Vishen Lakhiani describes how Mindvalley nearly collapsed in 2008 despite $250,000 monthly revenue, then attended a Harv Eker seminar that shifted the team's beliefs about money. Between May and December that year, revenue grew roughly 400%, enabling them to expand and secure an office.
Questions this video answers
May 2008.
About $250,000 per month.
Approximately $15,000 per month.
18 employees.
Nine employees attended.
Chapters
So I'd like to share with you guys a story. Five years after starting mindvalley, I was in a more miserable state than I was if I had never become an entrepreneur. And maybe some of you have experienced this. I'm five years into the business, and me and my business partner at that time, Mike, realized that we are more broke than if we had never bothered to start this business, business at all. I remember it was May 2008. We were doing about a quarter million in revenue a month, which sounds good, right? But the fact is we were burning through $15,000 a month and our bank accounts were getting lower and lower and lower. My partner still had his college debts to pay. I had debts I had to take care of. We couldn't afford to live the life we really wanted to. And to be honest, we felt really frustrated and we wondered, what on earth were we doing? May 2008 was a really tough month for us because I calculated that if things didn't change in about three months, we'd have to dissolve the company mindvalley and let go of all 18 of our employees. So it was a stressful time. Now, sometime that summer, a friend of my father's, a guy by the name of Vincent, gave me tickets to an event that was happening in the city. It was by a guy called Harv Ekerman. And the event was about the millionaire mindset, right? And so Mike and I thought, well, you know, we've always wanted to be a millionaire. We are nowhere close, but this might be interesting to attend. Now, we had a number of free tickets, so I went with Mike and we also made it available to some of our employees. And nine of our employees came with us. So we sat there in this room. We were listening to this guy, Har Becker on stage. And it was Friday. We had taken time off from work to listen to this man. And by the end of Friday, Mike is like, this is utter bullshit, Vishen, why are we here? Can I just leave? And Mike and I were so close to walking out that door, we didn't feel we were learning anything. But we decided to just stay anyway because we saw our employees, they were really into this guy. So we stayed on Saturday and on Sunday. And by the end of that three day event, something shifted. I remember a moment, I turned to Mike and he had tears streaming down his eyes. And he looked at me and I was well enough because we'd realized what had gone wrong in our lives as entrepreneurs. You see, business schools, they tell you that you need a certain amount of marketing knowledge or strategy or hiring strategies to build that company. What they don't tell you is that your business, your career is only going to grow to the extent of your mindset around money. And learning from this man, Harv Eker on stage, I realized that I was limited by a certain mindset. And because our beliefs become real in the world, this mindset was keeping me stuck in this bubble that wouldn't expand. For example, I grew up in an Asian family. My grandfather and my father were immigrants. They had come to a new country that started a business and like all immigrants, they had to work really, really, really hard to survive. So I grew up as a teenager watching my dad still starting his business. I remember working with him long hours at a warehouse, hauling boxes of textiles into the back of lorries. It was back breaking work. It wasn't the most enjoyable job. And I realized at that seminar that somewhere in my mind I developed this belief that to be successful you had to work hard. And I also saw that my father, my grandfather, they were becoming successful. They could afford the house, they could afford to provide only when they were in their 40s or 50s. I was 32 at that time. And somehow in my mind I just assumed that I would have to wait to be 40 before I was truly successful. So as I was at the seminar, I started seeing these mental blocks in my head. I started realizing that deep down inside I believe that because I was working reasonable hours, because I was a father of a one year old child, I don't want to come back from work at 9pm I realized that because I was working reasonable hours, I, I had told myself that I wouldn't be successful yet because I was only 32, I told myself, I'm not going to be a millionaire for another decade or so. All of these beliefs were suffocating me. Now. Here's what happened at the end of that seminar. We went back to our lives. We went back to our business. We set new goals for ourselves. It was still May 2008 and the company was still three months away from dissolving that something incredible happened. In a span of eight months, from May 2008 to December 2008, Mindvalley expanded and grew and exploded. We went from a quarter million and we'd been stuck. We'd never gone above a quarter million in about five years to a million in annual revenue by December, a 400% improvement in revenue. In April months, Mike and I, our lives completely changed. We now had cash in the bank. We could expand the team. The beautiful mindvalley offices that you see, we put a down payment on that office in January 2009 after we had such a successful December. The Mind Valley that, you know today happened because I as an entrepreneur got out of some bullshit mindset that was keeping me suppressed. And that's why today, when entrepreneurs ask me what's the biggest barrier holding entrepreneurs back, I always say it's your mindset around money. Now, the story doesn't end there. I said I took nine of my employees along with this, right? Now here's the really cool thing. Of the nine employees who came and spent those three days with me, Mike and Harb, two years later we were talking about it and something interesting happened. Four of the nine ended up going out and starting their own business. One became one of the most amazing yoga and fitness trainers in the city. Another started a tech company that's become crazy successful. Four of the employees who stayed with us, they were still working for us, but they had increased their income considerably. They were getting promotion after promotion. Only one I lost track of. She was an intern who had to go back to university, but last I heard she got a job at Google. So I. So I'm sure she's well taken care of. But it was amazing to see how a mindset shift could cause such tremendous effects in someone's life. And so fast forward many years later, I'm super excited to be able to bring Harv Eker to mindvalley Academy so that these mindset shifts that I experience might come to you too. If you are curious to learn more about Harv Eker, I invite you to join us on a masterclass with me and Half. It's about a 90 minute conversation, but half is going to go through many of the key ideas that I think are so important to shifting our mindset around money and removing that glass ceiling that keeps so many of us of getting into the next stage of our lives. The information is below. This video SA.
