Episode #674 - Learn By Doing, Not By Reading with Vash Tomanec, Co-Founder of Mindtrepreneur

Vash Tomanec built Mindtrepreneur from one-on-one coaching to a program serving over 1,200 entrepreneurs across 60 countries. He teaches sales through role play and recorded calls, not lectures, and scaled by moving to group programs with weekly calls and pre-recorded courses at lower price points.
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Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on Ready. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.
How would you do the role play? If you and I are, I'm your friend and you're doing it back, then how did that work?
Yes. So basically we would have hour long session, 30 minutes, I am the salesman, we could say, and the friend is the prospect. And so I will tell him, hey, usually the people I speak with are making this amount of money, they are having this type of business. So I would give him some information, very specific.
Yeah, okay, exactly.
So he would put himself in that position. So the sales score was as authentic or as real as it could be, basically in that setting. And as a result I got better and better because I didn't have it in my head, I was practicing it. So it become more and more natural. And I really understood the principle that do more listening. So I was rather asking a lot of questions, these prospects and I would be finding really what bothers them.
People can't argue with a question, you know what I'm saying?
Exactly.
And when you ask them a question, you're basically putting them on a pedestal because you want their opinion, you want their answer, unless you do it in an annoying, prying type way. But it's like giving them the opportunity to talk rather than talk over them and cram something down their throat. And so questions are the key to management, to sales, to leadership, to me. Because that allows the leader to become more educated. Just every minute you're spending with other people, you're becoming better because they're telling you things, they're helping you make a smarter comment to them, decision, suggestion, whatever, because they've already told you how they're going to receive it. And when did that dawn on you or how did that realization come to you?
I realized first why I started to even master sales. I realized if I learn how to sell, I will never go hungry because every business sells every business. We usually have even commission sales guys. And I know plenty making very good money. And I know that leaders need to sell, right? Salesmen need to sell. You sell to even your partner, wife, whatever it is you had to sell yourself at the beginning. So selling seemed to me like such a skill that is so important for anybody. And as more and more I realize, hey, the more I talk, the more I'm losing them. Because I would record the call as you are now recording the Podcast, I.
Would record the call and I would.
Watch back and I will realize, man, their body language change. I lost them. They kind of switched off. Oh, what could I do next time? I could ask them question to engage them. And just through this obsession almost to get better and really studying my calls back and really understanding minor details, I got better and better and better in asking questions and asking the right things at the right time.
So, Vash, you picked up sales organically by practicing sales with your friends and reading their reactions, because you can kind of tell if the conversation's going well or not. If you just pay attention to people's eyes and their expressions, people are going to tell you if they're interested or not as you go through. And keeping them. The first thing is to keep them engaged and keeping them listening. Whenever you get that blank stare, that means their eyes have gone somewhere else and they're not listening to anything you say. And so the person, the quickest way to get them back on board is to get a question. And so you're saying that's how you learn by observing and by practicing, not just by reading books.
Exactly, exactly. Because, yeah, the body tells us so much. If we ask them uncomfortable question, they will usually scratch their neck or touch their nose. Right. So I would observe it because people are giving us clues. But most people are so much in their head that they don't even pay attention to the feedback the client is giving them. So I was paying attention to it, and when I noticed, hey, I'm losing them a little bit, they are zoning out, we could say, okay, let me engage them with a question. Hey, Mr. Client, what do you think about this? Or was the same for you? Or does it make sense? Even these type of questions would immediately kind of wake him up and get him back in the game. So that's what I would use. Yes.
Like a teacher in a classroom, you know, student telling jokes to each other in the back. They ask them a question about what they just said. And so as you move forward, that's the priceless thing. That's one way to find out about people that are they worth training? Are they. You know, people want to ask you questions, but the thing is, when you give them an answer to, do they do anything with it, or do you have to tell them 100 times to get them to do it once? And it's just their response to these things. But, you know, your business works the same way. The business will give you that same feedback. And it's called the numbers. If you're working Your business and your trends are going level well. Your business is starting to flatline, but if it's going, you know, you start a new program starting to trend up. The numbers is like, are like the attention span that you see on the faces of your prospects or your people that you deal with. And so if you're watching, watching the numbers the same way as you're watching reactions to people and you're responding to the numbers to keep the. The numbers will tell you if it's working, gonna work, what your future is gonna be with this project or this game plan. You've got much like a conversation and people's reactions are in the sales process. But now talk about where did you go after you had this success in marketing. So what you would do for people is show them how to max out or increase online sales. Is that.
Would that be Exactly, Exactly. And my idea was never to finish in that business, like to park there and be there forever. Because I knew it's great cash flow business, but it's not where my heart is for forever. So I already hired a lot of team and I started to optimize it so I don't have to spend 8, 10 hours a day as I used to. And as more and more time became available to me, people started coming to me, hey, Vash, how come you did it so quickly? What did you use? And they started asking these questions and they said, would you coach me? I was like, yeah, why not? So I started coaching people and what I noticed, Larry, that they had all the strategies to grow the business, but they weren't applying it. So it came down almost what I now call the mindset part, that they had the strategies usually, but they weren't applying it due to some fears, stress, maybe limiting beliefs, whatever it was. So I started coaching them more on the psychology part, we could say in business and all of a sudden people start getting amazing results. So I partnered up with my very good friend and we started a second business which is called Mindtrepreneur, which is Mindset and Entrepreneur together, which is a coaching company. And now we have over 1200 entrepreneurs from 60 countries of the world that we are coaching on how to grow the business through mainly mastering their own mindset. Because I believe that the success of the company.
So how did you go. Let me let you finish that thought. The success of the company just depends.
On the mindset of the business owner. That's what I believe.
Absolutely. Everything flows from the head. You know, it's like a waterfall. If there's no springs and no springs going into that stream at the top of the waterfall. There is no waterfall, there is no results once it goes over the waterfall. Those results can splash in all kind of areas, but it goes right back to the top where it all comes from. And that's the leader in the business. And so now let me ask you as how did you transition from a few people asking you, hey Vash, help me with my business to where you've got 1200 people around the world and you got a team. So talk about that transition.
Yes. So as usual, business owners tend to have multiple businesses. What seems to me that it really became about optimizing my focus because focus is such a precious commodity. We could say that basically if I was jumping from one business to another, I wouldn't get much things done. So I rather dedicated, let's say the whole morning I'm working on business, a whole afternoon business B. So I was kind of making sure that I block out big chunks of time for one business before I move to the next one. And first we were doing one on ones. So coaching one on one. But of course that's not what you might.
One on one would be like you and I talking right now. So you get people on. I've got you at 10:30. I've got you at. I know. How long would these sessions be?
Yes, they would usually be hour, hour and a half. And we would meet.
Oh really? Really get into it.
Yeah, we would usually do twice a month and we usually did 90 day period. So six calls over 90 days. Plus they have access to me through some chat platform in between those calls. But now the time of course mine is limited. I can get only X amount of people per week into my schedule. So I was like the demand is higher than the supply in a way. So we decided to do group coaching especially for people who weren't as advanced as those people we are coaching. So we will do group calls. We would have a pre recorded course, so multiple videos they would watch on their own time, they would study and once a week we would come on a call where there would be another 30, 40 people and we would give them lecture plus some Q and A at the end. And that way we could accommodate more people. They could pay less than those people paying us for one on ones. And that's when we started to scale it because people start coming to us and we could onboard as many clients as we wanted because of the course structure.
Again, how did you get that many people? Because like if it's a 90 day project you're out of business in 90 days. You got to have another block of people signing up. Or would they renew and just go 90, 90, 90. How did that work?
Yeah, yeah, definitely many of them renew. But our strategy that is that we run Facebook and Instagram advertising to video sales letter. On the video sales letter, we give them value upfront and we offer them call where we will go deeper on the call. We give them value or our sales team give them value and then offer to them to join our program or one of our programs.
And so this is Facebook ads basically.
And so that's the main source. Yeah.
And so how fast did you ramp up once you started mine? Entrepreneur is it Com? Is that how people find our.
So it's exactly, exactly. Yeah. So it started basically we started maybe 50 students first month and then it started. It's now almost two years. So it's growing faster and faster. So it's not like growing steadily. It's more like it was steady grow and then it starts picking up the speed because we also launched some lower price points as well for beginners to make sure we can help as many people as possible.
Yeah. And so as how did you build your team? How did that happen?
I love, especially for this coaching company, I love to take our students. So when we are hiring somebody, it might be somebody who is beginner who went through our course so he understands our principles, our teachings. And then we just hire people from there because they know us, they trust us, they know what we stand for and this proved to be the best employees. Rather somebody external who doesn't know much about us.
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