Simon Devlin
speaker
125 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Simon Devlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, so I started my business back in 1997, importing, wholesaling, and distributing cigars. So I have retail stores in Australia and a private club as well. Like a cigar club? A cigar club, yeah. So it's a physical location where people pay an annual membership fee to be a member. It's a great, great community. And we also distribute cigars. for some of the biggest brands in the world.
And we do retail online as well. So I have a different separate business, which is I started a couple of years ago to try to do something a little bit different with a different character to sell cigars online. And yeah, it's been an incredible journey. It was 2010 that I actually... first found Dan Kennedy and started learning about... So then Dan was Kennedy. When did the cigar business start?
13 years later. 13 years. Interesting. Okay.
It was actually a guy that I met. It was actually a basketballer, an Australian basketballer who actually played for the Australian team. His name, Damien. And I met him. We had lunch and we had these amazing conversations and we had sort of similar philosophies. And he said, you need to meet a mentor of mine. He lives on the east coast of Australia, and you're going to absolutely love him.
And his name was Gary Dean Atkins. And so I go to the other side of the country one time. I meet this guy, and I'm like, wow, this guy's amazing. He's got similar sort of philosophies. Anyway, he gives me a book, which was Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. One of the greatest. Dan Kenny. And that, of course, blew my mind.
The co-author version with Dan. And then I was like, who's this guy? Who's this Dan Kennedy guy? And so then I searched him online and I found The Ultimate Sales Letter. And I read that book and then I was like, oh, wow. I'm going to sell a lot of cigars now. And I was like, up until that point in time, I thought, hey, I'm a pretty good sales guy.
Um, but then that just, that just changed my world, just all the different pieces of it. And then I just started buying everything I could have him. It was GKIC days back then where it was also piecemeal and I was buying, you know, CDs and DVDs and just consuming it all. And I saw the entire bookshelf full of Dan Kennedy CDs and DVDs. So I was the same way.
So the other day I got a young guy working for me and I'm teaching him marketing. I'm giving him a marketing apprenticeship at the moment.
and i was like oh i need one of the things wasn't in the whole i said that to him i'm like do you have a cd player and he's like uh cd like an eight track player right so i go online and buy a like a dvd player and i buy a stack of blank cds and i'm like i'm gonna burn it and then i can't work this out
I think the biggest thing is cigars are all about flavor and taste. So people think, and this has been a problem in Australia, and when I actually started the cigar business back in 1997, you couldn't buy cigars anywhere. It wasn't part of the culture, whereas it had been more part of the culture in the United States. People just saw it literally as a big cigarette.
Now, I've never smoked cigarettes in my life and never will, but cigars are actually about flavor and taste. You don't actually inhale a cigar. You actually just draw it in your mouth and you blow it out.
But I think the true value of cigars and why so many people smoke them and successful people actually smoke them is people think it's a status symbol, but it's actually because it's the only time that really busy people stop smoking. Because it actually takes time to enjoy a cigar. Generally, we don't say smoke a cigar, we enjoy a cigar. There is a rhythm to the breathing almost.
I often say it's like a form of meditation. And when you can share that with other people, yeah, it's a pretty amazing experience.
Yeah, it does. But you're not going deep into your lungs. Yeah. And so the thing is about nicotine is what makes it highly addictive in cigarettes is the other chemicals that they add into cigarettes to make the increase of the uptake of the nicotine into the bloodstream. So that was that movie with Russell Crowe, The Insiders, was all about is how they'd worked all that out.
So I was thinking about this actually this morning. So I smoke cigars. I love cigars. I would have on average a couple of cigars a day, which is a lot of cigars. Most people might have one cigar a week kind of thing. I left home a week and a half ago. I haven't had a cigar, you know, like, and I hadn't even thought about it, you know?
So I, I really, really enjoy the experience, but I don't feel the need to want to have a cigar. So yeah, it's interesting. It's a very, very enjoyable pastime.
Yep. So I really, it started out as a, uh, well, it started out, uh, Initially, importing, wholesaling and distributing cigars. And I actually had a business partner at the time that I had in the early days. And I found that he wasn't my kind of guy and we didn't really know each other. Perhaps our values weren't quite aligned.
And we kind of split, and he took over the wholesale distribution at the time, and then I took over the retail side, which was in a tiny little cigar shop in a beautiful little alley called London Court in Perth. And... That shop is so small, I always joke that you have to go outside to change your mind, right? So it's this tiny little shop.
And then so really I started out that in 2002 as almost like a one-man band. And, you know, just learning, learning how to have team members, learning how to, you know, make sure that you've got the right cigars and teaching people and those sort of things. And that progressed. And eventually I put on some more team members. And I kind of worked out... Well, actually, I had a problem.
So first of all, I put on some team members and their sales were nowhere near what my sales were. They were just – I couldn't understand.
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