Don't Fail - Just Pivot

Foreign.

Welcome to beyond you'd why Podcast, where we go beyond just talking about your why and actually help you discover and then live your why. You see, we believe that knowing your why, that driving force behind every decision you make and every action you take, is the essential first step to really knowing yourself. It allows you to move forward faster and have a bigger impact. If you're already a fan of the show, then you know that every week we talk about one of the nine whys and then we introduce you to somebody with that why so you can see how their why has played out in their life. This show will be more powerful for you if you've already discovered your why. If you still need to do that, head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. It'll only take you about five minutes. Now let's meet today's guest.

Today we are going to be talking about the why of Better Way. If this is your why, then you are the ultimate innovator. You constantly seek better ways to do everything from the most mundane tasks of brushing your teeth to improving the rocket fuel that powers the space shuttle. You can't stop yourself. You take virtually anything and you want to improve it, make it better and share your improvements with the world. You invent things and take what has already been invented and improve that too. You constantly ask yourself the question, what if we tried this differently? What if we did this another way? You contribute to the world with better processes, better systems and operate under the motto often pleased, Never satisfied. You are excellent at associating and taking from one industry or discipline and applying it to another, always with the aim of improving something. You generally operate with a high level of energy because after all, that too is is a better way. And so today I've got a guest I know you're going to love. His name is Mitch Russo. So in 1985, Mitch Co founded Timeslips Corp. Which grew to become the largest time tracking software company in the world. In 1994, Timeslips Corp. Was sold to Sage for eight figures. While at Sage, Mitch went on to run all of Sage USA as chief operating officer, a division with 300 people and a market cap in excess of 100 million. Mitch then went on to join Chet Holmes and Tony Robbins and created Business Breakthroughs International, a company serving thousands of businesses a year with coaching, consulting and training services. Mitch was the president and CEO. In 2015, Mitch published the Invisible Organization, which is the CEO's guide to transitioning a traditional brick and mortar company into a fully virtual organization. Nominated twice For Inc. Magazine's Entrepreneur of the year, Mitch helps companies scale rapidly. Then in 2018, Mitch published Power Tribes how certification can explode your business, which is the master blueprint for building profitable certification programs. To get the book, you can go to powertribes.com Then in 2021, Mitch launched Clientfold IO, which is a software to service platform for coaches to increase productivity and decrease admin time. Mitch, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Gary. It's great to be here.

That was a mouthful. I don't even know where to start with you.

I'll just make one quick correction. If people are interested in the Power Tribes book, they should go to powertribes book dot com.

There we go. Well, let's start with where are you? Where do you live?

I live on the coast of South Florida, here in a beautiful spot.

Oh, that's awesome.

So where were you born? Kind of give us the.

Take us through where you started, how you got into what you were doing, and then how you started. Time slips.

Sure. So I grew up in New York City. I grew up in Brooklyn, and I was born in 1954. So right around the time I was 15 or 16, we were smacking middle of the 60s and I got caught up in. In all of the culture that was going on then. And in high school, you know, one of the things I discovered was that I wasn't. I was kind of shy and I really didn't get many dates at that time. So thinking about finding a better way to get dates, I decided to start a rock band. I figured that might help and boy did it. So I, I practiced guitar. I. I pulled a bunch of friends together, we started messing around, but ultimately I didn't like what was coming out, meaning we weren't very good at it. So my desire was to shut the fun down and increase the repetition so we get better and better and better. So at first it was, hey, let's get together. This will be fun. You know, some of my buddies would say, hey, let's smoke a joint. That make it even better. But ultimately the product was terrible. So we then got disciplined and we in fact created a set list of about 14 songs which we knew really, really well. Then we started to get hired and then as a result of that, we didn't know what to charge. So we charged $50. Well, we were price experimenting. So we eventually brought that up to $500 and people were still paying that. We also learned that testimonials were a great way to get your next gig. So we asked moms to create Testimonials for us, which they did. We also noticed that anything we posted on the supermarket bulletin board would get seen by a lot of people. So I had the bright idea, why don't I take those simple little grocery store posts and send them to the local newspaper? And lo and behold, they got printed. It was amazing. So now we were trying to figure out how to do print, how to use testimonials, how to price test, how to increase the quality of our product. And then ultimately, we were now having fun. We were now getting booked all over the city, all over Brooklyn. We became the highest priced high school rock band in the area. And we were getting business. We were really enjoying it until eventually it was time to move on and we did. So that was my early exposure to.

To business.

Business, yeah.

Wow. So then where'd you go off to school?

Well, I started out at. At. At a college in New York, actually New York University, and found that I hated it. And, you know, I really just wanted to learn electronics. My passion was electronics and circuit design. So my mom said to me, well, then, look, you're not doing well in college. Where do you want to go? I said, well, I don't know, Mom, I have no idea. Then I had this idea, well, maybe if I learn how to fix color television sets, that would be a good living. And so I enrolled in color television repair school. Now, I have to tell you, I loved it. I was actually focused on exactly what I wanted to learn. And.

I thought overall the experience was great. I was an A student there. But in the last quarter, last term of school, there was a mandatory class that nobody liked, and it was called digital electronics. Now, Gary, we know we're talking about TVs here. There's no such thing as digital electronics. Inside of a tv, it's all vacuum tubes. Right? You know, of course, yeah. So. But we went anyway.

I'm sorry, Big ones.

Big ones, yes. So we ended up in the class, and the teacher asked me to stay one day after school and he gave me a book and he said, look, I want you to go home and I want you to read the first two chapters and do the exercises at the end of the book. I said, yeah, sure, no problem. I stuck in my bag and I left. That night I got home, I read the book, it was great. And I did the exercises, came back the next day, handed him the assignment, walked away. He goes, wait a minute, where are you going? I said, I just. You asked me to do assignment. I did. He goes, no, no, now you do the Next assignment. Well, this went on for most of that term. And I know the funny thing was, is that he never asked anybody else to do anything like this. I hadn't quite noticed that until towards the end of the cycle, until finally I said, you know, I finished. Here's the book. We're done. He goes, do you know what you just did? I said, no idea. What did I do? He goes, you just completed your freshman and sophomore year in advanced circuit design and logic design. And I said, oh, I did. He goes, yeah, here's a little, little hint, Mitch. You're never going to fix a color television set. You're going into the computer business. And he. He basically pivoted my life for me. He changed my life. The next. The next week, I was recruited out of my graduating class to move to Massachusetts and work for a computer company, Data General. And that's how I got from Brooklyn, New York to Massachusetts. And I found myself in a production line job assembling and testing computers, which at first was kind of fun, but boring, boring, boring.

So talk about getting. Having a better way on the line. One of our jobs was to take a computer that failed the QA test and then take a manual meter set of probes and check the backboard pin at a time. There were 200 pins per slot, and there were 14 slots, so imagine how long that would take. So, of course, I had the idea, well, look, why don't I just build a circuit that you plug it into the slot and it. It runs a. A timer in a way that it pulses each pin one at a time until it finds the bad pin and it stops, lights up the pin number. So in my spare time, I built it. I would plug it into the computer, hit the button, there it was, pin number 17bad. Finally, management came to me and said, what the hell are you doing? I said, well, I just didn't feel like sitting here for two or three hours buzzing out an entire back plane when I had designed a circuit that would do it for me. He goes, we don't pay you to do that. We pay you to do what we tell you to do, and you're not doing what we tell you to do. I said, you know something? You're right. Maybe I don't belong here. And they said, we don't think you do either. And so, luckily, I'd already been interviewing with another company, which was Digital Electronics Corporation dec. I got a job there. I went into their labs, their experimental labs, and I worked on what became their most powerful, profitable. And I would Say, popular release ever, the VAX 11 Sati 1180. What they called then was a mini computer because it was the size of a room, but it was a mini computer. Well, that was a lot of fun. I got to learn a lot about electronics there. I then went to the people who made the memory chips as part of my progression. They hired me, I came on board. I worked for Mostec Corporation, purchased by United Technologies. And I was open to this world of, of this whole process of what selling in the electronics industry is. So I got sick and tired of being an engineer and I said, you know what? I want to make the money those guys make. So I became a salesman and I sweated it out for almost 14 months until my very first commission check on a quarter of the base pay I was being paid before. But that first commission check, now remember, now this is like 1980, 81, the first commission check was $34,000. And I was completely overwhelmed. And I, by the way, those were coming now every month. And so I had no idea what to do with that kind of money. So I went to the bank, I filled that bank up with $100,000 because that's all they would insure FDIC. And I moved on to another bank and then another bank. I kept throwing these passbooks into my sock drawer. I wasn't even sure how many I had at one point. But the whole business collapsed. The semiconductor industry goes through cycles. It collapsed. One morning I'm having a casual breakfast with a new neighbor and I said to him, I'm having a lot of trouble trying to do this one thing that I'm trying to do. And he goes, what's that? I said, well, my accountant tells me that we cannot deduct our personal computers because the IRS considers them toys. So the only way to actually deduct the computer is to create a contemporaneous record of its use. And I said to my accountant, no problem, I'll just get some software and do that. He says, sure, as long as you do it, you can deduct the computer. So of course I went on a search for contemporaneous record keeping software for computers, and guess what? None existed. So I went to my, my buddy and I said, look, you want to know what I'm, I'm struggling with? I'd like to find a way to do this. So we sat at breakfast, course of about two hour breakfast. And we sketched out on, literally on a napkin what that first screen would look like of a software product that kept records of time. Well, and then, of course, he went off to build it. I went off to write the documentation and to test it. I went off to research how to do pr, how to, you know, basically get out into the marketplace, all the while holding our jobs. He had been designing software programs for teachers up until then and hairdressers. So finally we got to the point. Six months later, I said, you know, I think we're ready to start selling this. He goes, yeah, me too. I said, great, so I'm going to go in on Monday and I'm going to quit my job. He goes, yeah, yeah, I'm going to do the same. So we both go in. We quit our jobs on Monday, or it was actually on a Friday, because now I remember what happened. And then on Monday morning, with the two of us looking at each other, we've never worked for ourselves before, said, well, okay, what do you, what do you want to do today? We don't have any jobs. What do you want to do? And I said, well, I have a whole plan. I know what I'm going to do. And then all of a sudden, my phone rang. And back then it was a, you know, digital. It was a dial up phone on my desk. And so I picked up the phone. It's my accountant. He goes, mitch, I got some bad news for you. I said, what's that? He goes, well, you know that whole thing we were talking about with the contemporaneous record keeping? I said, yeah, well, the IRS just, they changed their mind, they relaxed the rulings. You don't need to do that anymore. And I was like, oh.

But we burned the boats. I mean, we're stuck on the island now. We have no way back. So I look at my partner, I said, I got bad news. I told him what my accountant said, and he said to me, okay. I mean, we got, we got upset, we got mad, we threw stuff around, we went for lunch, we commiserated. Came back from lunch, said, okay, now who else needs this? And I thought to myself, well, I mean, who keeps track of time? Well, lawyers keep track of time. Accountants keep track of time. We think, we don't really know. You know, maybe architects keep track of time. Who knows, maybe coaches, consultants, who knows? He goes, well, I have an idea. Why don't we take this thing and convert it from what we had into a time tracking tool for lawyers and general use? I said, but, Neil, we don't have enough software. We don't have a billing system. We barely have a reporting system. He goes, that's no problem. I Wrote a billing system for my hairdresser client. I'm sure I could do it for lawyers. It's probably the same anyway. Of course, it completely wasn't. And then I went to BU Boston University Library, and I went into the School of Law. I snuck into the School of Law library and I borrowed the manuals for what was then considered contemporary time and billing software. And we literally copied the billing formats out of those manuals. We kind of ripped them off, but they're public domain. We didn't do anything wrong. But we basically copied all the billing formats. And three months later, to much surprise and delight, we released our software. But here's how we did it. Because we are not lawyers and because we don't bill by the hour, we had no real idea of how it's done. So I found a chat group on CompuServe. Nobody will know that except you and I, Gary and I asked them if they would be willing to take a look at the software we have for lawyers who bill their time on their own desktop computers. Well, that was the cutting edge back then. And we got a bunch of people to say yes and literally followed whatever they said. They said, well, you know, you need a second billing rate. You know, we don't bill it the same. Well, fine, we added two. We added three billing rates. Well, you know, we also have to be able to write off time. Well, we added different schedules and different modes. And finally we got to the point where we took all of our remaining money. Now, we had invested $10,000 to start the company, and we had $6,000 left, and we decided to, quote, unquote, blow it on two ads in PC magazine. Well, that resulted in too much of our surprise that the rep had told us how we double and triple our money with two ads. We got five sales at $99 a sale after spending $6,000. So we're sitting there now figuring out, what the heck do we do next. There was a trade show in New York. We'll go to that. We had basically a folding table and a sheet in a room with multimillion dollar displays. And then finally, about two months later, we got a thick envelope in the mail, and it was filled with what was then called the bingo leads. Now, a bingo lead is if you go into a magazine, you be able to see a postcard inside the magazine with a bunch of numbers on it. Do you remember those, Gary?

Oh, yeah.

And so you would go through the magazine and you would circle the number of the ad that you wanted more information on. And you would send in the card and then a few months later, you've probably forgot what you circled. But the information would show up. Well, I get all these leads and I said, well, you know what? I have no, they're probably terrible. Why don't I start calling people and asking them why they circled our number? Well, that was the best market research I ever did. I realized at that point that almost all of those inquiries were from lawyers who used PCs. In fact, we then sold another 30 copies, one on one over the phone to those folks. At that point, we refocused the entire company on marketing to lawyers. Well, now following coming that following November, there was Comdex, which is a big computer show in Las Vegas. I go out to Comdex, I have the cheapest hotel room in 30 miles. I practically had a walk at least three hours to get to the convention center from where the bus dropped me off. And at that point I walked the floor of Comdex for 12 days handing out the hundred copies of time slips I brought with me. I had no idea what was going to happen. I came home exhausted, with nothing, but I hope, sure hope we get some phone calls. Well, we started to then place little ads and little newspapers and you know, we would start measuring how many calls we got from each newspaper. $30 ad here, $20 ad there. And we were selling, you know, for every $20 we spent, we sell three copies at $99. Well, that was fine until finally we get this call one day and it was from an unknown source. But they said, look, we're trying to do a fact check before we publish the review that we've written of your software. I said, really?

Who is this? He goes, well, all I could tell you is we're from InfoWorld. Now back then, InfoWorld was like the equivalent of being written up in the New York Times. It was the greatest, biggest technology publication. Good news is that if you made it in InfoWorld, you were world, you were known worldwide. Bad news is if you got even a mediocre review, you might as well shut your doors. That was like, you know, like, like if they rated you 6 or below, that would be like damning. Would faint praise go out of business? Just save yourself the time? Well, now we're terrified. We have no idea what's going to happen next. And I'll skip the drama. But the bottom line was one morning I get up, it's 6am and the phones are ringing off the hook.

Above the garage room, which is where the company was, and we had four phones. Optimistic we were. We had four phones that rolled over and we never get more than one call at a time anyway. But nonetheless, we set that up. Now all four were ringing, and I'm in my underwear and I'm sitting there writing orders one after the other after the other. And finally I said, well, where did you hear about us? And I go, oh, you didn't see the review you got in InfoWorld? I said, no, we haven't gotten our issue yet. He goes, I said, what were we rated? What were we rated? And the guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, you were rated the highest they've ever rated any software. 9.3. I said, what? Because, yep, the only other software product that was ever rated that high was WordPerfect, which back then was the big thing. Well, at that point, we were selling five or six or seven copies a week. After that review, we started selling 600 copies a week. Now, these days, PR doesn't quite work the same way because we have way too much noise. But back then, there really wasn't any other focused information, vertically focused information channels. Well, that's what put us on the map. And that is how we started the growth cycle for time slips.

Wow. And you stayed with them for how many years and then you sold them, Right, and moved on to the next thing?

Well, what happened was, is that my partner and I had financed the company ourselves. We had no investors, and we had a. The interesting factor about software is that you would sell a bunch of software and then you'd need to support that software. And then from there, once a year you get to release an upgrade, and that's where you could create an avalanche of money from your existing users. Well, so we were going through this sort of up and down cycle, up and down, basically rocky road revenue cycle. We, we were supporting the company during the down months. We had a line of credit that started out as we had a $2,500 line of credit when we opened it. By the time we sold the company, it was 850,000 line of credit. But the bank required us to bring it to zero for five minutes every single year, once a year, which we would do every upgrade cycle. Bottom line is that, you know, my, my CFO said to me one day goes, you know, you guys are, you're pretty much standing there at the top of the type rope you're swinging. You know, personally, you're risking somewhere between 4 and $500,000, and you don't even have any assets other than the company. So you might want to think about maybe getting an Investor. Well, that turned into a much larger conversation with my partner. And he said to me, look, we're doing this. We were doing this for seven years. And he goes, how much longer do I have to do this for? I said, well, are you not having fun? He goes, well, don't get me wrong, but it's really like a job and I'd really like to do something else. But he was very, very loyal to me as a friend and he said, look, let me take us through this. I'll get us out of this and it will work out. So I started putting us discreetly on the market and luckily I found two buyers literally at the same time. One in the legal industry, it was a very prominent legal publishing company. And the other in the software business, which was not involved. But here's the cool thing. We were struggling with revenue and struggling with support when I had this idea to eventually what became the Time Slip Certified Consultant program. So what I ended up doing is reaching out to some of my best customers and saying, hey, we are dealing with a lot of people who need support that are local to you, but not to us. Would you be interested in going out and talking to those folks? Well, without, again, that's a whole interview story about how that happened. But the bottom line is that eventually we are able to put together the infrastructure to support and launch a Time Slip certified culture based certification program which ended up ballooning to 350 certified consultants. Now Gary, in that time, that group, the following year, that one group dropped a million dollars of cash in in certification fees to our bottom line, became our third largest sales channel after retail, and also turned out to drop our support expenses by 20%. And remember, they're paying us for the privilege of supporting and representing our products. Well, that doubled the size of the company in the last 18 months that we owned it. And we said, my partner and I said, you know, this is really what I call getting out at the top. And and so we did. We found the buyer, we made an offer, they made an offer, and it was ridiculously great at the time. And we said, okay, and that's how we sold it.

While we take a moment to give our guest a quick break, I hope you're hearing how important it is to know your why. If you're ready to put an end to your frustration and unlock the code to your personal and business success, then after the show, make sure to head to why institute.com and discover your why today. It only takes about five minutes. Let's get back to the show.

You Got out. And then from there, did you go work with Chet Holmes and Tony Robbins?

Well, actually, from there, I didn't quite know what I was going to do. Chet and I had stayed friends, you know, he was so instrumental in helping me grow Timeslips Corporation. But I had this big pile of money sitting there, and I have to trust these advisors who I hate and know that well, but they seem to be smart. So I said, you know what? I have the time. I'm going to go back to school and learn how to invest. So I enrolled in a course on how to trade options. And I became so fascinated with options trading, I not only graduated the course at the highest level, I then hired a Chicago Board of Options exchange trader, actually floor trader, to mentor me. And I mentored with him for a year. And when I was trading, at the time that I. Just before I stopped, I was swinging about a half a million in and out of the market every month. And the risk was high. But I was generating cash, free cash flow out of the market at around 20,000amonth. And I was pretty happy with that. So I was adding all this extra money. I didn't even quite need it. But the bottom line is, it was fun. It was exciting. And then the big crash came in 2007, 2008, and I became terrified. I didn't, you know, luckily, my mentor was keeping me safe. But when the dust settled, I had lost all of my profits for the year, and my blood pressure meds went through the roof. And I decided, you know what? This was great, and I love it, but not for me. And by serendipitously, that's when Chet called and said, hey, I could use a little help here. You think you can help me out? I said, yes. That became me starting out at the lowest level inside of Chad's company as a recruiter. I then built a recruiting division. I then perfected the recruiting systems. I then rolled them out to the rest of the company. We then began recruiting for all of our clients. I then added two more divisions. He said, mitch, you should run my company for me. I said, okay. And after I said, okay, the next month, he announced, mitch, you and I are going to be on the phone with Tony Robbins Thursday night. I said, who? What? What? Fantastic. Why? He goes, well, I've been soliciting Tony now for 17 years. I finally got him to be serious about maybe joining us and working with us and building this brand. So at that point, that began a series of Thursday night phone calls, typically starting at midnight 12:11pm to midnight, and we would go till 1 or 2 in the morning talking all about how we can create this business together. And finally we figured it out, and it was a tough deal for both of us to swallow, which was great. And we launched Business Breakthroughs International with a event at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas with 500 people in attendance. We recorded all of those sessions, and that became our first product.

We then started selling them on a webinar for. We started the webinars, I think, at $69 a seat. Eventually, we took that to $239 a seat. We started advertising them on the radio. We were spending about, I think it was 10 or $15,000 a month on the radio. We figured it out. We figured out how to scale it, and we brought that to 150,000amonth on the radio. And at that point.

We were just printing money.

The organization grew faster and faster and faster. Our biggest problem was finding good people. But the thing was, the secret sauce was we did it completely, virtually. We did not own a single asset. And as a result of that, we were able to scale and grow rapidly while keeping expenses basically keyed to our growth. So as, of course, as we grow, our expenses would increase because we're paying salespeople. We're even paying our service bureaus, basically on performance. And then at that point, the worst thing I could have ever imagined happened. Chet came down, which was discovered he had stage four leukemia, and it became a slow path to his passing.

And that was an ordeal I never want to go through again. And poor Chet and his family had to go through all of that. The company was basically struggling at this point.

And I was unable to really feel like I could stay with that organization any longer. So I spoke to Tony and told him my plans, and he said he understands and supports me. So I left. And here I was now. I didn't know what to do. I had no clue as to what my future would be. I kept thinking, mitch, you don't even really have a skill you can promote.

And so I called up my friend. I called Jay Abraham. I said, jay, what do I do? He says, mitch, I don't know what you're going to do, but I got to tell you this. You must share what you know with the world. You cannot go to the grave with what you know. You must share this with the world. I said, how do I do that? He goes, I don't know. Have a nice day. Bye. And that was the end of the conversation, basically. Well, I thought about it. I sat on it for three months, I started making notes that resulted in my very first book called the Invisible Organization, which in fact is the blueprint of how we built BBI Business Breakthroughs International. Well, that went on to be a bestseller. It got some nice acclaim. And then I started getting calls from people who wanted my help, which was great. And at that point, I started taking on clients again. And, you know, I worked with some amazing people. NFL players, CEOs of $50 million companies, all kinds of amazing people. And you, of course, were part of that group as well at one point. And then eventually what started to happen is I realized that this model that I had created back with, with my software company, which is creating certification programs with something other people needed and wanted. So I started to create a systemization process for how to do it. So I spent a lot of hours on creating the mind maps, the flowcharts, the. The specifications for how to build what I had done. I basically had to do a postmodern. A post mortem on myself. And, well, what did I do? How did I do that? How can I improve what I did back then, now into the way we operate in today's world? Then after I did it for one or two companies, I realized I really had figured it out. So I documented the process in my second book called Power Tribes.

From there. And since then, I've been building Power Tribes. I've been creating software products, I have been working with clients, I have been trading options. And Gary, I've been a happy guy.

That is a lot you had going on there. I know Mitch, and still got a lot going on, so that's exciting.

Yeah.

So what? You know, when I think back about it, obviously you've found a better way in each area that you've jumped into, and then you share it, right? You create a better way.

You.

You go through. That's a common trait with better way people as we jump in and take a beating and keep working our way through those beatings until we found something that works. And then we share it.

That's right. And here's the thing that Chet taught me many years ago. I remember once, I mean, we had really worked hard to build this incredible dynamic infrastructure. You might say it was a trade secret at the time. Well, Chet gets in front of a room of 200 people and he shares the whole model. And I'm sitting in the back of the room with my mouth, what are you doing? You've sworn me to secrecy. Why did you do that? And he said the words to me that really changed How I thought about this whole thing. He goes, mitch, no one will ever take what I just said and even try to do it. But they now know we are the experts at it. I said, bingo, light bulb. That's it. That's the key. Share as much information as you have, disclose everything, and never worry about ever being hungry again, because nobody will ever actually do it on their own. Why, when they can hire the guy who wrote the book to do it, would they try to do it on their own? Wow.

I love that. And so when you were working with Chet, did. Chet did that organization bbi, bbi, did it go down because his health went down, or were other things happening?

Well, we had. You know, this again, this is a great. This is a great business case. We had scaled the company on one marketing technique only, and we did because it works so, so well. We scaled the company on radio. We had perfected how to make money on the radio, and very few people had figured that out. But here's what it really came down to. It came down to the fact that when Tony was on the radio, when we put Tony and we. Chet and I would write these commercials together. When we'd write the commercial and Tony would read it, we would get thousands of phone calls from people who were not focused on business because they just loved Tony. Anything Tony was offering, they wanted, but they wouldn't buy. They just wanted the free giveaway. When Chet did the radio announcements, he was speaking to business owners, and business owners knew that he was the guy who built. He was a business guy. He built his career that way. So what happened was, when Chet got sick, one of the first things that happened to him is he got a stroke. So when he got a stroke, he no longer could speak clearly and authoritatively the way he did before. So no matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't get him and those ads to work anymore. And so we were scrambling to try and get Internet marketing to work, to get direct mail to work, but really, we were behind the eight ball at that time, and our. And our sales were dropping because our radio was not. We could. The other thing was, is that it really didn't feel genuine anymore to be running ads by a dead person. You know, it's sort of like. It's sort of like the man is speaking to you, but he's gone. How can you run those ads? That's like. It's almost. It's embarrassing, and it's disrespectful. So eventually, you know, so what was happening is now people were Panicking. And, and I said to Tony, I flew out to see Tony one night and we met in his hotel room and I presented him with a, basically with a complete restructuring plan. And I had this back then I had this incredible vision for building a business university from the materials that he and Chet had put together, plus some of my own things as well. And we were going to take that university and we were going to co market it with financial institutions. And the reason was, is because we had proof that if people studied our material, the quality of those bank loans would increase. And so we saw a direct tie in and we figured that the university would drive people to the banks and that the banks could drive people to the university. Tony loved the idea. And I went home after that. We shared an incredible video of Tony. I together with the company. We tried to get things going again, but unfortunately there it wasn't going to work. What happened was that the family now got scared. They thought, you know, with Chad gone, they didn't know what to do. And they brought in a third party consultant who later turned out to have been a thief. So the third party consultant's goal was to crash the company and then buy the intellectual property for pennies on the dollar. Once I saw this and tried to alert the family, at that point they said, you know what, we're staying with the consultant. I said, okay, well then I need to resign. And I did and I resigned. And I was one of the first people to leave. And at that time, that was when I started my journey writing my books and becoming who I am today.

So it sounds like you guys built that kind of like a personal brand based on Chet. And then when he was gone, you couldn't turn it into a company brand.

Well, it was transitioning nicely to a company brand. And we had received, I can't say who because it wouldn't be fair anymore, but we received an offer, a buyout offer of 150 million. Now I was a stakeholder, I owned chair. Tony and Chet of course owned shares too. So we were kind of like counting our money at that point because we said, look, let's sell this thing, pick up the 150 million and you know, everybody's going to be happy. And then we can go and start some more companies. And Chet loved it, Tony loved it. So we went out to the team, went out to meet with the people who were interested in buying the company. And meeting at the hotel the next morning, we found out that the negotiator from the other company had died the night before, in his hotel room.

So again, it was one of these things where not meant to happen. It looked like we tried to revive the deal. It wasn't going to work. And so at that point we lost it and we let it go. But again, everything happens. In my world, I believe everything happens exactly as it's supposed to, even if I don't like it when it does. And for the right reason. And the right reason was for me to get out of the shadow of Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes, be on my own and make my own way. Because again, a lot of my feeling of success and my vision of myself was tied up by having served these two incredible men.

So what was it like working with Tony? I didn't never know Chet, but I know Tony is still very much in the public forum. I watched a lot of his videos. In fact, this last weekend he did a whole live event with, you know, 750,000 people watching it.

And I.

What's it. What was it like working with him? I know he's a larger than life figure.

Well, you know, there's a. There's this myth that Tony and others like him are different off stage than they are on stage. So in other words, that passion, that energy, that integrity that you see on stage, you see in spades off stage too. Tony was. Even during difficult times, he relied on his senior people like me to get the job done, even when I made mistakes. He was never harsh or condescending, which is opposite of Chet. Chet was brutal that way, but Tony was the opposite. Tony understood the psychology of what makes a person successful. And he followed, you might say he. He drank his own Kool Aid in that regard because he knew if he treated me with respect, I would feel respected by Tony Robbins. And so he made sure that I did. And I don't think it was a. I thought. I think it was genuine in the way he did it. And I appreciated it. And I would do anything for Tony. In fact, here we are, it's, you know, almost 10 years later, and I. You see how I speak of him. He's. He's one of the people I admire most in life.

Wow. So that got you so many great experiences, and those got translated into different books. Tell us a little bit about Power Tribes.

Well, one of the things that I had realized in building a certification program was that the business model itself, which is relatively simple on the surface, is very powerful. But what happens to many of these certification programs is they devolve and they literally descend into chaos. And because some strong negative personalities Get a hold of the group. And there's all these reasons why. And so what I had discovered is that the reason my first program failed when I built it initially is because I did not have the right people in it. And how do you get the right people in it? And the reason, the way I wanted to approach this was, what are the characteristics of the right people? And so I basically interviewed my best certified consultants back then, and I discovered that there were some very common traits about who they were and what they did. And from there, I created what I called the Code of Ethics. And the Code of Ethics has become over 38 key points about what, when you build any community or culture must be adhered to. Some of them are very obvious. Like, you know, if you join, if you become part of this group, you can't steal our intellectual property and claim it as your own or sell it. And like I said, that's pretty obvious. But there are others that are less. Less obvious. The other part of the Code of Ethics is it helps people who are running the program understand how to act as well. I'll give you a very simple example. When I was running my certified consultant program, a man comes to me and says, hey, look, this would be great in the Spanish market. I'd like to translate it for you. And I said, well, that does. That sounds like a very good idea. He goes, yeah, I'll do it for free. I said, really? Okay. And I let him do it for free. Well, now it started to happen was that there became a split in the group fom friend of Mitch's and the rest. So now there were people who wanted to do favors for me so they could be in the friend of Mitch group. Well, I had just destroyed the culture without even realizing it. I should have said, hey, that's a great idea. How much would you charge? And I'm going to open this up to the rest of the community and see if anybody else wants to do it. That would have been the right thing to do. That I did not do. But as they say, we learn from our mistakes. Boy, did I learn from that one. And there are many like that. So I designed a culture, I would call it a paradigm that now when I start a program, we start with that. So we create the business model first from the business model. We then evolve what I call the culture Parthenon. And that's a J. Abraham term, the Parthenon. He uses that a lot. So the Parthenon consists of this. The roof of the Parthenon are the key values. The why? Of the CEO and his core values, including his what as well. And then from there, we discover together what the pillars of the Parthenon are. And we call that the code of ethics. Now, once we are complete, once we all understand this, we then create a course on how do we educate our new population on our culture. We roll that out to the population, and boom, it's done. Now, when we bring people into the organization, they are a fit, and if they're not, the culture self corrects them.

I love that. You know, it's interesting we're having this conversation because we were. We were. My team and I were having this same conversation about the culture of our why certified professionals and how do we handle situations that may or may not come up? And we were talking about something similar, putting that into the. Into the courses. A section on the culture.

Yep.

And now we know where to go to get it.

You got it. You got it. I'm here for you. Absolutely. So the bottom line is, is that if you have a great culture, you have a great program. Now, it doesn't mean that if you have a great culture that they'll make money. That's a whole different conversation. So we have to, of course, still go back to designing the business model to make sure that we have a profitable program that benefits its members.

So you just start running scenarios. So if I'm somebody listening to this and I'm thinking, you know what? I've got this great intellectual property. I'd love to certify it to other professionals.

How do I do that? Would the book Power Tribes be one of your first recommendations?

Well, yeah, because, I mean, I recommend somebody read Power Tribes before they have a conversation with me, because then we could operate it at full transmission rates. Otherwise, I have to go and explain concepts that are already in the book and are a waste of everybody's time. So read the book, get an idea of what that's about. But.

I think it's a great opportunity. I've not found a more powerful business model than building a power tribe, a certified consultant program.

Wow. So what's next? I know we're kind of running out of time here, so I want to say, well, I want to hear what's next for Mitch. I know when we got on this call, you said, hey, I was just doing some options trading, but I know that's just part of what you're going to be doing. What's next for you?

Well, you know, I can't help stop myself from creating great things. I think they're great things. So I just. Last year I realized I had an issue with how I run my coaching sessions, and I started to look for coaching software, and everything I found was overly complicated and very expensive. So I said, you know what? I'm going to write my own. And so I spent the last 18 months working with a team, and we've built what I think is the best, most economical coaching system for coaches ever to exist. It's called Client Folio, and the IO is the extension. So it's Client fol IO. And for me, this I believe, and my beta testers have agreed that this is fast, it's efficient. The training video for the entire system is eight minutes long. So that will tell you how simple it is to operate. It all runs on one screen. It's dirt cheap. It's 20 bucks a month for unlimited clients, and it can expand to thousands of coaches if you have a large organization.

Wow. And the essence of it is.

Who is your ideal client for this?

So my ideal client is a coach who has five applications open on their screen, trying to keep track of goals, trying to keep notes, trying to write homework, trying to send the email, trying to book the next session. With all these different screens and browser windows open. Now you just go to clientfolio. All of those tools are at your disposal on a single screen, including some ones that will, if you use, will enhance the value of the work that you do with your clients.

I love that. All right, last question before we, before we let you go. What is the best piece of advice you've received or the best piece of advice you have ever given?

There's two parts to that question. The first is I go back to the story I told you. With time slips, we failed building our little time tracking tool until we figured out how we could reuse that technology. These days, that's called the pivot.

In my world, I don't really ever fail at anything because I just pivot what I'm doing to try and see if it would fit. The idea of I just find a better way to market and deploy what it is I'm doing. So that better way formula for me always translate into pivoting into the next thing. The other thing that I realized in my coaching many, many moons ago was that really, in essence, the CEO has only two roles. No matter what, it boils down to two things. The CEO's job is to create and to communicate. Everything else should be delegated. Create and communicate. And when I look at any business and I start understanding how well they're doing, what their failures are, what their tribulations are. It comes down to the CEO not focusing on creation and then not communicating effectively with your teams, their customers, their vendors and their own internal staff.

So what do you mean by create?

Well, Gary, you're a creator. You create products. You have the vision. So create can be replaced with visionary. So your goal is to be the visionary and communicate. Once you descend into the weeds, you're no longer doing your job. I'll dock your pay, Gary, if you descend into the weeds and it should be docked because your highest value is in the vision spot and in the creation spot. That's what I mean.

I love that that's a really simple way to articulate the power and what a CEO should do because it's confusing. Being a CEO can be very confusing until you hear such an easy explanation.

Well, it's worked for me and every even in my own life when I start getting jammed up and I start getting overwhelmed, I look back to that simple formula and say, well, of course I'm jammed up and overwhelmed. I'm not sticking to my, to my guns here. I'm doing the wrong thing. I'm doing low pay stuff that I shouldn't be doing.

So if I'm a coach or I have a coaching organization or I want to connect with you, what's the best way for somebody to get a hold of you and who would you like to connect with you?

Well, today, of course, I always like to connect with business owners who need help. That's my job. People who want to build power tribes, that's what I do. But I'm really excited about connecting with coaches and coaching organizations who simply want to save between 20 and 30 minutes per session that they normally would have spent trying to put together all the admin to deliver the results of their coaching session. I'd love to find those people. I'd love to show them clientfolio. I'd love to get their feedback and I'd love to help them improve their practice because I think I found a.

Better way to help coaches that would not surprise me. So what's the website again for clientfolio?

It is that clientfolio with the last IO being the extension C L I E N T F O L I O.

Awesome. Well, Mitch, I know that you and I are going to be doing some things together soon and I am really looking forward to that. I know you've got to go here just a minute or so. So I don't want to hold you, but thank you so much for being here for our audience. Thanks for sharing all the stuff that you've learned and I look forward to all the people that are going to connect with you and help bring Client folio to all the coaches.

I love it. Thank you, Gary. It was a pleasure seeing and spending time with you again.

Thanks, Mitch.

While we take a moment to give our guest a quick break, I hope you're hearing how important it is to know your why. If you're ready to put an end to your frustration and unlock the code to your personal and business success, then after the show, make sure to head to why institute.com and discover your why. Today it only takes about five minutes.

Minutes.

Let's get back to the show.

Well, now it's time for a new segment that we're adding and this one is called Guess the why. And we're going to look at celebrities, people that we think we know what their why is and we'll see what you all think. And so today I'm going to since since Mitch worked with Tony Robbins and I heard Tony Robbins story over the weekend, I learned a lot more about him in some videos that I was watching. I believe that Tony Robbins why is make sense. To make sense of the complex and challenging. I believe that he is somebody who had to grow up young early. He had a lot of drama and trauma in his life with his mother being an alcoholic and having four step fathers. So he had to be the guy that grew up fast and protected his younger siblings. And for whatever reason that is so common with people that have the why of make sense, they had to grow up young. I also believe that Tony Robbins how, how he does, what he does is by making things, by simplifying things, taking complex things, understanding them, then simplifying them. And then his what, what he ultimately brings is a way to contribute and and add value to other people. So I believe his why is make sense, his how is simplify and his what is contribute. So if any of you know him, I'm going to be reaching out to him here soon and seeing how we can do some work together and connect. But if anybody else knows him and can connect with him, let's figure out for sure what his why is. Now I just want to thank you guys all for listening. If you have not yet discovered your why, you can do so go over to why.

I've got a special code for you. Put in podcast 50 and you can get it at half price. It's only $47 so you'll get it at half price. And if you love the beyond your why Podcast and you're a regular listener, please don't forget to subscribe below and leave us a review and rating on whatever platform you are using to listen to our podcast. It'll really help bring the why to the world, which is what our goal is. We want to impact a billion people in the next five years, so the podcast is one of the things that we're doing to do that. So if this is something that you've enjoyed, please give us a rating, give us a thumbs up or whatever to help us spread the word. Thank you so much for being here. Have a great rest of your week and I will see you or hear or talk to you next week.

Thank you.

I really hope you enjoyed today's episode and that through today's guest you you heard how important it is to know your why and how impactful it can be in your life and the lives of those around you. Be sure to head over to why institute.com and discover your why today. Remember, the more you know about yourself, the more you'll know about others. I'm Dr. Gary Sanchez and I'll see you on the next episode.