On Saturday my wife and I and our 4 children, quite a brood, headed out to the Bishop planetarium for a fun, educational, family day. We try and make sure I spend at least one day a week with no work, nothing but time with the family. Of course, I often work from home, so I do spend a lot of time with my babies, but too much of it is distracted time...time spent rushing to the next project or getting a drink in between work sessions. So we like to reserve at least one day as family day..no work, just me with my wife and babies. So anyway, we went to the Bishop Planetarium because we had never been there before, as unbelievable as that is, since we live about 10 minutes away. Turns out it was family day at the Planetarium, which was really cool because they had dinner, a lot of functions for the children and some really great shows. One of the shows had my 7 year old and my 3 year old enthralled. It was a cartoon, on the planetarium ceiling, which showed a couple of children flying through the galaxy in a cardboard rocket, assisted by a talking astronomy book. HA! Fantastic. The show that really blew me away, though, was the show for the adults. Turns out the arms of the Milky Way, including our Sun, rotate around the center of the galaxy..imagine that!! It takes 20 MILLION YEARS for one revolution...and here's the amazing thing, our sun has been around 20 TIMES!! That means it's 5,000,000,000 years old! Amazing. Think of this, although the stars in the sky change, they have barely moved since the dawn of mankind. What's 50,000 years or so on a 250,000,000 year rotation, or a 5,000,000,000 year life span? The thought is incredible, the world will come into being, flourish, die and us with it, and the total time measured in a star's age will be a tick of the second hand?!? Makes me feel small, and in awe of the entire universal dance. However, just as classic mechanics and quantum physics run by different rules, so do the stars and our lives. Fact is, our lives are important. Our children of dire importance, and what we do while we're here critical to our posterity. I don't need to focus on a star's life, I'm not a star! I can focus on the importance of my life. However, we can take a lesson from the stars and put it to work in our businesses. The sky seems never changing to us...seems constant, always there. There are a few businesses that have lasting, ever green, control marketing campaigns. They are constant, rarely changing, producing results month in, month out...year in, year out. Those marketing campaigns produce wealth for the owners of the business. Consistent, predicable, constant...much like the stars. Sure, over the course of years they have to be tweaked, reworked here and there...just like the stars change over the eons. However, those little changes do nothing to reduce the dependability of a truly solid control marketing campaign. That should be your goal from a marketing prospective. To achieve it is damned hard, marketing testing measuring spending money to get nothing in return. It's a pain. Once you have it, though, your wealth will be as predictable as the stars! To your successful Everte Farnell PS. This program is likely going to involve some direct mail....most do. No matter what business you're in, direct mail can turn millions in profits for you. It's scalable, can be tested for little money, and once it's perfected it can produce the kind of profits you've never seen before. Don't fall into the "direct mail doesn't work" trap. Even Google uses it to advertise their Adwords program...Irony!