Transcription

Today we got a really cool interview with Danielle Brooks. We’re going to be talking about the hero’s journey of a Healthpreneur because what Danielle is going to share with you is a condensed version of 20 years of ups and downs of crap hitting the fan, of good stuff that’s come from that, and it’s going to give you some really good perspective on what is involved in building a successful business.

That’s part of my mission with this podcast is to pull back the curtains and remind you that building a successful business is not easy. Yes, let’s set the intention for ease and facility and everything running as smooth as possible, but let’s also understand that it’s not always going to be easy, right? They’re going to be times where they’re challenged in a very big way.

Do you just give up and call it a day or do you keep on going? I really believe the reason why most businesses fail is because most businesses are not run by entrepreneurs. What I mean by that is they are not run by people who understand what it takes to be successful in business. So I think this episode will really give you some really cool perspective and wisdom and I think you’ll really enjoy it.

Danielle is the author of, “Good Decisions.” Most of the time she’s a nutritional therapist, a clinical herbalist, and the founder of a very successful wellness clinic called Lake Washington Wellness.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Danielle onto the show and let’s jump right into it. Danielle, welcome to The Healthpreneur Podcast. How is it going?

Danielle Brooks:               It’s going great. Thanks for having me.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You’re very welcome and thank you for being here. I’m excited to jump in and share our listeners about your journey because like with so many amazing entrepreneurs, the journey is so special and I think is really what makes us unique and powerful. I think in terms of inspiration for other people, you’ve been in business for two and a half decades. You’ve been through some ups and downs, talk to us about how that all got started and how you went from where it all began to where you are today.

 

Her mother’s parting words and how they impacted her

Danielle Brooks:               Wow. Well, you know, let’s see. My journey started 24 years ago. I would say that the thing that really put the fire in my belly was when I was young, when I was 15 years old, my parents got divorced. When I turned 17, my mom left. She fell in love with a man who lived across the country. I was on my own and the last words that she said to me before she left were, “You will never make it on your own, you’re too irresponsible, you’ll never make it.” I remember at that point going, “You know what, I will show you. Oh, you don’t even know.” It was kind of like one of those moments of, you know, no, I’m not going to let that define me. Now, keep in mind that I was young and just out of high school when I started and my grade point average was 1.7 and my major was marijuana 101.

When I made the decision, so at first it was like, okay, well I had to make a living so I got a job working at a grocery store during the day. Then I was waiting tables at night and I knew that this was just not what I wanted my life to be like. I made the decision to go back to school and at that time I had to take a placement test. When I went in and I took the placement test, the gal who was giving me the results, she basically looked at me and she kind of shook her head as if to say, you know what, honey, you are so dumb you need to start back off at IDO 75 intro to fractions. I was devastated. I went home and I cried and I picked physical therapy.

I wanted to go into physical therapy at the time. Then I thought to myself, you know what, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this. I went back and I took IDO 75 and then I took 90 and then 100 and I worked my way up and I ended up getting a 4.0 in all of my prerequisite works classes for physical therapy, including physics one, two, and three.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice, that’s awesome.

Danielle Brooks:               The first lessons I would say is, you know, as a young entrepreneur, don’t believe those who tell you that you can’t and don’t listen to those people. There’s really only one person that you need in the whole world to believe in you and that is you. The second lesson from that I would say is you don’t need to have a degree or a 4.0 or you don’t need to be this really wicked smart Yale student to start your own business. You really don’t.

Yuri Elkaim:                         A lot of people, especially in the health space think that they have to have the letters after their name, the certifications, and a lot of time that holds them back from moving forward because they don’t think they’re good enough or they can’t charge enough or they don’t have the expertise to help someone with respect to their health. Other than sharing your own journey, if you’re speaking with someone like this, what advice would you give to that person?

 

Gaining confidence and excitement through experience

Danielle Brooks:               You know, I went through that, you know, after I graduated I still didn’t feel like I was good enough. I went through all of that and then I would say, when you go to see someone who is going to give you a surgery, let’s say that you need surgery and you have two choices, you can choose to go see the surgeon who has got 20 years of schooling, all of the degrees and all of the certifications. Or you can choose to see a surgeon who doesn’t have all of that but has been doing the surgery for 20 years. Which one would you choose?

Yuri Elkaim:                         I will go for the experienced, personally.

Danielle Brooks:               Right. I would say don’t worry about it, don’t worry about the degrees, the only thing that’s going to really give you that feeling of confidence in what you’re doing is to actually get in there and to actually do it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s so true. We talk a lot about fear versus courage and I think a lot of people want certainty before they jump into anything and it’s like listen, nothing in life is certain. You’re not going to have certainty of a healthy baby when you get pregnant yet we do it all the time. Right. I think it’s so important for entrepreneurs to not only get this because if you’re coaching clients or getting people to enroll in a specific program you have to offer, they too are going to be going through that same type of fear. They have to have the courage to step into the unknown and to work with you. I think we have to lead by example to take that risk to believe, as you said, believe in ourselves. That’s the big thing. When people want certainty of an outcome, what that tells me is they don’t believe in themselves.

Danielle Brooks:               I would add to that, see if you can swap out fear for excitement because I remember after I graduated, so I didn’t get into the physical therapy program when I applied to it, but I was working at a physical therapy clinic at the time and they said, “You know, Dani, you’re really good with your hands. You should open up your own massage thing. You should go to school and open up your own massage … ” I’m like, well, I can’t, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to run a business. You know, the group of PT as well said, “Yeah, sure you can.” And so I did. The fear that was there when I did it, when I graduated and I started the business, and back then we were doing everything on 13 columns. I mean it was like paper and the HIPAA claims that we were sending out were all paper claims.

Every single time when I looked back at doing it, I was like, wow, that wasn’t so bad. I would say when you have fear, when you graduate or you’re working with your first client and that fear starts to well up in your belly and the thinking mind starts going on about, “Oh, who am I to do this? And I really don’t know what I’m doing.” I would say swap that out for feelings of excitement and say, “You know what? I’m excited and I’m ready for what’s next.” Because when you can swap out fear, because it’s the same thing when you’re excited, you get that pit in your belly and your pulse goes up and your heartbeat elevates and you just get excited. I would say through all the years that I’ve gone through, starting and stopping and starting and stopping and facing fear and moving through fear every single time I looked back and it wasn’t as bad as I thought that it was.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s great. We always want that hindsight, right? But the only way to have the hindsight is to go through it in the first place to have that experience and that wisdom. For you, what is a moment in your journey where you thought yourself, “Shit, this is a really bad mistake or this is a bad move.” Something that you know, maybe cost you in some way reputation-wise or money-wise, a mistake you have made and what did you learn from that?

 

The initial business mistakes Danielle made and how she fixed them

Danielle Brooks:               Well, when I first started the wellness center and I was hiring people to work for me, I would interview people who were so much more talented than I was. At first, I shied away from that because my ego was really strong and that cost me because the people who I hired who were not as good as I was, the wellness center suffered. Once I learned of, “Gosh, Dani, get over your ego and hire this amazing person,” then my business began to thrive because I had people who were more talented than I was. When I began to do that, that’s when the clinic started to take off. I would say it costs me when my ego got in the way and I would say that it really rewarded me when I started hiring people who are better than me. I don’t mean like better than me but more talented, that had that expertise.

Another thing that I would say is that cost me is over the years, once I got to the point where the wellness center was doing really well and I’d hired a business manager to come in to take care of everything for me, the billing, the bookkeeping, the insurance claims and all the stuff that makes you want to poke your eye out with a fork. That would be another lesson that I would say is hire out your weaknesses. I got lazy. I got to the point where I have that work life balance and I got to the point where I was traveling and I was taking advantage of all that freedom and I let the business go. Then healthcare reform hit and back in 2016 when everything started getting implemented so we were primarily 90% orthopedic rehab clinic, and insurance billing and doctor’s referrals was our mainstay.

When health reform hit, our reimbursements decreased and the cost for getting authorizations increased. I wasn’t fully present for that and I found myself in a position where the wellness center was really going down and our line of credit was maxed out and I had to just be really quick and shuck and jive. I made the decision to rebrand the company and transition to a cash-based wellness center. I would say that would be another lesson is don’t take your eye off the ball. When you find that work life balance, it’s really easy to enjoy that and take advantage of that but nobody takes care of your business like you do. That would be a piece of advice that I would give.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. One of our clients posted a really cool piece and I can’t remember where … This is from The New York Times or something about leadership and one of them was the ideal … So you got four quadrants.  The one end you got vision at the top and then strategy on the right. Ideally a really strong leader has like zero compromise on their vision, but they’re flexible on their strategy and on the flip side you got to have a strong vision, but if you’re fixated on your strategy, you can very quickly go out of business. In your case, you kind of demonstrated how you had a pivot from that insurance-based model to more cash-based because of the climate, the economy, the whole political setup that changed around that which was a smart move otherwise I’m sure there’s a lot of businesses that may have gone out of business or were really affected by that.

I just wanted to kind of bring that up. The other thing you mentioned about hiring I think is a great wind up about hiring people that are better than you. Again, not necessarily as human beings, but just better in the role than you would be doing that. That’s a big thing I think for a lot of people to get their head around. You mentioned ego getting in the way. I also think that a lot of people try to cut corners by spending the least amount for work, so they want someone to do a task for $10 an hour and then they get $10 an hour results and then they complain about it and go back and forth trying to fix the issues instead of hiring someone maybe that’s $50 an hour, whatever it might be, who’s actually very proficient at doing that.

What do you recommend if someone is bootstrapping their way like most of us have? Bootstrapping their business and maybe cashflow isn’t quite what they want it to be the higher, like a really, really kick ass business manager or operations person or any kind of team member.

 

Relationships as a key factor for growth and success and how to hire

Danielle Brooks:               Well, first off I would say start with relationships. When I first started my practice, I was right there. I had no money, I had no funds, I had no resources, but I had a group of physical therapists that believed in me and I was working in a medical building at the time and I knew a couple of the MDs in the office. I would say build your relationships, find people within your community and again, get your ego out of the way or that fear of not being good enough or whatever it is that comes up for you about building that relationship or connecting with people. Move through that because once I got one doctor that was referring to me and I respected that doctor and so they would send us a referral and then we would treat the individual and then we would send out a progress report so that the doctor was the gatekeeper.

We never disrespected the doctor and we always kept them in the loop and that really built trust within that relationship. Now I went out and I met with other physical therapy clinics and I met with chiropractors and I met with other physicians. I literally got in my car, drove to their clinics and try to set up a meeting with them to say, “Hey, this is who I am and this is what I’m doing.” I did have a couple of meetings where, you know, I met with a couple of doctors and they kind of looked down their nose at me and gave me that whole, “Who are you?” You’re just a massage therapist and those were the doctors that I didn’t build the relationships with.

I would say, if you don’t have the funds, build the relationships because those will increase your referral base. Then as you’re increasing your referral base, if you hire somebody that you can afford to pay. Let’s say that you want somebody in the clinic that’s going to just really kick ass, but you can’t afford them. Hire somebody who’s passionate and motivated and train them, show them the ropes. Bring them into the clinic and create that company culture that makes people want to be there and people will come. People will come. You will get there.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s awesome. That’s really good advice. Two options. You have groom people to where you want them to be, it takes a little bit longer, but that’s a great strategy or you just hire out right from the top of the pool. Two great options for you guys. Dani, I know we’re pressed for time today unfortunately, but I want to jump into the rapid five if that’s okay for you.

 

The Rapid Five

Danielle Brooks:               Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There’s four or five really good nuggets I’ve already picked out in this conversation. Hopefully, you guys listening have as well. As you know, these are a surprise. You don’t know what these questions are unless you’ve listened to the podcast before and then in which case you would know them, but anyways. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer.

Danielle Brooks:               Okay, I’m ready.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Number one is, what is your biggest weakness?

Danielle Brooks:               My biggest weakness, self-doubt or social media.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Which they feed each other, right? They feed each other.

Danielle Brooks:               Right. Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally, yeah. Number two. What’s your biggest strength?

Danielle Brooks:               Biggest strength, I would say creating company culture and tenacity.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice. Yeah, that’s huge. That’s good and I think that’s how you get people to stick with you for a long time where you don’t have the turnover or you don’t have to worry about hiring new people because someone just left because you’re a Nazi of a boss. Right?

Danielle Brooks:               Right. It makes life so much more enjoyable. You go into the office and it’s family, it’s beautiful.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Number three, what’s the one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Danielle Brooks:               Skill, relationships.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice.

Danielle Brooks:               Yeah. I would say relationships.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Number four. What do you do first thing in the morning?

Danielle Brooks:               Wallow in bed.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I mean, we don’t need to go that far if you don’t want.

Danielle Brooks:               I love being in bed. The first thing that I do is really just really enjoy being in bed with my soft sheets. Then it just depends. Sometimes I’ll meditate, sometimes I’ll work out. It depends. I follow my intuition, but I’d say the first thing that I do in the morning when I wake up is just really enjoy being in bed.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. Finally, complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when …

Danielle Brooks:               I know I’m being successful when someone going through my good decisions online course is at peace with food and their body and I can make a donation to my global cause.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. That’s great. There you go guys. Danielle Brooks, thank you so much for being with us today. It’s been abbreviated but nonetheless really, really packed full of wisdom and I’m really excited to have you join us at Healthpreneur Live, which is going to be great. We’re going to hang out and have lots of fun. What is the best place for our listeners to follow your work online?

Danielle Brooks:               Well, they can follow the wellness center at lakewashingtonwellness.com. They can also pick up my book, “Good Decisions Most of the Time: Because Life Is Too Short Not to Eat Chocolate,” on Amazon. They can follow me on my website gooddecisions.com.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. There you go guys. We’ll be sure to link up to that in the show notes as well for you all and Dani once again, thank you so much for being with us today.

Danielle Brooks:               Oh, thanks for having me, Yuri. It’s been fun.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You’re welcome.

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I hope you enjoyed that one. I know it was a shorter briefer one today. We both had a bit of a tight schedule to meet, but I wanted to get that in and really share that journey with you so I hope you enjoyed it, I hope it inspired you.

If you want to connect with Danielle, she’s actually going to be at Healthpreneur Live. She’s going to be joining us in Scottsdale, September 20th to 23rd. Will you be joining us? If not, well, that’s unfortunate, but if you’re still on the fence, then I want to push you over the fence and urge you to check out the event.

See if it’s a good fit for you. Head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/live. That’s the event page. On the event page, you’re going to see everything that is involved.

You’ll see the speakers, you’ll see the dates, you’ll see all that stuff. It’s a by invitation by application event only. Okay? We don’t just allow anyone in because we want to make sure that it’s a curated, vetted events. We only allow 150 health entrepreneurs into the event and there’s a very specific reason for that because we want to create as magical experience as possible for everyone. Once you’re on the page, click the red button that says, request an invitation. Fill out the questions on the following page, submit that page and we’ll get that information and we’ll follow up with you within one to two days at the latest. Healthpreneur Live is a very unique events. We had 110 people last year’s event. Almost all of them said it was the best event they’ve ever been to.

The nice thing is that we have a really good mix of very successful people in the room and people who are still just getting things started and the reason I want to bring both groups of people together because I’m not, I mean I’m a big believer in you are who you surround yourself with. We do a very careful job of selecting the right people to be in the room. I’ve been to events where there’s a lot of ego, right? There’s a lot of egos, “Okay, I’m a speaker. I’m going to be in the green room and then when I do my talk, I’m gone.” And then you’ve got little cliques forming of people who’ve been around for a while and they kind of ignore everyone else like they’re too cool for school, and that’s not what this event is all about. See, our event is about inclusiveness and if you’re at the events whether you’re a speaker or not, everyone is on the same playing field.

For instance, the speakers we have this year, you know, Carey Peters, the founder of Health Coach Institute, or Shannon Graham who’s been on the podcast. Dr. Stephen Cabral who’s one of my mastermind members and just an amazing, amazing, smart, smart naturopathic doctor. We’ve got some amazing speakers, but they’re also going to be sitting in the crowd in the audience during when they’re not speaking, right? They’re not too cool for school. They’re hanging out there, might be sitting right beside you and quite honestly, we have a lot of people that are like, “Hey, I’d love to speak at your event.” I tell them, “Listen, our event is not about fire hosing information from stage.” The vast majority of learning happens peer to peer. We’re going to spend a lot of time during breaks.

We know we’ve got 30 to 45 minute breaks, a lot of round table discussions, a lot of peer to peer learning where you are teaching what’s working for you, you’re learning from what other people are doing. That’s what makes this event so special and so unique is that it’s not a top down approach of saying, “Hey, here are these experts you have to learn from.” Yes, you might be sitting beside one expert or several experts who are crushing their business and you’ll be befriending them, getting to know them, having lunch with them, having dinner with them, and that’s what this event is all about. The reason we put this together is because there’s just such a big gap in the marketplace.

There’s a need for this as most events keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and in personal, we want to stay small, intimate and more personal to give you that connection to great people but also big ideas and inspiration to take your mindset and your business to the next level. Space is running out. I mean we’re just over a month away and we have to finalize our numbers. Our cutoff date basically for the hotel and the venue is August 31st, right? So obviously we only have another two weeks or so before we have to finalize everything. We do have a couple spaces left if you want one. If you want a spot, head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/live.

I guarantee this will be a three day experience you’ll remember for a long time to come and it’ll be well worth the investment of your time, of your energy, and obviously just from being there with us it’s just a very special experience. So with that said, I want to thank you once again for tuning in.

Head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/live, request for invitation for annual events. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Follow Danielle Brooks. At:

https://lakewashingtonwellness.com/

https://gooddecisions.com/

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Transcription

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today, I’ve got a really great guest on with me. He’s a buddy of mine who’s one of the original gangsters. He’s been online way back since probably actually before I even started. I think he’s been online since the early 2000s. His name is Jason Ferruggia, also known as Jay Ferruggia. He is a fitness and lifestyle consultant with over 20 years of professional experience, working with athletes, celebrities, military personnel, and entrepreneurs. Since 1994, he’s helped thousands of people transform their bodies and change their lives. He’s been featured in Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health, Muscle and Fitness, MMA Sports Maximum Fitness, ESPN, and a whole bunch of other places.

Again, he’s experienced a lot of success online. What we’re going to be talking about today is the truth about success, and really understanding the difference between what he’s recognized over the years, the difference between success and fulfillment as it pertains to building a business online.

Jay and I have both been through a very similar journey. I think you’re going to get a lot of value out of this. This is a  wisdom rich episode. Sit tight, don’t go anywhere, grab a green juice, grab a sip of water. If you’re in the car or walking your dog, or doing something else, then buckle down. This is going to be a good one.

Without any further ado, let’s welcome Jay Ferruggia to the show. Jay, what’s up, buddy? Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast.

Jason Ferruggia:                Thanks for having me, Yuri; appreciate it.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Great to have you here, my friends. You’ve got an amazing podcast yourself. Guys, if you are not listening to, what is it?

Jason Ferruggia:                Renegade Radio, Renegade Radio.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Renegade Radio, that’s right. I was thinking of Kevin Gianni. I don’t even know. Renegade Radio, amazing podcast. I’ve been fortunate enough to be on the show. You’ve got an amazing, amazing following. You’re just a good dude, and you’ve got a shaved head like I do, so that’s awesome.

Jason Ferruggia:                Thanks, bro.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, for sure. Let’s jump into today’s topic of conversation, which is this whole notion of achievements versus fulfillment; something you love speaking about. Let’s talk about how all this came about for you.

 

Jay’s personal journey, awakening, and how he built true success

Jason Ferruggia:                I’d say for the first 35 to 38 years of my life I grew up kind of in fear of a lot of things based on my early days and my parents, and what not; which that could be a whole nother hour talk. It led to me being insecure, and shy, and just scared to come out of my shell and do things. I built up this wall, and this kind of façade of I got to get bigger, and stronger.

No one in my family weighs more than 150 pounds, but then I got up to like nearly 230. It was just really this suit of armor that I was hiding behind; hiding behind the tattoos, and the angry guy kind of personality, and stuff like that, and the rebellious guy. I thought I was happy, so I never worked on myself. I buried myself in work, because that’s what we do in our culture. Everyone prides themself on, ‘I’m always grinding. I’m hustling. I’m working.‘

I did that, and despite my issues, I was successful. I built up a really successful business, got in a bunch of magazines, successful online. But, by what definition of success? I was making a lot of money, but I was still never happy. I was always angry. I was still the same guy. I was just this big insecure socially awkward guy who had no close relationships, wouldn’t let people in, didn’t know how to connect, didn’t know how to communicate.

Finally, I just realized seven years ago I had to get out of Jersey, because I kind of had this awakening. I realized that, that environment triggers behaviors. Some people can make those changes where they are. I just wasn’t strong enough at the time. I heard something from Henry Rollins talking about, ‘Get out and reinvent yourself,’ and you should always do that. I was like, ‘You know what? I got to get out of here. There’s too much baggage, and too much connection to my past, and too many people that are bringing me down like crabs in a bucket.’

I moved out to the west coast, and I started to dig deeper on what really would make me happy. I’ve heard Tony Robbins talk about it, achievement versus fulfillment. I was making that mistake, so I was just trying to get bigger, stronger, and make a lot of money. Every time I did any of those things, I was never happier. I kind of just looked at the people that were living the life I wanted. I was like, ‘Man, some of these guys aren’t making half the money I am. They’re not obsessed with training the way I am, but they’re super fulfilled, and they’re happy, and they have great relationships.’

I was like, ‘I got to shift my focus for while. Business can go on the back burner.’ Learning about it, and obsessing about it, reading all these business books. Same thing with training. Let me start reading books about human nature, and psychology, and just being better at these things that are holding me back, and let me get around those people who are good at that so I can learn by osmosis. The cliché of the five people you spend the most time with, get around those kind of people and observe them. Okay, they do this. They do that. How can I start to push myself out of my comfort zone to be better with people, and to communicate more effectively?

That’s the most important thing in life. It’s your people skills. It’s not your technical skills. In this case, we’re talking to help entrepreneurs, so it’s not necessarily how much you know about macros, or periodization, or back squats. That all helps. You have to be really good at your craft, sure. It’s not your sales and marketing techniques. Again, that’s good. You need to get people in the door to teach them what you know about macros, but at the end of the day, it’s people skills. That’s the most important thing. When you develop those people skills, for me and everyone I’ve worked with, it just helps you to have much more meaningful connection. That’s what people are missing. Everyone wants connection. We all want community. We’re tribal beings.

I could just ramble on and on, but basically by focusing on that, my life dramatically changed.

 

Habits to live a fulfilled life, improve personally, and be present

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. No, that’s awesome. For you, going from very focused on business, to now getting more perspective connection and relationships; what are some habits or practices that maybe you still adopt, or you started to adopt to start to really build those relationships in a meaningful way? What were some of the initial,  general lifestyle practices that helped you get more fulfillment outside of just making money?

Jason Ferruggia:                It was like, again, I was focused so much on myself. I had to shift from an internal focus to an external focus. When I woke up every day, instead of what can I get? What could I give? Muhammad Ali said service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth. I was just too much all about myself. Even though I’m training people, and they’re getting scholarships and stuff like that, it was still just me, me, me; if I’m really being honest with myself.

Instead of how much more money can I make? How can I fix my problems? Just how many people can I engage today? How many people can I make smile? Who can I help? Then, I studied conversational skills,  started to talk about myself less, and listen more. We’re never taught that. We’re never taught those things in school, how to be a better listener. I just made it my number one priority, because I was awful at it. I would read books about it. Like I said, I would study it.

They always say the number one characteristic of successful people is they make other people feel important. I found that every time I was reading these types of books, they would always use stories about Bill Clinton, and Oprah, and Arnold. I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know Arnold well. I wouldn’t say ‘well,’ but better, over the years.  When he first started getting back into fitness a few years back, I was one of the first five people he contacted to write for the site, and to be an advisor. I was lucky enough to get invited to a couple of his movie release parties, and what not. Just to be around him, and to see the way he does it; it’s such a gift. He makes people feel so good. He actually came up to Jenn and I, my wife and I, at the bar at one of these movie release parties.

He’s like, “You gotta try the margaritas here.” That in itself was awesome, that I had this little exchange with someone I idolized growing up. Six months later, we’re at another movie release party. Imagine how many people Arnold has encountered and interacted with during that time. Comes up to Jenn at the bar; this is after he’s working the political set, and the fitness set. He’s talking to Stallone.

He comes up, and he says, “You got to try the chocolate martinis here. Remember, I never steer you wrong on drink recommendations.”

I was like, “Oh my god,” like my head exploded. I was like, “Wow, that is special. That’s more important anything.” That’s the kind of stuff I really want to pay attention to, and work on; and just being present. I always consciously am the guy who looks at my phone less than anybody else. I think so many people go through life, or at least I did, not aware of my body language. Like, what does my body language show? What is my face showing? Do I pause and show that I absorbed something when someone says it, or am I just the guy waiting to talk, and jumping in, and interrupting people?

All these small things that I think people overlook so much. Then, because I was timid and shy, I learned that science has proven that if you speak in a strong, kind of strong voice, and use strong body language, and strong gestures, all of these things will make you feel more confident. Then, that just changes the way people perceive you. I would just track this stuff, like almost like you would track PRs at the gym. At the end of the day, review in my journal, ‘Okay, how many compliments did I give today? How many questions did I ask people to start a conversation?’ At first, it was really hard. It sounds crazy. It was really hard to do, and I just continually just worked to get better, and better, and better.

I found that things like role playing, for example. If that’s not who I am now, maybe I’ll go out and say, ‘Okay, I’m as charismatic as the Rock when I walk into this room.’ Or, maybe you make it more relatable, like, ‘I’m as charismatic, and engaging, and as entertaining as my buddy Mike when I walk into the room.’ I would do all these things, like anything I could think of. I would use visualization. We use this for sports, why not for that?

Before I would go to a social event, a party, a meeting, a workshop, I’d go, ‘Okay, I got 35 years of going into these things, sitting in the corner, barely talking, being standoffish. Now, how do I want to visualize myself? I’m going to be smiling. I’m going to see in my mind and feel how my posture is going to be. I’m going to engage people. I’m going to make other people smile.’ Over time, it just becomes who you are. You just continue to push yourself out there. It becomes more and more natural. Now it’s funny. Again, I could go on with tactics and ideas for hours, but it’s funny nowadays people know me as the super connector. I have friends who are celebrities and pro wrestlers, and athletes. They’ll say, ‘hey, you gotta meet Jay. He knows everybody, he knows everybody. He knows somebody who can do that for you. He knows somebody who can connect you,’ or whatever.

Some of the situations and scenarios I’m in nowadays, I honestly can’t even believe; but man, I put a lot of work into it. It just doesn’t happen, right? I think we know for our business, we got to work every day. We know that to take your squat from 135 to 315, you gotta squat. So many people don’t focus on this type of stuff. Like, ‘Oh, that’s just who I am.’ You write that narrative in your head, ‘Oh, I’m just quiet and socially awkward. I have no friends. Whatever.’ You’re not going to get better at it if you don’t prioritize it, and work on it all the time. It changes your life so much.

My business is better now than it’s ever been. I have coaching clients who are making significantly more money than they ever were, but it’s really just because of this. We’ve barely even tweaked their business plan that much. That’s the thing, you can give people the best business plan in the world, just like you can give them the best diet or workout plan. Until you fix what’s in your head and what’s in your heart, and address some of these issues, it’s all useless anyway. You’re going to sabotage it anyway.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s right. That’s why I like being an entrepreneur is, I believe, one of the best spiritual journeys you can go on. Your business is a direct byproduct of your personal growth.

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

 

How Jay manages relationships and leads

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s amazing to see when you compare our journeys to like an employee’s journey, it’s a very, very different trajectory, I think, for … in a lot of cases. I want to ask you about building relationships, and really emphasizing that; because you have an amazing podcast. You’ve been doing the podcast for like, what a decade probably now?

Jason Ferruggia:                No. No, not that long.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Really?

Jason Ferruggia:                But I appreciate that it feels like that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It seems like a lot. For me, for instance, I love podcasting because I love having conversations like this. For you, was having your podcast maybe a subconscious way of starting to develop those relationships? Above and beyond the podcast, what are some things that you do to show people that you care, to build those relationships, to say, ‘ Here are the things that I do to help people know that I care about them, that I treasure what we’ve built.’ What are some of the things that you’ve done to help that process?

Jason Ferruggia:                Yuri, it was actually more of a conscious decision. It wasn’t even unconscious. I knew that having the podcast could help me have these conversations, and build more relationships. What I’ll do for example is, with the podcastspecifically, when I know someone’s coming over to do the podcast, I have the rest of the day blocked off free because I know when they get here, we’re going to hang out, have coffee, talk for 45 minutes. We’re going to record for an hour or two. Then afterwards, I want to be totally open if they say, ‘Hey, you want to go train?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘Want to go eat dinner?’ ‘Yup.’ ‘Want to go chill out and just go to the beach?’ ‘Yup.’ Whatever they want to do, I’m going to spend the next four hours with them, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that where I just spend the entire day with someone who’s a guest; and we hit it off.

Then, what I’ll do no matter who I meet, is I have a rule. Within 48 hours, they’re always going to get a follow-up from me. I always tell people, ‘Take the reins.’ The ball is always in your court. Never let someone else do this, because people won’t  do it. They’re quote unquote “too busy”, or just they won’t do it. People just aren’t great at this. I don’t give out business cards. I don’t give out my number. I get their number. I get their email, all that. Within 48 hours, they’re going to get a text message. They’re maybe going to get an audio message, maybe a video message, an email; whatever it is. I’m going to also within 48 hours, if appropriate, if it’s forced and it’s weird, I’m not going to do it, but if it makes sense, I’m going to connect them with at least one to two other people. I’m always going to set the time, especially if it’s somebody local. I’m lucky enough to live  right around LA, so often times, great guests are local.

I’ll say, “Hey.” We record on a Tuesday. I’ll get their info, and I’ll say, “All right, let’s meet up Friday at Bulletproof Coffee at 11,” and I’ll just lock it down. You can’t be vague. You can’t wait for other people to do it. Always take the responsibility. Now that’s what I do. It’s funny, my wife jokes around that I’m an event planner, because I’m just constantly planning stuff. I do it for all my friends now. I’m constantly telling people, ‘Hey, I’m getting Pearl Jam tickets for this date. We’re going.’ ‘Hey, we’re going to go to Montana, are you free this week? Let’s get it booked this week.’ ‘We’re going to go to the comedy store, our favorite guys are there on Wednesday. Let’s go.’ I constantly do that stuff, and just push myself.

A lot of people will be like, ‘Well, nobody ever calls me,’ and that was me for years. ‘Oh, nobody ever calls me. Nobody asks me to do anything. All my friends are jerks,’ or, ‘People don’t like me.’ That’s not the case. You’re just telling yourself that story. People will thank you if you start to do all this stuff. It makes their life easier. Now, you could say, ‘Well, you’re busy, too.’ Yeah, I’m busy, too, but I prioritize that because I realize how important it is. Those are just a few of the things, and just … I think just taking the reins and always following up is crucial.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, I so get it. You’re essentially stepping into a leadership role in a bigger way. It’s like you’re taking responsibility for the fact that you think this is something important. It’s not going to happen magically by itself. I think people appreciate that because there’s a whole paradox of choice and overwhelm. It’s like, ‘Hey what do you want to do tonight?’ ‘I don’t know, what do you want to do?’

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         If you make the choice for them, it’s like going to a restaurant and the restaurant has one option for dinner. It’s very freeing. I think people appreciate that, which is awesome. I think it’s like, if you’ve got kids, or even with your clients, people are turning to you as the leader. It’s like take the reins, lead by example; just show them the path, and commit to those relationships. I think it’s really awesome.

Jason Ferruggia:                Well, you brought up such a great point there. It’s just another way. You said it: it’s another way for you to become a better leader.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Jason Ferruggia:                It sounds kind of crazy and trivial, but I always tell guys, ‘Hey, you want to become a better leader? When you’re out with your friends and you’re at O’Brien’s, and you’re going to go to the next bar, don’t be the guy that’s just, ‘I don’t care. Where do you want to go? Where do you want to go?’ Say, ‘Hey, we’re going down the street to this place. We’re going here. We’re doing this.’ Any opportunity you have to stand up and practice your leadership skills, do it. If you’re somewhere, if you’re at an improve show, and people say, ‘Hey, does anyone want to come up on stage.’ Jump up. Do it. Just be the leader all the time.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, absolutely. Yeah, I mean again, people appreciate that.  I think a lot of people podcast and they miss the boat. They think it’s a 30 minute interview, and then it’s done. It’s like, no, you have someone, like in your case, in your place or in your house.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         What an opportunity to start a relationship, right? Or further that relationship. I think so many people just want to get some cool person on the show. Then it’s like, ‘Okay, we’ll email you in a couple weeks when it’s live, and you can send us your followers.’ It’s like no, you guys missed the boat on this big time.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, totally. It’s funny, we have parties all the time. A great book to read on this is ‘Never Eat Alone,’ by Keith Ferrazzi. He talks about getting people together that you don’t know. We have parties quite a bit. At a recent one we had for, I don’t know if it was UFC or something. My friend says to me.

He goes, “Dude, look around this room. It’s absolutely crazy, like the level of pro athletes, and wrestlers, and entrepreneurs, and authors, and multi-millionaires, and they’re all here ’cause of you.” I kind of got emotional, because I can’t tell you how many nights I spent through my teens and 20s where I hung out along. There was no one around. For me, it’s a fantasy just to have that. The funny thing is, I’d say 70% of those people were guests on the podcast, and that’s how I got to know them, you know?

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup. Yeah, in Toronto, very much like LA, there’s a huge hub of people in our space, and entrepreneurs. I started this trend about a year and a half ago. I call them ‘wine and shines.’ I’d say every four months or so, I’d just invite people that I don’t know who are doing some cool stuff in our space, over to my house for some cocktails, wine, some h’orderves. We just kind of hang out and talk personal stuff, business stuff, just get to know each other. There’s something magical that happens when someone enters into your front door.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, yup.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You’re welcoming them into your home. It’s almost like vampires have to be invited into a house, right?

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         If there’s something special that happens there. Because we started online around the same time, we’re kind of like internet dinosaurs. I think back in the day, the whole promise was like come online, hide behind your computer, put out some eBooks and never talk to anyone ever again. I think a lot of us found that attractive because we got so sick and tired of training clients in person, that we realized, ‘Fuck this is miserable.’

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I really think there’s a huge swing that’s happening culturally now. The more digital we get, the more people are craving this intimate type of relationship. Not like sexual, but just actual connection with humans. Are you finding that as well, like in your space, the people that you surround yourself with either online or offline, that this is. Have you seen kind of a similar type of trend with, in your surroundings?

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, I agree with you. For me, definitely, it’s so funny because like you said, I was cracking up. I used to love that, to be able to make a bunch of money online and not go out or not talk to people.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Jason Ferruggia:                But now, it’s the bane of my existence. I can’t get off the computer fast enough. That’s because I feel like to discover this superpower late in life that I love being around people, and I love connecting. I’ll do it for free all day. I spend a lot of my time. I’m not even saying this to brag, but just how great it is and how more people should do it. My friends reach out to me, ‘Hey, can you help me with this thing, or that thing?’ ‘Yeah, absolutely. Let’s meet in an hour. I’ll be right there.’ I just love being out and amongst people. It just makes you feel so good to give back, and to help people. I do see that from so many other friends, too; from colleagues and what not where they’re pushing. They’re doing more live event stuff, and just getting off of the … Like you said, like it was, I don’t know 15 years ago, or whatever.

Yuri Elkaim:                         They get back from a social media blitz, or they’re online typing up some sales copy. They come out like on fire compared to actually like going to events and hanging out with people.

Jason Ferruggia:                Right, yeah.

 

Building a fulfilling business, managing technology, and picking that one thing

Yuri Elkaim:                         What advice do we give to, let’s say people in our space who are either starting their business online, or they’re looking to grow their existing one. From your years and all the wisdom you’ve acquired, what advice do you give to them to build a business that is successful, but also gives them a deep level of fulfillment in the process?

Jason Ferruggia:                There’s so many questions I think you should ask yourself,  what would you do if money was no object? Would you do this for free? So many people would say, ‘Oh well, this specific niche is untapped. It’s going to make a lot of money.’ Well, do you love it? Are you going to do it every day for free? What would you go down the street and help someone for free at the gym, or at the coffee shop, or whatever, forever? Be sure it’s something you’re really passionate about, or if money was no object, you’d still do.

I think that’s the most important thing. What really lights you up?  One school of thought says you should speak to a super specific niche, paint the avatar. Okay, it’s a 38 year old guy who lives here and does that. I do believe that’s good advice for when you’re starting out. You should probably do that and solve a problem, and ideally a problem in your own life.

Like okay, I don’t have time for workouts, so you create 15 minute workouts. Whatever, I’m just using a super easy example. Solve a problem in your own life. Make sure it’s useful to other people. Also, a business idea has to be something not only you’re passionate about, that you can monetize, and that you can be really good at, and stand out, and be exceptional at.

With those three things, I think it’s good advice in the beginning to speak to that super specific target niche audience. As you get out there and grow, and get bigger, and you think bigger, I think that’s a little limiting. I think that’s where I’m going with that; is that is a little bit limiting. I think too many people think small and limit their self, so ‘Okay, I can only talk to 45 year old golfers.’ Okay, maybe, and you could certainly make millions doing that; but I like to think bigger. I like to think to myself, if I was able to do what Jay Z and the Rock do, so I’m not going to speak to you at an ultra specific niche. If I hire some business coaches, they might say, ‘Dude, you’re going too broad right now. You’re casting too wide of a net.’

Yeah, okay. I get that. If I was starting out, maybe; but I think that’s too limiting as you gain more confidence, and you get better at what you’re doing. Just as long as you’re trying to help, you got a good product, good service, something you’d do forever; I think you can’t go wrong.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Cool. Good advice, I like it. Talk about social media, because you’ve got a presence on social media. You talked about like not being on your phone all day. How do you navigate social media? What is a day in the life of Jay look like, social media-wise?

Jason Ferruggia:                I’m not the best at it. I know mutual friends of ours would yell at me and say, ‘You gotta step it up a little.’ I just prioritize people and real life experiences so much that I’m willing to sacrifice some of my reach, and some of the amount of money I can make. Most of my friends would tell you … All of my friends would tell you, they’ve never seen my phone out at a dinner or lunch table.

I don’t document as much as I should. Some days I’ll get gung ho on it. I’ll talk to one of our mutual friends who’s really good at it. I’ll do it for a little bit. Then I’m like, ‘I miss some amazing conversations. This is annoying me. I really don’t want to do this.’ I’m not the best at it.  The only thing I have in my phone, I don’t know if anyone even uses Twitter anymore, but I’ll have Facebook on my phone. I don’t have email on my phone. I have Instagram on my phone, and I log in and log out twice a day. I’ll log in, post some stuff, like some friends’ stuff, comment a little, interact, support some people, respond to comments, and then I’ll log back out so I can’t go back in until later.

I post at least once a day on Instagram, and then I just … I know it’s not ideal, but I select a little thing and post it automatically to Facebook. I refuse to go on Facebook. That’s how I do it. I focus more on the podcast, for reaching people. Honestly, email still works great. I can get up in the morning and pump out an email in 15, 30 minutes. That works more effectively, actually.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s cool. I agree with you. I don’t have email, Facebook, or Instagram, or that thing called Twitter, on my phone. I don’t do any of that stuff, because I recognize for me, my personality is if I start, I’ve caught myself on occasions scrolling through a Facebook newsfeed on my phone for 30 minutes.

Jason Ferruggia:                Oh yeah, easy. Yeah, for sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I’m like, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ I really believe that environments trumps willpower, at least in my case.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         I’m like if I know this is my tendency, I’m going to get it off my phone and figure out another system to make this work somehow. It’s tricky because there obviously are ways to monetize social. There are ways to really add value.  We’ve got mutual friends that are posting Instagram stories like every second of the day. It’s like, is that the life you want to live? I personally don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have my phone around when my kids are with me. I want to be present. I think for me, the big distinction was I stopped caring about Instagram when I started feeling like I had to take pictures of everything I was eating.

Just live your life. I don’t need to document every single part of it. I understand that some people, it works for them, and that sort of the thing. I think it goes back to what you said. Identify what you love to do, what is it that’s important to you? What is it that’s just a time suck or an energy suck? Spend more time on the former.

Jason Ferruggia:                I don’t know about you, but if I’m around people … If we’re out doing something fun, and they’re Instagram story-ing the whole fucking experience, I want to lose my mind and say, ‘Whoa, why’d I even come hang out with you? Put your phone away.’

Yuri Elkaim:                         Seriously. It’s like a celebrity moment for them, almost. It’s like they have to document it because it’s cool, and their followers who probably don’t even know who they are, are not going to be interested.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, I mean I get it if we’re hanging out for four hours, and you want to post two things. If you’re documenting the whole thing. ‘Oh, here’s our appetizer. Oh, now we’re going bowling. Now we’re going to this bar.’ Dude, come on.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, I know. It’s too much.

Jason Ferruggia:                Once in a while, it’s okay; but when it’s your whole thing, I think it’s a little much.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally, and that’s the irony. We feel, or a lot of people feel they have to do this for whatever reason so people like them; who they don’t even know, instead of actually being present with the people in their presence.

Jason Ferruggia:                You and I grew up … I think we’re close to the same age. There’s plenty of people who made a lot of money and had a lot of impact that didn’t have to do any of that stuff. I still think there’s something to have a little bit of that mystique, and being more exclusive, and reducing frequency, and stuff like that. I get that social media gurus are telling you, you have to be in front of people 24/7. I don’t agree with that. We went, I don’t know how many years without all that, and people still were pretty successful.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup. I’m sure there’s people that are doing great with classified ads in the newspaper still.

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         That’s the tough part about this day and age. It’s like everyone thinks they have to be on this, and this, and this, and this, and this. It’s like, shit; like you don’t have to do all that stuff. For everything you think you should be doing, there’s someone else who’s not doing that, who’s crushing it, and is laying in a hammock right now and just enjoying life, or whatever it is they’re doing.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, and you hit on a great point there. I think that’s great advice for someone starting their business, or who’s struggling and looking to grow their business. Do one thing. Just what you say.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup.

Jason Ferruggia:                Don’t try to do all different forms of social media, and have a blog, and a podcast, and a YouTube channel. Pick one thing that really … that you like to do. If you like to write, and everyone says, ‘Oh no, you have to podcast.’ Don’t podcast, just write. There’s always going to be written word from now until eternity. There will always be books. There will always be blogs, and whatever. Do that, and do really well at that. That was all I did for years is I would get up every day and write a minimum of 500 words. That’s largely responsible for the success I have today.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Jason Ferruggia:                If you just want to do YouTube, that’s your thing. Do YouTube videos, two to five days a week, and don’t worry about anything else. Then, if you want to chop them up for Instagram, cool. Do that one thing. Do one thing in business. In 2018, instead of being the guy who gives you workouts, nutrition, lifestyle, this, that, and the other thing; maybe be an expert at one thing. Like Jason Phillips has this nutrition coaching certification, and some guys just do kettle bell stuff. I think you’re going to have a much better chance of standing out if you just do one thing. Eventually, once that one thing is crushing, maybe you can move on to a second thing, and then maybe a third thing. If you try to have those two and three things at once, forget about it. You’re going to buried. You’re always going to be stressed out. You’re always going to have anxiety off the charts. You’re really never going to get anywhere.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, I call it the underwear drawer; which means if we have cabinets of stuff, what is the drawer you want to occupy in your market’s mind? I am the underwear drawer. I am the sock drawer.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah, yeah. Yup. All I did for literally like the first 12 or 15 years of my career was I talked about how to get bigger, stronger, faster; so just work out. I don’t think I mentioned nutrition once for the first ten years. I did it through a blog, that was it. Nothing else.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yup, absolutely. I do believe folks on the one thing is huge. It is I think the most dangerous question you can ask someone, or have someone ask you is what’s new and exciting?

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s a dangerous question because we think that we have to always be doing new things and exciting things; but honestly, I feel so much happier answering that question by nothing is new and exciting. It’s the same old boring goodness.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah. That’s so funny because dude, that’s crazy that you said that. I had a bunch of people this weekend, I was at an event with 500 plus people. A bunch of people asked me that question. I basically gave your answer.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah.

Jason Ferruggia:                I was like second guessing. I was like, ‘Should I be giving them a different answer?’ But that’s really true, you know?

Yuri Elkaim:                         It’s a sign of wisdom. For all that’s listening, not only do we have the same hairstyle, but we also have the same level of sageness and wisdom.

Jason Ferruggia:                Right.

The Rapid Five

Yuri Elkaim:                         This has been a lot of fun, Jay. Let’s move into the rapid five; you ready?

Jason Ferruggia:                Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         All right, man. Five rapid fire questions, whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer.

Jason Ferruggia:                Is this just like a one word answer, or you want me to elaborate?

Yuri Elkaim:                         You can quickly elaborate if you need to.

Jason Ferruggia:                All right, sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Whatever’s most suitable.

Jason Ferruggia:                Sure.

Yuri Elkaim:                         First question is what is your biggest weakness?

Jason Ferruggia:                I think it’s still thinking … It’s still going against the advice I just gave. It’s still thinking that I’m more super human than I am, and I could take on too many things. I always have to be reminded, that’s why I re-read the book, ‘The One thing’ and ‘Essentialism,’ all the time. I have to be reminded of what I just told you, and that’s why I think we all have to have accountability, and coaches, and things in place to remind us of that. I can get suckered into it just like anybody else. This is a huge opportunity, and I could probably be pretty good at it. Then once I start I’m like, ‘Fuck, I gotta get out of this.’

Yuri Elkaim:                         Totally. Number two, other than improv and stand up comedy, what is your biggest strength?

Jason Ferruggia:                Just building relationships and connecting with people.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Nice. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve had to become very good at in order to grow your business?

Jason Ferruggia:                Listening.

Yuri Elkaim:                         There should be a course on public listening.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yup.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Instead of public speaking.

Jason Ferruggia:                There should. Yeah. No, I agree. That’s a great idea, because we’re never taught that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah. All right, maybe we should work on that. We’ll see.

Jason Ferruggia:                Yeah.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Yeah, we’ll just get off course and we’ll work on something else. … Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Jason Ferruggia:                Do you want the whole … I’ll give a quick run down. I get up. I put on a hot water, which I drink with lemon. While I’m doing that, brush my teeth and all that. I will then … Sorry, first I meditate for five minutes. I used to meditate for 30 minutes, and that became overwhelming, so I meditate for five minutes; put on the hot water with lemon. Then, I read. I’ll either read something that was written over a thousand years ago first thing in the morning. I’ll just read one passage of that. I write in my gratitude journal. Then, I eat, and then I get into my most important task of the day, and then I get out, hopefully within an hour of being awake. I get out, and get sunlight, and movement by taking a walk with Bronx.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome, love it. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when.

Jason Ferruggia:                I know I’m being successful when I’m making people feel good, making them smile, making them laugh, introducing them, connecting. That’s a large part of my life. A lot of the time I spend out with friends just connecting, and focusing on other people, and complimenting them. Like if that was my epitaph, like that was my one line on my tombstone; ‘Here lies Jay, he made people feel better,’ I’d be very happy with that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome, love it. Jay, this has been a lot of fun chatting, shooting the breeze, hopefully giving our listeners some things to think about. First and foremost, I want to acknowledge you for everything you’ve done for our industry over the past … decade and a half. Obviously, you’re one of the original gangsters doing some amazing work and serving a lot of people. I just want to acknowledge you for that, and for who the person you are. Like honestly, you’re a great dude. It’s just great to see your evolution, and I just want to acknowledge you for that.

Jason Ferruggia:                Thanks so much, brother. I really appreciate that.

Yuri Elkaim:                         You’re welcome. What is the best place for our listeners to stay in touch with you, or follow your work online, or listen to your podcast?

Jason Ferruggia:                If you just go to Jay.Fit, that’s my main site. You can find everything on there, J-A-Y dot fit. Then, RenegadeRadioPodcast.com.

Yuri Elkaim:                         Awesome. All right guys, listen in. It’s a great podcast. Jay’s got tons of awesome stuff, so follow him online. Stalk him in a healthy way. I hope you guys have enjoyed this one.

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Healthpreneur Live

All right, so I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did. Jay is a great guy, a great friend, and doing some awesome stuff in the space.

I want to leave you with one call to action today.

The reason for this is because time is of the essence. We have our annual event, Healthpreneur Live, taking place September 20th to 23rd in Scottsdale, Arizona. Tickets are almost sold out. We only allow 150 people to join us. It’s by invitation or application only.

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for any amount of time and you enjoy what I’m bringing you, and if you’re enjoying these guests; many of these guests you will be able to meet in person. Most importantly, you’ll be able to connect with 150 other health and fitness entrepreneurs doing great things in their businesses. We’re talking about coaches, authors, practitioners, naturopaths, dieticians; like the whole gamut. We’re coming together. We do this once a year, and it’s our big family gathering. The reason why we limit it to 150 people is because I believe in scaling by going deeper and not wider.

A lot of other events, there’s no shortage of events. They keep getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. It’s like a pissing contest. ‘Hey yeah, I’ve got a thousand people at this one. We have so many cool speakers.’ Ours, there’s no ego. There’s 150 amazing people from people kind of getting things going with their business to businesses doing eight figures, and everywhere in between. There’s no ego. The speakers who are on stage will also be sitting beside you for three days at your table. There’s no, ‘Here are the speakers. Here’s the VIP section.’ Everybody who comes to our event is considered a VIP, whether you’re a speaker or not. Everyone’s on the same playing field. That’s just the environment that we create so that everyone can just let their guard down, and really connect on a deeper level. I just found there’s just so much ego and BS at so many different events, where you have like little cliques forming of people who are more successful, and then others are like beginners are over there. This is not about that.

If you want to connect with myself at a deeper level, with other amazing entrepreneurs in our space at a deeper level, then this is the event you need to be at. We’ve talked about this, how you cannot grow a successful business in isolation. Almost all of our guests have said one of the things that they wish they had done sooner was start going to events and connecting with other people, and hiring a mentor sooner. I can’t overemphasize how important that is. You have to be connected with the right people. You have to be in environments that are going to lift you up and raise your momentum. They’re going to raise your energy, because that energy and that momentum’s going to last you for months after the events. It’s going to help you create the things you want to create in your business with a lot more facility.

If you want to join us, here’s where you got to go: HealthpreneurGroup.com/Live.  Do that right now. Do not finish what you’re doing, if you’re walking your dog, if you’re driving your car, pull over, put it in park. Take out your phone, type it into the browser. When you land on the page, you’re going to see a red button that says ‘request an invitation.’ Click that button, fill out the questions that are on the next page, and submit. Once I get that, we will review it. We’ll get back to you within 24 to 48 hours to make sure all is good. If we have any further questions, we can have a quick chat about your application.

That’s what I’d like you to do right now. If you’re on your desktop, on your computer, just get it done; because again, space is limited. We want to make sure that we have given you enough time to think through this, to look at the option for attending. I’m telling you, this is an event that you will remember for a long time to come. We have some amazing business relationships that I didn’t even know about that happened last year’s event. I was actually at dinner; I’ll just give you an example. I was at dinner a couple weeks ago with a friend, with a number of friends for a bachelor party. One of the people there was actually at the event.

He was telling me like, “Dude, this was the best event I’ve ever been to, and I would love to come this year but I’m going to be in Columbia for a month.”

I said, “Why are you going to Columbia?”

He’s like, “Well, I connected with two of the guys at the event from last year,” and they started shooting a bunch of YouTube videos together. This is back in already, just after that event. One of those videos went viral on YouTube. It now has millions of views. It’s generated so much business for the respected businesses. I never even knew about this. This is just what’s possible. I mean I don’t even know the things that might happen when you bring amazing people into the room, but that is what is possible if you’re in the right place.

Again, if you’re new to the podcast, and you’re interested in the event after you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while and you want to check it out; now is the time to take action. HealthpreneurGroup.com/Live. Do that now and I’ll see you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Hey, hey, what’s going on? Welcome back to the show. Yuri here with you once again, and I’ve got a really exciting solo round to share with you.

I was just in Alaska for a seven day cruise with my wife, left the kids at home, well not technically at home, we left them with my wife’s parents. They had a good week at their house with the pool and doing all that fun summer stuff.

My wife and I got a chance to get away, which is the first time I think in about three, three and a half years, that we were able to take a bit of a trip together which was really nice, without the kids, obviously.

What I want to share with you here are two big lessons that I came back from that trip with, with respect to our business and I think these will really, hopefully resonate with you.

This is really funny because a couple of years ago I took a two month sabbatical, so no work at all for two months, no emails, nothing, and the lessons from that sabbatical are very similar to the lessons I got from this trip.

 

My trip to Alaska and the lessons I learned

If you’ve never been to Alaska, if you’ve never taken an Alaskan cruise, I highly recommend it. It is breathtaking, it’s amazing, it’s tough to even capture on camera, so I’ll start with that.

So let’s jump into this and give you a bit of context.

Now, with that said, if you’ve ever been on a cruise, you know that most cruise ships don’t have really good internet service and if they do offer internet, it’s ridiculously expensive. So I just said, “You know what? I’m not even going to use the wi-fi. I’m not going to get online and if I need to, I’ll just quickly check in when we’re at port and I can jump on to the internet on land.”

Disconnecting while your business runs itself

So the nice thing is that for about a week or so, I had minimal to no access to the internet and thus my business. Obviously I prepared my team ahead of time and they knew pretty much what to do anyways. So here’s the funny thing, and I’ve noticed this every single time I do something like this, is the less I’m connected to my business, the better off it does.

We actually had one of our best weeks during that cruise and there’s no better feeling than being able to take off, not being plugged in, having a system and people in place to make things happen, without you having to be there in its presence, and that’s one of the biggest lessons I want to share with you and one of the things I’ve seen a handful of times over the past couple of years.

Every single time I’ve stepped away from my business, for a trip, for a sabbatical, for anything, it’s always done better. So why does that happen?

Energy, attraction, and tending to ourselves for optimal results

Your guess is as good as mine, but what I really think happens here is that at an energetic level what was happening is that I was in a space where I was simply detached from the outcome of having to control things on a day to day basis, or get stuff done.

I was enjoying experiences that simply raised my energy, raised my vibration if you will, and because we attract what we focus on and what we attract is really dependent upon the level of energy and vibration and feeling good that we’re feeling and exhibiting at any given moment, it just makes sense to do things that put you in that type of state.

Now I know that might sound a bit ethereal, spiritual whatever, whether or not you believe it, it doesn’t matter because it simply is the way it works — it’s the way the universe works.

A lot of people say, “Well I focus on what I want and I don’t believe in the law of attraction because I focus on certain things and I’ve got the other things come into my life,” and what I would say to that is that you’re probably not even consciously aware of the fact that you’re focusing on what you don’t have and as a result of that, you’re getting more of what you don’t want.

I’ll create some more episodes on that topic a little bit later, but the key here is that we as the owner, as the driver of this train which is our business, our sole objective … I shouldn’t say sole but our primary objective is to feel good because when we feel good, everything just happens with so much more ease. I talk about this, getting yourself to the right state, whether that’s through exercise or meditation, or different experiences, and not being so obsessed with making stuff happen in your business.

I’m not saying that you don’t have to do the work because there is obviously a time where you have to do the work, but we have to be able to step back and allow things to just unfold, very much like planting seeds and allowing them to turn into flowers.  You can’t over water the flowers, you’re going to kill them. You can’t speed up the way grass grows by overlooking the grass and staring at it, or drenching it in water. Nature has a natural course for everything that happens in the world and a lot of times, and I’m guilty of this probably more than anyone that I can think of is, we try to force the issue.

We try to make things happen faster than they’re naturally supposed to. We can’t.

We have to be okay with stepping back sometimes and tending to our own garden, which is internally in our mind, in our energy, in our vibration, however you want to define it, and I believe that is one of the biggest reasons why we had such a great week was that I’m in Alaska and I’m hiking in the mountains, on this glacier, doing all sorts of cool stuff and not really worrying about day to day stuff, and so I think it was a really, really powerful lesson that I want to share with you, so that’s the first one.

Lesson from a glacier: Seeing the big picture and getting perspective

The second one is, we were in Juneau, Alaska, and we had scheduled a helicopter tour up to a glacier, and then we did a trek on a glacier, it was unbelievable. If you’ve never been on a glacier, think of it like this. Think of it like lava running from the top of a volcano down to the coast, but it’s ice. So it’s essentially a river of ice and it eventually outlets into some type of lake or ocean, or whatever, depending on where it’s situated.

So we went to this one glacier called, I think it was like the Mendenhall glacier, or something, in Juneau so we got … think of it, you’ve got a couple of mountains and then in between, in the valley, you have this pouring … obviously doesn’t look like it’s pouring because it’s kind of fixed in stone although it moves a couple of feet every day. So we’re on this glacier and it’s immense, it’s absolutely incredible. So we’re taking a helicopter ride up to this glacier, we land on it, it’s like we’re on the moon, not that I’ve eve been there but just the landscape is incredible, it’s so unique.

It was like a skating rink so we had to have crampons on and there was all these crevices and we drank glacier water, it was awesome, it was so fresh and so clean, just took a water bottle and grabbed a little stream coming down, filled it up, it was so pure. There were crevices that dropped 1,000 feet into the abyss because of what nature was doing, because the water’s flowing through and just over time this water’s penetrating and penetrating this ice, and the ice from a glacier is so dense that it’s blue.

So we have really cool pictures of this deep blue, crystal-like ice and it’s so dense that it doesn’t even melt and if you were to bite on it, you’d probably break your teeth. So it’s really, really cool stuff. Anyways, so the whole lesson from this experience was we’re on a glacier walking around, and it is so immense that you can’t even appreciate how big it is when you’re in the sky. As soon as we land, we start walking around, we’re like, “Oh my goodness, this thing is huge.” What looked like little valleys, or little fault lines when we were in the helicopter were just huge, huge crevices, and what seemed like mini mountains on the glacier, and folds and all sorts of stuff.

So the lesson here is this, is that when we’re too close to our business, when we’re too close to something, we can’t see the forest for the trees. When we’re staring at the bark, we have no clue about what’s around it, so it was really interesting to be immersed on the glacier, in the glacier, and then taking the helicopter back out of the glacier and having that perspective. It’s something I talk a lot about is working more on your business than in your business, because when you’re working in your business, you’re in the helicopter, you’re looking down at the glacier and you have the perspective.

When we’re on the glacier, we’re working in our business and it’s a very, very daunting task to try to figure out the best way forward or what to do next when we’re in the trenches, because you don’t have the perspective. You can’t see the bigger picture but when you’re in the helicopter you’re like, “Okay yeah, we’ll just go this way and then we go that way and watch out for this because this drops over here.” Sadly, because of, I think, this world of entrepreneurship being so focused on grind and hustle and work, work, work, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on setting things up properly so you can step back from your business and really observe what’s going on. Doing things intelligently than almost having to work all the time.

So those are two big lessons that I pulled away from our trip. There’s many more but those are two of the ones that I wanted to share with you. So the take home message here is that you want to set up your business in a way where you have the freedom to step away from it. Not necessarily for ever, but for a couple of days or a half a day at a time, or a week vacation, whatever it is you want to do, so that you have the space to recharge, to focus on what’s important, to get some perspective and not always be working away in your business.

Setting up your business so you have the space and freedom to recharge

I think if you are able to set that up properly, that’s really where we feel satisfied in business, I don’t think a lot of people … a lot of people we help, obviously, we’re helping our clients achieve three things, more impact, more income, more freedom.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean lay on a beach for ever, freedom might just be doing more of the things in your business that you love doing and less of the things that you don’t enjoy doing. When you love what you’re doing, you don’t really need to take weeks at a time off of your business. If you want to, that’s great, but I think a lot of times, we’re looking for an escape because we hate the things we’re doing in our business.

So you want to set your business up to win, you want to set your business up in a way where you enjoy what you’re doing and to have the freedom, because of the systems you’ve built, to be able to step away. To be able to go on a cruise, or go somewhere else, or take a day off and not have to worry about in the back of your mind, “Oh my God, because I’m not working, is stuff going to happen?” I think that’s a place that all of us want to get to as entrepreneurs, because if we don’t get there, then we don’t have a business, we have a job.

If the business is dependent upon you all the time, you have to set up systems properly to be able to move yourself out of that.

So with that said, if you want help with that, and doing things properly so that you have got a perspective on your business, setting up your business in a way that works mostly for you instead of you working for it all the time, then I would strongly recommend you attend our 7-Figure Health Business Blueprint training, it is awesome.

We actually had just a lady this morning who said that she watched this training three times. It’s a 75 ish minute training, she’s watched it three times because it resonated with her so deeply and there’s new insights that she was picking up each time. So watch it, it will really, really give you some ah has and some insights and it’ll show you our business model. It’ll show you, it’ll give you a very simple breakdown of how we run our business and how we help our clients run theirs and it’s just smarter than most people are doing.

So you can attend for free, there’s no charge. You can go over to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. So you want to write that down, or if you’re on your phone, just type it in.

I would strongly recommend watching it from a desktop, so you just get a better experience and obviously there’s less distractions, I guess.

So check it out, healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

Do that today, you deserve it, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your business to really be doing things that are going to move the needle in a smarter way and that is all for today’s episode.

Thank you so much for joining me. Hope this episode has inspired you and I look forward to speaking with you on Wednesday.

Transcription

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the show. Today I’m excited to be speaking with a long-time friend. He’s one of the first guys I met when I started online. We were in a mastermind group back in 2010. It was my first mastermind group. That’s initially how we met.

His name is Ian Hart. At the time, he had an amazing back pain solution program, which he still has. I was dealing with some back issues from deadlifts. He walked me through this program, and it was incredible what it did for my back. Ever since then, I just had a great affinity for his work.

Anyways, I’m excited to have him on the show today because we’ve lost touch a little bit, and it’s always great to reconnect with people that I hold in high-esteem and are doing great things. I’ll give you a bit of background as to who Ian Hart is. This episode is all about the journey that so many of us go through. I think you’ll be able to relate to Ian because Ian and I are very similar in this. We’ve very type A, go-go-go, and that easily leads to burnout.

He’s going to share how he went from burn out to burn out, then figured things out. Have you ever found yourself spinning your wheels, overtired, or just feeling like you’ve run yourself into the ground? We’ll talk about how to come out of all that. If that’s something you want to get out of, or you’re hoping not to even get into that, you’ll discover some wisdom and some nuances that’ll help you prevent that. This interview will help you in a big way.

With that said, Ian Hart is the creator of EarthFIT Training Systems, which is on pace to do 1.5 million in 2018. He is the co-creator and founder of Back Pain Relief 4 Life and mybackpaincoach.com with sales in over a hundred countries. He’s been featured in Men’s Health Magazine as an expert trainer. He’s been in OK! Magazine, Shape Magazine, CBS, Fox Morning, all those other awesome places as well.

He’s also the owner of a luxury tree house in the middle of the Costa Rican jungle in a world-famous tree house off-the-grid community called Finca Bella Vista where he hosts transformational retreats for the body, mind, and the business. That sounds awesome, doesn’t it?

With that said, and without any further ado, let’s welcome Ian Hart to the podcast. Ian, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going, buddy?

Ian:                  Great. Thank you for having me.

Yuri:                You’re very welcome. It’s good to reconnect. It’s been too long. We were, a long time ago, part of the same mastermind. It’s always nice to touch base with everyone, see what they’re up to, and see their journey over the years. I’m excited to have you on the show.

Today we’re going to be talking about some very refreshing topics, not that other episodes haven’t been refreshing. But you want to talk about some of these epic failures, as you call them, or mistakes you’ve made with respect to your whole online journey. I think for everyone listening, this will give you some perspective as to what it takes to build a business online; with some of the challenges involved and some of the mistakes that can be made.

But anyways, I’m happy to have you here, Ian.

Ian:                  Yeah, thank you for having me again. I’m excited to be on the show.

 

Ian’s online journey and how he came back from burnout

Yuri:                All right, well, let’s dive in. Before we jump into mistakes and stuff like that, give our listeners a bit of context as to your journey and how you got to where you are now.

Ian:                  Sure.

I started as a personal trainer in New York City. I did well pretty quickly. I started managing trainers for Equinox and Crunch. I figured that, after a couple of years, I could create something that would be an improvement from big box gyms.

I moved. I started my own training facility down in South Carolina. I started to see what was happening online, and I was burnt out from personal training. Anybody who’s listening to this who’s a personal trainer, typically, we go through a phase of burnout because we’re trading dollars for hours. I saw freedom on the other side of the online business where you can get money and not be working.

I thought, “That’s what I want because I’ve been burn out for years.” I started to chase that as I was working on my brick and mortar business, and the brick and mortar business just kept growing. That was my bread and butter. I was trying to do the online business at the same time.

That’s around the same time that I met you, Yuri, when I joined Bedros’ online marketing.

I was trying to do two things at once. I think one of the big mistakes that I made was that I was doing too much at once. For those of you who have read the book or know about the book “The ONE Thing”

Yuri:                It’s like a Bible. That should be a Bible for an entrepreneur.

Ian:                  Exactly. That helped me hone in and eliminate all the stuff. I still have trouble with it because I’m a true entrepreneur and I’m a quick start, meaning I start things then have a hard time finishing them. I need someone to help me follow through with them.

So, I started the online business. I was pushing hard for it. I was pushing hard in my brick and mortar, and I got totally and completely burnt out. I was probably sick and run down. I was sick and run down before I started my actual brick and mortar business. It just got worse.

I didn’t know when or how to stop. I just kept burning the candles on both ends until I finally ended up in the hospital. It was probably a combination of a bunch of different things. I hear this with a lot of other entrepreneurs as well. They just burn themselves out and end up with some health crisis or issue.

I’ve been there, and I experienced it. I learned that I needed to build a structure around my life; that if I grow the business, I can’t grow. There’s a cap that I can take it to by myself, and I can’t do more. I needed to build a team around me that knows how to do the thing that I don’t know how or don’t want to do.

Yuri:                That’s such a huge insight.

Number one, everyone should read “The ONE Thing”. It’s such a good book. It’s a quick read as well, but it’s a reminder to focus on one thing at a time, and that’s tough for us to do. If you’ve taken the Kolbe Score and you’re a high quick start like Ian and I, it’s difficult to do.

But the other thing you mentioned, too, which I found interesting, is when we started online around the same time, the vision was almost like, at least in Canada, “Can’t wait until 65 and you can retire,” and, “Save for retirement to lay on the beach,” that was the dream of having an online business back in the day.

We worked as trainers with clients. We thought, “Shit, this sucks. I’m burnt out. We’re going to start selling eBooks, and we’re going to live the life,” and it doesn’t happen like that. For very, very few people does that life exist in the way of just chilling. You’re not alone in that discovery.

You went from burnt out to burnt out again, and then obviously hospitalized for being just overdrawn out of your own personal health bank account. If you were to speak to younger Ian, knowing what you know now, what advice would you have given to yourself?

 

Enjoying the journey, taking it slower, and learning from struggle

Ian:                  I would’ve said, “Enjoy the journey and take it slower.” As trainers, as fitness people, I think we have a ton of energy. Usually we get a lot done because we’re go-getters. That’s why we are trainers. We motivate other people, we inspire other people, and we go all out, but we don’t have an infinite amount of energy.

Entrepreneurs live in the sympathetic nervous system, so they’re training hard, they’re in their business hard, they’re pushing hard all day, every day, and they don’t leave time for the parasympathetic activities, which should be more than the sympathetic activities.

Coming into the one thing; you push yourself hard for a few hours a day on the one thing that you know you’re good at, then chill out the rest of the day and let other people do the things that they’re good at. Build an empire based on that.

I’m still in the process of doing that.

Now, I’m at a point where I don’t even have to work if I don’t want to because I learned those things, but it took that pain and struggle to learn, even though I was learning from people like Bedros and through the mastermind group. Sometimes you must experience it, and I had to experience it and go through those obstacles and pain and struggles to have it hit home for me.

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. A lot of people listening might have a brick and mortar practice or gym. They’re straddling both worlds, offline and offline. When we started, the whole allure was to be 100% online and live this amazing, glamorous life. A lot of us have realized that, you know what, it’s not about 100% online because, either way, you’re still using the Internet to grow your business whether it’s offline or online.

 

Recognizing what you love and what to delegate to someone else

What advice do you give to somebody who might be in the position where they’re seeing clients or patients in person, but also thinking about doing more of an online type of platform?

Ian:                  You can mix the two. What I would advise anybody is to figure out what they enjoy the most and what they love doing. What I came to find out for me is that I liked being in person. I’m way better in person than I am online or over the phone or whatever it is. I’ve gotten that feedback, and I enjoy it more.

I enjoy doing workshops, and go online to raise my value. For now, I do workshops where, in an hour of my time, I make about $1,500 into $2,000.

For me, that marries the two, and I’m happy with it. I don’t have to push online to be online all day. I can just send emails out, market myself in that way, and then meet people in the physical world and give them results way better than I would be able to if I was just sending a program or a video out online.

There’s other people that can do it better through a video. My advice to other people is to hone in on what you love, what you enjoy, and what you’re good at. Really, for me, that’s what I’ve found life is all about; just doing things you love and enjoy. It just builds more love, joy, and excitement around what you’re doing, and you’re not dragging your feet all day, worried, and stressed out.

It takes time to do that. I mean, without any pain and struggling, you don’t reach those points. I think that’s true for myself. I don’t know if you feel the same way.

Yuri:                Totally.

Ian:                  Yuri, I had to go through pain and struggles to realize what meant something to me and what I loved and enjoyed. Trying all the different facets and doing all these different things – it’s like a process of elimination.

Yuri:                I totally agree. I tell people I’m a very slow and stubborn learner. I have to fail a lot and finally say, “Okay, dude. Did you get it yet?” I’m very much the same. It’s so funny because I think a lot of people in the health and fitness space are very much like us.

There’s a reason we got into coaching people, which is probably because we enjoy interacting with them at some level. Then we come online and realize that it’s not that enjoyable to write sales copy all day long, and then we’re back in person with people a couple years later. So, it comes full circle.

It’s just as you said, about honoring who you are and what you love to do. I mean, if you love data and you love cranking away at the keyboard, and you love doing that stuff, that’s fine. I think a lot of us just enjoy serving people at a deeper level.

Ian’s got an amazing back pain resolution. I can’t even remember the name of the program, but it’s an amazing back pain system that you taught me in person, then I had access to the online program years ago when I was dealing with some back issues. It was revolutionary. Obviously, you had a product. You sold it online. You’ve got the sales pages, the whole upsell flow, all that typical online marketing stuff.

Out of everything you’ve done, when it comes to building out an online product, what is the least favorite thing for you to do?

Ian:                  My unique ability is getting on camera, speaking, demonstrating, and coaching through the camera. Anything else technical or online is just not my forte. I was pushing the “Back Pain Relief 4 Life” program and doing everything from the start. When I met you, I was still hiring sales copy guys. I had written my own sales copy twice, and it just didn’t work.

Back pain is a very complicated story to create and sell because of all the skepticism, but I was doing all of that. I was setting up the websites and it doesn’t work for me. It has too many moving parts. I’m very simple at what I do and what I know how to do and what I’m good at.

That led to me eventually reaching a point where we had all the products. I had invested a ton of money. I tried to do an infomercial with that, and I lost almost everything I had.

Yuri:                Oh, shit.

 

Clarity and vision as a developed skill

Ian:                  That was a low point for me, but something good came of it. I found a partner who was willing to do everything else, and I just did the videos. I gave him the product. I was seeking that, and I found it.

For those listening, if you think about what it is that you want and are good at and you go out and try to find it – and keep working at it – eventually you’ll get what you’ve envisioned to a degree.

Not exactly, but that’s what I’ve found for myself. You have a goal, you have an idea of what you want, and you work towards it daily. In some way, it manifests if the action is taken.

Yuri:                Yeah. You mentioned an important word I think, which is “envisioned”. Having that vision, that clarity, is important. You mentioned that you had the clarity to want a person to support you in business, and that person manifested themselves into your life.

Ian:                  Right.

Yuri:                Is vision and clarity something you’ve learned how to develop over time, or was this something you had from day one?

Ian:                  You know what? I’d have to say it’s something I developed over time.

I had to learn it from other people. I didn’t understand life, in general, until I was in my early 20s, and honestly, before that, I was in health and fitness my whole life. There was a point where I got sidetracked and I was drinking and doing all this crazy stuff, and then I stopped drinking.

 

Practicing self-care and recovery

When I stopped drinking and I started honoring my body more – before it was about pushing hard, training hard, and going out to party hard – I realized that I wasn’t honoring myself.

I stopped drinking. I started to focus on the future. I would sit down daily. Someone taught me a morning ritual: to envision what I want and do a gratitude list. You hear a lot about that now. I think even Craig Valentine has that as part of his morning rituals.

I’ve been doing that for almost 14 years now. I do a morning ritual and then an evening ritual. I try to envision what I want the next day, and then also for the week. Really, you must see it in the mind’s eye for it to become reality. Writing it down and then thinking about is what helped me dramatically.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. One of the things that I discovered over the years is, as the visionary of your business, as the leader, we should be spending most of our time in the “what” and the “why.” What’s the vision and why is it so important?

As soon as we start getting into the how, that’s when shit hits the fan.

It’s tough. If you’re listening to this, and you’re a do-it-yourselfer, a DIYer, a Home Depot type of person for your business, I think it’s a dilemma. I’ll ask you in a second how you navigated this, but when you’re starting off, unless you have a lot of money backing you or you’re just pulling out from savings, most of us are bootstrapping it.

How did you get to the point where you said, “I had to write the sales copy, build up the websites, and I did all this stuff myself too, and it was brutal,” and what was the point for you where you said, “I need to step out of the ‘how’ and just focus on the ‘what’ and ‘why.’”

Ian:                  I don’t even think I asked that question.

You’re asking it now in an analytical way, after the fact. It was almost survival, I think, to a point where I thought, “My brick and mortar business is going right now, and I have employees working. I just said, “Tuesdays and Thursdays, I’m not even showing up.” When I show up now, I’m screwing things up.

They don’t want me there. It’s like, “Just let us do our thing,” but yeah, I had to literally remove myself from the whole process. I think it was Dan Sullivan who said something like, “If you don’t take time for yourself to just relax and think about the things, like the what and the whys, then you’ll never transform anything.” Something to that degree.

I found that to be totally true. This, again, goes back to parasympathetic activity, which is meditating, relaxing, changing your environment, and just totally decompressing and unplugging. That is where I find most of my genius and creativity, which creates the vision and the what and whys. That’s the way I found that works for me anyways.

Yuri:                So here’s the dilemma. As you mentioned, most of us are so sympathetic. We’re go-go-go type A. We want to get stuff done but we know and teach our clients to spend more time on parasympathetic activities, which is an irony. We know that the breakthroughs don’t happen when we’re behind the computer.

The breakthroughs happen when you’re going for a walk in the jungle or in a forest or going for a surf or whatever it is. This is something I struggled with, and I’ve really had to tame the beast a little bit to say, “Listen. Today, you’re going to do nothing.” Doing nothing is very tough for me to do.

Is that something you struggled with as well?

Ian:                  Completely. I was out of my mind. For three years, I was working in New York City, and New York City is just complete grime. I saved up about $45,000 to start my business. I thought that, after leaving New York starting my business, I was going to calm down and slow down. It just took off from there and kept growing and growing.

Now, I’m way better. I take time for myself. I don’t feel guilty like I used to for going to get a massage or something like that. Really, those are things that I should be doing, like practicing self-love and relaxation.

It’s okay to do nothing. It’s okay to take the time for myself. It’s okay that I’m not at my business and I’m paying employees to do the work that I built up. In my head, I’d like to think I should be there all the time and constantly doing something. I should be answering emails. I had to practice how not to do the thing, just like you said, and that took skill because I had trained myself to do the opposite.

Yuri:                I completely agree with you. I think it’s something you must train yourself to do because it’s not natural to most high achievers. In athletics, there is a time for recovery, but if you’re not training, you’re getting less fit or your competition is surpassing you. At the same time, a lot of pro-athletes don’t last beyond 35, so you can’t sustain that forever.

You must take the time to have those massages, to have that self-care, because if you don’t, you’re going to burn out. During the last couple years, I’ve recognized a lot of people give CEOs, let’s talk about Fortune 500 companies, a lot of slack because they’re hanging out on the golf course, they’re going to long lunches, and they don’t seem to be doing much in the office.

I recognize that’s why they get paid the most. If they were in the office all the time, something is not right there. It’s the same way if someone’s grinding away in their business on social media every single day, and then doing this. They don’t have a business; they have a job.

I believe that you must build a business as if you were going to sell it or take a year-long vacation. If you don’t think in those terms, you will constantly be doing everything you shouldn’t be doing, and you’re never going to have the freedom that you want.

Ian:                  That’s where I’m at in my business. I just spoke with my team, and I said, “Hey, guys. I’m leaving for three months, and we’re making sure that this is growing because if it’s not, then there’s something wrong with the system and I need to come back.” They say, “Oh, we don’t want you back,” so…

Yuri:                That’s a good sign because business is a system. If it’s dependent upon you, you don’t have a business.

You’re able to step out for three months. The business continues not to just stay where it is, but grow in your absence. Ultimately, that’s what business is: You put together a system that other people or technology can deploy on your behalf. You come in and work your genius. You shoot some videos. You do your thing with people in person, and that’s it.

For some people, it takes a long time to get there in terms of their own personal evolution. I mean, for us, it took some time as well. It’s like this, or you burn out. Those are the two options.

 

The best investments Ian has ever made

This has been good, man. Before we get into the rapid five, I want to ask you: out of all the things that you’ve done, what’s been one of the best investments you’ve made for yourself or your business, whether it’s books, time, money, education, whatever? What’s one thing that jumps out at you, and how did it help you?

Ian:                  There are two things.

Mastermind groups and vacation or some type of retreat. Those are the profound transformations. A lot of people think that transformation is what people give you while you’re in the mastermind, but the transformation is putting the money down, making a commitment, and investing your time into that. It’s not only getting things out of it, but putting what you know into that mastermind group and helping other people out.

I’ve spent a lot of money on those things, and I would say the rewards – the connections and things I’ve learned – far exceed any investment I’ve ever made. I’ll continue to do that because it has made me grow.

Yuri:                Yeah, I 100% agree with that. That’s interesting.

 

At our Healthpreneur LIVE event last year, I showed a slide and said, “Here is my journey with every single investment I made in terms of coaching or masterminds,” and I said, “Here’s the first mastermind I joined. From that one, this happened, then this happened, then this happened. Then I went to this, and this happened, and everything led to the next most amazing thing.” I said, “Guys, the only reason I’m here is because I made that one decision back in 2009 to hire a coach and attend a couple of live events, even when I didn’t have the money. I knew that what I was doing wasn’t getting me the results I wanted.”

Almost everyone we’ve had on the show says the number one thing is hiring a mentor sooner or attending masterminds and stuff like that because you can’t do it on your own. I totally agree with you on that.

Ian:                  I hired a coach that was online. Then I joined Bedros’ mastermind. When I called them to put $10,000 down, which back then was like everything, I was so adrenalized that I was yelling on the phone. They were like, “Dude. Chill out.”

I knew I had to do it, but at the same time, I was overcoming fears in my body. I did it, and I gained a tremendous amount from it. That $10,000 probably made me, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands.

Yuri:                Totally. What if you had your future self talk to you in that moment to be like, “Hey, it’s all good. Just don’t worry. We got this”? I still remember that feeling in my stomach. When I was on the phone, I was giving my credit card thinking, “Holy shit, how am I going to do this?” But we make it happen.

Ian:                  I wouldn’t be talking to you right now if I didn’t do it.

Yuri:                Look at everything that’s come out of even the worst events. I mean, great stuff still came out of the things that weren’t as great as you’d hope them to be, whether it was one relationship, one connection, one introduction, or one nugget of wisdom. As you said, it’s not about what you’re going to get from the event. It’s how you’re going to show up and be of the most value and service. It’s also, “How am I going to participate and get the most out of this?”

I think a lot of people don’t approach it with that. They ask, “What am I going to get out of this?”

Ian:                  Yup, “What am I taking from this?”

Yuri:                Yeah. It’s like the John F. Kennedy quote, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” It’s a great way to approach life. I think that’s why you’ve had the success you’ve had, and that’s why you’re the person you are.

There are other people that have a victim mentality who are just waiting for things to happen to them instead of participating in their own journey.

Ian:                  It’s a simple formula. What value are you giving out to the world? Then, you’ll get something in return, whether it’s money or whatever. There’s a lot of people out there waiting for people to tell them how great they are, and really, if they just add value to people’s life, they’ll get something back in return.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Good advice. Ian, this has been awesome, buddy. You read for the Rapid Five?

Ian:                  Yes, I am.

Yuri:                Here we go. Five rapid-fire questions. Whatever comes top-of-mind is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Ian:                  Lack of patience.

Yuri:                Yeah, no kidding. Me too. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Ian:                  My biggest strength is healing people.

 Yuri:                Awesome. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Ian:                  Creating a vision, then executing that vision.

Yuri:                Nice. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

 Ian:                  I do a morning meditation, some qi gong, and I write down a gratitude list.

Yuri:                Nice. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Ian:                  I know I’m successful when I’m not in my business, and it’s growing.

Yuri:                Wicked. Ian, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. Where is the best place for our listeners to follow you online?

Ian:                  You can follow me on Facebook at Ian R. Hart, or EarthFIT. Same thing on Instagram.

Yuri:                Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us. It’s great to reconnect and catch up.

Ian:                  Thanks, Yuri. It was great. Good luck with Healthpreneur, if I’m saying that correctly.

 

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Yuri’s Take

If you can relate to Ian’s story about burnout and building a business that works independently from you, then welcome to the club. That’s what being a business owner means; having systems, technology, and team members that support you so you don’t have to be involved every second of the day and every step of the process. If you are involved in every step of the process then, sadly, you have a job, not a business.

If you want to take your business to the next level and discover some more nuances, ideas, strategies, and connections that can help you avoid or get out of the grind and give you a perspective on how to build more structure in your business so that you can step away from all the day-to-day, then I encourage you to check out our Healthpreneur LIVE event.

I’ve mentioned this the last couple of episodes because the clock is winding down and spots are filling up. The event is September 20th-23rd, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in one of the most beautiful venues on the planet. These are not my words. This is per Travel + Leisure Magazine, and that is simply a reflection of the amazing experience you will enjoy over the three days.

It’s unlike any other event you may have been to in the past. This is not about having thousands of people and speakers that come in, do their thing, sell you from stage, and then leave. There’s no pitching from stage. You’re going to be sitting beside the speakers. Everyone’s on the same playing field.

Yes, people are on different journeys in their business. We’ve got seven and eight-figure business owners. We’ve got people who are little bit further at the beginning stages of the business, but the beautiful thing is that everyone comes together with no ego to connect, to serve each other, and to create magic.

The beautiful thing is that you just never know what can happen. You never know who you might meet. There are people you don’t even know you don’t even know who will be there. They might be sitting beside you.

You might be connected over lunch or dinner, and suddenly, something incredible sparks in terms of business potentials or anything else. That’s why we created this event; to create that environment where we can bring amazing people together and allow those sparks to fly, those ideas to be shared, and those connections to be made.

We only allow 150 people at the event. It’s by invitation or application only. We only have a few spots left. We’re getting close to the end here. Are you serious about taking your business to the next level? Do you want to be a serious player in this space and not somebody who hides behind their computer and says, “I’ll get to that next year”?

I’m telling you, I’ve reached out to the same people who told me, “Yeah, I’ll definitely come next year,” last year, and they’re still in the same place in business as they were last year.

That’s sad. Don’t put your business off. This is your life. Do not delay this. If this is something you feel could be a good fit for you, here’s what I want you to do: Go to healthpreneurgroup.com/live. Click on the red button that says, “Request an invitation.” Fill out the questions so we have a better sense of who you are. We’ll review your application. We’ll get back to you in one or two days, and we’ll let you know if all is good. That’s it.

We only have a few spots left. We must let the venue know our final numbers by the end of the month. We’re down to the wire. As I said before, the number one decision I ever made in my life was to attend my first live event in 2010. Before that, for three years, I thought I could do this on my own, sitting behind my computer and figuring it out.

That’s when I struggled. That’s when I struggled big time. I attended that first live event in 2010, joined a mastermind group, met people like Ian, and everything because of that, everything in my business, is a result of that initial decision.

Do not let excuses hold you back. Do not let, “Oh, I don’t know if I can afford this,” do not say, “Well, I’ve got stuff going on in my life.” Stuff is always going to go on in your life. If you’re getting married, that’s one thing, but if you think that this is something you can put off, well, that’s sad because what you’re essentially saying is, “I’m going to put off the growth of my business and the dream I have for yet another year.”

This event is more popular every year, which means that we must turn away a lot of people moving forward. You get in now, assuming you’re a good fit for our group, and you have that first-mover’s advantage, if you will. This is our second year doing the event, but you’ll be part of the alumni, if you will. It’s a lot easier to get into future events if you’re part of the first ones.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to if you are serious enough about growing your business. If you are, these are the types of events you need to attend. We’ve spoken with a lot of people who say, “Yeah, I’ll come if I could speak.”

They don’t get it. They don’t quite understand this. This is not an event where you come to speak and sell from stage. This is not a TEDx type of event. Every single person at the event will be speaking. You’ll be at your tables. You’ll be sharing in breakout sessions. You’ll be doing round table think tanks.

The breakthroughs are not going to happen from a person speaking on stage. The breakthroughs are going to happen from what’s happening at the tables with your peers where you’re sharing your best practices, you’re learning from theirs, you’re helping troubleshoot their issues, and they’re helping you troubleshoot your issues.

That’s where the collective magic happens. If you want to be surrounded by this type of mastermind environment, then this is the event for you. It’s as simple as that. If you don’t, then you’re missing out. I’m sorry to see that.

Anyways, we would love to have you, assuming you’re a good fit. Head on over to healthpreneurgroup.com/live. Do that now. Submit your application, and let’s get you at HP LIVE 2018. Thank you so much for listening today. Hope you enjoyed this one, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Hey, welcome to today’s episode. I’m excited to have you back on the Healthpreneur Podcast.

Today I’ve got the pleasure of interviewing an awesome coach. His name is Matt Balducci and we’re going to have a good conversation about coaching. Let me give you a little bit of a background as to who Matt is. He’s a highly sought after high-performance coach for high-achieving individuals; mostly entrepreneurs seeking to create mass momentum in their lives.

He’s on a journey and mission to become his coined avatar, “The Modern-Day Superhero,” and bring as many people along with him. His 100-day high performance accelerator helps his clients generate one year’s worth of results in just 100 days while generating mass momentum in their health, productivity, relationships, income, and self-development.

We’re going to have a great conversation. I think you’ll enjoy this one. Without any further ado, let’s bring Matt Balducci onto the show. Matt, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How’s it going, man?

Matt:               It’s going awesome. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Yuri:                Absolutely. It’s always good to connect with new friends and people who are doing great in the world of business and health. You’ve got an interesting back story. You played baseball for Team USA as I understand it, way back in the day. Then you evolved into running your own business.

Can you tell us how you got to where you are now? What does our tribe need to know about who you are and what the journey’s been like for you?

 

Matt’s journey and what he’s doing now

Matt:               I grew up in Chicago, so I’m a Midwesterner.

Yuri:                Cubs fan or White Sox fan?

Matt:               I’m a Cubs fan. I grew up on the south side so I should be a White Sox, so for all you White Sox fans out there, I’m sorry. In terms of the Cubs, now it’s awesome. I lived through my whole childhood not winning and now they’re winning and it’s awesome to watch. This year they’re having a rough-ish week. We’ll see how it goes, it’s 162 games.

I grew up out there in a low socioeconomic status. My dad’s a mechanic, my mom’s a stay at home mom, and I got taught hard work from a young age. I grew up working. Since I was 16, I had the typical 30, 40 hour a week job while going to school and playing sports.

I ended up playing the traditional Midwestern sports; basketball, baseball, and football. I excelled in the football and baseball realm and then I ended up pursuing baseball and I got to play on a couple USA teams. We won a silver medal and a bronze medal. One was in Italy and the other one was in Amsterdam, which, for a 16-year old boy, was an adventure.

I ended up going to college and I was a premier walk-on at University of Illinois. Unfortunately, they brought a new coach in. I got tendinitis in my arm, my pitching arm, and I got cut right away. My baseball dreams got cut short in terms of playing college baseball. After that, I ended up getting accepted into an internship called College Works.

I ended up running a $80,000 painting company as a freshman. At that point, I got bit by the entrepreneurship bug but, realistically, it was the fact that I could compete again. I looked at it as a sport and went from baseball into the business world fast. I learned that I had a knack for talking to people, sales, and managing people.

It was an adventure and it was a great year. I made around $25,000 as a college student in six months, and that propelled me to realize that I can make a lot of money.

I ended up going through college. I started a marketing company. I took it to about a half a million dollars in revenue, then I dropped out of college my junior year. Just for the listeners and my mom out there, if she ever listens, I did get my degree a couple years back. It was mainly for my wife.

When I got married she wanted me to get it so I took some online courses and I got my degree from Illinois. I dropped out and after I dropped out, my business collapsed on me. I went broke. I was making great money to basically I had no money left. I went into the corporate world for about a year and a half, switched jobs four times, and did not enjoy the corporate world much.

I got the opportunity to come and help run a branch of College Works in Michigan and Illinois, did well, and then I started up my general contracting business in Maryland. My wife’s family lives out here so now I live in Annapolis. Basically, over four years, I took my business from zero to 2.6 million in revenue. I had 50 contractors work for me, had 40 plus sales reps, and built up an infrastructure.

It’s been fun. It’s been a lot of ups and downs. I lived in my office when I was 22 and after my first year of running my business in Maryland, my number one employee is the guy who’s buying me out now.

He left me for the year. He had a family issue and continue working with me. It took a huge toll on my growth for the next year. He ended up returning a year later and we became business partners. He ended up being the guy who is going to take over completely this year.

It’s been a journey on the business end for sure.

 

Acting instead of making excuses, courage, and patience

Yuri:                Yeah, no kidding. That’s awesome. If you were sitting down with someone over a green juice or coffee, and they were venturing into their own business, what would be your go-to wisdom to share?

Matt:               I would say to act right away. One of the things that is one of my greatest strengths is that I am an action taker. Sometimes to a negative. I’ll just go do something and if it doesn’t work I’ll keep trying; try, fail, and adjust. I know a lot of people out there, especially in the health and fitness industry, want to start a business, don’t know how, and end up making excuses for a long time.

When I use the word excuses I don’t mean it in a negative way. I say just take the leap and ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen. I think my first tip to anybody out there, I don’t care what industry, is just try it. Act.

The second one is, if possible, start it up on the side of what you’re currently doing. That’s what I’m doing right now.

I’m starting up my new coaching company, which I started two months ago. It’s looking like it’s going to do about a quarter a million in revenue this year, but I’m doing it while I’m running my other business. Even though I sold my company, I’m still running it for the next six months.

Instead of waiting until the end of it and then starting up, I’m using these six months as a side hustle and basically putting myself able to sell out and then walk into, hopefully, a million-dollar business in 2019.

I would say that’s a huge thing that I’ve seen, especially working with a lot entrepreneurs. Sometimes they’re slow to action. You know and you’ve probably seen that. You’re in working with a lot of different people. You give them something awesome to go do and then they take forever or they make excuses.

After action, I tell people is this, “You have to have some patience.” Now I’m the worst at patience. Literally the worst. My personality type is horrible when it comes to it, but I’ve learned this over time. I’m doing a fitness show in the fall and I associate a lot of analogies with working out. I had a massive transformation in the last year.

What you notice when you’re lifting and going through the process is that you’re getting very small, incremental adjustments. Over time it grows, and then you create momentum. Then suddenly you look in the mirror and you say, “Holy crap, I have six pack. How did that happen?”

Yuri:                Especially when you can see it in the before pictures.

Matt:               Oh, yeah. It’s insane. You hit it on the head. I think it’s tough sometimes for business owners, especially getting started, is they don’t have the before picture. You know, they forget what they were like when they first started and then they don’t realize it.

I tell people sometimes to make a quick video of when they’re starting out so they can laugh later. I have videos of myself when I was younger and it’s funny to watch the transformation of how I talk, sound, and my confidence. You can even see the body language. You can see that you’ve transformed and even if your revenue or your profit isn’t where you want it to be, you can see that you’re developing.

Those would be a couple quick tips for anybody starting a business.

 

Coaching and looking at incremental steps instead of a big goal

Yuri:                That’s awesome. I want to touch on a few things you mentioned. One, a lot of entrepreneurs are so focused on tomorrow and the future. We’re so stuck in the weeds, in the trenches, that we don’t come up for air and acknowledge the progress we’ve made.

With your physique, you can have the before and after, and you can look back on the before like, “Holy cow. This is an amazing transformation.” A lot of times entrepreneurs are so focused on the gap, right? On what they haven’t done yet.

They fail to look back on where they came from. I think success in life is gratitude and appreciation, and being able to acknowledge those small wins. It’s being able to say, “This is not as fast as I want to go, but look at where I started. Look at what we’ve done since then.”

I think it’s a good analogy to use fitness and body transformation back into business. There’s so many parallels. That’s cool. The other thing you mentioned is, what’s the worst thing that can happen? This is a question we ask everyone we speak to when we do strategy calls.

I believe one of the most important traits for success in anything is courage. I think a lot of people want to be certain that what they’re about to embark on is going to produce whatever result they want. The reality is, you can’t get that.

It’s like if I were to say, “Hey, Matt. We’re going to start this transformation and I can’t guarantee what you’re going to look like a year from now, but I need you to have courage to go through the process with me.” A lot of entrepreneurs want to see the proof before they act.

In my experience, it doesn’t work like that. You must take the action to see the proof. It’s almost like you must believe it before you see it. Would you agree with that?

Matt:               I 100% agree. I think that you’re hitting it right on the head, Yuri.

The company that I run and that I just sold has a huge sales force of college students. They’re all millennials and over the last seven years, I’ve coached hundreds of college students about running businesses. What I’ve discovered is that the best entrepreneurs that I coach are the ones that can jump in and see the big picture. They can see the long term, visualize what they’re going to have, but then they forget the long-term goal.

I hate to keep using fitness, but it’s just like weight loss. If I would have started last year at 27% and said, “Hey, I need to lose 50 pounds,” – which a lot of people do and fail because they’re focused so much on 50 pounds – I’d stand on the scale, see that I lost half a pound and think it’s not working.

What I tell people is that I call them momentum metrics. You must figure out the actual metrics that you’re willing to track along the way and forget the big goal. When I say I want to run a million-dollar coaching company, I’m not focused on a million dollars because if I focus on that I’m going to go insane.

You know this being an entrepreneur yourself. When you focus on that result so much, you’re going to go insane because you’re never going to quite get there. You’re never going to be satisfied. Instead, how can you have small wins every single day?

Utilizing fitness again, talking to all the health coaches out there, I focus on three things. My nutrition: I eat the same meals every single day. I’m kind of an extremist when it comes to that, and I don’t expect people to do that. I’ve eaten the same meals every day for the last six months straight.

I drink two gallons of water every day. On my desk, right now, I have my gallon of water sitting there and its half-drank already. I’m going to get through that by noon today and then refill it. The last thing that I focus on is my body fat percentage. That’s the component that I look at versus my weight loss.

You can go into a lot more factors when it comes to that, like lean body mass and things like that. In business, you must figure out your metrics. You can’t look at the million dollars, you should look at, “All right, how many client meetings am I doing,” or, “What is your standard of performance that you’re looking to have.” Again, I call them momentum metrics so once you start doing them over and over, they become ingrained in your consciousness and you don’t even have to think anymore.

You just wake up every day and its part of your lifestyle. When you first start on anything new you must understand that you’re going to go through four phases, especially entrepreneurs.

Your first one I call the honeymoon phase. You’re just freaking jacked, you’re excited, you’re running a mile a minute, you’re telling everybody about it, and then a couple weeks later, just like weight loss, a couple weeks later people stop going to the gym. Same thing with entrepreneurs. Suddenly, they’re not seeing the results they thought they were going to see and they’re not wealthy yet.

Then they hit what’s called deception. There’s a good YouTube video out there with this laid out. I also have a YouTube channel that you can go check out, but they hit deception and this is where I think a lot of people get lost. They sit there and think, “Well, I’m not seeing the success yet.”

They can’t see the big picture. They’re like you said, Yuri, they’re in the weeds. They’re lost, they’re stuck, they don’t know how to get out of it, and all they must do is just keep tracking their metrics. Eventually they’re going to get out of it.

What they’re going to find is that they’ll be consciously incompetent, which means they’re going to know that they suck now.

That’s the hardest part: when you realize you’re not as good as you thought you were going to be, you must learn, and it’s going to take time. That’s after you start tracking your metrics. We’ll use sales calls, which is what I track for my employees, my sales force. I track how many calls they take and how many clients they meet with. That’s what generates our revenue.

I don’t care what their closing rate is in the beginning, but eventually their closing rate always, no matter what, gets to about 40%, which is insane. Every single time. I don’t care if you start off booking at 10%, by the end of the year everyone averages out and it’s simple. It’s just because we’re tracking one specific metric. Eventually people get consciously competent; you know what you’re doing.

Then you can move onto your next skill set.

Yuri:                That’s valuable. Entrepreneurs, business owners, and even people in general focus on the outcome, right? They’re focused on, “I need to make a million dollars,” or, “I want to be five percent body fat and 300 pounds of muscle.”

That creates a lot of anxiety because you’re not focused on the next action to get you there. What you just mentioned, focus on the process and metrics you have control over, makes all the difference. If you reverse engineer things properly you set the outcome and reverse engineer how we get there.

If all your focus on a day to day basis is simply the small steps, the metrics that you can control, it’s inevitable that you’ll hit your outcome. I think that’s great advice that you gave to our listeners. Listeners, if you’re setting goals without focusing on the things that you can control, you’re going to go down a rabbit hole of anxiety and won’t achieve your goals.

Matt, was a moment in your business where you made a big mistake or something didn’t work out as well as you’d hoped? What was the lesson you learned?

 

Growing your identity before your business and building legacy

Matt:               I would say there were two of them. This is a good question by the way. I think every entrepreneur loves this question. The first one is that, and this sounds kind of self-help-y, but you can only grow your business as big as your identity allows you go.

It hit me multiple times in my career where my business outgrew who I was. What happened is that my business would either collapse on me or fall backwards. It would always catch back up, like a rubber band. What I had to learn over time was that self-development is almost more valuable than even your business growth.

Your business will always grow to who you are. Reading books, podcasts, listening to your podcast, Yuri, and reading your books, and different things like that. You must seek people that are awesome. You must go and stretch yourself.

Anytime that I’ve fallen back, failed, my businesses collapsed on me, it’s because it was a rubber band effect where I got cocky. I thought it was doing well, which I was, and then suddenly man, it was like a snap effect. That leads into number two, which is what I’m a big believer in: Momentum.

Obviously, it’s a standard word for life, but I always look at an analogy in life which is a fast moving train. When you can get your train moving at 100 mph, it’s pretty impossible to stop. It would take a long time to stop that train. You know, once you get the train moving at 100 mph you absolutely need to just keep going.

One of my biggest weaknesses in my life, which I’ve fixed recently and am working on, is keeping the momentum going. I built a strong momentum in my 20s and then I coasted for about a year and a half.

I took my foot off the gas and my train started slowing down. I woke up one day and realized I wasn’t at 100 mph anymore, I was at 30 mph and I wasn’t very happy with it. I was like, “Crap, I got to get my train moving again.” Then, it takes a while to get that train going. Those would be the two things that I’ve noticed in my life, at least in business.

If I could go back and whisper in my ear when I was younger, that’s what I would have said. I would have said, “Matt, don’t slow down. You’re not where you need to be yet. Continue reading books. Continue working out.” I think that entrepreneurs sometimes get lost in revenue, money, and profit. In retrospect, it’s not as important as being healthy, sleeping, waking up every day having energy. Your business is going to grow naturally because of that.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s awesome. You said your business grows to the level of your identity. That is such a great concept. It’s so powerful because it’s true. If you have self-worth issues, if you see yourself as not worthy of certain levels of success, you’re not going to get there. I completely agree with you that you must build yourself to make your cup bigger to allow more stuff in your cup.

That’s a big one, guys. That is such a great statement. That was good.

When the train was going at 100 mph and went down to 30 mph, metaphorically speaking, what did you do to get that momentum back? I know this is a big pain point for a lot of people, myself included. We go through a period where we’re just crushing it. Maybe it’s a morning routine you’re consistent with, and suddenly you’re like, “Eh, I’m comfortable. I’m good.” You get out of your normal routine and things fall off the bandwagon a bit. What have you found useful to build that momentum back up?

 

Start small and keep going

Matt:               I got lucky. I had a son.

Yuri:                Sounds good.

Matt:               Once I had my first son, I have a baby on the way in October as well, which is exciting. I know you have three sons yourself, Yuri. If you don’t have kids, listen. If you don’t have kids, I’m going to tell you right now – I’m sorry that I’m going off topic here – you better freaking work your ass off now.

I wish I could go back in time. I love, love, love being a dad. It’s one of the best things that’s ever happened, and I’ll explain in a second why. But, I tell people in their 20s, man, just go balls to the wall and have a morning routine. Wake up early, don’t sleep in.

You know, the whole Gary Vaynerchuk. I’m not telling you that you can’t have fun. Honestly, I had a blast in my 20s. I had unbelievable fun. My wife and I traveled like crazy but you can do both. Understand that you have so much time.

If I could go back, I would have said, “Matt, what are you doing with the additional 40 hours? Stop watching three hour Cubs games.” You know? Utilize that. I could have probably grown a whole other business on top of my company that I was growing, but I didn’t realize the time I had until I had my son.When I had my son, I realized that my train wasn’t moving very fast. People out there have the same issue, which I know happens a lot especially with high performers and high achievers, which is who I work with. That’s why they come to me as a coach and say, “Matt, I’m a high performer but honestly, I need to get ignited again. I need that fire back.”

You must find your real why and I know, again, Simon Sinek and The Why. Everybody’s talking about it, but it’s so freaking true. If you don’t know why you’re trying to succeed at something, you’re never going to stick to it. Once you hit deception like I talked about earlier, you’re going to stop, you’re going to quit, and you’re never going to get momentum going.

Momentum takes time to build. You first light the fire. It’s like a car. You must put gas in the car first. After you put gas in, then it takes a little bit of time to get the miles per hour up. Once you get the miles per hour going and you’re slowly accelerating and you get it to 100 mph, then you can just speed. You can literally go fast as possible, but it takes a little bit of time. It’s faster than you think.

I woke up one day, looked in the mirror, and I wasn’t very happy with where I was, honestly. Outside of my business and my income, you know, I had this awesome family. I had everything. I had the car, the house – I just bought a house actually – but I had the car and everything that you can imagine.

Everybody from where I grew up looked at me like I was God’s gift to life and I wasn’t happy. I sat there and thought, “What is different now than a few years ago?” Basically, I wasn’t pursuing greatness anymore. I wasn’t pursuing who I was supposed to become. What I did was I sat down and said, “All right, Matt. What is the life you want to live and why are you doing it?”

I said, “All right, so I have my kid and I want to build this legacy.” I wanted to create this legacy in my future, but once I had my son it rang to me. I have this person that’s looking up to me and, honestly, I wasn’t being a great example for him. I was overweight, out of shape, and lazy. I had this outside looking in financial success but I was not being the best version of myself.

I started making incremental changes.

The first being health, which I think is the most important for anyone out there. Obviously, everyone who’s listening can agree that without health, no matter how much money you make, you’re failing. It was after I started rebuilding my health that I looked at my company and said, “Okay, is this my passion?”

I love what I do. I love what I built. I realized it wasn’t the life I wanted in 10 years. That’s why I ended up selling my company and starting up my coaching business. I said, “I want to help millions of people.” Before I even started my coaching business, I started a YouTube channel and – it’s crazy – once you get clear on where you want to go and why, everything starts lining up.

People start coming out of the woodwork to help you get there.

If you came to me a year ago and said, “Matt, you’re going to be a coach. You’re going to be a high-performance coach. You’re going to have a YouTube channel. You’re going to be writing a book. You’re going to be waking up at 4:30 every morning and you’re going to have a six pack and be in the best shape of your life,” I probably wouldn’t have laughed at you but I wouldn’t have believed it.

It wasn’t like that happened overnight. What people must understand out there is that if you’re trying to rebuild your momentum you must sit down and first figure out why the heck you even want to go after whatever you’re going after. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as where I’m going right now.

I’m trying to accomplish as much as you possibly can in one year. What I found with it is that it wasn’t like I did all that at once.

It sounds great now when I say it out loud, but it got stacked on each other as I went. The clearer I got, also the more productive, I started looking at my time management and my productivity and realizing that I wasn’t doing the necessary things in my day. I started creating boundaries with people.

Even in my business I stopped taking phone calls at certain times. I scheduled in family time. I just became this machine when it came to my day. If you can see my office wall I have a calendar printed up there and I track my morning routine, literally, like a crazy man. I have 12 things I do in the morning and I literally label it out.

The reason is, like I mentioned earlier, you must figure out who you want to become, your identity, and you must realize in the beginning that it’s conscious. If you read a good book called “Incognito” by David Eagleman, it talks about how to take things from conscious to unconscious.

That means creating habits like in the book “Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. What you’re going to find in both of those books combined is that it takes time to recreate who you become. If you’re trying to rebuild your momentum, you don’t want to go do the same thing you did previously to build your momentum, because then you’ll be in a circle, which is what I was in.

I would get in shape, out of shape, in shape, out of shape. I would grow out my business then I would have a slow year, then I would grow, then I would say, “All right, Matt. Time to go again.” Then I would do it again. Then I would get cocky.

This time around what I realized is no, you just must change who you think you are and you must go all in. Again, it all comes back to why. For me it was that I have a son, and I have kids now, and I want to be the best example I possibly could be. It wasn’t a matter of providing income. That was already there.

It was, what do I want them to look at when they go tell their friends at school? I want them to walk into their school, and I know this sounds cocky, but I want them to look at their friend and say, “Hey, my dad could kick your dad’s butt.” They’re proud of me, you know? They’re proud of their dad. I was very proud of my dad. It didn’t matter how much money he made.

He was a hard worker and a great guy. I was very proud of him when I grew up and I wanted that same feeling, but on a massive scale. To help the people out there that are like, “Listen, Matt. I’m in the same boat you were a year ago. I have this success. I’m a high performer.”

To start, figure out one thing to change in your life now. Honestly, if you’re not healthy, first do that. If you are healthy and you feel good about that, then start small and keep going. There’s another good book – I hate to keep throwing books out there, but this year I’m reading 60 to 80 books, so there’s a lot of knowledge in my head right now – it’s called “The High Performance Habits” by Brendan Burchard.

There’s this unbelievable quote in that book that I loved. I used to love, “Light yourself on fire and people will come out to watch you burn.” That’s a good one, but this is even better. This was unbelievable.

He said, “Yell from the rooftops what are your goals. Literally yell them and the village idiots will come out, which are the people that are going to tell you that you can’t do it. There’s a lot of them, right? But the village leaders are going to come out and show you the way.” Every time I say that out loud I get freaking chills because it’s so true.

As I started yelling from the rooftop that I was going to become a bodybuilder, when I was 27% body fat I said, “Matt, you’re going to become a body builder,” I had to change my identity so I ate like a body builder, worked out like a body builder, and had a personal trainer.

I changed my identity by yelling, and I’d tell everybody. Luckily I have a very supportive tribe that I know and have around me. I’m sure there’s people out there that are like, “Oh, he’s probably not going to make it,” but now I’ve proved them all wrong.

People started coming out of nowhere and started helping me on that journey. Then, when I started my YouTube channel, literally out of nowhere people started calling me and that’s when I first started getting my business consulting clients. That’s what built my confidence.

Through weird connections I hired my own coach. He is a guy who runs a multi-million-dollar company right now all online. All this came together by knowing where I was going, taking full action, and understanding building my identity up.

Yuri:                Totally man. That’s good wisdom and great advice. One of the things I loved is that you talked about your why being your son. A lot of times, we get more jazzed up about doing things for others more so than ourselves. I’ve personally found, when I set goals with our company, instead of setting a company revenue goal, and I say this very overtly to our perspective clients and our clients as well, is that when we work with someone our goal is to get 90% of our clients to 2X ROI within four months or less.

That is everything we focus on. Because of that it’s like, “What has to be in place for that to happen?” It becomes exciting when you can be obsessed about the results you create for other people or the reason why. For instance, you know, your son, or for someone else it might be something else. Instead of us selfishly focusing on ourselves then there’s a cap, there’s a ceiling to that.

But when we focus on what we can do for others and others are that reason why, whether it’s people you want to serve or family, it’s limitless what can happen. We start thinking so much bigger. That was tremendous, man. Awesome stuff. This has been really inspiring and I know our listeners are getting a ton out of this.

 

The Rapid Five

Are you ready for the Rapid Five?

Matt:               I am.

Yuri:                All right, so here we go. Five rapid fire questions. Whatever comes top of mind is probably the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Matt:               My biggest weakness is, it’s crazy, my exact opposite.

I’m an extreme action taker and what I must do is control. This is what’s been part of a lot of my failures. After I take a lot of action and get results I get cocky, then I’m oddly lazy. I oddly want to be the laziest man alive but I’m also the most extreme action taker you’ll find. I’m either one or the other. I would say my biggest weakness is keeping myself in action mode versus going back to the lazy Matt mode.

Yuri:                Well, I can relate to that.

I’ve come to recognize that there are times where I’m going to go full in and there’s times where I got to take time off. It’s almost like an athlete, right? You can’t be competing all the time. You must take that off time. I mean, I don’t recommend watching TV, but there are some nights where I’ll just watch three hours of Ballers, or some Netflix special because I need to just chill.

I get that. That’s cool. All right, number two. What is your biggest strength?

Matt:               It’s probably being able to act without worrying about the result. It is something I’ve always done and I guess the second one is my super power: being able to recover from failure or suffering rapidly.

I hate the word suffering because I’ve not suffered like people out there have, but  could recover very fast from business collapses, or like I said, sleeping on an office floor, or when I dropped out of school, or when I didn’t make the baseball team.

I quickly recapped and got going versus letting it put me into any sort of depression.

Yuri:                Wicked. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Matt:               Sales and, honestly, likability. I’m able to build trust relatively fast with people and not in a manipulative way. I care. I care when I talk to people and I want to get to know them. I would say that’s my unbelievable skill that I can teach now, too, which is exciting. It’s something I’ve taught people.

Yuri:                Nice. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Matt:               I have a crazy morning routine. I’m not going to take up your listener’s time with it, but I have 12 things that I do in the morning from meditating, visualization, stretching, drinking apple cider vinegar, and things like that. They are all health-based and identity-focused. Then I drop off my son at daycare and hit the gym every single day right after.

I have a pretty intense morning regimen. I track it.

Yuri:                Love it. That’s awesome. Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Matt:               I know I’m being successful when I literally am on fire. When I’m on fire I don’t care if I’m making money. I don’t care what the results are. I wake up every day jazzed up and ready to go. I just feel good. Again, sometimes it’s weird, it oddly happens sometimes when I’m not making money but it’s because you’re in the pursuit of greatness and you just feel amazing when you’re doing it.

I would say that’s when I’m the most excited.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Matt, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. This has been a great conversation. What is the best place for our listeners to follow you online? You mentioned you had a surprise for them before we started recording as well.

Matt:               If you guys want to follow me, there are a couple different places to do so. First, I am offering anybody who is part of Yuri’s tribe and community a free 60-minute business momentum maximizer session.

If you want to do that, just go to the website, go.mattbalducci.com/momentum. You can schedule a 60-minute free session with me where we can see if I can help you create some business momentum in your life. Besides that, if you just want free content, you can go to my YouTube channel, which is Matt Balducci. I put out two videos a week. One’s a book review and the other one is awesome videos where I talk about morning routines, success habits, sales, and business.

If you just want some fun daily content, I am a crazy content machine. I put out videos on my Instagram. I have two of them. One’s called @MatticShockFitness, which is just fitness motivation, then I have a business one @mattbalducci and then I have Facebook as well, which is just Matt Balducci.

There are lots of places where you can follow me but for anybody out there that needs to create mass momentum, honestly just opt into a 60-minute meeting; not because I’m going to sell you, but because I might be able to help you get things reignited and build that momentum back up.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Yuri:                Dude, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your journey and wisdom with us. Guys, take advantage of the call. Matt’s a solid dude who knows what he’s doing and if you think there’s a good fit there, why not?

It’s complimentary and I’m sure he can help you out. Matt, thank you for offering that. That’s generous of you and your time, and I just want to acknowledge you for all the awesome work that you’re doing and have done in the past, and what you’re continuing to work on. I want to acknowledge you for that.

Just again, thank you for joining us today.

Matt:               Perfect. I appreciate it Yuri, and you keep kicking butt, keep pushing me, and I’m going to chase after you.

Yuri:                Sounds good, buddy.

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Yuri’s Take

All right, so I hope you enjoyed that interview as much as I did. I want to show one of the big things that jumped out at me from our conversation, which was the idea that your business only grows to the point of your own identity.

Personally, that was the thing that stood out the most out of all the amazing things we spoke about.

If you can relate to this then that’s great, and if you can’t, that’s totally fine as well. It’s such a great concept because we only can attract into our lives that which we believe we are worth attaining. For instance, if you want to build a multi-million-dollar business but you can’t even visualize yourself doing that and enjoying the fruits of that labor, it’s going to be very tough for you to do so.

If you want to build a multi-million-dollar business but you have self-worth issues, for instance, you don’t feel comfortable around other people who are wealthy because you feel inferior – you don’t feel you’re good enough. Those are going to be energetic road blocks to getting to that next level. The whole idea here is to build yourself up from the inside so that you can enjoy the outside results.

Whether that’s a morning routine where we have some meditation, visualization, gratitude, setting big goals for yourself, and seeing, acting, and feeling as if it’s already happened, is helpful in building your identity to the point where you feel worthy of the specific results you want.

I struggled with this for a long time because soccer was such a huge part of my life for 24 years. That was all I wanted to do – play pro soccer.

I always identified as a pro athlete, and when I stopped playing in my mid 20s, I had this transition period for several years where, even though I started my business, I still felt like an athlete. I still felt like a soccer player. Even to this day, I still hang out and dress very casually when I’m at home. I’ll wear soccer outfits. Not like full team jerseys and stuff, but just training tops and stuff like that because I like it.

I remember not feeling worthy when I would travel business class. I would feel like I was out of place. It didn’t feel right. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I was just an 18 or 19-year-old kid in my mind, even though I was in my late 20s and early 30s. It took me a long time to readjust and tune up my thermostat, my self-identity, to be more congruent with where I am now.

If you can relate to me, just understand that we all go through that. I think there’s this imposter syndrome and these are all things that everyone deals with, no matter how successful or unsuccessful they are. These are universal struggles and I think the great thing about having your own business is that it forces you to grow.

It forces you to grow infinitely more than if you were working for somebody else because if you’re punching in and punching out there’s not much growth that has to happen there unless it’s a type of company where you can progress forward. When you’re running your own business, the buck stops with you. You can’t mess around, and if you do, then the business is not going to do what it wants to do.

Anyways, I think the whole message here is to grow yourself if you want to grow your business, right? Everything we want starts on the inside.

This is something I teach my kids. I’m like, “Hey, guys. You see that car out there? You see the couch? You see that lamp? You see that chair? You see this desk? How did this all start? Where did these come from?” I get them to understand that everything in our physical world started someone’s head. It started as an idea, as a thought, as a vision, and that’s where everything starts.

The message that I want to leave you with is to focus within to get whatever you want outside, okay? With that said, if you’ve enjoyed this episode remember to give the Healthpreneur Podcast some love on iTunes. Head on over to iTunes and if you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, do so and a thumb up or review would be greatly appreciated. I want to thank you for taking the time and joining me today.

Continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

 

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Transcription

All right, so what’s more important, the idea or the execution?

This is a debate that has gone on for as long as I can remember. It’s probably going to continue going on until the end of time. I want to show my perspective on this because it will make you think a little bit differently about the whole topic of ideas versus execution.

 

The two sides to the debate and what they mean

Depending on who you speak to, some people believe that execution is the most important thing because ideas are great but if you don’t act on them they never work. I agree with that, but I want to give you another way to look at it.

In 2018, in today’s day and age, execution has become commoditized. That means you can have anybody, or even technology, implement the stuff you think about and create. For whatever it is you want done, you can hire a freelancer, team members, or employees do things on your behalf. With that understanding, we have this system, this funnel, that is built out and executed flawlessly.

Everything is working as it should, and the leaks have been stopped. If that’s the case, then what’s going to make a flawlessly executed idea better? Nothing more than a better idea.

 

Why some people succeed and others don’t when using the same process

For instance, I’ll give you two examples. Look at product launch formula. A lot of people have run product launches for years. You’ve got free videos and the open cart sales video, so why is it that some people hit it out of the park and others don’t?

Why is it that with sales copy some people have an offer that does well and other people don’t? Even in our own business we have what we call a Perfect Client Pipeline. Why is it that some people hit it out of the park very quickly while other people take a little bit more time and don’t see the same types of results or conversions that other people do?

It doesn’t matter what you’re looking at; any type of strategy or blueprint is going to yield that type of dichotomy.

I’ll use the example of our Perfect Client Pipeline. We’ve got a four step process that runs our entire business; it’s what we help our clients deploy. We have cold traffic –Facebook ads in our case – leading to a webinar, to an application, to an initial call which is a strategy or consultative call, so four steps.

Let’s say you have all this built in. You’ve got the Facebook ad running and you’ve got your webinar. It’s implemented, it’s executed, it’s perfect. Now you’re buying your Facebook ads and suddenly you notice that, although you’ve got everything set up and it’s been implemented, the results are not there yet. You spent a couple hundred dollars in ad spend or a couple thousand dollars, and you’re not seeing the results you want.

Why is it that happening?

 

Why it always comes down to the big idea

You see, it’s not an execution problem, it’s an idea problem. This is what I want you to understand. I’ve been in business for 13 years and every single time I see something that hits it out of the park, whether it’s in my own business or someone else’s, it always come down to the big idea. The big idea is essentially the core of what it is you’re offering. It’s the core of your whole thing.

If someone’s running a product launch, there’s got to be an idea there that’s new, that’s novel, that’s contrary, and that’s different than what people have seen before. If it’s not, the human brain has a good radar for boredom. “Oh, I’ve seen this before, I know this.” Our brain is wired for novelty, that’s why cars keep coming out with new versions every two to three years of the same model. We love novelty and if you have an idea that is mediocre you’re going to get mediocre results.

If you’ve got an amazing idea you’re going to have exponentially better results assuming the execution is built out properly.

You can’t squeeze more out of the execution if the execution is done flawlessly. You can’t over execute a Facebook ad; it’s set up, you press submit, and it’s done, so what’s different between one Facebook ad and another? It’s the idea in the messaging.

It’s the idea behind, “What is the best image here?” Once that’s been crafted and the message has been crafted, the execution of a Facebook ad is simply copy, paste it into the description window, put the title in there, hit submit.

 

Delegating the execution process and using your brain for something else

The execution side is very rarely the real clog in the system, yet most people think it is. I want you to understand that it’s never about the execution because execution can be delegated. The thing you need to focus on as the owner, as thought leader, is the ideas.

I’ll talk about social media in a second, but if you’re running a Facebook ad and you want someone else to run your Facebook ads for you because you don’t like worrying about the execution, which is totally understandable, have somebody else do that. Have somebody else focus on the implementation, the execution of that. What you cannot outsource are the ideas in your head. That is where your brilliance must come from.

When we started Instagram with Healthpreneur, it was just posting new episodes on the podcast or a couple things here and there. We had somebody else posting on my behalf. It wasn’t my voice. We said, “You know what? Instagram: I’m tired of it. Let’s divert our focus on this,” and we took off a year from Instagram.

 

Social media examples

Four months ago, as of this recording, we got back on Instagram and I recognize that the best use of my time is not necessarily posting everything. We use Later, an app that schedules posts to Instagram with, but it wasn’t the best use of my time to get into Later and place the posts on the time and day throughout the calendar. I could have someone else do that. But a very good use of my time is sharing my thoughts because they’re my ideas.

One big idea can take a post from normal to awesome.

You’ve probably seen these infographics on Instagram, we call them Instagraphics. Apparently I just coined that phrase. You see this, “Eat this, not that,” “This is good, this is bad.” Why do some of those do well while others don’t? Well, it goes back to the idea.

 

Why great ideas are endless and execution comes second

It’s got to be involved or unique; it’s got to give people something to think about. This is the most important thing I want you to remember: When it comes to ideas versus execution, ideas will always win because execution has a ceiling on it. Once something is implemented and executed you can’t make the execution that much better once it’s flawlessly executed. The possibility for better, stronger, and more innovative ideas is endless.

That is why the best anything has not yet been created. The best iPhone, the best computer, the best car, the best chocolate chip cookies, the best whatever will never be created because they’re always getting better. How are they getting better? Not necessarily in terms of how they’re executed or implemented, but because of the idea, the innovation behind that.

As you’re developing your offers, as you’re coming out with products or services or a coaching program, you must spend the time to think about what to offer and how to position it in such a way that is unique and better than what’s out there. You want someone to be like, “Wow, this is awesome.”

It’s going to solve a problem for people in a way that is unique, better, novel, and different than what everything else out there is currently offering.

If you don’t, you will become a commodity. You will not stand out. People will just look over your stuff as they’re flipping through pages of a magazine, and that is the key. Ideas versus execution: I will heavily put my money behind ideas because at the end of the day a great idea beats flawless execution.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. If you agree, awesome. If you don’t agree, that’s totally fine as well. No hard feelings either way. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast on iTunes. While you’re there, leave a rating or review. It’s always greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I hope you have an amazing day and a great week. I look forward to seeing you in a couple days with another great interview coming your way. For now, continue to get out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you in our next episode.

Transcription

Hey guys, welcome back to the show.

I’ve got a very special guest, Dr. Michael Breus. He’s known as America’s Sleep Doctor. This is a cool interview because he’s going to share his media secrets how he’s gotten on to shows like the Dr. Oz Show, which he has been on 39 times. Yes, 39 times. He’s now part of their advisory board.

He’s been on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He’s been on all the big media you can think of. He’s going to share how he’s done that and, more specifically, how it’s helped him drive his business forward.

Michael Breus is a clinical psychologist, a diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine, and a Fellow of The American Academy of Sleep Medicine. He was one of the youngest people to have passed the Board at only 31 years old with a specialty in sleep disorders. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world with his credentials and distinction.

If you want to learn more about him just check out TheSleepDoctor.com. He’s going to share with us how he acquired this URL, which is a great lesson. He’ll share how he separated himself from a typical profession that is a little bit less adventurous, if you want to think of it that way.

I think you’re going to get a lot of value out of this interview. He’s very giving, very generous and he’s pulling back the curtain to share exactly how he went from working in practice with his clients to being featured on shows like Oprah, the Dr. Oz Show, and now being part of the clinical advisory board for the Dr. Oz Show.

I think you’ll find this helpful. Even if you’re not into playing the media circuit at a big level, there are still some nuggets of wisdom that can apply to your business. Without any further ado, let’s welcome Dr. Michael Breus to the show. Michael, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How are you?

Michael:                              I’m great, how are you?

 

The origins of the name “The Sleep Doctor” and positioning

Yuri:                      I’m doing very well, thank you. I’m excited to have you on the show because you are The Sleep Doctor. Some people talk about you as America’s Sleep Doctor. First and foremost, how do you get that name? Is it something you coined yourself or is did someone give it to you?

Michael:                              It was basic marketing 101. I wanted to start a brand and I was looking for what would be descriptive and make sense. The Sleep Doctor was perfect for me to have as my moniker. It makes sense because I am an actively practicing sleep specialist.

I went out looking to see who owned TheSleepDoctor.com and it’s a funny story. It turned out that a woman had bought it for her husband as a gift because he was a sleep specialist down in Florida. He wasn’t using it. It was just a fun unique, here, I’m going to give you this URL for an anniversary, or whatever.

I had an attorney contact them and say, “Hey, what are you interested in? Would you be willing to sell the name?” They were very excited. This was a long time ago, maybe 10, 12 years ago. They said, “Sure, pay us $100,000 and we’ll give you the name.” My attorney wrote back, “My client is willing to give you $10,000 for the name.” They said, “We’ll do 9.” I went backwards and he said, “He’s willing to give you $9,000 for the name.”

Yuri:                      That’s awesome.

Michael:                              They came back and said, “Well, what about 80,000?” He said, “He’s willing to give you 8,000 for the name.” They didn’t catch on for a while. I paid five grand for that name.

Yuri:                      That’s great.

Michael:                              It was the best single investment I’ve made in my brand because it’s eminently recognizable, nobody ever forgets it, and once you meet me you just attach those two things simultaneously, which is fun.

Yuri:                      It’s so smart. The URL is awesome, but we tell our listeners quite a bit that positioning the marketplace and being niche is extremely important. One of the things that we get people to think about is occupying a drawer in someone’s mental cabinetry? When I’m thinking of underwear here’s the drawer. When I’m thinking of sleep I think of Michael Breus, right?

Michael:                              Right.

Yuri:                      It’s so smart to be The Sleep Doctor. When I’m thinking of sleep I think of Michael. Listeners, take that in because that’s powerful. I’m sure the couple you bought the URL from are probably kicking themselves now.

Michael:                              You know, honestly, I don’t think they are. They’ve been in touch with me since then and I think they like what I’ve done with it.

I don’t think it’s like, “I wish I would have tried to get more money out of him.” I think it was, “Wow, look at what he did with it. That’s a cool thing.” You find that in business as well. As a health care specialist, media doc, and all those things, it is much more collaborative than competitive, at least in my space. That’s what I’ve discovered.

Yuri:                      I’ve noticed that as well. When I came online in 2006, the number one thing I recognized quickly was how abundant and collaborative people were. In a brick and mortar type of scenario it seemed to be more competitive, but as soon as I came online everyone was happy to support. I totally agree with that.

Michael:                              I think it has to do with the nature of people in health care in general. I think we’re much more collaborative bunch. There’s plenty of patients to go around. Nobody is out there starving for patients.

Yuri:                      Yeah, exactly, and it’s not like people are going to be sleeping amazingly all through the night just like that, right?

Michael:                              Right, exactly.

 

How Michael’s business and brand grew; “be a good date”

Yuri:                      So you seem like a pretty savvy business owner and marketer. I don’t even know if I want to use that word. Is that something that you developed over time? Did your background in psychology help with that? How did that all develop for you?

Michael:                              It was very organic but purposeful.

When I decided that I wanted to have a brand, I sat down and talked with a business person. I’m a great sleep doctor, but I’m not necessarily a great business person. I met with and eventually hired a manager and her job was to elevate my levels of exposure so that my people could know about my brand. Then she’d help me monetize it.

How do you monetize a brand? There’s two ways. You either put your brand on other people’s products or you create your own products. I’ve done a little bit of each.

It was purposeful. I basically walked into my bedroom and I said, “What are all the items in here that we could add some level of sleep science to make them better and more efficacious?” Also, to be very honest with you, as I started doing more and more media people just showed up at my doorstep.

I didn’t have to go out and pitch myself to hardly anybody because once you start getting on shows like Dr. Oz, The CBS Early Show, and Oprah, everybody shows up at your doorstep.

Yuri:                      It’s all about positioning. It’s one of those things where if you have it it’s amazing, but getting it is so challenging for a lot of people. It helps.

Michael:                              I would challenge that thought, to be honest with you. I’ve got a method that I developed that I’m happy to explain to people briefly today, but maybe in more detail later to be able to teach them how to do it.

If you’re up for it, I can lay it out there right now.

Yuri:                      To give everyone some context, you’ve been on Dr. Oz what, 39 times?

Michael:                              That’s correct.

Yuri:                      Everyone listening, what Michael is about to share could be valuable, so I’ll let you take it.

Go for it.

 

Dealing with producers and solidifying media relationships

Michael:                              Okay, so there are a couple of things that people must understand about media in general. The very first thing is to be a good date. A long time ago when I was growing up my dad said, “Even if you go out with somebody and there’s no chemistry or you’re just not attracted to them, always be a good date. Number one it’s the right thing to do. Number two, girls know when there’s no connection, and they will be able to set you up with one of their friends who they think would have a connection with you.”

The same holds true with media. Always be a good date.

I write most of the segments that I’m on television for. I work with the producers. I make their lives easier. I ask them questions and come back with the script. I do the same thing with articles that I’m being quoted in or being interviewed for. I always provide more information than what they want.

If a reporter connects with me, not only will I do the interview, but I might send them a follow-up note with an article that I’ve written pertaining to their topic, or find an article within the research world in case they wanted to have real up-to-date research.

Remember you are not in charge as the doctor of the media. You’re just another source to them so you don’t have that walk into a room with a white coat feeling that you’re in charge, because you’re not. You need to make their lives as easy as possible.

Look at media from a different standpoint. They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They’ve got very tight deadlines so you must be available for interviews quite a bit. I do a lot of stuff on email. People will email me questions and I’ll email them answers back, which seems to work quite well, but you need to be available. You need to be ready to help them out in whatever way, shape, or form they need.

Now the real question is, how do you get them to call you? The easy part is after they’ve called. So how did I get people to call me? To give everybody a reference point, I do between 25 and 35 interviews a month.

Yuri:                      Not too bad, you want to do the most!

Michael:                              Yeah, exactly. This is how I’ve curated that ability: I went to my local newspaper and local media outlets and searched on their websites for articles about sleep and my topic area. Once I found articles about my topic area, I looked to see who the reporter or journalist was. Nine times out of 10 on those websites, they give the journalist’s contact information.

I contacted those journalists and said, “Hey, I really liked your article on sleep deprivation I’m a local sleep specialist. If you ever need somebody to talk to as a source, I’d be happy to help. Here’s an article that I wrote all about sleep deprivation.”

I did that for about three or four months with any local article that I could find that had anything to do with sleep in my geographic location. Of course, several of the reporters would call me back and say, “Wow, we don’t have a sleep source,” “We’re looking for one that would be great,” or “I’ve got sleep sources, but you sound very eager and interested. I’ll be happy to include you.”

Then I was always ready with ideas for sleep stories. I would look in PubMed, a medical literature database, and see the newest studies in sleep. I would then be able to pitch them ideas, so once they connected with me I’d say, “Oh, well, actually a study was just released last month and it was all about dreams and that Vitamin B helps you remember your dreams. Is that something that you think your readership would be interested in?” They’d respond, “Oh, my gosh, wow, that sounds really cool tell me more.” That’s how the relationship starts.

Once you get about four or five of those local pieces of coverage then you can go to a regional or bigger group. Here in Los Angeles, once you have three or four pieces of coverage then you can go to KTLA, the biggest news station in Los Angeles and say, “Hey, I’ve been interviewed three or four times and these are the topic areas. I’d love to have the opportunity if you ever want to do a story about sleep. Please let me know.”

You do that regionally and basically take the same form and use it multiple times.

That works well on a local and then regional level. Once you get about two or three television and four or five articles, then you’ve got enough of a base to go to a publicist who can get you onto national television shows. I hired and worked with a publicist for a couple of years. Their job was exclusively to get me on television, in print, on radio, what have you.

That’s how we did it. I had to have enough stuff locally and regionally to get to the national stuff.

Now here’s a little secret that most people don’t know about national media. Most of national media – I’m not talking about video, I’m talking about print – has consolidated. Almost every magazine in the country has fired all their staff writers and just use freelancers. That turns out to be good for people who want to be in the media.

Here’s why: Freelancers write for multiple magazines. Once you speak with a journalist or a reporter and you get their contact information, you can pitch them ideas and they might say, “Well, I’m writing an article for Cosmo and it’s probably not going to be good to talk about that topic there, but it might be perfect for Health Magazine.”

Working with freelance writers turns out to be effective because they can put you into different media distribution channels quite easily because they write for so many different ones.

Yuri:                      Yeah, that’s awesome. Then you become their go-to source.

It’s almost like one of those movies where they say, “Let me talk to my source” and give you a shout. You’re talking about climbing this pyramid and starting locally, contributing value, and making it easy for their lives. It just makes sense. It’s simple, but I think a lot of people missed the boat on that. They just want people to call with a topic to talk about. It’s the other way around.

Michael:                              Exactly. You don’t want to be aggressive about it, but you want to let them know that you’re an expert. Having a press kit is good. Having a headshot, bio, list of topics that you can speak on, and a couple of articles you’ve written is good to send to these journalists once you identify who they are. It looks professional, it’s very effective, and honestly they’re all looking for good sources because it makes their life easier.

They don’t have to scour the Internet, try to find somebody, and try to call them. You’re there. You’re ready and you want to help. That’s what they’re looking for.

Yuri:                      You probably know this better than I do, but what I recognize having been on The Doctors and Dr. Oz is that they are content machines; it’s five days a week, multiple segments. They must come up with stuff all the time.

Michael:                              Correct.

Yuri:                      So by you making their life easier they’re like, “Oh, thank God.”

Michael:                              Yeah, you are serving a purpose and, by the way, they will learn to depend upon you for that service. The reason I’ve been on Dr. Oz 39 times is very simple. Well, there are two reasons.

Number one, I’m the easiest guest they work with. Number two, my ratings are good. How did I do both of those things? Again, be a good date. When a producer asks you to do something, do it. Whether you want to do it or you don’t want to do it almost doesn’t matter.

If they’re asking you to do something – unless it is forcing you to describe something in an inaccurate manner because they don’t want you to do that – most things you can do.

Now, there are caveats. As an example, there was one show where they wanted me to wear pajamas on the show. I felt like that wasn’t a good idea from a branding and credibility standpoint. I politely refused and said, “Look, if you want me to wear a costume I can wear my white coat, but from a credibility standpoint you don’t want your sleep doctor in pajamas.”

As soon as I said that they agreed.

Yuri:                      Especially if you sleep naked or in your underwear.

Michael:                              Exactly, that won’t go over well on that type of television for sure.

There’s one more little caveat that I wanted to sneak in there for people. At the national television level, you need to know who the producers are. On a show like Dr. Oz there are six or seven different producers. Here’s what’s fascinating: If you’re a producer at Dr. Oz and you decide to leave that show, you take your experts in your back pocket with you.

As an example, when I was on the Oprah Winfrey show in 2004 I worked with three different producers and met two other producers while I was on stage. I got their cards and information.

Well, when the show ended, guess what? They dispersed to some of the top shows in the country. So, guess why I can get on Rachel Ray, Dr. Oz, and The CBS Early Show basically whenever I want? I’m a known quantity at that point.

These people have used me. I’ve been effective. I do what they ask me to do and I do it well, and they’re like, “Wow, this is a segment I don’t have to think about. I’ll just get Dr. Breus.” Again, it’s about becoming that go-to person.

The other thing I would recommend for people out there is media training. I’ve personally done over 200 hours of media training over the course of time, and different media requires different types of training. For example, if you’re doing a national television show and they’ve got three different sets and you’re walking from set to set and doing different things, you need to understand things like blocking and lighting. You need to know who your host is.

What is their style? How do they like to work with people? You need to do your research. If you’re going to get on a show like Dr. Oz, you need to watch a couple of Dr. Oz shows to see how it works. How are they standing towards the camera? Where are they looking? Are they looking at the camera? Are they looking at him?

Those types of things can be very, very helpful because, again, you just make the producer’s life easy. If they don’t have to stop everything in the middle and say, “Hey, Michael, you’re looking in the wrong direction,” they love you.

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. How has all this media helped your business?

Michael:                              In quite a few ways. The exposure I’ve gotten has landed me six-figure endorsement deals – quite a few of them, actually. It’s interesting because when somebody sees that you’re credible enough to be on a show like Dr. Oz – never mind what people might think of Oz or whatever – but just the mere fact that I’m on a national television show that gets 4.5 million people to view it, and I’m sitting there teaching about sleep, that’s enough for most people who are looking for an endorsement person. That’s enough for them to be like, “Oh, I need to look at this person.”

Of course, every time you do one of these you want to get the clip and post it on your YouTube channel so you can push people towards your YouTube channel when they contact you. What will happen is that somebody will say, “Hey, I saw you on Dr. Oz the other day and you were talking about sleep deprivation. I’ve got a new supplement. Would you be interested in learning more?”

That’s what you want. You want them coming to you as opposed to you having to prospect and go to them.

Now here’s where the problem comes in: If you are on a national television show like Dr. Oz, everybody wants you to endorse their product, and that can be a problem. For me, personally, I only work with and endorse products that have real data behind them. The very first question I ask a lot of these companies is, “Where’s your data? How do I know that your stuff really works?”

About 60% of people fall off at that point. They say, “Well, it’s anecdotal, or it works with my mom or my girlfriend or my boyfriend.” That kind of stuff and a lot of those companies are start-ups and, quite honestly, they can’t afford you to be a spokesperson anyway.

The bigger companies will have real data. They will be able to work with you, and then it’s just a matter of figuring out what they’re looking for.

I do all kinds of work for companies; everything from Facebook posts to Twitter chats. I do what’s called the Satellite Media Tour, where I will be in a studio for maybe four or five hours doing 30 different interviews with different news stations around the country from there. I do trade shows where I’m talking to people – potential customers – about products and the science behind them.

You’d be pleasantly surprised at how many opportunities there are for additional income and, in some cases, believe it or not, better income than what you might be making in your practice.

 

Responding to adversity and how Michael’s response benefited him

Yuri:                      Sure, that makes sense. Is there a time or a specific moment where you were doing something on one of these shows and it was a bit of a blooper? Has something ever not worked out as well as you’d hoped?

Michael:                              Well, yeah, my appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show was a great big blooper. I was sitting in the green room. The show was going to be on women’s health. The first guest was a journalist named Rene Syler.

She had done a prophylactic double mastectomy, so she had been diagnosed with cancer, but she had both BRCA genes. She had both of her breasts removed, filmed the whole thing, and wrote a book about it. She was the first guest. When you’re on a show like that, there’s three segments. You get 18 minutes and because it’s an hour-long show, you’ve got to consider the commercials. She went 23 minutes on her segment.

The next person who came in was a doctor who oversaw the HPV vaccine. She went 24 minutes. By the time I walked out on stage at Oprah Winfrey, which is the biggest of the big, it doesn’t get any bigger than that, I had eight minutes on the show. I went from 18 minutes to eight minutes.

I was supposed to do three different things. We were doing a bedroom makeover. We were talking about Ambien. We were talking about my new book. There was a lot of information we were going to have to cover.

As I walked out, Oprah looked at me, talked with her producer, and said, “You are not going to be on my show today.” I looked at her and I don’t know how I had the presence of mind to say this, but I turned around and said, “You know what, Miss Winfrey, I totally understand that. You’ve got some important topics here and, to be honest with you, there’s more information that you could get from both of those guests. If you ever want to have me on your show again, I’d love to have the opportunity to be there.”

She looked at me like I was insane and she was like, “Really?” I responded, “Yeah, no worries.” She said, “Would you mind going back to the green room?” Well, when Oprah Winfrey tells you to go back to the green room you march your butt back to the green room.

Yuri:                      Absolutely.

Michael:                              I went back to the green room. She finished the show and then she turned to the audience and she said, “We have a guest that didn’t make it on the show today because we ran long. Would everybody be willing to stay here so we can do a segment with him on it?” Of course, the crowd said, “Yay.” I walked out and I got 26 minutes of time.

Yuri:                      There you go. That’s awesome.

Michael:                              Here’s where it got really interesting. I was what’s called an “orphan segment”. We basically had only half a show, so I was in the last show of the season of segments you didn’t get to see. I was with a woman who speaks to the dead and another woman who teaches women how to get exercise on a stripper pole.

That was my show because each one of them had about 14 minutes and I had this big segment. Here’s where it got even better: Because the woman who talks to the dead and the other who teaches on a stripper pole was so interesting, that show reran five different times. Every time it reran, my book sales went up because in my part of the segment I was talking about my book.

It was a blooper turned pot of gold, if you will.

 Yuri:                      That’s awesome. I think the key thing that you alluded to was how you responded to that adversity. Some people may have thrown up their arms or thrown a fit or whatever. You just had the presence of mind to be cool and just be like, “That’s totally fine, let’s just figure out a better way to make it happen.” Well done, that’s awesome. Let me ask you this: There are a lot of psychologists. There’s no shortage of doctors.

Michael:                              No, there’s not.

 

The intersection between what you love and serving a gap in the market

 Yuri:                      What was the moment in time where you made the decision to say, “I’m not going to do what everyone else is doing. I feel like I’ve got a bigger vision.” What was the moment in time and how did you have the courage to go out and do something that was outside of the comfort zone for your profession?

Michael:                              Sure. I know the exact moment. I was on the third day of my residency and I was rotating to the sleep lab. During the residency, people were choosing their rotations and nobody wanted the sleep rotation. I thought, “Sleep sounds kind of cool. I like to sleep and I don’t know much about it. It would be a cool thing to learn about.” I said, “All right, I’m in.”

By the third day I had absolutely fallen in love with clinical sleep medicine. I get the opportunity to help people incredibly quickly and that’s not something that you normally get in normal clinical psychology.

In normal clinical psychology, it can take weeks, months, even years to see treatment gains. For me, I literally help people in 24 hours sometimes. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but that was very attractive to me. Also, to be honest with you, there weren’t a lot of sleep psychologists when I started 19 years ago.

In fact, there were almost none. When I looked at the marketplace to niche myself out I said, “Okay, this is an MD specialty, but I’m a PhD wanting to get into this. How do I do that?” What I did from a legitimacy standpoint – and this is rather unique – is I took the medical boards without going to medical school and passed.

That gave me the credibility as a psychologist to walk into this field. People challenge me on my knowledge base even to this day, especially when I first started. People said, “Oh, you’re a clinical psychologist. What do you know about apnea?” My response was always the same: “Ask me a question about it.”

Every time somebody asked me a question, I could give a very detailed and accurate answer about the area. If you do decide to move into an area like sports psychology, sleep, or something that’s more niche, know your stuff. People will challenge you.

The reason they challenge you is because they’re threatened. They see that you’ve got something that they want, and they want to try and knock you down a peg. Or, they want to prove that you don’t know something because it makes them feel better.

People will do that in a public forum, too. I’ve had that happen live on air before. It’s always about being calm. It’s always about being cool and collected because the other person will make a fool of themselves long before you need to. Just answer the questions and move on. That works extremely well.

At the end of the day, getting niched in sleep was twofold. I loved the area, and there weren’t a whole lot of people doing what I wanted to do. I thought I could make a market.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Good for you, man, that’s amazing. You’ve helped a ton of people because of that, which is tremendous.

Michael:                              That’s an interesting point that I wanted to bring up for folks out there that want to help a lot of people, do what I do, and get involved in the media. I’m on the clinical advisory board now for the Dr. Oz Show because I’ve been on it so many times. At the beginning of the season, the question is, “How do you want to educate 4.5 million people today, Michael?”

Yuri:                      That’s a nice question to tackle.

Michael:                              Just think about that as a responsibility or as a question.

It’s such an honor to have the option to educate that many people. Forget about whether my brand is out there, people know my name, and exposure. That’s all cool and gravy on the taters, but I get to influence 4.5 million people when I’m on the Dr. Oz Show. That’s an incredible responsibility that I take super seriously.

Folks out there should, too. If you’re going to be on media, people will listen to you, so make sure that you’re doing it for the right reasons.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                      That’s awesome. That’s great advice, Michael, thank you so much for being with us and sharing this. Before we finish, we have the Rapid Five.

Michael:                              All right, I’m ready.

Yuri:                      All right, here we go. Five rapid fire questions, and whatever comes top-of-mind is probably the best answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Michael:                              I don’t say no often enough. I tend to do things for people because I feel like they’re in need. I need to do a better job of saying, “I don’t have the time,” or “I can’t really do that.”

Yuri:                      Cool. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Michael:                              I can work harder than anybody I know. I have no fear of hard work and I put in the time. I would say that I have two real superpowers. One is that I never stop working, and number two is that I know how to take complicated information and turn it into bite-sized chunks that the average consumer can learn from.

Yuri:                      Wicked. Number three, what’s one skill you’ve had to develop over the years in business that’s been responsible for the success you’ve had?

Michael:                              Public speaking, for sure. That has served me incredibly, incredibly well. I do a tremendous number of lectures. I’ve probably done 12 lectures at five-figures a lecture this year alone.

Getting into that circuit and using that skillset whether you’re presenting in a meeting or just talking to a patient can be incredibly valuable. I would say learning how to public speak and being authentic in that public speaking style is what’s worked well for me.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

 Michael:                              First thing I do every morning is drink 16 ounces of water, get about 10-15 minutes of sunlight, and take three grams of Omega-3s.

Yuri:                      Nice. Do you have a preferred version of Omega-3s whether it’s fish or algae? I don’t even know if algae has more DHA, because there’s a lot of debate as to what’s the best. What do you find is the best source of Omega-3?

Michael:                              I use a product from a company called Designs for Health. It’s called OmegAvail. That’s the one I’ve got. It’s got EPA. It’s got DHA, and it’s got fish oil. It’s got all the stuff that you want. I’m on a very high dose of Omegas because I had a closed-head injury about six years ago and we’re trying to tweak my brain a little bit. It’s been very, very helpful.

Yuri:                      Awesome. They’re a great company. We do a lot of stuff with them, too.

Finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when…

Michael:                              Oh, that’s an interesting question. I know I’m being successful when I receive emails from people who’ve either heard, read, or seen my work and it’s influenced their lives.

Yuri:                      Awesome, I love it.

Michael:                              That’s the goal. Look, don’t get me wrong. I need to make money like everybody else. We all do. But it’s so valuable when I get feedback from patients or people who see me and say, “Wow, I did this one thing and it helped me so much. Thank you so much Dr. Breus.” That’s what plays the heartstrings and makes it worthwhile for me.

Yuri:                      Awesome. That’s what it’s all about.

Michael, where’s the best place for people to stay in touch with what you’re up to?

Michael:                              TheSleepDoctor.com is the best place, and I have a new book out called “The Power of When.” It’s all about these cool things called chronotypes. If you want to learn what your chronotype is, go to ThePowerofWhenQuiz.comand check it out.

Yuri:                      Awesome. Check it out, guys.

Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I want to express my gratitude and acknowledging all the amazing work you’re doing, and for just being on TV and impacting the millions of people you’re able to impact. And, through your books and your speaking engagements, you’re impacting a lot of people in a positive way. I appreciate all the work you do and for joining us today.

Michael:                              Thank you. It was my pleasure. I’m happy to come back anytime.

Yuri:                      Thanks so much.

 ***********************************************************

Yuri’s Take

Wasn’t that bad ass? Seldom do you speak with and get to meet a clinical psychologist who is this dialed in with the development of his business. Obviously, he self-professes that he’s not like some business building marketing genius, but he was smart enough to bring somebody else in who could help him with that.

I think that’s a very big lesson here, guys. What Michael is great at doing is teaching, serving, and sharing his expertise. If you’re listening to this, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “That’s what I want to do as well. I don’t want to have to build funnels. I don’t want to write sales copy all day long.”

The thing is that you have two choices. Either you figure it out yourself, and that’s going to take you a bit of time with a lot of trial and error, or you spend a bit of money to find people who can do those things for you.

This is part of our results accelerator framework. I don’t know if you’ve heard me talk about this before, but you have, as the leader and visionary of your business, your focus on the what and the why. You have what is it that you want to achieve and why that is important.

But the next question is extremely important. Are you asking “how” or “who”? See, most people think, “I know what I want to do, here’s how I want to do it. How do I go about doing that?” Then they go down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out the whole thing themselves.

Smart entrepreneurs ask “who”.

“Who can help me do this? Who can do this for me? Who can walk me down this path?” Because of that, they get results so much faster with a lot less stress. Even though a lot of times you’re paying for this “who,” in the long run it saves a lot of money and, in fact, makes them more money because they’re seeing more return.

They’re getting a proven path and it just makes a lot more sense. I thought I would bring it up, piggybacking on what Michael had shared with us in this interview.

Now, if you want help, if you want the “who” to help you take your business to the next level, then please book a result accelerator call. We’re going to help you do three specific things on this call. Number one is we’re going to help you attract more clients into your business predictably. It’s not hosting randomly on social media and hoping for the best.

We’re going to show you a predictable way that gives you predictability in your business, which is what most businesses want. Second, we’re going to show you how to enroll more clients without feeling salesy, and third, how to deliver an amazing result for them without one-on-one coaching.

If that’s of interest to you and you want to speak with us for 45 minutes, we’ll jump on the phone with you. It’s completely complimentary. We do this because we believe it’s the best way of starting a relationship with you. Number two, we understand that a percentage of people we speak to may want us to help them a little bit deeper with their business.

If that’s the case, we can tell you more about that. If not that’s totally fine as well, but at a minimum, understand that it’s not a sales call. It’s a call for you. It’s all about serving you to your highest possible level. Our goal is to give you more clarity and more of a proven path that you can follow with your business.

If that’s of interest to you, book yours today at HealthpreneurGroup.com/book. We only have so many spots every week. They get filled up quickly because we have a predictable way of generating a lot of these calls, which I’ve spoken about in previous episodes. Anyway, if that’s of interest to you grab a call. We’d love to chat with you.

Second, if you’ve enjoyed this episode and you haven’t already subscribed, subscribe to the Healthpreneur Podcast. Head on over to iTunes, click that little subscribe button, and while you’re there leave a rating or review. That would be awesome.

That is all for today, my friends. I hope you have an amazing one. Continue to get out there, do your stuff, work your awesomeness, shine your light, be great, do great, and I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.

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Transcription

Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing great and having a great day. It’s about to get a little bit better. We’ve got a great guest on today named Ricki Heller. This is going to be a fun interview because she’s going to share some cool stuff about removing excuses and just doing what you must do to get on people’s radars or get stuff done.

The title of this episode is “What Ricki Did to Get on Ellen DeGeneres’ Radar.” That’s tough to do. Ellen DeGeneres is a pretty big deal, so you’re going to discover what Ricki did from a guerrilla marketing tactic. This is Guerrilla Marketing 101. It’s a great lesson and, whether you want to get on Ellen’s radar or anybody else’s, you’ll be surprised at how simple this is.

I’ll tell you right now that the reason most people don’t do this is because they have and inherent human built-in hardwiring that says, “Oh my God, what if this person doesn’t like me?” You’re going to see how Ricki overcame that. I think it’s going to be super powerful for you.

A quick background on who Ricki Heller is: She’s a holistic nutritionist and author, recipe creator, and educator. Her world was turned upside down when health issues forced her to cut out gluten, sugar, eggs, and dairy in 2009, and rather than give up work as a professional baker, which she was, she went and studied holistic nutrition and recreated all her favorite desserts and baked goods in healthier forms.

Today, she shares recipes and information through her blog, RickiHeller.com, her online programs, and individual coaching for people on restricted diets. She’s also the author of two best-selling cookbooks, “Naturally Sweet,” “Gluten-Free and Living Candida-Free,” and was a nominee in 2016 for a Canadian Holistic Nutrition Award. She lives just outside of Toronto, so it’s always a great honor to have more Canadians on the show. I’m super proud of that.

She was also featured and recommended on Ellen’s website. She’s going to share exactly how that all happened. She’s been featured in a bunch of media. Anyways, she’s going to share her secret sauce here. I think you’ll enjoy this. Without any further ado, let’s welcome Ricki Heller onto the show.

Hey Ricki, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast. How are you?

Ricki:              I’m great. Thank you so much for having me.

 

Introducing Ricky, her journey, and how Ellen endorsed her self-published book

Yuri:                Yes, you are very welcome. Thank you for being here. We’re going to have a lot of fun today, guys. Ricki’s an awesome person doing some great stuff in the holistic nutrition space, as we’ve mentioned before. We’re going to talk about the journey in a few moments.

You mentioned to me that you got started in the space a little bit later in life. How did that happen? What was the initial moment where you made that decision to do this? How did you get from there to where you are now?

Ricki:              Yeah, it was a real process, I must say.

I come from a teaching background. I taught at a college for 27 years, but I’ve been immersed in food, one way or another, my whole life. I come from a family of bakers and I was always baking. Even though I was teaching full-time, I think food and working with food was always on the back burner, so to speak.

I always had something else going on while I was teaching. I didn’t even think of it as work, really. Just as an example, when I was newly married I would send baked goods to my husband’s office with him because I baked all the time. Of course, I didn’t want them at home because I would eat them all.

Yuri:                I’m sure that made him happy.

Ricki:              And it made his workers happy. One day, after about a year, he came home and he said, “My colleague wants to know if you’ll cater her wedding.” I had no idea what I would do or how I would do it. I had no idea, but I just said yes because I knew I loved to bake and I was thrilled that somebody wanted to hire me.

Little things like that happened over the years, but eventually what made the shift for me was a food blog I was writing just for fun. After I graduated from CSNN, Canadian School of Natural Nutrition, where I studied holistic nutrition…

Yuri:                Me too.

Ricki:              Oh, did you? Great. Yeah, it was such a great school. I was doing that just for fun, then I was diagnosed with candida overgrowth. Of course, my diet had to radically change.

Suddenly this food blog that dealt a lot with baked goods, sweets, and things, became a candida food blog because that was all I could eat. What I found was that my audience increased exponentially. I was basically niching down and didn’t realize it, right? I was suddenly so focused on candida.

From there, it was just happenstance. I had a lot of people over two years asking me for help and advice. I can tell you the moment where I didn’t even realize it, but it became a business.

This is a tangential story, but it does all fit together. I was newly on Twitter and one day I noticed that Ellen DeGeneres was following me on Twitter. I’m assuming that, at the time, she was vegan. I don’t know if she still is vegan, and she had just gone sugar-free. Of course, I was sugar-free.

Anyway, I saw this and something clicked. It was like I was back in my teenage mentality. I started tweeting at Ellen literally every minute, one tweet a minute.

I remember this so well because I didn’t even have a smartphone or anything at the time. I was sitting at my desktop just tweeting and tweeting, and then I’d run to the bathroom, and then I’d tweet, and tweet, and tweet. At one point I thought, “Hey, why don’t I turn on the Ellen Show and then I can make references to what’s happening on the show.”

I did this from 9:00 AM till about 9:00 PM. Seriously. It was just fun.

I kept tweeting that I had this great book that I had just self-published which was all vegan sugar-free treats. Anyway, about two weeks later, when I was looking at my blog stats to see who came to my blog, with how many hits and whatnot, I noticed a whole bunch of hits from Warner Bros.

I had no idea what that would be. Then, when I went to check, it was Ellen’s website and she had recommended my self-published cookbook on her website.

Yuri:                Wow.

Ricki:              I can remember, literally, standing in my office and shaking for about 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe it. Then, I called my husband and all my friends.

That was a turning point for me. As anybody who knows about getting a reference on a big person’s site, it didn’t result in any book sales, but what that did do was allow me to leverage that. I could acquire a literary agent to get that book republished as a conventionally published book, which was called “Naturally Sweet and Gluten-Free.”

Then again, because I was writing about candida while I was writing the draft of that book, another publisher who didn’t even know I had an agent contacted me to say, “Would you like to write a book about candida?”

That was the book I wanted to write in the first place. I ended up working on two books at the same time, which I would not recommend to anybody ever. It almost killed me. But when the first book came out, it suddenly hit me that I needed to adopt a more professional demeanor online.

It’s not just a personal little blog anymore, I wanted it to be what I do. That’s when I made a conscious decision to rebrand. I changed the name of the blog. I started thinking about what else I could do besides writing recipes and books.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. It’s so true, too, because it’s a mindset shift taking it from a hobby to a profession, right? It’s, “This is what I like to do here and there,” versus “This is my livelihood”. As soon as you make that distinction, everything changes. That’s awesome that you could make that shift.

Ricki:              I wouldn’t say I made it that fast, to be honest. It wasn’t instantaneous. I’m still working on it, but that was the moment when the shift started, let’s say.

Yuri:                Sure. The tweeting was to Ellen, or just around her topics and show?

Ricki:              No, direct tweets. At that point, I don’t know if anybody follows Ellen, but it was new. I think it was 2010. I don’t know how new she was to Twitter, but she used to brag that her tweets were her own.

I remember her tagline. She said, “My tweets are my own and they’re magnificent,” or something like that. Which was a line from L.A. Story, I think. She was referencing that line in L.A. Story where Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her boobs being real, right? She said, “My tweets are real and they’re mine and they’re magnificent,” or something like that.

In effect, if that was true, she was seeing them because I was tagging her on every tweet.

At some point, she was getting inundated with tweets from me. The funny thing was, as the day went on, I started noticing other vegan cookbook authors tweeting Ellen. I guess people saw me tweeting out hundreds and hundreds of tweets and they thought, “Oh, that’s a good idea.” It was hilarious. But I’m assuming, because of she’s never contacted me or anything.

I’m assuming she just saw them at some point when she was looking at her feed and she saw all these tweets coming from the same person about her book and how I have vegan sugar-free treats. Then I was making jokes about the guests on the show at times. I was possessed that day, seriously.

 

Her thoughts on entrepreneurship, overthinking things, and persistence

Yuri:                There’s a huge lesson there of the power of persistence.

What you demonstrated there was something that I would say almost everybody lacks, including myself a lot of times. You get to the point where you think, “Okay, I don’t want to be annoying. Are they going to get pissed off at me?”

What was your thought process as you were tweeting? What was going on in your mind as you were doing that?

Ricki:              You know what? It’s interesting; it didn’t occur to me that I would be annoying. They were all – if I say so myself – funny tweets. I know she has a great sense of humor and I knew that she was talking a lot about being vegan, going sugar-free, and wanting help around that.

In a way, this was something I was offering her. This is a book. I kept saying, “I’d love to come on your show and give these treats to you.” When I look back, what hits me the most about it is that if I had stopped to think about what I was doing. I just thought, “Oh, that will be a fun thing to do.”

It was like I was a teenager again, not even thinking about the consequences. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have thought exactly what you just said. “It’s Ellen, for God’s sake. Who am I to tweet Ellen? Of course, she’s not going to see this.” I would never have done it. I was doing it more for me in a way, in a weird way.

I was having fun with it. It was something that I thought of doing and I thought, “I’m going to be so crazy and silly today.” That’s how I was as a kid and I felt like I had lost a lot of that as I got older. For some reason, that day, the spirit moved me again and I just went with it.

If I hadn’t done that, had I stopped to think about it for even 30 seconds, I probably would’ve just stopped and given up. I just thought, “I’m having fun,” so if I was having fun I kept doing it.

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s cool. I think what you mentioned about getting out of your head, or not even allowing you to get there in the first place, is an important part, too. I can relate to thinking, “Well, am I going to be annoying if I message this person too often?” But, it’s funny, because when you speak to successful people, one of the things that they admire is persistence.

A lot of times, when we email, message, or tweet someone, sometimes they don’t respond to us as a test, like, “Does this person even have the wherewithal to follow-up?” It’s a filtering mechanism. Sometimes people don’t hear a response and they give up. In your case, you just kept going and going and going.

I think it’s such a great example of top of mind. When you’re top of mind, you’re tip of tongue. Obviously, she was thinking sugar-free, maybe candida, and then you were the first thing that came to mind.

That’s such a great example of the power of just doing your thing, not overthinking it, and not letting that little mind fret get in the way. That’s such a cool story.

Ricki:              Oh, good. Since then, I’ve had thoughts about deliberately trying to contact someone who I think is a big guru in business, or somebody who I admire. Of course, I’ve had second thoughts about it, right? Now it’s become something that I’m consciously trying to do, so I think you’re right.

Being able to get out of your head, that’s something for sure that has served me well over the years when I can do it.

 

Failure, perfection, discussing business, and her exit strategy from teaching

Yuri:                Yeah, totally. We were talking before we started recording about the journey that you’ve been on in terms of your own growth as an entrepreneur. What are one or two big lessons you’ve learned about yourself, or had to learn about business, since you started several years ago?

Ricki:              I don’t know if this is a lesson, but I never realized that I have always been an entrepreneur, but just never realized it.

Looking back, I’ve always had a side hustle going on. In my mind, it was, “Oh, I just need extra money from teaching. Teaching is great and secure, but I wish I had more.” I was just always wanting more and wanting to further myself and use my potential further then what I was doing in my day job.

I would start little businesses. That’s what they were, but I didn’t think of them as that at the time. I catered, and at one point I was doing tutoring on the side because I was an English teacher at college.

That was something I learned about myself, because I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. When I first decided that I was going to leave my job and do this full-time, I was struck by self-doubt, lack of confidence, and all those things. I didn’t know if I could do it; I’m so not entrepreneurial.

But now that I’ve learned so much more about what some of the traits of entrepreneurs are, I think yeah, I was entrepreneurial. That was a big “ah-ha” for me. Then the other thing for me, which was huge, is that you absolutely must embrace failure.

Growing up, especially as a teacher, I was an absolute type A perfectionist. That held me back a lot. That’s probably part of the reason why it took me so long to do what I’m doing. I was always afraid of not being perfect, and if I couldn’t get it right the first time, I didn’t want to do it. I was too insecure to try it if I couldn’t get it right the first time.

What I’m trying to do now is just totally embrace failure. I think you need to be able to fail with ease to be a successful entrepreneur.

Yuri:                That’s such a great point. The irony is that a lot of high achieving entrepreneurs are type A perfectionists.

I don’t think a lot of us have the mindset out of the gate to say, “You know what? I’m going to fail and it’s all good, because the faster I fail, the more I learn, the more I can grow.” You have to go through the pains of getting to this point where you’re like, “You know what? All right. Maybe everything’s not going to be perfect, I’m just going to fail.”

But it’s tough, because there is that resistance initially. We’re wired to say, “It’s got to be done right. It’s got to be perfect. I can do this better than anyone else.” When it doesn’t go right, it’s very deflating. I can certainly relate to that.

I know a lot of people we’ve had on the show can relate to that, as well as probably most of our listeners. We’re all high achievers wanting to grow, do more, and be more. It’s essentially these dichotomies and these contrasting forces that we play with on a day-to-day basis.

Ricki:              Oh, yeah. It’s true, like in my case, pretty much everybody who was in my life before I did this was not an entrepreneur, even just well-meaning family members. They see the failure and that’s all they see. They think, “Okay, this is never going to work,” and they try to talk you out of it.

I’ve wanted to not discuss my business with my family and friends anymore, because to them, and certainly this is the way I used to think, failure means that it’s over. You failed. Now, I try to approach it as, “Okay, what can I learn from this? Okay, next.”

Yuri:                Yeah, good point. We speak with so many health coaches and experts on a weekly basis and one of the biggest objections they have about enrolling in one of our workshops or programs is that they need to talk to their spouse.

I understand that because you’re part of a relationship you want to make decisions together, but what I realized very recently was that I’ve never asked my wife for her permission to invest in anything business-related.

Ricki:              Neither have I.

Yuri:                I remember the first mastermind I invested in was $18,000 of money I didn’t have. I didn’t even talk to my girlfriend at the time, who’s now my wife, because I knew I had to do that and make it work no matter what. What I’ve found is that, a lot of times, when people let someone else decide for them, there are a few things happening.

Either they don’t believe in themselves and don’t have the confidence to do it and make it work, or they’ve simply lost their power. They don’t have control of their life, so they let someone else make their decisions. I think it’s a cop out.

I love the fact that you brought that up because, again, we as entrepreneurs are the leaders of our families, businesses, and people we serve, and we must make the decisions. We can’t leave it up to someone else to make those decisions for us.

Ricki:              Absolutely. I’ve discussed it with my husband, and he’s so amazing he would never think to say to me, “You can’t do that.” It’s just not in his nature. But, I would still – because this is a partnership and you’re building a life together – want him to be aware. It’s more just for that.

 

Complacency and the constant desire to become and do better

Yuri:                Talking about mindset for a second, you were a teacher in the traditional sense. A lot of people we speak to are entrepreneurs, and I believe there’s a very strong difference in the way our minds work and our outlook on life.

Having been in the trenches working with teachers, and not that they’re lower or bad people, what have you found to be one or two big mindset differences between teachers who are happy to do the minimum, get by, and take their two months off for summer, versus entrepreneurs who are willing to step out on the edge and have the courage to go out for their dreams?

Ricki:              I think that’s part of the reason why I felt I had to leave, quite honestly. I was at the college for, like I said, 27 years and I had colleagues who taught the exact same material for 27 years. I was always trying to create new courses.

There are programs now online, but new material, because I would just get bored. I would be bored to death repeating that same information over and over. There was a certain level of complacency, and I don’t know if they were just jaded or what, but there was just no self-motivation to learn more, do more, get better, and change. If what you were doing was excepted, then you never did any more than that.

I’m not saying that was everyone. It was just endemic. I think that’s part of what the system engenders in people. You’re given your little raise every year and it takes about two years for you to get permanent status. But once you’re permanent like that, it takes an awful lot for a college professor to be fired. You have security that, honestly, is almost unshakable.

For a lot of people, that creates complacency. For me, it just created the itch to leave.

I remember plotting out how long it would take me to leave. I just couldn’t stand doing the same thing over and over. For me, that was a big difference. There’s no merit or acknowledgement. For instance, if you were the best teacher or you were the worst teacher, maybe your students would talk about you differently, but in terms of the rewards from the administration like financial rewards or status in the college, it was absolutely the same. It didn’t matter.

Yuri:                Interesting.

Ricki:              I believed I could do better, and if I want my reward, whether it’s financial, or appreciation, or testimonial on my site, whatever the reward is, I want it to be commensurate with the level and the quality of work I’m doing.

I wouldn’t expect to be paid the same amount if I were not doing what I felt was an excellent job and what my clients felt was an excellent job. But there, it almost didn’t matter. I hate to say it.

Yuri:                Yeah. We operate in a results’ economy, where if we produce great results, we should be compensated with fulfillment, financially, or however you want to define that. I don’t think a lot of people operate in that same world. But as an aside, do you know the number one reason for aviation accidents?

Ricki:              No.

Yuri:                It’s complacency.

It’s human error obviously, right? Pilot error. The only reason I know this is because I got my private pilot’s license five years ago, so I love flying. I remember reading about this. The number one reason planes crash is because of complacency. Pilots get to the point where they think, “I know this. I don’t have to do this checklist, whatever.”

Whatever that looks like, that’s the biggest reason that human error comes into that equation. Yes, teaching or your own job is maybe not life and death like flying a plane, but I think it is, right?

To live a life of 20, 30, 40 years of just saying, “Maybe I’ll just do the minimum,” I don’t consider that to be a life fully lived, especially when you’re impacting kids, teenagers, or students whose future you can shape. To have someone like you be their teacher would be a very different experience versus somebody else. I don’t know about you, but in my 20 years of being in school, there’s only maybe three or four teachers that I can recall impacting my life in a meaningful way. That’s sad.

Ricki:              Yeah. I think it is sad. It’s the way the system’s set up. I was a young teacher with enthusiasm, and it gets beaten out of you over the years, and it’s very unfortunate. That’s the way it’s set up.

Yuri:                But the cool thing is that you teach now, right? Just in a different format, in a different platform, and I think a lot of the people that we’re speaking with, whether they do online coaching or are building out programs or books, are essentially teachers. Yet we don’t have to be confined by a regimented or rudimentary type of schooling system to be able to impact people’s lives, which is amazing.

Ricki:              This is more of a rewarding form of teaching because I’m working so much more closely with a lot of these clients. When you were saying that for some people it’s not life or death, it is, in fact, with some of my clients. One client comes to mind. She literally couldn’t get out of bed when we started together and by the end of our three months together, she was planning a camping trip with her family.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

Ricki:              Yeah. To me, nothing can beat that feeling of helping that person get there.

 

Regrets and doing things that align with who you are

Yuri:                That’s great. Let’s say you’re speaking to a new grad coming out of CSNN, Canadian School of Natural Nutrition, or any other health coaching program. What advice do you give to them if they’re starting their business and jumping into this world? What words of wisdom would you give?

Ricki:              To be true to who you are as a person.

Like I was saying with the thing with Ellen, that was the core of who I was as a kid and who I still am today. When you do things that feel aligned with who you really are and your personality, they work out. Even if they don’t, I’ve never regretted anything I’ve done that I felt passionate about, or said yes to, that I wanted to do.

What I’ve regretted are the things I passed up because I was too afraid.

Be true to who you are and go with those instincts because they won’t serve you wrong. Then the other thing is to get some business training. I don’t know if business courses would’ve helped, but some business training. I took a lot of online business programs, which I do feel helped me because I knew nothing about this world before.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. Great advice. I remember when I was in CSNN the business component was to put together a business plan or something along those lines.

Ricki:              Yeah, we have that.

Yuri:                I think I refused to do it because I had a business operating at the time. I was like, “I have a business, here it is.” Anyways, there’s my rebellious nature, right? That’s why I can’t work for anyone.

Ricki:              Exactly.

 

The Rapid Five

Yuri:                Ricki, this has been enjoyable so far. We’re going to shift to the Rapid Five before we wrap up here. You ready?

Ricki:              I’m ready.

Yuri:                Okay, here we go. You’ve got no idea what these questions are, so whatever comes top of mind is the right answer. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

Ricki:              I overanalyze things. I’m a Libra, so I tend to want to weigh every single option before I decide.

Yuri:                Very cool. Number two, what is your biggest strength?

Ricki:              I think I’m very adaptable. I can change, pivot, and always try to adapt.

Yuri:                Chameleon-like powers. That’s awesome.

Ricki:              Okay, I’ll take it.

 Yuri:                Number three, what’s one skill you’ve become dangerously good at to grow your business?

Ricki:              Never stop learning.

Yuri:                Awesome. Number four, what do you first thing in the morning?

Ricki:              I do my affirmations, meditate, and then I exercise. If I have time, I do an infrared sauna, but that doesn’t happen every day.

Yuri:                Cool. It’s funny, almost every single person we’ve had on the show has said, “I wake up and meditate.”

Guys, there’s a reason that successful people are doing this stuff. It’s a very common trend. It’s interesting. Finally, complete this sentence, I know I’m being successful when…

Ricki:              I know I’m being successful when I think there’s a combination of what I feel passionate about doing and being able to see that it helps other people.

Yuri:                Love it. Ricki, thank you so much for being on the show with us and for all the amazing work that you’re doing helping your clients and shifting focus from baked goods to helping candida.

I loved baked goods. I mean, I live right behind a French bakery, so it’s dangerous.

But I just want to acknowledge you for all the amazing work you’re doing, for getting your messages out and helping your clients. It makes a difference, so thank you and thank you for being on the show.

Ricki:              Oh, it’s been a pleasure.

Yuri:                What is the best place for our listeners to follow you online?

Ricki:              Go to my site, RickiHeller.com, and find me on Instagram and Facebook.

Yuri:                Nice and simple. Ricki, once again, thank you so much for being with us. It’s been a lot of fun. I hope you guys enjoyed and got a great lesson from that.

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Yuri’s Take

That is such a powerful strategy: Just follow-up and keep on going. Who cares what people think, right? If you annoy them, hey, whatever. Anyways, that’s a good reminder that persistence usually wins and the worst-case scenario, if you piss somebody off or they don’t like you, that’s too bad, right? Just move on to somebody else.

Now, there is an easier way to get on people’s radars and that easier way is to be in their presence. If you want to exponentially accelerate your business success, I would say the most important thing you can do is be in the room with the right people. For that reason, I want to remind you of our annual family gathering called Healthpreneur Live, which takes place in Scottsdale September 20th through 23rd.

It is just over a month away and the time is now.

If you want to be surrounded by a 150 awesome and inspiring health coaches, entrepreneurs, practitioners, authors, and influencers in the health and fitness space, this is the event to attend. It’s 150 people by application only. There’s no ego. You’ll be sitting beside the speakers. They’ll be helping you out. They’re not light years ahead in many cases.

There are guests who are building six, seven, and eight figure businesses. Everyone is there to share. Everyone is there to connect. Everyone is there to be cool and have a good time. It’s a three-day experience unlike anything else, and if you’re serious about getting on the radar in the health industry, this is the event.

Here’s what I want you to do right now. Go to the website, HealthpreneurGroup.com/live. On the webpage, there’s a red button that says, “Request an invitation.” Click on that. The next page will have a couple questions for you to fill out. Fill those in and then submit that page. It will come into our system, we’ll review your application, and we’ll get back to you within one to two days.

Time is of the essence, okay? It’s filling up very quickly. We’re almost two-thirds sold out right now. A little bit more than that, actually. We must let the venue know by August 31^st. That is our cutoff date to finalize all our numbers.

If this is something you’ve been thinking about, then now’s the time to act. If you didn’t know about it, well now you know about it and check it out. The name of the event is Healthpreneur Live. This is the event to attend if you’re serious about growing your business and taking things to the next level. You never know who you might connect with. You never know what might happen from this opportunity, so now is your chance. Request your invitation now and I’ll see you in the next episode, and hopefully I’ll see you at the event.

 

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