and they want you to focus on the private jet. They want you to focus on the really fancy sports car.

They want you to focus on all of the things in their lovely mansion home. But they don't want you to focus on the substance of the material they present. I want you to take a look through my YouTube videos.

All the videos that I share here, I present information you can use today for free to go and make a great living and live a great life. I provide substance. Real gurus provide substance.

What do you see when you look at some of these fake gurus? You see $20 million mansions, private jets, cars. Are those owned? Are those aspirational trappings things that they actually have the money to plunk down and pay for? Or are they borrowed? Are they leased? Are they rented for the photo shoot? I know a lot of people who are quote-unquote professional speakers and quote-unquote business development gurus who have borrowed somebody's private jet for the day. They pay maybe $300 or $400 fee to have a photographer take pictures of them on the steps of the jet, take pictures of them reading documents inside the jet on a seat, take pictures of them and two or three of their team members talking on the jet as if they're flying somewhere, and then they shoot a video of them walking on the jet, getting off the jet.

Maybe they take stock footage of that particular jet taxiing on and off the runway and splice it in with their videos, and they've never even flown on a private jet like that. I make no judgment about people who fly on private jets. I think it's fantastic.

I like flying on private jets myself. When people focus only on the trappings of success, vehicles, houses, private jets, yachts are another big one. When everything in their videos or in their program is all about, you can get this, and you can get this, and look what I have here, and there's no substance, or they're shooting from the hip.

They're not actually giving you anything you can take action on. That's a red flag that this is someone who wants you to look over here because if you look over here, there ain't nothing there. It's sleight of hand like a magic trick.

The second thing I want you to focus on as a red flag of a fake guru, fake gurus are emotionally manipulative. Their presentations are all emotion. Now, good speakers will tell you stories, and they will engage you.

Every good speaker I know, myself included, tells a story most of the time to start a speech, and they tell a story for every point they want to make in a speech because they want to bring you in with the emotion. There's a moral to the story that gives you something actionable that you should take away. For example, I open many of my speeches with my origin story, and my origin story is a fascinating one.

I was working really hard as a partner in the Gallup organization, and I was selling multimillion dollar consulting engagements. My biggest client was a pharmaceutical company. The CEO called me, and he said, get in my office right now.

I need you to tell me what's going on with the study you're conducting for me. I left my office in the middle of winter, ran down the street going to the CEO's office, and I got in a crosswalk at the corner of 6th Avenue and 43rd Street in Manhattan, and I was struck by a taxi cab. I flew over 20 feet.

I was paralyzed from my armpits down, and I made a deal with God. I said to God, if you let me out of this, I'm going to change my life. I'm going to have control of my business, and I'm going to do that by working with really good clients that I care about, and I'm never going to have to be at the beck and call of another client again.

That's how I got into sales, and that's how I got into helping people like you take the freedom of your life back through learning to sell. That's my creation story. I tell that story all the time.

You may have even seen it in another video here on YouTube. I tell the story, and the moral of the story is you need to learn how to sell because if you can sell, you can replace that client who demands you drop what you're doing and run out into the cold to see him in that instant. And that's the reason I tell you the story, to entertain, to engage you, and to hit home on the moral of the story.

A fake guru is only going to tell you an emotionally manipulative story to make you feel guilty, to make you feel embarrassed, so that you buy what they have to sell, and you never have to feel those feelings again. The truth is you'll feel those feelings again because you're human, and the fake guru is manipulating you based on the emotions he's making you feel. Red flag number three for fake gurus.

They make promises that are too good to be true. If you invest in one of my programs, or I coach you one-on-one, you'll find that you can get increases of anywhere from 20% to 100%. I've even had a handful of people over the course of my career triple and quadruple and ten times their business.

But anytime a guru promises you that you will ten times your business, or you will double your income overnight, or you'll double your income in three weeks, that's nowhere near true. And if a guru tells you that you can do this without working hard, without working smart, and without getting, quite frankly, a little bit lucky, if the guru doesn't tell you that, he or she is selling you something that's too good to be true. My average client who does the work and shows up to every session, my average client who does those things grows by 20% to 30% on a year-over-year basis.

The top 1% to 2% of people that I work with have doubled or tripled or some, a rare few, even quadrupled their income in a year. Most see really strong growth within 12 to 18 months. But if you do nothing, nothing will happen, regardless of whether you work with me or whether you work with some other genius.

If somebody tells you something that seems too good to be true, it usually is. I live in South Florida, and when I was working almost exclusively with lawyers, there was a lawyer in Fort Lauderdale named Scott Rothstein. He was working with lawyers to bring them into his firm.

He was recruiting lawyers into his firm, and he was paying them phenomenal sums of money. A lawyer who had a book of business of $400,000 was making $350,000 a year. So there's no way with benefits and overhead that lawyer could possibly be profitable in that environment.

Rothstein was paying these lawyers phenomenal sums of money. He was driving around in a Bentley. He bought a restaurant on one of the most expensive streets in Fort Lauderdale.

He gave thousands and thousands of dollars to politicians, hundreds of thousands of dollars to political action committees, tens of thousands of dollars to charity. He did it all in a very ostentatious way. He was in your face about the money he was spending.

And every lawyer in town who interviewed with him and didn't take a job with him said, all of that is too good to be true. Unfortunately, some people were duped. They were fooled.

They went to work for him, and he was committing a fraud. He had a giant Ponzi scheme, and he and the people who were in charge of his firm went to jail for 50 years. Everything around him seemed too good to be true, and a lot of people saw it, and some people didn't.

If something seems too good to be true about a fake guru, if they're living in a mansion in Beverly Hills, driving $100,000 cars on a boat they say they own that costs $5, $6, $10 million, and they fly private everywhere they go, you know those trips take $10,000 or $25,000 to book. At minimum, something there is too good to be true. Do not invest your time or your money in them because you're setting yourself up for heartbreak.

Red flag number four. The fake gurus can never provide you with any real, live references that you can talk to. If you called me up and you said, Dave, I need five references before I hire you, I can give you the names of five clients right off the top.

You want me to send you a list of 20 people you can talk to? I can do that. And the gurus that I know, the mentors, the coaches, the consultants, the people who are business leaders that I know, will all give you dozens of references of people that you can call who are still working with them, who've worked with them and left, and who have known them for 15 or 20 years and can testify about their character. Fake gurus, if you call them or you email them and you ask them for references, names and phone numbers of people, are never going to give you the names and phone numbers of people.

If you look on their website, they may not even publish the full name and city that the person lives in when they have testimonials on their website. I caught one of these fake gurus even using stock photos for testimonials. If they don't have references, you shouldn't work with them and you should ask for references before you work with anybody.

The fifth red flag is that the fake gurus never have experience in building a business. They're always showing you how to do something they're currently doing. If I was going to sell you how to make money making videos, that would be a red flag.

Instead, I sell you on how to make money building a business around your lifestyle. I sell you on how to increase client lifetime value. I sell you on how to shorten big ticket sales cycles because throughout my career, I've built businesses doing just that.

I built a consulting business and I took it from zero to a book of business that I carried that was over $20 million a year. I did that myself. You can go call that company and check it out.

I can introduce you to the people I worked with, both clients and people inside my firm. I took a corporate housing business from startup to $50 million in annual revenue in three years. I can introduce you to people in the New York City real estate community with whom I worked.

They can testify to that fact. People don't have experience building a business that they're trying to teach you to build or they don't have experience in the real business world. You've got to run away as fast as you can because that's a red flag.

The sixth red flag you need to watch out for is their body of work. If you want to check me out, I've written three books. One I self-published, one was published by a boutique publisher in the legal world and the other one was published, the third one was published by John Wiley & Sons, one of the most reputable publishers and largest publishers in the world in the business book industry.

You can watch over 750 videos. You can read hundreds of articles that I've written. I have a massive body of work.

If you're hiring a guru and they don't have a body of work, it's a red flag. You've got to run away. The seventh red flag you need to watch out for is that a guru will never put skin in the game.

What does that mean? Well, if you come to me and you're not in a regulated industry, you're not in financial services, you're not in the practice of law, let's say you are a person who sells corporate jets. And you say to me, Dave, I want you to build a sales academy for me and I'm going to pay you $300,000 to build it. I know your fee usually is $700,000 to build this because one corporate jet is going to bring us in $30 or $40 million.

I want you to build this sales academy. I'm going to pay you $300,000 to do it. But if you sell more jets in one year than we sold the year before, I'm going to give you a $2 million bonus.

That's me putting skin in the game because I'm reducing my fee for a piece of the upside. I will do that all day long because I know the things I teach work when my clients do them. A real guru is never going to do that.

You try emailing Tai Lopez and saying, Tai, I don't want to pay $5,000 for your course. I'll pay you $1,000 and if I make $100,000 or $200,000, I'll pay you a bonus of $20,000. Tai Lopez will never go for that.

The fake guru out there who is raising a red flag in your mind, that person is never going to go for that. And why are they never going to go for that? Because there are plenty of shills out there that they can take money from without having to do that. And they don't have a problem with their integrity.

They sleep fine if they've cheated people out of their money. My friends, there's an expression that says, a fool and his money are soon parted. And that's what fake gurus believe all day long.

They take regurgitated information from other people and they spit it out as if it's new. And they get you to invest inflated prices. They could take a $25 book and turn it into a $2,500 course and sell it to you.

Now if you want three people who are real gurus who I trust, who I would invest in, I'm going to share those three people with you right now. The first person is someone I've known for over 20 years. I've taken his advice myself.

I've attended his events. And he is an individual of high quality and high integrity. The gentleman's name is Joe Polish.

Now Joe is at the pinnacle of business development coaches. He's also a guru in helping people who have addiction and who want to recover. Joe has been very kind to me over the years.

As I said, I've been to his events. Joe is a master of connecting people to one another. And if you invest in his $25,000 program or his $100,000 program, you will get 10 times the return on your money.

I can almost tell you for sure based on the connections that I've seen Joe make between people and the connections he's made for me. The second person I want to make sure that you know is a real guru is Alan Weiss. You may have read some of the 60-plus books he's written.

He is the dean of Solo Consulting. I have worked with Alan for over 15 years. I've been to his house two different times for group coaching sessions.

I've attended seminars on several occasions that he's put on. I've consulted with him over the phone. I've been a part of his mentor program over the years.

Alan, although he has some of the trappings of success, is real and legitimate. And the way you can tell is because he's done it himself. Alan used to work with large companies.

He still has one or two large companies that call him from time to time, but he used to be a consultant who works with large companies. He is now helping people just like me build consulting businesses. And every time I implement his advice, it pays off.

The third person I think you should absolutely look into and work with is a gentleman by the name of Jim Palmer. I've read some of Jim's books. I've interviewed Jim on my podcast.

I've seen Jim speak. And Jim is a quality individual of high integrity and outstanding character. Jim has a legitimate interest in helping his clients be successful.

He's just a really good man helping other people become the best they can be. There are plenty of really good gurus out there like Joe Polish, like Alan Weiss, like Jim Palmer. You can find them all over the place.

Use these red flags that I've shared with you when you're looking for real business development secrets and avoid anyone who has all of these red flags because those people are fake gurus. If you want another great video about business development, it's coming in right below me right now. Make sure you click on that video right below me.

It's coming in right there. I can't wait to see you in our next video.