Patrick Donohoe, Author at The Wealth Standard – Your home for finance, economics & building wealth outside of Wall Street

Breaking Down The Biggest Myth About Entrepreneurs with Jim Beach

November 15, 2018 Patrick Donohoe Comments Off

TWS 10 | Myth About Entrepreneurs

There are a lot of misconceptions about being an entrepreneur. Most of the time, we tend to think that to succeed in it, one has to have that passion from which they turn into a career. Speaker and entrepreneur Jim Beach gives some practical advice and counters the biggest myth about entrepreneurs. He talks about the myth of being a risk-taker to that of the many stereotypical entrepreneur archetypes. Sharing how one can still become an entrepreneur even if the passion is still not there, he shows some unconventional ways that will even comfort us in our own journeys. Jim is a sought-after speaker on business, low-risk entrepreneurship, and personal development. He takes us to the story of how he redefines or refocuses passion, asking each one of us to just get off the sofa and start moving.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Breaking Down The Biggest Myth About Entrepreneurs with Jim Beach

Jim, it’s awesome to have you on. Thanks for spending some time with me.

Thank you very much for having me. It’s my honor.

Jim, why don’t you give the audience a brief background in your career in the entrepreneur space?

School for Startups: The Breakthrough Course for Guaranteeing Small Business Success in 90 Days or Less

I was summarily dismissed from Coca-Cola at the age of 24. I thought I was going to be there forever and they decided otherwise. I was completely devastated. I was as corporate a man as you could be at that young age. I wanted a corporate career. One of the last things they told me at Coca-Cola was that I would be a great entrepreneur. I’d never heard the word and didn’t know what it was. I did that. I went out and started my first business when I was 25. I grew it to 700 employees. It was in the children’s education space. At 31, I started teaching at a university. I was a university professor with a small P, not a PhD guy, but the one who taught all the classes for ten years. During that time, I came up with some interesting philosophies on entrepreneurship that I hope we can talk about. I wrote a book about that called School for Startups, which was published by McGraw-Hill. It sold well. That turned into a radio show and here we are.

You’ve done it all sounds like. Are ready to hang up the boots? Call it a career?

I’m one of the people that would get bored in ten seconds. I don’t like golf.

That’s part of my argument is even if you do like golf, humanity, especially a human being, especially one that is experienced entrepreneurship and creation, your space understands that life doesn’t end at 60, 70, 80 or 90. It ends when it ends. Production, whether it’s business or mentorship or consulting creates that livelihood in people. Let’s get into some of the nature of your books and the business that you’re a part of. What you’ve experienced over the years in regards to what is the times of Coca-Cola until now. Everybody knows what the word entrepreneur is. Maybe from that and then until now what your experience has been seeing what is possible for those that have an entrepreneurial vision?

The thing I would like to focus in on are some of the myths that I have seen and the perception of some of those. The biggest myth about entrepreneurs is that they are risk-takers. You have to be this risky guy or maybe there are three things to entrepreneurship. You are creative somehow, you are somehow risk excited and you’re going to do something risky. Number three is that you have a passion for what you do. That’s become the definition of the entrepreneur. I’m a risk-taker who found a creative idea to start a new business that I’m passionate about. I believe I can make a lot of money with that business or something silly like that. I find that because of that we have lots of people sitting on the sofa who are not trying entrepreneurship because they’re afraid of one of those three things.

One of those three things is preventing them from becoming an entrepreneur. I find that all three of them are completely false. That entrepreneurs are not risk-taking people. As a matter of fact, I do every single thing I can think of to reduce risk before I start a business. If there is a risk, I don’t start the business. I start the less risky ones. The more entrepreneurs that I meet, the more people I interviewed, it’s the same with them. Risk is a bad thing. We’re not creative. 93% of new businesses are copies of existing businesses. That data comes from the London School of Economics. There are not that many new ideas. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you find what someone’s doing in Salt Lake City and copy and do it in Atlanta. There’s nothing wrong with that. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, Mercedes, Honda and Toyota. There are lots of me-too companies. You don’t have to be original to go be an entrepreneur. Just find an idea and execute the daylights out of it.

Life doesn't end at 60, 70, 80, or 90. It ends when it ends. Click To Tweet

Before we get to the third point, maybe in your mind, define what an entrepreneur is. At the fundamental level, I have a four-year-old. If you were talking to my four-year-old and explaining what an entrepreneur is, how would you describe it?

Someone who goes out and sells things to people. A four-year-old would understand that. I have stuff that people want to buy. That could be different stuff.

It comes down to how do you define selling? Selling is the exchange of money for something that’s more valuable than money. In the context of your other businesses, it’s improving. It’s creating more value than was currently there. If you seek ways to do that, that is the beginnings of that entrepreneurial ideas to improve whatever exists or to create something that doesn’t exist.

I don’t want you to wait for something that doesn’t exist because that creativity lightning bolt may wait until you’re 90 or maybe never come. Go start something now. There’s this idea of the Corridor Principle. As you go down the path of entrepreneurship, the life of entrepreneurship, there are doors along the hallway, this path that you’re on. You could never see into those doorways until you had gone down the path a little bit. Because of where you are, you don’t have a view that allows you to see the opportunities in those rooms. By becoming an entrepreneur now, doing something very me-too, not creative but running a good business will then give you the opportunity. It’s a beautiful analogy. What it says is that we should get off the sofa and start something now no matter what it is.

There are opportunities all around to be an entrepreneur in that definition. You’re right. There are some fundamental things that scare people about being an entrepreneur or it separates that persona from who a normal person is. If you define it in the context of whatever environment that you’re in, figuring out a way to be valuable to somebody else. Once you have that mindset, the opportunities are infinite.

I say that with my coaching and what I’m working on. I’m not trying to create 100 millionaires. I’m trying to create someone worth $3 million or someone who makes $300,000 a year. That’s my goal and that’s my definition of success. You don’t have to be lifestyles of the rich and famous, yachting, private jetting to be very successful and have enough for you and your family to survive on. That’s very realistic for everybody.

Let’s go through that. First thing is you dispel the idea that being an entrepreneur is risky. Then you got into this instead of doing the whole Peter Thiel, Zero to One, creating something out of nothing. An entrepreneur can be somebody that improves an existing business or an existing process in a role that they have. I know you were going to get into a third point or subsequent points. Would you mind picking up where you left off?

That would be passion. There’s this overwhelming belief that you have to be passionate about what you sell. I would counter that. I’ve sold purses. I’ve sold leather jackets. I’ve sold a lot of stuff that I don’t buy, that I would never buy. I must tell you, that doesn’t bother me at all. I would like to redefine or refocus passion. That passion for a product is called materialism. I am passionate about the lifestyle that I lead. I am passionate for the fact that I drove four carpools. I had zero commutes. I wore what I wanted to. I wasn’t responsible to anyone. I made as much money as I was willing to work to do to get that money. I am passionate about the entrepreneurship itself. That can be enough for a lot of people. The joy of having an Amazon re-seller business that you buy stuff in bulk and sell it on Amazon. I’ve seen how that simple, non-creative, non-risky business that no one should be passionate about can change people’s lives and change their perception of themselves.

I’m passionate about the opportunity that it presents. I believe God gave us a certain basket of skills when we were born, when our DNA was created. We’re good at this and not good at some other things and I’ll never be able to throw a baseball. Entrepreneurship uses those skills better than anything else could. I could still work as CEO and my creativity would not be utilized. I could still work at Coca-Cola and not use the skills necessary that are used by my entrepreneurship. That’s exciting to me. Overall, just being an entrepreneur is cool enough that I don’t have to love what I’m doing. I have enough fun selling purses that I’m willing to sell purses if I could make some money doing it.

We should get off the sofa and start something now no matter what it is. Click To Tweet

Let’s breakdown then the stereotypical entrepreneur archetype. The entrepreneurial archetype is that person is beaming what you’re quoting as passion. Can you break down that one more time and talk about who would you consider an example of that passionate person and stereotypical definition? From what you’ve seen, a person does not necessarily have to be this overly A-type of personality to go out and find something that they’re either gifted at or interested in to pursue.

There are several different people that jump to mind. I would think of an entrepreneur who is obsessively passionate as someone like Bill Gates. Not necessarily in his first generation, but in his second generation as a philanthropist. He is obsessive with that. He’s following his passion there. His desire to solve malaria in Africa, he’s going about it at 100% wrong, but he has a tremendous passion for it. He’s also very interested in helping education. As a former professor, I’m not sure that he’s doing the right things there either. Nevertheless, his passion there is laser-focused. On the other hand, we have someone like Richard Branson who I think that of the 700 businesses that he owns, he’s probably passionate for three or four of them. The Virgin Galactic Airline, the outer space vehicle. Maybe still the airline, but I bet he’s pretty tired of the airline that hasn’t done any work there in ten years. He’s not interested in the thing that got them started the stores anymore. His passion is the love of the game. He’s enjoying the game. Whatever the business is, he’s going to have fun doing it and give it an interesting, sexy, unique twist. I don’t think he loves all of those businesses that he runs. He enjoys the, “Let’s come up with a new brand that exudes confidence. That’s cool and sexual. I get to jump out of a parachute or a hot air balloon wearing a parachute to promote it.” He’s enjoying promoting it more than me as the brand. He never goes back to those businesses on day three. He’s not there on day three.

He gets it all up and running and passes the baton.

Those are two very different views of entrepreneurial passion. All I’m suggesting is that if you wait to do what you’re passionate about, it may skip you altogether and you may lose the opportunity to go off and start a great consulting practice very similar to your last job. There’s nothing creative. They’re very similar to your last job. You steal some of the clients and you do the same work very well. That may not be your passion, but that may allow for you to do your passion in three or four years from now. What I’m passionate about is woodworking, but I suck at it. I’m bad at it. What I’ve learned is that I can enjoy my passion for what’s called the weekend and make more money so that I can go to a woodworking school more often.

You talked about natural gifts and natural abilities, that we’re all different. We all have different personalities, different strengths and different tendencies. From what you do as a consultant or a coach, is there a method to discover some of those interests? Maybe not passions but interest and figuring out a way to monetize that through business? Is that where you were saying with that comment?

I don’t think so. I have a hard time understanding those people; the people who at the age of 30 don’t know what they’re interested in or what they’re good at. That makes me wonder what is going on there. If an eight-year-old doesn’t know that, I understand. By the age of 30 or 40 or whatever you enter into the world of entrepreneurship, you should know, “I need a business partner, I need a cofounder because I’m not very good at speaking in front of people. This business is going to require a lot of speaking in front of people and so I should go get a cofounder.” I did that personally in my first business. I had a cofounder, Doug, whose sole responsibility was to talk and he was amazing at it.

Myth About Entrepreneurs: If you wait to do what you’re passionate about, it may skip you altogether and you may lose the opportunity.

He’s amazing at it and he probably liked it to an extent, you didn’t like it even though you may have been amazing at it. Isn’t that a feeling or a flag or a hint of what you should and shouldn’t do? I know you love working and there’s obviously hobbies that are out there but have you in your entrepreneurial experience seeing tons of businesses speaking, talking to a lot of people, is there a common connection fundamentally between what a person does as an entrepreneur and their level of interest?

Their level of interest in what?

Whatever they’re doing.

I don’t think so. I am working so that I can go to Disneyworld, so that I can take my family on nice vacations, so that I can go to woodworking school, so that we can live the standard that we all want to live. To me, that is the ultimate goal and I’m willing to focus in on that and say, “I’m willing to sell purses if I can get toward that ultimate goal.” For me, the passion is almost irrelevant. I am passionate about the lifestyle. My friends go to work, they commute and they get told what to do. Their destiny is in someone else’s hands. None of that is true for me and that’s what I’m passionate about.

I’m having a hard time distinguishing because I agree with you in that respect. For me, it’s one of those things where if you sell purses to be able to go to Disneyland, is something that will get you what you want? Long-term if you’re selling purses your entire life, is it possible to have a level of fulfillment that some entrepreneurs get? That’s where you go back to Richard Branson. He was probably passionate at one point in his life about his Virgin Records and the airline and the passion’s changed. As far as the future vision, I look at those that get on a highway and commute every morning and hate what they do. Then go home and try to disregard all that crap and be a good parent and a good husband or wife. I look at where we’re at as a society and because of how much commerce is going on in opportunities that exist, is it possible to find something that you like doing that you make money at? You were also able to provide some fulfilling lifestyle for your family? That’s where I’m disconnected.

That’s largely where the corridor principle comes in. There’s an important thing here. One idea that we haven’t talked about yet is that entrepreneurial things are created to be sold. Businesses are created to be sold. The first business that I was involved in childhood education was an amazing business, but we had thousands of kids every day that we were taking care of. The stress level was not enjoyable. I like my kids but that’s it. That’s where I draw the line. I got out of that business as quickly as within seven years, pretty much as quickly as I could when I was 32 years old, which allowed me to go off and do something that maybe I did enjoy more.

Open your mind to the opportunities that are all around you and figure out ways to create more value for people. Click To Tweet

The experience gives me the credibility, the opportunity, the fundraising skills, hopefully, some cash in pocket to go off and say, “I had your business with 700 employees. I want to be a college professor and I can go do that because I have the credibility of having a 700-person business.” That allows me to do what I am passionate about, which is teaching and sharing and helping other people down the path. I’m willing to do to get off the sofa because that long-term will lead to my goal of eventually running a business that I love obsessively and fulfills my creativity and my risk and all of that. I want people to get off the sofa and say, “I’m going to go start something that I can put up with.” God knows where that’s going to lead.

That helps me a ton. I would add to that the getting off the sofa idea, some people were naturally lackadaisical, but we’re also naturally-driven. It’s an interesting dichotomy there. If you look at the discovery process, isn’t there normally some level of anxiety or friction or stress that tells us whether we’re doing something we want to do or not that eventually leads us to what you explained? Isn’t pain, friction and anxiety an environment part of the process?

You mean the pain and the anxiety of the horrible job that I had beforehand? The horrible life beforehand? I hope that motivates you to get off the sofa and start doing the research. One of my favorite stories is about my step-brother-in-law. His name is Joey and he had a job working on a shrimping boat, peeling shrimp, taking care of freshly caught shrimp. I can’t imagine anything worse. His goal was to have a restaurant bar of his own. Eventually, he was able to say to save $5,000. 99% of our risk universe would say you cannot open a bar or restaurant for $5,000. He did it. He didn’t even have enough money for kegs. He bought cases the first weekend. He sold those cases and made what’s called a profit. Eventually was able to buy half of Athens, Georgia, which is where the University of Georgia is. He owns half of the town and something 20 or 30 different bars and restaurants off of a $5,000 investment to get started.

Off of working on a shrimp boat doing something he didn’t like to do?

For him, the interest is he was willing to say, “My dream is to have a restaurant bar with all the brewing equipment and all of the brass and the beautiful fixtures. It’s going to have dark mahogany and the walls are going to have leather embed in them and stuff.” That’s his dream. What he ended up opening was in an abandoned barbershop. It still had the linoleum floor. It had the big rings on the floor where the chairs used to be, cinder block walls, exposed metal rafters and a bathroom that didn’t pass code. He spent $4,000 of the $5,000 getting the bathroom up to code. He then went to a flea market and got $200 worth of abandoned chairs that we would throw away on the side of the road and opened a bar. His standards were so low because the alternative of working on the shrimp boat was so bad that he said, “I’m willing to take the long view on this. To put my dream aside and to start something that’s feasible now.”

You can argue that it’s right on the side. It’s in the future and the path to get there requires that you have to put a lot of money in the bathroom before you get to the Mahogany and the brass and what his future vision was.

Myth About Entrepreneurs: Sometimes, bootstrapping is healthy – taking on a big responsibility and try to circumvent steps along the way.

Eventually, someone bought the piece of property across the street, put in $3 million into a restaurant. It failed. The lesson is, how many beers do you have to sell to repay a $5,000 investment? How many beers do you have to sell it to repay a $3 million investment? It’s a good lesson.

Sometimes bootstrapping is healthy and taking on a big responsibility and try to circumvent steps along the way, which that restaurant across the street did. That’s how you learn those painful lessons. They probably had to go backward and then learn the lessons that Joey was learning.

Joey also did something smart. He reduced the risk. His risk was $5,000. If he lost, he’d have to go back to the shrimp boat.

Being able to rebound from that versus bankruptcy on $3 million. That’s a longer lesson to learn than having to go back on the shrimp boat and get another $5,000 and invest it wisely the next time.

Joey got off the sofa.

When you’re in your book, School for Startups, is it targeted to the normal individual or who’s that person you are writing to when you wrote that book?

Life, in general, is never this calculated path where if you do X, Y and Z, you're going to get A. Click To Tweet

The guy sitting on the sofa who is trying to say it can be done. There are some stories in the book of some businesses that I started when I was teaching at the university. I bet my students on a semester by semester basis that I could start a business that semester, get a cashflow positive that semester, repay the startup capital that semester. They got to choose the country and the industry that I would start the business in. The first one was Pakistan and furniture. I had to start a Pakistani furniture company. After that, it was a Brazilian leather purse company. The year after that it was Argentinian painted leather for leather jackets. The book talks about some of those stories and talks about the rules that came out of those experiences. The major primary rule is don’t spend any money, bootstrap. I can go back and show you how all of the ideas that I had were not creative. The Pakistani chair idea, the furniture company, most people look at and go, that’s a very creative idea. I go, “I can tell you the flea market that I saw the idea that I copied from.” I saw the idea in Santa Barbara ten years before I started the business. When I had to start a Pakistani furniture company, I was like, “Santa Barbara ten years ago, I’m going to copy that idea. I’m going to do it for under $5,000.” Very little risk, zero creativity. I was not passionate about it, but it was a homerun success.

In the book, you addressed that principle of getting off the couch obviously, but also how individuals could be more entrepreneurial in their current environment whether it’s a full-time job or in school. Do you give direction there?

There are some examples. There a lot of characters in the book, real-life stories. One of my students, he was a junior and a senior who was making $100,000 a year on Best Buy arbitrage, going to Best Buy as they liquidated stuff. Buying $10,000 of stuff that Best Buy considered at the bottom of its life cycle. He would then sell on eBay and Amazon make $100,000 a year doing that. Those things are in there. The book is designed to be very motivational and say, “If this twenty-year-old can make $100,000, what’s your excuse?”

Have you seen it in maybe other circumstances where you have companies that motivate or incentivize for that entrepreneurial mindset? I know some tech or manufacturing where if you come up with some improvement to the intellectual property they already have, that you’ll be able to profit share off of that. Have you come across a lot of companies that have maybe not to that extent, but similar incentives to be able to provide improvements to efficiency or of that nature?

I don’t think you’re going to like my answer on this. The honest answer is I see that with every company until they have 50 employees. Then eventually that becomes something that’s written in the handbook that no one ever looks at. Back on my own business, when I was running a business and we were doing $12 million, $15 million a year in revenue and I hired my brother right out of MBA school. He came in and he was like, “You should try this. You should try this. You should do this.” I was like, “I had done it. I had seen it. The competitor did it. I don’t want to try it. I don’t like that.” I had an off the cuff response for every one of his bright ideas. Some of them we ended up trying, but a lot of them didn’t work. That part of the entrepreneurial story is getting comfortable with what you do and then not wanting to mess with it. That happens somewhere after $25 million in revenue or something like that. That eventually these incredibly creative entrepreneurial places that are designed with their baked DNA and we’re going to have a Friday creativity meeting every Friday with pizza and foosball. Eventually, that gets shut down by the venture capitalist. I don’t see it in the ten-year-old companies. I see companies that claim that they’re still doing it. When you dive deep, you very rarely see that. Maybe I’m a young curmudgeon.

Failure is vital in the process because it's part of the learning process. Click To Tweet

I would say life, in general, is never this calculated path where if you do X, Y and Z, you’re going to get A. It’s one of those things where sometimes there are great ideas, sometimes there are crappy ideas. I was curious because I’ve seen at a smaller level as you were explaining I’ve also seen it at a very high level at Honeywell in particular. They have a program and it’s all calculated into the engineers. The guy that I was talking with was a graduate of MIT. He made $500,000 a year, three times what his salary was because of the processes that he created that allowed Honeywell to save a bunch of money. He did some level of profit sharing with them and had ownership in the IP. It’s the environment and it’s the principle. Even though that doesn’t exist, I still think there are opportunities for anyone to figure out ways in which they can improve, whether it’s a process, whether it’s a product, whether inside the company, outside the company. Your point is to open your mind to those opportunities that are all around you and figure out ways to create more value for people so that you’ll have more money.

It will be interesting to see where Honeywell is ten or fifteen years from now because in essence, Honeywell is a startup. They were a huge high flyer of the ’70s and ’80s and so many other companies that crashed and burned. They are now finding a new niche for themselves like Xerox. There’s no comparison between the business that Honeywell does today and what they did in the ’80s or the ’90s. It will be interesting to see if Honeywell still got those creativity DNA packets ten, fifteen years from now.

It’s hard enough at a high level when you have hundreds of employees, probably thousands of employees to orchestrate something like that is definitely difficult. I would assume that something good has come from those programs. You also have brothers-in-law that have sophisticated degrees that tell you, “You should do this with your toilet paper. Have recycled toilet paper instead of the thick stuff to save some money.” My point is I’m totally in-sync with you in regard to getting off the couch and doing something that provides a level of fulfillment and I would say failure sometimes and taking risk. People don’t like that because they have a probability of failing. If you think about it, re-contextualizing failure, it’s vital in the process because it’s part of the learning process. It’s part of growing. You don’t know something and suddenly accelerate your path to perfection. There are these friction points, these failures and these dips along the way. That’s a good thing because the more of those you have and the more resilient you are, the more you’re going to be able to create it. The more money that is going to have and so goes the process.

Somehow, I always forget to leave off my resume that during that time I had 700 employees, I also got $10 million in personal debt. The bank called and said, “We’re seizing all of your assets and you have 30 days to repay everything.” I forgot to tell that part of the story for some reason.

That probably didn’t keep you up at night at all. That’s the thing. If you have a freaking $10 million mistake, talk about the lessons that you learned along the way. In the moment you’re like, “Get me out of this.” In hindsight, I’m assuming that that was one of your most valuable times.

I learned a lot.

This has been an awesome conversation and you’ve been around the block a number of times you speak. Do you do personal consulting and coaching as well?

Of course.

The book, which is the School for Startups: The Breakthrough Course for Guaranteeing Small Business Success in 90 Days or Less, that’s your only book at this point, correct?

Free Radio & Podcast Marketing In 30 Minutes: Fire your publicist and leverage free radio and podcasting to market your business, brand, or idea

No, I have another book that came out. It’s called Free Radio & Podcast Marketing In 30 Minutes. This is a series called in 30 minutes. It’s a series for people that the dummies books are too complicated. In 30 minutes, I teach you what you need to do to get on hundreds of radio and podcast interviews to sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of your product for free. I have that book out as well. You can read it on one airplane flight.

I would argue that that’s not below the level of a dummy. All the complicated stuff is at the level below the dummy because it takes a genius to take a lot of sophisticated information and simplify it so the average person can understand it and use it. Talk to us briefly about your role as the Executive Director of the International Entrepreneurship. What’s that role? What’s the purpose of that organization?

I’ll let you in on one of my little secrets here. That’s a great a loss leader as Walmart would say. That is a thing that I do from time to time. Sometimes it’s newsletter format, sometimes it’s videos where specific people get information about levels of entrepreneurship around the world. What countries are growing? What countries are retracting entrepreneurship? The main reason I do it is as a marketing tool for my speaking. In the last few years, I’ve done India probably ten times in Egypt, Dubai, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. I’m sure I’m leaving out some places. All of that happens because of the Business International Entrepreneurship, which is a marketing vessel for me. It’s a faux business designed to get me business in other areas.

That’s not a bad thing. The principles of entrepreneurship don’t have country boundaries.

They don’t so the rules apply. I’ve made a lot of money off of that though.

Awesome to have you on.

Thank you so much. It’s been fun.

It was great to meet you. Thanks again for the information.

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About Jim Beach

TWS 10 | Myth About Entrepreneurs Jim Beach’s against-the-grain approach to entrepreneurship is not your typical business advice. He argues that entrepreneurship isn’t about creativity, risk, and passion, and that any individual can become a successful business owner without any of those traits.

At the age of 25, Jim started the American Computer Experience and grew the company with no capital infusion to $12 million in annual revenue with over 700 employees. The company was the world’s largest technology training company for children, and enjoyed tie-ins with Microsoft, Intel, Lego, NASA, and many others.

After this business was sold, Jim taught at Georgia State University and was the top-ranked Business School professor 12 semesters in a row. His book, School for Startups: The Breakthrough Course for Guaranteeing Small Business Success in 90 Days or Less, is frequently atop Amazon’s best sellers lists, and is the basis for his radio show, School for Startups Radio.

Jim has become a sought-after speaker on business, low-risk entrepreneurship, and personal development.

Using The Culture Course And The Code Of Ethics to Build Certification with Mitch Russo

November 8, 2018 Patrick Donohoe Comments Off

TWS 9 | Culture Course

Using certification, consultants can generate millions and millions of dollars in symposium, event, and training fees. A lot of things play into how they use certification to double and quadruple their business. TimeSlips CEO and author of the book, The Invisible Organization, Mitch Russo says there are at least four recurring revenue streams in every company that nobody is tapping into. Certification taps into that and creates those recurring revenue streams. Mitch says he’s been able to see as many as eight under certain circumstances. He shares his journey to business success – from PR to promotion and sales – and how he’s now helping CEOs build independent tribes of certified consultants and develop loyalty and engagement with their most valuable customers.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Using The Culture Course And The Code Of Ethics to Build Certification with Mitch Russo

Mitch, it’s awesome to have you on. Thank you for taking the time.

Patrick, thanks for inviting.

You have quite a remarkable background. For our audience that has not heard of you before or read your book, would you mind going through your business experience, how you got to where you’re at now? Maybe touch on the experience you had with the Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes Company?

I’ll go back to tell you a little bit about how I grew up because that influenced the rest of my life. I was a lead guitar player of a rock band in high school. It turned out we were eventually the highest grossing rock band in our little neck of the woods in Brooklyn, New York. What that did is it taught me a lot about business and a lot about promotion. A lot about PR, a lot about how to get testimonials and use them to sell. In a way, I thought that was terrific and a great way to start my life. I also dealt drugs in high school before becoming addicted to heroin. That too was a great way to learn about distribution, dealer networks. I was blessed to have all these wonderful things happen to me. All of that led me to where I am now. What ended up happening is as I graduated high school and I was interested in electronics, I went to school to become an electrical engineer. I discovered that engineering is not as much fun as selling and that’s when I took off in business.

I began my sales career at the age of about 26. I sold for two years and I got some amazing experience. At the age of 27, I was generating about $35,000 a month in commissions. That was a lot of money and I was unsophisticated financially. I was putting $100,000 in a bank. I took the passbook and I put it in my sock drawer and then I’d go to another bank and open up another account. I had a collection of passbooks in my sock drawer. I had no idea, other than that, what to do with money. That was my education. When I finally got around to starting my software company, I had saved enough money to back myself. My partner and I came together. We built a software company. I would say that it’s a combination of luck, timing, a little bit of skill and a little bit of experience. All came together to allow us to build the largest time-billing software company at that time in history. It led us to sell the company for over eight figures to Sage PLC in the UK. It was in that process of growing and building Timeslips that I met a guy named Chet Holmes.

Chet has a book called The Ultimate Sales Machine, one of the bestselling books I’ve ever read. The point of my experience with Chet was he wanted to sell me something and I didn’t want to buy it and he didn’t give up. That’s what impressed me most about him. When I did finally buy, it was eighteen months later, and I bought space in the magazines he was selling ads in. Those ads changed the company. Those ads turned out to be the best investment we ever made. As a result, we became amazing friends. That friendship led me to later be invited into his company to help him, which then led to a relationship with Tony Robbins.

The Invisible Organization: How Ingenious CEOs are Creating Thriving, Virtual Companies

The three of us, as equity partners, put together a company called Business Breakthroughs International of which my title was President and CEO. I ran that company. We grew it to 350 people, over $25 million in sales per year and then disaster struck and Chet died. When Chet died, it was a new chapter in my life. I had felt like maybe Chet was telling me it’s time for me to go out on my own again, and that’s what I did. I wrote a book called The Invisible Organization, which in effect is a blueprint of how I built Business Breakthroughs, as a virtual company. That book went on to be a number one Amazon bestseller. It’s been quoted in different articles. It’s helped a lot of people save a lot of money by going virtual instead of buying buildings and stuff like they were before.

Going back to your experience with Business Breakthroughs, how many companies did you work with over that span of time? Do you recall that?

I’m going to estimate that it was about 3,500 companies.

It says quite a bit where you had that experience of being successful in business. You started to experience where businesses could modify this, that or the other to break through, then the tragedy with Chet. You took that wisdom, that knowledge and you created this book, The Invisible Organization. That tells me a lot about that book. Would you summarize a little bit more in detail what that book is about? What it teaches the reader? Start with how you decided on writing that book because you could have written on probably a ton of different topics given your background. What made you decide to write on that topic?

First of all, I didn’t know that I was going to write that book. I called my friend, a guy named Jay Abraham. I asked Jay, “What do I do now? BBI is over. I resigned and I don’t know what to do with my life.” It was at one of those moments. We all have them. Jay said to me something I’ll never forget. He goes, “Mitch, you cannot prevent the world from knowing what you know. You have to share what you’ve learned in building BBI with the rest of the world. I don’t know how you’re going to do that, but you’ve got to find a way to do it. You cannot keep that a secret because what you did was amazing.” I said, “Thanks, Jay. How about a job?” He says, “I don’t want to build a company as Chet did. I don’t want that infrastructure. You might be able to find someone who would hire you, but you still have to find a way to share it.” I thought about it and I said, “Let me start writing things down,” and every night I would set aside a quiet hour and sit and write.

Culture Course: Once you transform into being a virtual company, you have superpowers you didn’t know you had before.

After about a year, I had about 50,000 words. I thought it was mostly rubbish so I deleted it off my hard drive because I knew that nobody would read whatever I had written. I said, “Let’s start over,” but I needed a theme. What we did was build a company that was invisible. It was an invisible organization. I went to GoDaddy and I checked to see. The name was available, Invisible Organization. I said, “That’s the spine of the book. Now, I know the theme of the book and I can go back and repurpose a little bit of what I’ve written, which wasn’t much and hammer into this whole theme.” I did some research and found that other people had written books about working virtually. There are several great books about working virtually, but none of them were for the CEO. They were all for the virtual worker.

I did some research and I discovered the Stanford University had done a study called Does Working From Home Work? conducted in 2014. The conclusion was startling. I figured that between this and what I know, I can produce a pretty compelling story behind how to build a virtual company. The first thing I do in the book is I talk about CEO mindset because everything starts with mindset. The second chapter is all about the myths and truths about building a virtual company. One of the myths is that if I try to build a virtual company, I’ll lose control of my people. It’s exactly the opposite that’s true. I kept going through these myths and truths going back and forth. We get to the point where I understand the core values of a virtual CEO. I had to manage a virtual team, the myths and realities of going virtual. Finally, we get into the building blocks, the blueprints of the software you need, the systems that you need, the philosophies that you need until we literally construct in the book a fully virtual company.

From there we get into the superpowers because once you transform into being a virtual company, you have superpowers you didn’t know you had before. I’ll give you an example. Let’s go back to the 1990s when American Airlines and other airlines had call centers. These folks housed thousands of people in buildings, picking up the phone when customers called to make airline reservations. Someone had a bright idea, “Why don’t we set up VPNs in everybody’s house, Virtual Private Network boxes, which would allow them to transmit securely back and forth from a person’s home and send our entire workers home?” No one talks about this, but this was the advent of the airline merger story. Two airlines to merge would have merged their call centers of which it was unwieldy. There were thousands and thousands of people. People didn’t realize that they’d be speaking to somebody sitting in their kitchen when they’re making a reservation on JetBlue, Southwest or American Airlines. Ask the next time you’re on the phone and they’ll tell you because they’re happy about it. That’s the story behind it. That the efficiencies and productivity, attrition drops to nearly zero. Sick days completely go away. Employee satisfaction skyrockets. It’s pretty compelling.

Everything starts with mindset. Click To Tweet

The idea behind the technology is to create efficiency. I look at all the tools that exist to be able to do that. I put myself in that boat where you’re held back because you have a belief associated with what will happen to employees because you envisioned them at home. It’s Squirrel Syndrome where their focus shifts here and they’re shifting here. They’re not going to be focused on what they should be doing. At the same time, I would say the mindset that has those thoughts is essentially programmed into how most businesses run, which is a managerial hierarchical structure. I don’t think that works regardless, whether it’s physically or virtually. It’s a fascinating idea. What results from your book have you seen? What have companies done when they realize the opportunity? Where did they go? Where did they start and where did they end up?

The first example I always talk about is Tony Robbins. Tony saw how we were operating at BBI and sent his entire sales force home. We saved Tony $1 million in lease expenses over the course of one lease. As the book came out, I started getting thank you notes and articles come out about the book and its application. I’ll tell you one story. I believe I wrote about this in the book. I got a call from a guy who has a meatpacking company in New York City. Real estate is expensive. Those companies have been in place, some of them 100 years. They had to expand but they can’t because they’re locked into this tiny little space. He said to me, “We can’t make meatpacking virtual.” I said, “I understand that but you can make your accounting department, your marketing department, your sales department and your traffic department all virtual.” What he did is he took my advice and turned that. He ended up expanding his manufacturing operation by 20% without incurring another penny in rent and sent all those people home to work. He ended up blowing his revenue out the door because he had much more production space.

I’m on the phone with another guy named Josh Turner, who has a great company called LinkedSelling. We were building certification program for Josh. As a side note, Josh says to me, “We’re leasing another building for our expansion.” I said, “Did you read my book?” He goes, “No.” I said, “Let me send it to you.” I sent him the book. I said, “Do me a favor. Would you mind holding off on that lease for a week? I want you to read my book or at least read the first few chapters of it.” He goes, “Okay.” I call him back. It was a couple weeks later. He said, “You just saved me $335,000.” I said, “How did I do that?” He goes, “We were going to lease this building for five years. I realized that I could send my entire sales team home. That’s what we did.” I said, “That’s The Invisible Organization way.”

The book came out in 2015. I believe that this is a big part of the future as far as how people work and how they choose to work, but also how companies choose to lead. I believe that when you put more trust and more responsibility in people, and you have a set of core values and a clear mission that they’ll do the right thing. More so when they’re in their home, their environment and plus all the co-working spaces that exist too. Maybe transition to your book called Power Tribes: How Certification Can Explode Your Business.

The book is straightforward. It’s all about how certification can and does explode a company’s business. The story behind it, I write about this in a book, it started with my Timeslip software company. We were a nice little niche software company, probably generating about$ 2 million, $2.5 million a year. Profitable and happy in doing what we’re doing but we were up against some big competitors, number one. Number two, we were growing faster than our revenue could support our infrastructure. We had problems. Tech support calls we’re running ten, twelve minutes hold time and I didn’t like that. The other thing was that there’s always a challenge to find more opportunities to sell. We didn’t have the internet back then, so we use direct mail extensively, tradeshows and retail.

When you're able to align your tribe with the values of the company, you create something bigger and more important than the company itself. Click To Tweet

What ended up happening was I got a call from an important person in Los Angeles. She was the head of the Los Angeles Bar Technology Committee and she said, “I bought your software. I installed it on my computer and it crashed my computer. You guys are criminals and thieves. I’m going to sue you to infinity and back.” I said, “Slow down. Tell me what happened.” She says that our software’s responsible for destroying her entire office. Remember, she paid $99 for the software. What I did is I thought to myself, “How am I going to get out there and help her?” While I had this idea that I would call another customer who lived in the area, who I happened to know was good with our software. She was an administrator at a law firm nearby. I called her up and I said, “Ann, would you do me a favor? Would you run over to this person’s office and see if you could straighten her out? I’ll pay you whatever you want, just tell me.” She goes, “No. Thank you, Mitch, for the opportunity. I’m thrilled and honored that you called me.” I said, “Do me a favor. Call me at home as soon as you know because they’re in California and I’m in Massachusetts.”

It must have been about 9:00 at night. The phone rings and it’s Ann. I said, “How did it go?” She goes, “She’s all set. She just didn’t get it right. Turned out all you had to do was reinstall the software index her database and she’s fine now. You want to know the best part, Mitch?” I said, “Yes.” She goes, “She gave me a $100 bill.” That was my light bulb moment. I said, “What would happen if I were to mobilize my best Timeslips customers as consultants and deploy them all over the country as a mobile sales force support system? Would that be a good idea?” What I did is I created a test, which was step one I created a test and I offered to test for sale. I sold it for $500. If people passed it, they could become certified. If they didn’t pass it, we return half their money.

Culture Course: We have certified consultants spread out all over the country. They became our third largest sales channel.

How many clients?

At the time we probably had maybe 80,000 clients at the time, which was a third of our total clients when I sold the company. We didn’t mail it to everybody. We mailed it to people who had active tech support plans. It was even a smaller subset. The short and long of it is that what we did is we certified a small group, maybe twenty or 25 people. It was working, but we had a problem. It turns out that although we certified them, we never taught them how to be consultants. Some of these folks showed up looking like Elmer Fudd and smelling worse. It became a bit of a nightmare. It almost crashed the company because they had caused problems. There was one guy who was mentally unstable and threatened to kill everybody in the office because nobody was listening to the training while he was teaching. What we had to do is we had to shut down the program and restart it with a much higher level of care and training. It took six months. I called every person who had a problem. I interviewed them and found out what the problem was. My team and I rebuilt the program, reopened it and ended up in less than a year selling 350 certifications.

We had 350 certified consultants spread out all over the country. They became our third largest sales channel. Over the course of a couple two years, doubled our revenue and reduced our support costs by 20%. Everyone in the world is saying to me, “How did you do this? What did you do? Share it with me.” I got a call from a buddy of mine. His name is Scott Cook, Co-Founder of Intuit. Scott says, “I hear about what you’re doing there with your certified consultants. You think you could share that system with me?” I said, “Absolutely, Scott. I’d love to.”

Maybe expand on Intuit because Intuit owns QuickBooks and Mint.com and Quicken.

Scott knew what I wanted. Scott had a policy where no third-party products were able to link back then to QuickBooks or Quicken. I said, “I would be thrilled to share with you, but you know what I need?” He goes, “Yes, I know. I’m prepared now.” I said, “Great,” so I got what I wanted, which was an exclusive link between my time billing software, which was a receivables module for accounting for services directly into QuickBooks. That elevated us yet one more notch. Can you imagine competitors going up against me now? I have offices in every state. I had 28 offices in California alone. Certification changed the world and allowed me to sell the company for eight figures. Needless to say, I’m a fan.

We all have common values. It's just that without stating those common values, we don't know what they are. Click To Tweet

Did you incorporate that to the company that you ran with Tony Robinson and Chet Holmes, Business Breakthroughs International?

The answer is no. We never did that because we were moving fast on many different fronts. There were eleven divisions, including operations. That meant nine different products and all different sales forces all that stuff. We were running at full speed all the time. We never got around to it. We still ended up with over 50 coaches who worked with us directly and another fifteen consultants, high-level, high-end consultants. Certification never played a role in what we did. In fact, I forgot about it in the sense that I never brought it up again until a client asked me if I would do it for them. They had read most of the blog posts I put on my MitchRusso.com and said, “Do you think you could do that for us?” I didn’t know what to charge. I said, “What do you charge for something that could have such dramatic circumstances?” so I picked a number out of thin air and they said, “That sounds fine,” and I built their certification for them. Now, I’m doing it in the modern era in 2016, 2017, in 2016 mostly. I incorporated all the tools that we have. We have a wealth of amazing tools that we could use to build certification. We have Learning Management Systems, for example. We have all kinds of marketing systems and Infusionsoft, etc. We built a fantastic system for him and then I started getting more clients. That’s when I decided that I’d like to write a book about it. That’s what Power Tribes is all about.

You mentioned Intuit. Let’s talk about other massive companies and how they’ve used certifications to not just grow their team, but to market by certifying actual clients and customers.

There are dozens of them. My favorite example is Infusionsoft. For many years, people would call Infusionsoft, “Confusionsoft.” The reason is that it’s hard to use. I don’t care what they say now, to me it’s still hard to use. Here’s the interesting thing. Infusionsoft was a nice little company out in somewhere near Phoenix, Arizona. They are maybe running it about $5 million to $6 million a year in sales, which is still pretty good for a little software company. Someone had the bright idea as, “Why don’t we teach some of our best customers how to install and maintain Infusionsoft so that we don’t have to?” That became the beginning of their certification program.

If anyone knows what Infusionsoft is now, it is a billion-dollar company in terms of market cap. They have dominated the CRM space when it comes to sequential marketing. They’ve done it all through by building certified consultants. Not only did they end up turning all those folks into salespeople. Certified consultants sell and get a commission for every time somebody buys Infusionsoft and pays for it every month. Not only that, but they also ended up with the tech force that is unmatched in terms of size and power. Using certification, they generate millions and millions of dollars in certification fees, in the symposium, event fees and training. All these things play into how they use certification to double and quadruple their business just about all the time. My claim is that there are at least four recurring revenue streams in every company that nobody is tapping into and certification does that. Certification taps into that, creates those for recurring revenue streams. I’ve been able to see as many as eight under certain circumstances.

Culture Course: The culture course brings everybody into alignment and makes sure that all certified consultants understand the boundaries in which they’re allowed to play.

Salesforce is software that I’ve used for a number of years and I’ve gone to Dreamforce, which is the tech takeover of San Francisco. If you go to Dreamforce, you’ll experience that. Now they’re in the biggest building, I believe, on the West Coast. A lot of how their business works are through certification because it’s essentially a platform in which people, companies can build integrations or apps or customizations. They certified their customers to do more business with them. What was your comment on your experience at Dreamforce?

I was at Dreamforce to meet with Tony. Tony and I had set up a time when he was going to be speaking on stage with Benioff. I was going to meet him the night before. I flew in from Boston that day. I ended up meeting Tony at 1:00 AM and we had three hours of meetings. It was 4:00 AM by the time we recorded a video together that we used to send back to the company to talk about the new direction that we were going to be taking the company. That next day I came out on the floor. I walked around and I sat through some of the keynotes. There were thousands of not people there, but vendors. Every one of those vendors was paying to be there. Every one of those vendors supported Salesforce in one way or another. Look at what certification did for Salesforce. Look at what other CRM companies are missing. This is the story I tell all the time. When I talked to somebody who has CRM software they said, “Eventually we’re going to get around to that.” I said, “Take your time,” but look at what it’s done for these types of companies. Does that mean that because Salesforce exists or because Infusionsoft exists that no one else can do it? Absolutely not.

This is the reason why I named the book this way. The goal is not to just sell certification. The goal is to build a loyal tribe led in the direction that is in complete synchronization with the company and the company’s founder. When these things happen, when you are able to align your tribe with the values of the company, you create something much bigger and more important than a company itself. You create this huge supportive community that has more importance than your own employees. That’s what certification does. In my world, when I build certification for clients, we start with the code of ethics. I have a standard code of ethics, a 38-point code of ethics, which I provide my clients and we customize those to meet exactly their values and then we record the culture course. The culture course I have created but is recorded in the CEOs voice. What the culture course does is it brings everybody into alignment. It makes sure that all certified consultants understand the boundaries in which they’re allowed to play and do anything they want. That is amazing freedom.

You essentially have created your code of ethics and then you go into a company and essentially align whether it’s ten, whether it’s five, whether it’s twenty. You align those but then because you already have them done, then the CEO or the leader is able to record what you’ve already created but it aligns perfectly with the company.

We all have common values. It’s just that without stating those common values, we don’t know what they are. Here’s a simple example. Patrick, you had never encouraged someone to copy the content of your website and pawn it off as their own, would you?

Most people don't realize they already have more leads than they need. Click To Tweet

No.

That happens. A coaching organization brings on a new coach, without a code of ethics, without establishing a culture, at that point, we’ve seen coaches do exactly what I just said and worse. The idea is if you set guidelines and boundaries and then you encourage people to work within them, you only get exactly what you want. Otherwise, you don’t know what you’re going to get.

Everyone brings years, decades, thousands, millions of experiences that have formed their perspective of how things should be and they’re all different. I would say the binding nature of a code or a set of values allows everyone to talk from not the exact same perspective, but from the closest to exact possible.

That again is why I believe it was important to codify this. This is the same code. I’ve evolved this code over the course of many years. This is the same code we started with the Timeslips Corporation, later brought to BBI and evolved there further. We ended up using it when we work with clients as well. It’s the way that you build a company’s values together with the people in the company and then creates this foundation as an extension to everyone who you bring in as a consultant.

It’s necessary. You gave examples of when you were experimenting this with your first company. How you had the guy that was mentally unstable go in and almost ruin not just your brand, but the other company too. I would say looking at those values, the first step in any venture as far as what I’ve been taught starts there to make sure that everybody is aligned.

When we were at BBI, one of our best salesmen happened to have an interest in neo-Nazism. It turned out his Facebook was covered with it. He was a perfectly nice guy. We never knew that except he was thrilled to share it with customers. You can imagine we weren’t too happy about that.

As I step out of my perspective and look at this conversation from our audience’s standpoint, I would say you don’t have many Marc Benioffss in the audience. For some of the smaller organizations that you address in the book, how do you have that conversation with them that this isn’t just a billion-dollar company idea? This can be done on a small scale.

Some of my clients are in fact relatively small companies comparatively speaking. I’ll explain the math to you and you’ll see exactly what size company works. If you were to offer certification to your customers, let’s think of your client base and that number is X. What you know about your customer base or your client base is that there is a percentage of them that are passionate about you and your work and the products that you’ve created. Those people, number one, set themselves apart because they’re passionate. If we take a subsection of them and we call them early adapters, those are the folks that are going to buy just about anything you offer, anytime you offer it. If you look at a whole population and we were to do an estimate of the early adopters, it would be somewhere between 2% and possibly on the high end 5% of your audience.

If you have an audience, and let’s say you have 500 people who are your customers, which isn’t a big company. You said 5% of that, that’s 25 people. Let’s say 3% of that, that’s fifteen people. If you were to sell to fifteen people certifications for $20,000 a copy or $25,000 a copy, that’s a nice little windfall that you get to repeat every quarter. Think about the mountaintop. There are the early adapters at the top, then there are the people who would be open to it if they understood it but want to wait for somebody else to have gone first. You have a larger element of that pinnacle and that mountaintop who would be available to buy certification and on and on. You could literally build certification for a company running a few million dollars in revenue as long as you have enough customers to cover the expenses of building your first launch. Once you launch certification and once you generate that first tranche of money, you would set aside 20% of that to market. Here’s the key. If you go on the internet and you say, “I want to be a coach.” You can buy coach for anywhere from $75 to $18,000 if you buy it from the John Maxwell Organization. What you get is a certificate and a thank you. At that point, you’re on your own.

With that, the words, “Good luck,” comes to mind. My belief is that the people that we would certify in the organizations I work with would never ever be sold a bill of goods like that. Instead, what we’re offering them is a lifetime opportunity to create a profession. In order to create a profession, there have to be leads. In order to sell certification, my mandate is that we have to also create a lead generation system for our certified consultants. That’s everything I lay out in the book on exactly how to do that. Most people don’t realize they already have more leads than they need. If you think about any company, 90% of their mailing list is prospects who never bought. If you went back to those same prospects, even if they’re two years old and said, “Last time we tried to sell you this, but now we’d like to sell it to you with a series of free one-on-one coaching sessions that will help you get started and make sure that you’re successful.”

You’re going to revive some percentage of those folks. The coaches or consultants, in this case, are going to be thrilled to work for free. Why? They get to build a relationship with these people and eventually upsell them to coaching or consulting. We already know that anybody we talk to already has a built-in prospect base that we can convert some percentage to new clients. We’re generating revenue from certification. We’re generating revenue from the old client base. We’re generating revenue from the training that we provide on a yearly basis. We have another thing that we talk about in the book called ascension. Every company that you’d ever go to work for has a path. If you come in at the entry level, if you do a good job you get to be promoted to the next level. Why shouldn’t certification programs have an ascension path as well? My belief is that you create ascension in any program that costs money to ascend, but at the same time returns 3X to 10X what you paid. That’s the theory on which my programs work. That is a client pays for certification, by twelve months later they should have 3X to 10X what they paid back and willing to pay again next year.

Culture Course: Within business, there’s multiple ways in which you can create value for other people. You just have to open up your mind to those possibilities.

There are lots of thoughts that have gone through my head in the past. Especially with all the certifications that I paid for people that are here that work for me, but it’s not my certifications. They’re certifications for other programs. I’ve thought over the years how powerful that idea is, but it’s profound being able to certify existing relationships that you have. It’s a profound idea. What are the best ways to learn about the book or to buy the book? Do you have some learning that you have online where people can go and learn more about this idea and how to incorporate it into a business?

First of all, you can go to MyPowerTribe.com, which is where you would get information about the services that I deliver. You can go on Amazon and you could search for Mitch Russo, you’ll see both my books. You could place an order for Power Tribes. We’re creating a short course that we’re going to sell for $495. Anyone who preorders the book is going to get the course for free. At that point, all you have to do is go to MyPowerTribe.com and on that page, you’ll be able to enter the invoice number from your Amazon receipt and get access to the course. Whatever the book might cost, maybe $20, you’re going to get a pretty informative course on how to set yourself up for certification in terms of understanding what it takes, making sure you’re a fit and understanding the benefits of doing it.

Why don’t you give out the other ways in which people can follow you, learn more about you because I know you have a few other websites?

The central website for me is MitchRusso.com and that’s the place where I have over 50 business building blog posts there. I house my podcast there. You could probably contact me easily from that place as well. For the most part, you just have to Google Mitch Russo. I’m all over the place.

You have a podcast too, Your First Thousand Clients Podcast. You’re doing quite a bit and I wanted to thank you for the value you’re providing based on the experiences that you’ve had. I can’t wait to learn more about the certification idea.

You’re going to learn a lot more about it because there’s going to be a fairly big release on that. I’m excited to talk to people in the press and podcasters like you about it because I believe it’s the way that we work now. I believe the world is evolving to individuals being empowered and going out there and crafting their future by themselves with the help of others. This is a blueprint for how to do it.

Society is filled with opportunities and I would say a mindset is definitely a big barrier to that. I know you talked about that quite a bit, but this is a testament to the fact that within the business there are multiple ways in which you can create value for other people. You have to open up your mind to those possibilities. Mitch, it’s been wonderful having you on. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Patrick.

Important Links:

About Mitch Russo

TWS 9 | Culture Course Mitch Russo says his path to business success stemmed from his time as a high school rock band guitarist in Brooklyn, New York. From learning about business, to PR, to promotion, and sales, Mitch’s propensity for execution was nurtured early and led him to start Timeslips Corp, later selling it for eight figures.

Mitch then ran Sage, PLC as COO, and later became the CEO of Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes Business Breakthroughs International, which he grew to $25 million-plus per year. He’s also the author of the Amazon #1 Bestseller, The Invisible Organization.

Mitch now hosts a podcast and helps CEOs build independent tribes of Certified Consultants, helping develop loyalty and engagement with their most valuable customers.

The Principle Of Grit with Angela Duckworth

November 1, 2018 Patrick Donohoe Comments Off

TWS 8 | Principle Of Grit

American academic, psychologist, and popular science author Angela Lee Duckworth talks about the principle of grit and why it is an important component to success. She is a Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies grit and self-control. Angela takes us into the science behind these characters as she also imparts her non-profit called Character Lab. Learn how she discovered this principle as she shares its opposite and how DNA plays a part. She talks about the roles models that exemplify those characters plus developing grit among children, exploring how failure is not a bad thing while sharing the differences among generations when it comes to society’s pressures.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Principle Of Grit with Angela Duckworth

My guest is Angela Duckworth and she is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also the Founder and CEO of Character Lab, which is a not for profit whose mission is to advance the science and practice of character development. She’s also the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Angela, thanks for joining me. It’s awesome to have you on.

I’m so happy to have this conversation.

For those who don’t know you, you’re right next to Simon Sinek as far as TED Talk views are concerned. Would you mind going into your experience in discovering the principle of grit?

I am a psychologist by training. Before I was a psychologist, I was a teacher. I taught kids math in middle school and high school. The fascination I have with grit and with achievement in part stems from being a teacher and watching kids. Some of them do fantastically well. Others in the same exact classroom, under the same roof, using the same books and of seemingly a comparable intelligence were not doing well. One of the reasons that some do well in life and some don’t is the ability to muster perseverance and passion for something over long periods of time, not giving up. Also thinking about something because you want to be in adulthood, at least voluntarily obsessed by something so that you’re always working on it in the back of your mind.

One reason that some do well in life and some don't is the ability to muster perseverance and passion for something over periods of time. Click To Tweet

This helps me sometimes to understand a word or an idea is by knowing what the opposite is. What would you say the opposite of grit is?

The opposite of grit would be apathy, not caring and certainly not doing anything about a goal that means something to you.

That’s what I thought it is. It’s not caring about something. It’s being okay with mediocre things and mediocre results.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

There are some people who would say, “I have a good work ethic,” but they are working on one thing after another. There’s no consistency in the direction in which they’re working. That’s also a failure of grit is to be working hard but on very different things all the time. There’s nothing immoral about that but I do think it’s hard to be excellent at something unless you work at it for a while.

I would also say the drive behind the effort is also important in a sense to identify. As you’ve done a tremendous amount of study and research around the principle, what is the common denominator as far as where it comes from?

One of the things that I should say at the outset is that this question of, “Is it in my gene? Was I born gritty?” There are people that we know who are like, “They were like that when they were two years old.” There is a genetic component to grit. In other words, your DNA does influence how gritty you are, but that’s also true of extraversion and your height and your preference for broccoli. I’m not kidding. These have all been studied in twin studies and everything about you is partly your genes. I should acknowledge that, but I don’t think it’s worth obsessing over in part because it’s true for everything. It doesn’t mean that our experiences don’t matter, they enormously matter. Maybe the most important thing about grit is having a role model. Somebody that you’ve seen work hard, get up again and somebody who wears it on their sleeve that they love what they do, which is why leaders and also anybody who considers himself a mentor or a teacher to another person, they play a very important role in cultivating grit in other people.

What are some of the societal archetypes of grit now that you’re talking about role models and actual people that exemplify some of those characteristics?

If you look carefully at the life stories of the people that you admire, literally pick your favorite coach, sport, musician, politician or entrepreneur. It’s hard not to find stories of passion and perseverance of people who have been toiling for hours a little bit behind the scenes. If you look at Dwayne Johnson, The Rock, who comes from professional wrestling and makes it into Hollywood where he is signing these blockbuster deals more than once a year. If you ask him, it wasn’t luck and it wasn’t talent. It was that he was incredibly gritty. Also the hours of work that he puts in behind the scenes. They never show up on YouTube. You could, in a way, nominate your favorite high-achiever. Then when you start digging, have an open mind and look for whatever you want to look for, I do often find, at least I have found when I did that, I find grit.

It's hard to be excellent at something unless you work at it for a while. Click To Tweet

Character Lab, which is a nonprofit where you’re at right now, also something you spend a great deal of time with. I have three children and they’re all different. They all are born with different personalities and some are driven this way or some are driven that way. From a children’s standpoint, what are some of the techniques and the things you do to get kids to understand the importance of the principle of grit?

I’m also a parent, mine are sixteen and fifteen years old. There are two things parents can keep in mind when they want to bring out grit in their own children. One is about perseverance and work ethic. I do think kids are not born spontaneously wanting to work hard. It’s part of being an animal. You don’t see squirrels and the park doing push-ups. Effort is something that all animals try to avoid. In a way, we’re all lazy. When you want your kids to work hard, practice, take feedback, come at it again and go to a track meet even though it’s raining. These are things that parents have to play a role. You cannot expect your kids to do those things on their own.

When your kids are about the age that mine are, you will see that all of those times that you made them do things and maybe nag them a little bit, they do pay off. I used to think when I was raising my kids that they would do it on their own. I thought they would see my husband and myself work hard and do it on their own. They do need more direct parenting than I thought. On the passion side though, which may be even more important or at least as important, is that you have to watch your kids for what they’re interested in. Encourage them to sample widely, to try things and to develop those interests.

Nothing is sadder to me than a 22-year-old graduating from, for example, the Ivy League school where I teach. They’ve got great skills. They know how to read, how to write. They’ve got great math skills but they have no interest. You’re like, “What are you passionate about?” They’re like, “I don’t know.” That is so sad. Kids do have interests that are emerging in them, but their parents can help them. If you noticed that your kid seems to throw the ball around a lot, encourage them to try some sports. My own daughter, Lucy, she was thinking about food all the time. She was baking or trying to bake. I said to her when she was about thirteen or fourteen, “You could probably get a job like volunteering in a kitchen at a restaurant.” She’s like, “That’s ridiculous. I’m too young.” She was scared. She was shy and I made her do it. Now, she works in kitchens. She has a Saturday job. She would fully own that baking as one of her core interests that she’ll have her whole life. Don’t just work on work ethic as a parent, also be vigilant at trying to get your kids to develop interests.

Principle Of Grit: There is always something to be learned from mistakes because mistakes are information.

I’m going to break down a couple of things that you said, which I’ve struggled with in a sense because my two oldest are girls. I have a four-year-old too. I grew up with all boys and I played sports. I’ve got a huge wake-up call with my wife and two girls as far as understanding how they work and what they’re driven by and the care and the difference than men. For girls, especially at that age where you drive and you push, failure can have a different context, especially when it comes to the social side of things. What are some of the ways in which you have helped your children or you’ve seen children taught or influenced? That helps them get through those difficult times as you’re trying to push them into a class or push them to do this or have them do that. What are some things you use as opposed to just fighting their belligerence?

It’s true that everybody fears making a mistake and failure. It’s also true that there does seem to be a female perfectionism like, “It’s not perfect.” That seems to be more common among girls than it is among boys. It plays out in all kinds of ways. Boys raising their hand before they even know what the question is, they’ve got their hand raised in class to answer it, whereas girls would be much more hesitant on average and then mortified if they make a mistake. There might be many boys out there who are like, “Whatever, I’m going to raise my hand the next time.” What do you do then if you feel like that’s maybe not going to be ideal for your daughters?

First of all, times are changing. I sometimes say to my girls, “I’m going to be a boy about it.” What I mean by that is I’m going to take a risk, I’m going to stand up for myself and I’m going to be bold and effectively raised my hand, but the times are changing. For me, that means something. I grew up in the ‘70s and that to me is how boys act. My own teenage girls get annoyed at me when I say that. They’re like, “What do you say that for?” There’s no reason why boys would be more confident than girls. The times are changing and yet I still think that there are some persistent differences that we can do something about. If we can teach our girls and our boys that mistakes are information, if you raise your hand and you get the wrong answer, then there’s something to be learned there.

It’s like, “Why did you say seven? The answer is nine, not seven.” There was a reason why you said seven and there’s a huge amount to learn from that. If we can get the emotion out of it, and the paralyzing fear of embarrassment, shame and like, “I’m not perfect.” Then take mistakes and correct answers as information, we’ll be like this Rudyard Kipling poem that is called If. There’s a stanza that’s the last thing that you see before you enter the center court at Wimbledon. The players all have to walk onto the center court under the same. It was like, “If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” What that poem means in that line is that whether you get the right answer or the wrong answer, you win the game, you lose the game, you get picked for the fellowship or you don’t. They are impostors because it’s just information. It’s life and your job is to learn from it. Good, learn from it. Bad, learn from it; always learning.

Whether you get the right answer or the wrong answer, you still win the game. Click To Tweet

Where does the idea behind, “Failure is a bad thing and I’m afraid of it,” come from? Failure is a positive thing that is necessary to learning, especially learning in a meaningful way.

Nobody knows, honestly. I was having a meeting with neuroscientists about this very question, “Why are mistakes so terrifying and why do we not want to make them in front of other people in particular?” It’s one thing to fail on your own, but it’s terrifying to fail in front of other people. I don’t think anybody really knows but here are our guests, the collective group of scientists that have been working on this that I’ve been meeting with. There is something that happens when you’re five and you go to kindergarten and you’re in school and you’re now being evaluated. If you noticed two and three-year-olds, they drop stuff all the time. They’re making messes, they break things and they don’t care. They’re like wrecking balls but crucially, you don’t see a lot of shame or embarrassment when they fall down.

If I fell down in front of you, I would be embarrassed before I even felt pain physically. It would be like I’m humiliated before I get worried about whether I broke my kneecap or something. What happens between four and where you and I are? There’s something about going to school, being evaluated and everyone is seeing how worthwhile they are relative to others. I don’t think it’s the fact that we go to school. Maybe it’s about being older. If we can remember what it was like to be a young kid and to go back to where we started, that is how the people that I study who are continuously improving, it’s how they’ve evolved. They have a beginner’s mindset.

I think about that all the time especially with kids. There’s this paradox where you want them to succeed and you want them to be happy, but you realize that success isn’t going to come about by always being happy. There’s going to be instances and pressures and failures are going to make them very upset. I’m not sure if it’s avoidable but I’ve thought about the same thing. I have a bigger team here and we try to provide good context around the principle of failure. The principle of failure is a socially designed idea if you think about it. It’s good because the biggest successes I’ve seen, they failed the biggest. It’s interesting that I don’t know if it’s a failure muscle or something that you stretch and build, but I see that. The grit idea, as I’ve thought about having this interview with you, is what happens when you experienced that.

Principle Of Grit: As immense innovation continues to occur, so does the pressure from society’s expectations.

It’s such a profoundly insightful thing that you just said. I have a student who is working with me and she finds that people can have two different attitudes about failure. There are people who think that failure is debilitating. It’s destructive and bad like a typhoon, you should avoid failure at all costs. The alternative is that there is a silver lining to failure that, of course, you would rather be successful at least in the instance, but that failure is the way to learn that failure can be strengthening. To see failure as a cloud with a silver lining. I want to emphasize that it’s not that we know anybody who’s like, “I hope I trip every time I take a step. I hope that all my ventures go bankrupt,” but to see the cloud and then to also look for the silver lining is adapted. What she finds is that when parents have failure and is potentially also enhancing as well as painful that their kids can be much more growth-oriented and less fearful about making mistakes.

I would say adding to that, it isn’t this one-time mental shift. It’s a philosophy or it’s a way of living if you think about it. I do believe some of the books that you reference in your book and also in other instances, Carol Dweck’s Mindset book, there’s a lot of talk around this idea. It’s exciting because I look at generations and we’re in the similar generation and the generation of my kids and the generations in between. It is fascinating to me how their mindset associated with life is different. Would you maybe speak to that as you look at Millennials, you look at your kids? I’m not even sure what the generation is called. What you’ve seen is their exposure to more information. Their exposure to more judgment in a sense because 30 years ago it was your class, it was where you went to church, who was your neighborhood. Now it’s exposed to a very wide audience. I’m not sure if that has any correlation to what their potential is. How have you seen the different generations deal with this idea of perseverance based on the expectation that society has for them?

It’s a hard question but it’s a great question. How are the Millennials different from the greatest generation? How are the kids growing up now different from our generation? It’s something that you wish you had a time machine for. As a scientist, I can’t do what scientists do, which is do an experiment. I have to get a kid from the 1950s to come into the lab with the kid from now and that’s a real limit. If you think about what it was like to grow up in our generation, I want to take you back in time even more. Imagine you’re growing up in a village 300 years ago. You don’t even know any more than 100 people. There are the people in the village. You might be the best musician in the village. You could be the second-best baker in the village. To be the best baker, it’s out of seven billion people because the world is flat and we can make all comparisons. You’re very unlikely to be the best musician because there are seven billion people around. I do think of that and this is a guess because I don’t have a time machine. My guess is that that does produce a lot of stress, pressure, uncertainty and insecurity.

One of the mysteries that science hasn’t figured out is that rates of depression and anxiety, in particular, are going up. Not only in the United States and not only among teenagers but in other age groups and also all around the world. You have to ask, we have more food, we have more entertainment, we have more safety, crime is going down, but still anxiety is going up like, “What’s going on?” I do wonder whether it’s in part because these comparisons are not with 30 people anymore, they’re not with 100 people, they’re not with 1,000 people. You’re comparing yourself to everyone. You’re not as cool as Beyoncé. You don’t sing as well as Adele and you’re not as fast as Usain Bolt and you’re not as good looking as, fill in the blank. Those can be difficult to manage for the people who are growing up now.

Success isn't going to come about by always being happy. Click To Tweet

This is what I thought of when you were speaking. My next-door neighbor who just moved, they moved from Palo Alto. There are a lot of people moving from California for a number of reasons, financially. His two little kids, there’s pressure growing up there because of the expectations set by the community and the immense amount of innovation that is occurring. Having a startup and starting a business and innovating, that is the label most are trying to achieve which I’m not sure is realistic for everyone. It’s a fascinating statement because the pressure is building. The significance of teaching some of the principles that you’re focusing at with your nonprofit, the Character Lab, that’s vital. I don’t think kids can get enough of it.

I would say parents these days, and I’ve put myself into this position. I have to work a lot and the amount of time I spend focused on understanding their experiences in life and then helping them to process them the right way and put them in the right context has been hard. That’s where services like yours are profound and it’s not just kids, it’s everyone. It’s adults too but more so with kids because kids are our future. I love the principle of grit because it’s one of those fundamentals to success. That also made me think of a couple other questions in regard to your study of success and achievement. What are maybe some of the other compliments or principles associated with the success or achievement equation or is it grit alone?

Definitely not grit alone. I won’t say much about luck, although I do believe there is luck. Definitely good luck, bad luck and anybody who believes differently just don’t they’re facing reality. There’s also talent. I don’t study talent, but I do think some people are better at us naturally. It doesn’t mean that we can’t change our talent, but I do think that there are advantages. Other than luck and other than talent and other than grit, what else? There are two things that highlight as general categories of things. One is interpersonal or social skills. I call these character strengths of heart, their generosity, gratitude, empathy, social agility, being able to manage different social situations. There are some careers where you don’t need it very much. Like I sit in this room and I program on this computer, and nobody talks to me. Almost all careers require that you interact in a harmonious and positive way with other people. CEOs tell me all the time that in addition to grit, they want people with social skills with these teams.

The second category would be curiosity or what I call character strengths of mind, curiosity, creativity, intellectual humility. This is essentially being a very good thinker and being somebody who has a fallback, who will always be like, “Let me think about that. Let me keep thinking about it because it’s clear from this conversation that that’s you. It’s not everyone because you can also stop thinking about it. A lot of people don’t think about it.” In terms of this equation, there’s luck, there is a talent, there’s grit. There are character strengths of heart, these social character strengths. There are character strengths of mind and being a curious, thoughtful, person who likes to flex the muscle of their mind. If you have all of those things, the odds are going to be in your favor.

One of the final questions that I wanted to ask you is as you studied this, and you’ve clearly put a lot of time, effort and resources behind studying this and helping others understand it, how has it impacted you as an individual, whether it’s professionally or with your family or personally?

Before I get out of bed every day, I do three blessings, three good things. It doesn’t take more than 60 seconds and sometimes it’s the same list. I’m like, “Jason, Lucy, Amanda,” because those are three good things in my life. Sometimes it’s like, “The avocados finally got ripe.” That’s one good thing, “It’s not raining now. I had a good meeting.” One of the things that is often on my list is that I love what I do. I feel like I have meaning and I have purpose. I can tell you feel the same. For those people who can wake up and get out of bed and say, “I don’t know how far I’m going to get, but this is a good road to walk down,” that’s me.

I know a lot of people who have almost infinite wealth or they have fame or they have power, but if they don’t have a sense of purpose like, “This road is worth walking down. I don’t know how far I’m going to get.” I emailed a student that I’d been studying. He’s gritty. I literally sent my email, “Cody, I will take my dying breath trying to figure out how to get kids to thrive.” He wrote me back and it was like, “We’re going to work on that together.” That, itself, is the greatest blessing and it’s possible for anyone. It doesn’t mean you have to win the Nobel Prize or the Super Bowl. Could everyone in this world wake up and feel like they’re working on something that has purpose and try their best to do a better job the next day? The answer is yes, everyone can. I hope everyone does do that.

The feeling you get of seeing somebody achieve and accomplish something, there are very few circumstances that serve better than that. I believe, and this is what I try to teach my kids and my team here and what I try to learn about, that whatever level you’re at, that level doesn’t dictate having that feeling. Being able to be of influence for somebody else and also driving towards something else yourself. The discovery of purpose is the whole Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game and Game Theory. It’s not something you wake up one morning and have a thought pop in your mind but it’s a constant pursuit. It’s one of the greatest pursuits ever. There’s a high suicide rate in Utah that they’ve been talking about. I look at kids and with the limited experiences that they’ve had as far as understanding the meaning behind their experiences. The school system frustrates me sometimes. Their intention is genuine but the ability to talk to some of these skills and principles are absent unfortunately. Would you mind talking more about Character Lab and what you guys are doing and how you’re being of influenced to, whether it’s on an individual level or a school system level?

The biggest successes have been the biggest failures. Click To Tweet

Character Lab provides actionable advice to parents and teachers all based on science. For those grown-ups in the world who think about kids a lot and how to help them develop grit and gratitude, curiosity, self-control, creativity, honesty, all the things that Aristotle said make a good life, make a life worth living a life of meaning and purpose as you put it. There is a science behind those character strengths and we try to share it. Everything that we offer, watch this video, try this activity, try saying this to your kid, it’s all based on science. It’s supported by foundations and individuals, it is 100% free.

What are ways in which the audience can learn about Character Lab and follow you? Are there any other social media that you use to communicate?

I do have social media. I’m so bad at social media that I can’t even tell what the handles are. If you go to CharacterLab.org, you’ll see that there is a newsletter that I’m starting to write for parents and speakers and that’s free too.

Angela, it was awesome to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us and I wish you the best.

Thank you. I enjoyed this.

About Angela Duckworth

In her late twenties, Angela left a demanding job as a management consultant to teach math to seventh graders in New York City public schools. Several years in the classroom taught her that effort was tremendously important to success.

To begin to solve the mystery of why some people work so much harder and longer than others, Angela entered the PhD program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a 2013 MacArthur Fellow and is now a professor.

With Dave Levin and Dominic Randolph, she founded Character Lab with the aim of radically accelerating the science and practice of character development. Angela is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, and shared her expertise in a 2013 TED Talk.

Property As A Wealth Strategy with Paul Moore

October 25, 2018 Patrick Donohoe 00:40:52 Comments Off

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TWS 7 | Property

Wealth isn’t simply a bank account balance or a dollar amount of monthly cashflow, rather, it’s a state of mind. John Locke, the philosopher whose words we used as the backbone of this season, argued that the law of nature obliged all human beings not to harm another in their inalienable pursuit of life, liberty and property. He lived at a different time period, the mid-1600s, yet the liberties he fought for would produce a similar mindset we are seeking when it comes to wealth. One of the keys to wealth is the principle of property. Paul Moore, managing director of Wellings Capital and host of the podcast How To Lose Money, talks about the importance of understanding knowledge, education, and experience, and how that relates to property.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Property As A Wealth Strategy with Paul Moore

What is the key to wealth? Is there a magic bullet or a fast track? This year in the podcast, my focus has revolved around these questions. 2018 is almost over, as is season three where we are focusing on the principle of property, where are we? First, I chose the phrase, “Life, liberty and property,” because it’s a simple way to describe the foundational principles to achieve wealth. What I came to realize is that there is a natural human inclination to be wealthy. There always has been. There is an essential variable to consider when determining whether or not there is a key or a magic bullet. That variable is the definition of wealth. Ultimately, what I believe we are seeking is the combination of two mindsets, the state of mind that comes from being free and the feeling of certainty regarding your vision of the future.

Wealth isn’t simply a bank account balance or a dollar amount of monthly cashflow rather than a state of mind. Think about it. John Locke, the philosopher whose words we used as the backbone of this season, “No one ought to harm another in their inalienable pursuit of life, liberty and property,” lived in a time period, the mid-1600s, that’s impossible to fathom. Yet, the liberties he fought for would produce a similar mindset we are seeking when it comes to wealth. This mindset is available to all and is why I wrote the book and why I do this podcast. It’s so that you too can believe that it’s possible for you.

Season one, life. Do you consider yourself your most important asset and invest in ways to be more valuable to others? Season two, liberty. What are you pursuing? Independence and freedom or retirement? Season three, property. Does your wealth strategy, including your investments align with what you know or do you delegate that responsibility to someone else? My guest is the co-host of an insightfully charming podcast, How to Lose Money, which is one of the best ways to learn about business and financial strategy. Paul Moore is an experienced businessman, a real estate investor and the Managing Director of Wellings Capital. Let’s turn our brains on and get ready to learn.

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The Perfect Investment: Create Enduring Wealth from the Historic Shift to Multifamily Housing

My guest is Paul Moore. Paul is the Managing Director of Wellings Capital. He’s also one of the hosts for the How to Lose Money Podcast. He is an acquaintance of mine and I can’t wait for this interview. Paul is also the author of The Perfect Investment. Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for taking the time.

Patrick, it’s great to be here. Thanks.

I had a wonderful time in your podcast when I was invited to it. I had heard of it before, but the theme is amazing. It’s an incredible opportunity for you as a business person to learn from the failures of others through the theme of losing money. It’s pretty fascinating. I told the story on it that I’ve never told before and it was a great opportunity. I’d love to hear your background and how you got to the point you’re at right now with your real estate investment company as well as the podcast.

I wanted to be a parapsychologist in junior high. I’d seen the movie Ghostbusters at some point and it seemed like a good idea. I didn’t have any counsel. No one told me, “You’d probably be good at this or bad at that.” I found out there was no degree in that, especially not at the University of Utah or out in that area. I went and got a petroleum engineering degree, which sounded like fun drilling oil wells but I never used it. I went on and got an MBA. I went to Ford Motor Company for about five years. After that, I started my own company. We’re an HR outsourcing company, a staffing firm. About five years into it, it turned out that a lot of publicly traded companies were interested in gobbling up companies like ours.

When we sold our company after five years for almost $3 million, I thought, “We are smart.” I started investing and I thought, “I’m an investor now. I’m semi-retired at 34 and I’m an investor.” I found out that I wasn’t an investor at all and I wasn’t at all qualified to make the decisions I was making. I confused investing with gambling. I ended up losing a lot of the money I had made in that company, but I did get into real estate, which was a great move.

It’s much easier to avoid failure than it is to copy success. Click To Tweet

Losing money is one of the best investments you can make. We approach life knowing certain things and we try to go to school. We try to gain an education by reading books or listening to podcasts, but there’s nothing that’s a better education than losing and feeling a level of pain. From a human standpoint, it’s an indicator that something needs to change. You experienced that firsthand as do most successful investors. What was the early lesson that you had that woke you up to the fact that you weren’t necessarily the investor you thought you were?

I started losing money. I invested $100,000 with a guy who had this amazing foreign options trading thing. He was showing us how we could make 3% a month on our money. He was doing them. At least my paperwork said I was getting 3% a month. It’s $3,000 a month and it looked great on paper. Then I went down to visit him in Charlotte and I had this funny feeling. Something he said didn’t add up with what I had heard about him. I had this gut. I went to consider investing another $100,000 and I left there with a distinct impression, “I should not invest more with this guy.” I wish I had followed my gut and withdrawn the $110,000 or whatever I had in there but instead I didn’t.

About two months later, the FBI caught up with him. He still won’t tell me and the other 2,000 investors where he hid the $18 million offshore. He’s even faced with 153 years in the federal penitentiary. He still hasn’t told anybody where he hid the money and I’m not sure why. That was one of the many examples of things I invested in where I confused investing and speculating or gambling. I think investing is when your principal is almost completely safe, and you’ve got a chance to make a return. Gambling or speculating is when your principal is not at all safe and you’ve got a chance to make a return. I confused the two and found myself about $2.5 million in debt for those reasons and other reasons ten years after I sold my company in 2007. It was a tough time.

How did you piece it all together? I introduced you to the theme of this season’s podcast where we are combining the first two seasons, which talk about the importance of understanding knowledge, education, experience and how that relates to property. That combination is what creates an element of value. Looking at investments or property, you experienced investments that didn’t create value, they did the opposite. You have seen successful investments now, I’m assuming. What are some of the differentiating factors between the investments that lost money and the investments that gain money? We’ve talked about gambling versus investing. What are some of those variables that determine whether it’s a successful investment?

There was this guy on a TV commercial from the ’70s. He was a little whiny guy. He was sitting across the desk from this guy with his huge chair and he said, “Son, we only hire people with experience.” The kid turns around the camera and said, “How do I get the experience?” The experience of losing money and the experience of doing a lot of these things gave me a lot of the wherewithal I needed to make money now and to make smarter investments. Lack of due diligence was a big part of it. Trusting one other person’s word who was investing or who was paid to tell me to invest with them was helpful. This is the experience thing and the reason I told that little story is I was always surprised.

We put together a lot of successful real estate deals through the 2000s and beyond. I was always surprised when people say, “No, I don’t want to invest in that. I don’t know anything about it.” I’d say to myself at least, “You’ve got tens of millions of dollars, but you don’t want to invest $200,000 in this wireless internet project?” Warren Buffett said, “I invest in things I understand. I don’t invest in general on the internet because I don’t know where it will be in ten or twenty years. The internet will never change the way people chew gum.” When I stopped investing in things like the wireless internet or throwing money down to a bottom of an oil well or things that had a risk and things I didn’t know the outcome of, I began to do much better. The bottom line is I stopped swinging for the fences and I started trying to hit singles and doubles and that’s when everything changed.

Tell us about Wellings Capital. What are some of the projects? Who’s on the team? How do you determine who’s on the team? Tell us the story behind how you put that company together, which has resulted in some successful investment.

Property: The experience of losing money and doing a lot of things gave me a lot of the wherewithal I needed to make money and to make smarter investments.

Wellings Capital has three principals: Wade Myers, Dr. Brian Robbins and myself. Wade and I had been talking since 2007. He’s a Harvard MBA. He’s got a property management firm that has 220,000 doors under management. It’s not multifamily. It’s doing condos, HOA, POA type of work. He bought quite impressive companies. He’s had some big failures and big successes. He told me he never had any experience in real estate. He didn’t understand it. When I showed him a draft copy of my book, he read about four chapters and skimmed the rest and two hours later he said, “I want it. I want to invest.” We invited him to join our team because he’s got an incredible 55 different M&As and startups, acquisitions, plus some failures. He has invested a lot of money in Hollywood films. A big hit was I Can Only Imagine. The big money guys were behind that. He’s done well over the years and made a lot more money than he has lost.

My other partner, Dr. Brian Robbins, has been a serial entrepreneur as well as a pain management physician. I had asked him to invest with me in a multifamily project I built from the ground up in North Dakota and he said, “It’s too risky.” A Hyatt hotel that my friend built that I helped him with, “It’s too risky,” wireless internet, “It’s too risky,” something else, oil and gas, “It’s too risky.” When he heard about multifamily and I showed him the demographics that I think are going to make multifamily a great investment for decades to come, he was fairly stunned. He said, “This is something I can get behind,” then he jumped in with both feet.

What year was that when he joined up?

That was in 2013.

What’s your take in the multifamily space now? I’ve observed, and I have a personal investment in several multifamily projects in various states. I look at what the market has done even in the last four years and how much money has come into it, how much syndication is being done to either do a ground up or acquire and remodel and value-add play. I see more and more as weeks go on. How are you looking at the multifamily space these days? What are some of the conclusions you’ve come to?

First of all, we’ve concluded at the title of my book. It’s The Perfect Investment because it does a great job balancing risk and return. The Sharpe ratio measures return divided by risk for a whole lot of different asset classes. Multifamily and self-storage are at the very top of the list. They’re performing about 460% better than the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 in the return divided by the risk because the beta, the up and down of multifamily is much more stable. It’s much more predictable. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, according to a report I read, haven’t had a single foreclosure in multifamily in three or four years. Where else can you get something like that? We’re talking about nationwide. That does speak to the great underwriting and the conservative underwriting that they do.

Multifamily has got a lot of big things going forward. Number one, in 1995, the government tampered with the housing market and they thought that anybody who could fog a mirror should be able to get a loan. Homeownership skyrocketed from its historical low 60s to 69.2%. In 2005, I had a friend who was making $40,000 or $50,000 a year who bought a $600,000 mansion as his second home. He had no business doing it, no way of paying the mortgage. It was before Airbnb. I don’t know what he was thinking. He lost that back to the bank in a matter of months. That was happening all over the US homeownership. When things plummeted from 69% to about 63% from 2005 to 2015 and every percent dropped meant a million new renters.

Fall in love with the numbers. Don't fall in love with the property. Try to be as objective as you can. Click To Tweet

There were all kinds of other renters coming into the renter pool as well. Number one, Baby Boomers, the smallest group of renters are the fastest growing group. The statistics say that when a Baby Boomer starts renting, they’ll never purchase a home again on average. The second group is Millennials. That’s the largest demographic group in US history with about 80 million strong. In general, they don’t see the reason to be tied down to a 30-year contract on a seemingly overpriced home when they might have new friends, new opportunities, new jobs in another part of the city, the state or the country next year. They’re much more transient and they have much more debt as well. They’re on the position with the slightly more difficult qualifications than 2005 house standards to qualify for a mortgage. They’re not quite there. Even though Millennials are starting to get married, starting to move into homes, on average, they rent far more and for far longer than Baby Boomers historically. Third, we’ve got immigration. Immigration is still playing a very significant and increasing role in the US demographic picture. Immigrants rent more often and for longer than people born in the US. I think we can look out for many years and say that this is a great investment.

In my book, I called it the perfect investment because it seemed to balance. It was a property, which is a big thing. You own a hard asset. You get all the tax benefits. There are twelve significant tax benefits you get from owning real estate directly and you get this fairly stable, fairly predictable, single or double typically. Although a lot of multifamily syndicators have been hitting homeruns for a long time. I see that coming to a place where maybe they won’t happen anymore. I’m even wondering how people are affording and why are people even investing in multifamily right now because the perfect investment is no longer perfect if you can’t find a deal that makes sense.

That’s where I was going to go because what I talked about on your show was the product could make all the sense in the world. There could be the right cap rates, there could be the right market. It doesn’t mean the investment is going to be successful or the apartment complex is going to be successful. My first question is going to be around not necessarily the market or the metrics that you do due diligence on, but how do you know you’re working with the right person? Then the second thing is there were a lot of apartment investors back in 2007 and 2008. I know in the single-family market why people were leaving their homes.

Another tangent that’s interesting and this came from the chief economist at Fannie Mae where people during 2008, 2009 weren’t even in default about leaving their homes. Fannie Mae went into bankruptcy or was taken into receivership. Because of that, people thought that they had to leave their house. That’s another side issue. My underlying question is what constitutes a good investment, not necessarily from the return, cap and market standpoint, but the operator’s standpoint? Talk to us about how important that team is.

We think that the right property manager and the right market make up about two-thirds of the likelihood of success in buying a multifamily asset. It’s incredibly important to have a market that’s large enough to support multiple significant national or regional property managers. If you might have one that goes South, and we’ve had that happen, you want to have other options. That’s one thing, the property manager. Going back to more of the philosophical level, it’s incredibly important. In our design, we have a built-in gut check thing, like the guy who invested $100,000 within Charlotte years ago. It’s incredibly important to follow your gut. I don’t know about you. I know you’re married. If you’re like me, your wife might have better instincts in some ways than you. She may not know anything about business and my wife doesn’t, but she can somehow spot a phony or a fraud and say, “I don’t know why.” I go, “I want reasons.” She goes, “I just don’t think you should invest with them.” We need to learn to listen to our gut and sometimes it sounds like the voice of our wives.

Property: Our brain at a very deep level allows us to be able to see things in a deeper and a more sensible way than we do.

Have you done that with your wife, had her do gut checks with the people that you’re doing business with?

Yes. I ignored her many times. Those were some of the things I lost money on. The wireless internet company in North Dakota, several of us started that company. She was like, “I don’t think that’s going to work.” I said, “It’s got to work. Let me show you.” I thought we were going to make a huge profit in the third month and here we are seven years into it, shutting it down. There are other times I have listened and now I eagerly seek her out. Even if she doesn’t meet the people in person, I lay it all out for her and I try to get her feedback. Now that she knows I listen, she’s way more likely to try to take a deep breath, be reasonable and not let fear drive for what she had some in the past. That’s why I was able to discount her advice. I said, “That’s just fear. I’m not listening.” That was not a great thing. She didn’t go with me on that trip to Charlotte but she if she had, I know she would have seen through that guy.

I’ve had my wife be part of business discussions and retreats and off sites but as far as bringing on key people, I’ve never had her involved. That’s an incredible idea. It depends on your spouse and their knowledge of people in business investment and so forth. I would definitely agree that she’s one to understand body language and understand the tonality at a level that is almost instinctive.

There are 3,000 signals we send off between tone, eyebrows and body language and all this stuff. We don’t consciously know what those things are, but our brain at a very deep level can make 40 quadrillion calculations per second. Our brain at a very deep level is involved with some quantum physics that I don’t understand. It allows us, and especially our wives in general, to be able to see things in a deeper and a more sensible way than we do. I’ve found that over the years, I’ve often shut that part of me off because on paper it looked like such a good profit and the wireless internet was a perfect example. It was a lot of greed on my part and it was one of the worst investments I ever made of time and money.

The balance of human emotions. That’s a game we’ll always be playing. Maybe talk through some of the elements of your book because using the word perfect could be a slippery slope in a sense. Talk to us about how and why you chose that word to define the core theme of the contents of the book.

One of my favorite internet marketers is Perry Marshall. We had him on as a guest on our How to Lose Money show. He has a book called The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords so I named my book The Definitive Guide to Multifamily Housing. I thought it was great but everybody I talked to about it seemed indifferent or yawned. I had a friend who goes, “Multifamily, after skimming your book, it’s like the perfect investment. You should call it that.” That’s too big of a claim.

Age, wisdom, and counsel all goes into the mix of knowing when to cut your losses and get out and when it's time to start another business. Click To Tweet

I didn’t know much about self-storage at the time. I realized that I couldn’t think of any investment I’ve ever seen, and I was a couple of years into this that was a better investment with a better balance of risk and return. That’s why I had the audacity to name it that. It’s selling quite well. I just don’t know what to do with my next book because I might write a book on self-storage someday. A lot of people in BiggerPockets, which is the ultimate forum for real estate investors with a little over a million strong, a lot of people want to come in and they want a house hack. They want to be a single-family landlord. They want to build up a portfolio of 100 single-family homes and they don’t realize the incredible toll it takes emotionally and in every other way on you to do that.

I’ve seen one person after another who gets up to ten or twenty single-family rentals of whether they’re duplexes or mobile homes or whatever. They sell off the portfolio in frustration. They never make any money because there are so many hassles involved. My argument in the book is there’s a better way. There’s a better way than dealing with toilets, tenants and trash, and that is to invest with a great trustworthy syndicator. The book goes through all the different reasons. Multifamily is a great investment and then a lot of the demographics, a lot of the reasons Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae love it. Then how to find a great syndicator using that same test, that gut-level test. One of the great things toward the end is I talk about a couple of things. Number one, I talked about the various tax savings that commercial real estate provides, which are incredible. I talk about my big why which is my, “Why I’m doing this?” at the very end.

I look at the Trump tax cuts and a lot of the stuff that went through a lot. There are some big benefits to investors, especially in commercial.

A friend of mine showed me how you could take $20 million and turn it into $211 million and throw off $130 million in cashflow over twenty years. He said, “Where else can you get returns like this?” I was like, “That’s amazing.” He said, “If you play your cards right, this passive investor might pay virtually zero in taxes over those two decades.”

Your podcast is fascinating and some of the topics are fascinating. I’m going to definitely start listening because I had seen the best lessons in failure, especially when money is lost. As you have experienced, you’ve learned firsthand 100 ways that people are losing money. What are some of the primary lessons you’ve taken from that and applied to your businesses?

It’s great because it’s a weekly reminder of what not to do and that’s a key for this. I could tell you how we grew our company and sold it for $3 million in under five years in Detroit. That was great. That seemed smart and everything, but I couldn’t replicate that. If I heard that story, if you heard that story from me, it worked out well. The timing, the relationships, all these things, there’s no way to easily replicate that. The lessons I learned from that and the lessons I could teach from that, were pretty small. If I hear all these guests and if they hear me talking about how I lost $500,000 or how one guest lost $70 million, I can say, “I’m not going to do that.”

Property: Making a good investment comes down to not just investing because of an idea, but investing in the people that are actually supporting and running it.

Failure is much easier to avoid than success is to copy I think. People like Tony Robbins might say, “No. I can show you how to get successful.” I agree that’s a point as well. For me, it’s been easier to replicate not failing than it is succeeding. One lesson we’ve learned is lack of due diligence, jumping in quickly and falling in love with the property. A lot of our investors, a lot of our How to Lose Money guests are real estate investors. For some reason, a lot of them seem to lose a lot of money in 2007, 2008 and 2009. That’s when I was $2.5 million in debt. Thankfully, that was all tied to real estate, so I was debt-free thirteen months later right in the middle of the recession. Speculating versus investing has been another big lesson. Picking things for wrong reasons, like saying, “I like the Buffalo Bills. I want to invest in Buffalo.” Not that Buffalo is a bad market, I just picked that out of the air but you get the point. It’s easy to do things like that or it’s easy to justify things. It’s easy to fall in love with the property. Donald Trump when he was about 30 or 40, I heard an interview with him. The only thing I remember about it was he said, “Don’t fall in love. It’s so easy to fall in love with the property and then use every argument after that to justify why that’s a great purchase.” We all do this with cars. We do it with future spouses. We do it with investments, “It’s got a leaky basement, but the kids need a wading pool. Right, honey?” It’s maddening in all the way we justify what we want to do. My thing on that will be fall in love with the numbers. Don’t fall in love with the property. Try to be as objective as you can.

Another piece of advice would be to get great counsel. I know you spend a lot of money every year on coaching and masterminds and all that and I am starting to dive back into that as well. We’ve got a mentor. We paid $25,000 one time for this mentor and they’d been worth their weight in gold. That’s in the multifamily space and I recommend them to people all the time. We still use them four or five years later for questions. Another harder to quantify thing would be what you do with the lessons you’ve learned. I can argue both sides of this. I’ve heard both of them on the podcast. You’ve got somebody who says, “You just paid all your tuition in this horrible loss. Are you going to quit and start some new business?” Ours was, “Are you going to start out as a freshman in another business, a freshman in college again? Or are you going to dive back in and take all you’ve learned since you’ve paid the tuition and go deep and use that lesson to expand on and succeed?” That’s one argument.

The other argument on the other side of the coin is you’ve got to know when to cut your losses and get out. I’ve heard guests passionately tell that story of why you’ve lost enough and that with the wireless internet business. If we would have cut our losses four years ago and had just taken the $300,000 or $400,000 loss, then we would have been way better off than where we are now. That’s another argument but those don’t seem the same. Years, age, wisdom, counsel, all that goes into the mix and we’ve got to know when to do the one and when it’s time to do the other. Those were some of the main lessons we’ve learned from our How to Lose Money guests.

We’re in this information sharing world and oftentimes information has a candy wrapper on top of it. I thought it was refreshing to see the theme of your podcast. It was a pleasure to be on there because that’s when things get real and that’s where the true education is not by the shiny objects on the surface, but what went on to create them in the first place. There are so many points you’ve made throughout this interview that I would echo. In the end, financial tools, whether it’s real estate. Whether it’s a stock, a business, some startup or venture, it’s one of those things where the less you understand, the less involvement and value you can bring to the table the more risk you have.

As it pertains to real estate, it’s a fundamental need that we have and it’s always going to exist. It’s not necessarily just investing because of that idea, but it comes down to investing in the people that are supporting and running it. It is where I’ve seen the majority of issues. It’s not just your failure to learn from but one of the criteria I have is I won’t ever put money with people that I’ve earned who have not failed. It’s understanding what happened, what they learned from it and what they did in those moments of failure. Oftentimes it’s not even what they say but what those who were involved as an investor said during those times.

That’s what tells the story about things not going as planned, which tends to be the case with humanity. You want to know what their principles are, what their mission is and what drives them. Also what values they have so that you can get a barometer as to what decision they’re going to make and how it will affect the money you’ve given them and invested with. In your book, you talked about real estate. You talked through certain details of your story. One thing you said in there was where you talked about your purpose, the purpose of that company, your why with what you’re doing.

Real estate is a fundamental need that we have so it's always going to exist. Click To Tweet

I don’t know how much you’ve heard about human trafficking, but people are starting to hear about it thankfully now.

The Operation Underground is here in Utah, the big one that Tony Robbins sponsors. There are tons of money in there. The ex-Special Forces guys.

If you took the total record profits from General Motors, Nike, Apple and Starbucks and combine those, double that number, and that’s less than what is believed to be the annual revenues from human trafficking worldwide. It’s a big deal. They say there are over 30 million people trafficked and a lot of those people are sex trafficked. I want to believe that if I was alive years ago, pre-civil war, that I would have been fighting for abolition. I’d be fighting to free slaves. If I would have been an adult in the 1960s, I want to believe that I’d be fighting for civil rights. We’ve got an emergency here that doesn’t get headlines and it’s not caused a civil war. It’s not causing marches on Washington, but it’s slavery and it’s a big deal.

My company Wellings Capital and I are dedicating ourselves to donating a significant portion of our profits to fighting human trafficking and rescuing its victims. We’re identifying organizations we can back and we’re already doing that. I’m also part of a group called FreedomPlaceProject.com. Our goal is to build a billion-dollar office complex in Dallas, to use that as a prototype and then build other office complexes around the country and say, “We’re giving 100% of our syndicator, of our internal profits to fight human trafficking.” That’s in the works and we’re excited about that. There’s nothing to do with that now except maybe visit the website, but I’m excited about that. My goal is to donate $1 billion to fight human trafficking and rescue its victims through my influence and personally over the next years.

Can you give out those website addresses again and if there are other new sources, feeds or groups that are out there that people can learn more about the human trafficking problem?

One I would go to is ExodusCry.com. They’re based near Kansas City. They’ve got an incredible gut-wrenching movie out called Nefarious. If anybody wants to get ahold of me, I’ll send you a copy of the film. I’m friends with the director. He’s got 800 hours of film footage and he’s making a lot of films. He’s made other ones since then but Nefarious is the one that had opened my eyes. We also have FreedomPlaceProject.com. We’re looking for a CEO to run that company. Then my company is Wellings Capital. We’re at WellingsCapital.com.

I knew it was a problem and you travel around and in airports there are signs everywhere to keep your eyes open and pay attention. From the numbers side of things, I didn’t know it was that big.

We talked about Apple, Starbucks, Nike and GM times two. Let’s go down to small. One preteen or teenage girl can generate up to $500,000 a year in revenue for her trafficker, for her slave owner. Think about that. Think about what that means to that girl.

I didn’t know it was this prevalent and this big. Thank you so much for sharing that and at a minimum, helping me be more aware of it. Thank you for what you’re doing by dedicating some of your profits to that cause. What are some of the groups that are getting together and what type of impact are they having? Is it slowing down or is it going to take a while to eradicate as it seemed like a social epidemic?

There are some great groups. There’s one well-known group that’s rescuing girls in places like the Philippines, but the reports I have are that 99% of those girls are going back to prostitution later. It’s a tough situation and now it’s becoming more prevalent. There are more ways to kidnap these girls and social awareness in airports and all over the place is going up. However, the problem I think is probably getting a little worse.

Where’s the concentration in the world? Is it international or is it the US?

It’s both. There are some statistics that say one out of every 500 girls will be trafficked. I don’t necessarily believe that because I know of people of the places I’ve visited, but I don’t know anybody in my personal sphere or anybody that I’ve ever heard of personally be trafficked, in the news but not myself. I think it’s probably more prevalent in other countries. This documentary, Nefarious, goes over some of that.

The Operation Underground Railroad, which is out of Utah, they have a documentary out as well. Hopefully, the awareness continues to rise. I didn’t want to end on that sad of a note but still inspiring that you are trying to do your part to make a difference. Thank you for that.

Thanks. I’m glad you asked about it. We all have a part to play in this. They asked Mother Teresa how to feed a billion starving kids and she said, “One mouth at a time.” We are making a difference and good will prevail. I’m sure of that.

Paul, we appreciate your time and thanks for joining us.

It’s been great. It’s been an honor to be on your show. Thank you so much.

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About Paul Moore

An expert in the real estate space, Paul Moore of Wellings Capital graduated with an MBA from Ohio State and entered the management development track at Ford Motor Company. After five years, he departed to start a staffing company with a partner. They sold it to a publicly traded firm five years later for $2.9 million.

Along the way, Paul was Finalist for Ernst & Young’s Michigan Entrepreneur of the Year two years straight (1996 & 1997). Paul later entered the real estate sector, where he flipped over 50 homes and 25 high-end waterfront lots, appeared on HGTV’s House Hunters, rehabbed and managed rental properties, built a number of new homes, developed a subdivision, and started two successful online real estate marketing firms.

Three successful developments, including assisting with the development of a Hyatt hotel and a very successful multifamily project, led him into the commercial multifamily arena. Paul is the author of The Perfect Investment – Create Enduring Wealth from the Historic Shift to Multifamily Housing. Paul also co-hosts a wealth-building podcast called How to Lose Money, is a featured guest on numerous real estate podcasts, and is a regular author for Bigger Pockets. Paul is married with four children and lives in Central Virginia.

Patrick Donohoe Welcomes Rich Horwath as His Special Guest / Property, Episode 6

October 18, 2018 Patrick Donohoe 00:36:20 Comments Off

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Rich Horwath has been described by Chief Executive Magazine as, “The world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking.” He is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author on strategy. As the CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, Rich leads executive teams through the strategy process and has helped more than 50,000 leaders around the world develop their strategic thinking capabilities.

Rich is the author of six books, including, Elevate: The Three Disciplines of Advanced Strategic Thinking, which a leader at Intel proclaimed: “If you only read one book on strategy, this has to be that book!”

Patrick Donohoe

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Patrick Donohoe Welcomes Rich Horwath as His Special Guest / Property, Episode 6

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