It’s been a bit of a whirlwind since I got back home since I was away for most of January between Vegas, NYC and then Baja, Mexico for my premiere Baja Experience for Maverick Business Adventures™. I feel like I’ve been waiting for the trip forever and it went even better than I could have imagined. Members were blown away by the adventure part, the business and giving back all rolled into one. I’m even more excited about this idea now that we got our first trip under our belt.

Here’s a quick 4-minute highlights video, Perry Lawrence, put together:

Ultimate Baja Experience from Yanik Silver on Vimeo.

A couple fun stories…The Legend of Phil “Cliff” Chapman:

The tale begins with an all-day and evening drive from La Paz to San Juanico (the longest drive ever made by any Wide Open Baja customer group). We arrived at Juan y Juan’s in Scorpion Bay after dark (important fact as you’ll see in a moment). The town (if you want to call it that) is pretty isolated and extremely hard to get to but they are famous for the 2nd longest surf break. The entire town was excited by our arrival and the local taco stand was closed all day to prep for our dinner and party.

After our fill of tacos and margaritas – we went back to our accommodations at Juan Y Juan’s. Jesse James had built a pretty raging fire and about a half dozen of us just hung out to talk and drink a little.

Phil Chapman, the Ad-words expert, was down there and the fire crackled and shot flames towards him. Our hero jumped out of the way and ended up rolling. He missed his footing and ended up falling all the way down. (Remember it was dark out when we drove in and nobody knew there was a steep ledge beyond our beach.) Everyone started laughing because we had no idea how far it was. Good thing Phil was ok and he even managed to save his margarita glass. The first words out of my mouth were, “You signed the waiver!”

I believe an illustration would be helpful here:

We started calling incidents like this “Maverick Moments”…

Now part of the Maverick Business Adventures is learning and being around business icons and celebrities. Our first guest was Jesse James, from Monster Garage and West Coast Choppers. He hung out with us for 2 days and was just super cool guy…plus very sharp. During our confidential business sessions he gave us a lot of candid insight into his $200M business. He also sat in on one of the sessions I ran about “Instant Leverage Points in Your Business” and he told us on tape that he probably learned more than any of the members who attended. Pretty neat.

Here’s a quick pic of me and Jesse getting ready to tear it up in the monster Baja racer belonging to the owner of Wide Open Baja.

Here are a few more Maverick Moments…

If you watch the video closely you’ll see a car stuck in the red mud, spinning wheels, with about 5 of us pushing. That was one of my MasterMind members, Mike Dillard and his girlfriend, Stephanie, managed to get axle-deep in some sort of super deep mud/clay mixture. Another car couldn’t pull them out because they’d get stuck too. We pushed them out and in the process got caked (head to toe) in mud. One of the members, a former college football player, reverted back to the grid iron and rubbed mud under his eyes so he’d be ready to go into battle against the dune buggy!

Also, on the highlights video you saw some cool whale footage. Our final stop before flying back to Cabo was San Ignacio. This is one of the best places for getting up close and personal with the Gray Whales when they come into the shallow lagoons to breed. In the brochure they show a family basically hugging the whale and I wanted to touch the whale. I asked our guide how often people touch whales and he replied, “Not so much.” I was determined. Everyone on my boat was cold and wet (the ride out was about 45 minutes). Mike Filsaime, somehow picked the wrong seat because he was just soaking wet by the time we arrived around the whales.

They were magnificent and they were almost within arm’s reach – but not quite. I was adamant. I told our guide that he would get a $100 tip if I touched a whale. No dice. We stayed out another 25 minutes longer than our 2 other boats but no whale touching. That became the running joke – and if you paused the picture of me sitting with 3-time Super Bowl champ, Darren Woodson, you’d see the flip chart. On the left was an arrow pointing to me “Did not touch the whale” and to the right was “3-time Super Bowl Champ” with an arrow to Darren. I forgot it was there for the entire session we held with Darren.

Here’s another one…

I had 2 reporters who tagged along on the trip to write about it. Brad, the reporter from Outside Go magazine, decided he wanted to ride with me the final day. Our cars travel about 1 mile apart so the dust from the road doesn’t interfere with the driving. And each car is supposed to call to the one behind it any obstacles or turns, etc using the GPS mile marker.

Well I guess car #3 missed one because I was flying down the road about 65 or 70mph when a hard right turn came out of nowhere. I slammed on the brakes and dropped the car into 2nd but it was too late. We jumped an embankment and went into a field with massive boulders. I thought we might possibly flip. I got us back to the road and checked out the damage. I need to get a photo from someone but the rim had been bent in about 8” and completely broke off. I was pretty proud of my handiwork and gave Brad something else to mention in his article. [Side note: Should hopefully be appearing in the April issue of Outside Go.]

I’m extremely excited and encouraged by this first trip because members walked away with tons of memories, business breakthroughs and even helped the next generation of Maverick entrepreneurs with our ‘Young Entrepreneurs’ learning session that took place the final morning. I can’t wait to get some of that video posted because it was a group of college students in Mexico and the very first words out of my mouth were – “Everything I learned in college was Bullshit.” The translator looked at me like I was crazy and told her to please translate…and the kids got a kick out of it.

Then to cap off the trip we had a “Big Game” party hosted by 3-time Super Bowl champion, Darren Woodson. It was pretty cool to watch this huge upset with someone who had been there done that. You might have seen Darren lately on ESPN doing the NFL Live show and he literally flew in straight from Arizona to be with us in Cabo. Here’s quick pic of me doing my worst ever Heisman impression trying to block out Maverick Member, Mike Lally.

I’ll probably post up some more stuff here as I get more pics and video finished.

If you want in on the business building and shenanigans- the 2nd trip is now locked in. May 15-18, 2008 in Las Vegas for a Zero G flight, Aerial combat in a jet fighter , Helicopter inside the Grand Canyon, dinner with Peter Diamandis (founder of the X prize) and much more still shaping up. Get a sneak peak at www.BusinessAdventures.com

One more interesting incident from Baja…As we were sitting around having a few beers at Scorpion Bay (one of the most remote locations in the world) the conversation turned to my friend Mike Hill. The guys sitting around with me were some of the Internet’s top marketers…names you know and many others you don’t know who are bringing in 6-figures/month & more.

In confidence, Mike started talking about a hidden backdoor method for getting your site seen in front of the most eager, excited and motivated prospects you could want. It’s called “CPV” or Cost Per View.

Here’s how it works…

Imagine, being able to walk up to somebody at Wal-Mart who has a t-shirt in his hands and say, “Do you know what? That t-shirt in your hands that you’re about to pay $12.00 for? I’ll sell you one for $9.00.” That’s how powerful CPV Marketing is. You literally can grab the customer at any point in any process and make them your own customer.

Maybe you advertise on Google for an extremely competitive, very high-priced keyword. You’re going to pay anywhere between $5.00 to $10 per click

If you were advertising in a CPV platform, you could pay probably anywhere from $0.03 to $0.05 per click, instead of $5.00 to $10. You can literally specify inside that CPV platform which keywords or which competitor’s site triggers your URL to be pulled up OVER your competitor.

This is huge and only a tiny group of people have capitalized on this so far!

Want to know more?

I got Mike to come out of hiding and get on stage for the first time since 1999 for my upcoming Underground® 4 seminar next month. It’s already nearing a sell-out! If you want to attend – I strongly suggest registering immediately.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Adventure, Fun, Start-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.