LE011: Building Businesses with Tom Libelt

Today's podcast is all about building businesses. Tom Liebelt will share some of his best insights and what it is, the number one skill for the modern entrepreneur. Let's find out some more information. Hello, I'm Dais Francio. I'd like to welcome you on the new episode of Leadership Execution Podcast, a podcast for leaders who'd like make a difference. My goal is to inspire you to take the initiative. To change what no longer works and provide you with the necessary strategies, approaches, and tools to achieve that. Without delay, let's start with today's topic. First, I want to introduce you to Leadership Execution Podcast, and I'm glad to be here, and I hope you're glad to be here as well.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

First of all, I want to ask you Who Tom Liberty is?

I don't know, man. I have no idea. Just me. You know, these are like existential questions, right? Like, what's the meaning of life?

I tend to open up with open questions because this helps a lot to warm up a little bit the place. Defining you, it's the best possible way for me and for my audience to know what you are and what you're doing in your life. I mean, first of all, you're from Poland, which is a place that has a lot to achieve for and to be proud of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I moved to the US when I was about 10, so I spent most of my time in the US, and I do go back to Poland like once every 2 years for a little bit, but I don't feel like I belong there anymore. So it's kind of a tough situation. I like it a lot, but I just, you know, I don't fit in. When I speak even to my family and the people there, it's just we don't see things the same. Just, I think it's just too much of a culture difference now. But if you ask who I am, I don't know, just someone that gets things done, you know, and tries to enjoy life. That's pretty much it, you know. I don't like to define myself as like business guy or something because that, you know, that's not really Who I am. It's just something I do, right? We all need to do something.

Yeah, this is something that I'm going to ask you later on, but you're going to define yourself as an entrepreneur, as a digital nomad, or something else?

Definitely not digital nomad. Yeah, not a fan of that. I mean, I guess entrepreneur. I mean, I've been doing it, but I don't define myself as one. It's just something I do. I build businesses. You know, some people go to work, I build businesses.

Okay, this is very interesting. This is exactly the point that my audience would like to know. How do you do that?

How I build businesses?

Yes.

It starts with ideas and then execution, right? So usually you need to come up with something that you can fulfill and/or your team can fulfill, even better. You try to position it in the market and then match an audience with the positioning, right? And that's all it really takes to make money, right? It's just getting an idea, executing it, positioning it correctly, and then finding an audience that will buy it. If you can have something that's recurring, even better. If it's productized, even better. If it's something like an online course where you don't have any fulfillment, even better. But if not, you know, services are a good place to start. You, you know, trade time for money. Eventually you can become either a boutique, which means you will have a couple of very highly paying clients, and that's fine. You can go the agency route, which is a lot of hassle, but it's fine too. You know, you've got a lot of people you're going to manage and just a lot of nonsense, but it's fine. Or you will figure out something that is in common between all your clients from the service and you create once again, either an online course or productized service or something. We all try to get away from fulfillment, right?

Yes.

So as long as you have to fulfill what you're selling, that's a pain. Even if it's highly paid, it's still a pain. So that's what we try to get away from, but it's a great place to start. It's the easiest. If you took everything I have away, within a week I could make $5,000, $10,000, and that's with services just because of my skills. But is that a long-term thing? I don't know. It depends on you. I tend to burn out, so I like to do services, figure out what's working, and then stop the fulfillment, have someone else do it, or just come up with something else. But yeah, there's different ways of going around this.

Yes, I just haven't completed because I do a parallel life as well. I'm a consultant, I do blogging, and I do now podcasting, and I try to But that's not that, being a father and having all of the responsibilities and all that. And my team is more loose than the one you described. Yeah, I think it's possible, but you need time, room for thinking to find the ideas.

Yeah, you've got to make time for thinking. Yes, definitely. Yeah, because so you see it, right? Like you're trying to constantly get clients and You probably think the best way is podcasting and blogging, so you're putting your time into that. Then you get some clients and you got to do the fulfillment, so you're not selling at that point, right? And then the clients start leaving, you get more clients, and it's a never-ending loop, right? So it doesn't stop. Like, you're going to be doing that forever unless you figure something out.

Yes, you have right, but for me it's a little bit different because I have a vertical portfolio as well, and I can Capitalize on that for some time, but the things in Greece is not very well, so I tried to find more income. As many things, I think you can do anything you like as long as you can pay your bills at the end of the month, and that is the main thing, because when you have a family behind you, you need to make a priority of that. So I'm not quite sure how the things work around. I'm just describing my type of work.

Yeah, but still, when you said consultant, if you're a consultant, you got to fulfill, right? You still trade. Yeah, you got to deliver. Yeah. But when you're delivering, you're not selling, right? So it's always this cat and mouse situation. Should I be selling or delivering right now? But if I sell, I got to deliver. So do I even want to sell it? It's this thing that just never stops. That's what I mean. And yeah, making money, I mean, paying bills is fine, but I mean, the whole point is to make more than you spend. That's how you get richer.

Yeah.

Just paying bills, that's easy. Surviving is easy, but there's no point because it doesn't stop. It's not making you wealthier. So it's all about just you got to make as much as possible so you keep putting money away. And at some point, You become financially independent and then you do whatever you want.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. And that brings me to the next question. What was the incentive for you to move to a full-time business builder job?

So I've always been into selling and trying to do my own thing, but there was a time where I felt like, okay, I'm a pretty good salesperson, but I'm not great. I don't understand why it's working. I don't understand like the stuff I'm doing wrong. So I started training at a lot of different corporations where I pretty much got sales jobs, right, in New York. And I was going from one to the next. They trained me to, you know, I hit the streets, hit the phones, whatever, because I did retail, outside sales, inside sales. And, you know, I realized, you know, there's a method to it, you know, and I just kept on practicing. You know, the good thing was I got a lot of training, paid training, right, by big companies and— Mm-hmm. They went out with me, they helped me figure it out. And at one point I just felt like, okay, I can sell. The thing is, if you can sell, you'll always be fine, right? Like, that's the main thing. If you can't sell in your business, you don't have a business. I can sell. So that's all I needed to make that step, right? Like, I was like, okay, well, whatever I need to do, I can sell it. So, you know, it's not, doesn't really worry me. Like, I have a really high closing rate and I don't put in much effort into, you know, the podcasts or blogs or anything like that. You know, I'm very strategic, but I have leads coming in and I close them. So I think as long as you have a couple skills, like you know how to influence, persuade people, you know how to present in some way, and that's why doing a podcast is awesome. It helped me refine how I present things, and selling, as long as you can do those, you're fine. Everything else can be hired out.

Okay, so that brings me to another question that I wanted to ask very much. What is your daily habits that help you to be a builder, an entrepreneur, and a founder of companies? I mean, how do you find the time to keep up with all these things without leaving behind the important things in your life? I mean, you try to be free, to get freedom to do the things that matter most to you, but you have to do other things.

Well, yeah, so I'm a sprinter. Right, so I don't work as much as you would think, but when I sprint, I work super hard. And it's the same thing at the gym, right? I don't go to the gym for hours. I go for a shorter time, but I hit it super hard.

Mm-hmm.

And that's the thing. You can knock out a lot of tasks if you are in the mood, if you have it as a habit, and if you're focused. You can do a lot. I can do more in 2 hours than a random business person can do in a week. You know, because I'm just going through things, right? So a part of being able to do that is you need to rest and you need to think. So you got to make a lot of time for that to do that. If you're doing like nonsense, like, you know, answering emails and dealing with customer service, putting up blogs and podcasts, you know, that should be hired out. You shouldn't be doing that.

Mm-hmm.

You got to figure out what's the 80/20 of your business, right? What's the things that makes money? And for me, that's actually selling to a customer. So when someone wants to get on the phone, bam, I sell them. Doing a podcast, networking, and with my business, it's the strategy and then doing the high-level tasks. Anything lower, like, you know, design a sales page, I'm not doing that.

Mm-hmm.

Doing all the technical stuff that needs to be done to hook things up, I'm not doing any of that. Designing graphics, all that, I'm not touching it, you know, because it's not a good use of my time. I could play with Photoshop.

Mm-hmm.

I used to like it, but it's just not a good use of my time. That's a $5 or $10 an hour job.

Uh-huh.

Right? The stuff I do needs to be between $100 and $350 an hour for me to touch it. If it's not, it's not worth it because I know I can make that. I can just do coaching if I just want to completely trade my time for money and just get that. It helps me when I define how much I'm worth and then making sure I don't do anything But all that weight, just hire that.

So you basically, you outsource and automate a lot of things around.

I do. Yeah, I'm good at automating. Yeah.

And essentially what you're saying is that you're an organized person outside of yourself.

Yes. Yeah. And I do that not only in business, but in life, right? Like I have a person that cleans my apartment. I have a person that does my laundry. I have a person that helps with the cooking or does all of it. I have all that. I don't do things that I don't feel like are bringing me any value, right? Like these are low-level tasks and they take a lot of time, right? So if you're doing them, that could be time spent thinking, right? Or doing something else that's making you money. Like I can work for 1 hour and cover all that for a week. So why would I spend 6 hours on all this nonsense? When there's people who are really good at it, professional, and that's what they do.

So how's your day? How's your— I mean, you're working from home or you should go to your main office?

It depends which city I'm in. It could be either an office at the house or an outside office if it's, you know, depends on— like when I go to Warsaw, I will sign up for like a private office or private desk. Because most of the Airbnbs don't have an extra room for an office. And if they do, it's designed really badly with a crappy desk. So it depends where I go, right?

Yeah.

But either way I spend my day, I'll do some high-level thinking stuff in the morning, then I'll hit the gym, I'll rest for an hour or 2, and I knock all the other stuff out for like 2 or 3 hours. If I need to do calls in the evening, I'll spend like maybe 1 or 2 days a week at the most. Doing that because it depends on time zones too, right? Like, you know, let's say I put away Thursday for my calls. They could be at any time from 7 in the morning till like 10 because, you know, if I'm in Asia, all the people in the US only have a short amount of time, right? Just morning and evening to talk with me. So I would try to do that once a week now. I used to do it like 3, 4 days a week, but it really messes up my schedule. And then, you know, I can't think well because I'm always on calls.

Yeah.

So I just do it like 1, maybe 1.5 days a week at the most. And the other time, yeah, I just try to stick with my schedule. I try to cover all the high-level tasks, and if something is kind of like a maybe, I just put it away. Like I figured out if I just don't do the maybes at all, nothing ever changes. Like all these things which like, ah, maybe I should do, but I just forget it. Let's just not do it. Or just tell one of my employees, can you take care of this? If I feel like it's got to get done. But it's just controlling what you're working on too. I don't like just staying busy. I don't like the hustle thing.

Mm-hmm.

I think there's a time for it. Like when you're starting out, you do need to hustle because the more you do, the more confidence you get, the more experience you get. But at some point, you know enough, you have enough skills, and the hustle can stop. There's no point. That's not how you leverage business and grow. It's not by hustling. It's like there are way smarter ways of doing it later.

Of course, you have right. And what I wanted to ask you is, you mentioned a lot of times Asia. Probably you're referring to Chiang Mai in Thailand. What's about Chiang Mai?

So I like spending the conference season here between around September to January. There's like 3 or 4 conferences just in Chiang Mai. and there's another conference or 2 in Bangkok. So a lot of networking can be done by just being in the right place, right?

Right.

It's like if you were thinking of the summer, you want to go to Europe. That's where everything's happening, the Web Summit and all these huge conferences. If you want to do something around the spring, you go to the US. That's when Traffic and Conversions, Funnel Hackers, like all this stuff is happening. So sometimes by just putting yourself in the right place, you just have the people that you want around you. And it makes things easy. I don't have to fly somewhere because they all come to me. I'm all set up here with a nice apartment, car, everything, and the people are all coming for these conferences and they hang around for like a month or 2. So I'm able to just network and do it really easily, stress-free. I'm going to eat lunch anyway, so I just make sure I eat lunch with someone different every single day.

Okay, now a couple of questions that are related. to the way you do things. I mean, what I'd like to ask you is, what is the one book or the books you would like to recommend to people who would like to help?

The books?

Yes, what books have influenced your thoughts?

So there are a couple different ones, but How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis, that's one of the only books you need on how to get rich. Takes you through the journey that you're going to be going through. Cashvertising is really good if you want to sell on the internet. I liked Total Recall. I recommended that to a lot. That was the biography of Arnold and just an amazing book. And then there's a fiction collection and it's, I think, starts with Shogun and then there's a couple other ones, Noble House.

Yes.

I mean, it's all in one. Yeah, one. Yeah, so those are— you're going to learn more from those fiction books than from almost any business book that's coming out recently. So those are the different types I recommend depending on what stage someone's in. But you don't need to read that much. And the stuff that's coming out lately, and I look through these books, they're just rehashing a lot of old stuff. And, you know, some of these books could be summed up in one or two sentences. There's a lot of garbage coming out. So you can be busy reading and you think you're doing something, but you're not. It's not helping you build your business at all.

Yes, I totally agree with that. So if you could give only one piece of advice to a new person that would follow your lead, I mean, to be an online entrepreneur or build an online business, what would be that?

Well, the main thing I see is people don't finish what they start. And this is why a lot of the people fail or they try to do things which don't make sense, right? So I'll give you one example from Chiang Mai, from a lot of people that I've seen. They try to build influence and a following before they have anything to sell. And maybe on paper that sounds like a good idea, you know, if you're in school, but I think it's incredibly dumb. You know, if you don't have anything to sell, what are you doing it for?

Right.

Like, it's better to build something or have something to sell and then figure out how do I build the audience or influence to get them to buy this right now. Because what's the point of, you know, working for 3, 4 months trying to get views on YouTube? There's no point if you have nothing on the back end. And then, you know, if you do build it and you're just like, okay, if I have an audience now, I know what to sell them. I don't know, it barely ever works out that way. It barely ever does. Like, I've had some influencers on my, uh, on my show, um, they had like 2, 3 million people following on Twitter, writing books about getting, uh, following and all this stuff, and they went broke. And I'm like, well, if you spent all this time, you have 3 million followers and you're going broke, like, that's, that's the dumbest thing ever. Why would you even, you know, do that?

Yeah.

It doesn't make any sense at all. Um, so I don't know, I'm not a big fan. Like, it's better to have 1,000 really loyal fans or 100 Then all these millions of people, like I told my girlfriend too, she's on Instagram, you know, trying to get followers, and then she'll get like a thousand, get super excited, and I'm like, tell them to buy us a pizza, see how much they're worth. And she can't even get them to do that, you know what I mean? Like, it's dumb. Yeah, it's a complete waste of time.

It's better to be an influencer rather than be a person that is followed by a thousand or million people. I mean, the problem with the social media is that make it give the impression to the young entrepreneurs that they can do everything without really hard work, because social media needs really hard work behind that to reach loyalty, a level of loyalty that can move around things. So the problem is that many people think that everything is like push button.

Yeah, yeah, I've actually seen an ad on Facebook with like a 365-day marketing content plan, right? And it's like it says if you put out this content, which is like really crappy memes and different sayings and things, like, you know, you're going to make money. No, you're not. Look, like I can put a strategic post once in like 2, 3 months and be booked for those next 2, 3 months. Like, you know, putting out just content randomly that doesn't make sense is not going to get you any customers or likes. People like, you know, I always think like when someone's putting out too many quotes and things, I'm like, this person is not successful at all.

Mm-hmm.

You know, because they have too much time on their hands and they're doing stupid stuff. But, you know, I've seen this ad trying to sell it and I was like, wow, it is even more nonsense.

It is a trend, I think, that social media can solve many problems as many other technological that try to solve all the problems.

The thing is, if you know how to solve a problem in your market, social media can amplify it, right? So I'll give you an example. Like when we do online course marketing in my business a lot, that's pretty much our focus at the moment. And if I come up with a new strategy, a new idea, and I write it out, you know, and I know this is super valuable, now if I go to Thinkific or Teachable or one of these groups, right, because they put all this work to make these groups and put that post in there, I might get 200 to 300 people liking it and I'll get calls immediately booked. People want to become my customers. But it's just because I amplified the message. I'm not going to post every single day. I'll just wait until I have a really good idea. I'm like, okay, I need a few clients. Let me put this out and I get new clients. So it's just being very focused and strategic about what you're doing.

This is your strategic choice you made. I mean, you structure all your business around your strategic decisions that align to your personal and professional goals.

Yeah, yeah, and then social media, all it does is amplify things, right? It's like when you see a rich person, it's going to amplify their behaviors, right? Because they can do whatever they want now, so they're going to act how they would be acting. It just amplifies things, and that's what social media and marketing does. It amplifies your message. So if your positioning and message is garbage, you're amplifying garbage and you wonder why nothing happens. So it's not a solution, you know, to market and get traffic unless you got those things, you know, figured out first. Like, you know, does my positioning and message convert? And then yeah, you amplify it and you get more clients. It's that simple.

Okay, and one last question if I may, Tom. If you could teach one thing to a person to make him Make himself autonomous in financial means, in personal means, in anything. What would that be?

Well, spend less than you make if you want to become any financially. I mean, that's, that's the number one thing. You got to spend less than you're making every single month. It's a simple thing, but if you don't do that, you will never make it.

This is an excellent advice. I'm ready to conclude our interview here, Tom, and I thank you very much for being in Leadership Execution. Would you like to add something?

Not really. I think we went over a lot of stuff. When you mentioned digital nomads before too, I find the focus is not on business. So the digital nomad focus is more like traveling and understanding themselves and touchy-feely type stuff, you know, a lot of hippie and vegan stuff going on, and it's great, but the focus is not on business, right? So I don't like hiring digital nomads.

Mm-hmm.

I find they have no skills and are pretty lazy and are not just good employees. And if you're someone trying to make a business as a digital nomad, you know, get the travel and the nonsense out of your system first, and, you know, you're still going to have to Focus and put in the work, you know, just like any other person. You know, it's not going to come to you. It's not rubbing, you know, 2 stones together or, you know, abundance or something. None of that's going to happen. Like, you got to put in the work. You got to come up with an idea. You got to come up with positioning, a strategy, and execute. That's what it's going to come down to at the end.

Okay, excellent. Thank you for being here, Tom.

Thank you for having me.

You're welcome. When we're ready, I'm going to send you to check what we have recorded before we publish it. Thanks very much again for being here, and it was really an honor to be discussing with you some very peculiar subjects, and thanks for answering all the peculiar questions I made.

I did my best. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye, have a wonderful day.

You too, bye.

Bye. Thank you all for listening today. I'd love to see you at the next episode of Leadership Initiative Podcast. If you have a question or a comment, please send me a message at my site, takisathanassiou.com. Until next time, take the initiative to become the person you want to be. Start now and make a difference. Thank you all for listening.