Power Tribes With Mitch Russo
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
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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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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Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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Millionaire Secrets With Jeff Lerner
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Getting to the top is not worth it if you are not doing what you love, or you still feel empty despite having everything. True professional success is all about indulging in your passion, keeping a healthy body, and having a deep connection with others. John Livesay is joined by the Cofounder and CEO of ENTRE Institute, Jeff Lerner, in discussing the secrets of attaining worthwhile business success, from taking care of your body to knowing the right way to eliminate money-related problems. Jeff looks back on his life that led him to become the entrepreneur he is today, starting from his piano performing days, getting divorced twice, and being a father figure of an integrated family.
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Listen to the podcast here
Millionaire Secrets With Jeff Lerner
Our guest is Jeff Lerner who shares the 3P’s to success, physical excellence, personal excellence, and professional excellence. He does a deep dive on what the word professional means to him as well as what the word desire means. You’re going to want to listen to how he’s completely turned his life around and figured out how to be successful. More importantly, how you can too. Enjoy the episode.
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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Jeff Lerner, who is the Cofounder and CEO of ENTRE Institute. He is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, author, and musician. He’s a native of Houston, Texas where he spent most of his twenties attending university by day while working nights at one of the top piano players, a gig, which found him playing in the homes of billionaires and business owners. This is what triggered his interest in entrepreneurship. In 2008, when he was only 29, after multiple failures, during a restaurant franchise that left him with over $400,000 in debt, he found his calling as a digital marketer and paid that debt off in eighteen months. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Grateful to be here, John. I appreciate you having me.
Let’s start with your own little story of origin. You can start by playing the piano. I love that story of seeing how successful people who are entrepreneurs got to live and being in the entertainment and saying to yourself, “What’s the secret sauce here?”
That was a powerful transformative experience for me. I’ll set it up by backing up a little bit. I’ve had one job in my life and it’s when I was sixteen years old. I worked for three weeks in the office supply room at a major law firm. That meant that I worked for legal secretaries. I don’t know what big five legal firm culture is now but I can tell you that in the mid-‘90s, legal secretaries were not the happiest bunch of people. As they say, they got what rolls downhill.
Professional Success: When you start screwing stuff up, and it involves kids, it’s a whole other level of carnage and negligence.
It rolled downhill from the attorneys to their secretaries. They paid it forward down to me in the lowly supply room and like, “I need a print cartridge. My boss has a deposition due at 2:00 and if he doesn’t have it, it’s going to be your ass.” I’m like, “I’ll bring you a print cartridge. Take a chill pill.” Three weeks was all the abuse I can handle. I managed to get myself fired. Apparently, I was disrespectful to a secretary. I’m sure she was being very respectful to me though. I was like, “I’m never doing that again. I better figure out something that I can do so I can make a living and make a life in this world without having to ever take that again.”
I became a musician. It was a very strategic decision. It wasn’t like I had some deep longing to express myself through the creative arts. It was more of like, “What do I know already that I’m good at it and I can develop into a tangible, monetized skill?” I went hardcore into piano. I didn’t start seriously playing piano until I was seventeen years old but I had played guitar previously. I knew I was a good musician, but the problem with guitar is if it’s acoustic, it’s not loud enough to play by yourself. If it’s electric, nobody’s going to hire you without a band for the most part.
Generally, you don’t get to keep all the money. A lot of times you get booked to show up, there’s already an instrument there and you get to keep all the money. Especially if you learn to sing, you can make decent money. Again, it was very pragmatic. I was like, “I’m going to learn the piano. I’m going to start learning to sing. I’m going to learn the Great American Songbook. I’m going to learn contemporary, radio hits, and I’m going to go get jobs.” It was a little harder than that. It took me three years to get good enough to play professionally.
I dropped out of high school at seventeen. I was like, “High school holds nothing for me. That’s going to graduate me to learn how to go get a job. I don’t want to do that so there’s no point. How to navigate that with my parents?” It was interesting. They knew me. They’re like, “If he decides he’s going to do something, there’s no stopping him. We can either make our home life miserable because he’s going to be pissed off all the time because we’re fighting him or crazy as it sounds, we can support him in becoming a professional piano player.”They bought me a piano. They said, “You better practice your ass off, son.” I did. It took three years. I practice 8 to 10 hours a day as much as I could. The only days I took off were because my hand was so stiff, I couldn’t move my fingers. In three years, I became good enough to get a scholarship at the collegiate level and start getting hired for gigs. It ended up taking me almost ten years to finish college but I did graduate with a degree in Jazz, Piano Performance, and Music Composition and a minor in Finance which is most notable because I had dropped out of high school.
[bctt tweet=”Physical, personal, and professional excellence are all needed for success. Stop trying to take shortcuts.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I still managed to get into college on a music scholarship. That was the musical part of the plotline but what was transformational for me were few things. One was, I did get to experience what it’s like to make a living doing something that you love. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s hard to ever imagine going away from it. I was hooked at that point that I had made the right decision even though life was hard and I did not make very much money. I tried to get married twice in my twenties and blew it both times. I was twice divorced by the end of my twenties. There are two classes of people that are hard to be married to.
One is startup entrepreneurs. The other is aspiring musicians. I was both. God bless my ex-wives. I don’t necessarily fault them for their second choice. The first choice to marry me, I questioned that but the one to divorce me, that makes some sense. The biggest thing in my twenties was as a gigging piano player, it’s not hard to get the elite gigs that pay the best. You have to get a suit that fits and not smoking. If you do smoke, do it in such a way that it doesn’t make you stink like cigarettes. You have to be on time and respectfully carry on a polite conversation but not over-talk because the clients don’t want you chatting up the guests. You have to know a lot of songs, and be a decent piano player. Since I was one such person, I got in with this good agency. They started booking me.
I played in the homes of Tilman Fertitta who owns the Houston Rockets, Jim Crane who owns the Houston Astros, Bob McNair who owned the Houston Texans. He passed away in 2017 but I played in his home, and Andy Fastow, the CFO of Enron. I played in some big billionaire mansions and I got a real taste of how much money there is out there. I was in a unique position because I would always get to the gigs early so I could warm-up, set up, play the piano, and feel the keys. Whenever I could, I would try to corner these guys for at least a minute or two of conversation.
Usually, I would frame it as like, “Do you have any favorite songs? How loud do you want me to play? What mood do you want me to set? By the way, you’re successful. Do you have any tips? You got a lot of zeros in your bank account. Anything you could share with a broke musician?” I started hacking my way into billionaire mentorship from some of these guys and got a real strong vision of what my life could look like. They frankly alienated me from my musician peers because they’re all about struggle and the art, and I was a jazz musician.
Professional Success: You can change who you are through cognitive restructuring, even though it can be brutally painful and exhausting.
There’s a real lore in jazz around the struggle. I was like, “Screw this. I want to be rich. I want to take care of people. I want to bless the world. Honestly, I want to be able to make music someday on my terms.” I heard a story about how Prince built this whole recording studio in his house. He started his own record label. He could release his albums and do all his recording. He answered to no one. I was like, “If I’m going to be a musician, I want to be a musician like that.” I realized I was never going to get there for me through playing piano so I tried to start businesses.
All through my twenties, I rattled off on the last interview I did, it was nine businesses that I failed at. Fast forward to 2008, the Great Recession destroyed the economy. In 2006, I had gone through the funding and application process for two franchise restaurants. I own these two sandwich shops. I thought I was going to be a traditional American franchise millionaire dude, instead it all went out of business with the Great Recession. In 2008, I was $495,000 in debt. I couldn’t afford my apartment. I ended up moving in with my estranged and soon to be ex-wife’s parents, living in their spare bedroom, dodging creditors who were calling their house so you can imagine how popular I was.
The hard thing about owing that much money on those types of loans is of the $495,000 in debt, $330,000 of it was to the US Treasury because these were SBA bank loans that are backed by the US government. It’s no different than owing $300,000 worth of taxes. You don’t disappear from that unless you die. I was hiding from the US government in my ex-wife’s parents’ house trying to figure out how the hell I was going to get my life back on track. That’s when I discovered in 2008, I remember it clear as day, it was Monday of Thanksgiving week, November 2008. Three days before Thanksgiving, for $395, I bought a course on affiliate marketing. It turned out that I was good at a keyboard whether it was a piano keyboard or a computer keyboard as it turned out. Mostly, I had the ethic to practice. I knew how to sit there and grind for 8, 10, 12 hours a day leaning in, deciphering complex musical passages.
You do the work and you give it time. As a musician, I know how long it takes to develop competence. It’s something that is sophisticated. Years, thousands of hours, and that’s how I approached internet marketing. Thankfully, I was a quick study. I had a great training course, a good mentor. In eighteen months, I paid off $495,000 in debt. I’ve been doing some form of new economy entrepreneurship ever since. I’ve done real estate, Shopify stores, affiliate marketing. I had a digital agency, I create my own courses online. You name it, I’ve done it.
[bctt tweet=”Always solve the money problem first to prove to yourself that money wasn’t the problem.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The thing that stands out for me, besides the wonderful metaphor of the keyboard from a piano to the keyboard of the computer, is the lessons you took from learning and becoming a professional musician, not from an artistic standpoint but driven money-making, “I don’t want to work for anybody else,” mission of discipline to practice, being on time. I can’t emphasize that enough to anyone. Since you make a virtual appointment, it doesn’t mean you get to be late, especially if you’re pitching to a client or an investor. How you do one thing is how you do everything. I’m wanting to tap into that, Jeff, because that’s one of the things that made me want to have you on the show. Finally, not talking too much. We both are comfortable in selling things and selling ourselves.
The biggest mistake I see a lot of people making is they talk too much about the features. They bore people. They’re not telling stories, and the worst mistake ever is after someone says bye, but they keep talking. When you brought that up, I thought, “I don’t hear a lot of guests talking about that being one of the keys to their success.” In this case, as a piano player. When you transfer that to an entrepreneur, a salesperson, and having a successful pitch, the exact same three things, discipline, be on time, don’t talk too much, that’s like table stakes. If you’re doing it and most people are only doing 2 of the 3 or only 1 of the 3, you’re already ahead of the game. In my mind, if you can tell better stories, which clearly you’re great at, because music is a story. Each piece of each song tells a story so you have the ability to transfer so many of those skills to that.
You’re doing at the ENTRE Institute these ways of excellence and you have three of them. There’s a personal one, a professional one, and a physical one. Many times, people sacrifice 1 of the 3. We see all these wealthy people that are one beat away from a heart attack. You’re like, “You’re walking commercial of what that looks like.” It’s because the physical is not a priority or the sleep deprivation is a badge of honor and all these crazy behaviors or the multiple divorces and miserable life. You had said you have some insights for people. I bet a lot of people are going to lean in now of you can show us how to be excellent in all three. Please start with the personal. What tips do you have for people on having an excellent personal life while being an entrepreneur?
What’s funny is this is the one that I thought I had figured out because I’ve always been a reasonably fast, smooth talker. I thought that meant I was good with people. I was a train wreck of a listener like, “I got to stop talking and let other people talk.” I was an only child. I thought I was the sun and everyone else was a planet. I thought that my personal skills were well-developed. It wasn’t until my mid-30s, I realized how truly terrible they were. I’m jumping ahead in the story but in my early 30s, I started making money but I’m still not happy even though I’m out of debt. I came off of another interview, but this was what we ended up talking. It’s important to solve the money problem so that you can prove to yourself that money wasn’t the problem. As long as you have a money problem, it’s easy to make that your problem.
Professional Success: Professionalism is an intentional profession of faith, belief, testimonial, and value.
I solved it in my early 30s and I was still miserable. I was a divorced bachelor living in New York City, trying to live a cool Manhattan bachelor life which was such a façade and a distraction. I met this wonderful woman who lived in St. George, Utah, a little town I’d never heard of. She was a widow. I met her at an event that her dad was hosting, and I was the guest because I’d been an affiliate for his company. We hit it off. She had three kids and her youngest was two at the time. I went and visited. It didn’t click with the concept of a dad. It wasn’t like, “You’re not my dad,” because she’d never had a dad. It was like, “Who’s this guy?” I came out a few more times. I was head over heels in love with this woman.
I was like, “This is the woman I want to like to hang out with. There’s no one like this in New York.” I’m flying out to Utah every weekend from New York. It’s 4, 5, 6 weeks into that process, then all of a sudden, she’s like, “Daddy.” Suddenly, my girlfriend and I are like, “What happened?” We didn’t plant or suggest that. In fact, we’ve been very careful. Here’s the thing, I pretended to be mortified. I was so happy. Something came over me and I was like, “This is it. This is what I want for the rest of my life.” Within a month after that, I had exited everything else I was doing in New York City. I had loaded up a U-Haul, I was driving out to Utah, and I’ve been here ever since. The reason I’m telling you this in terms of the personal excellence, personal relationships, communication, connection, all that good stuff.
Now I was the father figure in an integrated family. She had two boys and a girl and the stakes are high here. I’ve been through a divorce. It sucks when adults screw things up. When you start screwing stuff up and involves kids, it’s a whole other level of carnage and negligence. It was like, “Let’s go get therapy. Let’s go get help. Let’s do this right.” She’d been divorced. I’d been divorce. That’s what changed my life. Early mid-30s, I go get in with a good family counselor. I thought I was going for a couple months to follow instructions, put the Legos together, and it was all going to be grand. I spent 2,000 hours in therapeutic environments over the next five years.
It doesn’t surprise me because you’re focused on the number of hours you put into learning how to play the piano, you’ve taken that ability to focus and commit to making your personal life as good as it can be.
[bctt tweet=”Excellence must always center on how you connect with people and how you manage energy in conversations.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Here’s the thing, I love it. You talk about listening. It’s stop talking, responsive listening. I say those two words together or people are like, “I should listen and be more responsive.” There’s an art to responsive listening like empathy. I got tested in the early days of therapy. My empathy on a scale of 0 to 100 was a 4. I’m an only child. I don’t need to hear about other people’s problems. I don’t walk out on anybody’s shoes. Years later, I figured out what if I retook the test. It was up to an 80. You can change. Not what you think and what you do. You can change who you are.
It’s a process called cognitive restructuring. It is brutally painful and exhausting. To this day, my therapist says, “You two are some of the only people I’ve had that were willing to do the work.” In ENTRE, when I talk about personal excellence, I’m talking about how you relate, how you connect with people, how you manage and control the energy in conversations. I’m talking about power dynamics. We teach something called nonviolent communication. One of the most important skills in life is making it so that every time somebody finishes a conversation with you, they feel good.
Wouldn’t it stand to reason that would be a useful skill? There’s a way to do it. Study transactional analysis, non-violent communications, Adlerian psychology. There are actual ways that you can become excellent in relationships that not only make your personal life better, not only make your relationship with yourself better. Honestly, they’ll make you a crap load of money. We’re here to talk about pitching and selling. Let’s say I’ve made millions. These skills added a zero.
Let’s dive into that. Be professional excellence, especially around the world of affiliate partnerships. For those who may not know 100% what that is, it can be everything from someone selling a course or a training program and people promote it for you and they get a percentage of what your revenue is. What’s happening in my perspective, of course I want to hear yours, is transferring of trust. The skills that you learned, empathy and listening, are what allows people to want to partner with you and then have those people who are following them say, “If Jeff trusts John, then I can trust John.” That’s the foundation for then seeing of whatever John is offering wouldn’t even be something but at least the ears are open. “If Jeff has vetted him in this, then this is a safe email to open,” or whatever it is.
Professional Success: Money is the last indicator of health. It must always start in the body.
Affiliate marketing is technology applied to referrals. We’ve had referrals as old as time, “John, you’re in Austin. You got to check out that pizza place on MLK.” Imagine if I said, “Make sure when you go in there to give them my name so they know I sent you. They might even give you a discount but also they’re going to know I sent you so they’re going to send me $1 for the referral.” Affiliate marketing is that, only it’s all tracked through digital links. That is what I started with in 2008. I was a full-time dedicated affiliate marketer from 2008 to 2012. I did well with that and I paid off my debt.
At the end of the day, it’s all about communication. I have a very specific definition of the word professional. It’s the 3P’s, Physical, Personal, and Professional excellence. Admittedly, I like it because it starts with P. It fits the pattern. I could say financial excellence, business excellence, or value excellence. Professional is a very specific word, very intentional to profess something. A profession of faith, belief, testimonial, value, or whatever.
There’s so much more to change the way we view business as how we make money or change our career. The way we view our career is how we make money. What are you professing every day through the work that you do? It’s important to change the way we view the business that we do or the career that we have. It’s not how we make money. It’s what we stand for in the world. It’s the profession of our faith, our belief and our identity.
I love that because the basics of being a professional, one of the things is showing up on time which we talked about at the beginning. What’s more than that because it’s energy of your passion that you profess your company in such a way that is not something you’re doing. It’s something bigger and there’s a bigger purpose behind it. Therefore, you’re able to profess your belief in it and that’s what is attractive to people.
[bctt tweet=”Say yes to success by saying no to everything that isn’t success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You could rate somebody’s career satisfaction by saying, “Is their profession consistent with their profession?”
Finally, the physical element of it. For those who aren’t able to see you in person, you obviously keep in great shape. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a musician, or an athlete, there is something to be said that your health is your biggest asset. Without it, you’re tying one hand behind your back. Any thoughts you have about the importance of sleep and exercise and all that to be successful?
When I draw the physical, personal, and professional excellence model on a piece of paper or a whiteboard, I draw it as concentric circles and physical is at the center. By the way, I always say them in that order, physical, personal professional from first to last. Money is the last indicator of healthy, sustainable, non-destructive growth. I personally believe it starts with the body. The body is the fuel cell. You cannot power a life, an engine, or a machine if you do not have a charged fuel cell. The way I look at it is, your physical is your fuel cell. It’s the energy source.
When energy projects from your life, what’s the first thing it hits? It hits the people right around you. Your points of impact, those are your personal relationships. I would argue, if you’ve got an energy that positively suffuses the people around you, do you even deserve to have a lot of professional success? If you’re saying, “No, I want my energy to skip my family. I want it to land in the market so I can make a lot of money. I don’t even want to have to have good, healthy energy. I’m going to neglect my body and my family. Hopefully, there’s this peripheral ring of professional, whatever that sends me a bunch of money.” That’s irresponsible. That contravenes the universal law of effort and value.
Millionaire Secrets
We need to stop taking shortcuts or trying. The shortcuts don’t exist, but they’ll work for a while and then they’ll call our bluff. We need to stop trying. Take care of your body and the people around you. Again, use the word deserve. The place that you serve from. If you’re serving from the right place, you’re professing something that’s aligned with who you are, you believe in, and it gives value to the world then you deserve professional rewards. That’s how I look at the world. I’m a simple person from the standpoint of when the going gets tough. I can only remember one thing. It’s easy to sit here, you and I can have this coffee shop talk, be intellectual, cerebral, and have all these great ideas.
I’ve got a bookshelf right here. I can pull a book off and read. If I’m in a firefight or if I’m $495,000 in debt, my ex-wife is leaving me, I’m stuck living in her parents’ house, and I have a month to try to figure out how I’m going to generate $40,000 or $50,000 a month or else, I’m going to lose everything. I’m going to have to end up in debtor’s prison or whatever. In those circumstances, when the stress has ratcheted it up, I’m not smart enough to remember all the fancy stuff. I got to have so simple heuristics that I can glom to. The three PS is at the center of my mental universe because it’s always there for me, physical, personal professional. Jeff, where are you faltering? You don’t have the money you want.
Are you taking care of the people you love you? Are you taking care of your health? There’s the problem. It always proceeds in that sequence for me. As far as an execution, there’s only 24 hours in the day. How do I get to have it all? By the way, this is a podcast so people can’t see this, but I’ll show you and you can speak to it. This is my schedule. People will say, how do I do it? I get up at 3:30. I do my morning routine. I practice piano for an hour. I go to the gym for 90 minutes. I have an hour of family morning and breakfast and take my daughter to the bus. It’s 8:00 and I start work. There’s no way around it. Get your butt up, do the work, and be balanced. Here’s the key, you say yes to success by saying no to everything that isn’t success. I got time to do that because I make no time for anything else.
I believe that you might have a free gift for the readers.
I absolutely do. I have an eBook that I wrote. It’s called The Millionaire Shortcut. I am privy to all the studies on human attention spans and how much they like to read long books so I didn’t write one. I wrote a very short book, very big print. It’s even got some pictures, and it’s twenty pages long. You can read it in fifteen minutes. It’ll teach you the fastest way to become successful in the new digital economy. You can get that at MillionaireSecrets.com/JohnL. It’s a special landing page we set up for this episode. I invite you to read it. On that page, you can also subscribe to my YouTube and listen to my show if you’d like.
Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your passion about how we need to show up for ourselves so we can show up for the family and then make the impact in the world that we want with our finances. It’s been great. Thank you for sharing that great eBook. I’m sure lots of people are going to take you up on learning that. I love your story from the discipline of the piano keyboard to the keyboard of your life at this point.
Thanks, John, for having me.
Important Links
- ENTRE Institute
- MillionaireSecrets.com/JohnL
- YouTube – Jeff Lerner
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
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Road To Revenue And Happiness With David Meltzer
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Pain is a turn signal, not a stop sign in your life. This is one mantra David Meltzer has always believed in his whole life. David is the Cofounder of Sports 1 Marketing and formerly served as CEO of the renowned Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment Agency, which was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire. Today on The Successful Pitch, he joins John Livesay to talk about his life mission to empower over one billion people to be happy. He also shares how you can be happy and successful without being pushy. Don’t miss this episode and be on the road to revenue and happiness.
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Listen to the podcast here
Road To Revenue And Happiness With David Meltzer
Our guest on the show is David Meltzer, who has many great takeaways for you about how to be happy and successful. He said, “Pain is a turn signal, not a stop sign in your life.” Also, he said that the secret to a great pitch is credibility. Read the wonderful stories he tells about how you can be happy and successful without being pushy. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is David Meltzer. He’s the Cofounder of Sports 1 Marketing, and formerly served as CEO of the renowned Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment Agency, which was the inspiration for the movie Jerry Maguire. I’m happy to have David on board. His life mission is to empower over one billion people to be happy. This simple yet powerful message has led him on an incredible journey to provide one thing, value. In all his content and communication, that’s exactly what you’ll receive. As part of that mission for the past many years, he’s been providing free weekly training to empower others to be happy. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m excited to be on a pitch show. I’ve done so much to help people share a vision and they neglect the pitch so much. I’ve executive produced Elevator Pitch with Entrepreneur the TV show. My TV show is called 2 Minute Drill, which is a two-minute pitch show on Bloomberg and Amazon. I do a Perfect Pitch on my free Friday training as well. It’s nice to have someone that understands the value of whether it’s a 1, 2 or 10-minute pitch.
That right off the get-go is a big value. You need to have variations of your pitch. Most people only have a ten-minute version. They don’t have a 2 or 1-minute version and they get completely overwhelmed. If your ten-minute version, it’s not the first minute of your pitch, it still has a beginning, middle, and end. Before we get into all your expertise around this, let’s go back to your own story of origin. I’m always fascinated to hear if you can go back to childhood, school, college, what was it that made you start your whole journey into business? I want to hear how you came up with your own personal mission statement because I think that’s important for people to realize the why of what you’re doing besides making money is crucial. Take us back as far as you want.
[bctt tweet=”‘Pain is the turn signal, not the stop sign in my life.'” username=”John_Livesay”]
My journey started with money. I wanted to be rich at five years old. My dad had left. Six kids and a single mom, a terrific mom. She worked two jobs as a second-grade teacher, packed her dinner in a paper bag, put us in the station wagon, and filled up the turnstiles at convenience stores with greeting cards. I said to myself, “Someday I’m going to be rich. I’m going to buy my mom a house and a car,” and that was going to make me successful. I wanted to be rich because the only time I wasn’t happy in my childhood was when there was financial stress. I’d catch my mom crying because we didn’t have enough money for food or a summer camp or the car broke down. There’s always something and it always revolved around money and so I believed that money bought happiness and love.
One advantage of that journey is that I was always looking at opportunities to make more money. Unlike a lot of kids, including my siblings whose parents tell them to be a doctor, lawyer, or failure, and they stay limited in their scope of what they’re supposed to do in life, I was completely open-minded because I wanted the highest paying gig. I used to tell people I’d shovel crap with my hands six days a week, twelve hours a day to buy my mom a house and a car. I didn’t care. I wanted to be rich. My journey led me through wanting to be a professional football player. I played football in college but got ran over by Christian Okoye, better known as the Nigerian Nightmare, AFC Player of the Year. That’s when I realized lying on my back, “Doctor, lawyer, failure.”
I thought I’d be rich being a doctor. That’s when my oldest brother who was a doctor gave me the best advice of my life. I told him I hated hospitals. He said, “Dave, you’re eighteen years old. What do you mean you hate hospitals? You’re pre-med. What are you talking about?” I said, “I want to be a sports doctor. They’re not in hospitals are they?” He goes, “David, you need to be more interested than interesting.” That became truly a perspective of mine. I no longer was going to be an interesting person. I was going to learn what I call, “Find the light, the love, the lessons, and everything.” Ask as many questions as I could, which ended up being a great tool not just in pitching, but in selling in general. You are an expert at selling and you know how important it is to be more interested than interesting.
Being Happy: The lens of gratitude will give you the ability to find enjoyment and the lesson in what you’re doing.
I went to law school instead, but while I was in law school, I kept my options open. I ended up with two job offers. One to be an oil and gas litigator, which is one of the highest paying jobs out of law school. I also had found a sales job in this new thing in 1992 called the internet. This new thing piqued my interest and I told my mom, “I’m thinking about taking the sales job. I’m not going to be a litigator.” My mom almost died. She is like, “You’re going to ruin your life. The internet is a fad. Don’t do it.” That’s the next lesson that I like to teach people. Just because somebody loves you doesn’t mean you get good advice. That helped me throughout my whole career. Voting for what you want, not seeking other people’s approval, knowing your own values, these are all tools not only in selling but in pitching in general. To understand what the objectives are, what your aligned values are in seeking advice from people who sit in a situation you want to be in. I took the sales job nine months out of law school, millionaire, bought my mom a house and a car, had a little bit left over to pay my loans.
Here’s the interesting thing. I graduated law school at 24, 25 in 1993. Everything I did reinforced that money bought love and happiness. I became the favorite child of my mom in my mind. 1995 came, we sold the company I worked for $3.4 billion to Thompson Oils. I then went to Silicon Valley and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the wireless proxy service space, the middleware space. I then became CEO of the world’s first smartphone. I worked with Microsoft. It was a Windows CE device. I worked with Samsung manufactured by them. I was a multimillionaire by 30. I married my dream girl from the fourth grade. Every single thing that I did reaffirmed that money buys love and happiness. That’s when the journey shifted because I then became the CEO of Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment. You’ve interviewed Leigh, the most notable sports agent in the world.
I surrounded myself with celebrities, athletes, entertainers, and I truly started to realize one thing, that I had moved from a world of not enough, where I was a victim. I was always looking at, “Why me? Why does John have that and not me? I’m as good.” I was a victim. I then became a millionaire and it was everything enough for me. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy things I didn’t need. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy more things I didn’t need. If I wasn’t happy, I’d buy different things I didn’t need. If I still wasn’t happy, I’d buy things to impress people that I didn’t like. This was not the best world to live in. It wasn’t a world of abundance. I was barely philanthropic. I gave to receive. Everything I did was to help other people, but I wanted something back. I wanted acknowledgment, recognition. I wanted some quid pro quo or trade. I wasn’t living in the world of more than enough.
[bctt tweet=”Be interested, not interesting.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s where my journey took me is I learned to shift the paradigm of value to understand, to receive so I can give. I talk about a world through me to others. I’m always looking from, what am I going to receive? How’s it going to come through me for others? I’m inspired, not motivated, to receive as much as I can. That value paradigm, that value shift, that transformation has helped me. I am a natural salesperson. One who oversold, backend sold, lied, manipulated, and cheated like a lot of salespeople in the name of commissions, territories, and quotas to somebody who provides more value than I receive. I guarantee more value in everything. I carry an energy of providing more value than I receive. That’s the context and basis for why I wanted to come on your show to share these ideas of how we can and truly make a lot of money, help a lot of people, have a lot of fun, create abundance for everyone, and to empower others to be happy.
There’s much to unpack there. Let’s start with the myth that it can be fun to make money. I think a lot of people think, “It’s going to be hard work, grit, pushing, and frustrating.” I think you are showing that is not the case when we come from a place of, “Am I having fun?” That is not mutually exclusive. The concept when we were growing up was you have fun on the weekends and at night, but not at work. Now that the whole wall has come down in a big way and the more fun you are to be with, the more people want to buy with you and hang with you.
I came up with this definition that aligns specifically with what you’re talking about. Instead of attaching my emotions to an outcome to the weekends, to the nights, I have shifted my emotions to enjoying the consistent every day, persistent without quitting, pursuit of my own potential, my own objectives, my own what tied to my own why. By doing so, I don’t believe in the word we’re working more, talk about a shift in the paradigm and perspective that people have. I believe there’s an activity you get paid for, an activity you don’t get paid for, and you should enjoy them equally. You should try to maximize the activity you get paid for that you enjoy more than the activity you don’t.
Being Happy: When we can be accountable as salespeople, we become empowered and in control of everything.
One of the things that you offer are these wonderful quotes on your Instagram account, which is @DavidMeltzer. The one that stands out for me, David, is “Be kind, not right.” Let me tell you why that resonates with me on two levels. One, from being in the traditional sales training, it was ABC, Always Be Closing. I shifted that to ABK, Always Be Kind to the way you talked to yourself so you can be that way to other people. That in a nutshell is a huge paradigm shift. You’ve taken not just be kind, you’ve added this premise of not right. I remember years ago someone saying to me, “The question for you is do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Since happiness is part of your branding as well, I’m completely thrilled to be able to ask you about this whole concept of happiness and choosing kindness over being right, and how that all connects for you.
It connects by the fifth daily practice. The most important daily practice that I have learned over all these years and that’s practicing ending fear. What I realize is we have primary and secondary fears. These are the interferences, the corrosion between us, that unbelievable source of light, love, lessons, and happiness that we’re connected to at all times. It’s the thing that creates resistance, voice, and shortages to the sales that we’re making in our pipeline and energy sucks that exist out there. What I realized was why don’t I have a practice to end the need to be right? I guarantee you, if you take the need to be right or the need to be offended which is closely attached to the need to be right, the need to be separate, inferior, superior, anxious, frustrated, worried, and angry, any of these, if you took the time, emotion, and money that you wasted trying to do these things, it wouldn’t matter how good of a salesperson you were.
You’d be a millionaire, a billionaire if you could get all that time back and harness it towards what you want. I decided what was the higher frequency over being right, over being separate, inferior, superior, offended, resentful, guilty, and all these feelings. It was happiness and kindness. It was a truth that was so much easier to have gratitude in my life. The pain would present itself as it always does when you live in an expansive world and you’re trying hard with what I call the Law of GOYA, Get Off Your Ass, like you and I, people who know how to be productive. We don’t sit around dreaming about what we want. We dream, but we go ahead and we take action to go get it.
[bctt tweet=”Find the light, the love, and the lessons in everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you look at the number, one, gratitude. The lens of gratitude will give you the ability to find enjoyment in what you’re doing. To find the lesson in what you’re doing. What it does is it says, “Pain, mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, financial pain, and pipeline pain which is no closing. You’re an indicator. You’re not a stop sign.” I’m not going to quit. You’re an indicator pushing me to something better. You’re teaching me a lesson. That pain is there to indicate I have a lesson to learn. It’s not a stop sign. It’s a turn signal that there’s a better way to go. A better situation to be in. Using gratitude, it allows pain to be a turn signal in my life. Leading then to forgiveness because if I have forgiveness, I can forgive others.
Most importantly in sales and pitching is accountability. Asking myself two questions, one, “What did I do to attract this to myself?” Two, “What am I supposed to learn from it?” I find the biggest detriment in salespeople’s careers is they lack accountability. They live in a world of blame, shame and justification. When we can be accountable as salespeople, we become empowered and in control of everything. The lessons keep on coming until we learn them, but they start coming bigger, better and faster. We become statistically more successful and productive as well as accessible to others. This is an extraordinary thing. The number one piece of advice is ignored by most people. People think that they have all these different things about a pitch that you should have.
The number one thing you can have in a pitch is credibility. If I was 100% credible, if I could attain 100% credibility, which I’ve never been able to do, maybe in my mom’s eyes. That’s because she thinks I’m better than I am, but 100% credibility, all I would have to do for a pitch is say, “John, wire me $1 million tomorrow and I will wire you back $2 million on Friday.” If I was 100% credible, you’d say, “Okay.” The difference is most people don’t realize when they’re pitching that the minute they diminish their credibility, dissolve their credibility, create overselling, backend selling, manipulating, lying, shortages, avoids obstacles, some sort of insecurity, of credibility, people start harnessing and focusing on that. You create many more obstacles for yourself because you exaggerated something.
Being Happy: Time, emotion, and value are the three reasons people change their minds.
I told you, I had the two TV shows, Elevator Pitch and 2 Minute Drill. This guy gets on, he’s pitching and goes, “Our revenue is up 300% this year.” In my mind, I’m like, “He’s an over-seller.” If his revenue was at all decent, he would have said, “We did $1 million last year. We’re at $3 million already this year, which is a 300% gain.” I’m thinking he did $1 last year. He’s tried to BS me and sell me on an accumulated number. All of a sudden, I wasn’t listening to him anymore. I was trying to pick holes in everything that he said. He had a credible company when I ended up vetting it after the pitch, but he would have lost me if it wasn’t a TV show. People do this all the time. If you’re going to have one takeaway on pitching from me, someone who’s done six episodes of Elevator Pitch, created Bloomberg TV’s new series, 2 Minute Drill. Be credible. Make sure to fine-tooth comb. Eliminate the negatives. Be honest. Don’t oversell, backend sell, manipulate, lie and cheat. You’re going to ruin your pitch no matter how long it is.
We’re certainly going to make that one of the tweets from the show. Credibility is the number one secret to a great pitch. The other tweet I love that you said is, “Pain is the turn signal in my life.” Let’s double-click on that and then we’ll get back to credibility. A big fear that causes the blame shame justification you were referring to that salespeople can fall into is the fear of rejection. I tell people, “You’ve got to stop rejecting yourself.” If someone says no to you, you go, “I must be bad or my product must be bad.”
You take it on personally as opposed to you saying, “That’s a signal, it’s not a stop sign.” That would be helpful for people whether you’re pitching to get a new job, get your startup funded, or get new clients, rejection is part of the journey. You’ve said, “I look at it as a turn signal even if that’s not working. Let me try something else.” As opposed to, “I’m going to give up.” What else do you think about rejection and how we can build up our tolerance especially as it relates to your sports experience? There’s a lot of pain involved in sports.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t sit around dreaming about what we want. Dream but take action to go get it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I have two rules when it comes to no. Number one is a perspective rule. I always tell myself, “I’m 25 noes from getting what I want.” What it does immediately in that framework is when you tell me no, I’m like, “Good.” When I’m at ten noes, I’m like, “All right.” I’m the only one that gets super excited after 24 noes because I know it’s coming. The idea of it is, I’m only many noes from getting what I want because I take the turn steering wheel strategy. I know that pain is indicating I have a lesson to learn. Every time someone tells me no, I have a lesson to learn. I love to learn because I’m more interested than interesting. That great line my brother told me at eighteen has changed my life because it allows me to find the light, love, and lessons, and know because I have an opportunity to grow, accelerate and expand because someone’s telling me no.
The second no rule that I have is interesting because people are made by the people that say no to you if you understand how no works. In the context of someone being interested in the follow-up context, when people waste time and they wonder, “I’ve called him eighteen times.” I say, “There’s a three-time closing rule.” You’ve got through the process. You’re calling for either a meeting or an order, something that has been agreed upon. The person says, “Sorry, I had a flat tire.” That’s one no to me. I’m accountable and honest to people. Even I who’s a student, my calendar, every once in a while I’d miss a call. Usually, it’s an important call that I missed. I don’t know how that happened, but if I miss it, I still count that as a no.
The third no is I love to shift the energy of it. I’ll always tell someone, “This is the right time, emotion or value I’ve been able to convey to you. I have a lot of other people who want to do business and meet with me or close. I’ll tell you what, please give me a call if you’re still interested in moving forward. If not, thank you for your time and consideration.” Fifty percent of the time the guy will call back and close, meet me, or do whatever. The other 50% of the time, I never hear back. Do you know what I say to myself? Think about how much time, emotion, energy, and money I saved. I especially as a younger salesperson who is an aggressive, hyper and persistent person, I would hit my head against the wall 50 times thinking I was doing myself a great service because I wasn’t quitting, instead I went from quitting to allowing the deal to happen.
Being Happy: Don’t hug people and make them feel good. Give them a profit and they will love you.
It’s a turn signal. I allow the deal to happen. I don’t make it or force it to happen. When you’re in that close, three times is enough to get a meeting. When someone’s already agreed on it and gave you a yes, there’s something there. If you allow it to happen, note time, emotion, and value are the three reasons people change their minds. Timing has changed. Their emotions on it have changed, or the value has changed. When someone tells you no, it means they have something more valuable to either spend their money, time or emotion on. That’s all it is. Be honest with yourself. You’re not the priority.
In addition to being an author, which we’ll talk about, you’re also a coveted speaker to major companies and talk about the value changing. It’s a great example to those of us who speak for a living or that’s a big part of our living. We’ve had to go from live events to virtual events. I’ve had the experience where a client will say, “You need to resell me on the value of your fee for it to be virtual versus in person.” Whether you’re a speaker or not, this whole exercise is valuable for everyone reading. How do we reframe value when something’s changed like this?
I take quantitative reasons you want me to speak, the quantitative impact you’d like me to have, and the quantitative capabilities that you’d like me to enhance in the readers. Whether I’m on a stage, in person, on Zoom, or whatever other platform you want to use, it’s all about quantifying the value. I’ll usually break it down to per person. I’ll say, “If I was here on stage, value-wise if I increase production 10% of 1,000 people, what’s the value of that? If I help your closing ratio, one extra sale per guy, if I’m able to have people show up on time. What is the value of people who are happier?” Happier people are proven to produce 41% more in a day if you’re happy than an unhappy worker.
[bctt tweet=”The number one thing you can have in a pitch is credibility.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I utilize open and closed-ended questions to say, “What are you doing today? Where are the quantitative reasons, impacts and capabilities? What do you like about it? What don’t you like about it?” Take out the fact that I’m not there in person. The fact that I’m not there in person, it’s only going to save you money. That’s the only difference between me being a person and me being here and also the capabilities of replay, rewinding, and a variety of other extra values I can bring virtually. What I have found is I am getting paid equal or greater to march of what I used to get in person. People are getting acclimated because I’ve been able to completely quantify. There’s a problem with selling called subjective value. The stage and the virtual stage is a perfect place to talk about it.
People love to feature and benefit dump. They love to be that purple dinosaur that’s a cartoon. We know him as Barney. Everybody knows the big purple dinosaur. I get frustrated when I see Barney sellers. I see it in speaking and authors. People who are overselling, backend selling, feature and benefit. They haven’t gotten to the nuts and bolts of, “Can you see any reason why you want to have me speak to you? I am guaranteeing to be a profit center for you. You may pay $50,000 for me, but I’m guaranteeing you’re going to make $100,000. Can you see any reason you will want to move forward?” A Barney seller, what they do when they speak, write books, consult, or do the things that you and I do is they hug you and they say, “I love you. You love me. Nobody makes any money.” Everybody feels good after you’re done speaking because you’re a Barney seller, like the meeting, you’re a Barney seller. Everybody is feeling great when you leave the pitch because you’re a Barney seller. You walk away and it doesn’t wear well. You’re not selling through the client where they’re going, “That’s life-changing.”
I do it in my executive coaching. I had a client right before the interview, all I did was give him the belief, the shift in the mindset and heart set that he’s charging too little. I have him ten times, he closed two people. Let’s say he was making $1,000 a client. I told him to ask for $10,000. I told him why and how to be a profit center at $10,000 to guarantee that the minimum they’ll make is $20,000 if they pay him $10,000 a month. Two closes where he would have made $2,000 a month for the year, which would equate to $24,000 each. He had a total gross of $48,000 that became $480,000. I said to him, “Can you see a reason you don’t want to pay me $20,000 a month? He has no reason. You can do that virtually on stage. People don’t do the work. They’re Barney sellers. Don’t hug people and make them feel good. Give them a profit. They will love you. You’ll sell through them. They’ll brag to everyone how much money they made from you.
Game-Time Decision Making: High-Scoring Business Strategies from the Biggest Names in Sports
I want to support what you said because if someone’s reading and they’re like, “What does that mean that don’t just give motivation or good vibes?” You need to be tangible. In my situation, I tell people, “I’m going to show you how to tell a case story and whoever tells the best story gets the yes.” If you’re up against competitors, no one’s telling a story and you’re the only one telling a story, that’s going to mean more money, “What’s the average sale? Do you get that? Do you understand their business that well?” One more piece of jewelry. One more airport renovation. Whatever it is they’re doing, you help them win that, then the ROI is great on having you come to speak because it’s not, “Here’s something that would be nice to have.” It’s like, “We’re tired of coming in second place. If you can help us solve that problem, then that’s worth much more money.” That’s another example of what you said in action for people who are still thinking, “How does this relate to me?” I completely support what you’re doing.
You live by it, which is why I wanted to come on your show. What I enjoy about watching your stuff and reading your stuff is that you are the exact same type of salesperson that I am. You create productivity, accessibility and gratitude. You have quantitative value in what you do. You’re able to articulate it in the way that people want to communicate because it’s not what we say as salespeople. It’s what they hear. If you know your stuff well enough to articulate a story that comes to a logical conclusion of, “Can you see any reason you won’t want to do that?” You know how to pitch and you know how to sell like John does.
Thank you, David. You wrote this wonderful book called Game-Time Decision Making. That taps into not only why you, but the why now part of any decision. You talked about time, emotion and value. We’ve talked a little bit about creating value and storytelling creates the emotion. We’re going to end on the importance of timing, how that ties into your book and your upcoming workshops that you do every week on Fridays.
The manmade construct in this vibration is time. Everybody has 24 hours a day, but the productivity, the accessibility within that time of being able to number one, align your values. Your personal non-negotiable values, your experiential values. You’re giving and receiving values to the concept of time. Asking is related to time. If you understand time, you should understand the exponentiality of saying, “Do you know anyone that can help me? How can I be of service or value?” Understanding how time equates to that profit center and the exponentiality of growth, of growing exponentially by asking each person, “Do you know someone that can help me in person, on the phone, email, or media?” When we were young, most people had their card game, their golf group, and their church group. Nowadays on average, some guy you meet on the bus stop has 1,000 people in their network.
If you’re not asking, “Do you know what it can help me?” you’re cutting off your legs. Studying time is paying attention to and giving intention to the coincidence as you want with your time, the activity you get paid for the activity you don’t. Remember, that’s the mathematical equation of luck. Attention plus intention equals coincidence. Another thing about time is do it now. One hundred percent of the things you do now get done. The difference between successful people and others is successful people get stuff done. Ask yourself, “Could I do it now? If not, put it in your calendar to schedule for tomorrow and study that.” Finally, the practice of ending fear, utilizing your time, not to accelerate in the wrong direction, not to create resistance, avoid shortages and obstacles in your life, but to stop, drop and roll when you’re in an accelerated ego-based emotion, like the need to be right.
Kindness will take you back to the center and allow you to roll towards statistical success. More people in your pipeline. More people pitch correctly. More value is provided. More sales are made. More commissions are made to give to others so you can make more money, help more people and have more fun. Time is that manmade construct that you have to work within in order to effectuate that last world, to tie everything together. No more living in a world of, “To me, victimized and not enough.” No more living and buying things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like in the world of enough for me, but utilizing time, you can live as an instant between limitlessness and infinity in the world of more than enough. More than enough of everything for everyone.
When you’re selling and pitching from an abundant attitude that it’s not going to cost you anything, but we’re going to create value between the two of us that there’s more than enough of value for everyone. It’s because I take doesn’t mean you lose. It’s because you lose doesn’t mean I take. Everybody wins in the world of abundance. That’s where we need to pitch from with credibility and emotional judgment. Quantify the reasons, impacts, and capability from a world of more than enough. That’s what you do, John. We hit it off the first minute we ever spoke, we knew a lot of people in the same circles, but you started telling me what you do. I said, “This guy gets it. I’ve got to do more stuff with him.”
If you want more of David and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you want more? For the weekly training, you can go to his website at DMeltzer.com/training. Some of the episodes talk about creating a habit machine, learning to love what you do, and health, happiness and profitability. You walk your talk. The fact that you’re giving this training for free is such a gift to the whole community. I want to thank you on behalf of everyone reading for that. I want to encourage everyone to get this, because why would you not? David, any last thoughts or comments you want to leave us with?
Be kind to your future self and do good deeds. You can always email me at [email protected]. John, thank you for having me on.
Thanks for joining us.
Important Links
- David Meltzer
- Sports 1 Marketing
- Leigh Steinberg – Past episode
- @DavidMeltzer – Instagram
- Game-Time Decision Making
- https://DMeltzer.com/training/
- [email protected]
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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