The Birthday Episode: 5 Unexpected Lessons I’ve Learned in the Past Year

Transcription

Do you know what today is? Today is the day after my birthday. That’s right, it’s March 24th, which was yesterday. I turned 39 years old, 39 years old. It’s amazing. It’s crazy. You know it’s so weird because I talked to people about who knew I used to play pro soccer. I was like, yeah, I used to do that. I’m thinking, I retired 15 years ago. That is crazy, crazy talk in my mind. I don’t feel 39. I feel really good. I feel like I’m in my mid 20s at the most. Maybe I look a bit different but I feel really good.

Introducing my birthday episode and entrepreneurial journey

In this episode, I want to share five really unexpected lessons that I’ve learned in the past year. Mostly related to business. I mean, obviously, I can share a ton more I have around like family stuff and parenting and maybe I’ll do that in a future episode but for now I want to keep it somewhat tight and concise. Listen, I’ve been in business, I’m very, very, very fortunate to have been in business for a long time. I started my first business in 2006.

Actually, that’s not true. I started my first business as a kid. I was telling my son, Oscar, he’s like, “How did you make money when you were a kid?” I told him, I’m like, “That’s a good question.” I told him I would knock on people’s doors, I would shine shoes. I’d be like, “Hey man, you got some shoes you want to shine?” 50 cents a pair. I would shovel driveways. I would mow lawns. When we lived in a town home complex, I took care of all the lawn maintenance, like the spring cleaning and stuff like that. Washed cars, I’ve always been an entrepreneur. I’ve always been someone who was thinking about ways to make money and do all that stuff from a young age. It’s just the way I am. I started my first business online in 2006 and it’s been a really, really good ride. A lot of ups and downs, as I mentioned before, way more downs than ups. That’s the reality for most entrepreneurs and business. You’re going to go through periods of time where it just feels really, really bad. Can I keep doing this? Like, I can’t even pay the bills. How am I going to pay for food? Should I keep doing this? All sorts of self-doubt, all that stuff creeps in.

If you haven’t experienced that, you’re a freaking alien. I’m just going to put it that way because listen, that’s the emotional journey you go through as an entrepreneur. There’s so many, so many lessons and I want to share five big lessons, rather unexpected lessons that have really hit me hard the last year. Without any further ado, let’s jump into this. Okay.

1- Doing too much and people-problems

Number one is the realization that I’m still doing too much for my business. I really am still doing too much for my business. The only thing that I can boil that down to is I’m a control freak. I have been doing this for so long that I’m really good in many things. I talked about this with our Luminaries Masterminds clients in Tampa. We did an extra, it’s called the Magic Matrix and the Dream Team. One of the exercises was identifying your danger zone, danger zone activities are things you become very, very good at but are not your true genius. For me, that was selling and copywriting and running Facebook ads. Right?

There’s probably a couple others in there as well because those are things that I’ve become very, very good at because I had to do that to grow my business but I don’t love doing them. There are things in my business even till today that if I really take a step back and ask myself, hey man, this is something someone else should be doing, don’t do it. I’m probably going to be a lot better off. Here’s the thing is we often feel that I’m just going to get this done because it’s going to take me 10 minutes. That’s the danger is because it takes us so little time to do this we think we can just do it. What I want to challenge you and me with is, dude, take 30 minutes, map out the process and give it to someone else expecting it to be done in twice or three times the time it would take you to get done. Let’s say I wanted this one thing to get done today. Now if you’re like me, you probably want everything done today, right? But the people you work with are like, dude, you’re freaking crazy. I need more time. I need more structure around this. Okay? You want something done today. Take a step back, breathe and ask yourself, is this something someone else can do?

If the answer is yes, then map out exactly what it’s going to look like. We do this through a process called the result accelerator. Ironically, it’s a worksheet. I don’t even use that much with my team and I need to make a point of doing it more often because essentially what it does is it helps clarify what is it that we want, why it’s important, and then really map out the success criteria. This is what it should look like when it’s done. You hand that off to the person running the operations or the project. You give it to them, they make it happen. Yes, I want this done today, but is it okay if it takes three days to get it done? Probably. If everything is last minute and urgent, you probably need to relook at how you’re doing things in your business. That’s the big thing for me, I was still doing too much for my business and I’ve got to make it a point of really, really being a lot more diligent with handing things off. Two, and this kind of segues from number one is every problem you have in your business is a people problem.

2 – Growing Your Business Through People

This was reminded to me by my good friend Dan Martell, super successful entrepreneur. We’re in the same mastermind together and we’re sharing all of our metrics for the quarter on a big scoreboard. He was talking, one of the guys in our group had set a goal from the last quarter and he was like nowhere near it. What Dan brought up to the group after everyone had shared their numbers, he’s like, “Hey guys, you see all these gaps on your scoreboards? These are all people problems.” I was like, man that is so true. That is so true. When I say people problems, I mean number one, maybe you need an extra person or another person on the team to do this thing to help you move that needle. Number two, maybe it’s a process issue with the person like you’re not clearly communicating what they’re responsible for, what their metrics should be, this should be accountable to, or maybe it’s the wrong person doing the work. Really knowing what the work is and if that person is even a match to do it. That was a big, big epiphany for me in understanding that in order for us to scale, in order for you to scale your business, it’s only a matter of people. That’s it.

If you want to grow your business exponentially, get more people on your team because the alternative is you do everything yourself. You can still build a very successful business all by yourself depending on your business model, but at a certain point it’s going to break and to really scale beyond that, it’s people. It’s going to be people in different areas, different departments, different skill sets that you don’t have and the nature of the business, especially when you start getting like the two to 10 million dollar range, that’s kind of the world in which we’re playing is a very different animal than the zero to one million. Zero to let’s say, I would say zero to half a million in sales, the number one objective of your business is to sell like crazy. You just have to figure out a pipeline and sell and sell and sell and you have to generate revenue. Once you hit a point where it’s like the airplane taking off, a lot of energy to get off the runway, a lot of that, and you’ve probably experienced this and maybe sometimes sunken into a little bit of a panic when the airplane takes off and it’s like full engines and then all of a sudden it’s like, whoa, what happened to the engine? It’s like, are we going down? No.

The reason that happens is because airplanes are not going to fly full power because they’re going to blow through their gas and it’s going to cost the airlines a ton of money. What they do is they’re full power when they take off and they throttle way back at a certain altitude and then they’ll level off, right? Then they continue to climb. You notice like a step climb. They’ll do, right? The same thing happens in businesses. It was a lot of energy to take off and then you hit that initial kind of 10,000 feet, which let’s just call it $100,000 in revenue, things stabilize a tiny bit. Then you’re like, cool, let’s keep going. We got to get to cruising altitude. We go from 10 to 20,000 feet or let’s say 100,000 to 500,000 in revenue. You ramp up some energy again, you start getting the work done, selling, enrolling clients. You get up to half a mil, things are good and then you’re kind of at that cruising altitude. Now it’s really a matter of starting to bring people in, really rectifying systems in your business to move to the next level. Once you hit about two million dollars in revenue, the nature of the business changes and you start to become more of a leader as opposed to a doer.

That’s really been a big, continues to be a big thing for me to really think about and work on is, dude, don’t do so much man. Just lead the team, bring other leaders onto the team, let them drive the business forward. That’s part of my evolution and it’s very exciting because we’re in a good place and I’m really excited for the growth that we’re going to see over the next year. I know the only way we can do that is by bringing on great players. One of our clients or one of my first clients, Amanda Tress, who was actually on the podcast, do more than a million dollars a month now. She’s a great example of someone who has publicly said the only reason that they’ve grown to the point of where they’re at is because she’s brought amazing people on her team, right? Amazing people doesn’t mean like you hire random people on Fiverr to do graphic work. It means you’re hiring C level people, like VP of operations, director of marketing, stuff like that, once you hit a certain point, okay.

Every problem is a people problem, initially and down the road, right? If you’re spending too much time creating graphics, guess what? It’s a people problem fire yourself, hire someone else to do graphics. It’ll cost you five, 10 bucks. Third lesson is it takes courage not money to build a successful business. We talked about this with Zander Fryer the other week, talking about how self-belief and courage are prerequisites to anything in life. I don’t care how much money you have or how much money you don’t think you have. You always have more than you think because there’s something called credit. I have no problem telling you to get a credit card and invest in yourself and your business because every single time you do, assuming you do the work, it’s going to pay off exponentially. This year alone, I’m spending $8,000 a month on my own coaching, masterminds education. I don’t say that to brag. I say that because I need that to move to the next level. I need it because I need to learn things and be exposed to things that I don’t currently know.

3 – Commitment, courage, and confidence

When I first hired my first coach in 2010, actually that’s not true. I actually worked with a coach before that, but it was 2005 I think up until about 2006 midway through 2006. That was a bit of a different thing. It was 200 bucks a month, it wasn’t a big investment. We checked in twice a month. It was really good. That was the first formal coaching I had back in 2005 but when I really took the leap to grow my business after struggling for three years, I said, listen dude, man, you got to hire a coach, someone who knows what the hell they’re doing. It was $18,000. I didn’t have that. I said, you know what? I’m going to figure a way to make this work. I put it on my credit card and I’ve always been the type of person who’s like, I’m going to jump out of the plan even though I love flying and I would never jump out of a plane. I shouldn’t say never. I’d rather not, but I’m like, I’m going to jump and I’m going to build the parachute as we go. That’s always the way I’ve been. I’m not saying you have to be like that, but I do believe you have to have courage and courage …

See, here’s the funny thing. We’ve talked about this before and I think what I should do is actually one of the upcoming episodes, I’m going to share my Courage Quote talk from Healthpreneur Live because I think it’d be really valuable for you. See, courage is not something that happens after having a lot of success. I mean, it helps. Courage is like a muscle, right? You keep working your muscles, they’re going to get stronger. Courage comes right after commitment. The way I see this is this, you have vision, right? The first thing is you have a vision for what you want to do. Second thing is you decide, you make a decision to take action and then decision to capabilities like the journey from making that decision to building the capabilities to create that outcome. That whole journey of action is called courage. It’s a bridge you have to go through from making the decision to getting the outcomes you want, and then from the capabilities you build confidence. The more confidence you have, the more courage you build, and it becomes a really cool self-perpetuating cycle. You don’t need a stash of money to start a business. You need courage. You need self-belief.

You have to have the ability to say to yourself, I don’t know how to do this, but I can figure it out. I can figure it out. I can find people who can help me. I’m resourceful. I can do things. I have succeeded in the past. I can do it again. You have to lean on experience. All these different moments in your life where you’ve had some degree of success, those are reference points to remind you that you can do it again, even if it’s in a completely new space. What was it that allowed me to play professional soccer? It’s exactly the same thing that’s allowed me to build two seven figure companies, exactly the same thing. Completely different industries, completely different walks of life but the common thread was me, not the people around me, nothing else. It was me. It’s you. What that means is that you have beliefs in your head that are hurting you or helping you and you need to water the ones that are helping you. You need to pull the weeds out of your head for the ones that are not helping you. You constantly have to be tending to this internal garden because if you have self-doubt, that’s fine.

We all have self-doubt, but you need to get to the point where your self-belief and your desire overshadow that self-doubt because if it doesn’t, you will stall, you will procrastinate and you won’t move forward. That means you’re choosing fear over your dream. What ends up happening because of that is a life half lived really, it’s a life half lived. You know there’s something big you want to do, but you’re scared. I’m here to tell you that you will never not be scared. You will get better at handling the scared and that’s called courage and there’s no remedy. There’s no Pepto-Bismol. There’s no magic pill other than repetition. I love how Zander mentioned in our interview, talked about, I think about the courage challenge or something like that, race. Little things like do something every single day that requires a little bit of courage. Say hi to a stranger, smile to someone and they’re going to give you that awkward look. Who cares, right? Do things every day that are going to challenge your courage and build that muscle because that is all it is, is building a muscle.

Why is it that someone is more confident in sales than someone else? They just put in the reps, right? They went through a lot of nos. They pick up the phone again. No thanks. Okay, cool. Next. Dude, when I was in my early 20s I was selling mattresses going door to door. Now I didn’t do that for a long time. I did it for a couple of weeks I think, but it was a really great experience because from one door to the next, I’m like, okay, well that didn’t work. The person didn’t open the door. How do I approach the next one? How do I refine my approach? How do I get better? No, no, no, no, no. Oh yeah. Cool. Tell me more. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You do enough of that, you’ll get better. You’ll build your courage. Then at the end of the day you’re like, you know what? Who cares? I’m not taking anything personally. You have to have courage to move your business forward. That’s a big lesson and it’s something I see a lot of people … We did 1,300 enrollment calls last year. Okay.

We didn’t enroll 1,300 people, and the number one reason is because of the people who did not enroll aside from the people who were not a fit for us, the number one thing holding them back is the lack of courage. It’s simple. I don’t have the money yet, I talked to my spouse, bullshit, whatever. It’s a lack of courage. That’s all it is. Let’s just be honest. Okay. It’s fear. That’s it.

4 -The power of meaningful goals

Fourth lesson is the power of meaningful goals. Not all goals are created equal. I don’t believe you should set goals that have no visceral charge for you. When I was playing soccer, it was very easy for me to work out, very easy. I would train in the morning by myself. I train with the team afterwards. I had a very clear vision of what I was doing. I wanted to train. I want to become more explosive, more powerful so I could jump one inch higher, dive one inch farther, kick the ball a little bit more accurately, whatever it was. It’s very clear why I was training. When I stopped playing soccer when I was 25 at that level, and I still play for a couple of years just recreationally. My workouts really just went to the shit because I had no compelling goal for what I was doing.

I was like, yeah, like, okay. Yeah, I want to look better. Who cares? I still want to perform better. That’s important. Yeah, but it was like, what am I performing for? Right? Really recently, I’m talking about within the last six weeks, I was listening to a podcast on The Tim Ferriss Show where he was interviewing John Sommer, I think, who’s the Olympic coach, the U.S. Olympic gymnastics coach. I’m listening to this interview, it’s like three hours long. I was on a plane, it was perfect. I’m like, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do. Because as you know, I love tennis, like tennis, I’m obsessed with tennis but the challenge with tennis … I got a little bug flying around here. The challenge with tennis is that for me, I’m not a very flexible and mobile guy so I’ve always had shoulder issues, right? I’ll play tennis for a couple of weeks. I’m like, shit, my shoulder is acting up again. I got to do treatments. It’s really been a nagging, like one of those nagging things.

I thought to myself, I’ve always admired gymnasts, like the strength, their physique, their mobility, everything. They’re the most complete athlete. I thought to myself, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to train like a gymnast, I’m doing dead lifts. I don’t even have the flexibility in my ankles to do dead lifts. Why am I doing dead lifts? Right? Who cares? Every time I lift, I just kind of tweak a muscle in my back. I’m like, what am I doing this for? They’ve got a great program called Gymnastics Bodies, again it’s gymnasticbodies.com. It is an amazing platform, severely underpriced severely underpriced. I should actually send them an email, be like, dudes, you should be charging $10,000 for this minimum because what they had given me is a structured path to not only achieving the goals I want to achieve, but it’s given me a meaningful goal to work towards. Now I know exactly how I can get there. My goal, Healthpreneur live, which is in September, full splits, press to handstand, right? Those are my two goals. Why does that matter?

It’s not about doing the press to handstand. It’s not about doing the splits. It’s about what those represent for me in terms of how I feel. The best I’ve ever felt in my life was when I was doing hot yoga three times a week. Now that I have this gymnastics routine and I’m not talking about like doing like horizontal bar and pommel horse and stuff like that. All I’m doing for now is I’m building my mobility, I’m reconditioning my connective tissue to not be so tight. I’m working on mobility and strength at the same time. I have a gym in my house. I don’t even use the bar anymore. I’m not even using weights. I’m using my body weight, I’m getting mobility going. For me, now it’s like I see the end results because I can see as I increase my thoracic mobility, I’m going to be more performance in my tennis serve. I’m going to have less shoulder issues as I improve my scapular mobility, all of this stuff is going to help. The way I’m training now is a lot more meaningful than it was for the past 10 years. Bringing this back home for the lesson I’ve learned is like in your business or in your life, you have to set goals that are meaningful so that you feel excited about working towards them.

Look at your goals and just ask yourself, do I care about this thing or is this a vanity metric that I thought I should go after? You can always just scratch the goal, you can scratch the goal and be like, you know what? This doesn’t matter. I’m going to just wait it out and I’m going to start a new one. There’s nothing wrong with that. Okay. Five, the fifth lesson is that lead flow is the lifeblood of your business. We’ve had a couple, two specific instances of this. Last year I was writing on my Facebook ads in the early part of the year, going great, like crushing it. Then our ad account got shut down. I’m like, what the, right? Not good because 95% of our business is reliant on Facebook ads. You might be saying, well maybe that’s not a good thing. Well, it is kind of, if you know what you’re doing, but again there was a bit of risk with that, right? When our ad account got shut down, our lead flow got shot down to zero and I’m like that’s not good. Now, the good thing is that we had recurring revenue because of the way we, because you know, not all of our clients pay in full. They have payment plans and so forth. It gave us a little bit of wiggle room.

We set up new accounts. Two weeks later it’s going great, shut down. I’m like, oh my God, what is going on? I’m in Mexico at the time on a vacation with my family and all this is happening and I’m trying to coordinate with our teams like, “Hey man, can you set up accounts under this person’s name, this person’s credit card?” It was just mayhem. We had six ad accounts in the space of four weeks shut down. I got to the point where I’m like, oh my God, is this going to be our business for the next forever? This is really not fun. I also understood that Facebook has everyone I could possibly ever want to serve. It’s a worthwhile battle. I needed to figure out a way to make this stability, to make it more stable because if we don’t have that lead flow stability as a relatively new business, right? Healthpreneur, we started four years ago. The first two years were really like haphazard. I wasn’t really focused on it. I was still on my health business. Then about two, two and a half years ago I really went 100% of Healthpreneur.

5 – Lead-flow is the life-blood of your business

This is kind of how we built it from scratch with Facebook advertising into our Perfect Client Pipeline and it’s been great. The challenge was that we had no organic following. I didn’t have an Instagram account at the time. I wasn’t doing anything on YouTube. I mean, our blog was simply nonexistent and now it’s just the podcast repurposed on the blog and it’s not like we get a ton of traffic. I share this with you because if you’re doing things like that and they’re not generating consistent lead flow for you, you are screwed big time. We see this all the time like, oh, I’ve got a coaching business. How many coaching clients do you have? I’ve got zero. Okay, great, well you don’t have a coaching business. What are you doing to get clients? You know, posting flyers, Starbucks, you know, posting on Instagram once a month. I’m like, dude, you don’t have a business. You have a freaking nightmare. Lead flow is everything in your business. Now, you have to deliver a great service. That shouldn’t even be part of the discussion.

You could be amazing at what you do and really help your clients but if you don’t have lead flow, that’s the lifeblood of your business. If you don’t have leads coming in, you are toast. Yes, I’m a big believer in referrals and making sure clients are super happy and kind of generating backend stuff like that, but if you don’t have leads coming in, it’s the single biggest problem we deal with and the single biggest problem we help our clients solve is I don’t have enough leads or clients. How do we solve that? You come work with us. During this process, I knew that I was going to have an issue having our ad accounts stay active. I reached out to another firm. I’m not going to mention them because it wasn’t a good experience. Agency, $10,000 a month retainer and then going up from there based on ad spend. They said, yeah, I told him, I’m like, listen, I know you guys are great at what you do. I just need my ad accounts active every single day, no issues. We know this works. We know our ROI. We just need to scale and we need to stay active. They said, yeah, we can certainly do that and we just need to have a look at your accounts. I said, cool. Here are my accounts.

I don’t know if you can access them because they’ve been deactivated or shut down or whatever. Five weeks later, nothing is happening. I sent them an email, I’m like, dude, WTF, it’s been five weeks without our ads running. What is going on? We’re having a challenge getting into this account. I’m like, dude, I don’t care. This is unacceptable. It doesn’t take you five weeks to do this. I said, you guys were toast, I’m not working with you guys. This is ridiculous. I sent my buddy Nicholas Kusmich who ironically I should have contacted in the first place because he actually ran ads for us when we first started Healthpreneur and he’s the best in the world. I sent him an email and was like, I came in like, I don’t know what your workload looks like. I don’t know what your capacity is at right now, but here’s the issue. Here’s the challenge we’re in. Would you be able to take us on and run our stuff? He said, yeah, for sure. I was like, dude, that’s amazing. Two days later, everything’s active. He’s been active ever since and it’s been great. If you don’t have a consistent stream of leads coming to your business, you’re going to run into challenges, I promise you.

Then the next thing is obviously improving the conversion funnel and all that kind of stuff. If you don’t have people coming into your business, you don’t have the business. You have to look in the mirror and you have to be very honest with yourself, is what I’m doing putting enough money in the bank? If the answer is yes, keep doing it. If the answer is no, stop doing what you’re doing or if you’re building up what it is that you think is going to work, continue doing that. If you’ve been beating the drum, if you’ve been beating the same thing for months or years and you’re barely scraping by and guys, it really hurts me when I’m like, hey, what’s your monthly revenue at right now? I’m thinking about a thousand dollars a month. I’m like, how do you eat? How do you survive on that level of income? You can’t, and this goes back to courage. You have to have the courage to step up. Listen, if you want our help, we can help you. Okay? Invest the money to work with us. Don’t worry about what other people have done or have not done. It has zero bearing on your success. I will tell you what the most important determine of your successes is your self-belief.

Why your beliefs define your results

If you don’t believe that you can get results working with us or anyone else, you will never get the results you want, I promise you that. We have a lot of people that ask us like, hey, show me some proof that your stuff works. I’m like, we know our stuff works. Here’s some proof. Have a look at the testimonials. I still need more time to think about it. I still need more proof. I’m like, you’re full of shit. Sorry for my language here. You can tell, I get very passionate about this. You see, if you were to draw a triangle and we have attract, convert, deliver on the triangle, right? We help you attract leads, we help you convert them into paying clients. We help you deliver an amazing result for them. We know this process works. Do me a favor. Draw your name in the middle of the triangle. The one thing we don’t, the one variable in this process we don’t yet know about is you. Please tell me why we should hire you as a client. That’s the discussion that really should be happening is listen, I don’t need to sell you on the fact that we know what we’re doing.

You need to sell me on why we should work with you because you need to prove to us that you will do the work because I’ll promise you, you are going to struggle. You’re going to go through challenges, you’re going to hit your head against the wall. You’re going to have self-doubt. Some of your stuff is going to suck. Some of your stuff is going to work, some of it’s not. What are you going to do when that happens? You’re going to cry about it? You’re going to hide under the covers? No. Some people, the answer is yes. Some people take one year to create a webinar and that’s unacceptable in my eyes. If you are the type of person who’s great at what you do and you’re generating revenue right now, you’re working with clients, but you’re not growing fast enough, but you want to go to the next level, then let’s have a chat. I’m going to finish off this episode with a little bit of tough love because that’s the way I work, man. I’m telling you, don’t come to work with us. Obviously, if you don’t like my tone, the way I approach things, you’re not going to work with us anyways and that’s totally fine.

If you need a real kick in the ass and you want a very simple process to follow to build your business substantially and rather quickly, then go to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Watch the training. If you resonate with what we’re talking about then book a call with us because I promise you, nothing else you will do will produce the results we can help you produce. You have to believe in yourself. You have to understand that you are the only determining factor in your success. Yes, the business model does come into play. Absolutely. That’s why I’m so adamant about this business model. If you are great at coaching, if you enjoy speaking with people and if you’ve got a great idea that can serve others, we can help you. I can promise you that having done almost every other business model you can imagine, the blogging, the content marketing, the affiliate stuff, you name it, nothing comes close to what we do with our clients. I promise you that if you work with us and do the work and you just keep persisting, you’re guaranteed to create some amazing results.

One of our client’s brand, it took her two months to get her Perfect Client Pipeline deployed. Her first week, she made $10,600. That’s pretty good. Now, does that happen all the time to everyone? No. Right? Some people see thorough results. Some people see amazing results as well. Another one of our clients, Dan, he 3x his ROI in the first week of working with us by sending two emails to his following, right? These are the things that we can help you do, but you have to have the courage to step up and you have to believe in yourself because I can’t give you a magic pill to give you magic self-belief. That’s up to you. If you know you’re awesome at what you do and you just need a better business model and better coaching, then we can be that for you.

Again, healthpreneurgroup.com/training. Watch the training then book a call with us and we’ll take it from there. Anyways, that is the end of today’s episode, the birthday episode, five unexpected lessons I have learned in the past year. It’s been a really good 12 months.

The next 12 months are going to be even better as I’m sure they will be for you, right? Hopefully, right? Thanks again for joining me today. Continue to get out there, be great and do great and I’ll see you in our next episode.