Mark Jenney From Cash Flow to market disrupting business.mp3

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Hey fastlaners, thank you for listening to Freedom Fastlane. This is Ryan Daniel Moran and today I'm going to be interviewing my best friend in the world. His name is Mark Jenny, and he is my best friend, my mentor, the person I look up to most in this world. And he is one of, if not the most successful businessmen and marketers that I have the privilege knowing. And I have learned much of what I know about business, entrepreneurship, mindset, the stuff we talk about here on Freedom Fast Lane directly from Mark. Mark hardly ever speaks in a public setting. He rarely speaks from stage. I think he's spoken maybe once in his life publicly. So it's an extreme, extremely rare. And yet we're very privileged to have him here on Freedom Fast Lane. And what I wanted to hear about was a pivot that he made in his life about a year, maybe a little bit less than a year ago. And that was he started to move away from businesses that had a focus in making money. Now, I know that sounds crazy because we talk a lot about cash flow here on Freedom Fast Lane. But Mark decided that he wasn't going to start a business ever again that had the sole purpose of just making money. That's a big graduation point for an entrepreneur to move away from the focus of how many dollars can I extract from this business and then move over into how much value can I create. And as a result, he has built a new company. It's called rvshare.com and it is basically the sharing site for people who have RVs. You want to rent an RV, you have an RV and you want to turn it into a small business. You go to RV share and you either rent other people's RVs or you put your RV on there and you turn it into a small. It's a concept that didn't exist before Mark went into the industry and he's been featured all over the place as a result of building this business. Now, one of the reasons I wanted to have Mark on was because this business lost money for quite some time before it. It got a lot of exposure or even a lot of customers because he was okay doing that, he was okay putting the money in, knowing that this was a long term business that was going to make a big impact in the world, not something that was going to cash FL from day one. We don't talk about that much on Freedom Fast Lane. What it looks like to build what I call a market disrupting company, a company that's going to exist 10 and 25 years from now. Rather than something that just exists so that you can quit your job. And Mark is building a company that is all about providing as much value as possible, and it's becoming really successful. And he's on a faster growth trajectory than he ever was on when he was chasing dollars, if I can call it that. He's now building a really valuable company. And this is an inspiration to me and I think to a lot of entrepreneurs who have been chasing dollars but forgetting about value. So enjoy today's chat with Mark. Jenny. Mark, Jenny, thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Ryan.

So, Mark, obviously I know your story. Heck, we lived together for a couple of years. But why don't you kind of give us a little bit of your background? I want to ask you why you've kind of shifted and gone more of the tech route, or what I would call a market disrupting business. But I'd like to hear your story of because you are one of the most successful cash flow business creators in the world, maybe ever. I know you would be too humble to say that, but I'll say that about you. You're one of the best cash flow business builders in the world and you've started to transition out of that. But could you tell us a little bit about your story, being involved in that world?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think I'll probably actually even push it back further just to kind of, you know, most people on this call probably don't know who the heck I am. I, you know, I don't do interviews. I don't really normally do podcasts or anything of this nature. I don't generally speak. So just to kind of let everybody, I'll just give you a couple bullet points on who I am. And, you know, hopefully today on this call, my goal is to, you know, be able to provide some insight. And there's a great quote that I just want to say is to attain knowledge, add things every day, and to attain wisdom, remove things every day. So I'm hoping that on this call, Brian, you and I will be able to help everybody attain knowledge, but also help them attain some wisdom. So figure out some things that they maybe are doing that they shouldn't be doing.

Beautiful.

So just a little background about me. Bullet points. So high school dropout. My father was homeless and we lived in a garage. And by the time I was 21, I was a millionaire. So there's a little contrast there. And there was a lot of stuff that happened in between.

That time period. But no, I mean, so my background is I grew up in a small town in Northeast Ohio, I guess you'd say on the wrong side of the tracks, very low income area. And both my parents worked hard but never had any extra money. And I remember when I was younger there were times where we'd go to McDonald's and my father would literally buy one hamburger and cut it in half for my brother and I because he couldn't afford two 59 cent hamburgers at the time. And so definitely come from very meager beginnings. Which.

The reason why I bring that up and why I think that that's important is because it just goes to show that no matter who you are and if you're listening to this call, no matter who you are, no matter what your background is, and no matter what's happened so far, you can make it. We are in a time right now where there's absolutely more opportunity out there than ever before. And because of technology, because of the Internet, it's a level playing field and it allows somebody like myself, who's a high school dropout who grew up living in a garage part of his life.

To by the age of 21, become a millionaire and go on to build multiple successful businesses that generated tens of millions of dollars. And over the years I've been able to sell more than $100 million of products and services online. But I don't have an Ivy League degree. So we're going to talk about tech companies today, but I don't have a computer engineering degree from Stanford. I don't in Silicon Valley. I still live here in Ohio in a little nicer part of town now. But so.

The Internet and technology has really leveled the playing field for. If you're listening to this call today, it doesn't matter where you are in life, where you live, how much money you have in your bank account, what your background is, you can go out there and you can really build a better life for yourself and for your family. I think that's just something important.

We were talking about businesses and I said, I need to check something on my FTP. And you said, what's FTP? I hear people talk about that and I like, I face palmed it. And I was like, really? Anybody can become successful if you don't know what FTP is, which is file transfer protocol for anybody who's listening. And you know, you taught me something in that moment that you've kind of touched on here, which was that at that point in my life, I was trying to learn every little detail of every piece of my business, which was probably why I was stuck. And you have stayed selectively, dare I say selectively, you pick certain things and you try to learn nothing about them and you let other people handle those. And that's been one of the things that has really helped to be successful, is just selectively focusing on where you put your time and your energy and knowing that a lack of experience or a lack of background or a lack of having a silver spoon in your mouth doesn't hold you back from where you go next.

Absolutely. That's a really good point, Ryan, because for me personally, I'm probably the least technical person in our company, and I've probably actually always been the least technical person in all of my companies. A few years ago, I started a web hosting company, which is generally thought of as a technical type of company.

We were able to take that company essentially from zero to close to $30 million in annual sales in a very short period of. But I knew nothing about the technology. I knew nothing about web hosting. I knew nothing at all.

About the technological side of the business. But what I did know is I knew how to generate users and generate customers, and I knew how to sell. The psychology of selling to people and understanding customer acquisition I think is pretty important if you're going to learn something.

Like you were saying, you were saying you're trying to learn everything and you realize, well, you can't learn everything because as soon as you learn everything, there's always somebody else out there who's way better than you. And not only because you only know a surface level, you know a little bit about a lot of things. And really, you know, you got to figure out for you and your business is like, what's the most important thing you can learn to really grow your business. And for everybody it's different. You know, that may be becoming a better programmer, it may be becoming better at sales, it may be becoming. It just varies depending on what your business is.

But yeah, I definitely stand by the philosophy of really, don't worry about your weaknesses, focus on your strengths, focus what you're really good at, and become the best at that because you can always hire people who know other things.

I want to ask you about that because a lot of people are like I was five years ago, which is trying to learn everything. And I don't want to spend too much time on new business startup in this part of the interview. But you just broke it down into something really simple, which was basically an idea and getting customers or getting users. And so many times New entrepreneurs will talk about. Well, I need to figure this out, and I have to have this in place first. What would you say, from an entrepreneurial perspective, that the starter of a company does need to know when starting a new business or going into a new channel or a new market?

So I'm actually going to kind of borrow some advice I got the other night. The other night. You and I both actually have a mutual friend, Mike Chen, who has a company that's in Y Combinator. If you're not familiar, most people probably are familiar with Y Combinator. If you're not familiar with Y Combinator, it's essentially the startup incubator out of Silicon Valley that's developed Airbnb and Dropbox and a lot of other just massively successful companies have come out of there.

Mike has a new company called Magic, which is basically blowing up. It's about four weeks old right now. It already has a $40 million valuation, which is pretty crazy to think that you just launched a company four weeks ago and then all of a sudden it's worth $40 million. But I was asking him, I'm going to bring this back to your question. I was asking him the other night, I said, what is the single biggest piece of advice that.

You'Ve learned out there? He said, everything is so counterintuitive. They actually say, don't worry about the business model. Don't worry about how you're going to get customers, how you're going to get users. The number one thing you need to think about is, and this is advice, because we're talking about tech today. That's why I bring this up. This is advice that's coming from the cream of the crop with the tech community out of Y Combinator. This was directly from Paul Graham. When Mike was telling me that he had dinner with him recently.

He said, what you need to do is you need to build. And this is what he told Mike and a few of our other friends who started the company Magic, that has basically, which is a tech company which has gone from a zero valuation to a $40 million valuation in a month. So literally, it was nothing but an idea. A month ago, a month later, it's $40 million valuation already.

How they came up with this idea, and I think it's pertinent to your question, is Paul said to Mike, he said, look, as long as you're building a product or service for somebody else, you're always going to be guessing. You actually never know what they need because you're not the customer. So really what you want to do is you want to build a product or service for yourself. So Paul Graham was telling Mike, you know, don't worry about the business model. Don't worry about how it's going to make money. Don't worry about any of that. Like, normally, those are the first things you're going to think about. Don't worry about how you're going to get customers. Normally, as a business person, 99% of business people, that's exactly what they're thinking about. It's like, if you're thinking of a new idea, it's like, okay, how am I going to get customers? How am I going to generate sales, and how am I going to generate a profit? It's really interesting, the advice that's coming out of Y Combinator.

These are guys who have been there, done that, and.

I've been very blessed, and I've achieved a lot of success in my life. But these guys are on a whole other stratosphere. We're talking billions of dollars in one company after another, after. And they've helped hundreds of companies reach just crazy valuations and really change the world. But it comes back to figuring out, you're saying, what's the one thing that an entrepreneur should figure out? I think that with all of us.

For me today, I would say my answer would probably be different than what it would be a year ago.

I 100%, wholeheartedly really believe in that. Advice coming from Paul Graham is that really, you need to build something for yourself. What do you want? And that's how Magic started for Mike.

He wanted to be able to get anything he wanted on demand by just sending a text message. And the service wasn't out there, so he built it for himself. And literally, Michael Rubin, who's another friend of ours, and Mike Chen. Mike Chen literally just sent a text message to Michael Rubin, who was in the other room at the time, and said, can you get me food from XYZ restaurant down the street? And.

They talked with each other and said, let's just do this as a project, just as a test. I want to see. This is an idea we have. Let's just test it between you and I. But it comes down to building something that you want something for yourself. And I think.

The biggest impact that advice had on me was really, if you think about it, Ryan, you and I are both very. And probably a lot of people on this call, I'm guessing very familiar with split testing and trying to optimize and things of that nature. Why are you doing that it's like, why are you split testing? Why are you trying to optimize? You're trying to do that to generate better user experience, generate more revenue, generate higher conversions. But are you always your own customer? Lots of times. You're not. I know for me, traditionally, and I know a lot of business people, it's not to say that everybody on this call, or Ryan or anybody, there are people who, they are their own customer, they are their best customer and they want to use their product or service, but there's an awful lot of people who they're selling something because they think they can make money. They're not selling something that they personally want. And I think that just going back to your question of what should somebody learn? And I think if somebody is literally starting out and they're trying to figure out, okay, what skill set should I learn and what business should I start? I would look at it through the lens of really, what do I want? Because in reality, most people think that they're pretty unique. But the fact of the matter is, as a human being, most of us are very similar to each other and a lot of us have the same likes as others. If there's something that you want, as you're listening to this call, say a product or service that you've always wanted, it's just not there and nobody else is providing it, then that's really what you should be thinking about. You should be thinking about going out and building that product or service because it's for you, you're building it for yourself. And in reality, you're going to be building it for a lot of other people as well. As far as a skill set, if you are building something that you want, I feel like just natural skills that you have already, they're going to help you more than any other skill set. You can learn to go learn how to do pay per click ads, or learn how to do SEO or learn how to program or whatever it may be. If it's a product or service that you really truly want yourself. I think that, that, that although not a skill set, I think that that's one of the most important things that somebody could really think about and look at what they want to do next through that lens.

I wish I had heard that advice a couple of years ago because I spent so much of my young entrepreneurial career trying to figure out what the market wanted or what everybody else wanted me to do. And the minute that I just said, this is where I want to go and this is where I'm Going all of a sudden people just started following. I actually started Freedom Fastlane two years ago because I was frustrated with the lack of really good advice and really good content out there. And I just started putting out there what I would want to hear. And now we're one of the top business podcasts on itunes. But Mark, I want to ask you about the transition because you have moved from building really successful companies to most people's standards, but you've decided to pivot and go in a different direction that it kind of flies in the face of the traditional direct response, cash flow style businesses. And I remember you said, we were sitting with Mike at a table once and you said direct marketing and direct response cash flow businesses is like a guy, you put in numbers. This + this equals this result. Tech companies and market disrupting companies are like a girl. It makes no sense and at the end it works. So would you tell me why you decided to make that change from what you were really successful at doing to something that was really on the surface, very different?

Yeah, I mean, I think on the surface it is very different. You know, it's funny you say, you know, tech companies are like girls and you know, cash flow businesses are like guys because, you know, everything, you know, generally with guys is a lot more black and white and with girls they're maybe, you know, more of a gray area. And I was just, just got done reading a book about Amazon and if you're familiar with Amazon story, it's like Amazon lost money year after year after year for a long period of time.

I'm not sure what their current revenue numbers are and earnings, but I know for forever they continue to lose money and people kept pouring more and more and more money in. But it's really interesting just the.

The concept of a technology company versus the concept of more of a traditional direct response company. A lot of these companies out in Silicon Valley that are tech companies, the valuations that.

A lot of these tech companies receive are just some people would think they're astronomical. Lots of times companies are valued at 20 times.

Basically 20 times potential earnings. So they'll look at a company and say, okay, how much is this company going to earn over the next 20 years? Which is not saying how much is this company earning today? And let's Multiply it by 20, it's saying, what do we think this company will earn over the next 20 years? So the company, it may actually be losing money today, but they may have a crazy valuation.

You know, for example, you know, there's a company there In Austin, where you are HomeAway, and HomeAway is peer to peer home rental platform. So very similar to Airbnb. Airbnb, I think, is a little more similar, I guess, to hotels.

It's a kind of a hybrid of both condos, someone's spare bedroom, and also entire houses. But just for an example of we were Talking about valuations, HomeAway is a public company. And HomeAway, if anybody's familiar with public companies and what public companies are trading at times, their earnings and whatnot. I don't know exactly what HomeAway's PE ratio is today, but in the past few months I glanced at it and PE ratio. It was crazy. It was north of 200.

Basically, that means that they're valuing that company, which is a tech company, at literally more than 200 times earnings coming from the direct response space.

Like mind boggling. It's like traditionally a direct response. Your valuation, it may be anywhere from.

One year to seven years or somewhere in between there. Generally you're not getting more than a few years. And so it's really interesting. And to be honest with you, by no means am I an expert. I'm kind of still learning myself as far as why these companies are valued at what they're valued at. I think that we're definitely in. I don't want to call it a bubble, but I know a lot of people are saying it looks like a bubble. In the tech community right now, you have a lot of different companies.

That are just raising just astronomical valuations.

The outlook on the companies are promising and there's a lot of great press and they're growing, there's huge growth.

But.

It'S interesting because a lot of these companies are actually not turning a profit. They're losing money. And yet their founders are billionaires, which is completely counterintuitive to anything somebody who has a background in direct response thinks. You think, okay, if you are going to become a billionaire, then that means that you have a company, you've built a company that is very, very profitable. It's just so funny because this is not the case all the time. There are a lot of companies that are very profitable in the tech space. But it's interesting to see some newer companies that aren't necessarily profitable yet and have valuations of billions of dollars, and the founders are worth billions of dollars, and they've built a company that's become very large, but it's not even profitable, you know, and they just have all this investor money that keeps coming in.

So I want to interpret what you're saying a bit, which is basically you hit a certain level, you saw that if you wanted to go to the next level, it would require a pivot into something that you hadn't done before. And you saw opportunity in the tech space. And I know from your own transition that at first it was kind of like a, huh, that's interesting that the trend is going in this direction. And then it was like, I wonder what we'd have to do to go in that direction. And then it was, I have an idea. And then the idea came to fruition. So would you talk to us a little bit about RV Share, which is the company that has become really your baby lately? That is what's going in that, that tech direction, that you're disrupting a market there. How did you come up with that idea?

Yeah, absolutely.

There's actually a piece of advice that somebody else gave me. Another friend of ours, Perry Belcher, he gave me this piece of advice years ago and it was when I actually had an info publishing business at the time. And he said, look at what you're doing and are there any old happy rich guys who did what you're doing? And if not, you may want to think about doing something else. And that piece of advice has actually been one of the most impactful pieces of advice I've ever received. And I want everyone to think about in this call. Think about what you're doing right now and do you know of any old happy rich people who did what you're doing? And if there's not, if there's not a bunch of old happy rich guys at the end of the roadmap, then what are you doing? And you may want to rethink what you're actually doing. He gave me that piece of advice and it's actually caused me to pivot a couple times in my life. I feel like every few years I go back to that one piece of advice and it's caused a couple really positive pivots in my life. But getting back to RV Share. Yeah. So I mean, for those of you who aren't familiar with what RV Share is, I guess you can think of RV Share is the Airbnb for RVs. So we have a, you know, peer to peer rental platform@rvshare.com if you want to check it out. But basically we help facilitate RV rentals between private owners and renters. And.

It'S been going really well. The company was started a little over a year ago. We've been growing rapidly. We recently been featured on CNN and LA Times amongst a whole bunch of other, you know, news outlets. So, yeah, things are, things are going really, really well with RV Share. What specifically? What specific questions can I, can I answer for you with RV Share, Ryan?

Well, I'd love to hear how you came up with the idea to start. And then I'd like to hear, you know, how does one who has such a direct response background even make that change into, okay, now I'm going to go in this direction and what skills applied and what did you have to completely relearn?

Yep, absolutely. Okay. So you know, as far as launching RV Share and coming up with the idea, my wife and I, we got married and we decided for a honeymoon. We said, you know what, let's take an RV trip. And so we ended up, we bought an RV and we decided that we were going to go on an RV trip for our honeymoon. And it wasn't until really until the rv, you know, made its way home to the driveway that suddenly I'm like, okay, holy shit, we're only going to use this thing like you know, 10% of the year. What the heck are we going to do with it the rest of the year? And so, you know, being familiar with other peer to peer platforms like Airbnb and Boat Bound and whatnot, I immediately went out there and I looked for a solution. I said, okay, well we're going to go ahead and we're going to rent our RV out because very familiar with the whole peer to peer model. We some investment real estate, some vacation rental properties out in Scottsdale and we rent those on HomeAway and Airbnb and VRBO and those sites. So for me it was a no brainer. Okay, well we bought this RV, so let's just find the Airbnb equivalent for RVs and let's just start renting it out when we're not using it. And sure enough, there was nothing out there. And so that's really kind of how RV Share started. It started with really a need for the service. Myself.

When I did research and I couldn't find anything, I said, okay, well you know what, this is a little bit outside my wheelhouse. I've never necessarily built a platform type business like this before. I built a lot of different Internet based companies, but they were all traditionally more direct response. You have a widget and you create that widget and you sell that widget and is a little more, I guess jumping into this is a little more of a gray area than what I had been used to with direct response. Once you figure out how to sell a widget. It doesn't really matter what the widget is. It can be green, black, red, blue, big, small, expensive, inexpensive. It doesn't really matter. If you can sell something, you can sell anything.

I get that and I agree with that point. But you were going into a market, or at least your business model at the beginning. You weren't even charging for it. You had no money from the get go. So how did you overcome that hurdle? You started to go in this direction, but you weren't even quite sure yet how are you going to monetize it? And you didn't for a while. So how did you continue building it?

Yeah, no, that's a really good point. So I think that really with this company, the vision was very different than any other company I've ever started.

Up until RV Share. Every company I had started previously. The first question I would ask was, how are we going to make money? When are we going to make money? We need to be profitable right away, immediately. Traditionally, I've only been involved in businesses that turn a profit right away. If it doesn't turn a profit immediately and we can't tweak, tweak it and test it, and this, that and the other, and we don't see some good positive results in a short period of time, we'll move on to the next thing. Whereas this is completely different. I knew going into this, okay, this is all about value. This is all about basically going out there and building a ton of value in the community because no one had actually done this before. So this was something completely new we're building. Although the sharing economy as picking up steam with Airbnb and Uber and some of those other companies in general, when we first started doing research with the RV market, it's a little technologically handicapped I'd say would be a nice way to put seems like this particular market is like five years behind some of the more progressive markets. And so going into this we really, you know, it was looking at the business through a different lens of, okay, we have, you know, not looking at it through the lens of we need to be profitable right away, but looking at it through the lens of like, okay, how can we go out and build something that is going to be around in 10 years from now and it's going to, you know, be the largest RV rental platform, we're going to be the Airbnb for RVs. And really I'd say a longer term vision. You know, I mean, you were saying, how do you go from something you Know, traditionally with direct response and then go into a technology platform where you're not necessarily turning a profit or generating revenue right away.

Luckily for us, we had some, I've done well with some of the prior businesses. So we weren't under the gun to necessarily make money day one. And I think that that's, we are bootstrapped and that's, that's a whole nother story. We've had a lot of actual VCs reaching out to us and trying to invest and whatnot, but we actually turned them all down. We're interested in staying private as long as we can, but as far as technology goes, there's a lot. Traditionally, most technology companies will raise outside capital and that's why you do see a lot of VCs investing in technology based companies that don't necessarily turn a profit in the beginning. And it takes time to build up your user base and build up your brand, brand awareness and then before you actually are profitable.

So Mark, I want to ask you, since you weren't going to be profitable right away and since you didn't want to raise outside capital, from the outsider's perspective, that's a little bit riskier than your traditional cash flow business, which if it doesn't make money right away, you cut it. This was, if we don't make money right away, we.

Put more money in or we get outside capital. So. So how did you go about verifying your idea before putting all hands on deck? Yeah, that's because in a cash flow business you verify it by the market, you know, it makes money. It's a good idea. Let's keep doing that. But with this type of a business, it's a longer run. So how do you verify if the idea is even good enough to push through that, that dip where you know you're not going to be profitable for a while?

Yeah. So for me it may be different. You know, it's different for every company and every person. But I can just kind of tell you, you know, my personal perspective on how things came about. For me, this is more of a mission. You know, this is not just a business, this is a mission. We're on a mission. And that was really the biggest.

Excuse me, differentiator between everything I had done prior and RV Share. Everything I had done prior to RV Share was always to generate a profit. And with RV Share, this was more about a long term vision and a mission of making a difference and changing lives. And.

Now that we're actually bringing that into reality, it's nice seeing the Fruits of our labor actually come to life because we always had a vision in the very beginning of, look, there's 10 million RV RVs out in the United States alone. And that means, to me, in the very beginning, I saw this as great. There's 10 million business owners, potential business owners, because there's 10 million people who own an RV, who, and their RV is just sitting there doing nothing for 90% of the year. Just like platforms in the past, like, you know, when ebay came about, you know, ebay created. How many millions of small business owners were, you know, came from ebay. And with Airbnb now, it's like, how many people make money renting out their room or their apartment when they're not using it, or if they have an extra bedroom and they're just renting it out to other people on Airbnb. I really looked at this as an opportunity to. I love entrepreneurs. And one of the reasons I'm happy to be on this call is that your listeners who are listening to this, most of them are entrepreneurs. I love entrepreneurs. I know you do too, Ryan. I know. That's why you do what you do.

For me. For RV share, this was a mission of building entrepreneurs. It was building the tools that would allow people who, traditionally, if you just look at the RV demographic in general, they don't have a lot of excess income. And a lot of these people, some of them live paycheck to paycheck. And I wanted to figure out, how can we go out there and how can we help people? How can we really make a difference in people's lives?

Having somebody who has an asset that's a depreciating asset that's costing them money every single month, and turning that into something that may cost them $500 a month into something that may put $1,000 or $1,500 or $500 or whatever it may be in their pocket every month. Now all of a sudden, that person, they're a business owner and they're an entrepreneur now. And now they may not be starting the next billion dollar company, but that's not where everybody's at.

You've had a meaningful impact on somebody's life as a result of that.

Yeah. And really, going back to your question of.

Going into this, you knew you weren't going to necessarily turn a profit right away. You had to build up the platform before it was profitable. It wasn't like you just create a widget and sell it today, and you create it today and sell it tomorrow. This is more of a long term game plan. The mission is the biggest reason why we've really been focused. We haven't been focused on profits, we haven't been focused on revenue. We've been focused on adding value to people's lives and changing lives as a byproduct of I think that this particular company, I'll probably end up making more money than I've ever made before from any prior companies and will have more of an impact, positive impact on the world than anything else I've done prior to this. But it's more of a byproduct that I think is going to come from it rather than the main focus. The main focus is really just its value.

Well, Mark, we're almost out of time, but I want to ask you, I want to ask you about users and exposure because you've built up, you've built up, you know, a large number of users fairly quickly and you've also just got a lot of exposure. You mentioned at the top of the hour that you've already been featured on CNN and a bunch of other places. How do you go about identifying where you're going to target users and acquire users? And how are you getting exposure quickly to something that's brand new?

Absolutely. How much time do we have? Because there's actually a couple of things I want to make sure we get into this call that are even more important than users and user acquisition.

We've got about 10 minutes.

Okay. So if you wouldn't mind, I actually would love to just touch on a couple other points real quick. I just have a few notes of.

Just go for it.

Things that I wanted to make sure I got across on this call. I don't know if you know this or not, Ryan, but I've been on a major book reading bench recently. In the last two months I've read like 40 books. And so there's a couple books specifically and a couple just tidbits of great advice that have been really impactful for me. And I think that sharing these will be much more impactful for everyone listening on this call than a specific user acquisition tactic would be. And if we have time, once I run through these real fast, then I'd love to share any answer question as far as user acquisition. But first and foremost, four books. You know, like I said, in the past, you know, two months I've read 40 books. Right now I'm on the pace of essentially reading about a book every other day. And so there's four books specifically that everybody on this call, they need to Pick up. If you're an entrepreneur, if you are trying to make more money, you're trying to change the world, you're trying to add value, you need to read these four books. So the first, go for it. Absolutely.

Because I've got my four too. The Slight Edge.

That is one of them. Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. That is an absolute must. Read the One Thing that is Another one. Yep. By Gary Keller. The One Thing by Gary Keller is absolute must.

Read the Power of Habit.

That is not on my list and I have not read that yet, but I'm probably gonna read it tomorrow now that you mentioned it.

All right, I got two of the four, so go ahead and give us the other two.

So the other two are the Star Principles by Richard Koch. Great, great book. And the other one is essentialism by Greg McCowan.

I don't know that one. I'm writing that one down.

These four books for me. I've read a lot of books recently and these have made the biggest impact on my life. And so I highly, highly, highly suggest that. If you're listening to this call right now, get on Amazon, get these books. The Star Principle by Richard Koch, the One Thing by Gary Keller, the Slight Edge by Greg Olson, and essentialism by Greg McCowan. So those are four just absolutely phenomenal books that are life changers. So that's the first thing I wanted to just mention to everybody. Another thing too, and a couple of these tidbits are actually just some pieces of advice that come from some of these books.

If you're listening to this right now, look at everything you're doing in your life right now, look at everything you're doing and rate everything you're doing on a scale of 1 to 10, both in your personal life and also in your business life. Anything you do, and if you rate it anything less than a 9, you need to stop doing it. And that's actually some very, very, very impactful and important and important advice. And this particular piece of advice.

This came a while back and this actually caused a major shift as far as just focus on RV share. For me personally, up until recently, I've been involved in a lot of other companies. I've had equity ownership and multiple other companies that I've helped co found. And not too long ago, I actually literally just walked away from almost every single one of the other ventures I've been involved with. We're talking.

For example, one of the companies I completely walked away from, which I had a 25% ownership stake in, was a company that was generating more than a million dollars a month in revenue. I literally just walked away from it. It's not to say that that's the best advice for. If you're listening to this call, it's right for everybody. But for me, it was right. And the reason why is I looked at everything I was doing and I rated all the different companies I was involved with and everything I was doing in my personal life and I rated everything on a scale of 1 to 10. And if it was not at least a 9 or 10, I eliminated it and got rid of it. And that actually caused me to for a long period of time. You know, my focus was actually divided between RV Share and multiple other companies of which I had co founded and, and getting that piece of advice and looking at my life and looking at all my businesses I was involved with figuring out if it's not a nine, then I'm moving on.

In some of the cases, it just made more sense for me personally to literally just walk away. That's what I did. And I'll tell you what, I am so thankful and so happy that I took the leap of faith and literally eliminated everything from my life that was not at least a 9 or a 10. It has made all the difference in the world just from on a success level. I mean, things are exponentially growing quicker with RV Share from a happiness level and a fulfillment level. I've never been happier. I've never been more fulfilled. So that is just one really important piece of advice that I'd like to just share with everybody out there is look at your life, look at everything you're doing and rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. If it's not at least a 9 or 10, you need to get rid of it. Another thing.

Real quick is.

This is actually part of the book by Jeff Olson. The slight edge is just looking at the things you do every day. You know, what are the small things you do every day? Because the small things that you do every day make the biggest difference in your life and most people don't realize them. And for me, and I'll tell you how this impacted me, for me, I made a decision to change one small habit at a time. And the first habit that I decided to change was I said, okay, instead of late night watching tv, right before I go to bed, I'm going to read. I read before, but I never really had a consistent reading schedule. It was kind of like I'd sit down and read a book here and then I'd go a Period of time without reading. And I didn't really have any consistency there. I looked at my life and said, okay, what's the one thing that I'd really like to, to focus on and make? You know, what's a small thing that I can do every single day that's really going to make a huge difference long term for me? And I realized that thing at the time was reading. And so for me, I just decided that every single night right before I go to bed instead of watching a few minutes of tv. And I've never been really a big TV person. I mean, as far as in general, I don't really. I haven't traditionally watched much tv, but generally half an hour or an hour right before I go to bed of tv, I watch. And I just made the decision to stop doing that. And literally I shut the TV off and I opened up a book. And in the past two months, I've read 40 books. And I can't even tell you how much internal growth I've experienced during that time. And I think it's really just at the very beginning of my internal growth for me. But if you're listening to this, you need to look at what's one thing you can change in your life every day. That's something small. Maybe it's not business, maybe it's eating healthier, maybe it's working out. But what is one small thing that you, one small tweak you can make in your life right now, that if you do that and you continually do that day after day after day, that in two years from now you're going to be completely different person. So I think that that's just a really important, impactful piece of advice that.

I wanted to share.

I like to say that all those things have, they have direct roi. Your relationship with your significant other. How hard is it to get meaningful work done when your relationship is out of whack? How hard is it to get meaningful work done when your body is out of whack and you're not feeding your body or working out or when you're, when your friendships are out of whack and you're alone and you feel lonely and empty? So there's a direct ROI to each of the areas that you're talking about?

Absolutely. Absolutely. You're so spot on.

Another thing that I wanted to share is this is actually something that's come from the book, the One Thing. And I'd say it's actually a combination of the One Thing and scrum. I don't know if you're familiar with the Scrum principle, yeah. But one thing that we do in our company which has worked very, very, very well for us, and it's something that I would say if you're not doing something like this, you should definitely consider doing it and I would suggest at least trying it out and see how it works for you. But we do a 15 minute daily stand up meeting every single day. So every day we have a 15 minute with everyone in the company. We go around real quick and basically it's like everyone has one thing every day. So every day you come to the meeting, basically I would say, okay, here's my task for today and the next day I better have that task done. The biggest thing I think it's done is the accountability of how accountable everybody is to. Because lots of times, unfortunately most, most people are more accountable to others than they are themselves. And that's just, it's unfortunate, but that's true. A lot of times most people.

They would be more likely to let themselves down than they would to let somebody, they care about them 100%.

True.

And so having just a daily 15 minute stand up meeting, and we don't allow it to go over 15 minutes, you want to make sure it's short. But having a daily 15 minute stand up meeting with your team or your company every day and having one focus item that is the most important thing for every single person to do, you will see exponential progress and growth. Because lots of times people have this massive to do list with 800 things to do and sometimes it's like you can get overwhelmed. There's just so much to do, you get overwhelmed and sometimes people aren't prioritizing things correctly. And I've noticed just for us, doing this 15 minute daily standup where everyone has one priority, one focus that every single day they have to bring to the meeting of what they're doing for the day and then the following day they basically let everyone know, hey, I got yesterday's one thing done or I didn't. And nobody wants to show up three days in a row saying I didn't get my thing done. So it really, I think, has increased productivity for us big time. I think it's just a universal productivity.

Hack. I guess you'd say that is just something that's really helped us out a lot.

Well, Mark, thank you for all that. There's more long term value in that than talking about user acquisition and exposure. But what I'd like to do, if you're open to it, is bring you back on the show at some point and have a conversation about growing market disrupting companies. You're the one person I usually interrupt people more often, but you're the one, probably one of maybe three people in my life that when you talk, I just listen. Just shut up and listen. So thank you for coming on the show and for sharing your knowledge. I know you do very few interviews and very little public speaking, so thank you for sharing your knowledge with the listeners here at Freedom Fast Lane.

Absolutely. You know, I'm just, I hope that I was able to add value today to, you know, if you're listening and if you have any questions or if you want to get ahold of me, you guys can, you can actually email me@markvshare.com if anyone has questions, advice you want to, any more advice on anything I've talked about today, feel free to reach out to me and I'll get back with you. So, yeah, Ryan, thank you very much. I really respect what you're doing and what you're doing with your, with Freedom Fast Lane. And just in general, I know that your heart is really out to help people and there's a lot of people. One thing I really appreciate about you and knowing you, most people on this call probably don't know you as well as I know you. I mean, we live together for a period of time.

But you are one of the most genuine people I've ever met in my entire life. And you're, you are out there trying to add value and trying to help people. And your listeners are lucky for all the hard work everyone listens to these podcasts. Not everyone realizes all the hard work that goes into them. And I know you really work your butt off to help people. I know this isn't a big profit generator for you. I don't even know if you make any money off at all because I know you and I talked about it and I think you said, look, I do this because I care and I want to help people, you know, and I really just want to say I really respect you for that.

Mark, thank you so much and thanks for hanging out with us at Freedom Fast Lane.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

I usually talk more during a podcast, but Mark is the one guy who, when he talks, I just shut up and listen. And he's the one person that I would let sidestep a question like he did there at the end. So we'll try to bring him back and talk about user experience. But hey, the most important thing in this podcast is how Mark talks about how he's in this for the long game, and he's in this to create a bunch of value, to create value for people's lives, to remember that this is a people business, not just a numbers business. And not forgetting who our customers are behind the numbers and creating real value in is how an economy works. That's what money is. It's an exchange of value. So the more value you produce, the more that will flow to you. And in our age of hiding behind computers and working from home, it's easy to forget that. And the people who really create tremendous value that change people's lives and change the world are still who are rewarded in today's economy. And let's not forget that surrounding myself with Mark has been the best thing that I've ever done. Well, both personally and for my business, because I've learned so much from him. And if you don't have mentors in your life, if you're not surrounding yourself with people who take you to that next level, I would encourage you to go listen to the podcast episode about building your success network. It will run you through some strategies to get around people who stretch. I'd also invite you to join the tribe or the tribe mastermind, depending on what level you're at. And I'll have more details for you on what that looks like in the next couple podcasts. So thank you for listening. Today's show with Mark Jenny. Be sure to check out his new company@rvshare.com and I'll see you all on the next show.