How Jeff Lerner hit $50 MILLION in 2 Years with Online Education

Over the last two years, I have seen the man that you're about to meet everywhere. I've seen him in YouTube videos. I've seen him on big podcasts. I have seen him retargeting me everywhere. And I recently found out that he started this business just a couple years ago, and it's pacing $50 million. Actually, I think it did $50 million over the last year. And this is a guy who I've been watching and going, how the heck is this guy coming into the game and just winning? How is this happening? Because I want, like, I have something to learn from this person, which is ironic, I just realized, because his last name is Lerner. I have something to learn from learner. Anyway, I asked Jeff to come on the podcast as almost like a consulting call for me because I wanted to hear what this guy was doing to go from zero in terms of business. Like, his business was doing zero a couple years ago, and then it did a little bit his first year, but then rocket shipped. That's a verb now. It rocket shipped all the way to a $50 million business after just a few years in. There is something in his mindset, something in his strategy that I need to learn from, and I gotta find out what it is. And we found out what it is in this conversation with Jeff Lerner. I hope you enjoy.

Jeff Lerner, welcome to capitalism.com. it's great to meet you. I've been looking forward to chatting with you for a long time.

Yeah, likewise. I'm glad we were able to pull this off. I feel like we've had our. My people have been talking to your people for quite some time now.

I want to tell you my favorite thing about you, Jeff, is your LinkedIn description, which is that you are striving to be the first billionaire founder who also deadlifts three times his body weight and performs at Carnegie Hall. So my biggest question to you is, what are you going to perform at Carnegie Hall?

I don't know. I'm hoping they'll put a lifting platform on there and I can just deadlift.

No. You know, I was a professional pianist. That one's actually the one that I'm probably most qualified to do. I'm not a great natural athlete, and I still got a long way to go to be a billionaire, so.

So we're early in the process, but we're getting there. But I know you just recently crossed $100 million in total revenue for your primary business that's less than three years old, which is something that I want to Dive into deeper. So maybe you're not that far away from being a billionaire. We'll see. But, Jeff, the thing that I wanted to start out with is I feel like you came out of nowhere. I feel like you have entered the marketplace, become a recognized name in the marketplace, and are just kicking ass and taking names, and it seems like it happens so fast and out of nowhere. So is that the case, or is there a story before the story?

Well, there's definitely a story before the story. I mean, we both know nobody really comes out of nowhere, Right? But I will say I was very late to the game of influence. So it really was. So September 2018 is when I had my midlife crisis at 39 and was like, I got something to say, and I got people I need to reach, and I got a world that I think I can help. But I have no platform. I have no footprint from which to do this.

And what were you doing for work before then?

Yeah, so I had just sold a digital agency that month. They'd actually closed that month. September. I sold a digital agency that I had been building for about five years prior to that. And prior to that, I had done affiliate marketing for about five years along the way. So I had about a. I started on the Internet in 2008. I actually started as an entrepreneur in 1995 at 16 years old. I dropped out of high school to play piano, become a musician. And very early on, I started. I tried to start, like, this Internet business, but it was, like, 1995. That was just fun. I tried to hire my dad's IT guy from his work office to, like, build me a website or something. But my first real foray in entrepreneurship was as a musician. I tried to start a booking agency in the late 90s, booking other bands because I was decent at getting gigs. And so, yeah, I've been an entrepreneur now for 25 years. And it's just. Well, let's see. I was a failed entrepreneur for the first 13 of those years or whatever, roughly.

And then throughout your 30s, you're, like, making enough money to be an entrepreneur and have an agency that's doing okay, that has an exit that's like, all right.

Yeah, I sold my agency for, like, 2 million bucks, almost all cash. A little bit of stock in the company I sold it to, and then that company went out of business, and I got screwed out of, like, a good chunk of the money.

But I can relate. I know this story very well.

But also along the way, you know, we got up to where we were doing like, about. Almost. About 6 million annual run rate. At our biggest. We did that for almost three years straight. And that agency, I was the sole owner, and it threw off 20 to 30% margin. So I had a great life, man. For a guy that 10 years prior to that had been a broke, homeless jazz musician, life was pretty good. But in 2018, I had this, like I said, this moment where I'm like, okay, I'm 39 years old. I'm 10 years removed from literal homelessness. I mean, I would have. Thankfully, my wife at the time, who I was separated from or I was in the process of separating from and eventually divorced from her parents were nice enough to let us move in with them, or else I literally would have been homeless.

You were like, 29 at that point, right?

Yeah, I was 29. And I'd been an entrepreneur. I'd had 11 failed businesses, but I always paid the bills with piano. And then I got arthritis in my wrist. Plus I ended up like, half a million dollars in debt from these SBA loan franchise restaurants. And so anyway, the fact that I had done that in 10 years, I'd gone from zero to marginally retired. High seven figure net worth, real estate investments, passive cash flow. Just had an exit. Life is great. I'm like, okay, if I could do that in 10 years. Coming from where I came from. And I look around at the world, and whether they're business owners or they're employees, the vast majority of people are struggling right now and kind of always have been. I think maybe I should teach the world some of what I've learned. And that was my big decision. And then I read a bunch of books around the time. I kind of had my Blue Ocean idea for what would become Entre, which we can get into. But Honestly, I read 10x Rule by Grant Cardone at the time, and it was like. I was like, okay, he's right. This is intuitive wisdom. If I'm going to do this, I got to add a zero to whatever I'm thinking. I just got to go big. I got to go exponential, right? And I did. I came out. You know, most people are like, hey, I'm going to start making videos for social media, right? And they post like, two videos. I made 500 videos in my first 10 months. I just went big. I don't really know what. How else to describe it.

And this is. This is the beginning of what became entre.

Yeah. September 2018, I had a little. I shot this video. It's funny too, because it got. There's like, these YouTubers now that are going back, they've somehow found my very first video and there's actually. People are now making reaction videos to my very first video, which was me having like really like, I mean, you go back and watch it and it's like, man, this guy was like really on edge. Like he, he. There was too much chili pepper in his soup that day or something because I was like spitting at the cab I was driving and I just went on this rant and I put my phone on my windshield. I was in my wife's car and I was like spitting and yelling about like just. It was just nonsense. Like yelling about potheads and like yelling about like, people are too mellow and yelling about like, we need to get fired up. Anyway, I ended up calling it let's Get Extreme. I published it to the web and it became my Jerry Maguire pivot moment into what's grown into now probably the fastest growing education company in the world, at least that I know of.

And at what point did a following start to arise? Because I know it wasn't at first.

No, no, no, no.

There's nobody listening at first.

No. Well, we have to qualify. By following, do you mean like six people that sat around and poked fun at me or do you mean people that actually listened to what I was.

Saying.

To build a business around it?

Yeah. So I'll tell you how I did it. And there was some method to the madness. It was actually a little more finely orchestrated than it probably appeared. So at the time. And we actually may have. Do you know Aaron Parkinson very well?

Yes.

Yeah. Okay, so Parky's a really good friend of mine. In fact, I got my start in an affiliate marketing platform in 2008 that he was one of the co creators of. So we've known each other for almost 15 years now. And he and I were really good friends. And I started talking to him in 2018 about like, man, I just. I got this hunger. I want to do something big and different. And we started dissecting what Frank Kern was doing at the time, which was what he called intent based branding. Ibb. Right. And he was like. And which if you know Frank, he's like very reserved and shy. So if Frank Kern is putting himself out there on social media, you know, he's up to something, right? Yep. He's very introverted.

I remember this time in Frank's career. Right. In that 2018 period.

Yeah, yeah. And it was all about just putting out high value content, building rapport with the audience and sort of like Trojan horsing your way into their life through value. Which is, it's not like a new idea. But he was just, it was like, he's frank, he's influential and he was doing it with social media in a very specific way. So we kind of reverse engineered what he was doing and that's what I started off doing. It was like, okay, I'm going to test all these different types of videos and micro content and I'm going to put a little budget behind them and actually boost them into different demographic categories and create a bunch of sub targeting options and use Facebook's platform essentially to figure out who likes me, who listens to me, what type of content they like, what problems I can help them solve and, and what it is about me that they respond to. And that's why I put out so much content. And you ask about the audience. Admittedly I spent about $20,000. So my startup budget for Entre was 20 grand. And I used all that money to boost. I'd spend $20 on this video, $50 on this video and say this video I'd go after Gary Vee's audience and in this video I'd go after women between the age of 55 and 65 living in Canada. And this like every video it was all just this like giant permutation experiment. Right?

You're just throwing things at the wall at this point.

Exactly. And I started to get clear that a what I was hoping and what I was wanting my blue ocean to be, which was this bringing together of what I called the entire betterment industry. So there's like business education, there's digital marketing, there's human development, personal growth, psychology, relationship theory, communication, physical health, wellness, fitness, like smashing it all into one platform that because I had a very long journey myself of really optimizing my entire life not just getting good at business. And so I love, I'm very passionate about like physical, we call them the three Ps, physical, personal and professional. And frankly in that order is what I wanted to talk about. But I know, but I also know as a practical matter, most people think that if they can make some more money, that's what will change their life.

That's right.

So I wanted to hook it all into business and we basically. It's interesting because I started this three and a half years ago and only now have I really emerged with clarity around the concept. And it's a concept that I call entrepreneurial life design, where it's not just about building a business, it's about building an amazing life. But in the modern world, you kind of got to build a business for most people to create the awesome life.

That you actually want.

Like, you just don't get it from a job for most people. And so entrepreneurial life design, that's the name that describes this white space that I saw in the market. It's like if Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, Grant Cardone, Oprah Winfrey and Andy Frisella all had a love baby and made a platform or something.

And maybe that will be scientifically possible one day someday. So I want to live in this world.

It'll be like that movie Twins, right, With Schwarzenegger. Hopefully we get Arnold, not Danny. But actually, I don't know, I might choose Danny. I like them both, but. But anyway, yeah, so that was the idea. And then I used all this targeting and boosting to get this audience. And it was. So I started in September 2018. Fast forward to June of 2019. So that's 10 months. I had about a 2 million person. You know, I had the Facebook pixel, and I had about 2 million people in my pixel that I could retarget that had at least watched 25% of any one of my videos. And that was the audience that I launched entre to initially. And that's part of how we were able to scale so fast, is that I took 10 months before I ever created a product and I warmed up and built this big audience.

You built. You built an audience and then you had a group of people that you could launch to. And at this point, you do not have email leads, you do not have. TikTok doesn't exist. So you built it on the ad platform and now you're like, okay, I have enough eyeballs for me to be able to launch something. Is that right?

Yes. Yes. So I have built the audience. And then I had the existential challenge that every digital marketer deals with, which is how to launch a minimum viable product, which I've now replaced that term in my lexicon with minimum lovable product. But either way, how to launch this, like, MVP that is going to end up being a loss leader, because that's just how it works with digital advertising. So I had to like, create an MVP backend too, because again, like you said, I had no list, I had no social audience. I could only launch with paid ads to an audience that I built. And I had given myself a rule that said I'm only going to. I had a one credit card with $20,000 on it. And I was like, this is how I'm going to start this company not because I didn't have any more money than that, but because I wanted to be able to credibly say to anybody, look, I've proved you can build a billion dollar company on a $20,000 budget. I had to figure it out. And so we launched an initial Tripwire course that was $39. And I figured out a $2,000 upgrade course for people that came through the tripwire and that was the MVP that I launched with.

What was the $2,000 course?

It was an upsell into a bundle of trainings and it was very like 1.0. I mean I should even probably call like 0.1 version of like some trainings that me and some friends of mine had put together on a few different business models. And so it was basically kind of a mushy bundle of affiliate marketing at the time. We actually launched with E commerce training which we swapped out and I want to say digital agency training. So it was kind of a mush of like, hey, here's all the business stuff that I've done and I'll teach you how to do it. So the Tripwire was all like kind of the habits and the foundation of effective productive entrepreneurial living. It was kind of like the entrepreneurial life design concept in its earliest form. And then it was like, okay, now that you've learned how to be an effective person, if you're really serious about building a business, you can upgrade to the course that'll teach you these business models that I've done.

Yeah, I'm asking selfishly, so it seems like what you're saying is that the $39 front end was where all your buyer acquisition was. And then there were follow up processes and upsells, put them into the 2000 which is what offset your ad costs. Is that a fair summary?

Yeah, yeah, that's how we started for sure.

So that's a pretty simple model to start. That's three years ago, four years ago.

That was 34 months ago. July 22, 2019 is when we launched that.

Okay, so 1, 2, skip a few. 99, 50 million or a hundred million in total sales. I know the business like this model that you just outlined for me doesn't go to fifty or a hundred million dollars. So where did the growth start to kick in? And I'm asking selfishly because I think there's a couple big ahas that you're about to drop here. So where did that growth start to happen beyond this just tripwire product?

Yeah, so I'll answer technically, and then I'll answer philosophically.

Sure.

The technical answer is we added a bunch of stuff to our stack in our product. Right. I mean, we diversify. Well, actually, what's interesting. So I'll give you the timeline. First of all, the growth. We did a million in revenue in the last six months of 2019. So from July to December, that was just proving out the model. Right. And how much of that, you know, we were. I doubt we were even really profitable. We basically just spent a million to make a million. Right.

Okay.

But we got all the systems dialed in. We got the tech working. We were able to deliver. We were able to create a quality student experience, and we were able to start building a culture. 2020, we did.

A little over 14 million.

I think that's a big jump, my man.

It's a big jump. Yeah. And I would say. But frankly, we did probably half of that in the last two months. We just started to really, really hit our stride in the Latter part of 2020. I don't remember the exact dates, but I'll tell you what cracked. It was a free ebook. We were running direct to tripwire course for months, and then we put in.

A free ebook download that you needed an email address, and now we're building a list. Now we're giving value. And that was a paradigm shift for us that allowed us to ramp pretty fast in the latter Half of 2020, especially, as it turned out, especially on YouTube. The free ebook offer worked like gangbusters on YouTube. And then we all know what happened to ad costs. 2020, 2021. Right. Just Covid the shift from traditional to digital media. Big companies going in, driving up the price of online ads. So in 2021, we actually eclipsed 50 million.

So we went 1 14, 52, I think. 52.

That's amazing, Jeff.

It's bananas, right? I mean, I'm blessed. But again, I've been getting ready to come out of nowhere for 25 years now. So I also, like, I've been. This ain't my first rodeo.

What's the breakdown of that revenue? Like, where does that $50 million get allocated in terms of.

So I'll tell you. Yeah. So again, the technical answer to how we generate more revenue, we add more stuff to the M. Yeah. And actually, you know what? Let me give the philosophical answer first, because it'll contextualize the technical answer. The philosophical answer is we had to make a decision whether we were trying. Like, what are we actually trying to do? Are we trying to grow the biggest possible business? Are we trying to grow the most profitable cash cow business? Are we trying to be a fundamentally disruptive, you know, ground shaking company.

Or this or that, or add a bunch of things to the list? And ultimately what we decided is none of those are the right answer. The right answer is pick one person who's never had a successful business before and who's frankly not very well suited to start one, like they're not already a gifted natural entrepreneur and ask ourselves, what is everything that one person would need to become a world class entrepreneur? And the answer was terrifying because it was training, obviously, courses. It was hand holding, it was white glove support, it was regular check ins, it was coaching, it was personal development, it was physical habit transformation, it was probably live seminars, it was software and technology, it was an app, it was this whole list of stuff that we looked at and go, oh, well, that's not a company you should be bootstrapping. That's a company you should be go raising $50 million of VC money to build.

But let's prove that you can bootstrap it anyway, right? And so now fast forward three years and we actually have all of those things we have, you know, you buy a course from us, you get put into a cohort group, you get assigned to a facilitator, you have options to upgrade to coaching. The co, you know, with that has its own level of assistance. We have specialists, we have enrollment advisors, we have a group, a team called VIP concierges, which are just white glove. Whatever you need. How may I help you, ma' am or sir? We have live seminars. I just came back from our one year anniversary. We've put almost 3,000 people now through live personal growth and development events that we were able to find somebody that had been in that space for 20 years. We basically built our own Tony Robbins seminars. I hate calling it that, but that gives people a reference point. We built our own funnel builder software entrasoft that, you know, why send customers over to Russell Brunson? We built it ourselves. Like we've done all of this in three years because we committed to the philosophical decision. And we actually call him, we have a name for him. His name is Jeremy. What does Jeremy. And we even have a picture. I went and stalked a guy named Jeremy who was one of our customers on Facebook. He's a truck driver. He's like total, like, honestly, he looks like a guy from a Trump rally. Shades, beard, bandana, just. And this guy's never had a business. He's as salt to the earth as they Come and we're like, we're going to build everything. Jeremy needs to go from Jeremy to Elon Musk and damn it, it hasn't been a lot of work. So that was the philosophical decision. And then the technicalities of that is we had to add all that stuff into the mix and we had to go source talent and we had to get ambitious and we had to create all these crazy plans and work a hundred hour weeks. And I still honestly don't quite know how we pulled it off, but we have.

So I want to clean this up a little bit for those who are listening, because there's a couple themes that Jeff went over really quickly that will sound familiar to what we talk about commonly here on the podcast. And one is that he spent the first six months building the audience.

Almost a year.

Almost a year building. So you had. And you did it in not the traditional way. You just spent. You spent money on advertising to get in front of eyeballs. And as a result of doing that work, he had an audience to launch to and he only had pixels. Right. No email list. No email list, no social media following. This is before TikTok, he just had pixels. That's it. Not what most would consider the most efficient way.

But let me point this out. Two million people for 20 grand, that's one penny per pixel lead, as opposed to three or four bucks for an email lead.

Is that still possible today?

Not at those numbers, but I mean, Even if you're paying $0.04 for a pixel lead, it's still 1% of an email lead.

Sure. Right.

And by the way, Facebook retargeting has a lot higher delivery rate than an email, so.

Interesting. Yeah, I'd love, I'd love to hear you comment on this more and what you think is.

Well, I just mean if you ask Facebook to show an ad to someone, I mean, they're going to see, or may not stop on it, but they're at least going to see it. Whereas you can spend a lot of money generating email leads just to have 80% of them, not even inbox.

Yeah, that's actually really interesting, Jeff.

So if you're paying $4 an email lead, but you're only getting one out of five into an inbox, you're really paying $20 an email.

Yeah, that's actually really interesting. That's a very interesting distinction. So what Jeff is saying is that he spent this first year just building the audience, having people to launch to, which is why when he came out with a $39 product with a $2,000 upsell. There were people who were willing to buy it. And so he got that core group of customers, that core group of raving fans, a core group of people who are active in the community. And then he started to grow from there. But the things really shifted, and you've heard me say this a hundred times, is that. Then he sat down and said, okay, what is the vision that I'm going to build here? I've proven that I can build leads and I can get sales. What's the vision that I'm actually going to do here? Which is why that's such a focus of what we do@capitalism.com. so, Jeff, you cast a vision that scared you. You have probably had to grow into that as an entrepreneur.

That has a lot of pressure coming from a position in which you just had successes at the end of your 30s. So did you have what we would call the second album syndrome, where you have the big win, and now the second album needs to be better than the first in order to stay relevant? Did what? Did any of that own personal development come up for you as you were charting out these new territories?

Yeah, I don't know if I would call it second album syndrome because it was like I had completely switched instruments.

Or sports or what I see.

You know what I mean? It's like. It's like when Michael Jordan went to play baseball, right? It was like a whole different thing. Although I'm not at all comparing myself to, you know, Michael Jordan. But, but, but I will say it's a big difference between like, like, you know, new levels, new devils, right? Like, so three and a half years ago, I was a successful. I was a big fish in a small pond, if I'm being honest. I live in a small town. I'm one of the more successful people here. I'm known. I had a great family, had a nice house. I had a great life. I didn't have a job. I had to clock into every day. I had what most people think is the dream. But as soon as I had this vision of creating this platform where I start pulling in names like Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone and Oprah. And again, it's just a vision. I don't really think of them as my competition because that's the whole point of a blue ocean. But I'm still using them as reference points now I'm a freaking minnow in the oceans where they play. I'm not. I'm like plankton. And so as I, you know, in the last three years, you know, I got A, I launched this company. I became one of the, you know, biggest bootstrap success stories in business history as far as I. I mean, literally as far as I know, to start a company on, do a hundred million dollars in sales on a $20,000 credit card in less than three years. Like, I literally don't know anybody that's got a bigger crazy story than that. Right. And so, you know, I'm saying that humbly. It's just these are facts. I pinch myself, but damn, now I got a business like a podcast that flirts in the top 50 for my category. I got a book deal. I have, my book's going to be in 2,000 bookstores in three months. I'm getting interviewed on capitalism.com. i have 240,000 customers. I get recognized in the airport. Like, if I can just say it, like, shit's gotten weird. And yeah, it has been a massive personal development challenge for me to not completely wig out.

And I want to hear you comment on this piece because I don't think most entrepreneurs realize how quickly things can change when things are lined up properly. And part of that lining up process is the personal side of it, of having your stuff together, of being ready for the inevitable outcome of having a bigger stage, of having bigger influence, of having a bigger footprint. So could you comment on that idea of how fast things can change or things are lined up and also how you prepared for it, because most people would have sabotaged having that big of growth that quickly.

Yeah, I mean, it's like we know each other better than we do. Because you're asking like the perfect question for me because this is actually what I'm so passionate about, is the preparation. And I used myself as the guinea pig. If I'm going to back up in the timeline. Well, I guess first of all, just to speak to how fast things can change. I mean, that is what it is, right? Like, OK, I may have, let's say on a scale of 1 to 100 for stories of rapid business ascendancy. I'm in the 90s. I don't know. Right. I mean, comparisons, the FIFA happiness. Right. So it's probably arbitrary to give me a score, but you don't have to go from $1 to $100 million. You go from $1 to $20 million, $1, $50 million, $1 to $5 million. And depending where your thermostat's been set your whole life, it's not going to be any more or less disorienting than what I'm going through. I was already used to bringing in seven figures. Right. Just personally. So. So my arc, you know, it's all, it's all like every time you add a zero, life gets really weird. I don't care if you go from 100,000 to a million or a million to 10 or 10 to 100. And now I'm trying to go to a billion. It's always going to be this weird transition. Right.

And the way that I prepared. It's not only that I prepared, the way that I prepared is actually what, what even made it possible. It was the precondition. The preparation was the precondition for the outcome. And what I mean by that is I am going to be a little bit sentimental here. So in 2011 I met my wife. Her and I moved to Utah and she had 1, 2, 3, 3 kids. She was a single mom. So. And then this is our fourth Stella who we added together in 2016. But anyway, the point is, so I went from being a divorced bachelor living in New York City, basically being a total degenerate with his life because I made decent money from affiliate marketing. And I was depressed and hated, just kind of hated it. I was angry at the world and just being self destructive, living in Manhattan, which is an easy place to do that. And I met this beautiful woman and this family and these children and there was this dad shaped hole in that family and I moved across the. You know, long story short, I won't give you the whole love saga, but it's a cool story. But I ended up moving across the country, moving in with her, becoming over the course of a year, both a husband and a father to three kids. And that immediately I recognized I am not remotely equipped to deal with this emotionally, psychologically, like. And unfortunately I had, or fortunately I had just enough shred of humanity to say I may be willing to screw up my life, I might even be willing to screw up her life, but I'm not willing to screw up these kids lives.

And what year was this, Jeff?

This was. We got married in 2012, I moved in in 2011. So it's been 10 years.

And this was early in the new career. This is like you're, you're, these are the early. You're like making six figures.

Yeah. Just starting to see. Here's the thing. I made the first half a million dollars I made as an affiliate marketer in actual profit, all went to paying off debt.

Got it.

Um, so by 2000, 2010, late 2010, I actually got to start keeping some of the money I was Making. So I'd been making good, you know, high six figure income for about a year at that point, which is good because it meant I had enough money that I could take care of us, I could get us into a little nicer house, and I could afford a therapist. And that was it. That was the. Honestly, that was the inflection point for my entire life, was getting into a really, really wonderful therapist and really, really committing to the process. Our therapist, in all seriousness, says to this day that we are the most committed patients he's ever had in his entire career. We went to thousands of hours of group sessions or of individual sessions, couple sessions, family sessions, group sessions. We took classes. I was part of one of those group therapy things you see in, like, movies. I did that every night or one night a week for four hours, every week for three years straight. Because I wanted to get better at interpersonal connection, not because I had, like. I wasn't, like, molested. I just. I wasn't like, they're dealing with something. Although I was bullied as a kid, it was literally, I just felt this. This call that, like, I want to be the best human being I can be because I've frankly neglected that part of self development even when I could have not. And it was kind of like, I don't know. And I just really leaned into this process and I think about, what are the things now that prepared me to be sort of unflappable with what I'm doing now? And it's things like, you know, I live in southern Utah, and there's a lot of people here in this part of the country who have left polygamous communities in northern Arizona. And they've come here and they've been completely estranged from their family. They've been isolated, they've been cut off, and many of them were either married or abused at young ages. And I spent three years in groups holding people like that as they cried their pain out and helping them process through and just putting myself into the visceral guts of human experience and forcing myself to have experiences, literally, because I just wanted to be worthy of these children's love. I wanted to be a good enough dad who was good enough at human connection and relationship that these children would not have made a mistake the day they decided to call me dad because they didn't have to choose me. I was not blood. And that's the stuff. And I had no idea in a million years what that would make possible for me as an entrepreneur and how it would teach me to build teams and lead people and rally people around a mission and find the real meaning and purpose inside of the business and the mechanics and create like mission and vision focused companies that really do mean what they say. Because we're not just in it for the money. Because I've already been miserable with money.

You know, and like, and it's the human stuff is what prepared me for where I am now.

Jeff, could you share a little bit about. And you're saying prep is. Prep is the work. So after you have done all that internal work. And I can relate so much to this. A. I was an affiliate marketer until I found out that I was going to be a dad. It was a surprise. You know, I'm a 1 percenter in more ways than one.

So I'm the 1% to make all the other things 99% effective. And I had to figure out who I was and that made me such a better entrepreneur. And now my second is two and a half and I'm starting to experience it again where I have a boy who is seeing who he will become. And so there's this whole other level that is starting to kick up in me. And so I'm fascinated by what you have discovered on the other end of this work of now that you have both prepared for and experienced extraordinary success. What lessons do you take from that that you wish you could instill upon budding entrepreneurs?

So it's so interesting. Entre was this, this very, like, meta experiment, you know, like it's self, you know, meta, like it's self referential, right? Like, the whole time I was doing it, I was also proving it so that it could. So that it could deliver as a service what it had proved as a concept, which is anybody with certain commitments to call them character. If you read Stephen Covey, he talks about character ethic versus personality ethic. And my vision was that we actually need both in the modern world. We need both. And that my premise for Entre was that anybody with a modest budget but with a huge reservoir of both character and personality ethic and with a real genuine heart to serve people can build an incredible business. But I had to prove it. And to prove it, I had to build Entre. But in so proving it, I gave Entre something to prove or something to deliver now and something to enroll on the basis of, right? So it's very meta, very weird. And so when I set up the conditions for this experiment in September 2018, first of all, it was, I'm going to be 10x in my production, right? If somebody else makes 50 videos, I'm going to make 500 videos. And then I'm going to.

Be very strategic. I'm going to spend, you know, don't spend $20 to boost this ad if you can spend $15. Right. Like I'm going to pretend that I'm broke again and I'm also going to prove that you can have it all. Meaning I'm not going to sacrifice my family, I'm not going to sacrifice being a committed husband, I'm not going to sacrifice being a present father. But I'm still going to build this incredible hyper growth business. And the only way to do that, oh, and I'm not going to sacrifice my fitness and I'm not going to let it turn me into some angry stressed out person who's like personality changes. But the only way to do that was to embrace what my therapist had been telling me from day one, which is structure is your friend. You have to create structures. Nobody has the willpower to live excellent all the time. So you have to make it easy to do even when you're tired, easy to do even when you're off your game, easy to do even when you feel dumb. And the way you do that is with your schedule, right? So I mean we went off to do it now but like my schedule is like, it's like looking inside the engine of a Lamborghini. It's just this precisely tuned thing where like every minute is accounted for. And so before I even started making content, I started getting up at 3:30am every day. I was at the gym. I do personal development from 3:30 to 4:30 while I get to the gym. I'm at the gym from 4:30 to 5:30. Then I jog to the office. So by about 5:40 I'm here. I practice piano from 5:40 to 6:30. So I get 50 minutes of piano, then I jog back to the gym or if it's too hot I'll drive here. Then I get in the car, go home, pick up my daughter, take her to school. From 6:45 to 7:20 I'm taking her to school. Then I'm home by 7:30 and my other daughter's up. I see her from 7:30 to 8. Then my calls start at 8 or whatever work is from 8 to 6. And then my evening is just as tightly scripted as my morning. And by the way, I only sleep five hours a night. And in order to make that happen, I have to have really, really great sleep hygiene. I follow Craig Valentine's 1032 1, 0 rule, right? Like no caffeine 10 hours before bed, no screens. You know, I use blue light filtering glasses. I've taken most of them for the day. But I'm super obsessive compulsive about my baggies. Every day I take a whole baggie of vitamins. I drink a gallon of alkalized water. I can never afford to get sick. I literally being sick, I did not schedule in time to get sick. So I had to make sure it didn't happen. Right. And that was the only way I was going to pull this off. And so my preparation has been to create a life that seems oppressive to most people. But to quote Jocko Willink, discipline equals freedom. I can do anything I want if my schedule is optimized enough. And that's how I prepare.

It's interesting because I don't want that life.

I didn't think I did either. Remember I'm a jazz musician, used to stay up till five in the morning.

So what? I don't even know if I want to ask what flipped because right now where I am, I don't want that life. But I am scheduled in other areas. Like I am very structured in other areas. Just not at 3:30 in the morning.

Yeah, I mean nobody. I'm not saying that people have to get up at 3:30.

I think it's just like, you know, there's that quote by Randy Zuckerberg who I don't know, can't have it all. Yeah, that can't. Yeah, she, you know, she's, she's noteworthy because she's related to a billionaire I guess. I don't know what she did, but she had a rich brother and made a quote. So anyway, you can't have it all. It's like pick three out of five, right. Friends, work, whatever, this family. Yeah. And sleep or something.

I don't know.

I just decided whatever those five things were, I just decided I wanted all five. But to make that happen, I needed about 19 hours a day. And to make 19 hours a day happen, I needed to biohack myself into a well oiled machine. And to prove, by the way, I'm 43. Is this sustainable? I don't know. I'm in the best shape of my life. I feel the best I ever have. I believe that when you commit your life to, to a meaningful purpose, to the exclusion of all else, when you actually embrace that good is the opposite of great or good is the enemy of great and you're willing to divorce most of the good things out of your life so that you can obsess over your singular capacity for a single piece of greatness, that you tap into an energy supply that is there waiting for you to discover when it's time. And that's what I physically have experienced for the last three and a half years. People ask me how I do it. You know what I hate now weekends, because I sleep in and I feel like crap. I'm serious. I just, I prefer getting up. You know, I get up at 3 o' clock in the morning on a Saturday and it's like I don't have anywhere to go, my family's asleep, so I'll go back to bed for a couple hours. Then I feel crappy all day. I just, I don't know, I think we all have this like hidden, you know, like ludicrous mode that we just don't tap into.

Once you tap into the vision that wants to come through you, that's what I think is the lifeblood to that. And I would love to wrap up to hear you comment on something you sort of touched on, which is this idea of a give first mentality, this idea of I am in this to impact someone else. I know the customer that I have in mind and I am here to impact their life. And that gives me the juice to be able to put all of my energy into that person. And because I couldn't sustain this level of focus and productivity and energy if I was just trying to extract from the marketplace. So I would like to hear you close with commenting on that idea.

Yeah, I swear, man, it's like we rehearsed this because that was such a huge part of what this again, this was all an experiment, right? It was like I'm going to prove. But it was, it was weird. It was like calling your shot. It was an experiment that I already declared what the outcome was going to be and I did it very publicly. That's the other thing. I used Cialdini's commitment and consistency principle on myself where like I'm going to publicly declare that I am building the world's first holistic entrepreneurial education and life design platform. And I've on this big crusade and I'm going to essentially I'm going to disrupt education. I want to be this thing that kids go to instead of school at some point. And I said it all very visibly on the Internet to where I would have looked ridiculous, at least to myself, if I had stopped. And so anyway, I created this inertia of visible commitments and I'm sorry, Ryan.

What Was the actual question, the idea of putting the person first.

Yeah, yeah.

How much energy that gives you.

And part of that experiment and part of that declaration was like, I'm a huge believer in the power of vulnerability. Brene Brown's whole thing. And one of the things that I owned from the outset of this is I have been a taker my whole life.

I can relate to that.

We're born takers and you have to learn to be a giver. Right. And I had talked a good game about Zig Ziglar's hole, helping other people get what they want and everything you want will come true and all that. I had used those words for years, but I had never actually gone all in. And it was my therapist who showed me what it looks like to be all in. This is a guy that has saved hundreds of marriages and repeatedly destroyed his own because he was so committed to helping his patients. He didn't take care of his own life. And I'm not. And by the way, he's happily married now and his life's amazing and he's learned a lot and grown a lot. And this isn't about him. My point is I actually had somebody come into my life that showed what real service looks like. I mean, this is a guy that if you're struggling, he'll meet you at one o' clock in the morning on a Saturday. And if you can't afford it, he won't even let you pay him. He just deeply loves people. He was already retired from his career in.

Working for the government in the child welfare department. Right. His whole private practice is a service project. And I got to see what that looks like. And so when I started this experiment and I kind of got into this whole intent based branding, like, current idea, I'm like, okay, I get the sense that if this is going to work, it's going to work the best. If I. And it's going to be the most developmentally productive for me as a human being who's here to do more than just eat and not die and have a paycheck. If I actually commit to service, like really commit, like commit to the point where it makes me consistently uncomfortable and I regret it and then I still do it anyway. And more than anything else, I'll say that I think that's what entre. Why that's the secret of our success is people that come into our world, they know that we will go to lengths that certainly no company in our space has ever gone to. And myself, this is now why I get up so early. Here's the thing about getting up that early. It never actually gets any easier. Although I feel better when I do it. 3:31 is as miserable now as it was three and a half years or four years ago. But every day I say the fact that I don't have to do this.

Makes it an act of service to do it. And then I don't go back to bed. And actually, to be honest, Entre has grown to the point now where I have my biggest. Like, the thing that gives me more panic than anything is that we're going to lose it because there's so many other people involved. And I'm afraid that we're going to. Just by human nature and by the law of diffusion, we're just going to lose that heart of service. Because I don't know if everybody's as extreme about it as I am. I don't even think that it's reasonable to ask people to be as extreme about it as I am. And so I'd love. I know you're coming on my show later. I'd love to, like, talk about how you create that as a culture, not just a crusade. Right.

It's amazing what can happen when you just decide to go all in on other people. And I had this conversation with Alex Formosi where we said that entrepreneurship is this beautiful irony where in order to get what you set out to get, you have to undo your selfish reasons for wanting it in order to give to other people. And only then do you unlock what you actually want. And it is this beautiful undoing of it. And I think what you are displaying is how fast things can change when you actually do that, because there is. You tap into a creativity, a commitment, a energy that doesn't exist when you are just trying to suck energy out of the finite resources and put them into your pocket. You're actually the creator of it. Yeah, I am still in process of doing that. I'm still in the undoing process. And this is inspiring.

And I'll tell you this. It was my therapist and it was my wife. My wife, I don't think I properly did really justice to what the impact that her and the kids were. They taught me how to love. I really wasn't like a loving person. And my wife modeled it.

What my therapist did was he modeled it and combined it with structure. My wife is like this just big, unconsolidated ball of love energy. And then my therapist, like, organized it into, like, a formula and a process and the combination of the two. I say all the time. What Entre really is is my attempt to pay forward to the world what I received from the combination of my wife and my therapist. But there's not enough of them to go around like you can. Nobody can have my wife, and very few people can have my therapist. So I had to build something else to embody what they gave to me. And that's really what entre is. But you're totally right, it can happen.

Head spinningly fast when you commit to it.

Jeff, where do people find out more about Entre and where do they follow your journey?

I appreciate the question.

Gosh, you know, my YouTube channel's a great spot. I give a lot of free. I think I have up to almost a thousand videos on there. I have a podcast called Unlock your potential that'll soon be recording an episode with the illustrious Ryan Moran. Maybe they want to start there. And I have a book coming out in August. Just social media, though. I'd rather you come take all you can get from me for free before I ever try to offer you anything for sale.

Good man, Jeff. It's great to meet you, my friend. I look forward to chatting with you again soon. Thanks for hanging out with us.

Thank you, guys.