Transcription

Nowadays, a lot of people are talking about the importance of hustling, grinding, and working yourself 28 hours a day. But in this episode, I’m going to bring us down to earth and talk a little bit of reality into us.

 

Do you really need to hustle and grind?

Now, I’ve got nothing wrong with hard work and putting in the time—that’s all important. But, I want to start off by saying that in life and in business there are seasons. When you start in business, or when you start your passion project, let’s be very honest—you have to work pretty hard. You’ve got to plant the seeds, you’ve got to do the learning. You kind of have to wear all the hats, right? You’re doing the marketing, the content, some web development, the customer support… There’s a lot of things that we’re doing.

And, that’s okay. It’s okay to understand that at that point in time, you simply have to put in that work. But, what I want you to think about—even from day zero—is building your business in a way that will be sellable.

By that, I mean this: How can you document and systemize your business in a way that other people can eventually come in and do a lot of the work for you?

One of the things that I’m always asking myself, is: If I do something more than once, can I step out of my body for a second and look at myself from an out-of-body perspective and ask, “What’s going on here? What are the steps that are involved here? How am I doing this? How am I going through this process?” And then, being aware of that and documenting it at the same time.

This is one of the things I wish I had done from day zero, because without that documentation I ended up doing a lot of stuff on my own.

Recently, at one of our Luminary Mastermind meetings in Los Angeles, I asked our Luminary Mastermind group several weeks prior, “What do you guys want the most help with?” And I gave them a couple of options, I said, “Like, creating webinars, or funnels, or whatever else?”

And then I also mentioned that I could help them create a playbook for their company that would create more self-managing systems for them. And that was the overwhelming winner, so that’s really what we talked about on day two.

Typically in our two day Masterminds, the first day I do ‘hot seats,’ where everyone gets a chance to go into their business or one specific problem they need help with. The second day, we do a teach and implement.

So the second day was really about … Here’s this idea, and let’s actually get it done in your business. People left on that second day with a playbook created for their business, which was awesome—no matter what stage of business they were in.

So, it’s really one of the things I wish I had done from day zero, because it would have freed up a lot of my time. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point in your business where it’s all about working smarter, not harder.

I really believe that as the business owner—no matter what you love doing, whether it’s sharing content or marketing or anything else—one of our biggest goals is to actually do nothing.

Doing nothing

Yeah. I really believe that doing less creates more, because the big breakthroughs are going to come from ideas, and not necessarily the execution of those ideas. I know we talked about this with Mark Alexander on episode 18, where we were talking about bringing a disruptive fitness technology to market. Really cool episode.

One of the discussion points we had was … What’s more important? Execution, or the idea? Mark mentioned that execution is very important, because without that, nothing gets done. And that is absolutely true. But, assuming that all else is equal, if we know stuff is going to get done anyways, then what will ultimately move the needle the most is a better idea.

The other thing to remember is that execution—the “doing” of stuff—is now becoming commoditized. We were actually just away in The Dominican for two weeks with our kids, which was a lot of fun. I went to Club Med, I played tennis all day, and it was just amazing to have that space to disconnect.

I had this space—so I played tennis for a couple hours in the morning, and then I would just go chill on the beach. I would literally just go and chill, lay in a hammock, look up at the clouds or the sky, and just think.

I’m telling you, that is where the breakthroughs happen.

I think you know this. The breakthroughs are not happening when you’re typing away at the keyboard, or in the trenches of your business doing stuff. It’s when you’re taking your dogs for a walk. It’s when you’re taking a shower. It’s when you’re meditating. It’s when you’re taking a vacation.

Creating space

So, the number one rule for us as entrepreneurs, as the business leader, is to create space. Space for you to disconnect from the doingness, into the beingness—just being and having that space to think, allow that divine digital download to come into your minds.

Then, from there, let it stew and brew. Get clarity on it. Then, you can disseminate it and share it with your team. They put it into action.

Then you go back, get some space, do your thing, you come back with another big idea. You have clarity on what it looks like, why it’s important to achieve this, what the finished product looks like, give it off to your team and they make it happen. This is what it’s like.

It’s almost like the movie March of the Penguins. This is years ago now, but it was really interesting to see that these penguins … Their entire existence is just coming out of the water in the Antarctic, walking for miles to a specific spot, laying an egg, huddling around the egg to stay warm in the brutal cold of the winter. And then, I think it was the husband, had to do this huge journey just to get food to come back and feed this baby.

That’s it. Then they just die and it repeats. Rinse and repeat.

I’m like, “Wow. I’m happy I’m a human. There’s a little more purpose.”

But the thing is, the father that went out to get the food—his sole objective was to get the food and bring it back. That’s it. So, for us, as the leader, our sole objective—not the sole objective, but the main objective if you really want to impact a lot of people and grow a great business—is to leave the nest, metaphorically speaking.

Get your food, your nourishment, your ideas. Bring it back to your team, get clarity and communicate what needs to happen to your team. Then they go and do it. That’s as you run your business, as you have people around you, and technology to support you. That’s the ideal, right?

But initially, you’re going to have to put in that work. But I want you to reconsider all of this prioritization that people are putting on the grind and hustle. Also understand that even as your business develops, as you grow and mature, there might be periods of time where there is a little bit more hard work. If you’re launching a book and you’re going to tour around the country, doing book signings and podcast interviews, all sorts of other stuff. That is a season of time in your business where you’re just going to have to be okay with putting in the time, and putting in the work.

If you’ve got a family, you’ll be like, “Hey guys, you know this books coming out. Here’s what I’ve got to do. I just want to be up front and be okay with what’s about to happen. But, it’s not going to be forever. It’s just for two months, three months, and then we can get back to normal.”

So, it’s really important to be realistic about what season you’re in, and no matter what season you’re in, always asking yourself, “Is this something that I should be doing? Do I love doing this?”

If the answer to the “I love doing this” question is yes, then keep doing it. But if it’s something you’ve done more than once that you can give to someone else, or it’s a skillset you don’t really want to learn or acquire, hand it off to someone else.

And whoever you’re bringing on, if you haven’t given them some type of documents and procedure, make sure that what they’re doing becomes documented. Part of the process of working with you and your company is that everything you do needs to be documented, so that, God forbid they should leave, someone else can take their position. Okay?

And that’s the thing. The big take away here is that when you are hustling all the time, you don’t create the space for yourself to create the big ideas and big breakthroughs. That is where your magic lies. Your magic lies in creativity and the creation, not in the doing. Okay?

So I hope that message finds you well, and if you’ve enjoyed this please remember to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.Healthpreneur Podcast is the name, and same bad time, same bad channel.

Every Monday, we’re doing solo rounds. Wednesday’s and Fridays, we have great interviews with other awesome leaders in our space. For instance, we’ve got a great interview with an online fitness coach out of Australia coming on Wednesday. His name is Aidan D’Arcy. He’s going to show you what he’s done for 18 months straight, to dominate his niche and grow his online training business. Really good takeaways in this one.

Then on Friday, Ive got my good buddy AJ Mihrzad, who is the founder/owner of Online Super Coach. Very well-known person in the online fitness space. And we’re going to talk about live events, being vulnerable, and building your superpower.

So, stay tuned for that. If you subscribe to the podcast you’re not going to miss that, so just head on over to iTunes, subscribe right there.

Roger Federer, one of my favorite athlete of all time, he took six months off in 2016. Came back, made 2017 the best year of this professional career almost, and he was 36! Rafael Nadal, same thing. (I’m just going to use some tennis references here, because that’s what I love watching.) Rafael Nadal took a bunch of time off after being injured, came back playing the best tennis of his life in his early 30s.

Novak Djokovic, just disappeared out of tennis for whatever reason, I think there’s some injuries going on. I think he’s taking almost an entire year off. It’ll be interesting to see how he comes back. Probably fresher and more hungry than ever.

So, whether you’re an athlete or business owner, or just a regular human, you need to take time to step away, to create that space. That’s where you rebound even faster.

And if you’re a strength coach, you know this. This is something called supercompensation, in the whole periodization framework. If we’re on a four week training program, each of the three weeks we build up, build up, build up. The fourth week, we drop it right down, rest and recovery. So then by week five, we supercompensate. We come back even stronger than we were before.

But in business, we forget about that. We’re just like, “go, go, go, go, go.” You will burn. You will burn out. You will die. You will hate your business. And that’s not what I want for you, because you’ve got a gift and a message that really makes a difference in people’s lives.

Anyways, I want to thank you so much for joining me on this solo round. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s episode, it’s going to be a lot of fun. And next week’s solo round, we have got a really cool thing we’re going to talk about—the three types of traffic, and how to best convert them.

But, one final thing I want to leave you with is that I am going to be running a live training, which we’re starting towards the end of December, early January, called Best Year Blueprints. This is going to be a completely free training for my Healthpreneur audience. And because you’re a listener of the podcast, you’re my tribe!

So, if you want to join us, it’s completely free. There should be a registration page where you just pop in your name and email, over at healthpreneurgroup.com/byb—that stands for best year blueprint, byb.I’m going to walk you through how to create the most amazing year in 2018, how to structure your goals, how to reduce overwhelm, and how to get super focused and clear on what steps to take next to get you there.

Sound good? I hope you can join us for that. It’s going to be a lot of fun. More details to come, but for now, thanks so much for joining.

Continue to go out there, be great, do great, and I’ll see you on Wednesday.

Transcription

We were just on a two week trip in Punta Cana with the kids and that was a lot of fun, had a lot of good times. Played a lot of tennis and just chilled out with that space on the beach. I love to break up the winter because I live in Toronto and if you’ve ever been up here, it gets pretty cold in the winter time—snow, slush, not a lot of sunlight. I’m a huge fan of breaking up the winter with small vacations like that and I’m pretty pumped.

So, tomorrow I am traveling out to Aspen, Colorado. I’m actually speaking at The Ad Summit, which is a big event for online advertisers, I think there are about 3-400 attendees this year. A lot of them are doing seven and eight figures in their businesses, and mainly using advertising to grow their businesses.

Now, the reason I’ve been invited to speak there is because they have a lot of attendees who are in the health space. They were looking for someone who could speak to how to grow business with content.

So I was like, “Well, I am your man.” I was introduced to them and that’s why I’m headed out to Vail tomorrow. I’ll be there for a few days at a special mastermind that I’m looking forward to. It’s going to be a fun couple of days, and at least I get to travel a bit and see some parts of the world that I haven’t been able to see. But that’s enough about me, let’s get to today’s episode.

We are speaking with an amazing person and a dear friend of mine, Dr. Krista Burns. She and her partner, Dr. Mark Wade run an amazing company called The American Posture Institute. And this has become a really, really big deal in this space. I don’t know the exact revenue numbers, but I know they’ve grown it into the high seven figures, if not more.

Kris is going to share in this episode how they started from—interestingly enough—a small local clinic in Italy. Here are two Americans that started a clinic out of a school in Italy. She is going to tell you how and why that happened, and how they transitioned to growing a mammoth of a business online and impacting a lot of people.

So, let me give you a rundown of who she is.

Dr. Krista Burns is a certified postural neurologist, certified posture expert, PhD in global health policy and doctor of chiropractic. She is a co-founder of The American Posture Institute and has helped thousands of students in more than 35 countries worldwide. She’s a highly sought after international speaker, speaking at conferences such as the World’s Congress of Neurology and the International Chronic Disease Conference.

As the author of the textbook, “The Posture Principles,” her goal is to inspire audiences worldwide to understand the importance of posture. Unfortunately, posture is declining with the speed of technology and Krista provides modern day postural correction solutions to improve neurological function, energy expenditure for increased productivity, and longevity of vitality.

So, obviously you guys know what that stuff is—neurology, neurological function—but for the average person listening to that, they’ll be like, “What the heck are you talking about?” That’s why we’re here. We’re in the know, right? We’re health and fitness experts, so we kind of know the stuff.

So with that said, let’s welcome Krista Burns to the show. This is going to be a good one.

Krista Burns, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How is it going?

 

Krista:            Doing great. Thank you for having me on, Yuri. Good to connect with you.

Yuri:                Yeah, you’re welcome. Great to have you here.

So, you run a pretty amazing business—The American Posture Institute—along with your colleague and partner, Mark Wade, who in and of himself is an awesome guy and a great character. Talk to us about how that got started.

Because you guys run a really great online platform, but it didn’t start out that way. You started off in the brick and mortar space. Can you walk us through that journey as to how you got started there and then what the pivotal moment was where you decided, “You know what? Maybe we should look at this online thing a little bit more seriously.”

The hero’s journey

Krista:             Absolutely. It has been a fun journey and it’s been a hero’s journey. We graduated from school and full of passion, ready to change the world—just like all of us who get involved in healthcare. We all want to make a difference in lives of our patients.

So right after school, we made this crazy move and we packed up our bags and moved over to Italy … Thinking that we’d have no problem getting new patients, regardless of the fact that Italy was in the worst economic crisis in their history.

We knew nothing, we didn’t speak the language, we had no entrepreneurial experience, we’re fresh out of school.

So Dr. Mark and I moved over to Italy just full of passion, ready to change the world, and once we got to Italy, we were in for quite a realization that we really did lack that entrepreneurial experience.

We tried opening up a clinic in the beginning—and I refer to that first year in practice as the treadmill effect. The feeling of working so hard to get ahead, but seemingly never moving forward.

We would make a sprint forward and get a couple of new patients in the door, but then we didn’t have the systems in place so we would just lose them out the back end. That first year in practice was nothing but failure, after failure, after failure to the point where we finally looked at each other and said, “Maybe we should just call it quits. Maybe we should move back to America where things are easier. At least we speak the language. We know people. We understand the laws there a little bit better.”

It was that moment where we said, “We either admit failure, give up, and move home—or we make this thing work,” because we hadn’t made money in a year. So we’re sitting in our apartment in Sardinia—the beautiful Mediterranean paradise—and we used to do these things called book reports, because we couldn’t afford to travel to seminars.

So we did book reports where we’d tap into the minds of our favorite authors, our favorite entrepreneurs. And one that really stands out to both Dr. Mark and I is the book, Good to Great by Jim Collins. In that book, he talks about the difference between good companies and great companies. Now, the difference between good companies and great companies is that the good companies mean well, but the great companies are the ones that leave a legacy, the ones that really stand the test of time.

And the main difference between those two businesses is that all the great companies specialize. They all have a hedgehog concept, or unique expert position. Instead of trying to meet the needs of every single person every single day of the week, regardless of their case, presentation, age, niche, you name it—you need to niche down very specifically within your unique expertise.

Looking back in that first year of practice, we thought, “Well, what was one thing that did work? We know that a lot of things didn’t work. What worked?”

And looking back on that year, we started to reflect and what we noticed is that every time we did external ads for postural correction, we got more new patients in the door. Every time that we focused on helping them with their posture transformation, we actually kept them longer. Meaning we were getting more new clients and we had better retention.

So we thought, “Okay. We’re really on to something here. Let’s define our unique expertise as postural correction.”

From that point, we started raising our knowledge to expert level. Now, you can imagine at this point with brick and mortar, we grew our practice tremendously and became one of the most successful practices in the country. We were working with five different professional sports teams. I was doing lectures with all the local corporations—keep in mind, in a second language. They just loved the information so much, they kept inviting us back.

We were able to work in the school systems implementing a postural hygiene program in the schools. And from that point, we realized—I was only 26, 27 years old and I had gone from being in a treadmill effect to failure after failure, to growing a great business. We just couldn’t believe that they didn’t teach us this in school.

We felt like more people need to understand how to define their unique expertise, and really niche down and build out that platform in their community. From that point, we wanted to share our message with more practitioners, more manual therapist out there—and so we put together our first online course, called “The Certified Posture Expert Program.”

Then from that point, we’ve built an entire platform to the point where The American Posture Institute Online grew so much, we were able to actually focus 100% of our attention to the online business, which is where we are today.

Yuri:                That’s awesome. So in Italy, you guys obviously learned how to speak Italian, I’m assuming? Were those lectures and patient interactions in Italian for the most part?

 Krista:             Yes, 100% in Italian. You can imagine, at the beginning, how difficult that was. It is definitely an obstacle when you can hardly communicate what it is that you’re trying to explain.

Yuri:                That’s awesome.

 Krista:             One of the things that is so cool with posture is that posture is a universal language. You can actually demonstrate it without saying any words.

So that was one thing that was really beneficial for us from a communication perspective in the beginning, because we did have that communication barrier. Then I’ll tell you what, once you start learning how to communicate in a second language, it really helps you pull your thoughts together in a more clear and concise way. Sometimes we over-talk things instead of being very niche specific and narrowing our focus, so with that second language, it was much easier to narrow that focus and be more clear and concise with our marketing message.

A lot of us tend to go off for miles and miles in different directions with our marketing messages, instead of keeping it clear and concise.

Yuri:                Yeah. This is really a good advice. It’s funny because I speak French, Spanish and Italian. I learned Italian by watching Italian soccer growing up, so that’s my only exposure to the language itself.

I love the language, it’s so amazing. But what I found was—and this is a credit to you guys—is that speaking French or Italian or anything is fine conversationally … But when you started having to speak about anatomy and a lot of those body parts and different systems, that’s a whole other ball game.

Credit to you guys for being able to do that in a foreign country. That is awesome. It’s very interesting to me because I’ve also had an affinity for Italian culture and I love the soccer teams over there.

So one of the things I wanted to touch on was that you hit upon postural correction and one of highlights is that you mentioned correction—which is different from prevention. Can you talk about the difference between trying to convince people that they need to be doing things to improve their posture versus helping those who are already in need of correction?

Kind of like treatment versus prevention, if that makes more sense?

Treatment vs. prevention

Krista:            Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s an incredibly valid point.

Now, if we tell our clients to look around next time they go to the supermarket, next time they go to the airport, and just start being mindful of people’s postures around them—what they’re going to find is that nearly 90% of people have a forward head posture while looking at their cellphone, that tech-neck posture.

We looked at this and we recognized that now 90% of clients out there actually have posture distortion patterns. So this starts the conversation and the mindfulness pattern that we need to prevent it. But also, if you already do have tech-neck posture, forward head posture, then we need to get in and do some correction.

We have a three-component system, which is spinal alignment, posture rehabilitation and posture habit reeducation. That habit re-education is the a re-education, but also a prevention period moving forward. Because we have our posture with us every single day—everywhere we go, we carry our posture.

We’ve had it for however many years up until this point, so we make those corrections and then from a preventative perspective, we put those posture habit reeducation reminders in place.

What’s so interesting, Yuri, is the shift in the societal patterns of this digital age. We used to see that it was just older adults who have postural distortion patterns. But now from a prevention perspective, we’re seeing this so much more rampantly in the younger generations—even adolescents and millennials, especially with the digital age. Talking to them about prevention of tech-neck posture—which is also leading to things like digital dementia, which is a change in brain function due to overuse of technology and poor posture.

So recognizing our prevention ability, our capabilities as healthcare professionals to get in from a prevention perspective for the adolescents. And then of course, making corrections for people who already do have progressive postural distortion patterns.

Yuri:                Yeah. So with that being said, do you find that the majority of people taking action—the people seeking out help and paying for solutions—are they typically people already in pain? Or is the level of awareness at a point now where millennials, for instance, will say, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to hold my cell phone a little bit differently.”

What seems to be the trend there for you guys that you’ve noticed?

Krista:            In brick and mortar, we found that it was more people who had pain. Then, a lot of our referrals were parents for their children. They would come in with pain and then we would start talking to them about tech-neck posture with their adolescents … And what we would find is that we would grow our pediatric population within our practice, because from a preventative perspective, the parents really understood that and wanted to prevent any health distortions for their children.

From an online perspective, I will say that people are recognizing it and it’s almost becoming more cool, if you will, to have ergonomic equipment for the millennials. They understand that they’re working from a coffee shop versus working in a traditional retail office, for example.

So these millennials are working from anywhere on their laptops and they’re starting to notice a new trend in posture, which is pretty cool. So it’s becoming more of the forward front, and we’re seeing this definitely more so from our online platform.

Yuri:                Yes. Cool. Because I remember hearing some stat about millennials … I think relative to their annual income, they spend the most amount on wellness. They may not be making as much money as baby boomers but relative to their income, they’re actually spending the most on preventative type of wellness, which is very, very cool.

They’re the ones getting the $12 juice and doing $18 yoga classes—stuff like what you guys provide, which is awesome.

Krista:            And they’re all on social, so we reach them there, too. Our baby boomer generation, they’re on social as well, but they didn’t grow up in that generation. So with our millennials, if we reach out to them from our online platforms, they’re incredibly receptive to receiving and taking in information on that platform.

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s awesome. Walk us through the initial first year, I guess, online whether it’s in the transition period or when you guys are full time online. What were some of the initial challenges that you guys had to learn about and overcome with this whole thing called “the internet?”

Videos, list building, engagement

 Krista:            Yeah. It’s amazing, our ability to stay connected via social media now.

In the beginning, I tried to put together my first online course and I had no experience. What I did, Yuri, is I actually wrote out 200 pages of material. And then I remember my first time standing in front of the camera, to record my first online course, and I just totally froze.

I thought, “I have 200 pages of great content. How come I can’t communicate it in front of the camera?”

That first day brought me to tears because I thought, “Well, that’s going out the window. I’m never going to be an online YouTube star. I’m never going to have an online course.” But then I got into my flow and I figured out that I could break up my course material in a way where I could do more bite-sized videos and put that information all together through a great platform.

Our courses are anywhere from 20 to 30 hours of edited video, and so we try to break that down into bite-sized pieces, instead of just standing in front of the camera with 200 pages of content—which is really just like having a blank sheet of paper with the camera staring at you. Getting over that and going in with a plan when you start recording is really important.

Now, before we released that first course, I remember thinking, “Oh, I hope we just make a couple of thousand dollars on this thing.” Because we had no list, I mean we built a list of 900 people when we did our first online launch.

So out of a list of just 900 people—just healthcare professionals—we actually did a six-figure launch our first go around. So it was a big success, but the reason it was successful was not because we have thousands of people in our list, but because we really nurtured the people that we did have.

It’s really true what they say in the online space, that it’s not about having millions of followers, it’s about having a smaller number of engaged followers. We really engaged with our people, we created a whole community around it, and we made it about becoming an expert.

So with the certified posture expert program, it is clinical. It is a clinically based program, but it also teaches you how to become an expert and position yourself as the go-to expert within your community.

So it was a clinically based program, but it also had the marketing support to help you position yourself as a go-to expert. And I really feel that everybody can connect with this—and in the Healthpreneur space, I feel like we were left behind when it comes to marketing.

We were all taught how to be great healthcare professionals, but if anybody is listening to this—they’re a little bit further ahead than everybody else who’s not listening to the podcast—but we need to share this marketing information to our fellow colleagues who don’t know anything about online marketing.

By being able to position yourself as go-to experts within the community, it’s now raising our knowledge and our prices to expert level versus a race to the bottom to be the less expensive guy in town.

Yuri:                Yeah, that’s great. It’s so true, because no one has ever taught this stuff in school, which is a shame.

 Krista:             Right.

 Yuri:                It’s good that you guys are doing this stuff and we’ve got stuff that’s supporting our audience too, because it’s definitely needed. The way I see it is that every single health professional has an amazing gift that can transform people’s lives in a bigger way than almost any other profession.

And it is a shame that schools aren’t teaching people how to build businesses because if you can’t get in front of anyone, your gift is not going to help them.

With that said, how did you start? What were the first couple of things you guys did to acquire that list of 900 people? And since then, what’s been your go-to strategy for getting new people into your world and then converting them into paying clients and customers?

Krista:            Yeah. Great question. It all started with Facebook ads, and we still do Facebook ads on an ongoing basis for lead generation. And then, nurture sequences. Once we get them on our email list, if they opt in for a lead magnet, then we want to nurture that lead, and we have multiple different programs at this point.

We make sure that we have a very segmented list where we’re actually providing them with the information that they want to know based upon what they opted in for, so we don’t keep it generic. We keep it very specific to what it is their interests are.

Another great tip that I want to give everybody—that I wish I had known in the beginning—is to have a Facebook group for prospects, and one for members.

So for prospects, we actually had a point one time where we were in the middle of a launch and our email got blacklisted. So we were going crazy, we weren’t sure what to do with our emails—but because we had set up a prospect Facebook group, we were able to communicate with them via Facebook in addition to email.

Because we have that prospect group, it saved our launch and we were able to hit $800,000 in revenue. But if we just had email in that situation, we would have been toast. Our launch would have been over.

So when doing an online launch, always set up a prospect group where you’re really nurturing those leads with email but also through that Facebook group. You’re connecting directly with them on precisely what it is that they want to know.

For example, I have a very niche course called “Postural Neurology,” which is neurology to posture system. It doesn’t get more niche than that, right? We’re really breaking it down.

So everybody in that group has a very high interest in posture and neurology. And what do I talk to them about? Neurology and posture, right? We meet those needs very, very specifically.

We talk about where they’re at in practice, where they can go and how they can get to the next level with these implementation protocols. Always speak to them about what they want to learn and understand their needs.

And also, in those Facebook groups it’s really easy to do polls and engagement questions, “Hey, tell me what you’re struggling with. Tell me what you want to learn more about.” And then, of course, I look back on that and say, “Okay. I need to write a blog post today. What do they want to know?” That’s my blog post.

Or if I’m going to go live on Facebook in that group, I’m just going to answer the questions that they already have. So, being able to communicate with email as well as Facebook is a huge tip that I want everybody to be aware of, because if you ever have a problem with your email, at least you can still communicate via Facebook.

Yuri:                Totally. Great advice. And a lot of times, the engagement is actually better in those groups than with email.

One of the things we’re finding is that nowadays, people gets so many emails that they don’t even care about them anymore. They’re just like, “Oh my God, get me out of my inbox.”

So I think, moving forward—especially with a lot of people talking with deliverability issues nowadays—it’s really important to look at alternative channels like you just mentioned.

And at Healthpreneur live, Mark did a breakout session on how to run a launch and it was so popular. People were like, spilling over. He was so popular, and people got so much value out of that—obviously, he was sharing some of the stuff you just mentioned.

One of the things that a lot of healthpreneurs deal with is … They just want to do their thing. They just want to share their content, teach and not worry about the marketing and the business side of things. I know you and Mark have different roles in the business, but what advice do you give to someone who is starting their business online has that mentality where they’re just like, “I don’t want to learn the marketing, I just want to teach.”

What do you say to them?

Honing in on your unique skill

Krista:            Yuri, what I say to them and to everybody listening is, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I’m the type of person who struggles to turn my computer on, who always has an audio issue, who has recorded more videos in mute than anybody else. I make these technology glitches literally on a daily basis. So I just want to let you know that if I can run an online business, I promise you can too.

And then just as you mentioned, it’s playing to your strengths. I’m in the front of the business. I do all the video, all the content creation, all the blogs. I’m going live on Facebook, to our Facebook groups. I teach all of our courses, I speak on stage, and I thrive in that arena.

Where I do not thrive is running and evaluating Facebook ads and engagement or setting up the emails to then go out through Infusionsoft.

I recognize that my quality talent is spent on stage or on a platform, teaching—versus Mark, who is fantastic when it comes to marketing strategies. If you can play to your strengths and then find a partner or find employees to help support you where you’re weak, then you’re not going to burn yourself out.

You get to stay within your zone of genius where you thrive. Because when you’re thriving, that’s when you get really engaged followers, versus if you were trying to do every single thing in your business. If that’s case, you get stuck working in the business and just looking at how to go from 1% to 2%. You get stuck in the numbers versus thinking of the overall picture.

So, play to your strengths. If you’re really good at the marketing aspect, then find somebody else who loves doing the teaching. If you love doing the teaching like I do, then find somebody to support you—to run the numbers on Facebook and email and get those conversions, so that you can stay within your zone of genius.

I’m glad you brought that up because that’s important. If not, it’s a quick road to burnout. We can also prevent a lot of obstacles by staying within our zone of genius within our businesses.

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s really good advice. What do you think is the one big skill or trait entrepreneurs must have for lasting success, especially online?

Krista:             I think it all goes back to the unique expert position. If you are not 100% passionate about something that can be profitable and that you can be the best at, then it’s the road to the bottom. It’s going to be burnout. So when we defined our unique expert position with postural correction, we really thought hard about this—like, what can we be the best in the world at?

I’m not trying to be all things health. Of course exercise and nutrition and stress management is important, but there’s other experts out there who address that and they do a better job than I do.

Instead of trying to be everything to everybody, define and hone in and really own in your unique expertise. If we can take an old concept like posture—which is classically one of the most boring concepts on planet earth—and turn it around to make it more sexy and exciting in a modern day and age, make it relevant to millennials and the digital age … then you guys can do it within any aspect of health.

Just hone in. Instead of trying to be everything health—find your unique expert position, really own that, stay passionate about it and always be raising your knowledge to expert level. Always be learning the next best thing within your niche, so that you can stay cutting edge and revolutionary with how you’re presenting this material to your clients, your target base. As well as staying at the forefront of correction for healthcare.

Yuri:                Nice. Good stuff. If you look back over the years you guys have had online so far … Other than the creation of content—you mentioned spending so much time in front of the camera and not knowing what to say—was there another big challenge or obstacle?

A pivotal moment where you guys were like, “Holy shit. Stuff’s about to go wrong if we don’t fix this or figure this out.” Was there a moment like that for you guys?

Getting back to your core and engaging your raving fans

Krista:            Yeah. I’ll be honest, we actually just recently went through this. We live in Puerto Rico now, where Hurricane Maria just hit and that totally wiped us out.

It was in this moment where we started realizing that we got a little bit too big. Does that make sense? We started having great success within the business and then the obstacle was almost that we were expanding too much and we were doing too many different things.

This hurricane moment was one of those things that put us in our place and we said, “Okay. Let’s get back to basics. Let’s not try and do every single thing. Let’s get back to our core. Let’s get back to our people.” And what I started doing from that point was an enthusiastic customer campaign. It really brought me back to the core of our business and reengaging.

I was sending out personal emails to thousands of our people, and I said, “Hey, here’s my individual email. If you have any questions, let me know. I want to help you be successful.”

Instead of going too big, we got back to our core, back to basics, back to our people, and we’re sending out personal emails to help them be more successful. You’re at that point in the beginning where you feel like you’re never going to grow and then suddenly, you grow very fast.

Then, you get to a point where you’re expanding at such a rapid rate … You’re bringing on new employees, you’re all over the place on social media and then suddenly you get to a point where you think, “Maybe I’m doing too much and I need to go back to my people, back to the core.”

So that was an obstacle that we recently went through. Hurricane Maria was one of those reminders for us to get back to the core, don’t try to go too big, deliver the most value possible to your members and then grow from there. Increasing profit per X instead of always trying to get new people on board.

I mean, you should continue doing lead generation, but instead of just focusing on new people, also focus on increasing your profit per X with your current members.

Yuri:                Yeah. That’s such a huge takeaway. This was kind of the overarching theme of our entire Healthpreneur live event. We went through a similar situation—minus the hurricane—where you kind of climb this mountain and you’re like, “Wow. I actually don’t want to be on top of this mountain anymore.”

It’s really about going deeper with people as opposed to going wider, and it’s a tough thing as an entrepreneur because we’re always looking to expand in terms of our reach, our growth and a lot of times we think that expansion needs to be in terms of numbers. More followers, more customers.

But as you said, if you just focus on serving your existing customer base even better, like sending them a personal email—which is, “Oh. God forbid!” as you said. I really believe that’s where the future is when it comes to online marketing.

Mass marketing? We’re in a day and age now where I think what you’re doing with the micro marketing is going to make a huge difference, and it’s going to really help you, and anyone listening, to really stand out.

So I’m excited that you guys went through that. Obviously, without the hurricane stuff, but to have that realization is so powerful.

Krista:            Yeah. It was powerful. Again, always be doing lead generation—never fall flat and get to the point where you plateau—but never give up on the fact that you have these followers from the beginning. You can always provide more value to them and keep them as raving fans.

It’s so much better to have raving fans.

I mean, I told you at the beginning, we did a six-figure launch with 900 people in our email list. That’s because they were raving. Versus having 30,000 people who don’t really care or don’t really open your emails. Always focus on developing that raving fan.

Yuri:                Yeah. One of my favorite books, as a reminder of this, is Acres of Diamonds. You don’t even have to read the book. The whole concept is that you’ve got acres of diamonds sitting under your nose. So instead of chasing the next shiny object, it’s like, “Let’s deal with what have.” And it’s a good reminder, so I’m happy that you were able to bring this up and help our listeners realize this as well.

But I think it’s one of those things too, where … You almost have to experience it. You can tell people, “Okay, think about this,” and they’re just like, “Yeah, whatever. I want to build my list.”

They’ll get to a point where they’re like, “Holy shit. Maybe they were right.”

Krista:            You’re correct. Because the big thing you think is, “Oh, if I just have 30,000 people on my list, if I just have 100,000 people on my email list…” and that is great. Please work towards that and continue developing that lead generation.

But again, always provide value to your raving fans and don’t lose touch with them because they’re your people at the end of the day. They’re your tribe.

Yuri:                Your peeps. All right. Krista, this has been awesome. Are you ready for the rapid five? This is our five rapid fire question session.

The Rapid Five questions

Krista:            Absolutely.

 Yuri:                All right. You’ve got no idea what these questions are, so here we go. Number one, what is your biggest weakness?

 Krista:            My biggest weakness is technology. Which is funny, because I own an online business. Anybody can do it if I can do it.

 Yuri:                Yeah. I would actually say the less time you spend worrying about the technology, the better off you’re going to be. It’s actually a good weakness to have. Cool.

Number two, what is your biggest strength?

 Krista:            My biggest strength is teaching and content creation. I absolutely love my material. I love teaching, I love connecting, and I stay in that zone of genius.

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

Krista:            I become dangerously good at doing Facebook lives. I used to be so terrified to get on screen without a script, and then once I started doing Facebook lives it was such a great way to connect without being too scripted and too wordy. Just honestly connecting as a conversation.

Yuri:                So just as an offshoot to that … It’s one thing to get in front of the camera, it’s another thing to get in front of that live camera and maybe have zero people watching you.

What advice do you give to someone who might have zero people watching them? Or even a bunch of people watching? Is it just a matter of putting the reps to get more comfortable with it?

Krista:            Yeah, 100%. I started off on Periscope before Facebook live even came out, and I used to have no followers on Periscope, but I used to get on there anyway and just made myself commit to a consistent practice of doing live video. It’s so important that even if nobody’s watching, recognize that probably 90% are going to watch the replay anyway, so talk to them.

You can talk to your replay followers. You don’t need to say, “Okay. We’re waiting for more people to get on. We’re waiting for people to get on.” No, no, no. Skip all of that, go straight to the point, right into the meat and potatoes of what it is that you want to provide value on. And recognize that you’re going to get a ton of replay watches.

Yuri:                I love it. Good stuff. All right, number four, what do you do first thing in the morning?

Krista:             First thing in the morning is always a morning workout. I was a bodybuilder before, so I always get up, drink some water, some coffee, and I go to the gym or go for a run in nature. I promise you, any problem that you ever have can be solved over a run in nature.

Yuri:                It’s so funny because I woke up and I was like, “Uhhh, it’s a little chilly outside…” We have a gym in our garage and I’m like, “God, I don’t know if I want to work out,” but I love exercising first thing in the morning.

I’m like, “I need to get out of my funk, so I’m going to go for a run.” I dropped the kids off at school, went for a 3K run, nothing crazy, but it’s amazing what it does.

Krista:            It’s therapy.

Yuri:                Oh, it’s huge. I don’t know how you feel about running as a postural expert—I’m not a huge fan doing too much of it—but there is something for creative types with running. There’s a very expansive thing that happens when you run, just the mental clarity that comes from it, so I think it’s great.

Krista:            And the parasympathetic feeling of being in nature. And you throw a great podcast like Healthpreneur on top of it and now you’re learning while you’re working out.

You’re challenging your mind and your body physically. There’s nothing better.

Yuri:                Here you go. Finally, complete this sentence: “I know I’m being successful when …” 

Krista:             I know I’m being successful when I’m over delivering on my number one core value—that your success is our priority—to our raving fans and followers at The American Posture Institute.

Yuri:                Awesome. I love it. Krista, what’s the best place for our listeners to find out more about what you guys are up to and follow your work online?

Krista:            Yeah, we would love it if you join us at americanpostureinstitute.com or follow us on Facebook at facebook.com/americanpostureinstitute.

 Yuri:                Wicked. Krista, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been awesome.

I want to acknowledge the amazing work that you, Mark, and your whole company have done to really expand this message. And obviously for bringing your passion and expertise to the marketplace and just continuing to deliver so much value.

So I want to thank you for all that you do and for joining us today.

Krista:             Thank you. And I want to acknowledge you for the amazing platform that you provide, because this is the information that we needed to know when we had our brick and mortar business.

For everybody who’s listening to Healthpreneur, just know that you’re in good hands. You have a good mentor, a good leader that’s helping you be successful. Stay tuned in, keep listening, keep attending the Healthpreneur events and stay connected in this community.

Yuri:                Awesome. Thanks so much, Krista.

Krista:            Thanks.

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Yuri’s take

I hope you enjoyed our interview. Krista is very articulate, you can tell she’s very passionate about what she does.

One of the things I wanted to bring up was how she talked about really finding your magic. The secret sauce that you love to do, the way you can specialize and stand out in your marketplace. And I say “your marketplace” in a very specific way because, as you know, the health industry is very wide. There’s a lot of different marketplaces and niches within it and it’s also very competitive.

So one of the best things you can do, as she mentioned, is really figure out how you can specialize. If you come out with another weight loss program like I did with my health and fitness business, you’re going to be the generalist. It’s a very, very tough hill to climb.

But if you can look at what you’re really good at doing and say, “Listen, I’m just going to focus on posture. That’s my thing. I’m going to focus on leg exercise. I’m going to be the dude who focuses on helping tennis players improve their serve.”

Whatever your thing is, really own that.

And that’s what I’ve done with Healthpreneurs. I said, “Listen, I am the guy.” When health experts think of building a business using the internet, we are the company they think about. We are the go-to solution for that. What we’re sharing here and all the stuff that I provide could be very relevant—and is very relevant—to every single business in every single industry because the fundamentals are the same.

I’ve just made a conscious decision and said, “Listen, I only want to serve people in the health space because I have an affinity to that and because that’s really how I want to specialize.” I want you to think about this today.

If you haven’t already, how do you carve out a segment for yourself, within your marketplace? Really define what that is and who you want to be an expert and a hero to.

Because if you can do that and communicate that, and have other people tell a story of who you are in a very conducive and congruent way that fits with your message … They’re able to share with their friends and family, “Hey, this is the person who was this, for me.”

Right? Anytime we do business with someone or anytime we think about anyone, we’re always putting people and businesses into a category. If you think about your head and your brain as a chest of drawers, think about each one of those drawers, each one of those components as a different business or person that might be influential in your life.

So you want to occupy a specific drawer in your prospects’ minds. When they think about pancakes, they think about you. I don’t know why I said pancakes … But when they think about getting fit, they think of you. When they think about posture, they think of the American Posture Institute.

If you try to be everything to everyone, it’s very tough for people to say, “Okay. How does this person really help me? How are they different from everyone else?” But if you can carve out that niche and occupy that one space in the drawer, it’s really going to help you in the long run as well as in the short run.

That’s my little challenge for you today.

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Follow Dr. Krista Burns At:

https://americanpostureinstitute.com/

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Transcription

Hey guys, how’s it going? Yuri Elkaim here. Welcome to another great episode of the Healthpreneur Podcast.

I’m excited about today’s guest (I’m excited about every single guest we have on the show).

Today’s guest, Anthony Balduzzi, I actually met at an event. Again, the importance of putting yourself in environments where you’re going to meet great people—I can’t emphasize this enough.

I’m a big fan of connecting with people. It’s going to help you exponentially in your business.

Anyways, so I met Anthony at an event. We had lunch together. Young guy, I think he was in his early 20s at the time … He was in school for his naturopathic doctorates degree and starting to build a business online.

I’m like, “Dude, this is amazing.” The guy’s got great core values, really integral person, and to see what he’s been able to do in the last couple of years has been tremendous. Really inspiring.

I call him the modern-day Superman because he kind of looks like Superman, and he’s built like a truck, so I’m excited to have him on today’s show.

So Dr. Anthony Balduzzi is a men’s health, weight loss, and muscle-building expert exclusively for busy fathers over forty. That’s the key part—exclusively for busy fathers over 40. In this conversation, you’re going to find out why that’s so important and what you can learn from that.

After watching his own dad lose his health and pass away sadly at the age of 42, Anthony founded The Fit Father Project to help other busy fathers get and stay permanently healthy for their families.

Anthony holds dual degrees in nutrition and neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, a doctorate in naturopathic medicine, and is also a national champion bodybuilder. He’s most proud of the fact that he’s helped over 10,000 fathers lose over 75,000 pounds collectively with his work at The Fit Father project.

I think you’re going to find this conversation really inspiring and uplifting, and if you’re somebody who’s made excuses—”I don’t have enough time. I got a lot of stuff going on in my life”—Anthony’s going to bust those excuses because here’s a guy who started his online business while attending naturopathic school full time. And now, it’s his full-time gig.

So without any further ado, let’s bring Anthony on to the show.

 

Anthony Balduzzi, welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast!

Anthony:   Happy to be here, Yuri. Thanks for having me, bud.

Yuri:    All right, man. So I consider you kind of like the modern-day Superman, partly because you look like him, but also because of the work that you’re doing with all of the fathers that you’re inspiring, which is amazing.

What’s exciting? What’s new and exciting? What do you focus on these days? What do people need to know about what you’re working on?

Anthony:  Well, first off, thank you! Certainly been called worse things.

For those that aren’t familiar, I run a business called The Fit Father Project, and our goal and mission is to be the go-to online hub for busy fathers and men over 40, online, who need health advice. It’s practical, simple, sustainable, and just damn effective.

Our goal is to be the biggest content-publishing platform, and so we’re publishing tons of content, and we also have online programs. Everything we do is tailored around the mission of how can we serve this very specific avatar-father in a better, bigger way through online coaching.

Yuri:    That’s awesome. Just so all the listeners know, you’re not currently a father, but you started this because your dad went through some not-so-great things, and you used that as fuel to start this, right?

Anthony’s story—perseverance and a whole lot of work.

Anthony:  Yeah, exactly. I’m actually not a father yet, and the reason I’m so passionate about helping dads is because the reason I got into health from a young age was that I watched my dad essentially lose his.

He worked himself to the bone, gained weight, stopped exercising. He was eventually diagnosed with terminal cancer that was related to his lifestyle, and he died at 42 years young.

I always had a soft spot growing up for what it’s like to be a man who’s out there providing for his family, but the health slips in the process.

So I wanted to help other dads, and I also wanted to make sure that the path that I saw my dad go down didn’t happen to me, so that’s why I studied health, nutrition, became a naturopathic doctor, got into bodybuilding at a high level.

Everything’s kind of been from this inception point of watching my dad’s own health journey. So this is a mission-driven business for me. This is about helping guys like my dad because there’s so many men out there who are struggling.

I also have to say from an entrepreneurial perspective, men were not being served when I was looking in the market in a big enough way. I think there was a lot of programs that were more female-geared—and those are fantastic—but I really couldn’t find something that was specifically talking to guys like my dad, so I wanted to fill that space in the market.

Yuri:   That’s so good. It’s awesome.

I think it’s an important lesson there for a lot of the listeners because a lot of times, we get into a space where we went through the challenge ourselves. I lost my hair when I was 17, but I didn’t really go into this space of helping people with alopecia.

I became the energy and fat-loss guy because even though I had a different issue, I could relate to the challenges of feeling like an alien in your own body and not feeling comfortable with how you look. So it’s interesting that you’ve kind of used your own kind of very closely-related father’s journey to inspire you to build this out.

I think it’s something a lot of people who get into this space either don’t think about or they’re very cognisant of. The fact that maybe it was a relative, maybe it was a family friend, maybe it was themselves—really utilizing that story in a positive manner to create positive change.

I think that’s why it’s such a great space to work in.

That’s why I love having conversations with people like yourself, Anthony, because you’re coming from such a great, genuine place of serving others because you don’t want them to go down that same path.

So when we first met, you were in naturopathic school and you were starting to build this bad boy out. How did you do both? Because there’s a lot of people that’ll make excuses. “I don’t have time,” whatever, whatever.

You started this while you were in school full time, and how did you do both?

Anthony:   Yeah, I mean, I’m going to be frank. It was very challenging to find the time. And no matter whether you’re in medical school or raising a family, you need to block out time to make the business a priority.

So my medical school schedule was more or less … First patients at roughly 8:00 a.m. and often working until 9:00 p.m. So I’d have to block time in the morning to make my first thing. Two-hour block, get up at 5:00, have two hours to work, and then get to school, get to clinic, get to do the things I had to do.

So because I had two hours, I had to learn how to be efficient and focus on the right things. And I knew that if I didn’t block that time first thing in the morning to work on the business, it wouldn’t happen.

As much as I might lie to myself, I’m not going to do it at 9:30, 10:00 when I’m back after a long day. This stuff was my priority, so I made it the first thing.

I guess when people have busy schedules, the straight answer is you gotta block time—ideally first thing in the morning, before life “happens.”

Getting up earlier was one way that I was able to grow the business, but I’ve also got to say it took a long time. Because I had so much limited time to really build the proper momentum, to get the business to where it was.

If I had a full-time schedule, I could’ve done it a lot faster. But I learned a lot of valuable lessons from bootstrapping this thing with low finances and low time.

Bootstrapping

Yuri:  Sure, and just to give some perspective two hours in the morning over a month is 60 hours. That’s a week and a half of 40 hours a week working.

That’s a good amount of time, and I think, again, you made it a priority and you just did it. I think that’s amazing.

When you say you learned how to bootstrap, what are some lessons you learned starting from scratch to ramping up to where you are now?

Anthony:  I think the biggest thing is there are so many people who know a ton about health, fitness, nutrition, physiology that don’t know the first thing about developing a relationship with somebody online—marketing, and walking people through a sales process in a transformation to get them to spend dollars with you. So I had to deep dive into the fundamental skills of marketing, web design, how to do some of the technology with Infusionsoft, et cetera.

Now, I don’t necessarily recommend that you need to become an expert in these things, but what worked for me was I became literate, and I started to study each of the individual pieces to the puzzle so that I could install the baseline processes that now run our business, and then eventually hire people when the revenue was there to do these things better than I could.

Bootstrapping, I think, usually comes down to—if you don’t have necessarily a ton of time or finances when you’re starting things up, you’re going to need to invest in the knowledge acquisition of those highest leverage things. And in any kind of online entrepreneur, these days, technology is something that you need to be somewhat literate in, I think, to be successful on a bootstrap.

If you have a $200,000 budget to hire people right off the gates, then you probably don’t need to learn those things, but if you are bootstrapping, then you need to, I guess, get a course.

You have some great stuff. You actually were able to help me off the front end of things and point me in the right direction on what to start learning in terms of funnel design architecture, all that.

Yuri:   Yeah, that’s awesome. You said you … You took the words out of my mouth, I was just about to ask you if you had about $100,000 or $200,000, as you mentioned, at your disposal when you first started, would you do anything differently?

Anthony:  Totally. Totally, totally, totally. I would do most things differently.

I think that because I came from mentality of being scrappy—being a hustler and a bootstrapper, having to do things on very little time with no money starting off. I got a $2,000 loan from my parents to build my first website, and I totally blew that.

I had no business spending $2,000 on a website. I had no idea what I was doing.

But I would’ve developed an organization structure off the bat and put people in key roles and served as a CEO of my company, and then worked on the business instead of in the business.

The problem with a lot of people who do bootstrap like I did is there’s a learning curve to learn your way out of the bootstrap mentality and into the “I’m running a business, I need leverage, I need people, systems, and processes, and I’m not doing everything by myself” mentality. And that took me awhile to get out of.

I think that’s one of the biggest shifts that basically 10X-ed my business revenue is when I started to get into that CEO leverage mindset and out of the bootstrapper, out of doing it all myself.

I’m incredibly grateful, Yuri, that I know how to do pretty much everything in my business to a proficient way—and I could do it if I needed to. But off the bat, I definitely would’ve hired and would’ve had a very clear organization structure.

Yuri:  Yeah, that’s a great insight.

It’s funny, I have this four-quadrants exercise that I have people do, and the top right is what I call the danger zone. Those are all those things you just mentioned—which are the things you learn how to do because you have to do them, because you’re on your own. And overtime, you become dangerously good at them and you forget that they’re not your zone of genius.

Then you end up spending a lot of time doing them, and you’re like, “Hold on, why do I hate my business so much? I don’t want to write copy. I don’t want to do this. I want to just talk to people.”

It’s cool that you made that realization about the systems and processes at such a young age because as you know, being in naturopathic school, you come out and you’re an amazing technician.

You’re the artist, you can help people, but running a business is a very different animal.

What advice would you give to somebody—if you’re sitting down with a friend who is just graduating and they want to start their own business.

What advice would you give to them? Would it be the same, focus on those systems and processes? Or would it be anything different?

The vision: What kind of business do I want to run?

Anthony: I think the first thing I would tell somebody is to really get a clear understanding of the business model that they want to be in, as it relates the kind of life and schedule they want to create.

I think when we talk to health and fitness entrepreneurs and business owners, there are a million different ways that you can make money and impact online—whether that is from high-ticket, one-on-one coaching, whether that’s from selling a million $10 eBooks, whether that’s from being a CEO and licensing things out and having other people run things.

There’s lots of different ways, so I would get very clear with an individual about what kind of business model is going to fit their goal of that ideal lifestyle, and then we kind of reverse engineer from there.

Yuri:   Nice.

Anthony:   I found, at least with a lot of my friends, is they end up not being intentional about that business model off the front end and just more or less publishing health and fitness content, trying to do this and that, kind of the throwing shit at the wall approach. Like, “Let’s do an eBook,” or, “Wait, let’s pivot. That’s not working. Let’s just try to sign up high-ticket,” and you end up having an unintentional process.

A lot of times, it leads to an unintentional business that can make you feel trapped.

So I’d get clarity off the front end on those quadrants, what your gifts are, where you want to be. A Tony Robbins kind of a guy is a lot different than the minimalist four-hour workweek guy who wants to sip Mai Tais and have a completely leveraged business.

They’re two different things. One is not better than the other. You just have to know off the front end what the goal is. It sounds simple, but a lot of people honestly skip that step.

Yuri:  No, that’s a really, really important distinction because, as you mention, a lot of people just jump in. They’ve got the whole “ready, fire, aim” type of advice—which I don’t really agree with, because I’m more of a fan of strategize then strike.

I think there’s so much focus on grind and hustle that people need to just sit back and chill for a bit and think about the vision. Think about, “What is the type of business that I want to run?”

Even as you said, what’s the type of lifestyle that I want to have and what’s the business model that’s going to make that happen?

If you don’t do that, as you said, you’re just going to go from one thing to the next with very little focus and it’s going to be the typical entrepreneurial ADD. So having that clarity right off the bat is huge. That’s a really, really good piece of advice.

So you have the vision. For you guys, you decided that content publishing was going to be the big business model for you?

Anthony:  Well, I was always very enamored by information products in general because if I could package what I do one-on-one with people in a scalable way and I could market in a way that I could more or less set the price … It’s a really cool, lightweight business in the sense that you don’t have inventory, you can create transformation if you’re really good at what you do.

So the goal for us was to build a content-authority site that sold non-physical information transformation products at scale.

We are in the one-to-millions game. That’s what we want. With The Fit Father Project and that brand, we want to touch millions and millions of lives, which is a lot different than an intimate, high-ticket coaching, boutique model. So this is kind of our business.

And because of that, we knew that we needed to double down on some of the best niche-specific content on the net.

We spent a tremendous amount of time developing amazing resources. So for us, if you Google right now “weight loss for men over 40,” we’re going to be the first or second hit on Google for that.

Yuri:  That’s great.

The benefits of a niche market

Anthony:  And so we just double down on very niche-specific content and keywords that will serve our avatar. And a big lesson that I also learned was that making the decision to serve exclusively fathers and men over 40 was the best thing I could’ve possibly done with this brand.

Because with my naturopathic toolbox and all the things I know, I could help an infant from one day old to a 99-year-old woman.

We have the tools to do all those things, but I found so much power in a psychographically-niched brand, and it’s been fantastic.

I can have … A lot of us in the fitness space, we hear people complain about how crowded and saturated and noisy our space is. Yes, if you’re doing the generic stuff, you’re playing in that sandbox, and it is. It absolutely is. There’s a lot of noise to cut through.

What we were able to do with The Fit Father Project is build a psychographically-niche brand where we sell fatherhood through the vehicle of fitness and other things. That enabled us to really cut through the noise and have a very different conversation.

I think you’re doing that as well with Healthpreneurs. I mean, that’s a psychographically-niche brand. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial podcasts, but the people here that are listening to this conversation today are people that strongly identify it as Healthpreneurs.

So I think it’s like a shortcut hack. If I were to develop more future brands, it would definitely be psychographically niched.

I think that is a good way to cut through the noise and have a more intimate conversation that’s ultimately more transformational for people. And it’s enabled our marketing to be a lot more seamless, and we don’t have to compete as much with other, just generic health and fitness stuff.

Yuri:  Yeah, no, that’s super smart.

I mean, I’m the complete opposite. My health and fitness business was generic, and it still is. It’s a tough beast. There’s a lot more that goes into that.

That’s why I tell everyone, go niche. Do exactly what you just said you did. It’s so smart.

Did you ever have the fear, because I know a lot of people have—”Oh, I don’t want to alienate 90% of the market.”

Did you ever feel that way? Or did you feel like, “All I need is 10%, and let’s crush that.”

Anthony:  Totally. Yeah, I had that fear, “I don’t want to alienate the market.”

I have the vision, Yuri, of creating ecosystems of these psychographically-niche brands.

The way I got over that fear is like, “Hey, look. This thing, this silo I’m creating is for these people. I can always create another niche-specific silo where I can serve all these different silos, but they’re contained.”

It’s kind of like a “this first, then that,” and I think that was one way to get over the fear.

I think that any brand that tries to speak to too many people in the health and fitness space—where there’s a lot of emotion and intimate conversations that need to happen—that tries to speak across gender lines and roles … It can definitely still be effective, but I don’t think it can necessarily be as powerful as if it’s specific.

Yuri:   Oh, for sure.

Anthony:  The Fit Father Project had two or three brand iterations before it.

At first, when I launched the business, it was called Half-Time Fit, and the idea was that I was going to help people at the half time of life. My dad died at 42, roughly the half time of his life, and I was going to help men and women. I started like that.

Then I’m like, “No, I gotta niche down to men.” It became The Healthy Men Project.

Then I’m like, “Ah, there’s something more deep…” And then it eventually became The Fit Father Project.

It was a step-wise process to niche down. You don’t have to have it all figured out right out the gate, but as you can continue to pipeline down and get more specific, you will find the sweet spot. Or at least that’s been my experience.

Yuri:    That’s really great. That’s awesome.

So, you decided content is the main business model for you, and that’s the same business model that we’ve chosen for our business. It is, I believe, the best way to add value to the marketplace and build a sustainable business.

With that said, what are one or two big challenges that you have faced growing a content-based business?

The reason I ask that is that 11, 12 years ago when I first came online—selling an eBook at 6-7 bucks was a no-brainer. Nowadays, there’s been a huge price erosion because there’s so much content … Blog posts now are more valuable than a lot of the eBooks that you can buy.

So how have you navigated that? Is that something that you’ve experienced at all, with your market? Or is yours a little bit different?

What are one or two challenges that you’ve faced and overcome with your specific business model and content?

Challenges with content—a lack of eyeballs

Anthony:  Yeah, in content. I’ll speak directly to the challenges.

I think a challenge that a lot of us can relate to is—especially if we’re in the content space or even if that’s not our direct business—we publish awesome stuff and no one sees it.

It’s like the lack of eyeballs. There is search engine optimization, and writing content that’s not just valuable intrinsically, but also optimized to do well on search engines is important. Because otherwise, your stuff won’t be picked up to the extent that it could.

SEO takes time. It’s not an overnight thing. It took us years to rank some of our big blog posts, and it doesn’t necessarily have to do take that long, but it is a challenge that you publish something and eyeballs won’t be there immediately.

That brings me to the second point is the most immediate way that we’ve found to scale your traffic and eyeballs is through paid advertising—essentially buying article clicks and views on Facebook, on Google.

If you’re good at this, you can get clicks to the website for as little as two, three, four, five cents. But it introduces another challenge because a lot of these advertising platforms for health and fitness are very tricky to navigate.

I’ll be flat out and say it—and I’ll probably get in trouble for this—but Facebook doesn’t really like health and fitness.

Even if you are a good guy, your stuff can get flagged, it can be taken down—especially if you’re good at what you do and you have lots of results pictures. They’re not a huge fan of that.

It is a massive challenge scaling traffic and staying compliant, knowing that paid ads are the fastest ways to get eyeballs on things.

You could wait on SEO, and it’s a good long-term strategy that you have to do. You have to plant those apple trees, but you also have to harvest the hay—and paid traffic can be the way to get quick eyeballs on things, but it’s stuff to stay compliant.

Those are some challenges, as well as … I think the other thing is really working on developing a Z-to-A content strategy, where the content is designed to fit perfectly into a funnel that has been reverse engineered.

You have your product, and then you’re working your way backwards to email value, to opt-in offers, to content that’s going to be seamless. I think a mistake that I used to make was that I was simply writing on things that I thought were interesting topics that didn’t necessarily fit into the framework of what would move someone down a customer journey.

I think it’s valuable to express yourself and write about what you’re passionate about, but also be intentional about having different types of posts that fit into the structure.

I’m not going to ramble on that. We can dive into any topic that you think would be best from there, but I’ll pause for now.

Yuri:   No, that’s good. That’s a really valuable insight because … I see it all the time.

We have a whole content master workshop where I teach our two-day Teach to Sell Method for content marketing, and it’s amazing—one of the biggest mistakes I see is what you just talked about.

People, or business owners, don’t reverse engineer. They don’t have a strategy for what they’re creating.

It’s like, “Hey, I’m going to go off these keywords,” but what are those keywords leading to? Or start with a product, start with the end result, work backwards as you said.

The other big mistake I see is the same opt-in for everything. It’s like, “Hey, join our newsletter,” and that doesn’t work. That does not work anymore.

With that said, you talked about driving traffic quickly with paid ads. In order for someone to do that, they should probably be able to see an ROI relatively soon.

How do you go from Facebook Ad, for instance, to blog content without burning through endless amounts of cash and actually seeing an ROI?

Marketing funnels

Anthony:  The only reason we can see ROI from sending people to blog-post traffic is because we have a very dialed-in funnel, and we kind of think of our business, our content strategy in terms of buckets that people struggle with.

We’ve done a lot of surveys and deep-dive research and market analysis, and we know that our guys struggle a lot with: Healthy eating, finding time to exercise, and there is another population, not the exact same avatar that is a guy that is over 50 and that struggles with building muscle.

Because we know those are big pain points, we have programs that directly address each of those, and each of those buckets has its own opt-in offer that’s very niche-specific to that problem. And then all of our articles are essentially going to unique opt-in offers.

Once they opt-in, we do a 14-day nurture that has strategic soft sells in there to our core offer—which in the weight loss space, it’s Fit Father 30X, our 30-day weight loss program. We just give them tons of value.

This is something I will brag about … Someone who opts in for our free 14-day email course will probably learn more than if they bought any of our competitor’s programs. And I’m most proud of the fact that we get emails all the time from people on our list being like, “Hey, I don’t buy your stuff, but I lost 40 pounds. Thanks. Thanks for the eCourse.”

And that’s great. I love those. Those are almost more valuable than the actual product testimonials because it means we’re doing marketing right in my opinion.

Email marketing, you gotta have a really great sales page, and then I guess one of the biggest lessons I learned is that if you’re going to be in the information game, you need to build a blockbuster product.

This thing has to be so good. That’s the biggest benefit to our business—was making Fit Father 30X as amazing of a course as it is … Because I had a couple iterations of programs that I personally knew were okay, but they weren’t good enough.

I found a lot of internal resistance as the driver of my business (this is back in the bootstrap days). I wasn’t selling it as hard as I could’ve, and I think the reason I wasn’t selling is because I didn’t believe it was the best damn thing in the world.

But once you get there, it’s not just the benefit that your clients are going to get incredible transformation, but you, yourself, will be so aligned with your product that the promotional aspect will happen automatically because you know this is good medicine.

I think for people that have programs they only partially believe in and have a “fear of selling,” a lot of it might come down to not having a good enough program that they absolutely know in their heart of hearts is necessary to get in the hands of their prospect.

Yuri:   Totally. You gotta drink the Kool-Aid. Gotta believe it.

Anthony:  You gotta drink your own Kool-Aid, yeah, for sure, to be fully aligned.

Yuri:   Yeah, and it has to help people, which obviously yours does, which is great. So we’re going to jump into the rapid-five in just a second, but first, I want to ask you one question.

What do you think is the number one skill entrepreneurs must possess for lasting success?

Building leverage

Anthony:   Leverage.

The ability to step outside the business and build leverage. I think that if you do not double down on your ability to build leverage— I have a great friend who says, “If you find yourself repeating yourself, record yourself or replace yourself.”

Yuri:   That’s good.

Anthony:  Yeah, so if you find yourself repeating yourself, record yourself or replace yourself. He calls it FYRYRYRY.

Essentially, I think that’s the biggest skill. That kind of mindframe gives you the ability to work on your business, not in it, and always be looking for areas where you can gain more leverage on the business. So you can stay in that quadrant of your God quadrants, the things that you’re amazing at that you love doing as opposed to the danger zone and other stuff. Leverage is the number one thing I think people need to double down on.

Yuri:   I love it. That’s good. Alright, are you ready for the rapid five?

Anthony:  Probably not. Let’s do it.

Rapid-five questions

Yuri:   All right, let’s go. So you’ve got no prior knowledge of these questions. They’re going to come at you, and whatever comes to mind is all good.

Number one, your biggest weakness.

Anthony:  Biggest weakness is that I’m good a lot of things in my business, and it’s hard sometimes to let those things go.

I’m a very competent individual, and you get good at things, and it ends up sticking in that danger zone. That’s a weakness—letting go and making sure I’m getting that leverage.

Yuri:   Cool. Your biggest strength?

Anthony:   Biggest strength is I’m very good speaking on stages and on video.

And I think that anyone who’s going to be a really impactful fitness entrepreneur who wants to serve in a front-man role—not necessarily a backend operations role—needs to get good at communicating in their main form of strength.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be video. It could be written, but I tend to be good in video, and I think that’s a nice way to produce content very quickly.

Yuri:   Yup, totally. One skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business.

Anthony:  Writing copy. Ultimately, from the minute someone reads an article to the time when they buy your most expensive program—it’s the communication and the copywriting that comes in many different forms that walks them through that transformation process.

You can find people to build you web pages. There’s an art to creating good copy, and I think that’s the life-blood of any information business, is trying to build relationships with good people in an automated, scalable way.

It all comes down to the copy and the communication.

Yuri:  Yup, that’s great. What do you do first thing in the morning?

Anthony:  I have a morning ritual where I drink a glass of water, 32 ounces with some pink salt, little bit a lemon, and some apple cider vinegar.

I will then make myself a coffee. I typically fast in the morning for productivity benefits. I have a little 5 to 10-minute meditation.

Right now, I’m using a productivity planner, I think called The Best Self Journal, which is really awesome. I review what I wrote from the day before, set my priorities, and I start my first … I do text my wonderful girlfriend Paige or if she’s there, give her a kiss, so invest in the relationship-

Yuri:  Nice.

Anthony:   … and then I start my first two-hour Pomodoro work block pretty shortly after. I’m kind of a “get up early and get after it” kind of guy.

Yuri:  It’s the best time. It’s magic time.

Final one, complete this sentence. “I know I’m being successful when … ”

Anthony:  I know I’m being successful when my clients are emailing me—without prompting—sharing their incredible transformation stories, and I get that feeling in my heart that I know I’m doing good work.

And those moments happen, I think, at very opportune times because all of us can probably relate to times when we feel stressed out and overwhelmed in our business. And maybe the revenue’s not exactly where you wanted it to be or you’re struggling with ads or the funnel isn’t working like it would … But I know I’m being successful when I get those emails and I see the deeper cut of what the work really means outside of the number KPI metrics.

Yuri:   Nice. Love it. There we go, guys, Mr. Superman himself. I call you Superman because you look like him, but also you broke your leg—was it your leg or ankle?

Anthony:   I broke my leg and my arm and a bunch of other things. That was not good.

Yuri:  Yeah, but like, I gotta say, if you guys haven’t followed Anthony or you’re not friends with him on Facebook—just go back through his history of posts on Facebook from a year ago (it might take you forever to do that, but just look at the posts).

It was just very inspiring to see the journey you went through, so I just wanted to commend you on that because that was super, super awesome for all the learning and the growth that you went through during that process.

I know it inspired a lot of people, so that’s why I call you the modern-day Superman.

Anthony:   I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, I essentially finished medical school on a wheelchair because I was doing some stuff on skis I probably should’ve have done, and I hit a tree at maybe 20 to 30 miles per hour and just shattered the right side of my body.

Leg was in, I think, five, six pieces. I had to have some emergency surgeries. Arm was broken. Pretty much every muscle was torn up.

I mean, as a fitness guy, that was a huge experience where I was taking such a good care of my body, and I value how it works … So a lot of transformation was gained through that healing process last year, and I’m definitely a better man for it.

Yuri:   Yeah, that’s awesome. Anthony, what’s the best place for people to stay up to date with what you’re working on?

Anthony:  Well, [email protected]. They can definitely send me an email if they’d like to have conversations about anything or just drop me a note telling me that this helped you. That always gets me excited. Like I said, that’s how I know I’m being successful out in the world.

Facebook, for other Healthpreneurs I think would be the best way to stay in contact. You can just add me, Anthony Balduzzi.

If you do search on Facebook, I have one for my business and one for my personal. Friend them both, and I’ll friend you on the one that’s actually the real me. One of them is like a Facebook Ad account. Don’t tell the Facebook guys.

I think that would be the best way to continue to have good conversations. I think it’s really unique that we have a podcast of great thought leaders in this health and fitness place. I really commend you, Yuri, for banding us together and being the leader of this movement. We definitely need it.

Yuri:   Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Alright, guys, well, there it is. Mr. Anthony Balduzzi himself.

Hope you guys have enjoyed this episode. Again, we’ll link up to everything Anthony has mentioned in the show notes over on the blog. Anthony, once again, thank you so much for taking the time, and I will talk to you guys later.

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There we go. Another great interview in the bag, Mr. Dr. Anthony Balduzzi.

Just really inspiring stuff, and seriously, what he went through with his injury was pretty traumatic and to see how he overcame immense adversity to come through on the flip side as just a better version of an already amazing person … it was truly inspiring.

Again, follow him on Facebook. Check out some of his later post from last year. It’s pretty awesome stuff.

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Follow Anthony Balduzzi At:

https://www.fitfatherproject.com/

Facebook

YouTube

Twitter

LinkedIn

Transcription

Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast, Yuri Elkaim here with you.

What’s up? I hope you’re having a great day. Today is another solo round—another sermon, if you will—and we’re talking about the magic of staying lean.

If you hear any background noise, it might be my little guy Oscar (who’s actually my big guy, he’s almost seven now, it’s crazy), he’s home sick from school today so he’s playing Lego in the next room. If you hear any stuff going on, that’s what’s happening.

I hope you’re doing great. I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to the last episode with Jason Phillips—amazing stuff with his nutrition certification program. We just had some really cool discussions about the reality of business, all the shiny object nonsense. Check out that episode if you missed it. It’s awesome.

 

All right, today we’re talking about the magic of staying lean, and I want to start by giving you some food for thought—literally. Most of us listening to this are in the health, fitness and wellness business and a lot of us have a very similar approach when it comes to food.

If you’re like myself you probably tell your audience, your clients—when you eat better quality food, you need less of it. Correct?

Why not the same thing in business? I’m going to elaborate on that in a second, but here’s the thing … What I’ve noticed, in my personal experience and seeing a lot of other businesses, working with a lot of other entrepreneurs, is that there’s often a lot of waste in many businesses. Especially as they grow.

So when I tell you that if we eat better quality food we need less of it … In business, how can we reduce the waste? I’ll show you an example and I’ll actually give you the solution in just a couple moments. But I want to share a little story first.

The Rodale story

So, Rodale—who is my publisher of my last two books—actually put up a statement that they’re looking for buyers. They’re looking for people to buy the company. This was in the summer of this year, 2017.

Initially, it shocked me. I was like, “Wow, this is like one of the biggest publishers in the world. They do Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Prevention magazine, all the biggest diet books for the most part are coming out of Rodale.” And I was like, “That’s really interesting.”

So what they’ve talked about in their press conferences is that they’ve had a lot of challenges in the last ten years as everything has moved online. Balancing the digital and print side of their business was a big challenge.

Because forever, they were a direct mail company. They would send out those postcard flyers or you would go to the bookstore, magazine shop and you’d see Men’s Health. Inside there’d be one of those postcards to subscribe to 12 issues and you would mail it in.

That was their business. That was their bread and butter and then everything shifted online and they’ve had a tough time. I don’t know the back end financials of the company, but I can only imagine what is going on, because one of the things that I’ve recognized in my health and fitness business is we’ve had a lot of bloating. I’m not going to call it wastage, but we had a lot of extra fluff in terms of personnel in our company, especially on the editorial side. So when we’re talking about our blog and our content development—we had a whole team of about five to six people there.

When we started to look at our payroll, I was like, “Wow, that is a large payroll just for that.” These people were amazing, they’re dear friends and I love them, but business is business. If you’re not seeing the profits you want to see, you’re not going to be in business very long—and Rodale is a prime example.

When I looked at my business I thought, “Well if that’s just my business, a tiny fish in this pond compared to a company like Rodale … Looking at how many people they have doing what seem to be redundant tasks. You have a senior editor, junior editor, editor in chief, editor of the editor under editor, proofreader.” I’m like, “What are all these people doing?”

I look at this and it seems like a lot of wastage. I really believe there a lot of wastage in these businesses where they have a lot of people who don’t need to be there.

I have nothing wrong with growing a team, because the bigger the dream, the bigger the team needs to be. If you really want to have great results and accelerate your success, surrounding yourself with amazing people is one of the only proven ways to do that. Really, it is.

With that said, there needs to be discretion.

There needs to be attention to detail when you’re hiring, when you’re looking to bring people in—and what I’ve recognized over the years is that people who I initially thought were A+ players turned out to be B players. That’s my fault.

That’s my fault in terms of jumping the gun, hiring people too quickly without having clear direction as to what they were going to do, what they were responsible for, what they were accountable to and what success looks like for both them and the company.

Hiring and the scaling scam

I want to give you a little exercise to help you avoid that from happening, but before I get there I want to talk about the scaling scam. The scaling scam is something I’ve recognized in our business and a lot of businesses in our space—where people continue to talk about growing to ten million, then 100 million, bigger and bigger, all this stuff.

Again, I’m definitely guilty of doing that. I’ve even said with Healthpreneur, our mission is to help a billion people on the planet. How are we going to do that? I honestly have no clue. But if I can help influencers like you become better at getting your message out and building more profitable business, then you’re going to impact more people and collectively we’re all going to win.

But, to avoid the scaling scam we really need to be true to ourselves and ask ourselves, “Why are we scaling? Why do we really want to scale? Why do we want to go to ten million from one million? Do we really know what’s involved?”

Because what happens is there’s this growth curve. There’s a lot of growing pains that happen as you’re building a business. The sweet spot, for a lot of businesses, is between 250,000 to almost $2 million in revenue. That’s a nice sweet spot in terms of … You have good cash flow, you have a good lifestyle and you’re impacting people in a pretty profound way, which is great.

I don’t know if it’s human ego or what, but we still just want to grow. And that’s fine—growth is necessary, it’s part of being human. It’s part of the journey.

So we want to go from two million to 10 million. Then we set this goal—let’s go to 10 million.

But all of a sudden we run into some roadblocks. There’s this gap from two to five million—even two to ten million—where there is a massive, massive learning curve. It’s like having kids, you don’t know what you’re getting into until you have them. Once you’ve gone down that path, what often ends up happening—and this has happened for me—is that you get to the top of the mountain and you look around and you’re like, “you know what? I don’t actually want to be on top of this mountain.”

I’ll share another little story with you. A couple years ago I was at a coaching mastermind group that I was part of and one of my friends—who is a very well known, successful person in our space, I’m not going to mention her name—was saying that they did about $10 million in revenue in the previous year … But she was really frustrated because they had little to no profit.

And I thought to myself—“You did $10 million in revenue but you have little to no profit to show for this?”

That really set off an alarm in my head. I’m like, “What’s the point?” What’s the point of faking it? Of showing everyone how successful you are and reporting revenue—which really doesn’t matter, by the way, it’s really about what you have in the bank that makes the difference at the end of the day.

We’re all bathing in these superficial “vanity” metrics. Whether it’s revenue or website traffic—numbers that make us look successful on the outside, but deep down, when we pull back the curtains and look at the business … The business owner, the CEO, the high level people—they’re stressed. They are swimming hard under the surface of the water to keep things afloat.

This year I had an epiphany, I was like, “What’s the point? When is enough, enough? Why go to 10 million if you’re at two?”

Why?!

Is it because you really want to impact people? Or, is it because you want to make more money? But again, just because you’re making two million now—let’s say your profit is $500,000—it doesn’t mean you’re going to have two or three million dollars in profit at $10 million in revenue.

Because the nature of the business changes. You have to bring in all sorts of new people, whole new infrastructure, it changes the game.

People are important, but what I’m going to challenge you with is, when you are looking to bring people on your team—hire slow, fire fast. And only settle for A+ players. It really is as simple as that.

You can replace three to four people with one unbelievable A+ player. And I would encourage you to pay that person well. Maybe not right out of the gates—give them one project to work on, see how they perform, if they exceed your expectations, then great, bring them on.

But the problem is when we start to bring people into our company who can just fill in the gaps— “Hey, I just need to do this for a while,” and then they end up sticking around for way too long …. Three years down the road you’re going to be like, “Oh man, I gotta let this person go but this is gonna be a tough conversation.”

So the question we always want to be asking ourselves is … “Knowing what I know now, would I hire this person again? Knowing what I know now, would I do this again?”

Always using our wisdom and experience to retrospectively look at our business and be honest with how we want to grow things. So yes, surround yourself with great people—but I would really encourage you to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible until it hurts. Until it hurts and becomes an absolute necessity to bring another person in.

Because unless you’re an anomaly like Thrive Market and you grew to 500 people in no time at all—most of our businesses are not growing at a rate where we can’t handle most of the deliverables with a small team.

I want to give you a really cool exercise to help identify how you can find these people and how you can get stuff off your plate that you don’t enjoy doing. Let me just go back to the scaling scam for a second—and I talked about this at Healthpreneur Live. (By the way, if you want to join us at our next Healthpreneur Live event, it’s September 20 to 23 in Scottsdale Arizona, you can request an application or invitation at healthpreneurgroup.com/live. It’s by application only and it’s already filled up pretty nicely!)

So, one of the things I shared on stage was this growth curve. So we start off in our business as a trainer, a nutritionist expert. We’re a great artist, we’re the technician, we’re doing the stuff, the content and delivery—sharing our expertise—and that’s how it starts.

Then, as the business grows, into the couple $100,000’s, we start becoming more of an operator—we have to start doing a lot more of the stuff. Building up funnels, doing all the little things that don’t really “jazz us up” all that much.

The company grows a little bit more and eventually we become the CEO—the corporate executive, CEO, the head of the company, the entrepreneur. Thinking of the company as an investment vehicle now. Looking at ways where we can work onthe business, not so much in the business. Building systems and looking at separating ourselves from all the stuff we’re doing.

And that’s all important stuff! But then we hit this point that I call the Existential Business Crisis. You get to a point in your business—let’s say it’s a couple million dollars in revenue or a couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue—and you’re looking at what you’re doing and you’re miserable.

You hate your business because you’ve become so far disconnected from what you loved doing in the first place—which was just sharing your knowledge, being the technician. Understand that if you’re going to scale, you don’t have to be the CEO of your company.

If all you want to do is share content, just be honest about that. Just be like, “Here’s what I want to do. I just want to connect with our customers. I just want to create content. I just want to shoot videos.” And surround yourself with people that can take on the growing side of your business to move forward.

The Four Quadrants Exercise

To help you get more clarity on this, I have this exercise called the four quadrant exercise. Here’s how it works …

If you have a sheet of paper you may want to take it out and draw this. If you’re walking, driving, riding your bike—you can just mentally do this and then transfer it to the paper afterwards.

Start off by drawing four quadrants. You’ve got a sheet of paper, just draw a line down the middle and then a line across, so you’ve got four quadrants.

Bottom right quadrant is entitled “Stuff I Hate Doing.” It’s pretty straightforward. This is all the stuff you really, at the core of your being, can’t stand. For me, editing is that one thing. This could be a big list. This could be like laundry, editing, this can be whatever it is you want. It could be personal business. You’ll see why this matters in a second.

For me, editing is one of the worst things I could ever spend my time doing. I’ve got an article that’s an unbelievable 5,000 word article, it was supposed to go up on a very, very popular website seven months ago, and it’s still not up. It’s actually in my inbox with about the tenth frigging revision back and forth with the people people at this website.

It’s crazy. I don’t even want to touch it. It’s driving me crazy. It’s been more back and forth with them than writing a published book.

So, I’ve delayed this whole process by about seven months because of all the back and forth editing. That’s just to give you an idea of how much I hate editing. You can see how the passion bubbles up there. That’s the stuff you want to write down in that bottom right quadrant.

Bottom left quadrant is stuff I dislike. This is a notch down from the hate. It’s stuff where there’s no energetic, “Oh my god, I can’t stand this.” It’s stuff that you don’t like doing but you don’t absolutely hate. It’s between the hated stuff and stuff that you’re okay doing.

It’s stuff I dislike to do. For you that might be, I don’t know, looking at financials. It might be writing. Whatever it is for you, you want to write that stuff down in this left quadrant.

Top left is what I call your “Younique Genius™.” Here you’re looking at one to three things that energize you. That you can do until the end of time and that you do better than anyone else.

For me that’s communicating—sharing my content/teaching/selling in this medium—basically the spoken word. If it’s on video or audio, that’s what I love doing and that’s why I have this podcast.

Second thing for me is strategizing and then obviously the delivery. The teaching, the speaking, communication, it all kind of boils down to two things—strategy and delivery of communication.

That’s all I want to do in the spoken word. What are the one or two, maybe three things that you do amazingly well that you can do for the end of time and it would totally energize you?

Finally in the top right is the final quadrant and it’s what I call the danger zone. This is where you start getting into trouble—and that’s why I call it the danger zone—because as you grow your business, as you’re wearing all the hats, you start developing skillsets that are necessary to develop in order to build your business. Especially if you’re growing things in a bootstrapping fashion.

But, the danger zone is comprised of activities that you’ve become dangerously good at in order grow your business, but these are things that don’t really jazz you up. For me, copywriting is an example of that.

I love copywriting, it’s super important to master. You have to understand the basics of direct response and practice it because it doesn’t matter if you’re sharing this stuff on video or in the written word—you have to understand the elements that go into direct response and influence and all that stuff.

But to sit down and write a sales letter for me, is not something I really enjoy doing. But I’ve done a lot of it because I’ve had to over the years.

The danger zone is stuff that you’ve become really good at, but that you don’t want to do too much of. It’s the stuff that you procrastinate on, it sucks the life out of you to some degree. And these activities become the key hires in your company.

If you don’t like copywriting, you hire someone who does. And all they do is write and copywrite, all that stuff. If you don’t like doing operations or managing people, that’s the danger zone that you’ve had to build up over time, that’s what you hand off. You get someone who’s a project manager, operations person, you have them do that stuff.

Do this exercise. I’m telling you, it is so clarifying—you’ll get your list of things you hate doing, that are in your danger zone, and the things you’re amazing at doing. Once you have that, what I would suggest is that at a very minimum level, you’re looking at a virtual assistant or someone at a low pay rate to take on the hate and dislike stuff.

That’s simple stuff like, “Hey, can you edit these videos, can you edit this article, can you edit this transcript.” That’s simple, you don’t have to spend six figures on that type of person.

Top right, danger zone, those are the key hires in your company. These are the key A+ players that you want to spend a good amount of time vetting and making sure they are the right fit for your company—because if you get these people onboard, man, they will make your life so much easier and your business will move. It’ll just be like a knife going through butter. No problems.

That’s a really cool little exercise that will definitely help you out.

Scaling deeper, not wider

Again, I want to just finish off by leaving you with a question to think about—“Why do you want to scale?” And again, there’s nothing wrong with growing. But I want to leave you with another notion, which is that with Healthpreneur, we really believe in scaling by going deeper not wider.

Think about that. Instead of impacting 10 million people, what if you impacted 1,000 people 10x better, 10x more deeply, 10x more intimately? Is there anything wrong with that?

Maybe you can charge more money. You can have a more fulfilled business by really connecting with these people who you actually know.

Something to think about. And then with that said, who do you need on the bus to help make that happen?

Those are your questions to ponder for today’s episode. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed delivering this message to you because it’s something I really believe in. At our peak we had a team of about 13, 14 people and now we’re down to about five. In terms of our health and fitness business, with Healthpreneur, we’re basically about three core people and then a few ancillary. A handful of people, and we’re going to grow that a little bit, but we still want to be very cognisant of what we’re doing.

So that’s all for today’s episode. If you have enjoyed this, I’d love to hear your comments. If you haven’t yet subscribed to the podcast, you can do so on iTunes.

Transcription

Hey guys, what’s going on? Yuri here. Welcome to the HP podcast—that’s the Healthpreneur podcast, not Hewlett-Packard. Today is the first of the month, which really doesn’t mean much… But I hope where you are there’s not a lot of snow and it’s not too cold, because things are gonna get pretty nasty soon in Toronto.

Today we’re talking with my main man Jason Phillips, who has helped tens of thousands of people achieve their goals through his nutrition coaching platform. He’s also created the first nutrition certification that will bridge that gap from knowledge to application, and this is gonna be an amazing interview.

Jason has scaled his business to over $100,000 per month in less than 30 months, so if you’re not so great at math like I am, that would be … two and a half years, right? I wish I had done that well over two and a half years—I was a very slow and stubborn learner, so it took me about three years, I think, to crack $100,000 a year. He’s doing $100,000 a month.

So he’s got some things that he’s doing that are just phenomenal, and the cool thing about Jason is that he’s such a great, heart-centered guy. He’s in this for the long game, he’s in this to impact a lot of people’s lives, and you’re going to see that one of the big themes of our conversation is the journey.

There’s no magic pill guys, there’s no secret. I mean, there’s a secret sauce, but there’s no overnight success. And we’re gonna keep hammering this home.

You’re going see some really cool moments, these reminders in our conversation. Jason’s going to talk about where he came from as a very scattered, chasing-shiny-object type of entrepreneur, to being much more focused and driven based on his current vision.

So there’s a lot of really good take aways from this interview. With that said, let’s bring Jason onto the show and let’s get into it.

 

Jason, my man, what is up? Welcome to the Healthpreneur Podcast.

Jason:  Dude, what’s going on? I’m excited to be here, excited to chat again and see what kind of value I can add to everybody.

 Yuri:    Yeah, I’m sure you’ll provide a little bit of value, so not to worry. If you’re listening, get a pen and paper out. You may want to listen at .5 speed on this, or we can just speak really slowly.

Anyway, enough shenanigans. Jason, what’s new and exciting with you these days?

Jason’s California trip and his certification program

Jason:   Dude, I just got back from California last night. I spent some time out there with some really high level dudes—some guys that are coming to your event next weekend, Ben Stelmani, and Ben Kapolski, Steve Weatherford—and we were all at Bedros’ event.

So that was really fun. For me, right now the really exciting stuff is getting the word out about the Nutritional Coaching Institute—which is my new certification program that just launched, super under the radar. But I truly believe it’s the next big thing in helping people get into the passion that is the career of nutrition coaching.

Yuri:   That’s awesome. Let’s go down this path, because I think it’s a really interesting model with what you’ve done. But before we go there, for those listening—we’re talking to fitness professionals, health and wellness entrepreneurs. They might be thinking, “Well this sounds a little bit like PN,” like precision nutrition. What’s the difference?

Jason:  Yeah man, and first and foremost, I have massive amounts of respect for PN. It’s not to say in any way that I don’t believe in what PN teaches.

What I started noticing, and the whole genesis of the project was—people were coming to me and saying, “Hey, I’m PN, but I’m still struggling working with clients.” And to be fair, I haven’t gone through their cert, but what I gathered was that the application piece is really what was missed.

And so even when I thought back to my personal trainer days—NSCA, NASM—it was a lot of knowledge but not a lot of … “This is how you actually work with a client. This is how you retain a client. When a client goes through really intense struggles, this is how you get them out of it. When a client goes MIA, this is how you approach it.” You know?

And so the certification is actually predicated on two unique pieces, and it’s a two day course. Day one is science, and obviously you have to be well rooted in the science and physiology of nutrition.

But day two is application, and it’s, “This is how you work with a client. This is how you intake a client, this is what you learn from the intake. This is how you build a prescription, this is how you adjust the prescription.”

This will show you how to ultimately get the client the results that, when we talk about having social proof, are so important to building an actual business.

Yuri:   That’s huge, that’s such a big point for all of you guys listening. I mean, we’re in the day and age where, if you really wanted to learn about nutrition, you could spend the hours scouring the web to find the stuff. But I think where a lot of courses and certifications missed the boat, as you mentioned, is the application/implementation.

I think it’s the biggest value add, because you’re showing people how to build their business, right?

Jason:   Absolutely.

Yuri:    That’s massively important, so that’s great.

Jason:   Yeah, and I mean if you’re not achieving results, then you shouldn’t be in the industry.  And understanding science is great, but like applying science, that’s where results live, in my opinion.

Yuri:  Yeah, there’s no point in debating over which methodology is the best if it’s not serving anyone. Just get out there and do it and help people.

Jason:   Exactly, dude. And that’s it, I mean that’s been my being from day one—how can I help you?

And people are like, “Well what method do you teach? Do you teach keto, or do you teach carb cycling, or do you teach fasting?” Well we teach you about all of them. We teach you about every single method that’s out there and we kind of fill you in with, “Hey, it’s tools in a toolbox, and when you’re working with a client, this is how you know which tool to use.”

And I think it clears up a lot of confusion, which is really exciting.

 Yuri:   Yeah, that’s awesome. So the reason you’re kind of well-versed on speaking about this is because you’ve built a large coaching practice on the nutrition side. Now, talk to us about the model—like how you really built this out, because I think this is really brilliant.

Jason:   Yeah, so it’s really funny—when I got in the industry and I started talking to all the “experts,” they were like, “Dude, your model, it’s not gonna work. It’s one-on-one, you’re trading dollars for hours.”

And I agreed with them, because that was the general premise, but it’s the only way my neurotic head knew how to work with a client. I cannot write an ebook to save my life. If you put 20 people in a room and you said, “Write a prescription for them,” the first thing I’m gonna do is I’m gonna want to interview each of the 20 people and I’m gonna want to find out as much information about each one as possible, and I’m gonna write 20 different prescriptions.

That’s just how my mind works.

And so it was never a money project, it was always a passion project. My goal was, “I’m gonna help as many people as I can and I will spend 20 hours a day coaching these individuals if that’s what it takes.” And sure enough, that’s actually what it ended up as.

At my peak, I was personally handling 167 clients, and my model is predicated on communication. And so my clients have full access to me, text and email, and I was actually having a 20 minute phone call with each client every 10 to 12 days.

Replicating yourself

When I say I was working 16 and 20 hour days, 16 of those hours were actually spent on the phone. I would be doing upwards of 30 phone calls per day. But again, it’s the only way I knew how.

Now, obviously that is not sustainable, burnout is inevitable. Even though I like to think I’m Superman, I’m not. And what I did then was I brought on my first coach. I had a client that was a really high performer, I could tell through our conversation that she was fascinated by what we were doing.

And so I just kind of brought up, I said, “Hey, would you like to learn what I do and just learn the methods behind it? And maybe one day, if it interests you enough, you’ll take on some clients.”

She’s like, “Oh my god, I would love that.” Awesome!

So I did a three month mentorship with her, which turned out to actually be a product in and of itself, but we did a three month mentorship, she really was comfortable.

At the end of three months, I was like, “Awesome, we’ll get you some clients, but I’m gonna oversee everything.” So basically she implemented what I was guiding. At the end of those three months, she was like, “Hey, I’m ready to do this on my own.” And so … The hardest part for me, admittedly, was that trust, right?

“Oh my god, I’m not gonna have my hands on this. I can’t believe I’m doing this. My name is on it.” But I had to have that trust.

Fortunately, she is a rockstar employee and she crushed it. So, because that first one went so well, I had more and more inquiries, because we’re just servicing more and more clients, and I needed to scale my team.

And that process was actually March 2016, so just what … a year and a half ago? That was my first coach, I now employ 10 coaches and three admin staff. We’re getting ready to hire an 11th coach, and so we now have a business that services around a thousand people every month.

Yuri:    That’s awesome. So there’s a lot of different, kind of, injection points that I want to talk about here. So there’s a lot of people in the online space who are online trainers, right? So they’re very much like you were, I guess more on the fitness side, but even on the nutrition side as well.

Jason:   Sure, yeah, it’s getting really popular.

Yuri:    Yeah, totally. I think the first step in terms of replicating yourself or cloning yourself is having some type of methodology, a unique method or a framework that you can give to someone else to follow. So when you were working with clients, were you aware of that, that you had this unique methodology? Or was it something where you said, “You know what, maybe I should start to document how I work with clients, so that eventually I can teach someone else how to do this as well”?

Jason:   So I was aware that I was unique—not that I had one unique method, but unique in the sense that I didn’t have one unique method.

And so when I looked around what I was seeing was people were saying, “Well I’m a keto coach,” or “I’m a carb cycle coach,” or “I’m a flexible dieting coach.”

What I recognize—and truthfully this comes from 13 years of being in the industry and being my own guinea pig—is that all of the approaches work when applied to the right client, and all of the approaches don’t work when applied to the wrong client.

And so my method was, “Hey, I need to match you up with the right approach for you.” And the real crux of it was …  “I need to be there for you, man.” Because nutrition coaching is not about numbers, it’s not about food. Something else is driving the inability to be healthy.

If you and I surveyed ten people today and we put three meals in front of them, one was a Big Mac, one was a salad with salmon on it, and one was a pizza, they would easily identify that the salmon and salad was the right choice.

Yet when they go out with their buddies, they’re eating the pizza or the Big Mac. And so there’s something that’s driving them that’s not allowing them to make the right choices, and that’s really the crux of coaching . That’s why my certification is called nutritional coaching.

And so that was really the crux of it. Obviously the initial prescription … You had to learn about the individual, identify where they were at, and I knew that was the foundation of why my method was successful—identifying where the person is now, what they need to move forward.

So I was kind of teaching the coach the art, and then kind of teaching the coach, “Okay, this is how you do the identification.” The actual, real, tangible results-based stuff.

Yuri:   Nice. So in some way, shape or form, there was some kind of secret sauce … Which is the way you’re able to duplicate yourself.

So, when you get to a point where you’re working 20 hours a day, you can’t do that forever. Was there a point where you kinda like just took a day off and you were like, “Shit, I gotta figure this out.”

Was there a thought in your mind that said, “How do I get other people to do this for me? How do I clone myself?” Was there ever a thought like that, that was the impetus to developing this coaching institute?

Jason:  To be fair, the initial transition of hiring a coach was never based on my own feeling of, “Oh my gosh, I need to clone myself.” It was actually 100% predicated on me realizing that, “Hey, this person’s really interested in what I’m doing.”

I feel like I’ve built something that’s really unique, I feel like the methods that are out there are flawed, what if I build other people into my methodology? Because I genuinely want to see the world a better place.

The evolution of Jason’s certification

If I die tomorrow, I know that there’s people out there that are using my methods now and the world, the next generation, can be a better place because of that.  I mean, that’s literally the root of all of my thinking, and so that was actually how and why I hired my first coaches.

Now, as the business has evolved over the last year, yes, that thought crossed my mind where I’m like, “Okay, is my business ever going to get to a point where I don’t need to coach clients and I can go out and change the world purely with the methods?”

Because I believe if people are certified in the methods, then the next generation is in a great place.

And so that was kind of a genesis of the certification. I’m like, “Great, I’ve got ten people on my team. We service a thousand people every month.”

Our goal as a team is to hit two thousand people … But that’s two thousand people, dude. The world’s got billions and billions of people, and most of them need nutritional help. Our team will never be big enough to service them. If I really want to create impact and I want to create legacy, then that means I need to create something that’s serviceable way outside of my team, and that was the impetus for the certification.

Yuri:  Yeah, it’s smart though. I think it’s a really important thinking exercise for a lot of people, because … If you’re creating products, it’s a little bit different, because you have the leverage through those products.

But I think if you’re someone who’s doing the one-on-one, you have to really have to kinda step back—or in your case have someone be like, “Hey, I want to learn from you”—and really think about like …  What is it that you’re doing?

This is exactly what I did when I first came online—I asked myself, “What am I doing with my clients, day in and day out, that I can turn into a product?”

And at the time—I didn’t even think about certifications—but it could’ve been, “How do I create a method around my way of training people that I could certify people in?”

So, maybe there’s a bit of ambiguity or maybe it’s just a little bit too big for people to kinda grasp, but I think it’s a really, really powerful question to ask. I mean, like you’ve seen, it’s massive leverage and you’re able to grow so much more quickly and transform a lot of people’s lives.

Jason:   Yeah, it definitely is growth, there’s a lot of growth that comes with doing it. And if I’m being completely fair, it was a very daunting task. It scared the crap out of me.

I’ll be super candid, when I launched the whole idea for the certification, I made a Facebook post about it. And I was like, “Guys, here’s the foundation of why I’m building this certification. I’m thinking about doing it at the end of the summer. If you’re interested, let me know.”

And I really was trying to gauge interest. That was the whole reason I made that Facebook post, and it kinda blew up in my face. I legitimately thought ten, fifteen people maybe would write back, like “Yeah, super interested.” Because I don’t have a huge following, but I’ve got a very loyal following.

Dude—160 responses later, I was like “Holy crap, I need to build this yesterday,” because these people don’t have the solutions they need. And I was like, “Wow.”

So for me, I need deadlines. And I think that’s a good lesson for a lot of entrepreneurs out there, because we live in a lifestyle world and we don’t have deadlines set by other people, we have to set our own deadlines … And an infinite deadline, right?

You’re always going to complete something in the time allotted to it, and so if it’s just a thought and you’re like, “Well, I’ll get it done one day” … One day could be five years from now.

So I actually set the date. I booked out the facility and I’m like “This is the date we’re gonna do it, let’s roll.” And I built out the outline and that was how I ended up doing it.

But it was a very daunting task. I think every time I sat down to write it, I was like “Man, I could make this better, and I could make this better,” and I continued writing more and more. But I can tell you that the first time I delivered it … The response, the people walking away, seeing the excitement, I was like “This is what I was meant to be doing.”

It just reiterated the impact. And impact is 100% what I’m after , man. I want to see everybody succeed, I want to see the world a better place.

Yuri:     That’s awesome. So you had 160 people. Out of all of them, what percentage of those people showed up to the actual certification?

Jason:   Yeah, so we give two options. We do an in-person or a livestream, and starting next year, there’s going to be a home study version as well—where you will get access to the livestream videos, so you can watch me interact with the people that do attend, you can watch the actual lecture. And then I’ll be recording modules for each chapter.

So that will be the three options, and I’m hoping that the people who choose home study also attend the livestream. The cost is going to be the same across the board, because I don’t think any method is better than the other—I think it’s just dependent on your time and your willingness to travel.

So yeah, in Chicago, I want to say like 90% of the people that signed up attended, and it was awesome, dude.

I won’t lie, I was exhausted for four days because it was just a lot of passion that went into two days of speaking. I remember, in full transparency, I went back to my hotel room on Saturday night and I was in tears. I couldn’t believe that literally everything I thought this would be … it was more.

And seeing lives transform in front of my eyes, I was like, “Holy crap man, these people are really gonna create change in this world and we just built the catalyst for that.”

It was amazing.

Yuri:   That’s awesome. And so these people that were being certified, were they just fitness enthusiasts, or fitness professionals? A combination of both?

Jason:   A combination of both. I even had two or three people that were clients, and they were like, “Hey, I think attending your certification will help me understand the process of working with you better.” I thought that was pretty rad.

The test for our certification is actually application-based, there’s some case studies involved. So those clients that were working with me that are like “I just want to understand the process better,” they went out and started working with their guinea pig clients for the test, and they’re now loving it and saying, “Wow, this is really cool. I see why you’re so passionate about what you do.”

And now I think they’re wanting to dip their toes into helping more people, which hey—if you help two people or you help 200 people, the world is still becoming a better place, and that’s pretty cool.

Yuri:     That’s awesome. So then they have this skillset that they can take back and utilize on their own, or they could become an employed coach through your company, is that correct?

Jason:  So it’s definitely not going to guarantee anybody a job, because obviously we’re putting hundreds of people through this certification and I don’t even have the volume to employ hundreds of coaches yet.

I will openly and honestly say that if you want a job with my company, attending and going through our methods is probably a good first step.

Now we have multiple certifications within our institute, and what everybody has had access to thus far is the level one nutrition coach. On January 6th we have the level one mindset course, and that was actually built out by a clinical psychologist that we employ. And then we have the level one hormone course on January 7th—and that was built out by a clinical hormone specialist that’s worked in the clinical setting for, I believe, 15 years now. And then we have a level one business systems course as well.

So the whole level one module system is designed to give you the tools you need to be an entrepreneur as well, and then we have a level two system.

I think people that are interested in working for me will probably want to graduate to that L2, and that’s really when the conversations start happening about being part of my team.

Yuri:    Awesome, nice. And going back to before you even had the coaches, or even now—you get to the point where you’re working 20 hours a day. I think that’s a good problem that people would love to have, at least initially, for awhile.

How are people finding out about you? How are people wanting you to work with them?

Jason:   So this is where everyone’s gonna be like “Oh, he’s just lucky,” and blah blah blah.

Because the answer is far less than most people think. I’ve never spent a penny on advertising, I don’t have a very big email list, I don’t have any of the assets that I think most people would look at me and be like, “Man, you’re crushing it as an entrepreneur.”

But the one asset I have is that I add value to every single person I come across . So like when you told me about Healthpreneur, I’m like “How many people can I send that way?”

And I wanted to get my team there and my team flaked—they suck, whatever. But we’re all going to be there next year, I want to come to one of your live events. Every single person that I come in contact, I need to find a way to add value.

Now in my day-to-day life, a lot of people need health and nutrition advice, so I’m going to give. And I don’t give with any expectation other than, “Hey man, if I moved you forward a half percent, then I won. And you will remember that interaction one day and you’ll pay it forward to somebody else.”

But I genuinely believe that was the crux of all my success, was just adding value, adding value, adding value.

Now here we are, we’re generating a pretty good amount of revenue. Yes, I am about to get into the ad space. Yes, I’m building a bigger email list. Yes, I’m doing the traditional marketing things that will help me sustain that success and scale it.

Giving without expectation, the marshmallow study

But my growth came from being willing to work without expectation, and I think that people need to listen to the second half of that—without expectation. Because I get people that come to me all the time, “Well I post on Facebook every day and no one reaches out.”

Okay, well that’s great. post on Facebook and try to help somebody. That’s all. Don’t have the expectation—if they don’t reach out, cool. That’s not why you posted.

And I think that we have to get out of these expectations and just start living from a value-based proposition.

Yuri:    Yeah, for sure. I think for a lot of people, myself included, it can be daunting when you do a Facebook live video and you see the number zero at the top of the screen … And it’s like, “Why is nobody watching this?”

But you have to really get over that and be like, “Listen, I’m gonna do my thing anyways. I’m going to add value, maybe one person will watch the replay,” because if you get hung up on the fact that no one’s here, no one’s taking action, you’re gonna give up by tomorrow.

So I think that’s a great reminder, to just give without expectation. Because at some level, in some way, shape, or form down the road, it’ll boomerang right back to you in spades, for sure.

Jason:   Yeah. I mean, I’ve talked to Google and people are often like “Oh, they must’ve paid you so much.”

The very first time I talked to Google, I paid my own expenses there. They didn’t pay me a dime, and I offered to do two talks in the same day because I thought it was a really unique opportunity to talk to people.

Walking away from there, I think I helped five people completely for free, and I just didn’t really care. But now, people are coming to me and they’re like, “Hey, Google posted the video of you talking there, and I saw that video and I want to work with you.”

So something that I could’ve gotten hung up on, is that I didn’t make any money from it and I didn’t get anything from it. Well here we are, two years later, and that video is now generating revenue.

Yuri:    Delayed gratification, my friends, delayed gratification. It’s something I try to teach my kids. I don’t know if you’ve heard about that study where they had kids at a table in a room and they offered-

Jason:    The marshmallow study!

Yuri:   Yeah, the marshmallow study.

So really briefly for the listeners who don’t know—basically they offered a kid one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in 20 minutes, I think. And they just wanted to test this whole delayed gratification thing.

So they found that those kids who were able to delay gratification were more success later in life, and I think it’s really true. It’s something I try to get my kids to understand—I’m like “Hey, you can have one Popsicle now or maybe two if you hang out for a bit,” you know?

Jason:    Yeah. And the results were astounding. It really showed correlation. If they could delay gratification, the success of the people that delayed gratification was exponentially higher.

Yeah, dude. Delayed gratification in life in general, it’s amazing.

Yuri:    Yeah, totally, for sure.

So when we first spoke, you talked about how when you initially came online, you were just doing everything. You were the typical squirrel chasing every shiny object.

Talk to us a little bit about that struggle. And then you kind of figured out that speaking in person to different venues was a really powerful platform, as you just mentioned with the Google story. So talk about the initial challenges that you had online and what you learned from that whole experience.

Jason:  Yeah, so it’s really funny. Some of my mentors are Bedros and Craig, and they did a podcast and it was actually about me—it was a case study on what I’m currently doing.

Bedros refers to me these days as JP 2.0. And when he first met me, he told me all the same stuff essentially he tells me now, and I didn’t really do anything with it. And what I found and what I give people advice for is … If you go to live events, you go to Masterminds and you hire a business coach—you’re probably going to get 10, 15, 20 ideas, because everybody’s achieving success a little bit differently.

The problem is, you walk away from these groups and you’re like “Oh my god, I need to be Daniel Dipiazza, posting on social media 10 times a day. And I need to be Yuri and I need to be leading this amazing live event and these amazing groups. And I need to be Joe Rogan and I need to have a podcast. And I need to be Steve Cook and I’ve gotta have a great vlog.”

Like you think that you gotta do 10 things—the reality is you gotta do one thing and you gotta do it really frickin’ well. And when that one thing starts to gain traction, outsource it and then do another thing, and do that thing really well.

And so my success came from falling flat on my face from trying to do everything. I lived in a world that was very tactical in nature. I was doing tactics and I wasn’t really adding value—meaning like, “Write your opt-in.” “Okay, I’ll write an opt-in, but I really don’t believe in what I’m writing, but hey, it’s an opt-in and the gurus say this works.”

And now, I mean if you go to my website, there’s complete transparency. There’s no opt-in, right? There’s a box saying, “Hey man, get on my newsletter if you think that I can add value for you.” Because I don’t really have a guide that’s gonna do anything for you in 48 hours. That’s the truth.

And so I lived in a tactical world, it made me fall flat on my face, and when I came back, it was this proposition of, “I’m just gonna add value.”

And for the people that listen, that think it was this wild, successful journey—it wasn’t. Three years ago this Thanksgiving, I woke up, I was overdrawn on my bank account, I was on a ski trip and I couldn’t even afford my morning coffee, let alone the looming Thanksgiving dinner that I was meant to have that night.

And I call it my Thanksgiving miracle, because for whatever reason at 8:37 that morning, a check cleared into my bank account on a holiday. I don’t at all understand it, it shouldn’t have happened, but I had enough money to get my coffee and I had enough money to pay for dinner that night.

And I never went to the tactical world, I just said I’m gonna keep adding value, I’m gonna keep adding value. And I kept doing what I knew to be right and I lived in one tactic—which was coach an individual—and made it successful. And I obviously started outsourcing that, figured out the next piece—which was the certification—and I built the pieces around that.

But that’s the thing, man; I think so many people want to focus on the tactic and not really the value add.

Yuri:   That’s so valuable. The thing is, people don’t want to hear that, right?

There’s no magic pill

Jason:   No, they want a quick fix, dude.

 Yuri:   Totally! It’s so funny. That’s why I wrote this blog post/video about why I don’t want to win the lottery and why winning the lottery is for suckers. It basically talks about how, whether it’s business for weight loss or nutrition, it’s the same thing—people want the end result without crossing the bridge. They don’t want to go through the journey.

And just like you talked about—you can try out all the tactics, they’re the little quick fixes. It’s like “Oh, I gotta do this little thing on my blog,” or add this little thing to my website and everything’s gonna magically happen. It doesn’t.

Jason:  I think so many people look at you and they’re like, “Why is Yuri so successful?”

Well dude, you added value to so many lives for so long, it was inevitable. And I get asked all the time, “What’s your one word of advice?” and my one word of advice is patience.

Patience is the biggest word—Gary Vaynerchuk preaches it endlessly—and another thing that I think is somewhat relevant, that Gary V talks about all the time is … He’s like “I’m scared of what my kids are gonna do when they grow up, because they’re growing up privileged.” They don’t have to fight for things, right? They think that there’s this tactic to success and that tactic is “We’ll ask Dad.”

Gary had to learn everything the hard way growing up and he figured out how to hack success, he figured out “This is how I sell, this is how I actually make money.”

So I think people that are out there—if you’re looking for that magic switch and you get a subject line, “Hey, I can make you $10,000 this week,” just delete it. Don’t even bother opening it, don’t read it, don’t click the link, don’t get caught up in that funnel.

Because if someone says they can make you that much money that quickly, they’re full of shit.

You’re probably going to lose a lot of money really quickly before you even make a dime, and that’s okay. Embrace that, because one day you’ll be in the position I’m in, telling the story of being really, really broke—and believe me, I remember that vividly like it was yesterday, and it absolutely drives me every single day.

But yeah—just be patient and still do the work. Do the work that you know to be true and right, and I think that success is inevitable.

Yuri:    Yeah, that’s such good advice. And you have to enjoy the process—if you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, then you’re just going to jump ship to something else. So you have to figure out what it is you love to do.

And to your point … So I’ve had this idea for a product called The First Sell Formula—how to show people how to make their first dollar online. And the reason I haven’t launched it is because the advice, the process I’m gonna show them, is not sexy.

Jason:   It never is.

Yuri:    Yeah. I’m like “Get ready to spend several months doing this stuff every single day before you start making money.”

OR, spend a bunch of money on Facebook and hope for the best with a funnel that may not be tested. And I don’t people want to do that.

Jason:   And to be completely honest dude, that’s why I have competitors in my space that are more successful than I am. They sell info products that make more money, their coaching can end up making more money, because they’re selling something like you said, that appears to be easy.

But I can tell you that I’m playing the long game, I’m playing the patient game—and if I’m being completely honest, in the last 16 months the people that have been to those companies ended up figuring out that they would inevitably fail on the “quick fix program” … They now work with me, and they’re now clients of mine.

So I feel really bad that they had to spend money elsewhere before they came and properly spent their money with us, but I’m gonna continuing doing it the right way, and I think that over the long-term, the quick fixes will phase themselves out.

We’re doing things the right way and we’re gonna stick around forever. And I would much rather have the security of foreverthan any amount of money on the front end.

Yuri:    Yep, totally. Couldn’t agree more. I think like you said, if what you’re doing is not producing results quickly, it’s probably the right thing to be doing.

Jason:   Amen, dude. And that sounds crazy to say, but it’s so true.

Yuri:   You brought up so many great things in this interview Jason—the power of adding value to every person you come across, attending events, surrounding yourself with people. So many people have talked about finding a mentor, being surrounded by other people, playing the long game, and it’s so funny …  Every single conversation has had that same message—”There’s no magic pill. Put in the work.”

So I want all of our listeners to understand this: It took me three years before I actually was able to make some decent money online—and I’m a little bit slower than most people, I’m not saying it has to take three years.

But just understand it’s not gonna happen overnight. And you’re gonna go through the hardships, you’re gonna have to put in the time. And if you don’t see results, if you don’t have anyone looking at your videos, just keep putting them out there.

Jason:  Using Gary as the example, Wine Library never even got looked at for two years and then all of a sudden people started to notice.

Last night flying home from LA, I was listening to a podcast—Lewis Howes’ podcast with Julian Dean, the magician that’s on YouTube and Facebook and stuff. And to be completely fair, I had no idea who he was—which is apparently astounding because he’s everywhere—but even his story, he’s 23 years old, he’s been doing it for three years, nobody took notice. He had one video that finally went viral and that’s where everybody noticed him.

But Lewis asked him, “Are you doing anything different today?” he’s like “No, the magic is the same, the entertainment value is the exact same. But finally, I broke through and one video got viral and I got the share.” And he actually goes into his methods about how it went viral and it was pretty neat.

But even in his methods, it was preceded by 10 to 12 months of relationship building and work before the video went viral.

I sometimes fear going on podcasts and doing interviews, because I feel like what I’m going to say is not sexy enough to sell for the interviewer and I’m always really transparent about that. Because I’m straight to the point, I’m blunt, I’m just honest that, “Guys, it’s hard work, it’s a grind, but it’s a worthwhile grind.”

Because now you and I get to live in our passion, and we get the rewards from it, but it’s because we never gave up.

Yuri:    Yep. It’s like a bamboo; the bamboo tree takes I think it’s like 7 or 13 years to even crack the surface, but when it does, it shoots up to astronomical heights like that. So many great analogies in nature. It’s awesome.

Jason:    I love that, dude. Yeah, there really is. It’s pretty cool.

The rapid-five questions

Yuri:    Obviously we can talk about this forever, which is a lot of fun, but I know that our listeners have stuff to do, you’ve got stuff to do, so are you ready for the rapid five?

Jason:   I’m ready dude. I’m a little intimidated, but I’m ready.

Yuri:   Yes, these are very, very tough questions to answer, so brace yourself. All right, you ready?

Jason:   You’re not gonna ask me like what color my car is? Because that would just be easy.

Yuri:    Exactly. “What’s your favorite ice cream?” No, that’s not … Well actually, just out of curiosity, what is your favorite ice cream?

Jason:    Oh, I was like “Damn, that’s easy.” So the ice cream that’s in my fridge right now is half-baked fro-yo from Ben & Jerry’s. Favorite ice cream is peanut butter cup perfection at Cold Stone.

Yuri:     Very nice, cool. So that wasn’t part of the rapid five. Now let’s just start with the rapid five.

Jason:   Damn. I thought we had one out of the way. All right, here we go.

Yuri:    Your biggest weakness?

Jason:   People won’t believe it—it’s self-confidence.

Yuri:    Your biggest strength?

Jason:   Willingness to give and willingness to sacrifice.

Yuri:    Nice. One skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business?

Jason:   Human interaction.

Yuri:    What do you do first thing in the morning?

Jason:    Go to Starbucks.

Yuri:   Complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Jason:  When people around me are smiling, laughing, having fun and living the life of their dreams.

Yuri:    Awesome. Jason buddy, there has been so much value in this episode. Guys, remember when we started this? I said put this in slow motion and take notes, because if you didn’t—rewind it, listen to it again. There’s so much value in this episode.

So Jason, thank you so much for taking the time, for being here, just being yourself, sharing your awesome-ness, and for all the amazing work you do in the world.

Jason:   Oh dude, it’s literally my pleasure. And I know I’ve told you privately and I’ll say it to your audience—I followed Yuri for a very long time and it’s very humbling and an amazing opportunity to be asked to come on such a great podcast. I know everybody that listens would probably echo the same thing and I look forward to a lot of people that are listening getting that opportunity. Just hustle, put in the work, build your business, and just keep adding value to the world. It’s amazing. So I appreciate you, sir.

Yuri:   Thanks man. I appreciate that.

What is the best place for people to learn more about you, about the Nutritional Coaching Institute?

Jason:    So as I told Yuri, the Nutritional Coaching Institute, it’s a relatively new thing—so he’s gonna list the website in the show notes. And about me personally, it’s just JasonPhillipsNutrition.com. That’s actually my coaching website, that’s where I put all my blogs. But yeah man, there’s that, and then Instagram is just JasonPhillipsFitness, Facebook is Jason Phillips.

The one thing I’ll say, and I’ll leave this with everybody out there, I answer everything myself. I don’t have assistants answering any of my stuff, so feel free to send me a message, send me an email, DM me, whatever you want.

I answer every last message, even if it takes me a day or two to get to you, I’ll do it. We’ll carry on a conversation, we’ll do what we need to do to help you move forward. So that’s an open invite to chit-chat with anybody.

Yuri:     There’s another tip, guys. It’s part of the magic.

Dude, thank you so much for taking the time. Hope you guys enjoyed this interview and Jason, I hope to see you soon.

Jason:   Brother, my pleasure.

——————————————————————

Now you know why I’m a huge fan of Mr. Jason Phillips. I don’t know why I call him “Mister…” He’s just a great guy, he’s a lot of fun, he’s doing some big things. And doing big things in a way that is going deep with people and impacting their lives in a tremendous way.

So yeah, I just wanted to thank him for being so awesome and for sharing everything with us in that interview. Hope you got some great nuggets out of that one as well.

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Follow Jason Phillips At:

https://in3nutrition.com/

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Transcription

We’ve got a great guest, Irene Drabkin, and what’s cool about this interview is that, first and foremost, she is Russian. So there is a bit of a thick accent, just wanna give you a forewarning.

Irene is a certified integrative nutrition health and wellness educator, and she actually is accredited by Columbia University and the American Association of Drugless Practitioners. She is also currently pursuing her master’s degree in health promotion at Maryland University of Integrative Health.

She’s the author of The Power of the Educated Patient, which has become an instant Amazon number one Best Seller, and was actually in the top 50 of all books on Amazon for a little while, which is pretty amazing.

So what I love about this interview is that Irene is still not at the pinnacle of her journey, and no one is, right? But what’s really amazing about what we’re going to go through is that she comes from a very heart-centered place—as obviously all of our guests do—and she’s very open about her challenges and her struggles.

She’s going to talk about what went into getting a book done, to the people that are required to help get a book from your head into its finished version. And she’s also going to talk about what it was like growing up in a family surrounded by medical doctors.

So just imagine this—you’re an alternative practitioner, and everyone around you is a medical doctor. How did she do it? How did she keep moving forward? Well that’s exactly what she’s going to tell us about in this episode.

So without any further ado, we’ll bring Irene onto the podcast. Let’s bring Irene into the lair—not that it’s a lair and I’m a dragon or anything—but let’s just bring her onto the show and let’s just get this party started.

 

Irene, welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. How you doing?

Irene:  Hi, hi Yuri, thank you so much I’m very honored to be here and talk to you, thank you.

Yuri:    Awesome, likewise. I’m excited for our conversation. So what’s new and exciting in the world of Irene? What are you working on these days?

Irene:   Well, it’s fall—it’s September, seventh of September—so my kids are back to school, I have a little bit more time now, and I’m back to my work helping clients, helping people with their energy level, with emotional eating, stress, losing weight.

And, I’m also pursuing my master’s in health education. So, down the road I’m going to be doing what I do now, not just with clients, but at the universities and hopefully corporate places.

Yuri:   Awesome. So, doing this studying, pursuing the master’s—how is that as you’re building your business?

Irene:   You know, to be honest, for the success of my business, I’m ready to do my work. I’ve been doing my work for about seven years now. Master’s—they do help, I’m getting new knowledge, I’m meeting new people. But mostly, it’s just to add a couple letters to my name.

Irene’s start and her daughter’s health story

I’m already a best-selling author which helps, but these letters, they do open more doors, to be honest. But I do learn new things and how to incorporate what I already know and deliver what I already know to more people with different backgrounds and different level of acceptance—because not everyone is open and accepting to alternative and holistic medicine.

And I know it firsthand because actually my whole family is physicians—conventional MDs, including my mother and my husband. And I’m a holistic health practitioner and NLP master coach, so it wasn’t easy for me at the beginning. It wasn’t easy for my family to accept what I was doing when I was implementing my alternative medicine like oils, nutrition, homeopathic medicine.

But as we grew, as we went, they saw the difference. Like when my kids were born, they were sick all the time, and conventional medicine didn’t help us. And I have specific examples, more about health, not about the business … But my daughter was suffering with an allergy—well, we didn’t know if it was an allergy …  When she started the first grade, she suffered from symptoms like stomach pains. And within a month or two, she became disabled—she couldn’t go to school because she didn’t know when the pain would find her.

Yuri:   Wow.

 Irene:   And for so many physicians—Harvard doctors, my husband was trying to help, and all they found was that she had some stomach problems, so they put her on a drug. And as a holistic mother and a health practitioner, I refused to give her this drug.

But within a few weeks, I had to choose the lesser of the two evils. She was becoming socially disabled, so I put her on the drug and it didn’t help. And moreover, it made things worse because now she didn’t believe that anything could help her.

She was getting worse and worse, and I tried everything I could—oils, natural medicine … And then I had nothing left. There was one thing I didn’t think of that was gluten. And I know about gluten intolerance, but my daughter was tested negative for celiac disease.

But I had nothing to lose, so I remember on Saturday I did my food shopping and on Sunday the whole family had the gluten-free breads, gluten-free pasta. On Monday I drove my daughter to school and she was crying—she didn’t want to go, she didn’t want to let my hand go, because she was afraid.

But when I came to pick her up that Monday, she got into the car and started to tell me how good her day was, how she was playing with other kids, instead of crying. A few minutes into that, I asked her, “How many times did you get sick today?” And she stopped, she thought about it … And then she said, “You know Mommy? I forgot all about it.”

Yuri:  That’s great. 

Irene:   Yes, on Monday, the same thing happened, and on Wednesday I didn’t even ask.

So this is the example of how a simple, inexpensive thing can help change someone’s life. And if I wasn’t who I was, I would have to follow—like all other mothers—the doctor’s prescriptions.

And she was actually prescribed to do surgical procedures, which I know would not have helped.

Yuri:   True.

Irene:    So that’s an example of how people like us, like you and me, can help others with simple answers.

My daughter’s story is the first story in my best-selling book, The Power of the Educated Patient, where I interviewed over 20 people with different health conditions and they gave me their stories. And I have stories with bipolar disease, stage four metastatic cancer, depression, Lyme disease—all different kinds of stories, and all those people were searching for healing, some of them for years. And they found healing through both the combination of alternative and conventional.

Because I’m not against conventional medicine. If there is a car accident, thank God for conventional medicine. But if there is a chronic condition, we need to get help from holistic practitioners like yourself and me.

Yuri:    Sure. Definitely. That’s amazing, and that’s why it’s great to take your wisdom and share it in the form of a book, which you did really well on Amazon with.

For people that are looking to share their expertise, share their knowledge in the form of a book, what advice can you give them? After the book is written, how did you get it out? How did you get people to buy it? How did you get the word out for that book?

Because there’s a lot of people who write a book and then it’s just kind of crickets—no one knows about it. So how do we get that in front of more people?

Irene:    Yes, and I totally agree with you Yuri, because there are many wonderful, amazing books but nobody reads them, nobody finds them.

So, I mean, it’s important that you love your book. That you love and you believe in your book.

This book was like my third baby—I spent over two years putting it together, and I knew I had to help this baby grow and to get to know the world. So, actually I took a few courses—not about book writing, but about book publishing. They are very important.

I took, I think, three different courses, and they were all different. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, and some of them were not as good. But, they all gave me little nuggets, which I used.

The three people you need to write a book

There are three people which are important. The book is like when the baby is born—there are two people when the baby is born that are very important. There’s the mother, and the doctor, or whoever is delivering the baby.

When the book is born, I would say there are three people who are important: The author, the editor, and the person who helps to put the technical bits together, like formatting the book and all that.

So I was lucky to find a good editor who believed in my book, because his wife actually went through cancer, so he was helping me … And actually, when I was interviewing editors I interviewed about ten people, and I was looking for someone who would believe in what I was doing.

Yuri:  And where did you find the editor? Just so people know where they can maybe find one if they are looking for one.

Irene:   Okay, there are different forums. Actually on Facebook, there are different Facebook groups.

Yuri:    Smart.

Irene:    I don’t remember them all now, but I can kind of find them. I went on them, I became part of their group, and I ask, I put a note that I am looking for an editor.So people got back to me, people recommended me editors, so basically through different forums. Actually, on forums for authors, I asked for recommendations and I put my questions out, so I had people getting back to me and then I interviewed them.

Again, I was looking for two things: How skilled the editor is, and whether or not he or she believes in what I do, and the mission of my book.

And I was lucky to find an editor who really believed in the mission of my book.

So that is the second person who was important in the success. The third person was the person who put it together—the formatting and stuff—and actually I’ve tried a few people.

Everyone knows about the site, Fiverr.com. There are great people there.

Some of them are in Europe … I never talked to them on the phone, but we communicated through email, and there I found a good person who helped me to put it together. And for the book cover I also found help on Fiverr.

If you can see my book on Amazon, The Power of the Educated Patient, it looks very professional. And it has over one hundred reviews, positive reviews, worldwide. About 80 in the US, and it has reviews from Japan, Germany, UK—I don’t even know how these people know about it!

Yuri:   That’s great.

 Irene:    So three people. And I would suggest for whoever’s writing the book, to start looking for an editor as early as they can. Because it’s a relationship they need to build on. So, if they have an idea what they’re going to be writing, it’s better to start looking for the right editor. Because for the success of the book, it has to be the right fit.

 Yuri:    True. So once the book is done, it’s ready to go, it’s all published, it’s printed, you have it sitting on Amazon, how do people buy it?

How are you getting the word out to people—through whatever means. How did you do that?

Irene’s support group and how they helped her throughout her journey

Irene:  Well, as I mentioned Yuri, I did join a few courses about book writing, book editing, book publishing, and I found there was a forum on each of those courses.

I found a group of people I really liked, and we had so much in common, so I actually created a support group for my book. And it had quite a few people—there were like 70 people, maybe more.

So it was really an exchange. As I was writing, I was sharing tips and lessons. Whenever I made a mistake, I would share—I would say, “Well don’t do that, but do this.”

When the book was done, I actually sent everyone a PDF copy of the book so they can read that.

Yuri:   Yep.

Irene:    And when the time came, I asked everyone, “If you like the book, please give me your honest review. Or if you don’t like the book, I’m just looking for an honest review.”

Yuri:     Sure.

Irene:    And I was lucky that people actually took the time out of their busy lives and they gave me reviews.

Yuri:   That’s cool.

Irene:    And so some of the reviews I have up are from there, some of them are from people I’ve never met, never talked to, never communicated with—they just found the book, I guess through the people they knew, or through Amazon, or through searching.

My book was published almost two years ago in November, and it became an instant best seller. It was number one in three categories, and believe it or not, I became one of the top 50 authors in health and wellness!

Yuri:    Good for you, that’s awesome. And I think what you did was very smart; you basically had a, kind of a support group, you gave them great stuff, you’re adding value to them.

Irene:    Yes.

Yuri:   So there’s this kind of sense of reciprocity that was built, so that when you ask them for a small favor they’re more likely to help you out. Which is a really smart thing to do.

And for anyone listening who’s thinking of writing a book or who has a book, I think it’s a really simple way of just kind generating that goodwill with your audience to support what it is that you do. So that’s really cool.

So in this journey of writing the book or launching the book, even throughout your business—what’s been one of the biggest challenges?

You talked about your parents being physicians and that; outside of that what’s been another big challenge you’ve had to deal with in your business, and how have you overcome that?

Self doubt vs. self belief

Irene:   The biggest challenge … I guess … I think we need to keep believing in ourselves. So the biggest challenge was when I’m feeling down, just overcoming that and to keep believing in my mission.

My aim is to start talking to physicians and medical students and my husband, as a traditional MD says, “Well, you don’t know all the biochemistry and the science they know. How can you talk to them?”

And then I answer, “Well, but they don’t know the simple things that I know!”

Yuri:    That’s very true.

Irene:    Yes. But you know? In the back of my mind, it kind of gives me some doubts. “Well, what if they ask me this biochemistry question and I can’t answer?”

So, I guess this is actually one of the reasons why I’m doing my master’s now—so I have more credentials and more knowledge. But this is … this one of the little things we need to overcome.

And even though my family and my husband are the biggest supporters now, but … I guess it’s me, the mom, that I need to persuade. You are on the right track and you’re doing a good job and you have to keep going.

Yuri:   Yeah, well you definitely are, and I wanna thank you for sharing that. I think you’re very honest about that, so I appreciate you sharing that.

We are our biggest obstacle, our biggest worst enemy—the negative self talk, and the self doubt. That’s part of a lot of the stuff we do. And especially with your situation—your parents and husband are all MDs, and to win them over, over time, is pretty amazing.

It’s very tough, it’s like someone who wants to lose weight, but they live in a household of obese people, it’s not easy to do.

So I want to commend you on being able to kind of just continue moving forward and sticking to your mission because there could be more supportive environments to live in and you’ve done a great job.

Irene:   Thank you Yuri, really appreciate you saying that.

Yuri:   Yeah, for sure. So knowing what you know now, if you were to start your business all over again, what would you do differently, if anything?

Irene:   I would still take the courses I’ve taken, even though I don’t use some of them, the trainings I’ve taken, so many trainings.

But differently? Um … I don’t know. Maybe I would go faster, but I did have small children when I started, so, I don’t know Yuri. Maybe … I don’t know what I would do differently now.

Yuri:    Okay, that’s fair. It’s not an easy answer to … not an easy question to answer. So I’ll give you another one: So on your journey, with all that you’ve learned, what do you think is a really important skill for entrepreneurs to possess for lasting success?

Irene:    Well, the most important thing is self belief. Self doubt destroys you.

So you have to believe in what you are doing first. You have to believe that this is a good thing. It’s great if it brings you money, but you have to actually believe in what you’re doing. You can’t be there just for the money.

So, self-belief. And if there are doubts, and we all are humans—just keep going. Find a support group.

I guess the support group is very important, and I do have a great support group on the forums, from the nutrition school I attended. So, that’s very important too.

Yuri:  That’s great. I was just about to ask you, is there a ritual or a practice that you engage in to build up that belief when you’re feeling down? Or is it really kind of leaning on that support group? Which I think is amazing.

Irene:    Yeah. I would say the support group is good, but sometimes I just need to take the time for myself and really think, recharge, watch an old movie, and then I’m back.

Yuri:    Sure. So, what lesson have you learned the hard way? What’s one thing you’re like, “Man, that took me a while to learn”?

And how can you help others avoid that mistake?

Irene:   I guess we have to take the negativity. There are negative people, they’re everywhere, and fortunately there are not many of them. And sometimes, it’s not that people don’t believe in the work you do—they might be jealous of you.

And it has nothing to do with the work or even you, it’s about them. So you have to go past them. And not pay attention to them. Because what you’re doing is important.

Yuri:    Well I think that’s a good one. They’re energy vampires, right? They suck the life out of you, they don’t encourage you, and I think a common theme that comes up in our conversation here is the power of surrounding yourself with the right environments. To really help you overcome those self doubts and get away from that negativity.

Just like with raising a family—they say it takes a village to raise a family. And I think of the same thing is true in business—you need the support, whether it’s from family or friends or a support group, it’s important to have that around you.

Because if everyone’s just saying, “You can’t do this, you’re not good enough, it’s never gonna work, it’s only a matter of time.” … We can only believe in ourselves so much before we break apart.

Irene:    Yeah.

Yuri:   So I think that’s a great lesson, for sure.

Knowing when to give advice 

Irene:    Another one Yuri, I have to mention, is people have to be ready. Have to be ready for your advice.

Yuri:    Yeah.

Irene:    Never insist your advice, never push your advice. That’s what I’ve learned.

Yuri:    That’s great.

 Irene:   Because there are some MDs, like my husband has many MD friends who come to our house. I remember that a heart surgeon came to our house and he brought a cake, and a huge bottle of Diet Coke. Ten years ago, and he is a bright man, and his wife was pregnant at the time.

So I took this Diet Coke and I poured it out in my sink. And to this day, it’s been years, I regret that. Because he looked at me in shock, and I explained why I did it, I made a joke out of it, but he was not ready for that.

So never push your advice. People have to be ready, and you have to take them, meet them where they are.

Yuri:   That’s really, really, valuable. Guys, that is such a key lesson. Because so many of us in the health space—we wanna convince people. “This is what you have to do, you need this,” but as you said, you have to meet people where they’re at.

And if they’re not ready to hear it, you can’t waste your time there. You can only talk to people who are ready to be spoken to.

Irene:    Yes, yes, yes. And that’s actually another negative thing, because when I offered my help to some MDs, they never said no, but they never came back to me. And I understand now, it’s because they are not ready.

They don’t know about alternative medicine or alternative medicine yet. So, yeah. Let people get ready. In time, they’ll come back to you.

Yuri:     Totally. That’s awesome. So I know you’ve got kids—what has having kids taught you about marketing, business, entrepreneurship?

Irene:   Time management.

Yuri:    That’s a good one, for sure.

Irene:   I remember when I was writing my book, my kids were smaller, and if I had like ten minutes in a row, I could have accomplished so much!

Now they both are in school, so I have a few hours to myself. So I learned how to manage time and how to make the most of what I had. Uninterrupted time … It’s magic.

And so, I’ve learned how to not look at Facebook or different social media sites. It’s time management, and it’s very important for any success.

Yuri:    Awesome. Great, great stuff. Irene, this has been a lot of fun. Are you ready for the rapid five?

Irene:    Okay.

Rapid five questions

Yuri:   The rapid fire five questions, you have no idea what they are, I’m just gonna fire them at you. Whatever comes to mind, just go with that. Sound good?

Irene:   Okay!

Yuri:   Alright. Number one: your biggest weakness.

Irene:    I like to sleep.

Yuri:    Cool. Number two: your biggest strength.

Irene:    I am very motivated.

Yuri:      Yes, I can tell, for sure. Number three: one skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business.

Irene:    Managing my time and talking to people, getting right people on board.

Yuri:     Very nice. What do you do first thing in the morning?

Irene:   Go and make breakfast and wake up my children.

Yuri:    They don’t wake you up, that’s good. [laughing]

Irene:    I know! [laughing]

Yuri:     And finally, complete this sentence: I know I’m being successful when …

Irene:    When I have that feeling that I had a good day. When I feel like I have done something good today. Good for my business. And obviously, when I get an email, a phone call, a letter, a review for my book—people thanking me for what I’ve done and sharing their stories of how I helped them.

That is when I feel good, and that is when I feel I am on right path—I am successful.

Yuri:     Awesome. Good. That’s great.

Irene, thank you so much for taking the time to share your journey, your experiences, your wisdom with us—it’s been a lot of fun. What is the best place for people to follow your work online?

Irene:   The best place is my website, which is www.Irenehealthandwellnesseducator.com. I also have another site, www.thepoweroftheeducatedpatient.com. My email address is [email protected].

Yuri:  Perfect. And we’ll make sure to link up to all that good stuff in the show notes guys, over at the blog which you can go to after listening to this episode.

It’s been a lot of fun Irene. Thank you so much, I appreciate the work that you’re doing and for persevering in spite of all the challenges that we all encounter—you’ve done a great job and I hope you all the continued success.

Irene:   Yuri, thank you so much for having me on your show—I really appreciate the work you are doing.

Yuri:    Thank you so much.

Irene:  Thank you.

——————————————————————

Now if you’re like Irene, and you have a surrounding—family members, colleagues, friends—who have gone one route, let’s say the medical allopathic route. And now you’re here doing this kind of alternative thing … I’m sure you can relate to what Irene talked about. Some of the challenges, the struggles, how she’s able to overcome that and really stay strong in the face of quote unquote adversity.

Because again, everyone has their opinions, right? Maybe it’s your father or your mom who wants you to become a lawyer, a doctor, and if you don’t then there’s disapproval and all this kind of stuff.

At the end of the day, you have to do what you do. You have to do what’s right for you based on your path in this world. So I’m really happy that Irene was able to share what she’s gone through and some of the lessons that she’s learned that hopefully will inspire you as well.

——————————————————————

Follow Irene Drabkin At:

https://www.irenehealthandwellnesseducator.com/

https://www.thepoweroftheeducatedpatient.com/

Facebook

[email protected]

Transcription

Hey guys, what’s up? Yuri here, welcome back to the Healthpreneur podcast.

In this episode I’m going to walk you through five ways to be a more productive entrepreneur, because it’s all about being effective and efficient—otherwise you’re just wasting your time. I’m a huge believer in working smarter not harder and if you’re the same, what I’m about to share with you is going to be extremely valuable.

So without any further ado, let’s jump into these five tips.

 

Now there’s other ways to be more productive but what I like about these is that they all flow together. If you want to take down some notes, you can do that.

1)    Long-term focus

Tip number one is to focus on one major project at a time. When I say at a time I’m essentially saying … When you look at scheduling your year—and I’m going to challenge you here—really figure out what the handful of big outcomes you want to achieve in the year are. I’m talking about a maximum of five here. These would be related to a project.

Let’s say for instance, that you had a product that you wanted to launch to market and achieve a certain number of sales. That would be one project.

Now what I’m going to say to you is that if that’s your focus, make that the only thing you work on for at least the next 90 days. And this is tough because there are other things you have take care of in your business.

But the whole idea is that you want to set things up so that 80% of your time is spent on the most important project. 20% of your time is spent on the little things that have to get tidied up and the little errands—the stuff that doesn’t really move the needle forward but just has to get done.

The key is to identify one major project at a time and do your very best to stick to it.

Now, if you have a team of people, it might be a little bit different. But what I can say from experience is that even when running a team of about 14 people, we had a very tough time focusing and effectively executing more than two or three projects at a time.

And even though we had smaller silos working on individual projects, when the team is split, when the company in terms of its focus is split, you’re not going to get the same results.

Whereas if you said, “Okay everyone. The only thing we’re going to do for the next three months is this one thing. Here’s what you’re going to do, here’s what you’re going to do, here’s what I’m going to do, we’re all going to work together to make this happen.” When you can focus—that’s the power.

It’s very much like getting a magnifying glass when you were a kid and roasting those ants under the beam of sunlight. And I know you probably did that—if you were like I was. Maybe you weren’t, maybe you just burned some grass and you were nice to the ants.

The power of focus is extremely, extremely important. There’s a great book if you want to go deeper on this, it’s called, The One Thing and it is about finding that one thing to focus on. So that’s the first way to be more productive.

2)   Controllable vs. uncontrollable

The second thing is that once you’ve identified that one big thing … How do we tackle that? How do you eat an elephant? As the saying goes.

Well you take one bite at a time.

What we’re going to do next is we’re going to identify from that big project—what are the controllable actions that we can start taking to move us closer to the outcome?

A lot of times businesses and entrepreneurs deal with anxiety, and this anxiety generally comes from focusing on things we can’t control. You’re saying you want to make a million dollars. Great—if you’re only focused on the outcome, that’s the outcome.

You can’t control how much money you make. You can indirectly, by focusing on saying “Okay, I’ve got to make this many sales, this much money, that is an indirectly uncontrollable type of outcome.

But when we focus on that, we tend to feel more anxious and the reason for that is because we don’t have a bridge from what we’re saying we want, to what we can do in the present day to move us closer to that.

What we want to do is break down that outcome goal, that thing that is slightly out of our control. Again, let’s just say making a million dollars. Now, we want to break down what all of the things are that we can control to help us move closer to that. This is essentially going to be a brain dump.

You’re going to write down all the different ideas to move this project forward. So again, you want to make a million dollars? Well how are you going to do that? There’s a lot of different ways you can do that.

But let’s just say you have a product that you’re going to go to market with and you know that if you can get the right people involved and have a good Facebook ad funnel, you can crack that code, you can acquire customers at a profit, you can crack a million dollars. Let’s just say that’s the example.

So, you have to identify—what are things we’re going to do to get us there? You want to write down all of the different ideas, the things that you can control. That might mean reaching out to potential partners, continuing to grow your podcast, pumping out three to five videos on YouTube per week, emailing your list on a daily basis.

You want to really think about this. And this I why I continue to say, it’s important to take time away from the business to do the thinking, to do the big strategic thinking. Because when you can really lay out everything that might be involved in a bigger project, it gives you clarity. Now you’ve got all the ideas down on paper, you’ve got everything out of your head and you can start to look at—okay, what makes sense out of all this stuff?

The second thing we’re doing here is we’re breaking down that one big project into controllable actions. And we want to write down as much as we can really think about because a lot of times procrastination can be a problem. And that is something we all deal with.

To be very honest with you, I’m really one of the most sought after experts on procrastination, if you will. And the reason for that is because I wrote the book on it, literally. And that’s because when I was just about to graduate from university, I was studying kinesiology and I decided not to attend any of my swim classes in the morning. We had a swim component to our activity classes. I thought, “Surely the school’s not going to recognize that I didn’t show up to any swimming classes…” And they did.

So I had to make up 20 hours of swimming in the last week before I graduated plus I had to write a 20 page paper on procrastination. So I can literally say that I’ve written the book on procrastination.

The reason we procrastinate is because we’re either delaying something, some kind of pain that we don’t want to experience—like me in the form of swimming, because I can’t stand swimming. I wish I did, it’s a great sport—but I just don’t like it.

That’s the first thing, but the second thing and the thing that is most applicable to a lot of us is that we’re not explicitly clear on what the next actionable step to take is.

So if you say your project is to launch products. That’s a universe in and of itself. But what is the next actionable step for you to take? It might be sit down for one hour tomorrow between twelve and one and brainstorm launch strategy. So you can see how that’s a lot more tangible.

You can almost visualize that happening in your mind. That’s what we want to do, we want to think about these controllable actions as being the next logical step, the next thing we can possibly do. They’re very visual and they usually start with a verb. Brainstorm, call, email, talk to, write down, create—and that’s all about taking that action. That’s the second step.

3)   Tangible sprints

The third way to be more productive is the next step following that. So once we’ve identified these controllable actions, we need to schedule them into tangible sprints. And I typically like to work in 14 day sprints.

So I’ll use the example of launching a product. Out of all the things I’ve listed, of things that we need to do that we can control—what can we do in the next two weeks where we can see a measurable moving of the needle?

One of those legs, in terms of what we can focus on, might be, “Alright, for the next two weeks we are going to do massive outreach to a hundred joint venture partners.” So that’s going to mean, “Within that, what are we going to do?”

So our goal is to contact 100 joint venture partners. We can’t control if they’re going to say yes to our request to promote the product but we can reach out to them, that is controllable.

That might be something you focus on for the next two weeks. Then you look at, “Okay. We contacted a hundred people. Our goal is to have 75 of them say yes, what can we do to make it as compelling as possible for them to say yes to promote this product?”

Well, we have to create a really enticing payment, bonus, commission structure. We want to sit down and really figure that out. That might be step one.

Step two is look at creating pre-launch content that might be suitable to specific audiences that our joint venture partners are in the space of. You’re starting to think about what you can do in the next two weeks that’s tangible and that you can see a direct outcome from. Again, this relates back to that list of controllable actions that you had previously written down.

I like to work in two week sprints because then you can look at the outcome you wanted and ask yourself, “Did we hit it?”

If not, why not? If yes, cool—let’s set the bar a little bit higher for the next one.

Two weeks is a good amount of time to get progress done or to see progress. If you go a little bit longer you start to lose focus or forget almost what you’re working on sometimes.

4)   The night before

The fourth way to be a more productive entrepreneur is to write down your day the night before. You have all the things you know you’re supposed to work on to make this project come to life. You know to the detail—call Susan, do this, strategize launch plan, you know exactly what’s supposed to happen.

And now you’re simply going to look at, “Okay, we’ve mapped out what we’re going to work on for the next two weeks, we have our tangible sprint and what we’re simply going to do now, if today is Monday, what do I have to do on Tuesday?”

Because again, we want to break this down to a very, very simple level. “What is the next logical action, the next logical step I need to take to move this forward?”

At the end of your day, let’s say it’s Monday—and this is actually really important—take out a sheet of paper or a notepad. I just use a Post-it note, to be honest. And write down the three most important things you’re going to do tomorrow.

It’s important to really limit how many things you’re working on because if you list out ten, there’s no way that’s going to happen. Let’s be honest. If you’ve got ten things to do, you’re just doing too much.

Write down the three most important things you’re going to do. And even within that, there should be one thing, the big needle mover that you need to get done. That needs to be priority number one and that needs to be at the top of the list. That’s the thing you need to work on the next morning, first thing, before you do anything else.

By writing the stuff down before you go to bed or at the end of your day, what this does is it alleviates stress and anxiety. It tells your brain—“Hey, it’s all good. We have this covered, we’ve already written it down. You can take the night off.” You already know what you’re going to be doing tomorrow.

Some people, for whatever reason, think that you can wake up and plan your day after you wake up. Well it’s too late, you’ve already lost the battle. You have to end your day, literally before you go to bed, knowing exactly what tomorrow is going to entail.

Because your subconscious mind is going to start to figure out how we can do this. Write down at least, the most important thing you’re going to do tomorrow and then those ancillary two or three tasks, smaller projects to also complete only after you finish the first one.

But the key is you gotta write this down the day before.

5)   Self control

Finally, the fifth way to become more productive. If you’re using a Mac (I don’t know if they have this on PC) I would strongly recommend downloading an app called SelfControl. It’s free and when you download it, it almost looks like it’s a virus that’s gonna hack your computer because it looks like a skeleton or a poison bottle. But it won’t. Here’s what this thing does.

But basically what this will do is you can tell Self Control which websites you want it block you from during a specific amount of time.

For instance, during your block in the morning where you’re going to do your most important project or work, you would tell Self Control, block access to specific sites—let’s say Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, all the social media sites that are distracting you. And you assign however much time. It might be two hours, you can set it for eight hours, literally as much time as you want and here’s the powerful thing: It’s physically impossible to reset that.

Once you hit the submit button and the countdown timer starts, you can throw your computer out of your, off your roof, it could smash on the ground, you could take it back the Apple Store for them to reboot it, it will still not allow you to access those sites until the timer is up. That is awesome.

The thing is, I recognize that environment is always going to trump willpower. And as dedicated and as disciplined as I try to be, I know that if I have that thought like, “Oh, what is so and so doing on Facebook?”

It’s a drug. And I’m sure you know this too—social media, email, these are all addictive platforms and they’re built like that, so we need to set up our environment to win, which means we have to basically just remove ourselves from that stuff.

It’s the same reason that an alcoholic can’t have alcohol in the house. If you’re addicted to sugar, you can’t have chocolate and pastries lying around. It’s the same thing with this. I’m telling you, if you block off two hours in the morning, use Self Control to shut down those most addictive sites, watch what happens to your productivity.

What I’ve noticed, is that I’ll be working on let’s say, writing something or creating a strategy for something. And all of a sudden after doing it for about half an hour, 40 minutes, I start getting a little bit anxious, like I want a little diversion to just change things up.

So, what I’ll do is I’ll go check Gmail sometimes or I’ll go check Facebook and that’s when things start spiraling out of hand.

The cool thing is with SelfControl, you go to those sites and it says, “Sorry, you can’t access this site.” It’s basically like the internet doesn’t work. You’re forced to go back to work and really focus on that. It’s a really, really good tool to help you stay focused and concentrate on what matters most until you’re done. And when you’re done you can reboot your sites, you can reboot all those different platforms and you’re off to the races.

Recap and conclusion

There we go, those are the five ways to be a more productive entrepreneur. Let me recap those.

1) We focus on one big project at a time and really do our best to only do that one thing. You have to say no to a lot of different opportunities. We talked about this in last week’s solo rant. We talked about the two letter word that will transform your business. If you missed that episode, go back and get it because saying no to almost everything is one of the most important things you can do to move yourself forward without distraction. That’s the first thing.

2) Second is we’re going to break down that project into controllable actions that we have control over. We don’t have control over how much money we make, but we have control over the actions that move us closer to making that money.

3) Number three, we’re going to schedule those actions into 14 day sprints. We’re going to allocate which ones we’re going to work on for the next 14 days, which ones we’re going to work on thereafter and move forward from there.

4) Once we’ve allocated the time in terms of what we’re going to work on over the next 14 days, we’re going to write down the next day’s activities before we go to bed, when we finish the day. We’re going to write down the most important thing and then up to three things to get done during that day.

5) Finally, we’re going to use Self Control which is that app you can download for the Mac which will shut down all those distracting sites.

Those are five really powerful ways to be more productive. Basically, it’s my secret sauce for how I’ve been able to get as much done as I have and I think these will really find you well.

Transcription

Hey guys. It’s Yuri Elkaim here. Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast. Hope your day is going great.

Today, I want to ask you a question. Have you heard about intermittent fasting?

Well, I’m sure you have. And honestly, intermittent fasting has been a buzzword for the past several years at least, and there’s a reason for that. There’s a number of people who have become really well known for talking about intermittent fasting—what it does to the body and health and all this great stuff.

But there was one man, really, who started it all (at least I think so). His name is Brad Pilon and he is our guest in today’s show.

Now, I’ve known Brad for a long time. We’re part of the same masterminds. We’ve known each other for years. We’ve traveled together with our families.

We’re good buddies, and he’s one of the original gangsters. He actually had his business going online before I even came online, and his book Eat, Stop, Eat has really become a bible for intermittent fasting. It was one of the first resources that I ever came across online.

I ended up buying it because it’s such a great book, but it’s been such a staple in the health and nutrition industry when it comes to fat loss and changing people’s perspectives with respect to meal frequency and so forth.

In this discussion, we’re going to talk about some of the challenges that Brad had getting a new concept like intermittent fasting to the market at a time where people thought that starvation was a bad thing, and how he kind of overcame that.

He’s also going to talk about his other company, which became the most successful product on ClickBank for three years—and ClickBank is a digital marketplace for selling information, products, and supplements. When I say top of ClickBank, I’m talking monstrous numbers, and Brad will share exactly what those numbers are in this interview.

So if you’re wondering what is possible in building an online business … If you have a book, a product, a self-published book, a course—what is possible in terms of volume and numbers? Just listen to what Brad is about to say in a few minutes.

Brad is very humble—I think—but his self-disclosed bio is author of Eat Stop Eat. That’s pretty much all he has for his bio, so that’s all I have to say about that.

But basically he’s used his online businesses to create an untroubled life where he’s free to do the things that he wants when he wants, and that’s really what matters to him most. So if you want to learn more about what he’s up to, you can head over to EatStopEat.com.

And without any further ado, let’s bring Brad onto the show and have some fun.

Mr. Brad Pilon, welcome to the show. How’s it going, buddy?

 

Brad:    It is going great. How are you doing?

Yuri:    I’m doing well. It’s always great to connect with you and hang out. We’ve known each other for a long time, we’re very fortunate to be part of our own private mastermind called the Baconators that we started years ago.

We’ve traveled with our families together and done a lot of cool stuff. Most recently fired some rifles and machine guns, which was pretty cool.

Brad:    Yeah. We’ve done some cool stuff. For sure.

Yuri:    That was pretty good. So what’s new and exciting these days in the world of Mr.Pilon?

The Eat, Stop, Eat journey

Brad:    It’s basically a lot of the same. It’s been that Eat Stop Eat business since 2006.

But the amazing thing about online is you have access to the entire world, so every day to millions of people you’re brand new and a brand new business, so you can constantly if not reinvent yourself, reinvent your business.

So we’ve been sort of actively working on that with Eat Stop Eat right now—reinventing it a bit and making sure we see it through the eyes of the newest customer, the newest potential customer. And trying to figure out exactly what it is they’re seeing as opposed to what I’m seeing as someone who’s looked at the exact same bloody thing for 10 years now.

Yuri:   Well, I love how you responded with pretty much the same thing, because that really should be the response, I believe. Right?

Brad:   Oh yeah.

Yuri:   It’s not like, “Hey, I’m jumping on this new thing tomorrow.” You’ve committed. Since I’ve known you, you’ve had Eat Stop Eats, and you’ve just been a dog on a bone with that thing and that’s pretty awesome, so great job.

Brad:   That’s the beauty of self-publishing; in a traditional publishing model, you’ve got three to four months of fame and then they move on to the next big thing whereas when you’re publishing yourself, as long as you’re willing to blatantly self promote yourself, you’ll stay relevant, so that’s what it is.

It’s constantly finding ways to stay relevant in a way that’s actually relevant to your business, and that’s all it is every day.

Yuri:    You talked about the new potential customer for this program, so just for all of our listeners, Eat Stop Eat is basically the bible for intermittent fasting as far as I’m concerned. 

Brad:    Yeah. 2006 was when Eat Stop Eat first came out. It was sort of in the era of the eight meals a day dogma, so you were breaking every rule in the book if you weren’t eating eight meals a day.

 Yuri:    Hold on. We’re not supposed to eat eight meals a day?

 Brad:   I know, right? I have like twenty. No. I came out with Eat Stop Eat and that sort of changed everything.

It was an uphill battle because at first you were a crazy. But, well, it caught on. And that drastically changes how the average consumer now views fasting and thus now views Eat Stop Eat. So you’ve always got to make sure you’re viewing what you’re saying through the user’s eyes or their lens, and that’s what I’ve been focusing on these last couple months.

Yuri:    Well, you were kind of the Copernicus, right? You were saying, “Hey, listen. The earth is not the center of the solar system,” and now it’s just accepted.

Intermittent fasting is everyone’s buzzword. Everyone’s using it. Everyone’s talking about it, and you were definitely one of the first guys to really own that space.

With Eat Stop Eat, what’s been that journey? What does that journey look like? The ups and downs, the good and bad that maybe a lot of people don’t know about?

 Brad:   A lot of it is, again, getting into the mindset of when people hear about it. Because you know that when people hear about it, the very first thing that’s going to come across their head for 90% of the population is “That’s got to be bad for you.” Right?

If it’s got to be bad for you, your job is to convince them that it’s not bad for you. In fact, it’s worth investing a couple bucks into reading a book about it. That’s all I’m asking them to do. I’m just saying, “It’s least worth your time to learn more about this topic,” right?

It’s actually a really interesting lesson. Something I’ve never understood is the people who are always like, “Ignore the haters.” I’m like—they’re a valuable resource. You can’t let them emotionally hurt you, but you’ve got to read what they’re saying and then read in between the lines, because they’re responding that way for a reason.

Whether they’re just trolling or whether it’s an emotional response to what you’re saying. And then you have to accept that you can be completely right, but the way you’re saying it or the words you chose to use isn’t getting your message across the way you wanted to get it across.

It’s just hammering away at that. Now, the people who buy your book and love your book, they’re a great source of ego and they keep you going, but they’re not a lot of help to figure out how to reach the other 98% of the people who hate your page that day, right?

What you want to do is focus on the people who send you the mail that makes your blood boil, because there’s no civility, no manners, they’re just spewing words out. But you don’t know what’s going on in their life, right? They had a bad day at work and then they got rear ended on the way home. They got home and their house is a mess and then they get an email from me and they’re just like, “I am going to destroy this guy.”

The people who you can imagine slamming the keys as they’re typing? They’re the ones giving you the most raw feedback, so you can’t take it personally. Realize that they’re not the adversary, you’re looking for the hints in what they’re saying.

It tells you, “Okay, yeah. If I change these couple words, the push to buy the book is just as effective, but now maybe someone like this would be curious. Or maybe I just address this one issue before this big push here and that would get rid of this person’s main complaint.” It’s learning to adjust to what the customer is seeing as the main negatives of your product and then cutting them off at the pass.

Yuri:    Well, I think what’s worked well, again, from an outsider’s perspective—I think A) the title is very easy to understand. Eat, Stop, Eat.

Brad:  It’s the whole point of the book!

Yuri:    It’s very intuitive. You kind of like, “Okay, cool. I can kind of grasp what that looks like and maybe let’s go a little bit deeper.” But also, at least the new version of the sales page is it’s basically just like, “Don’t change anything. Just try this once a week.” Right?

It’s not a huge overhaul of someone’s lifestyle, which I think is really attractive once people kind of come to grasps with no food for a day or so, right?

Brad:   Right, yeah. You’re looking at your target demographic and who’s interested in reading your book because I’m just looking for a reader here, right? My target market is anybody who’s willing to buy an online book, so I just want them to read.

I’m not asking them or telling them they have to change their life. I’m saying, “This might be something you want to implement on top of whatever you’re already doing.”

That takes a lot of the stress away. There’s people who are like, “I don’t want to change everything I’m doing.” I’m like, “Oh, you don’t have to. Just read this and maybe this is something you can do on top of it.” That tends to cast a very broad net that you can draw from.

The Venus story

Yuri:     Now, you’re also one of the co-owners of one of the most successful online digital programs called Venus. Is it Venus Index or Venus Factor?

Brad:   Venus Index, Venus Factor, Venus Something.

Yuri:   You just own the planet Venus and all its derivatives.

Brad:  Yeah, we just bought the planet and then we just sort of marketed that, yeah. It’s great.

Yuri:   So you were doing Eat Stop Eat, and then talk to me about how this opportunity came up.

You obviously joined forces with a couple other really smart dudes, and then you guys became the most successful product on ClickBank for what, almost three years?

Brad:   Yeah. It was a good run. It was about three years of Venus being number one.

It’s a long story. It starts with John Barban and I, and John’s been a business partner of mine forever and we had a heated argument at a coffee shop about why people work out—whether it was for strength or for muscle … And then finally we realized most people get started just to look good.

Most. I know there’s some people out there who do it for health reasons and good for them, but most of us, they’re like, “I just want to look better,” right? And then we realized there was no real metric for that, so we started working away at equations and we basically did physiology meets art history and art theory and came up with these equations for how to build a good looking body, right?

It started off as the Adonis Index, and that was really easy because it’s no problem telling guys how to shape their bodies, right? There’s no real stress there.

The big push was doing it for women, and I’m like, “Oh, dude, we’re going to be two guys telling women how to make their bodies look. This could be horrible.” Until John pointed out, he was like, “Well, actually if you look at what we’re doing, instead of saying the answer is thinner, no matter what, just keep getting thinner—we’re giving cut offs of no, you only have to get to about here and then you don’t diet anymore.”

And part of the measurements is that you need muscle mass. He’s like, “So it is a good message.”

I’m like, “Oh God, okay. All right, let’s do it.” Right? That sort of feeling like, “This could go horribly.”

But it started to work, and then after a bit, we got introduced to a guy named Brad Howard, and Brad came on board and was like, “Okay, the idea’s good, but the implementation is kind of horrible.”

Brad jumped on board and we were working sort of three of us now on it. Then Barban ended up meeting a guy named Kyle who does the advertising, and Kyle basically looked at it and was like, “Yeah, the idea is good, but you’re the world’s worst marketers.”

We’re like, “That is actually a true statement. That’s cool.”

So then he came on board and did the advertising. We kind of ended up being a four headed monster of advertising, tech, affiliate communications and then product development, product support that just sort of turned out to work.

Yuri:   Yeah, it’s a very unique situation because you guys are kind of a perfect storm of really complementary skillsets.

Just so our listeners have some perspective as to what’s possible—you don’t have to name any numbers—but where were you guys when you started and where did you guys get to when you were at the top of ClickBank? Just so people understand what’s possible with a great program online.

Brad:  Oh, yeah. When you’re the top one, two, three of ClickBank, you’re looking at thousands of sales a day. Not hundreds. Thousands.

Depending on the amount of money you’re making per customer acquisition, you can just multiply that out. If a product’s averaging on the ClickBank marketplace at $40 a customer, and you’re making thousands of sales a day, you can imagine it gets pretty extreme.

So that leads to some interesting issues when you have four very headstrong guys with giant egos who always, always, always think they’re right. You really have to learn how to manage the conflict and the ideas and which direction the company can go.

Flexibility and scaling

The biggest learning experience was that, plus it takes 10 years to be an overnight success. I love that statement, but there are periods of time in that 10 years where all of a sudden things do that mythical 5X, 10X in a week or a month type of thing, and if you don’t know how to scale and if you’re not ready to scale, it’s disastrous.

And the only thing worse than that disaster—because at least with that disaster there’s money coming in—is when that traffic cuts in half, how do you descale?

That’s a big issue, so your business always has to be extremely flexible. No matter how big it is, you need to be able to move and change with times.

 Yuri:   What was the inflection point? For you, what was the hockey stick moments where you said, “Holy shit, overnight”?

Was there something you guys changed with the marketing side of things or the advertising or was it something else?

Brad:  I would go perfect storm. We’ve got a very, very robust stats department now, but back then it was basically four guys plus a couple coders staring at whatever analytics you got off of ClickBank, trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

So it was really hard to tell what the exact inflection point was, because at the same time as we’re testing the front and video sales page—which is obviously a massive part of it—we’re testing the pricing and the upsell flow, which is also a massive part of it, right?

So all of that just combined. I guess it was basically a bunch of wheels going and all of a sudden, they kind of clicked, like a one armed bandit. All of sudden, it’s just all cherries across. It was that kind of feeling where you’re like, “Whoa.”

And then the problem is—okay, so it’s working. Something made it work. We want to test and make it work better, but we don’t want to mess it up, and it’s all of a sudden that feeling of “Oh, okay. We don’t know.”

And each one of us has a different opinion of what’s making it work, so you’re like, “Hey, we’ve got to just be systematic here and start workin’ our way through what we think is working, what’s not working.”

And the hard part is, you can ask a customer, “Hey, what do you like about the book?” And they’ll be like, “I like the way it was written. I like the font. I like the color. I like the message.”

Yuri:  All valuable information. [laughing]

Brad:    But you can be like, “Hey, what made you buy?” And the minute you ask that, you bias it by their own cognitive biases of what they think made them buy. So they’re not a valuable resource there, right?

It’s not really useful to have a one on one conversation with a customer and be like, “What was it that made you buy? What was it in my upsell flow that made you take a bunch of stuff at 11 at night when you’re sitting around the computer?”

So you just have to go with whatever stats you have and start feeling it out. But the problem is when you get to the point where you have excessively detailed knowledge about any phenomena, it just leaves you with massive amounts of anxiety because you don’t know which data is important and which data isn’t.

There can be really important data and then there can be a bunch of data that just is noise, and it’s really hard to tease out which is which.

Yuri:   That’s interesting. That’s a good distinction. I remember last time we were in Toronto, you were saying something to the effect of … You really get to see the best and worst of people when you have no money and when you have a lot of money.

Brad:   Exactly.

Yuri:   Can you talk a little bit about that?

Brad:  Yeah, well I like to say that if you’re going to have a business and you’re going to have any partnerships—I’m not talking about partners as in you and your buddy, you’re both going to be shareholders—I mean any partnerships, whether it’s with coders or what have you.

Any partnerships. Anywhere where there’s your spending money and that money might be variable. You have to sit and look, “Is this fair when the company’s making $500 a month and is it fair if the company’s making 50 million dollars?”

You really have to think your way through. “Is this agreement fair here? Is it fair there? Is it okay?”

“These prices look great because I only have 3,000 customers in my list now. What if my list all of a sudden hits 300,000?”

“I’m looking at the way you’ve marked this up and you would be a significant portion of my monthly expenses just because of the way you’ve done your whole exponential increase. So we’ve got to negotiate this now.”

It’s kind of like a pipe dream to most people that you’re ever going to get to that level, but on the odd chance you do, well what happens? You don’t want to be taken advantage of.

Along the same lines, if everything’s going awesome and you hire some people to do some great work for you and you’re making unbelievable amounts of money—you’re being generous and you’re giving them good money and then all of a sudden, things get tight. And you’re looking and going, “My company’s going to sink if you keep getting paid the amount of money you’re getting paid for what you’re doing now. Even though that money was meant to be what you used to be doing six months ago when the volume was high.”

You have to always look at things from both sides because the fear of loss is massive, and people will fight you tooth and nail. You’re never going to go to an employee or a contract worker and be like, “Hey, you know what? You’re doing a great job and I understand the call volume is really high, so you know, give yourself an extra 100 dollars a month on this contract.”

No one’s going to be like, “No, nah, it’s cool. Don’t worry about it.” But if you’re like, “Look, I gave you a raise in your rates eight months ago back when you were fielding 2,000 calls a day, but you’re down to 100 calls a day, and I just can’t pay you that much. I’m going to have to scale it back,” people would be like “No, that’s not fair.” Right?

You’re like, “Well, it’s fair because the other option is I have to let you go.” So you need to build in flexibility. The way things are online, you need to always think like a small business. Right?

You’ve got to think that the traffic can go away.

Your number one affiliate, who’s been giving you 300 sales a day and you’ve got this great relationship and you bunched up his take a bit—and then one day he tests something new that I put out and he’s making 10 cents more per customer than with me, and all of a sudden, he’s gone.

Gone. You’re like, “Well, 300 sales just disappeared. Okay, why?”

He’s like, “I’m sorry. I’m just making more money on this offer.”

You’re like, “Okay, well that changes my entire business plan.”

Or you’re cruising along on Facebook—and this is one of my favorite ones and Facebook loves you and you’ve got a rep and your rep’s telling you how great you are and all your ads are approved and your rep is helping you tweak your ads in the name of the best interest of Facebook, and then boom, they shut you down.

You’re like, “Wait, but … Your rep told me to do that.” It’s like they’re all of a sudden this spiteful ex-girlfriend or boyfriend.

You’re like, “But you’re not even returning my calls. You just literally took my last invoice from me. I paid it, and you shut everything off. But I was ramping up my business. I actually spent ten thousand extra dollars this month because of the success we were having and the way you were leading me to believe everything was good. I actually hired people to handle a Facebook advertising division of my company, and then you just shut us down with no reasoning.”

You’re not going to win that fight.

Facebook’s one of the largest companies in the world. They don’t care, right? They’re not that interested in getting back to you in a timely fashion or helping you out. You’ve got to be prepared for that.

A great example for me was, I was Twitter contacted. So they contacted me, all right? They’re like, “Hey, you should really try our advertising platform.”

I’m like, “Guys, I’m not interested in advertising, but I like Twitter, so sure, I’ll try it out.”

I was working with a Twitter rep, the guy who called me. He was like, “Well, what do you think?” I’m like, “Well, let’s just try these couple tweets that I did that got re-shared a lot. Let’s just put some money into them.”

And it worked. I’m like, “Ah, it’s cool. Let’s add an image.” That worked.

I’m like, “Alright, well let’s spice it up a bit and talk about weight loss,” and that worked. Everything was going really well, and I’m working directly with Twitter—who were the people who actually called me and gave me $500 to get started—and then I woke up one day and it was shut down.

That was maybe two years ago, so every three months, I email Twitter. I’m like, “Guys, I know my account was suspended. I understand that somewhere I broke your terms of policy use or whatever and I apologize, even though I was working with a Twitter rep setting this all up. But all I’m asking you for is I just want the ability to promote tweets again. I don’t want an advertising campaign. I just want to hit that promote tweet button and just promote the tweet that’s already out there.”

Every time I send that message, two days later they send me back an automated message conforming that I am correct, that I was not allowed to advertise because of what happened previously.

I’m like, “I know.”

Yuri:   You’re banned for life. [laughing]

 Brad:   Yeah. I’m like, “But the learning curve was literally you contacting me, getting me to spend some money, and it’s almost like I hit some threshold.”

They’re like, “Yeah, that was about $10,000. That’s good. Cut him off.”

 Yuri:  Sure.

Brad:   Right? As a business, you’ve got to be ready for that, because one of two things could’ve happened there. That didn’t happen and that ad, all of a sudden I woke up and I’m like, “Holy crap, we just did 3,000 sales today.”

Or “Holy crap, all my sales just went away.” You’ve got to be prepared for both at all times. It’s a perplexing situation to be in, but it’s the nature of the online beast.

Yuri:  Sure. Knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently if you started all over again knowing the peaks and troughs that may happen with this type of business?

Brad:  With advertising, no. Because until we get to the point where the Facebooks and Googles and Twitters of the world, when they approve an ad, it’s somehow binding.

Like it’s basically approved for three months as long you don’t change anything, this ad is allowed. Then in three months, we have the right to review. Until that changes, advertising will always be this wild, wild west where they turn you on or off depending on thousands of factors.

But I myself, I would make sure that I’m never relying on any one mode of getting customers because blogging was big, and then went away, and now it’s useful again. Twitter is big and it’s kind of full of hate and more hate now, but still useful.

So make sure that you’re at least working with a couple different types of platforms to reach people, but work with the ones you naturally enjoy. I don’t really like being in front video. YouTube just never felt overly natural to me, so I don’t really do it.

But as much as I dislike Twitter for what they did with the advertising account, I like their platform as a way to communicate with people. I like the challenge of actually making some sort of sense in a 140 characters.

I do like blogging, so I do that every once in a while, but my favorite one is email. So I stick to email, but I make sure that I don’t abuse email. If email’s my number one way to communicate with my customers, I try really hard not to infuriate my customers with what I put in their inbox.

Using email effectively

Yuri:   Let’s talk about email for a second because we haven’t talked a lot about email in the show yet. People think that email is dead or they don’t want to email too much or they’re emailing their list once a month because they don’t want to piss people off. They’re so worried about unsubscribes.

What advice do you give to somebody who is in the space—you’re sitting down in Starbucks, you’re having one of your special Smarties cookies or whatever the flavor of the day is—what advice would you give them when it comes to email marketing? To do things that are profitable but obviously on the cool side of things too?

Brad:  Okay, simple. Email is ridiculously simple and I think people fret over it too much.

Write an email that you would want to read. Right? It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell a product or not, right?

Maintain a level of civility in your writings, so be polite to the person reading that email. Treat them the way you would want to be treated and tell them something cool. If you’re selling them your best friend’s product, you don’t have to hide—people know now. Right?

A lot of emails are like commercials, right? A commercial is meant to sell people stuff. That’s the whole point of a commercial is brand awareness and making a customer buy something. Yet every Super Bowl, the entirety of North America is pumped to watch Super Bowl commercials because they’re the commercials we want to see, right? We’re actually excited to see them.

Your emails are exactly that. Let’s be honest. Most of your emails are commercials. Even your content emails that have no links in them whatsoever are branding to make sure that people get you and get your philosophies and get what you’re trying to do.

Your emails with links in them are more direct. They’re a commercial. You literally want them to click that link to help you make money, right?

They’re commercials, but commercials don’t have to suck.

There’s tons of really, really good commercials, so just have some civility and some manners. Make sure that you’re not just being an ass on email.

Then write an email that you would actually want to read. And then send that email. And people will read it and like it and eventually you’ll be sending promotional emails and people will be enjoying them because you’re giving them the one thing no one else is giving them, which is good, well-written promotional emails.

Yuri:   Sure. That makes sense. What type of frequency would you recommend? Does it really depend on the business, or does it matter at all?

Brad:  I think it depends on the business and what your people are expecting from you.

So I send two to three times during the week, once on weekends. I find that’s kind of enough. It’s mostly because I don’t want to write an email on Monday.

Most of my emails are broadcasts, they’re not pre-designed followups that I wrote five years ago or anything like that, so a lot of it is me just sitting down with my morning coffee and writing to people.

If I were doing some sort of intense three week program, then I would probably be emailing people once, maybe even twice a day. But if you’re just trying to keep people interested in what you’re doing and what you’re thinking, I think that a couple times is enough.

It’s hard because we don’t really email personally as much as we did, but think of texts. Everybody’s probably got that one friend who if they didn’t get a text from all week, you’d kind of wonder what’s up. But then you’ve got that one buddy who, if they text you five or six times in a day, you’re not reading them all.

So you’ve just got to find whatever that balance is based on what it is you’re talking about. If someone is going through something, something in their lives, whether it’s emotional or awesome, you’re going to expect more texts, right?

If nothing much is going on, they’re just sending you a “hey, Yuri, what’s shakin’?” text, then you might expect that once a week, so you can flow and ebb with it depending on what you’re talking about.

You just have to think of it like natural communication.

If you were to text me, and let’s say you wanted to go out for dinner on Friday and you know that I’m notoriously horrible at responding to texts, leaving my house, going out for dinner, that kind of thing … You know you’re going to probably text me to invite me, then you’re going to text me and be like, “Pilon, look, come on, let’s do this.” Then you’ll be like, “ARE YOU COMING?”

Yuri:   “Are you alive?”

Brad:   Right?

 Yuri:  Yeah.

 Brad:   Because if you’re just sending me a text being like “Hey man, what’s shaking?” You just have to send the one.

So it can vary. It can ebb and flow depending on what you’re telling your customers and the people on your email list, what you’re talking about, that sort of thing.

Yuri:   Cool.

Brad:   Don’t get too stuck in some sort of optimal pattern because it changes.

 Yuri:  Yeah, that’s good advice because I don’t know if there’s a one size fits all for every business, right? Everyone has their own personality, their own philosophy of how they want to run things.

So I think it’s great advice, what you said. Write an email that you would want to read, which I think as a fundamental principle is a really, really good piece of advice for anyone to follow, whether you’re sending daily or whatever it is.

Brad:  And your product will dictate. So if your product, whatever you’re selling them, if it’s an urgency based product, if the copy they got from the buy was all about the urgency, if the product itself is all about speed … So let’s just go with a two week diet or something like that.

If I’m buying Yuri’s two week diet and I get an email from you on day one and an email from you on day 14, that sucks. Right?

Because I wanted you helping me. Obviously if I’m a two week diet, I’m probably getting ready for a wedding that’s in two weeks plus a day. I want your help the entire way.

I want the morning email and I want the night time email and I want you to tell me exactly what I should be doing and how I should be keeping on track and all that kind of crap. If I bought Eat Stop Eat, which is a book about fasting once or twice a week, then I don’t know, maybe an email once or twice a week makes sense.

Yuri:   Read, Stop, Read.

Brad:   Exactly.

Yuri:   There you go.

Brad:  I like it.

Rapid Five Questions

Yuri:   All right, Brad. This has been awesome, buddy. Are you ready for the famous Rapid Five?

Brad:   I am more than ready.

Yuri:  All right. Here we go. You have no idea what these questions are. Whatever comes to mind, just blurt them out.

Brad:  Got you.

Yuri:   Your biggest weakness.

Brad:  I’ve got a really healthy ego and I like to be right.

Yuri:    Your biggest strength.

Brad:  I’m not afraid to admit when I don’t know and I’m open to the idea that I could be wrong.

Yuri:  Cool, and biceps probably as well?

Brad:   Yeah. They’re pretty good too.

Yuri:   They’re good. Okay, number three. One skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business.

Brad:    Oh, the openness of email communication—just writing like I’m writing to a friend.

Yuri:   Nice. What do you do first thing in the morning?

Brad:  Coffee.

Yuri:    Complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when.

Brad:   My stress levels are low. I find stress and success are very strongly correlated.

Yuri:  I’ve got one more bonus question for you actually. This is outside of the rapid five, but I know you’ve got two young kids, and what has having kids taught you about marketing or business?

Brad:   Family and friends is more important than success and money.

Yuri:    Very nice. Awesome. Well, there you have it, guys. The man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Brad Pilon. What is the best place for people to check out Eat Stop Eat or stay up with your shenanigans online?

Brad:  Alright guys, on Twitter I am @Bradpilon. You get my witty, witty musings on there.

On Instagram, I am Brad Pilon, and you get pictures of random inanimate objects, typically books on there.

My blog is Brad Pilon.com. You’re going to see a trend going on. And you get more properly thought out ideas, but just as many grammatical errors. Then finally, EatStopEat.com is where you got to check out Eat Stop Eat.

Yuri:   Awesome. It’s very smart too, you know exactly what is happening on each platform.

Brad:   Exactly.

 Yuri:  That’s very smart.

 Brad:   Keep them separated.

 Yuri:   Awesome, man. Brad, this has been a lot of fun, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me. As always, it’s great to connect and reconnect and just thanks for all the amazing work you’ve done. It’s really inspiring, and I know our listeners will get a lot of value out of this episode, so thank you.

 Brad:   Thank you. I really appreciate that.

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Yuri’s notes from the conversation after the conversation

Funny story, so just after Brad and I finished our recorded conversation, we actually started talking for another half an hour about life and what’s going on and all this new stuff, and it was so funny because I’m like, “I should’ve kept the record button pressed.”

Because there was so much more value that was extracted from what we were talking about, and I just wanted to share one of the insights that I got from our conversation after the conversation. Both Brad and I have been online for 12 years plus, and we’ve recognized that sometimes you have to go and do things that you think you need to do … to realize that ultimately that’s not what really matters.

And by that I mean we both started out by building big teams and all this kind of stuff, and we got to the point we’re like, “What exactly are we doing here?” Anyway, I’m going to save all the thoughts about staying lean and nimble for another solo round, and this is again another reminder to get around people like myself, like Brad, like other guests we have on the show here.

When you get around people like this at events, in coaching groups, in masterminds, is you’re able to have these conversations. You’re able to have these candid discussions over a drink where you’re just kind of chilling out by the bar for an hour or two or having dinner together and you’re able to tap into this wealth of wisdom of people who have gone down the path, who can give you these nuggets of “Hey, this is something I realized.”

That’s what I’m trying to do my best of with this podcast to really bring to you, but it really never replaces in person interaction. That’s really where the magic happens.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that with you because there are so many cool things that we got, obviously during the interview, but also in our conversation afterwards. And I just thought I’d share some of that stuff with you, which is again—the power of the journey.

There’s a lot of value in staying in this for the long run because you’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to meet a lot of people. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to get to what you think is success and then ask yourself, “What am I doing? Why am I even doing this?” Then almost going back to the drawing board and saying, “Hey, if I were to start everything from scratch, what would be different this time around?”

So a lot of this wisdom comes from just being in the trenches for a long period of time and yes, you can expedite that process by getting a coach, by getting a mentor. Those are very, very valuable, and those can help you accelerate this process, but you still have to go through the journey, right?

There’s no magic pill, as we’ve talked about before.

Anyway, just wanted to share that with you because I thought that was rather interesting.

——————————————————————

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Transcription

Today’s episode is going to be a lot of fun because we’re speaking with someone who is a digital nomad. He really lives nowhere. He travels all over and he runs his online fitness company from anywhere he has a wi-fi connection.

In this interview, he’s going to share how he does live workshops all around the world to get in front of the right people, build relationships with them, and really impact their lives in a way that’s much more impactful than just trying to make a quick buck.

Mario Tomic is today’s guest.  He is a certified physique coach, public speaker, digital entrepreneur, and world traveler. He’s been traveling for the last five years moving from country to country, on average, every three months while running his online business.

His coaching company helps entrepreneurs, consultants and executives reclaim their fitness and get in the best shape of their life. His specialty is being able to bridge the gap between complex exercise and nutrition research, and behavior change psychology.

In this interview, Mario is going to share some of the things he learned from his days running the digital marketing side of some big companies and how that’s translated into helping him grow his business.

If you want to learn more about what he is up to, you can check out his website, tomic dot com, or you can just follow him on Facebook which is what he prefers, at Mario Tomic Official (facebook.com/MarioTomicOfficial/) on Facebook

And with that said let’s get into today’s show.

Hey Mario, how’s it going my friend. Welcome to the show.

 

[Mario] Hey Yuri. Thanks for inviting me. I love it here in Toronto.

[Yuri] It’s a cool city.  In a little while it’ll be cold and a lot of snow which is not as much fun. But for now, it’s great.

I know you’re like the International Man of Mystery and you love traveling. You’re on a mission to travel to a ton of countries, do live events, workshops ,and other great things.

Business wise, what are you what are you most excited about nowadays?

[Mario] Business wise, what really excites me is to be able to travel to 100 countries and do live events.  In every one of those countries, I get 200 plus people in a room, and everybody is super excited about fitness, nutrition, and they want to take it the next level.

We’re sharing a ton of value, and we’re having a ton of fun.  It’s a feeling I cannot describe to you how awesome it is.

We were recently in Bulgaria and Romania, places that I don’t really consider to be the top places where people even know about me.  We organized an event and then we suddenly have 150 people in the room and they just love it. It’s crazy.

It’s exciting to go to countries where you don’t think you have following, and seeing how the message of health and fitness is spreading around every corner of the world.

Spreading that awareness and seeing how many people are really interested in this is what really excites me.

[Yuri] Let’s back up for a second.  You’ve traveled to all these countries and you’ve done all these live events with 100, 150, 200 people, how are you getting that many people in a room?

Insights from Mario’s digital marketing background

[Mario] That would be because of my background in marketing.  Before I got into this, I used to do marketing and a lot of online advertising for large corporations.

Through that experience, I have strategies for Facebook ads, Google ads and forums.

It’s mainly based on Facebook ads which has such a big audience. You need to know your copy, know who you’re targeting, and have a decent following in a country.

One thing that also helps other than ads is having strong word of mouth and connecting with influencers in that city.

You also want to reach out to groups that are into personal development, or groups that are into fitness and nutrition and you would be surprised how many people are there, especially if you have a following, which in my case, is YouTube.

If you reach out to someone who has a smaller channel in some of those countries, they will be eager to meet up, and from there email, and organize something together, however, only invite them as a guest speaker.  People are super excited to do that.

I can tell you that not having that limiting belief that there’s nobody out there waiting for you goes a long way.

There’s so many people you can connect with.  There’s a lot of influencers out there that have hundreds of thousands of followers in these countries that nobody even knows about.

Those are some of the strategies that I’ve used.  It’s really a combination of ads and influencer marketing and of course, your own following.

[Yuri] When you’re running Facebook ads to local audiences in Romania who have an interest in health and fitness, are targeting your own fan page or a combination of both? What is this what is the offer?  Do you say hey come join me for this live event because you going to learn X Y Z?

[Mario] I have a rule of my own and that is that I will run events for free. I have free events for now, and that’s basically a part of this world tour.

Take Romania for example. You can do broad targeting on someone who is following Bodybuilding.com for example.  If someone is following Bodybuilding.com and they’re in Bucharest, and they’re local, they’re going to be interested.

You’ve got to have good copy, and make it a massive win for them.  There’s no cost for them.  All they have to do is give their email and phone number to show up for notifications. I’ve found this works really well.

You can create your own audiences for people to follow.  You can do lookalikes.  That works in some countries. For the most part, targeting based on interests has worked well for me.

If you know your core audience really well, you know what they’re interested in, you can get a huge turnout using targeted ads.

It’s all about knowing your core audience, and knowing what they’re interested in.

My niche is a combination of people that are interested in personal development and growth, plus health and fitness.  They also tend to be entrepreneurial, and speak English. They’re interested in specific books, blogs, and websites so I can target that and gather an audience.

It is a niche audience, but if you’re targeting outside of the US, Canada, and the UK, I’ve found that ads in other countries are not as pricey, so the competition is not as it’s not as high, and you can get a massive list really fast in about a month.

[Yuri] You’re spending money on ads. They’re showing up for free. Is there a monetization strategy?  Is there a back end when someone shows up at the event that they’re going to be offered something else? How does it look?

[Mario] One thing that I do mention at every event is that I offer mentoring slash coaching.  If I had other offers, I would present them.

I generally do mention coaching and people eventually become your fans. It’s kind of like creating your own tribe around the world.

The main focus I have for this is not to monetize immediately.  It has been my experience that people will eventually they just reach out to you and they’re like “hey I met you at an event four months ago. Let’s start working together. I’ve been really following your stuff and I think you can help me.”

If you’re interested in short term monetization, it doesn’t work as well.

If I were to charge let’s say$40 for those events, I don’t think I would get it nearly as many people in the room.  This way, when you see a massive crowd of people, it makes an impact.

Almost 10 percent of the people at every event that I’ve done, have reached out to me and are interested in what I have to offer.

Even the countries you would think there’s no way people can afford it, people make it work.

People become resourceful when they see you’re out to help them, that your offer is of high value, and you can deliver the outcomes you promised.

A lot of entrepreneurs think short term. I’m in the long-term game.  A lot of these people reach out months later and that works really well.

Also, the cost of the venue isn’t a whole lot.  There’s a big myth that the venue costs a lot which is definitely not the case.

[Yuri] It’s great to see you’re taking the long game because typically, especially with live events, we’re looking to make money, and it’s obviously a very compelling environment for which people will convert to potential clients or customers as opposed to seeing a random video on Facebook or stuff like that.

As you said, you’re building a lot of goodwill, building that long game, and it’s working well for you.

Just so that everyone listening knows, you’re dealing mostly with high performers, entrepreneurs, consults and so forth, and helping them on the fitness and health side, and you’re primarily coaching them virtually. Is that correct?

[Mario] Most of my clients are into the personal growth space. They’re digital entrepreneurs. Usually there is some form of nomad lifestyle involved, a lot of travel, professional poker players, you know generally business oriented.

I work only with men, so we’re talking about a specific niche of self-made men in their 30’s, sometimes late 20s and early 40s, but mainly in their 30s.

Guys who’ve been crushing it in everything else and now it’s time to get the fitness side of things handled.  The coaching is online and works well for this type of client.

[Yuri] Why did you start doing this?  What was the calling? Was there a pivotal moment that said this is the type of business I want to run.?

Mario’s “calling”

[Mario] There’s been there’s a lot of testing. There’s always a lot of failures. You try out different things.

I learned a lot from product launches when I used to be a marketing consultant for a larger company. You would do these digital products and 50 percent of people never opened that product at all. They don’t even register for the web site and they paid hundreds of dollars for it.

This also happens to be a huge problem with low ticket products.

Another thing that inspired me is that I’ve seen how much noise there is out there, especially if you’re part of the low-ticket game.

People don’t really take your offer serious enough to put it into their lifestyle, try it out and give it enough will and action to make it work.

I found coaching to be extremely effective for that because you have another human being on the other side.  In my opinion, there’s nothing digitally right now that can hold someone’s attention, or focus better than a human being.

You can have the most engaging videos, the most engaging course out there in the world. Nothing keeps a person’s attention like another human being on the other side.  It’s someone who’s there for you.

There’s a whole boatload of research out there on peer support and community based coaching and what will create lasting change, and it just won’t happen through information for most people.

I’m not saying that it can’t work.  For most people that small offer product is going to be more of a stepping stone and maybe for some, it’s going to that last missing piece of the puzzle and they naturally get really good results.

I would say that a lot of people reach out to me because they’ve tried everything and it didn’t work.  They really need someone who’s there for them both as a support, but on the other hand, it is also to customize the programs to be absolutely the best for them.

If you travel, or if you’re a busy person with a crazy lifestyle, sometimes you need to create workout plans within an hour.

At this hotel I’m staying at, you get this message, “Here’s a bunch of stuff that I have available. What can I do here,” and you’ve got to create a workout within an hour.

This is kind of what my company does. To really be there for these types of people. This is what I do and my coaches do, and we’re trained to be available and be supportive.

I think the speed of feedback is important.

[Yuri] Of all the countries you’ve been through, what’s been at the top of the list in terms of this place was amazing?

Life as a digital nomad

[Mario] That’s a tough question. It depends what you’re looking for when you say amazing in terms of nature.  One place that I’ve been to recently that I’m looking forward to getting back to in the next few months is Iceland.

I really enjoyed my time in Iceland because I spend so much time at a computer and I spend so much time in big cities, Iceland feels like you’re on a different planet. That’s a place where I would see myself going back for a few weeks, taking a few friends, and just hang out there.

In terms of nature, by far, Iceland has been just breathtaking for me.

In terms of other things, it depends what you’re looking for. You cannot beat the U.S. U.K. or Australia for business. It’s really difficult unless your business is local, maybe in Scandinavia or somewhere like that.

For me personally, those countries have a good mix of a really awesome market place, and at the same time you have more people to network with who are into the same stuff.

I prefer more to stay in those countries now than other countries in the past.

If you were to have asked me this question a few years ago, I’d be more like “Oh yeah, let’s nomad around Southeast Asia and let’s hang out.”  In those countries you can hang out, but you won’t run into so many people who are into the same stuff.

You’re missing out on that networking aspect which becomes important after a while.  You do want to connect with people that are there living a similar life as you and can learn from. It also makes you feel like you’re less alone, which in this entrepreneurial world, when you’re working really hard, and you’re working with your own team, it sometimes feels like you’re the only person doing this which is a little bit weird.

[Yuri] Well you’ve got two things going on there because (a) you say you’re an entrepreneur and (b) you don’t really have a home base. You’re traveling all over the place. How do you stay connected to others who give you the support and keep you moving forward? How do you do that?

[Mario] That’s interesting and that’s a good question. Looking at the research on basic relationships and dating, if you look at some of the evidence based stuff, it’s enough to send an email to someone say once every two weeks.

People really underestimate how powerful it is to just to hit someone up on Facebook and just ask them how they’re doing.

We’re all living really fast.  If you’re an entrepreneur, if you are connecting with other entrepreneurs, a month will fly by and it’s going to feel like we talked yesterday.

A simple message, text or that simple voice you can do on messenger that’s about a minute long, it’s not that big of a time commitment for you.  It’s just that simple thing that can go a long way.

For them it’s “Hey we’re in touch. We’re still here.”

You want to be interested in what other people are doing. That’s one of the aspects that people forget.

Everyone likes talking about their own stuff, but if you’re interested in what other people are doing, they’ll be there be super eager to share that with you.  People you think who have 10 or 20 times more of a following than you, if you’re cool, if you’re not some weirdo just trying to leach out value, people will be totally fine chatting with you.

Having a podcast for example, that’s a really nice way to connect people.

[Yuri] Having a podcast is great because as you said, because you don’t really have the opportunity to have someone’s attention for 30 minutes online, or in general.

Having a podcast is a great way for us to connect here or for anyone else to connect with anyone else.  It kills a lot of birds with one stone.

[Mario] It’s a really nice one. As I said, small things can go a long way.

Sending something of value to a couple my friends, can go a long way.

We meet up once a year because that’s much as we can do because they’re traveling, and I’m traveling. Sometimes we end up in the same location. We deliberately meet up once a year and that’s the best we can do.

Throughout the year, if I stumble upon an article that says hey here’s this Instagram algorithm breakdown, here’s what works right now, I’m going to hit them up with that and they’ll appreciate that I thought of them and shared with them.

They’ll ask, what are you up to? That kind conversation is going to be five minutes and that’s going to be enough.

It’s almost like a refresher for our relationship and then they can hit me up later and it really doesn’t take that much time or effort.

People think it takes this big effort and a lot of time. You can just build it slowly and it does work. It’s not a big deal.

[Yuri] I agree with you because it’s very tough, even for people who live in the same city. I don’t see half my friends who live in Toronto. I have to travel to another country to hang out with them if we’re at the same event.

What I end up having to do, because I find it’s more effective, I’ll organized a trip once or twice a year with some of my closest friends and we bring our families together.

We know that even if we don’t see each other throughout the year, but we’re in contact throughout the year, we have that one or two weeks together, and it’s just that quality time when you’re creating experiences and memories together.

That is so much more meaningful than occasionally hanging out in person.

[Mario] You want to create some memories and these things are under appreciated.  These surface level contacts on a daily basis are over rated. If you go a little bit deeper it’s amazing.

[Yuri] Mario, you live an interesting life. What is a typical day for you like? What are your rituals, routines?  What does the day look like?

[Mario] That question is a very common one. A lot of people will ask that because as you can imagine, every time you change your environment, some of your habits fall apart, and you have to rebuild that.

Over the years, I’ve realized that if I have too much on my plate, I don’t get things done. If you run around a lot, your routines will just fall apart.

A lot of the anchors for your habits, a lot of the triggers in your environment for a habit are linked to the environment.

Mario’s daily routine and productivity strategies

Let’s say I move from Amsterdam to Toronto. It’s a totally different universe to figure out stuff and it takes about a week to two weeks to build up my habits and build up my routine.

This is why I keep it simple. One thing I realized, is if you don’t know how your day is going to go, at least the night before, that day is probably not going to be very productive.

If you’re waking up that that day and you’re like OK I don’t know what I’m going to do today, that is probably not going to be productive. I’ve realized this and I feel if I just fix this one thing, I’ve resolved 80 percent of the problems. So that’s my 80:20 there.

I’m a logical guy and I get easily overwhelmed.  I try to think over things a billion times.  If I wake up and I’m like oh my God, there’s 10 things, there’s 10 fires, I’ve got a lot of emails, my staff is staying I need to support this, need feedback on that, I would just totally become paralyzed and waste four hours stressing out.

What I do the night before is make sure that I have my one or two big objectives that will get handled for the next day, and if I just handle those two things, I know the day is going to be productive so anything else is a bonus.

That’s the first thing I do is just make sure that I pre-plan and the day.

After I wake up, I try to get some sunshine as soon as possible just to get some quality time in and a quick meditation session.

Just being out in the sun and doing some reading helps a lot.  Get in your water.  Maybe fast for a couple of hours, just an hour or two and then eat breakfast and just continue.

Throughout the time you’re working, you do a work break for about 15 20 minutes to get some food and then you work again.

I try to make each day start with about two to three solid work blocks that have small interruptions every hour, and the big ones every two hours.

I make sure that I have those interruptions otherwise I will just become burnt out very fast.

I found that the break is what keeps me productive throughout the day. A break from writing copy, a break from checking stuff or phone calls. You can get easily burnt out if you do two or three calls in a row. You’re done for the entire. There’s no will power and everything falls apart.

[Yuri] So it’s kind of like an extended Pomodoro method.

[Mario] I find blocking an hour of time to be the perfect amount of time to stay focused. I’ll take a five-minute walk around the house even if I’m on a call try to stay moving so I’m not sitting all day.

During that hour work block, I’ll take at least 10 minutes in between and just go outside, talk to my friends, or do something really relaxing that is completely unrelated to the work.  I come back to work again and tackle it for about an hour. I find that to be very effective.

[Yuri] I find that for me it’s about the same.  It’s about an hour.  I find that the Pomodoro twenty-five minutes or so is too short.  I’m just getting into my groove.

I’m the same way.  I’ll go in my back yard and jump on my kids trampoline for ten minutes, I come back and I’m good to go.

Knowing what you know now based on your journey of building your business, what would you do differently if you started over again?

[Mario] Only one thing and I’m super proud of everything I’ve achieved. The journey was amazing and rewarding and I wouldn’t really exchange any of those mistakes because ultimately, they create leverage which is why I’m here where I am right now.

Thoughts on mentorship

One thing that I would do a little bit earlier would be to seek mentorship on the business side of things. I think for us fitness enthusiasts, and especially for us in the evidence based field, what I noticed is that a lot of us will get lost in reading PubMed research and going over a billion other studies and think, OK’s this protein amount is really one point one point one. What is going on here?

Instead, you need to learn the basics of how to create good funnels, how to reach the clients that you can serve the most, and getting good business mentorship.  You someone who can work on that and give you the support you need, and how to manage a team.

A lot of fitness people, we’re used to doing stuff alone. I mean one of the great things about body building is you can go to the gym and it’s you against you. You don’t need a team, you don’t need anybody.

When you start building a company, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you try to do everything yourself, you’re going to fail. There’s no way you can do it. You will never be successful to a very high level.

For me, that would be one thing is, hire earlier, but first hire proper mentors who will teach you how to manage a team, and then start hiring more team members earlier.  Get people that do the stuff that you’re not good at, but you keep doing it anyway.

You know there’s a ton of things that my assistants are a billion times better at than me, and I was a micro-managing freak for a year until I realized that.  Getting off that micro-managing game is such a stress relief and then you can focus on the stuff you’re really the genius at.

[Yuri] It’s funny because I think everyone who’s been on the podcast has said more or less the same thing that getting a mentor or a coach is the game changer.

Obviously with respect to a team, you need to have people to take stuff off your plate.

Right now, how big of a team do you have to help support your virtual taking over the world mission?

Building and optimizing a remote team

[Mario] Currently we’re five people and I like to keep things small. All five are rock stars. We try to do the work of ten people.  I prefer to work with people that can do multiple things and do them at a very high level, they’re ready, they bought into this vision and they really want to crush it.

That’s the direction I want to go for in the future as well.

I like scale, but I will not scale just for the sake of scale.  I’ll make sure that there is an actual demand for it.

[Yuri] I think it’s easy to fall into that trap.  “Hey, let’s scale the business and get bigger and bigger and bigger”, but then it’s like, for what.  Are we solving world hunger, are we solving a major problem, or is it that we just we just want to have a bigger number.

It’s good to have that perspective.

With respect to team, a lot of people want to know if you have a virtual team, how do you coordinate with your team members?  Are there specific platforms or software you use to communicate and manage projects?  How do you connect with clients and keep them all in one place and accountable?

[Mario] In the past, I used Slack, Base Camp and just about everything else under the sun. Now most of the stuff is done either through Skype with a combination of Evernote, or even just Facebook.

[Yuri] Are you using a group, or sending messages back and forth to your team?

[Mario] For the team, it’s group chats, private messages, and spreadsheets. We use a lot of Google Spreadsheets.  We communicate through comments, we communicate through organizational stuff where you need to look at some data. Spreadsheets are the best.

If I’m looking at my ad targeting in my data over the last seven days, my CPC and all the other stuff, and I’m analyzing to see if my conversions are OK., I’ll use that spreadsheet in there to make comments.  We can create those comment threads and analyze that.

For quick communication, on a daily basis, we have Messenger, which makes things easy.

If there’s a team meeting or anything like that, it’s done via Skype or Zoom.  We rarely need to do a presentation so it’s usually Skype.

[Yuri] It’s interesting to see how people manage their companies and their teams.  We’ve used various software off and on.  We’ve used G-mail and Slack for one off communications, but Google Sheets and Google Docs, for me, has been the game changer.

Okay Mario, are you ready for the Rapid Fire?

Rapid-fire questions

[Mario] Absolutely. Let’s roll.

[Yuri] Here come the five questions that are going to keep you on your toes.

Whatever comes to mind first, just shout it out.

Your biggest weakness.

[Mario] Micromanagement.

[Yuri] Your biggest strength.

[Mario] I’m very independent.

[Yuri] One skill you’ve become dangerously good at in order to grow your business

[Mario] Resourcefulness.

[Yuri] What do you do first thing in the morning?

[Mario] I drink three glasses of water.

[Yuri] Complete this sentence. I know I’m being successful when…

[Mario] I have complete freedom.

[Yuri] I had an inkling that freedom might be one of the top core values. It is for a lot of entrepreneurs

Mario, this has been awesome.  What is the best place for people to stay up to date with you, get in touch with you and follow your work online?

[Mario] If you’re interested in seeing some of my content, YouTube is going to be the best place. I do share a lot of the YouTube stuff. I do share a lot of daily stuff on Instagram.

For some of my more in-depth, philosophical copy or all the things I’ve shared in my business, my Facebook profile is very active.  I share a lot of things there and you can of follow my journey.

I share from a variety of areas of my life.  Some of it relates to business.

[Yuri] For everyone listening, we will link up on the show notes to all those different platforms so you can check out Mario, follow his world travels, and other cool things.

Mario thanks so much for joining us on the show. It’s been a lot of fun and I look forward to connecting with you hopefully soon.

[Mario] I appreciate it. Thank you for the invite and I’m happy to share some value with you.

——————————————————————

A lot of people want to live a nomadic lifestyle where they travel the world and kind of do their thing from anywhere they want. Mario is a great example of someone who’s done that.

If I didn’t have kids, maybe I’d do that a little bit more. But with kids, it’s a little bit more challenging to travel to 100 different countries and do all that kind of stuff.

Honestly, it doesn’t matter what position you’re in if you want to travel. The beautiful thing is that you have an online business that allows you to work anywhere there’s an internet connection.

For me, it’s a lot of fun that I drop my kids off at school because I’m one of the only dads who can do that.  The other dads who are there, they’re all in their suits because a lot of people in our area are corporate lawyers and financial people.

In contrast, here I am strolling down the sidewalk with my two dogs and my kids and I’m wearing shorts in a hoodie.

They’re like ‘dude, what do you do?’ I don’t even know how to answer that question.

What I’m trying to get at is that this is just such a beautiful time in history to run your own show, to do what you want, live life on your terms, to travel where you want, work from where you want, serve who you want, create what you want, and there’s never been a better time than now to do that.

If you want to travel around the world and run your business from the other end of the world, guess what, you can do that.

If you want to stay put, you want to stay in town, you can do that as well.

I’m glad we could share some of those lessons with Mario, and his experiences on how he’s managing his team, how he’s acquiring new customers and clients, and how he’s using live workshops to bond with an audience and not necessarily worrying about “closing them” quote unquote, right on the spot.

I think it’s a great example of how to think about the long game as opposed to thinking about how to make a quick buck, because at the end of the day, it’s those who last, who will create a lasting impact.

The key to remember is that longevity is very important. The longer you’re around, the longer your business is around, that usually indicates that you’re doing something right.

Never compromise the long-term reputation, the long-term game, for short term quick fixes.

I know it’s a challenge sometimes, but it’s just something to keep in the back of your mind.

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Follow Mario Tomic At:

https://www.tomic.com/

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Transcription

Welcome to the Healthpreneur podcast, Yuri here. This is episode 20 and today we’re talking about the two letter word that will transform your business.

This is a solo round, we’re going to go for a few minutes and I think this is a really, really important lesson. You can think of it as a sermon if you want.

I hope you’re doing great and without any further ado, let’s jump right into this. I don’t want to waste too much time, I value time and I want to respect that.

 

The two letter word

So, the two letter word that will transform your business is the word no. Now I know that might sound a little bit controversial because a lot of people say, “You should be saying yes to different opportunities!” And saying yes to possibilities and all this cool stuff—and that’s fine.

But you have to understand that as your business journey evolves, there’s going to be different phases for these types of opportunities. Initially when starting out—we typically say yes to a lot of things.

Sometimes it’s interviews, podcasts, “Hey, can you do this for me?” Sure. “Can I get on the phone with you?” Sure.

We want to get ourselves out there. We want to get our name out there, we want people to recognize who we are. And that’s fine, but you’re going to get to a point where you can’t do that. There’s only so many hours in the day.

And you’re going to reach a point in your business where you’re going to have to really sit back and reflect on what you’re doing and what’s really moving the needle in your business. Simply looking at your calendar and how much time you have left, and at some point you’re going to be like, “You know what? I can’t keep saying yes to all these different requests and opportunities.”

And that’s the thing—the more successful you become, the more inaccessible you must get.

And I’m not talking about standing up on your pedestal and saying, “I’m better than everyone else. No one can ever reach me.”

What I am saying is that you want to be accessible to those people you care about. If you want to spend time with your family then that’s a priority. If you want to connect with your customers at a deeper level, that’s a priority. But inaccessible in a sense where … You know where you need to focus your time and everything else is put on the back burner.

You become inaccessible to stuff that doesn’t matter to your business.

Think about a waiter in a restaurant. He’s carrying a tray of dishes and all of sudden the maitre d’ or the chef comes by and says, “Hey I need you put one or two more dishes on your tray. Can you handle that?”

And the waiter’s thinking—because he doesn’t want to get fired—”Okay, sure. I guess I’ll do that.” He puts these extra dishes on his tray and now he’s completely off balance, he’s stressed out, he’s sweating as he’s carrying this tray throughout the restaurant.

That’s the same thing that happens in life and in business when we take on too much stuff. It becomes overwhelming, we get stressed out and we’re not able to focus on what really matters.

Priorities, and some of my personal stories

I want to share a little story about something personal that happened to me a little while ago, earlier this year. So I’m good friends with a company called Lead Quizzes and they do some amazing quizzes. Basically it’s a software that allows you to create quizzes really easily for your website and we use them—I highly recommend, they’re awesome.

They had approached me and they said, “We’re looking to create some courses that will better support our audience and we would love for you to create something around content.” Normally when I receive an email—and here’s another indication, when somebody sends me an email and you don’t respond right away, there’s a reason for that. And this time I didn’t respond right away because I wasn’t sure how to respond to this specific request.

So I took about a day or two to really think through this and I got to the point where I said, “You know what? I actually have a content course called Content Mastery Blueprint and we teach a whole workshop called The Content Mastery Workshop. Why don’t I take something out of that and give it to you guys for your tribe?”

And they said, “Well, you know, we’re looking for something a little more custom and hitting on these specific areas.”

And so I thought to myself … “Okay, I could do this and get exposure to a lot more people who may not already know me. But then, what is involved? How much time do I have to put forth to bringing this to life?”

And after reflecting on this for about two days, I got back to them and I said, “Listen guys, I really appreciate the opportunity but I’m going to have to say no.” And told them why.

And this is the important thing—the way you get to that word ‘no,’ and how you know what to what to say no to is by clarifying your vision. Once you know the path you’re on, it becomes a whole lot easier to say no to the things that take you off course.

So I responded to them and I said, “Listen guys, I really appreciate the opportunity but here is what I’m working on over the coming year. This is what I really need to stay focused on and as being successful entrepreneurs yourselves, I hope you can appreciate the fact that I just need to stay on my path.”

In the past, when I started my business, I would have said yes to that kind of stuff. And I know that would have been one more thing on my agenda to do. One more thing in the back of my mind.

And if you want to ease the stress in your life, if you really only want to focus on the things you want to do, you have to be able to step up and say no to people.

And I know it’s tough because we want to please people, we don’t want to offend anyone. But here’s the thing—if you say, “Here’s why I have to say no, because I’m really focused on this one thing.” I’m telling you, people will respect that.

“No, I’m sorry, I can’t come on that podcast. As great as an opportunity it would be, the times don’t work for me and that’s the one day that I have to really focus on my writing.” Or, “that’s the time that I have to pick up my kids from school.”

If that stuff really, really matters, don’t compromise your core values, don’t compromise what’s important to you to satisfy somebody else.

So the key thing here is that you need to clarify your vision. What is it that you’re doing with your business? What’s the goal 12 months from now? Three, five years from now? And asking yourself, how do I get there?

And this is something you do without any external input. This is something you think about yourself and you think to yourself, well, if we were having this conversation a year from now, looking back over the previous year, what would have to have happened in my business for me to feel happy with my progress?

That’s a really good question that I have people do to clarify what they want to achieve in the coming 12 months.

And what that allows you to do is, you start at the end and you look back over the year. And you’re looking in a retroactive, almost a backwards facing mirror—and looking at all the different things that happened to make this a successful year.

What were the projects you worked on? What were the people you impacted? What were the things that came to fruition? Clarify that. Really identify what that vision is. What it is that’s most important for you to work on.

And once you’re clear on that—and again, things can change, we live in a world that’s very rapidly changing so if you have to pivot that’s fine. But as long as you know that for you, in your soul, this is the one thing or the few things you’re going to be working on in the coming months or years … That’s going to give you a lot more direction.

Last summer I was hiking with my kids in the woods. It was funny—three of them, they’re tiny. At the time they were two, four and five. We went hiking on this beautiful trail called The Bruce Trail, which is very close to Toronto where I live.

And we went out, it was a late summer day and it had just rained all evening and morning. So we’re driving out there, my kids have their Croc boots on. They’re wearing Crocs, which is not the best thing to be wearing when you’re about to be walking through wet terrain. I got there, I’m thinking, “This is going to be a simple path, no craziness. We’ll go for a couple kilometers and we’ll call it a day.”

We get there and the whole thing is boulders. The kids are loving it because they’re walking over these rocks and all this cool stuff and I’m thinking, “Oh my god, they’re wearing Crocs, which are just rubbery types of boots, on wet rocks. This is not going to end too well.”

Anyway, it was a good time, we had a lot of fun.

The reason I’m sharing this with you is because on this path there were a number of moments where we could have veered off to take the white trail or we could have veered off to take the red trail … But we were on the blue trail.

And we knew that if we did not stay on the blue trail—well, who knows, we may have been stuck in the forest.

It’s just a great analogy. In your life, focus on which trail you need to stay on. And then when those other trails come up, you just have to put the blinders on and stay on your trail. Okay?

So I’m going to leave you with one final question here to give you a bit more focus. What’s one thing you’re doing in your business now that you can say ‘no’ to, starting today?

And if you’re wearing a lot of different hats in your business—that’s fine, we all start off like that. But I want you to really think about, what’s one thing that you’re doing or that someone has requested of you that is really just sucking the life out of you?

Just thinking of it, like, “Oh my god, do I have to this? Do I want to do this?” What’s the one thing?

Just don’t even think about it. Just intuitively, the first thing that comes to your mind is the right answer.

I want you to learn how to trust your intuition, trust your gut ’cause a lot of times that is the best coach. I should say, not a lot of the times, all the time. It really is your best advisor and it’s about allowing yourself to trust that internal instinct.

What’s the one thing you’re doing in your business that you can say ‘no’ to starting today? And then, just say no to it.

Stop doing it. Turn it down and move onto something that’s more important.

There we go guys. That’s the two letter word that will transform your business. By saying no to more opportunities, you’ll have more time to focus on what really matters.