Mike Dillard - Overcoming Struggles To Create 8-Figure Businesses

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, Joseph.

Yes, sir.

Welcome back.

Hey, I'm here. You're here. Welcome back to you, too. You're here.

You made it.

For a while.

I know Jimmy Fallon says at the beginning of. Is this Tonight Show?

Yeah, yeah.

So the beginning of the Jimmy Tonight Show. Every single episode, he goes, you're here. You made it.

Hey, that's an accomplishment if you think about it, man. There's a lot of crazy people out there. A of things. You got to get somewhere.

Flying in a plane, trying to just.

Get around New York.

True. I mean, it's an accomplishment.

So he's probably just talking about traffic here. You're here. You made it.

Probably true.

You're on time. Well, someone else is actually here with us as well today.

And he was also on time.

Yes, he was.

Luckily, we have pretty dang good guess where and seems to be very punctual.

Nice.

Today. It was. I love this interview. I love this conversation. It's not an interview. These are conversations.

Well, this is one that. That I think I've been wanting to do for a really, really long time. You know, I bought multiple of his courses. I have his book. You know, he. I listened to his podcast. So he's someone that I was really excited to have. And it's Mike Dillard.

It is the Mike Dillard.

Previous Mike Diller.com previously of Self Made man and also the Elevation Group. Yeah, and also Magnetic sponsoring.

Yeah, I found the book actually on your bookshelf, so I'm looking at it right now.

Yeah, he's. He's done some amazing stuff throughout his career and had a. A lot of businesses and a lot of sort of reinventions, and we're going to get into all of that. He. He kind of goes into his story. But I think the part that, you know, we. That got really interesting was towards the end when we started talking about, you know, anxiety and depression and over overworking and trying to build monster companies and how it takes a toll on your body and your mind and. And that kind of thing.

It's the stuff that. That I think every entrepreneur feels but just doesn't really talk about. And that's where we're trying to do more. We're trying to talk about that more on this podcast. And because it's. It's like our therapy sessions. We were talking. It's like our therapy sessions are starting to leak over into these interviews or these conversations we have with others. And Mike was So dang gracious and amazing for being so open with us like this. We didn't expect it, but we went down some very big rabbit holes in. I mean, all over the place, just in his story. But, yeah, like, what you're saying, Matt, with the stress, anxiety management and how he did have a brain injury, his nervous system, and he was very open with how he's been able to. How he's had to basically change his life. And it's still. But we're all, like. We all have our own struggles and things happening and. And, yeah, just with the technology and constantly being on and scrolling and keeping up with the news and the latest. It's like there's something common, man.

Yeah.

And that's what. That's what Mike was talking about, so we'll let him talk about all that.

So we dive into, you know, we dive into his story. We dive into, you know, a lot of this. This type of conversation about sort of depression and anxiety and working yourself too hard. We talk a lot about podcasting and why podcasting is so effective. We talk about different business models. He very openly shared about which businesses worked and which ones didn't work.

That was super cool, I thought, because he was like, yeah, that one did not work, and I blew Yara. I don't have to say you wasted money because you didn't. You invested this money and it did not work out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so a lot of good topics in here. And of course, as always, we took notes on it.

Oh, yeah, always.

Hustleandflowchart.com comp. You can go and get the notes from this episode that we hand wrote and then had a typist go and type up after we hand wrote them. In cursive, no less.

We actually have a monkey in the corner who has. Who's very, very good. Penmanship.

Pin.

Womanship. Is it a. It's a lady monkey.

Yeah. So we don't use pronouns with he, she.

Oh, okay. I don't know.

I don't know what we're talking about anymore.

I'm just. Yeah, so we took the notes for you, and I'm very much wanting to go back to these notes, just even for the books that he was recommending, he was tossing out all these different blurbs of wisdom, you know, and so much was interwoven in his story, and all the takeaways are kind of just mixed in there. So get the dang notes, man.

Yeah. Hustleandflowchart.com, to get the notes if you want to. Even better. Support the show and help us out and make sure that we're able to keep making shows because we're able to pay the bills. Go to egpletter.com that's how we pay the bills. It's, you know, it's kind of like supporting a show on Patreon where you go and say, okay, I'm going to support this show for X amount of dollars per month. But, you know, at Patreon, you're probably not getting much for it. If you go to us, we're going to give you all of the archives of notes, all of the new notes that are coming out in the mail of private forum community, new training videos all the time with us and our guests, and all sorts of cool perks. And it's super cheap right now, and it really, really helps. Support the show. That's@egpletter.com and also, if you just want to get the notes for just this episode, go to hustle and flowchart.com comp. They're available for a very, very limited time, so make sure you go quickly after listening to this episode if you want to get them.

Alrighty. Thank you very much for listening. And I don't even think we said, this is the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Did we say that at the very top?

I don't know. Probably not.

Probably not. We have a bad tendency of just forgetting about that.

But our intro music thing that covers.

It does say, okay, perfect. All right, let's go chat with Mr. Mike. Hey, Mike, welcome to the show.

How's it going? Glad to be here.

Doing great, man. Yeah. And, yeah, thanks for coming on. I know Kurt Molly, we both. We all work with him, I think pretty close and great buddy of ours, and he's like, you gotta get Mike on the show.

And.

Yeah. And further investigation. I know you've been, like, changing some stuff up with the business, at least the part that we can. The public can see. I'm like, but this is very similar to a model of how we run stuff. Podcast. Podcast kind of leads a lot of the content, interviews and subscription business. I'm sure a lot more that's happening that we don't know about.

Yeah, it's been a heck of a few years, so lots of changes going on.

Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. And, you know, I was a customer of the Elevation Group. Probably I don't remember when it started, so I may be totally off with my dates, but somewhere around 2010, 2011, I was in the Elevation Group.

And December 2010 was when we launched.

Okay. So, yeah, it was probably about 2011 that I was a member of the Elevation Group and we've been following the podcast and all that kind of stuff ever since. So super pumped to have you on the show because we've been following along to, you know, your, you know, the last nine or ten years of your career. So it's. It's awesome to finally chat with you.

Awesome.

Well, appreciate that.

Yeah, man. So let's kick it off with a little bit of a backstory that. Because I know you've done quite a bit of things and started a business at 27, or not starting, but you had your first seven figure so early in. So let's take us back a bit and walk us through that and we'll kind of take the conversation around from there.

Yeah. I actually started my first entrepreneurial endeavors in college, which I graduated from Texas A and m the year 2000. So, yeah, by the time I was 2021, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and a business owner and that I did not want to have a job.

Back then. That was web 1.0 days, so there wasn't a lot going on. The concept of a digital ebook was a brand new technology.

There were no videos online at that time. If there was, it was really rare and you usually didn't have the bandwidth to watch it. So I really got my start in the network marketing industry. I know that's a pretty popular industry, at least it was with college students, because that's one of the few businesses that you can start for a couple of hundred bucks.

I really pursued that for five straight years without a single dollar in profits as a result.

But I was determined. And during those five years, I probably joined a dozen different network marketing opportunities. Every single one of them, I saw that there were people walking across the stage, getting big checks and making a lot of money. After I went through that dry spell for five years, I finally realized, okay, the only common denominator is me when it comes to this stuff not working out. So what am I doing wrong?

I basically realized that I was looking for success to come from the opportunity itself, from the product, from the timing, whatever it may be.

I didn't take responsibility for my success on my own. Again, I thought it was going to come from outside of me. That was a really big light bulb moment. And I was like, okay, that's clearly not how this works. And the people who are making money have one thing in common, which is that they've all mastered one particular skill. They've either Mastered recruiting, they've mastered speaking from stage, they've mastered closing people on the telephone and cold calling. Whatever their skill was, they were truly masters at it. And that's how they were getting results. And I realized that I had not mastered anything. So that's when I dove in headfirst and I decided that I needed to master marketing. I didn't like cold calling people. I definitely didn't want to hold meetings at my house, I didn't want to bug my friends and family members, and I didn't want to call leads or buy leads. So everything that I was told to do in that industry, I decided I didn't like to do and didn't want to do. So that really inspired me to come up with a creative solution to that problem. And again, back at that period in history, Internet marketing was a brand new thing. So I discovered Dan Kennedy and direct response marketing. I learned what copywriting was. Google AdWords had just come out, and I taught myself how to use Google AdWords to generate traffic and leads. I was broke at the time, so I asked more successful people in my upline if, hey, will you fund this ad campaign? I'll run a marketing campaign on Google AdWords to generate leads for us. You pay for the ad spend and I'll do all the work and then I'll charge you a dollar per lead as my fee.

Oh, that's so smart.

Yeah. So before you know it, I'm generating 50, 100, 150 leads a day for these leaders and they're paying me a dollar profit. Excuse me, guys.

They'Re paying me a dollar in profit. So I was getting paid to learn at that point. And as soon as I had that skillset and I knew how to write copy, I was like, all right, I've got some power to finally use and to execute with. So that was it. I ended up writing sales scripts for the next opportunity that I got involved in. That way I didn't have to talk to people over the phone. I just put up a website with a big sales letter, told them all about the business and the opportunity started sending traffic there from Google AdWords and people started calling me, emailing me, ready to join my organization. I started sponsoring people for the first time, making some money. And then.

That strategy really started to grab other people's attention. I ended up writing a 55 page training manual for my team on what I was doing and how I was doing it.

A bunch of other leaders got a hold of that book and asked me if they could have copies for Their team. So I just stripped out anything that was specific about my company and made it generic, Threw it up online under the name magnetic sponsoring for 39 bucks a copy. And before you know it, I was selling about $60,000 a month worth of that book within three months.

That's where I got my start as an entrepreneur. And once I cracked the online marketing code, you quickly look at the network marketing industry and you're like, this doesn't make sense anymore.

A$5, a 5% commission on a bottle of vitamins is no way to build a business. And you've got to teach people and train them and babysit them, and it just didn't make any sense. So I spent a few years teaching Internet marketing to the network marketing industry, made about $25 million doing that, and then left and started the Elevation group, which is where you guys found me.

Yeah, no, that was the catalyst. It sounds like you picked up just lateral thinking and different ways of doing deals. Like you did. Whole ad spend go upline, you know, to someone else, leverage their. Their bankroll a little bit, but you're doing the work, so you brought them more value. And yeah, no wonder why you were like, I probably should direct this somewhere else.

Now, I'm curious, when, before you started teaching, what you were teaching, were people really using sort of like online automation to grow downlines and network marketing companies, or was that something you were kind of helping pioneer at the time?

You know, there were the. There were. I remember there being like these automated marketing systems that tried to do all of the selling and recruiting for you, and it would build your downline for you, and that was just a bunch of garbage.

If you really want to build a business in the network marketing industry, you have to truly train people to become professionals at that business. And back in my book, I use phrase that I still talk about this day, which is that network marketing is an industry of marketing and promotion pursued by people who have no idea how to market and promote.

And those systems.

Don'T empower people. They disempower people. So that's the stuff that would have appealed to the young green version of Mike, who again, was looking for success to come from outside of me through a system like that. And the challenge is it might work for a little while, but as soon as your organization dissolves or leaves or something changes, you still don't have any skill sets. So now you're screwed again.

And so for me.

I had clarity around that very quick. I was like, this is a dead end and a bomb just waiting to happen. So I avoided those quite well.

Yeah, sounds like it. It's almost like you're building really someone else's business and putting your heart, you know, complete effort into that as well. So what did that transition look like from there to Elevation Group?

At the time, you know, I had turned magnetic sponsoring into an eight figure business. I had built the largest downline in my network marketing company of choice at the time. So I really didn't have anything else to do in that industry. I had far surpassed any goals that I had ever even thought of. And because there was no more challenge or growth, I started to get really bored and didn't really have anything else to say or teach. And so during that time, that was around 2008, 2009, I'd seen the market collapse. I was turning 30, I was making seven figures a year and I was blowing all of that money on cars and houses and boats and stuff that a dude in his twenties would, would do. I just realized, hey, I need to figure out this money thing. I just watched my parents and their friends lose half of their savings. I know what I'm not going to do, but I don't know what the answer is. You quickly realize that there's two worlds of finance. There's the retail financial industry for middle America, which is designed to frankly, just suck them dry with fees. And then there are the wealthy who've really cracked financial education and investing and money management. And they're doing very, very, very different things than the middle class do, but they're not often talked about. I remember reading every Robert Kiyosaki book back then and Robert's phenomenal from a general education perspective. Like, hey, buy cash flow real estate. That makes a lot of sense. But how do I do that? Who do I do that with? Who are you investing with?

We didn't go into enough detail. I wanted contacts and resources. I also looked into all of the other financial education companies out there. Agora, Stansberry Research, Motley fool, and they were all based around stock picks. They all used technical charts and technical trading analysis and they were all in written text format. Primarily their demographic was men above the age of 50.

That was not me. That's not what I was interested in. I don't have any. Again, we just saw the market drop by half. The last thing I want to do is get involved in the stock market. At this point.

I decided to solve my problem once again. I wanted to learn how to invest like the rich. I went to the bookstores. I couldn't find A single book that was still relevant after the crash on how to do that. So I decided I'm just going to start interviewing people. I'm going to become the Oprah of the financial education industry because I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm going to go find some really smart people who do know what they're doing and I'm just going to interview them. And then if I have an opportunity to, I'm going to invest with them and their companies. For example, there's a phenomenal multifamily real estate group here in Austin called Thrive FP that my friends JP and Adrian run. I've known them since back when EVG was around and would invest in their apartment complexes. And I would document, here's how much I invested, here's the deal, here's what's happening with that.

It was kind of like a journey. I would release one video interview a month and I would bring people along on my story. For better or worse. Some of the investments worked out, some of them did not.

And that was the concept. I launched that in December of 2010. I had no idea if anyone was going to buy it. It's weird to go into a new industry where no one knows your name or you have no expertise, you have no credibility and you're openly stating that in your marketing materials.

Well, it sounds like you're doing it for yourself, which is really cool at that point in your life.

Well, I found that all of my most successful businesses are inspired by my biggest personal problems. And if I have a problem, then I'm motivated to solve it. And if I have a problem, then there's a very good chance there's a lot of other people who have it as well. So that was the general concept and what I said in the sales webinars, hey, I need to figure this out. You need to figure this out. Let's do it together. $97 a month, $600 a year. Put together a 90 minute webinar to market the the membership and then kept my fingers crossed again. I had no idea if anyone was going to be interested in this or buy it. Thankfully they were. So we ended up selling 8,700 memberships in the first week. Made about $3.2 million in a week.

Just from my laptop. With no employees, no office, one tech guy and a customer service gal.

So you're saying it resonated pretty well with people?

Yeah, you know, it was a zeitgeist moment. The timing was everything. So we did over $10 million in revenue in our first year. And we had just caught lightning in the bottle with the perfect message at the perfect time. Because.

People.

If you're like, my parents are just kind of an upper middle class person who's just taken this big hit, your financial advisor is telling you, you know, just invest more money.

And at that point, again, that'll work out in the long run. But.

They weren't empowered with education around what their options were. Right. So I was able to introduce my parents to folks like JP and Adrian. And they've tripled, quadrupled their money over the last few years. Working with them and their investments in real estate they've gotten the tax benefits from that.

Timing was everything. And then ironically, around 2013, 2014, actually, no, no, earlier than that, around 2012, 2013, as the economy improved and recovered, the business quickly started to just go away. The webinar had run its course. The doom and gloom scenario that was discussed during that webinar was no longer present and the market changed. But fortunately I had left the business by 2013 to my business partner. So I was in there about three years and he took it over. And then I was ready to do something else at that point.

And that's when Self Made man kind of started up. Was it around that same time or was there something in between?

The idea for Self Made man came at the Tony Robbins Date with Destiny event that he held in 2014. If you've ever seen the documentary that he did, that's the event that I was in. I was in the crowd there. Oh, wow.

Yeah, did see that? That's what. I'm not your guru.

Yeah. So that was the event that I was at. It was my first Tony Robbins event. And I walked away from that event inspired with two different ideas. One was in the hydroponic food industry. I was ready to take on a new type of business that wasn't revolved around myself and my name. After doing that for 10 years, I just needed to challenge and push myself in a different way.

One of the big problems that I saw in the world, living across the street from Whole Foods headquarters in downtown Austin and shopping there every week, is that you have to be quite wealthy just to afford food that is not covered in poison. And I thought that was really unacceptable. I was really inspired by Peter Diamandis book Abundance, where he talked about the decentralization of all of the industries that really started back then with Uber 99 designs, oDesk, Airbnb, and all of these different companies that decentralized their Industries that really inspired me to ask myself if it was possible to decentralize the ag industry in farming. If you look at the way we farm today, it's incredibly inefficient and it's incredibly destructive. We're pumping poisons into the ground, we're wasting ridiculous amounts of water.

We'Re incurring ridiculous food costs because we're importing food on giant tankers from other countries. We're trucking it across the United States.

By the time it gets to your local Whole Foods ahead of organic lettuce is three or four bucks.

So I wanted to fix that. And I've never grown anything before. I didn't know anything about producing a technical piece of hardware or technology.

And I just started on Google. I went to Amazon and bought five books on hydroponics. I went to Google and I started typing in industrial design firms. Yeah, I went to Odesk and I had someone make a kind of a Photoshop render of the concept that I had in my head. So I bought a stock photo of a kitchen, grabbed a photo of a Voss water bottle, gave it to the photo designer and I said, put the Voss water bottle in the kitchen, take the logo off, fill the middle with plants and put like a bright light on the top with my logo on it. And that was the image that I used when I started just cold calling industrial design firms and saying, hey, I want to build a fully automated hydroponic system for the home. Here's kind of a concept image of it. Is this something you can help me do? I eventually found a company called Whipsaw in Silicon Valley that said yes. They have designed a lot of really high tech, great looking tech products like the Drop Cam and.

A bunch of others that look like they're out of Apple, basically, which is what I was going for. I want this to look like Apple made it and I want it to look like a piece of art in your home.

Self Made man was the other idea that came out of the Tony Robbins event. I ended up going with Evergrow, the hydroponic system. And I can keep going down that road and how it did not work out. I can go to Self Made Man. Where would you guys like me to go?

Well, I know you had an episode I of Self Made man now called the Mike Dillard show, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. But didn't you have an episode that broke down pretty well? What happened with that and why you decided to phase that out and move in a different direction? Because if that's the case, we can just link up to that podcast and make sure people listen to that.

Yeah, you can go to evergrow.com or you can go to my YouTube channel and there's about a 25 minute video that I did with the system that went through the whole story. It's sitting next to me in my living room. I go from beginning to end on the intro that you guys just heard and then why I had to end up abandoning the project two and a half years later after well into the seven figure investment mark. But yeah, that'll take people through the whole story from start to finish.

After Evergrow did not work out as planned, Self Made man was my backup and I had been holding the or hosting the podcast since the launch of Ever or the beginning of the development of Evergrow in 2015. The podcast was the way I was really keeping in touch with my audience on a weekly basis. I didn't have time to pursue the Internet marketing education stuff that I had done previously while developing Evergrow. And a podcast was really the most efficient way for me to keep delivering value to my audience on a regular basis. And it really kind of took on a life of its own.

Yeah, and that's the beauty of podcasting is in the engagement rate. I'm not sure if you know yours off topic, but like we've seen 80% on hour plus long shows here, which is, it's amazing because you can't replicate that on Facebook video or something.

Some of the data that we've seen have shown that like Facebook lives people on average watch like 8% of it. Where podcasts on average people will, if they like the show, they tune into about 80% of every episode. So it's just, you know, it's such an intimate medium where you get to talk. You're basically in somebody's car with them for an hour or out for a run with them for an hour and the benefits are just huge.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely agree. There's, there's some drawbacks too in the fact that it's, it's hard to ask for sale on a podcast. There's no link to click. Yeah, things like that. But from a, a relationship building and a rapport building standpoint, it's, you know, it's phenomenal. So the feedback that I've gotten from listeners, you know, there's people who've listened to every single episode, it's the, the ROI for the return I've gotten in gratitude for my audience versus the time I've had to put into it. Is 10 to 1 true?

Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with that.

All.

All the way.

And for us, you know, with our show, it's kind of turned into, like, sort of an automated networking tool because, you know, whenever we have somebody on the show, we let them know that the episode went live, and then we asked for new connections, and it's just this. This sort of automated way of just kind of constantly getting connected with new, awesome people. So, I mean, there's that benefit as well.

Definitely. Yeah. I mean, when would I ever get a chance to jump on a call with Seth Godin or Tony Robbins or Daymond John or Gene Simmons or. Sure. Like, any of these crazy individuals that I would never, ever get a chance to talk to in normal life, you know, here we are chatting for an hour.

Yeah. How was it? Because I think what. Tony Robbins was on your show at one time, right?

Yeah.

How was that? Like, meeting, like. Because that was a big catalyst, it seemed like, for you, you know, going to his event but then having him on the show was that.

Well, what was. What was really surreal on that episode is that I found out that he, I believe, bought Elevation Group.

And that was one of his primary sources of inspiration for his book. So Money Master the Game was his version of the Elevation Group.

Wow.

Like, hey, we need to educate America so this doesn't happen again. We need to teach them how to invest, like the wealthy, and they even talk about some of the same exact strategies that we covered in evg. And just learning that he knew who I was and had gone through my stuff was mind blowing.

That's so cool, man. Yeah. Because I know with Tony, he wanted to give back in a bigger way, create wealth not only for himself, but for everyone else. And, yeah, it's exactly what you were doing as well. Yeah.

I'm curious how that connection happened. Did his people reach out to you? Did you sort of cold outreach to them? How did that.

Someone put us in touch, I believe, and said, hey, would you like to have Tony on the show? I was like, yeah. So I think they knew that my email audience and list from Elevation Group was the perfect fit for, you know, their book.

Yeah.

So, yeah, that's perfect.

So. So now you still have the podcast going all the time and amazing guests and definitely go over there.

Well, you've rebranded it to the Mike Dillard podcast now. Do you want to touch on real quick? I mean, I think I kind of understand why, but if you want to kind of explain real quick why you rebranded it, I think Kurt kind of Gave us the rundown on one of our calls we had with him. But I'd love to hear it in your words.

Yeah, you know, the goal for Self Made man was to build it into an education company that was not focused around or built around me. You realize that if you're building a business around your personal brand, it's a business you can never sell or have an exit from. And that's something that I was interested in doing. So we built Self Made man into an education platform. My role was really just to be the podcast host. And we filmed 40 to 50 classes in Austin with all kinds of entrepreneurial rock stars.

Friends of mine that we flew into town on all kinds of topics from building a business to investing to health and fitness and relationships and everything like that. We rented out all of these different venues in downtown Austin to create some visual.

Differentiation between the classes so they didn't look all the same. Filmed them in 360 VR. So if and when the time ever comes, all of these classes, you can put your VR goggles on and essentially sit in the audience and look around and you'd be right there as if you were shooting with us.

Oh man.

Then we modeled the platform after Skillshare and platforms like Udemy, CreativeLive. And there's a bunch of examples of these kinds of education platforms out there. And if you, if you see enough of them and you look at their numbers and maybe just whatever data you can find to judge their success by, you're going to think that, hey, this is a really lucrative business model.

We just.

Picked arbitrarily $19 a month or $97 a year for our pricing. And that got you access to a new class every two weeks when we first started. And.

The interesting part was is that it really didn't take off. I had the entire. One of the biggest mistakes I made is I had the entire platform coded with a great design company in California. They've done work for Porsche and lots of really big companies. They built a beautiful looking site that could handle skillshare levels of traffic and millions of users, which is what my vision for this would be, would become. And that again turned into a huge money pit. So at least half a million dollars in tech development, at least another half million dollars in developing the content, recording the content. So I'm into this thing for seven figures again. And when we launched it, by anyone's standards, it was a success. By my standards it was not.

And the really challenging part was when you have a big platform like that, that's not a single funnel like that you would create in ClickFunnels or Kartra or something like that. You don't really know what button to push or lever to tweak in order to increase conversion rates. It's a big open architecture and you have to just start poking and twisting and testing things here and testing things there. The challenge is when that software is all proprietary, is every single change has to be custom coded and rewritten, tested. And so I'd say, hey, let's try this workflow or this split test. And they'd be sure that'll be two weeks, three weeks and 30 grand. Right.

And that was just the killer. That's what killed the business is that it wasn't producing enough revenue. Because now we have the content production, we have the employees, we've got 30k a month, 50k a month in tech development, and at $19 a month in customer.

Value, we needed tens of thousands of members, which we did not get. I don't remember how many we started with in the beginning, but it wasn't hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in recurring revenue.

That eventually just bled the business dry because we couldn't split test quick enough and efficiently enough in order to get the flow optimized so that we could acquire customers profitably. What was really interesting is that about a year, year and a half later, I found out that CreativeLive laid off half of their employees, 3,500 people.

Oh wow.

And they had all Skillshare and CreativeLive Skillshare raised 30 to 40 million dollars, Venture Capital's CreativeLive over 70 million dollars. And so it really wasn't working out as I assumed that it was for any of them.

So that was it. And.

A year ago, a couple of months after we launched, I had a kind of a medical emergency, if you will, went through a brain injury that I'm still recovering from. And over the past year I really haven't been able to work or create anything. I haven't launched any new products for the most part.

Had to let the tech team go. And so the platform was just kind of sitting there and going through the health challenge that I've gone through. It just gave me new perspective and new drive in the fact that my primary incentive is no longer building a hundred million dollar business, having a $100 million exit.

When you're facing the fact that you might not be around much longer, you're like, you know what? None of that shit actually matters. I'm just going to focus on getting better And I'm going to do what I really enjoy and what's made the biggest impact.

For others that I've been able to make. And that was really just being myself and teaching and telling stories and doing what I know how to do best. And so that's where I decided to transfer Self Made man to Mike dillard dot com, get back to my personal brand and have really just gotten rid of these grandiose entrepreneurial dreams now that I'm 41 and getting back to stuff that really matters.

I love that. Was there any element of the original branding of Self Made man where you were kind of unsure around having man in the title, thinking maybe it would isolate females from gravitating towards your stuff?

Yeah, I mean, I originally wanted to get self made.com but whoever owns that.

Has either died or just doesn't respond. The individual I bought selfmademan.com from was a friend of mine who had also been trying for years to get selfmade.com and there's just no response. Right. So. So.

That was it. Self Made man was.

What it had to be. And yes, the female audience definitely felt alienated.

And it's really interesting the people in our industry understand the term and can appreciate it. The people outside of our industry, when I would say what I do, would get taken aback and they would see it as a very egotistical term or label. And I didn't like the fact that it was misunderstood and I always had to explain my definition of a self made man or woman.

So I just like, I'm fighting an uphill battle that I don't need to be fighting. I'm not looking to build a business that I'm going to sell anymore. And if that's the case, the absolute best thing you can do is to build a business around your personal brand. At the end of the day, when I talked to Dean Graziosi or Evan Pagan and I said this was probably three or four months ago, I was like, hey guys, why do you think that this platform model didn't work?

They were both really quick. They're like, it's because you weren't a part of it. Your following has been following you for a decade now. They like what you bring to the table. And you took yourself out of the equation and put a bunch of strangers in front of them that they don't necessarily know or appreciate yet and they just don't have any interest in that. And I was like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Now when you were building this whole platform, were you taking any sort of outside capital to help do this or were you just using your own savings to build this thing?

Yeah, savings, savings, which was a challenge. I went, I put all my chips on the table in Evergrow and then again in Self Made man over about a four year period and neither of those worked out as planned. So yeah, the financial risk that I took was, in hindsight, I definitely wouldn't have done that again. I'm also glad that I did not take on venture capital because that would have been even more stress and pressure.

For the reasons that are obvious. So, yeah, going back, I would have.

Really planned on the 3x rule, which is if you're going to build something proprietary, whether it's software or hardware, it's going to take three times longer and cost at least three times more than you think it will.

Oh yeah, that's so true.

Yeah. And it's been that way in every single time I've done that. I've started three software businesses and they've all ended up being that way.

Yeah.

I would put a hard cap next time on what I'm willing to invest in a new venture like that. And I have to figure out a way to create it within that budget and that's it.

Have you found that you've always kind of been somebody that has sort of a high tolerance for spending money? What's the word?

Investing?

Yeah, for investing. Are you someone who's always had a high pain tolerance for investing? Because when you say that you spent $30,000 to have somebody go and run split tests for you and stuff, I wouldn't think most digital entrepreneurs have the stomach to go even invest something like $30,000.

Is that something that's always been part of you? You just have balls to do that kind of stuff?

It's interesting. It's a blessing and a curse in the fact when it comes to the ability to make money, the blessing is once you learn how to make money essentially on demand, it's clearly a blessing, but it's also a curse because then you don't really appreciate it and you can take it for granted quite easily. And so for me, I'm just like, okay, this is what it's going to take to bring this dream to life. If I do this correctly, it's going to make back all of my money and more.

And I've just always had a really large amount of belief in myself because of my previous track record. And so I was willing to take those risks.

And it's just been a big lesson learned where if I could go back in time, I would do it very differently. I would do the budget, I would stick to that, I would save money in my savings or whatever it may be that's untouchable because for me I didn't have that with these ventures. It was if I needed to sell my house to keep it going, that's what I would have done.

Which again, that has its benefits and it manages for sure.

Well, it's interesting because you said with Evergrow you had this mission, you had this big thing in the world you wanted to solve, which I think so many people can relate to. You sunk a lot of money in your effort and all that stuff mental space into it. Now with this new business, it seems a lot more lifestyle and you're at this point in your life with what's happened throughout your years, how do you build this or what is your mission now taken to Mike Dillard and all the different assets you have.

My primary skill and the value that I've been able to deliver over the last 20 years as an entrepreneur really is empowering new entrepreneurs with the knowledge and skills they need to really start their first successful business. I've got dozens and dozens of students, I don't know how many, but at least five or six that have built multiple eight figure businesses just starting with my book. Dozens and dozens more who've built million dollar businesses. And I don't know, I don't know what the rest is, but.

That lights me up in a really big way when I get a text or an Instagram message from somebody that says, hey, I bought your stuff, I built this changed my life. I was broke and now I'm making X amount of money and my family's financially free and we're out of debt. Like that is what I'm here to do. So at the core of what I'm doing moving forward, that's really at the heart of it. We're going to be taking the classes on the platform now, moving those behind a paywall and I'm going to essentially be turning that into a year long mentoring program where I'm going to drip out one of those classes per week in a very specific order where they're all length and take someone over the course of 12 months from the very beginning of starting a business to the very end where you're dealing and learning how to set up an estate plan and asset protection and invest in multifamily real estate and all of that good stuff and then obviously all of the business pieces in between.

That'll be the primary way that I serve the newbies, if you will, people who are just getting started. And then after that, I'm not really sure there's a big opportunity out there these days to help larger, more established businesses that are already doing at least seven or eight figures in revenue with some of the more modern marketing techniques that we use. One of the biggest lessons that I've learned in the last few months is that it's easy to take what you know for granted and assume that everybody else already knows it, which is a very expensive assumption to make.

I sent out an email to my audience who are in the online marketing industry a few months ago and I just said, hey, how many of you have a business that's making at least $25,000 a month? And if you have that, how many of these five online marketing techniques do you use? And it was very basic stuff. Upsell, split testing, retargeting, UTM codes, and exit pops.

I had, I believe, 500 businesses respond that said, yes, we're making at least $25,000 a month. And out of those five strategies, which I assume anyone online is using, 80% of them said they weren't.

Wow, that just points you in the direction of the low hanging fruit. If you want to go help them, you know exactly what to go help them with.

Well, it's not only that, but these are like people already in my online marketing audience. They're already paying attention to online marketing. So that means when I look at downtown Austin, 80 to 90% of the law firms, the accounting firms, and all of these other businesses and all of these other high rises are not using those.

So I see a really big opportunity there, and that'll probably be where I turn my focus next once this mentoring program is fully baked and available for people to use.

I like that. It just seems like a perfect progression for your brand. And then just the audience you built and the trust you built over the years. The podcast, I'm sure feeds all of that as well and compounds the trust even more.

Yep. Yeah, yeah. So that's. That's where things are headed.

So I think you've mentioned on, on your show a few times in the past that, that you tend to lean more introverted as opposed to extroverted. And you know, me and Joe, there's two of us here, I'm very, very introverted. By comparison, Joe's pretty extroverted. And I'm curious how that has affected your business. If I'm, if this is even true. You can, you can Tell me I'm wrong if I'm wrong. But how has that affected your business? Do you struggle to do the whole networking and going to conferences and a lot of that kind of stuff because of the introversion or how has that played out for your business?

You know, being an introvert is great for online marketing because what we do typically requires us to sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day. So.

It fits me perfectly. And what I like to do, I like to think, I like to write, I like to create. And that really requires just a lot of alone time and quiet time. A lot of the most successful Internet marketers out there are all, ironically, the same Myers Briggs type, which is intp. So that's what I am. Evan Pagan is an intp, Frank Kern is an intp, and there are a few others that you would recognize as well. For some odd reason, that personality type tends to.

Do well, quite well in this industry, at least when it comes to writing. That's what all three of us have done. We've made our money creating information products and selling those.

At the same time. Opportunities come from networking and from putting yourself out there and going to events and going to conferences. There's two ways to change your life instantly, and that's to acquire new information or to meet new people. And people are.

Probably the most powerful one of the two. Meaning if you were to meet someone like Kurt Malley or me or whomever at one of these events and build a relationship, that relationship could change your life within a week or two.

And so you definitely need to get out there and go shake hands and get involved in these events. The opportunities that come from that, you really just can't even comprehend.

Has that impacted the podcast at all? Are there still people that, if they were to come on the show, maybe mentally, you still put them on a pedestal and you'd be sort of shitting yourself a little bit if you were to interview them.

Not really. I would have to say the only time I've truly been nervous was probably with Tony and maybe Gene Simmons or it's like, you know, the head of Kiss. It's like a legendary dude, right? So those two are probably the biggest celebrities, quote unquote, that I've spoken to. Where I did get. I did get kind of butterflies before the show started. As of right now, maybe that would be the case with. It would have to be just like a super, super a list type of individual.

Maybe Lewis Hamilton, since I'm a big race car driving fan or something like that. But once you do so many of these.

It just kind of comes naturally. I don't do really much prep work for my interviews. I do maybe 30 minutes of looking up somebody's website and bio and that kind of stuff. And I try to come to the table with one big topic that I would like to focus on and then I let the conversation go where it goes.

Love it. Yeah, I mean, that's similar here.

Very similar. It's funny because I actually, I started podcasting myself back in 2010 and one of my original motivations for starting a podcast was to get over my introversion. If I start reaching out to people who I put on a pedestal, who make me nervous, and I start getting on calls with them and I start realizing, hey, they're just real people who are going through the same shit I'm going through, who have had the same struggles. Maybe they're at a different, you know, a different place along that spectrum. But, you know, that that was actually how I sort of forced myself to become a little bit less introverted.

So I think it's working.

Well. Well, Mike, you mentioned this earlier and this is something Matt and I want to kind of bring to the show more and more is you said I forget exactly where it was in the story, but managing stress and just the load of stuff you're doing and obviously the pitfalls of losing a bunch of money or investing a ton and seeing that not pan out. How do you typically manage anxiety, stress and just your day to day, do you have some go to practices?

Well, I didn't and that's why my nervous system broke.

No looking back, I would wake up, drink a ton of caffeine, work stress, work stress, take a break, play an even more stressful video game and then bars on the weekend.

Oh, Jesus.

I wasn't stressful at all, right?

Not at all. Yeah, I mean I was basically have been living on adrenaline for 10, 15 years and that was just my normal. But.

Hitting 40, my body was like f you not anymore. And it just simply could not put up with that kind of abuse or workload anymore. And it just cracked. So. So.

I'm actually probably going to write a book about this whole last year because I've gone down the plant medicine road. I've done MDMA and Ketamine and Wachuma and all of these different alternative medicines and therapies to heal. And I'm seeing more and more entrepreneurs who are hitting around the age of 40 starting to see some of the same health challenges. And so I think this is going to be A really big epidemic.

That'S going to hit our industry here and has already started to. And I think it's going to get even worse with the younger generation who are, you know, frankly, their brains are just going to get scrambled by scrolling and social media and consuming content at such a rapid pace. Even just the eye movements of following Instagram as you're scrolling through as fast as it'll scroll. That affects your brain and how it's wired and your brain chemistry, your attention span.

Oh, for sure.

VR is going to totally F people up. These poor kids are going to get into VR and your brain doesn't know the difference between a real threat and a virtual threat. And that was one of the things that I learned is when I would take a break from work, I'd go play pubg for an hour. And if you don't know what pubg is, it's a real time simulation, like realistic simulation where you jump off a plane onto an island with 100 other players and it's a fight to the death to the last person.

Oh geez, I've never heard of that one.

Okay, yeah, so it's like Fortnite, but a realistic version of Fortnite, nothing cartoony. And so you jump in, land on an island and then it's a scramble to find weapons and armor. And.

It'S very immersive. You're wearing headphones. If someone, you know, if you're upstairs in a house and someone, or excuse me, if you, let's say you walk into a two story house and someone's upstairs, you can hear their footsteps on the wood and Jesus screaming or whatever. Fight or flight. Right. Like your body literally thinks you're being hunted and that you're hunting other people. And what I didn't realize is that your brain again doesn't know the difference between that game and thinking that you're actually going through that experience. And what makes it worse is that you're going through that experience for a few hours a day while sitting in a chair. And that means that your body is not burning off all of that cortisol and all of those hormones and stressors as you would in real life because you'd be running.

And so it's just sitting in your body and your bloodstream saturating your brain. And it can literally cause a brain injury, which is what happened to me.

So what do you do now that's obviously you're probably not playing pubg.

Yeah, yeah. No caffeine, no pubg. Really the last year has been just trying to relax my nervous system and to bring the parasympathetic, which is responsible for sleep and digestion, into balance with the sympathetic, which is responsible for fight or flight. And my teeter totter broke, obviously. And so meditation has played a really big role. I use my muse headset. When this first got started, I'd meditate 45 minutes a night, every night before bed.

You know, getting rid of social media. I deleted my Instagram, I deleted my Facebook account off my phone three months ago and Instagram off my phone a month ago.

Good for you.

And it's been great. Like, I don't miss it at all.

Yeah, well, I think, I think these are important topics too. You don't hear people talk about it enough. I'd be probably the first in line to buy your book if you put that out. Because I, you know, I'm with you.

I want, I want to show it everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, I was reading an article a couple days ago and I'm totally going to misquote these numbers, but something like 7% of the US population has depression and something like 38% of entrepreneurs have depression. So, like, it's a pretty, it's becoming a pretty big problem. And like the number one cause of death among entrepreneurs between the age of 30 and 45 or something like that is suicide.

Wow.

Because the depression and the anxiety and just this constant need to be on and to get things right has really screwed with a lot of people's brains. And so we're trying to bring it up more and more on the show and talk to other high level, high achieving entrepreneurs about, you know, how they're handling some of this stuff. Because I do think that there's not enough people talking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, that definitely motivates me to move forward with the book. So. Yeah. You know, I think a big part of it too is platforms like Instagram where it forces you to compare yourself with other people. And so this past year, when I could barely leave my house, you know, I'm getting ready for bed at 8 o' clock every night and going through this elaborate, like, nighttime routine and not able to drink and not able to really socialize with anyone and just getting on Instagram, all I'm doing is looking at all of my friends doing super fun shit that I can't do anymore. And that was very depressing. Like, I was like, this is not helping. This is not helping me at all. So that's when I just decided to delete the app. And it's been amazing how Much anxiety that I didn't realize was there. Just went away from not having to expose myself to that, you know, 100 times a day, you know, as you spend 30 seconds on Instagram. Right. So, yeah, yeah.

Oh, well, I was going to ask about the plant based medicines that you were bringing up a minute ago. I'm curious if there's been any that have really helped or been really effective.

Stood out the most.

Yeah, I mean, Joe and I, we've used psilocybin. Joe's done ayahuasca. You know, I still to this day supplement with THC before bed. So I'm kind of curious what sort of things have worked well for you and what sort of experiences you had there.

You know, CBD and THC were. I really credit, I credit with saving my life because.

Until I found that a friend who went through chemo gave me one of his THC CBD pills, 10 milligrams of each. I was on Ambien and Xanax and that would only get me an hour, hour and a half of sleep on those two drugs, which you're not functioning. You're just kind of laying on the couch all day. And it just messed with my emotions. It made me kind of dead from a feelings perspective and I just needed to get off of that stuff. So he gave me one of those THC pills and boom, I slept like three or four hours that night and was able to get off the pharmaceuticals. And that has been the single biggest game changer that I've had from a sleep perspective, from a just overall health perspective. MDMA has been the biggest game changer doing mdma. And this is in a therapeutic setting. So obviously MDMA is ecstasy, which I've never done recreationally before this, and so this is my first time ever doing that. But in a therapeutic setting, your.

Closing off your senses, essentially, right, you're wearing an eye mask, you're wearing headphones with a very specific type of music. You're going into a room with people that you trust and you're going in with intentions of, let's say, three to five things that you really want the answers to. And what it does is it instead of having all of this outside stimulus come in and overwhelm your body as you would like kids would do at a rave or whatever, when you close off your senses, you immediately just go inward. And it was like magic. It was unbelievable. It was as if I had instant X ray vision past all of my conscious walls.

Stories and whatever it may be, and I could instantly see into my subconscious and go back all the way to four or five years old and see why I made decisions or why things happened, or.

I could just see the matrix. Right. Of essentially my life in a way that I don't think would be able. You'd be able to otherwise. And so that three hour session, to me was the single most significant experience I think I've ever had.

That's amazing. Yeah, there is something special with all these plant medicines out there. And yeah, with my ayahuasca experience is very similar in a very, you know, safe setting. Not clinical or anything, but very similar to what you described. And, yeah, you walk away. I think I journaled ten pages by hand. Like, almost immediately the next day, it just flowed out.

Yeah.

Have you ever tried Wim Hof breathing or some of those techniques?

You know, I downloaded his app and I did it. I did it once or twice, but I stopped because when I was doing this, this was probably three or four months ago, my nervous system was still really fragile, and I did not know if his breathing method was stimulating the sympathetic or the parasympathetic.

Right. Yeah.

I couldn't tell. So I was like, I'm just gonna. I'm gonna hold off on that until I get the answer to that question.

But I'm trying to think of.

Yeah, well. And I bring it up because you said the parasympathetic thing, because with belly breathing, because I know I've been practicing this for a bit. You can completely change that. Parasympathetic, the fight or flight, which is like deep belly, not the chest breathing, like, that's a tool I go to immediately whenever I'm like, wait, breathe. It's so cool, man. I love that you're bringing it up. And thanks for being so open too.

Yeah, yeah. Like I said.

I kind of feel an obligation because I don't want this to happen to anybody else. And I see a wave of people that are about to break. And for me, it was losing sleep. For other people, it could end up being cancer or something else. And so.

Yeah, I mean.

Yeah, well, you're doing the right fight.

Yeah. There's got to be a point of service that I can use to help other people through having this experience.

Yeah. And I think what you're doing, just sharing the journey. I mean, kind of what you've always done with your business is just sharing the journey. And I think.

More people need to share the journey, but share the good and the bad.

Yeah. Yeah. Without a doubt. I look at Neil Strauss as a big inspiration for that if you've ever read his last book on relationships called the Truth, that was an unbelievably.

Raw and revealing book from him as far as his transparency about the good, the bad, and the ugly with him and growing up and within relationships. Like, the level of detail he was willing to go into and share publicly was astounding. And it's just something I'll never forget because the amount of courage it took him to do that was just unbelievable. But it's a book that will, once you read it, it will stay with you forever. So I'll be picking that up for sure.

I want to be respectful of your time. We got a couple minutes here. One of the last questions we always ask people, people is if they have any book recommendations. And you just mentioned the Truth by Neil Strauss.

Abundance was in there as well.

Yeah, Abundance, which I've never actually read that one. I did read Bold, which was amazing, but haven't read Abundance yet. Are there any other books that you tend to refer back to often or recommend to people often?

You know, Hacking Growth was one of the best books in the last year too, where I was like, oh, my gosh, you need to read this if you own an online business.

So that was one. And then I think Aubrey Marcus book.

Yep, that's a good one.

Is great. Own the Day on youn Life.

Yeah, there it is.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think those. Those three or four are great places to start, for sure.

That's solid, Mike. And where's the best place to send folks?

Just mikeiller.com we're giving away. If you want. You know, we're giving away a free class with Cameron Herold on the homepage there about how to create a vivid vision for your business. And just an awesome, awesome. He's got a book called Vivid Vision, and it's just. Man, it's awesome for any entrepreneur out there who's trying to come up with a clear vision for their business that they can communicate not only to their customers, but to their employees and team members as well.

Love it. Everybody listening needs to check out the Mike Dillard podcast as well. That's one of our favorite podcasts. I don't actually listen to a ton of business podcasts these days myself, but yours is one that I still do listen to. I think it's yours and Noah Kagan. So that's two Austin boys are the only two that I listen to.

I'm okay with that too, now, but second, that statement.

Ryan Moran's got a pretty good one, too.

Yeah, yeah. You guys got to come to Austin or something. This. This town is becoming a giant center of gravity for entrepreneurs with everybody who's moved here in the last couple of years.

It's true, man. Yeah, we're out there often. We're in San Diego, which kind of used to be the hub, but, yeah, Austin's steel and everybody. We're like, come on. But it's good, man. All right, Mike, I appreciate your time so much.

You bet, guys. Thanks for having me so much.

Thank you, man. Bye.

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