Power Tribes With Mitch Russo

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

20.01.21

What would it take to create your own power tribe that could generate multiple streams of revenue year after year? On today’s podcast, John Livesay brings on Mitch Russo, a CEO Advisor to several companies, the Cofounder of Timeslips Corporation, and the author of Power Tribes: How Certification Can Explode Your Business. Mitch builds certification programs for companies who want alternate sales channels, new revenue streams, and understand the value of creating a powerful culture in their workforce and external teams. Don’t miss this episode for a delightful conversation on how you can build profitable certification programs that could mobilize your best clients to become raving fans and make your business explode. Plus, stay tuned till the end for a free gift from Mitch!

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Listen to the podcast here

Power Tribes With Mitch Russo

Our guest on the show is Mitch Russo. Mitch has worked with Tony Robbins and he’ll share that story on the episode of what things he saw Tony doing that gets the energy up in the room and how he taps into what Mitch calls an emotional grid to get the audience engaged. Mitch also has a free gift for everyone so you’ll want to read the episode and know what the free gift is. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Mitch Russo who in 1985 Cofounded Timeslips Corporation, which grew to become the largest time-tracking software company in the world. In 1994, Timeslips Corp was sold to Sage for eight-figures. While at Sage, Mitch went on to run all of their operations as the Chief Operating Officer at which had a division of 300 people with a market cap in excess of $100 million. Mitch joined Chet Holmes and Tony Robbins and created Business Breakthroughs Int’l, a company serving thousands of businesses a year with coaching, consulting, and training services. Mitch was the President and CEO.

In 2005, he published The Invisible Organization, which is the CEO’s guide to transitioning a traditional brick and mortar company into a fully virtual organization. Yes, he’s always ahead of his time. That’s our Mitch. He’s been nominated twice for Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and he helps companies scale rapidly. In 2018, he published a wonderful book called Power Tribes: How Certification Can Explode Your Business, which is the master blueprint for building profitable certification programs. Mitch, welcome to the show.

Thank you, John. I’m glad to be here.

We’ve gotten to know each other even before this episode and you have so much insight, wisdom, and a heart to share, which is a wonderful combination. I would like to ask you to share your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood or somewhere in schools. Give us a sense of how did you get to be wonderful at running companies and helping people scale. Usually, there’s some background of, “I knew I wanted to be in business. I knew I wanted something,” but I’m going to let you decide where you start the story.

I’ll start the story in high school. It’s even before high school in junior high. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York and I was compared to the other boys. I was a small kid so I didn’t get selected much to play on teams. I was the last one left that they had to take after they did all the other team selections. I ended up feeling not part of everything or anything at that point so I didn’t have much success with girls. I had figured out one day that maybe the best way that I could meet girls would be to have a rock band.

The only problem with that is I didn’t have a band or even play guitar so I decided I would start taking guitar lessons, and I did. I studied guitar for three years, and then I started a band. Lo and behold, it was quite successful in my initial core objective, which was to attract girls to come to listen to band practice, and then get dates. That worked out well. It’s the lead generation. To answer your question, it was the experience of building and running the band as a young man that gave me many of the tools I use later to create companies.

If anyone’s read that introduction, they’re begging me, “Don’t make us wait any more, John. Ask him about working with Tony Robbins.”

It turns out that while I was building my software company, Timeslips Corporation, I had this pesky salesman who kept trying to get me to buy advertising space, and his name was Chet Holmes. He wouldn’t give up. If anyone’s read Chet’s book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, you’ll remember the phrase pigheaded discipline from the book. Chet had the strategy called the Dream 100, which meant you target your top 100 clients, and then you do anything it takes to get them to work with you. In that process, I became one of his Dream 100 client targets. For eighteen months, he showered me with gifts, phone calls, and visits.

Finally, I negotiated my way into an incredible deal and advertised with the publication, which turned out to be life-changing. That one set of ads, I remember purchasing the first ad thinking to myself, “This is a real stretch. This is $10,000 for an ad.” The bottom line was that it exploded our revenue. Chet and I, as a result, became good friends and the friendship continued to grow. Even through the company’s growth after I sold the company, our friendship endured, and later when I moved to Sage, I brought Chet on and hired him to train our sales force because he was that good.

Finally, some years later after I had left Sage and returned back to Massachusetts which is where I started, I got a call from Chet and he said, “I love to get your help with a little problem I’m having.” I said, “Sure. Fill me in.” Next thing I know, six months later, I’m president of his company and running Chet’s little $3 million consulting firm but then he announced that he finally had a breakthrough with his new friend, Tony Robbins.

Chet had been treating Tony the way he treated me. Except for me, it was only eighteen months. He said he has been pursuing Tony Robbins for seventeen years. That’s not giving up. That’s the pigheaded discipline part of Chet. Next thing I know, we’re on the phone with Tony every Thursday night, trying to figure out how to put a deal together to combine the assets of both companies to create a new company called Business Breakthroughs Int’l. That’s how Tony and I met for the first time.

[bctt tweet=”Dominate your skills and exceed your expectations when it comes to what you deliver.” username=”John_Livesay”]

That’s an amazing story of origin and I’m sure that’s just the beginning of the story. Take us on what that looked like. What did you offer? Most people think, “What doesn’t Tony Robbins know how to do even back then?” I’m sure there were some intellectual property, tips, or something that made Tony, after seventeen years, take that call and then agree to even possibly merge.

What it was was the strength of Chet’s materials. Chet had created some incredible content and some real intellectual property, and Tony recognized that. If I were to look at the three of us, because we were partners in this organization, Tony, of course, is Tony and has the ability to attract an enormous amount of attention just with his words. Chet had a lot of intellectual property and I had a lot of operational experience as a CEO building and growing infrastructure.

The only difference, John, to be honest, was that before, I used to be in front of the camera. As I grew my own company, I spoke hundreds of times in front of large groups. Now, I’m the wizard behind the curtain. I’m no longer out front anymore, which I was fine with because I got to learn. Even at that age and after all that I had done, it was the learning that I had and the experience mentoring with Chet and Tony for five solid years that upped my game a lot.

I get a couple of things there for people reading that they can start to apply to themselves. Be willing to check your ego at the door if someone else has a skillset that’s bigger than yours or a following bigger than yours. The other big thing is this awareness, and I’ve seen it time and again and it doesn’t surprise me that this is coming up, that successful partnerships, Cofounders have exclusive skills. It’s not an overlap. In other words, “We got two Cofounders that are both marketing. We got two Cofounders that are both tech.” That never works.

You need someone with your expertise to make the structure and keep it all running. Otherwise, it’s like trying to build a house on a shaky foundation. You need to have some secret sauce that pulls in a name like Tony, and then you’ve got the face of the brand. You’re backing it up with real solid, unique content, and then it’s all running smoothly. If anyone of those things falls short, you get buyer’s remorse and people get frustrated if the user experience is unpleasant. No matter how great it all is, if the operation isn’t there, it won’t scale.

That’s what I was looking for and I knew if I asked the right question, I would be able to pull out that formula for people who are reading that maybe have their own startup and realize, “I’m trying to scale.” That’s the number one thing I hear from people. “How do I scale this? I’ve got some proof of concept.” Even a big company now. “We have to pivot and figure out how to do things differently.” Whether it’s a healthcare company that can’t get in to see doctors in hospitals anymore to make sales calls and they have to figure out a new way to get in that virtual door.

Let me ask you, if you had 1 or 2 takeaways from having that front row seat to watch Tony, what would you say is the key to his success in terms of as a speaker? I know you also work with a lot of speakers. It’s completely relevant that we’ll transition into that. You’re watching this master and it’s like getting a front-row seat. You’re an actor and you’re trying to go, “Do they do the same thing, or do they customize it?” What are you seeing that he does that is magnetic?

There are several things here that are critical to being like Tony. If there’s a BLT, #BeLikeTony, it would be number one, have command of your skillset. Dominate your skills and exceed your expectations when it comes to what you deliver. The second thing is to command the room, and you do that with energy. If anything that Tony has taught me and probably everybody is that his energy is unbounded. I’ve watched him stand in front of rooms for more than ten hours and it seems as if the man doesn’t go to the bathroom. It’s crazy how he can endure and impact the crowd of tens of thousands of people. I’ve sat in rooms with him with 6,000 to 7,000 people and now, he is commanding rooms of 20,000 to 50,000 people online.

He invested in that. We’re talking about infrastructure, the great expert of the world.

The final element of this is understanding what human emotions are and how they work. When I watch Tony sell from the stage, it’s like watching a violin virtuoso play a solo. It is one of the most incredible and impactful things you could ever watch because if you take a part of his sales pitch and what he does, he’s going down the line. He’s one at a time hitting every emotional step along the way to making the purchase.

He eliminates ego, starts with affinity, and goes through every range of emotion. He deals with and conquers fear until finally, the final emotion in any sales pitch is greed, which is, “I want this badly and I need to have it.” I understand why it’s worth the amount of money that these people or this person is charging. Tony’s process is to dissect the sales into human emotion greed. One at a time, go through the greed and create desire and comfort through all this process.

The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies

I love that. We’re going to make that a tweet. “Create an emotional greed, which then causes desire.” Once you have that going on, then you’ve got somebody emotionally engaged. We know people buy emotionally and then back it up with logic, not the other way around. This concept of emotional greed and being aware, “Am I triggering the fear of missing out? Am I triggering a sense of, ‘You deserve this? Do you want to stay stuck? The choice is yours.’” All those feelings, I had an experience of that. I would love your insight to give another example since many of us will never be Tony Robbins.

I was working with a healthcare company and they recreated a repository map of all of the case stories that I helped train their team to talk about instead of a case study. I click on a state and pull up a case story from people across multiple divisions. It helps break down silos and it’s a great way to onboard new people if you don’t have your own story. There are lots of different outcomes. When I show that map to potential clients, they go, “We need this. Our stories are in someone’s head and nobody else has access to that. We need to break down silos and we don’t know how to do it.”

What’s fascinating to me, Mitch is they think it’s the map. “We need a map.” I gently remind them of, “It’s not just the map you need. You need the stories to go with the map, and then how to apply stories from there.” They go, “Okay,” but it is a fascinating behavior that you’re describing there, which is a shiny new toy. “I would look like a hero to my boss if I created this repository map. The details of everything and all the work that goes into making that meaningful aren’t important. I just want the map.” That’s what you’re referring to here.

Absolutely. When Tony does it, it’s an art performance as far as I’m concerned. It’s far more than just understanding the emotions. It’s understanding how to use this system or this technique for helping people understand what it is you’re offering. Break down the internal barriers one at a time until they can truly evaluate whether it’s right for them or not, so it’s not manipulative and not trickery. It’s helping people take the next step.

That’s why at first when you go into a Tony Robbins’ event, one of the first things that he’ll do is he addresses the core issue in the room, which is energy. His whole purpose is to raise your energy in the room and he does that first. In a heightened state of energy, he then goes through the emotional cycle I referred to. One at a time, he addresses each of those until finally, you get to understand why what he’s offering is valuable and take advantage of that.

There have been studies around couples that are dating that do things that increase their adrenaline rush like if they go bungee jumping together or something. They then associate that feeling, that oxytocin getting released as, “I must be falling in love with this person,” as opposed to the experience that’s creating this feeling. That’s another example of that coming to life for people. Let’s talk about your book, Power Tribes, and the subhead of How Certification Can Explode Your Business.

I love the word explode. That’s an action verb. It’s visual, kinesthetic, and all those good things. You can hear it. You tap into all the different senses with that word but what’s funny is the juxtaposition of certification. That causes our brain to go, “That seems like a little piece of paper you get when you complete a course or something.” There’s a story here about how you almost by accident stumbled on this process called certification. Let’s define what that certification is, and then tell us that story if you would.

First of all, for many people, certification means, “I buy certification. I study some material. I then take a test and I get a certificate in the mail or through email, and I’m certified. After having paid anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 or more, I get to hang that certificate on my wall and maybe join a Facebook group of other people who’ve spent the money and are certified, too.” That’s all well and good. That’s not at all what I do and I don’t even count that as certification. In my vernacular, you change the word to power tribes. The reason I did it is because what we’re doing is we’re mobilizing a tribe on a level that goes deeper than simply selling a certificate. In fact, when I stumbled across this process, it was almost by accident. I could tell the story if you like.

Yes.

It started with a client. This is back in the software days. I had a Timeslips client who was struggling with the software and then called us up and accused us of having our software crash her computer. That person happened to be the technology director for the Los Angeles Bar Association. I didn’t want to cause that if that were even possible to happen to her because she would spread the word and it would be bad for us. I assured her that we would take care of the problem, even if I had to fly out there myself. She wanted this done that day or the next morning, if possible.

I was all ready to get on a plane and at the last minute, I had this thought, “Who do I know who was good in the area?” I had a meeting in the Los Angeles area and invited a bunch of customers to come to have dinner with me, which was a great time. I do that all the time. I remembered one particular woman who worked at a law firm and was a master at our software. I called her up and said, “Ann, would you do me a favor? Would you mind going over to help this person out?” She goes, “For you, Mitch, I’d love to. Thank you for thinking of me.” I said, “It’s my pleasure.”

[bctt tweet=”We’re mobilizing a tribe on a level that goes deeper than simply selling a certificate.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Now it’s 6:00, my time and it’s 3:00, her time. She’s just leaving so I’m up until 10:00 to 11:00 waiting for this phone call. Finally, the phone rings. It’s Ann and she says, “Don’t worry. The problem is solved. It wasn’t even Timeslips. It was a glitch on her hard drive. We completely fixed the problem.” I said, “That’s wonderful. Thank you, Ann.” She goes, “I haven’t told you the best part.” I said, “What is the best part?” She says, “She gave me a $100 bill.” I said, “Congratulations. That’s fantastic.” Back then, $100 was a lot more than it means now.

The words that she said next changed my life. The word she said we’re, “If you need me to help anybody else in the area, please let me know.” All of a sudden, my mind exploded. “What would happen if I had 100, 200, and 300 Ann’s all over the country? Think of all of the people that we could help and at the same time, create this organization.” That’s exactly what we did. I created a system. At first, it was a basic system, which backfired the first time I did it. We trained people, tested them, and declared them certified.

The reason that backfired is because I didn’t do a good enough job of training them. In that first batch, we had complaints. We even had threats of lawsuits so I shut the program down and I called every person who had a problem. I diagnosed the problem and understood what the issue was. I then rebuilt the program from scratch and this is what we ended up doing. Eighteen months later after relaunching the program, we had 350 certified consultants paying over $1,000 per year to be a member.

This is back in 1989. Today is much more. They were paying another $2,000 to $3,000 for services and they were offering and selling our software. In eighteen months, we had dropped another $1 million to the bottom line in profits. We had created our third-largest sales channel, dropped our tech support expense by 20%, and cut our hold time on those tech support lines by well over half by having certified consultants.

The one part that stands out is that this Ann that you found, your first certification person or avatar. The irony that someone was angry at you for a problem that your software didn’t cause and yet, you went in and still fixed it. They must have gone from being furious to being grateful and maybe even a little embarrassed and feeling like they owe you one. That’s talked about exceeding expectations and going above and beyond. That’s my big takeaway from that story. It almost reminds me of Nordstroms where they have this return policy, even if you return something they didn’t sell just to have that image. If I fix something even if it’s not our software causing it, that is priceless.

That reminds me to explain to you what the Timeslips Ambassador Program was all about. You’ll get a kick out of this. We had a customer service team and they had their own little part of the building. There, we get calls from customers all day long. Their job was to solve a problem the customer has as long as it wasn’t technical. If it was technical, they get transferred to tech support. A lot of people have problems. They didn’t receive something or they want to buy something or whatever it may be.

More than once, people would call up and they wanted a refund after owning the software for two years or something, which is usually considered unreasonable. We had a policy that if customer service could not satisfy them, they needed to be transferred to a special customer service agent. That agent was named Alan Singer. What would happen is that there would be a joke in the building that said, “There’s another case for Alan.” This one particular person calls up furious. They want their money back. It’s two years later, and all these crazy things.

That call is transferred to me because I’m Alan Singer, but they don’t know that. They don’t know they’re talking to the president of the company. I get the person on the phone and I let them vent. I said, “How about this? How about not only do we refund your money, but we upgrade your software? I’ll give you a private tech support number that you could bypass everybody else and you could get service anytime you need for free for the next five years. Is that okay with you if I do that for you?”

What ends up happening is we have created a Timeslips Ambassador from a disgruntled customer. This person now goes all over the world wherever they go and sings our praises. If they’re in a meeting and someone asks about software, “You got to buy Timeslips. You can’t believe what they did for me.” We had this thing called the Ambassador Program and our attitude was that there is no such thing as an unhappy customer. No customer is allowed to be unhappy.

Did you have anybody take advantage of that and pretend they were there?

Yes, and it’s okay. Occasionally, people will take advantage, but the bigger benefit is more powerful than whether or not 1 or 2 people get a refund they didn’t deserve or something.

Power Tribes: How Certification Can Explode Your Business

Now we’ve got this vision. You did an amazing job of explaining how to explode a business with this type of certification, which is an instant response. These people are paying you a fee so that you give them business, but at the same time, growing your own business. It’s a win for everybody. When someone has a problem, they get a fast solution, and it’s local. The person is clamoring to be on your approved list. Your business is growing not just from the people buying your software, but the people paying you to be certified as part of your team. You have a mind blown business model and double sources of revenue. What an amazing process. It’s proven. There’s a book that people can buy to learn how to do this.

One of the things that jumped out at me was the details you talk about the Power Tribe has a business model and building a culture. We’ve done a good job of describing a business model. I would like to ask you because this line you wrote is poetry, “Culture is like the warm embrace of the family that provides boundaries and freedoms, which improves the experience for both the company and the new certification consultant.” It talks about an emotion back to Tony Robbins’ greed and the concept of boundaries and freedoms. That is fascinating. If you’re a parent, you go, “I know what that’s all about.”

The long answer is that there is no such thing as a group without a culture. If you don’t pay attention, the culture will create itself and that will result in complete disorder. Entropy comes to mind with large groups that have no culture. What we’re talking about here is what I call the culture Parthenon, and I stole part of that from Jay Abraham. He uses the word Parthenon, too. I love the word because the roof being slabs of stone and columns that support it.

The slabs of stone for the roof are your values, are the CEOs why, the values of the company, and values that you’ve instilled into your own employees, and the columns are your code of ethics. If we engineer the code of ethics properly, what we end up with is a system by which people have enormous freedom inside the Parthenon. As long as they stay inside the Parthenon surrounded by the code of ethics with the values built into the structure itself, then they have complete freedom to do anything they want.

Those invisible electric gate fences for your yard for your dog. They go, “There’s the boundary. Got it. I can’t break that.” I can play fetch and I can do whatever I want within this yard. What a great playground to use that analogy to create top talent. Much like children, people love to structure and they love boundaries. Without it, it’s like, “I don’t know if I’m crossing the line a lot because no one’s defined what the line is.” They also can’t self identify if they belong to that tribe or not. That’s the real key.

When you create a red velvet area of your company and you admit people into that area, then there’s a privilege to be there, that’s what being part of a certification program is. That’s what it should be. It shouldn’t be that we sold somebody a test and they gave us some money. It should be when we sell certification, it’s not a certificate but it’s a business. We’re offering a profession to people and their clients.

John, if you came to me and said, “Mitch, I’d like to build a certification Power Tribes program,” then what we would do first is design the business model by which they can have a profitable company. That may mean that you have to go further than you planned to go. You may have to provide lead flow and hire a PR person to start generating live PR opportunities for all your certified consultants or coaches. That’s what we do.

It’s smart because the more value you create, the more the unexpected value, especially, I know when I give examples of going from being interesting to going to irresistible, and what you do that makes you irresistible to people by these unexpected perks. They feel like it’s a collaboration and not that they’re out on their own. It’s another emotion. People want to feel part of something and they want to feel supported. If you’re giving them not just structural support but emotional support, then you get people all in.

This concept that you have of how people can solve their revenue dislocation is fascinating, especially with a pandemic. Let’s take the speaking industry, for example. With no live events, you’ve suddenly got to figure out how to create value for a virtual event and even how to get a virtual event. You have a whole program that’s helping that industry, but it applies to many. This one is specifically around speakers, correct?

Correct. It was originally nicknamed by a client as Mitch’s Revenue Dislocation Program, and I love that so I kept the name. I prefer to call it Mitch’s Revenue Relocation Program. I’ll tell you a quick story about one of my clients who’s a brilliant, gifted speaker for decades generating mid-six figures just about every year. I never had a business per se. All he did was have bureaus keep sending him new places where he needed to speak and he would show up and do his thing. People would love him and you’d be on to the next one.

As everything came crashing to a halt back in March 2020 or even before, he was referred to me. At that point, I said, “I’m not sure what we could do but let’s work together and figure this out.” Here’s what I discovered. What I discovered is that most speakers have, in a general sense, what I call intellectual property. Their intellectual property has been used on stage and that’s what they deliver. What I try to do when I work with the speaker is I try to help them take that intellectual property and build out several levels of a system that teaches people all about what it is that their skillset is.

[bctt tweet=”There should be no such thing as an unhappy customer.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What we do is we can approach a corporate executive and say, “Instead of hiring me as a speaker, I could work with your teams. I have three levels. I could work with your core staff, middle management team, and the executive branch, and align all of them using a common theme.” Once they understand that, then the light bulb goes off and they have that a-ha moment. By the way, many of them already have some form of this in place but generally, most people don’t have it tiered properly. They don’t have it set up in a way where one thing leads immediately to the next.

There’s the first tier of like, “I could work with your executive team, then I could work with your sales team.” You said there was a third one?

The middle management team.

It goes back to your success with Tony Robbins. You need all three to be functioning, the people in the field, the people that are managing those people, and then the top people. If they’re all singing the same song, great, but if one is off-key, then none of it’s working and people feel confused. The other problem I see speakers having that you’re solving is leading with, when’s your next annual meeting to hire a speaker? “It comes around once a year and we haven’t started planning.” You’re in this constant looking. Now, you’re doing it completely different. “We don’t need to wait for an annual sales meeting. We need help now.”

The next step is we have to reposition them. We have to rewrite the content on their website and their entire LinkedIn profile, which I do and I have my team do. The next thing we do is if it’s appropriate, what we do is we create a podcast strategy for my clients. The podcast strategy is simple. The whole idea of the show is to attract your ideal client to sit in your guest’s seat. John, if I were your ideal client, I’d be in the exact spot you need me to be in. I’m your guest. This is what we try to do with my clients. We get them set up so that they’re inviting.

This is key. You can go on LinkedIn. I’m sure if everybody reading would go on LinkedIn, there’d be lots of connection requests and people wanting to connect with you. They’re trying to sell you something or they’re trying to give you some general, “We’re both in business. Let’s connect,” which most of us will ignore. Would you ignore a connection request that says something along the lines of, “I’ve read your profile and you’d be ideal as a guest for my show called XYZ?” Once we strategically pick up exactly what their business proposition is and we use that as part of how we sell the show, most people will say, “I’d love to be a guest on your show.”

Let me give an example for everyone reading because it will help solidify this. As a speaker, I am completely in your audience’s shoes. One of the challenges all speakers have is getting a speaking bureau to represent them. You can have multiple speaking bureaus if you don’t have an exclusive. Out of the blue, because my show is called The Successful Pitch, I had Bernie Swain, the founder of the Washington Speakers Bureau, reach out to me because he had a book on entrepreneurship. He wanted to reach my audience of entrepreneurs. He’s famous and he did all the former presidents. Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric are his clients.

Once I had him as a guest on my show, that gave me incredible credibility to go to other speaking bureaus. One of their challenges is all about service. They don’t have any pricing advantage. It’s similar, speakers can be in multiple bureaus. They’re always looking for new ways to have PR. The fact that I had Bernie Swain on my show opened the door for many other people to go up. He’s done it. I built my business based on his model, or whatever it is. That’s what allowed me to get to know and they got to know, trust, and like me. Many of them went on to then say, “We’d like to represent you,” as opposed to me hammering them like any other speaker going, “Do you want to represent me?” That’s what you’re talking about in action.

I’m talking about positioning, and you described it perfectly, John. You were able to use one of your existing interviews and one of the people that you’ve worked with as a way to showcase who you are and what you do. One of my clients that completed my program, his first name is Patrick. Patrick called this the machine. He says, “Mitch builds the machine.” It’s a circular process where we send out these connection requests. We use PR and all kinds of other techniques, which I teach my clients how to do.

In the end, what starts to happen is that these people start getting the opportunity to interview them, explain to them how they do their job and what they do, and pitch them on working with your teams. Since I’ve started doing this, I’ve had several clients go through this program. We’ve seen people go from one engagement a year to now being engaged six months of the year with the same company. That’s the difference. The difference is not doing one, but doing many. Not just doing an event where they speak, but doing training and coaching, selling their products, and licensing their content all throughout the organization.

I’ve had that experience by turning my book into an online course with a healthcare company and they said, “You helped us with these three divisions in one business unit. We want to introduce you to other business units.” It becomes a corporate story and not just our story. It’s fantastic. I can’t thank you enough for sharing wonderful stories and wonderful strategies. If people want to find out more about you, your website is your name, which is MitchRusso.com. Your book is Power Tribes. Do you have any last thoughts or a quote that you’d like to leave us with?

Power Tribes: There is no such thing as a group without a culture. If you don’t pay attention, the culture will create itself, and that will result in complete disorder.

If I could, John, I’d like to offer your audiences something free, something that they could use right away.

Yes. Thank you.

I have created a guide and this guide is based on my many years of experience in generating PR for myself, my companies, and my clients. It’s free. They can go to ProfitStackingSecrets.com and download this free guide. In that guide, they’re going to learn how to position themselves to be on podcasts as guests. They’re also going to learn how to create killer PR for their own company using press releases, and then finally, how to open up their entire business by using joint ventures. I include ways to find joint ventures, including bureaus that will help them right inside that free guide.

What an amazing gift. Years of experience all in a free eBook. PR is a great way to build trust and social credibility. I know having been interviewed by Larry King, what that’s done for my career. People want to hear the story about it. One thing leads to the next. Thanks for that free gift, thanks for writing Power Tribes, and most of all, a sincere thanks for helping many people.

My pleasure, John. Thank you for having me on your show.

Important Links

• Mitch Russo
• Sage
• The Invisible Organization
• Power Tribes: How Certification Can Explode Your Business
• The Ultimate Sales Machine
• Bernie Swain – Previous episode
• ProfitStackingSecrets.com
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

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John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer

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