TimeSlips

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

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.

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.

TWS 9 | Culture Course

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.

TWS 9 | Culture Course

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.

TWS 9 | Culture Course

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.

TWS 9 | Culture Course

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.

TWS 9 | Culture Course

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.

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About Mitch Russo

TWS 9 | Culture CourseMitch 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.

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