How Struggle Can Create a Path to Opportunity with Jeff Lerner

Okay, everyone. Today we've got my buddy Jeff Lerner, who is the co-founder and CEO at ENTRE Institute, which is an online community of entrepreneurs, lifelong learners. And well, it is basically something that gives you, gives its members access to the training, support, and inspiration to succeed in online business. Jeff, how's it going?

Good.

Tell us a little bit about kind of your story. I mean, because one of the headlines for me that I want to talk about is You had $400 grand in business debt and you somehow turned it all around. So, let's hear that story first before we jump into the business.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I have found that of all the stories in my life, that's the one that people usually like to start with. Yeah, it was $495,000 in debt and that was a specific sum of a few different debts, one of which was about $330,000 And that was the biggie because it was to, it was to the small business or it was to the U.S. Treasury. Basically, it was a defaulted Small Business Administration loan, which means you borrow your money from the bank. But if you default on the loan, the bank gets made whole because they cash in an insurance policy with the government. The government pays off the loan or about 75% of the loan. The bank takes its loss. And now you, now you're dealing tête-à-tête with the government. So there's no bankrupting out of a defaulted SBA loan. There's no going into hiding. It's basically the, you own the same body as if you owed $300,000. $495,000 worth of taxes. So that was the biggie. I had 2 5-year leases with commercial real estate companies because it was for 2 franchise restaurants. And they both closed in about the first year. So I had 4 years left on 2 5-year leases with big real estate investment trusts and, you know, people with a lot of attorneys who it was no bother to them to come after little old me. So that and then some other taxes and stuff. So it was $495,000 in total.

Wow.

Life-crushing, soul-draining debt. I was 29 years old. Other than failing at 2 restaurants and a host of other businesses, the only thing I really had in my life professionally was I was a piano player, working jazz piano player. And that wasn't going to dig me out of $500,000 in debt anytime soon. And so it was late 2008. And from a total rock bottom place of desperation but also liberation because when you're that far down, you don't really have anything else to lose, I went online. I took what little credit I could scrounge up and invested in some online courses and went to work. That last bit is a biggie. I went to work. It is a lot of work. It's not just about watching lots of videos and listening to lots of podcasts. Like, but I did the work. And in 18 months, I paid off all that debt with affiliate marketing. In 5 years, I earned about $10 million in affiliate commissions. As a full-time affiliate marketer. So from 2008 to 2012, clearly my whole life turned around.

So I think that's a good lesson too, because I took over Single Grain at 27 years old, had no idea what I was doing. And I would argue still, for me at least, I'm still figuring it out, right? I think a lot of people think, oh, you know, just because you have years of experience, like you're, you're this hotshot. But at the end of the day, everyone's still figuring it out. So I don't know where you stand on that, but I think You know, people that have imposter syndrome, I say it's okay.

Well, yeah. I mean, people that have imposter syndrome, I would argue really they're just not, they don't have like a delusional lack of self-awareness. Like we are all figuring it out. I almost said faking it, but I don't think we're faking it. Like there's a way to be very authentic and real and vulnerable and transparent and humble within your figuring it outness. Where like, I don't think people have a service expectation of you to always have all the answers or do everything right. But man, they got to see that you try, you're trying, and that you care. You get a long way, you buy a lot of cushion and create a lot of grace in this world just by caring a lot and working really hard when you're— especially when you're doing it for other people.

Yep, for sure. Um, and that's a, that's a good lesson everyone should take to heart. If you're just getting started right now, it's okay, you know, keep going.

I live my life We have a really, really key piece of our DNA at ENTRE that's called the 3 Ps of Excellence, which is physical, personal, and professional. And I actually teach it as a concentric model where physical's at the center and then personal, then professional. So like you're never going to outperform the machine that you're housed inside of, which is your body. And if you're struggling with your results in life, you're Your external world usually reflects your internal world. And if your body's not in, you know, in a good place, likely most things, most other things aren't either. So we start there, then we move to personal, which— so it's kind of like you have the most impact on yourself, and then you have the next most impact on your personal relationships, and then you have the most indirect impact on the world at large. But yet most people are focusing on trying to get a result from the world at large, which is money, which is sales, which is authority or leadership or whatever, but like you actually have the most impact starting with you. So let's start there. Then let's move to personal relationships, which is like your family and your friends and your community and your neighbors. And, you know, this conversation right here, like people you talk to, right? How do those people feel? Right? If you're not as rich as you want to be, or you're not as cool as you want to be, or you're not as important as you want to be, don't start by asking, well, how can I win over a million people? Start by going, well, How does my neighbor feel about our last conversation? You know, the residue that you leave, you know, what was Maya Angelou say? They never— they'll forget what you say, they'll forget what you do, they'll never forget how you made them feel, man. If you're going around the world and you're not making people feel better about their interaction, better for their interaction with you, you're missing the key skill that's going to, you know, sabotage everything else you're trying to do. So we start with ourselves, then we go to personal, and then we go to professional. And it's a Very different way of approaching the digital business conversation that everybody's out there trying to go, well, how can I make more money? I don't know. Be a better person. Start there. Right? Like what? I don't want to hear that. Just tell me the hack. Well, do you want the truth or do you want the soundbite? I've been able to compress a lot of time. I mean, you know, long story short, we've gone from no sales to millions of dollars a month in sales. Like big growth, big fast growth, right? The kind everybody's like, ooh, I want to do that. And I've just accelerated through so much of the curve and the drag and the friction because this is kind of the linchpin of what I've done and what I'm doing. And not only how I've gotten here, but where, how we're going to get there, where we're going, is I've been able to shave out all that time that most entrepreneurs spend sitting there doubting and fretting about what they're doing. And by the way, that's like 90% of most entrepreneurs' time. So when you eliminate all that time, you literally get things done 10 times faster. But the way I did it was before I ever sold a product, before I ever tried to create a customer, I spent a year putting content out to the market, figuring out who I was, what I stood for, how I spoke, what I had to say, what people wanted, out of this messy, chaotic, multifaceted organism called Jeff? What are the little pieces of it both from a story, narrative, brand perspective but from a value, knowledge, skillset perspective? What aligns with my heart? Like how to figure out myself. And the analogy I keep using is I had to get as clear about myself as Nabisco is about a cookie. Like Nabisco thinks about a cookie in such deep, intricate, complex ways, yet it's something so fundamentally simple, sweet, and cute, right? You got to be that cookie in this. You have to be the cookie and Nabisco at the same time with yourself, in your brand, in your business. And I spent a year figuring out what was— what my cookie was going to be. So then when it got time to start selling cookies, I didn't have to question the recipe. I put out content for a year. I warmed up an audience of millions of people. I got thousands of pieces of hate and criticism, and people told me what they like. People told me what they didn't like. I'd ask open questions. I'd take feedback. I did all the R&D before I ever tried to sell anything. So then when it was like, okay, I think I know what the market wants. I think I know what I want. I think I know how I can serve the market in a way that can also be a really scalable business but also personally fulfilling. I just got to work and I haven't stopped. Literally every day I work for 10 hours. And when I work for 10 hours, I work as much as most people working 100 hours because I waste zero time questioning what I'm doing. That fluidity of like you got to work on your business the way like Muhammad Ali worked on a fight. Like he's always figuring it out and shifting and moving and adjusting. But he's never sitting there going, man, what am I— the second he stops and goes, oh, should I even be doing this? Like, I don't know. He's done. And that's Muhammad Ali. If it can happen to him, it can happen to you. Waste no time. Like listen, make the decision and then work it until the decision kills you or demands a better decision. But a lot of people seem like they're looking for, they're like in the moment of when they should be doing the work to validate the decision, Seeking a different decision.

I feel like you've done a lot of studying around this, right? You talk about Muhammad Ali. I mean, you still play that. It seems like you're very diligent when you come into putting in the work, right? Like you still spend what, an hour a day playing the piano, correct?

Yeah. So when I, I mean, yes, I do. And it's pure joy at this point. But I mean, I'll share the backstory on that. When I was 17 years old, I was at a boarding, actually, I guess I was 16. I was at a boarding school. It was my first semester of my junior year. I I had gotten kicked out of my grade school that I'd gone to from kindergarten through 10th grade. So I was a fish out of water. I felt super disoriented. I was very down on high school. I didn't see the point of traditional education. I wanted basically no part of anything I was being forced to do every day. And there was one thing I decided I wanted to do with my life, and that was play the piano. I was not a pianist at the time. I had played guitar previously. I knew I was a pretty decent musician, but I was like, man, I've got to do something or else I'm going to have to get a job someday. And there was nothing that sounded worse to me than that. So I was like, what can I do to get some control of my time, be doing something that I like, and at least make enough money that I don't have to get a job? Well, I imagine being a piano player would be okay because, you know, I've seen the pianists at the bars. They always got a couple hundred dollars in tips in their jar. And, you know, you go play for 4 hours and take requests. And if you're, if you're a piano player and you can sing, effectively you're the whole band. So you don't have to split the money with a bass player and a drummer and a guitarist. Like, it was a very strategic thing. And there was one problem. I wasn't a piano player and I was 17. My window was closing for— I mean, most, most pianists would tell you my window had already closed and I'd missed the boat. But I didn't get that memo. Instead, I dropped out of high school and spent 8 to 10 hours a day practicing piano for 3 years. I convinced my parents. I said, look, I'm not going to make you pay to send me to college. You not even going to have to pay to buy me a gown to walk a stage to get a high school diploma, but I need a piano, please. They bought me a piano. I practiced like a lunatic, self-taught for 8 hours a day for 3 years. Every semester, I would go back to the university and say, I know I don't have a high school diploma and I know I'm not a piano player, but please let me in. I promise I'll make it good. And every semester, I would audition as a self-taught, brand-new aspiring pianist to get into the piano performance school at University of Houston. And they laughed at me. They literally, they laughed at me every semester for 3 years until eventually they were like, we kind of can't argue with this anymore. And clearly, he's just going to keep coming back. So they let me in. And I ended up getting a full scholarship as the first chair jazz pianist in the jazz orchestra and got a college degree that I never had to pay for. But more importantly, I proved to myself that I can do just about anything if I ignore all the people who say that I can't.

I love that. I think that's the story that most people should latch on to because it's— if you can find one thing that you're good at, one thing that gives you energy, and it doesn't matter if you almost dropped out, whatever, and you keep practicing, eventually they can't help but to notice, right? And then you move on to the next thing, right? I'm going to give it a shot. Let's give the restaurant thing a shot. Doesn't work out. Okay, let's get back up again. Let's keep giving it a shot because you built the muscles, right, from piano. Like if you didn't have piano, you wouldn't have learned how to build that resilience, right?

So anyway, you know, I learned it's— but also, you're always alone. There's no— there's really no group learning of piano. I mean, there's certain things you can do, but generally you're alone for a huge amount of time. You're very concentrated. I mean, I always pictured my own eyeballs like droplets of blood falling out of them, hours after hours of just sitting at a keyboard, teaching myself to sight-read music, teaching myself to transpose music, teaching myself to improvise on chord progressions. It's a long, arduous, solitary journey that unites the intellectual, the artistic, the physical. It's a great template for just learning mastery as a concept. And when you do that, and I think everybody should, should have something in their life that's just like ridiculously hard and frustrating, because when you're making progress at that thing. You're making all the other progress that you want to make in your life seem easier and more fun because there's actually nothing I'm ever going to probably try to master in my life that's going to be as hard as the piano. As far as being successful at building a business with it, I think there's, you have to get really, really obsessed with the math and accept the conditions that the math creates, which are this. If you're going to promote products that don't pay big enough commissions to justify running paid ads, or that you're not going to assemble a sequence of enough products that lots of small commissions can still equate to a high enough lifetime value of getting somebody on your list to pay for the ad that got them on your list, right? Like, you have to do the math. You either have to— let's say you're going to go spend $50 to get a name on your list, an email. And, or let's say you spend $5, but you know, you're not probably not going to get above a 10 or 20% open rate. Let's say 20. So that $5, it's really $25 to get a person on there who's actually going to open one of your emails. So, okay, I got to either have a single product, and that product, let's say it converts at 5%. Well, if that means— sorry, my math is gonna break down— but if that product's converting at 5%, it means of the 25% or the 20% of people that open my email, so that's the $25 that I had to spend to get a name on my list. Only 1 out of 20 of those people is actually going to buy a product from me. So what's the math on that? That'd be, I got to make $500. I have to get paid at least a $500 commission on that one sale or else I cannot put a name on my list without losing money. So I've either got to get to that $500 through one product that pays me one commission of at least $500 or I need to sequence together a number of products that will in aggregate equal that same amount of commissions based on the conversions and the probabilities and And like that, a lot of people go into it kind of like conceptually but without like actually doing that work, that analysis. And then they don't understand why they don't make money. And so if you're going to do it through paid ads, you have to think through your products and your sequencing and your conversions and create some projections beforehand or else don't be surprised when the numbers don't work.

I love it, man. So Jeff, I mean you just talked about the podcast and the book. But what else are, are those the best ways to find you online or you got something else?

Yeah. Honestly, if you go to millionairesecrets.com, you're going to get my, you'll be able to subscribe to my podcast. You'll be able to go on my YouTube channel, which I really love when people start with my YouTube channel. I'd rather give you everything I got and then you go, hey, I like this. I'd love to have some more. And then you can maybe come become my customer or whatever. But like I leave nothing unsaid on my YouTube channel. So go to millionairesecrets.com. You get a free copy of my digital, I have a shorter digital book called The Millionaire Shortcut that's A download is 20 pages, really fast, easy read. Get that, go to my YouTube channel, uh, subscribe to my podcast and take it from there.

All right, Jeff, this is great. Thanks so much for doing this.

Of course. Thanks for having me, man. It's been great.