002: Cultivating Your Why Before Anything Else with Mike Dillard

Hi, I'm Natalie. Jill, fat loss expert turned high performance coach. When odds are stacked against us, how do we shift and create everything from nothing? How do we level up when we aren't feeling it yet or we've had a big setback? On this podcast, I'll be talking to some of the most inspiring and courageous men and women on this planet who at their worst, learned how to achieve success greater than they ever dreamed possible. Leveling up and creating everything from nothing. After multiple successful businesses, Mike Dillard created $10 million in revenue on a startup business in its first year. Eighteen months in, when he thought he was on track to bring his business to $100 million, his world came crashing down overnight. His sales were gone, his business tanked, and his most valuable trait that he had, his reputation, was taken away and used against him. He lost everything. His wife, his partner, his possessions, and most importantly, his voice. When I sat down to interview Mike, I had a big question for him. When all is taken away from you, sometimes over and over again, how do you shift and go on and create more? On this episode, Mike shares his incredible journey and and how. He continually comes up with great ideas by asking, what do people want solved? How he follows his passion and visions and never gets attached to the how and why. He believes in finding out and understanding how you are wired and programmed before launching a business. Mike is a true example of someone who has repeatedly leveled up and created everything from nothing. I'm so excited for this interview today, you guys. I've been waiting to interview Mike Dillard, who's a creator of one of my favorite podcasts, and I've got him on today, and I've been dying to share his stories and ask him questions about how he's so successfully created everything from Nothing many times. Mike, thanks so much for being here with me today. I can't wait to talk with you.

Yeah, thanks, Natalie. I'm stoked to be here.

So, Mike, people look at you now as this incredible success story. I mean, when you look at your show, what you've done with it, really, anything you've built, they look at you as this incredible success. But I know it wasn't always like that, and I. I'm hoping you could tell us a little bit about what it was like before you hit the success.

Oh, gosh. Entrepreneurship. I think our mutual friend Josh put it very succinctly one day where he said, entrepreneurship is a full contact sport and it's certainly a career path that has had its rewards, but it's also had Its downsides as well, and huge challenges. And it's been a series of ups and downs for, gosh, 12, 15 years now.

Yeah. And what is so amazing about you is that you, you just seem to bounce back from everything. So first of all, back up to your. What were you doing first? How did you even get into business? What was the first thing you were doing that was creating income?

My inspiration to become an entrepreneur was received in the original Macaroni Grill in Bernie, Texas. Before it was a franchise and bought by Brinker, it was just this one Italian restaurant that was built out of an old dance hall right next to the original Rudy's Barbecue. They were in the same building. And that was in high school. I was bussing tables probably five days a week and certainly on Fridays and Saturday nights while all of my friends were out doing fun stuff. And I'm sitting there busting my ass and filled with dirty Italian food until, you know, midnight, one o' clock on a Saturday night. And I would go home, fire up the TV to kind of decompress and relax a little bit. And there's very few things on at one in the morning on a Saturday, but the one thing they're was plenty of was infomercials at the time. So Tony Robbins and Carlton sheets and all of these old guys way back when that essentially showed me there was another option, that there were opportunities out there to earn a pretty significant amount of money as your own boss. And so that's really what planted the idea in my head. And from that point forward, I was just determined that I needed to be my own boss and become an entrepreneur. I hated the fact that somebody else had control over my schedule, told me when I had to work and how much I could ear. And I just, I hated losing all of my freedom and missing out on all of those times with my friends because I had to have a job. So that's where the seed was planted and the drive was created. And once you get that bug, it's really hard to get rid of it.

So your initial motivation was really, I don't want to work for somebody. I want to make my own decisions.

You know, there's few worse feelings when you're young. You know, keep in mind, I'm 16, 17 years old at the time than hearing about some awesome party that your friends are going to have. And you go into work and you look on the little printed sheet that's on the tack board and you've been scheduled for doubles all weekend. And that just killed me. And I was like, this absolutely sucks that somebody else has that much control over my life. And that's not how I'm going to spend the rest of my years. And so that's really. Yeah, that's where the seed was planted.

So what was the first thing you did? What was the first taste in being an entrepreneur then? What did you set out to do?

Network marketing. This is late 90s, 1997, 98, 99. And there weren't a lot of opportunities out there, especially if you were broke and a kid in high school that didn't have a lot of money. This is web 1.0 days. There was no such thing as MySpace or Facebook or YouTube. In fact, if you saw a video online, it was a really big deal. These are the days of CD ROMs and fax on demand. The only business opportunities that I really identified at that time that were 100, 200 or $300 to get started were in the network marketing industry. So that's where I dove in. I probably joined 12 different companies over three to five years. I failed at every single one of them. I never made a dime.

Okay, so wait, back up there because. Right. Just that alone gave me a lot about your personalities. So you said you failed 12 times at that, and you just kept going. What was going through your mind right then? Why did you keep going?

The thought of having to graduate from college at that point, because now I'm pursuing this in college, was even more painful than failing was. So I knew I had to be an entrepreneur. I'd made up my mind at that point. I needed to figure out how to do it. I've been in this network marketing industry for several years now. I've got time invested. I've been studying, I've been working with mentors. And yet the thing about that industry that I learned in hindsight is that it is brutal at showing you where you're weak.

Yes, it is.

There's no hiding from the fact that if you suck at sales or if you're not comfortable talking to people, it's going to expose that very, very, very quickly. And so for me, what I realized after I finally achieved success in that industry was that I was not made for it. I was an introvert in an extrovert's business line of work. I don't like talking to people. I don't like being around people in groups. Like, I'm very much an introvert. And here I am trying to build a business in an industry that is designed for that. It's dependent upon your ability to Network with people, call people on the phone, hold parties at your house. And I just kept trying to push forward to acquire those skill sets and to become better at that, because that's what I needed to do, right? If you want to get a result and that's what's required, great, I'm going to go do it, even if I hate every single minute of it. But I wasn't meant for that world. And I finally figured out five years in that something had to change. It's not working. I am not enjoying being in that industry. I was making probably two or 300 cold calls a day at that point, just because that was desperate. It's like my mentor's like, okay, buy this list of leads for 100 bucks and just start calling people and give the pitch. Here's the script, right? So it was miserable, and I finally started to have a little bit of success. I finally started to learn how to recruit people to sell the product. And that was the most disheartening part of my entire phase in that career. I probably sponsored 30, 40 people over the course of a couple of months, and I basically figured it out, and I hated it. And that was a really big epiphany, because here I am this many years in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and I finally figured it out, and I don't want to do it anymore. And I basically said, if this is what I've got to do for the next 20, 30 years, I don't want to do it. So now what? I've got all of this time invested, all of this effort invested, and I've just come to the conclusion that I don't want to do this anymore. So I basically asked myself the question, what would I want to do? How can I make this process actually enjoyable? Is there a way for me to build this business in a way that is aligned with my personality type and that I would actually enjoy on a daily basis? So that question is, what started the next phase of my career? And the answer to it was, you know what? I would really Enjoy this if 10 to 20 people a day called me or emailed me, and they'd already gone through all of the materials. They were up to speed on the opportunity and the products. They'd made the decision, they were ready to get started, and they just needed me to take their info. And if I could do that and get 10 to 20 people a day to reach out to me, ready to go, that'd be kind of fun. I could totally deal with that, because.

You'Re not recruiting or doing the cold calling or doing that. The grunt work.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so the next question was, okay, how do you actually do that? Is that possible? And that led me. I don't remember how exactly, but it led me into the direct response industry and essentially Dan Kennedy and Yannick Silver back in the day. And. And what I learned from Dan is that you can actually write a sales pitch in the form of a letter, or in this case, a website that would do all of the telling and selling for you. It would take people through the entire progression from beginning of introducing yourself in the business, all the way through answering their objections to then asking for the order. And once I saw that you could do that, I was like, ah, okay, this is really interesting. Now what if I can write a script that would sell everything for me? And that at the bottom it just said, if you're ready to get started, here's how much it costs, email me, call me, or fill out this form. And that was it. I spent the next probably 6 to 12 months learning copywriting because that's what I realized I needed to learn in order to write a letter. That worked like that.

And it works for introvert personality.

Yep. So I learned that I actually was pretty good at sales, just not talking to someone in person. So I started writing this letter, and I'm trying to think of exactly when this was in my career, but I started writing this letter to recruit people, and it worked. And I started generating leads online using Google AdWords. So I learned how to make a capture page, and I just started going after a very specific group of people, which was another lesson that I learned at that time, which was I don't have the patience or the desire to take someone who is brand new to this world and might have just bought $150,000 in vitamins from me. And now I've got to teach them how to become an entrepreneur. I learned that that's a really frustrating, disappointing, and inefficient way to build a team and a business. So I looked at it from the perspective of a team owner of a football franchise, and I was like, would I put out ads in a newspaper if I own the Dallas Cowboys asking to recruit a new quarterback? And basically the ad says, have you ever been interested in playing professional football? Play for the Dallas Cowboys, Call this number. Because that's essentially what people do in the home business industry, right?

Yes, totally. What they do and why it's a cheesy factor.

Yeah. I was like, you know what? I'm Going to skip that. And I'm going to treat this as if I own my own team. And who would I want to recruit? Well, the answer to that was other professional football players who've maybe already won a Super Bowl. And so all of my ads were specifically targeted to that individual. Now, people who've been in the industry, who've had success, built teams, making money, but maybe they feel like they're being underpaid based on the efforts that they've been putting in, that's really what my advertising and sales letter targeted. I ended up recruiting, I believe over the next three months, 20 people. And out of those 20 people, 10 of them became the top 10 distributors in the company, making me the number one distributor in the company. And I never had to recruit anyone ever again.

You know what? This is so incredible listening to you and it's mind boggling why more people don't figure that out because you're saying it and it's so duh simple. But I don't. Nobody figures that out. Right. Most people do. Target the masses and doing it that way. And you went right to the source, like what do I want? And just thinking about people I know, super successful in industry without even knowing they're doing that, they're targeting the right person for it too.

Yeah. It's the blessing and the curse of that world. Meaning there's a quote that I wrote years and years ago when I had this realization and it went something like. The network marketing industry is filled with. The network marketing industry is an industry of marketing and promotion pursued by people who have no idea how to market or promote. And when you're trying to recruit mom and pop next door who have no business skills or marketing skills, the only thing they can do is something ridiculously stupid. Make a list of your friends and family members and give them this cassette tape. Right. And I just realized that's you're not building a real business. And so after I had success at that company and I kind of figured out how everything worked, you also realize that once you have that skill set and you know how to generate leads, you know how to generate traffic, you know how to sell a product online, it makes absolutely no sense from that point forward to go out and spend all of your time, money and efforts building somebody else's company.

Yeah.

Because as a distributor, you don't own any piece of that. And that's another part about that industry that I think is a commonly held lie, which is, hey, you've got this business and this franchise that you can will to your kids. And it's passive income, total bullshit, pardon my French. But you don't own a single piece of that company. It is not your business. And so once I kind of had those realizations, I was like, okay, it's time to move on and do my own thing. And that's really when I entered the next kind of phase of my career, if you will.

So you were uber successful at this. So it's your first taste of really being successful. And one of the big things I heard is that you had passion and vision for what you wanted with it. You just weren't attached to the how, so. So you followed years with the how they were told to do. But when you unattached to that and really looked at it with a different mindset, different set of eyes, you figured out a way to make it really work.

Yeah, that was the big lesson, which if I could go back and do it again, is figure out how you're wired and how you're programmed, what you enjoy doing, and then build your business around that instead of around the way that, you know, somebody else tells you.

So what was next? So you're making this money, it's residual. Did you just shut it down? Did you just add on to it and create something new? What was your next step?

Well, it was during, during the same time period I essentially figured out this attraction marketing thing. How do I attract people and distributors to me? And that was a revolutionary concept in that industry. So I ended up writing a training manual for my new distributors telling them how this whole online lead generation and sales process worked. I called it magnetic sponsoring. I wrote it in Microsoft Word. I went to Kinko's and had a bunch of copies printed in spiral bound binding for two bucks apiece. I started selling that online for $39 a copy, and within three months I was probably selling 50 to 60 thousand dollars a month worth of that book. Wow, that was a huge deal. Because now I'm like, okay, I've got a product here that's being bought by leaders and distributors and 50 to 100 different companies. I'm no longer trapped within this bubble of my own little MLM business that I've been building. I've now got an opportunity to go after a much bigger audience and market that was really a revolution at the time. People had no idea what Google, AdWords or Capture Pages were. And so I got very, very lucky in the fact that I essentially awakened that industry to online marketing. And it is what put me on the map. And before you know it, we're doing half a million dollars a month in core sales on how to use the Internet to generate leads and build your business. So that became my primary focus for the next three to four years. I think we did like 25 million in sales during that time. And then at that point, I had written five or six courses and I had nothing else to say. Everything I had to say about that industry was in written word or on a video at that point.

Yeah, you said it all. Interesting. What was going through your mind at this time? Were you proud of what you had accomplished? Did you feel successful or are you feeling not? This is not enough.

I felt like I had accomplished more than I had ever thought that I could. My original blue sky dream, lifelong dream goal when I was first starting out in that industry was to make 50 grand a month.

Okay.

If I did that, that's more than any one of my family tree has ever made. And I know it's possible because that's what my mentor is making. So if I could hit that at any stage, I'd be a rich man and super happy about that.

So why not retire then? Why not be that? You hit it, you've exceeded it. You've said everything you wanted to say. What kept you going? What created the want for more?

Well, I didn't actually. I hit that point. And if my heart's not in the business, I'm not motivated to do anything with it anymore, I've come to realize. And so I'd said what I needed to say to accomplish everything I'd set out to and more. And so I had really lost my interest in my drive in that industry. And I've learned that if you're not on the gas and growing, you're declining. There's no such thing as neutral.

Yes. So true. So true.

I sat in neutral for a year and I was like, oh, this isn't neutral. It's starting to go backwards. So I didn't want to be in that world anymore. So I was inspired to solve my next big challenge, which was how to effectively save and invest the money that I was making. Because I was in my 20s, I was single, and I was burning through it like nobody's business.

Something about those 20s, right?

You've got all of these things on your dream board, right?

Yeah.

All these cars and everything. So I go out and I buy a 6,000 square foot, six bedroom house, I buy a boat, I buy an Aston Martin and then a Ferrari and then all of this other stuff. And then I turned 30 and I'm like, okay, this is kind of crazy. I have a really successful multiple seven figure business. I have all of these toys and I have no money in my bank account.

Wow.

Just because I've been making it, you're living month to month on a couple hundred grand a month. You think it's going to just keep going? And that 30 milestone was like, okay, I'm not a kid anymore. I'm an adult now and I'm really messing up an opportunity to build real wealth. And so that was a defining moment for me. And that was around the year 2008, when the markets had crashed as well. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to invest the money. Everything that you could have read on the bookshelf about finance and investing went out the window in 0809. It was no longer relevant. Nobody really had an answer. I thought that was a really big opportunity. I was like, if I have this challenge and this problem, and if I don't know what to do with my money, then sure as hell a lot of other people have the same challenge as well. So that inspired me to turn that into a business. And essentially it was just a very simple private membership site. And I said, I'm going to go interview one expert a month on a different type of investing. Maybe it's on cash flow real estate one month, maybe it's on gold and silver another, maybe it's on stocks, mutual funds, whatever it may be after that. But I'm just going to go interview specifically professional investors or entrepreneurs who've successfully made that transition from business owner to wealthy investor. I decided to charge 97amonth for it, which was quite a lot. But I figured if someone used any one of these lessons or pieces of info each month, it would be well worth the money. I did something pretty unique in the fact that I documented every investment that I made. So if I interviewed someone like JP and Adrian here in Austin, and if I invested in them a cash flow apartment complex, then I documented that in the members area, said, here's the money that I put in, here's the property we bought. And over the course of the next couple of years, I documented the results. For better or worse, it was an interesting business because I was the idiot. I didn't know anything about the subject matter and I was essentially like Oprah. I was just the host asking the questions. So that's a big clue for folks who are listening to this when it comes to starting their business. You don't have to be the guru or the expert. To build a really successful business, you just have to help solve a big audience's problem. And if you have that problem as well, that's great. So we ended up launching. I had no idea how it was going to do. I've never been in the finance space. Nobody knows who I am at this point. At least in that world, I have zero credentials. The sales webinar that I put to sell this membership basically said, I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just trying to figure this out. If you want to come and figure it out with me, we'll learn a lot and crack the code on this together. Interesting sales pitch.

Yeah.

We ended up launching in December of 2010 and we had 8,700 people join in a week. Whoa.

Did you ever expect that?

No, no. I expected something, but I not. We did 3.2 million in our first week.

That's unbelievable. And it's not anything you were working backwards from. You just were sharing a real problem. I'm going to help. I'm trying to figure this out too. And you attracted that much?

You know, I've got clearly an audience and a following at that time, and that's a huge advantage when you walk into anything. But a big part of it was timing. The zeitgeist at that moment in time was. And the offer was perfect. It's kind of like crypto over the last year or two here in Bitcoin. Right. If you had a newsletter or an offer in that space over the last 24 months, you've just crushed it. So it was very similar back then. The timing was right. As that business grew and developed, let's say three years later, it was much more difficult to acquire a customer because the economy had recovered. People weren't scared. They weren't trying to figure out this thing. Their portfolios had recovered and the timing had changed. And so that was a really important lesson for me as well, is that timing, timing can be a huge catalyst, but once it starts to shift back to something a little bit more normal, then that's going to affect your business as well.

Now, what was going through your mind, though? Okay, so you have this Launch and it's 3.2 million and you're giving a lot of reasons on. Well, I had, you know, I had the audience had the list that was the 10 timing, all this stuff. But you still did create this. It was incredible that you created that. Were you proud of yourself? Were you instantly going to. Well, it was the luck. I want to know. It was in Your head at this.

Point, probably relief because I was newly married and just had a baby and what I had set out to do worked, Right? So it's a big relief where you can kind of relax for a minute and be like, okay, I don't have to worry about whether or not this business is going to fly three or four months from now, and is the money going to come in or not? So I think relief was a big deal. And then it was also excitement because I was like, holy smokes, we have a potential to build a massive business here. This is not just me in my home office with my laptop anymore. This could be $100 million company. And so that's what we started. We started bringing on on employees and business partners. We opened up and designed an office here in Austin, had two saltwater 5,000, no, like 500 gallon saltwater fish tanks. We knocked out a wall between my business partner's office and I, and we put this giant glass saltwater fish tank in there. We're just like living the high life. I think we did right around 10 million in our first year in sales. And life is good. And, yeah, so that's kind of how it went the first year.

Yeah. And then what happened?

And then it all blew up. And then it all blew up.

Well, how did it blow up? What happened?

18 months in, we had been doing an interview a month. So we're on our 18th interview. Everything's going fantastically well. And then we fly down to Australia to interview this guy in the Forex market, interview him, and we end up sharing, obviously, his content with our audience. And then a few months later, everybody liked it. He came into Austin and he had a private investment firm. Well, basically they would like any other one you could invest and they'll trade for you. And they had all of these documents from KPMG on their performance and all of this other stuff. So I invested money in them, and a lot of our members invested money in them as well. And a few months later, I woke up with a ton of notifications, hundreds of notifications on our Facebook page that like, hey, my portfolio's down. What's going on? My Money's like, dropped 60% and I wake up and my account's down the same. And so I ping them and he's like, I'm so sorry. It was a trading error. Instead of a 6% loss. It was a wrong decimal point. It was 60. Just tell everybody to invest more money and we'll make it back fast. Whoa.

What was happening right now? Are you Panicking. Are you trusting him? Are you? Red flags.

Oh, that's. That's the moment where I was like, oh, shit. So the next phone call was to our SEC attorney, who flew down a couple of days later with his team and my business partner. Robert and I are sitting in his. In his house, going through all of this, all of these events, and he picks out. He picks up this giant book. It's like the size of an encyclopedia. Flips to a page, opens it, and shows it to us. He's like, this is the scam you got taken by.

Gosh. Okay, wow.

He's like, the next thing we need to do tomorrow is call the sec, call the cftc, and call the FBI. And I'm like, awesome.

Okay, so back up a minute. This guy that you fly down Australia you meet, how did he even come into your life? Like, where did that. Was he finding you? Were you looking for him? How did that even happen?

I saw him, like, a year or two previously, and we had some mutual contacts, and I went through his website and I bought his product, and I went through his product, and I was like, hey, this is actually really good. And, you know, so that's kind of how it started. And then they sent us their audited performance docs, and I was like, okay, this is. This is fine. And so that's, you know, it was all actually pretty normal until the money disappeared. And then they're like, hey, ask for more. And I was like, that's not normal. So, long story short. Long story short, it tanked our business overnight. We were doing a million dollars a month. It probably dropped to 200 grand a month. Legal bills went from maybe 5 grand a month to 80 grand a month.

Oh, my gosh.

And after two or three months, obviously, stress is insanely high. Robert gets cancer. I get a divorce. The business is tanking.

I mean, everything falls apart right now.

Everything. Everything. So we ended up spending every dime we ever made just to keep the team employed and to pay the legal bills and to help the prosecution. And that goes on essentially for three years until, you know, he's finally found guilty and all of that crazy stuff. So, yeah, from top. From Cloud nine to hell, basically.

Okay, so I have some questions here. So, one, looking back, were there red flags with this guy initially, or is it one of those, my gosh, it could happen again.

This time. I was not a financial guy, right? So I'm used to just taking people kind of at their word. And. And I'm a pretty trusting dude. And so I've never been ripped off before. I've never been betrayed before. I've never been lied to like that before. I didn't have a frame of reference as to why someone would want to do this, because if you screw someone over today in the world of the Internet, you're going to be discovered. This is not going to stay hidden. So I didn't understand. I didn't understand that people like that would actually exist, not just simply following that line of logic. So in hindsight, I mean, I would have hired an attorney. I would have passed all of these docs to a PI, Would have done a full research and investigation off of someone in that position if I was going to put them in front of my audience again like that.

And how did you handle this? This is happening. Obviously, you're devastated. You're trying to figure out the ethical side of. With how this even happened, the whole thing. What are you telling your audience right now?

Nothing. And that was the hard part, because I couldn't. Once you're in a legal situation like that, the first thing your attorney's gonna tell you is to shut up. And so I really didn't know what to say. And it's hard when there's your fans who've known you for years, like, give you the benefit of the doubt, but there's a whole group of trolls who have been waiting and waiting to sink their teeth in, and now they've got their chance. And so that was super hard, because the thing that was the most valuable to me in my life, which was my reputation, was essentially taken over by an individual and used to hurt the people I care the most about. And to have that power taken away from you and used and abused like that was. It just. It definitely effed me up, and I really didn't know how to handle it, so. A lot of margaritas in the evening.

Yeah. What was. What were you telling yourself about you at that time? And my gosh, how did you. How do you bounce back from that spot? Because you're in this spot, and that would. That could tear anybody up. My gosh. Taking your reputation and what you just said I wrote down, I mean, it is the most valuable thing we all have. So taking that and using it against you, what are you telling yourself? And you can't even be authentic with your audience at this point and share what you're finding out because you're told to be quiet. What are you saying to yourself?

I didn't do. Natalie. I didn't. I honestly didn't do a lot for about two Years we had a team member who would kind of write an email for each month. And we kind of did our best to just move forward and to kind of continue business as usual. But I basically lost my voice because I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what I could say.

Yeah.

So the best piece of advice I got was probably a year, year and a half into this was from Mark Ford, who goes by the pen name Michael Masterson, has written a ton of best selling books out there. Mark went, he's in the financial publishing space. So same industry I was in for Stainsbury Research and Agora. These are close to billion dollar. Agora is close to a billion dollar company in the financial publishing arena. So Mark's been in this space for a long time and I known that about 20 years, career, he'd gone through a similar situation. And I also knew Mark has my same personality type. A very introverted, introverted guy, introspective person. And so I called him up and I was like, I just need to know what to do here. And he basically said, just be completely transparent and tell the truth. And that's all you can do. So as soon as I got the approval from my attorney, I wrote this like 20 page long blog post and I basically said, you know, here's what happened, here's my signed affidavits. You know, I'm not trying to convince you one way or another. All I can do is tell you what, what took place and you can come to your own conclusion.

So super vulnerable.

Yeah, just completely transparent. And you know, the, you know, Again, we put PDFs of the affidavits up there and I'm like, if I lie on this, I go to jail. So I'm not lying to you because that would be worse. Um, and the response from that was actually really good. I think there was like 500 comments that people left that were really supportive and positive and maybe 10%, 5% were, were trolls. But that was, I think, a turning point for me and for my audience and the fact that they now know that no matter what happens, I will always be upfront with them and honest with them. And so for me, that was a big kind of point, transition point for that phase in my life. I finally got to say my side of the story. But at that point the business was basically dead. I didn't want to have anything to do with it anymore. There's just too much emotional scar tissue involved. I didn't know what to do. I moved on, opened a little online Mentoring thing for entrepreneurs to just help pay the bills for about a year. And then finally a friend took me to Tony Robbins Date With Destiny in 2014, I think November ish, December ish. And that was the big turning point.

Where it's like, okay, so before you go to Tony Robbins Date with Destiny, you've gone down the spiral. It sounds like you were going through the divorce, you had the stress, you had this a lot of self doubt. Were you depressed? Would you have said you were depressed?

Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, when I say drinking a lot of margaritas, I'm probably five, six nights a week. Just, I would work all day and it didn't get, I'm not, I don't have an addictive personality. So it never got to that point. But I would work as long as I could and then 5 o' clock would roll around and I'd walk down the street to this little Mexican restaurant downtown Austin, and my comfort food is queso and margaritas.

Yeah, you were numbing, you were not dealing. You were numbing.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt.

So you had all these success in your life, but now you're obviously questioning it at that point. What gave you the desire to even go to a personal development conference and really take that next step to level up? What convinced you of that?

It doesn't take a lot because I've been following and studying personal development for years. So I'm aware enough to know that I need to take control of my thoughts. I need to, I need to move through this and move on. And I'd been punishing myself basically for three or four years now. Around three years, and I'm just like, I can't keep doing this.

Sure.

That opportunity to go to Date with Destiny came up and I instantly jumped on it and that was the big game changer that got me out of that funk. And I basically said, I've, I've been hard enough on myself. I have to forgive myself and these other people and I just have to start over and move on. And so that was the real catalyst for me to come back from that and to just have all of that weight essentially lifted and inspired to go start the next chapter, you know, basically. So.

So you fully changed your state from that. You went there, you changed your state and you decided to take back control.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow, that's powerful because a lot of people would have really called it quits from there and been done.

And I mean, I just think, what is my choice? Right? Like, I'm not going to go get another job. I've got to keep doing what I'm doing. But I just. It's an emotional thing where it's like, I have to stop beating myself up over this. And. And that's the event that just, you know, helped me get through that. So. Yeah, yeah.

So. So bring us from that to now. Like, how did that. And what have you learned along the way? Like, how do you do things different with businesses now because of what you've been through?

Well, I came away from that, and while I was going through it, I was like, what is the lesson I'm supposed to learn from this? Because it has to be worth something. I have to learn something from this. And the lesson that I learned was the fact that I learned what was really important. And I learned that it wasn't about money or building an empire or building a hundred million dollar business. It was basically, if my family and my son and the people I care about most are alive and they're not bleeding out in front of me, life is good. And so it completely reset my perspective on what I valued. And so that was essentially what I took away from that. It was no longer this drive, drive, drive, build, build, build. It was like, okay, I've got a roof over my head and everybody's safe.

So gratitude. You started practicing gratitude, it sounds like.

Yeah, yeah. And it's just, you know, a different perspective and a hierarchy of what's actually important versus what isn't. And so after Day with Destiny, I essentially had a clean slate. I was like, I can do anything I want with my life right now. A wide open decision tree. And I was like, I want to do something that I've never done before. I want to do something bigger than I've ever done before. And I want to challenge myself in a new way and solve another problem that I'm really passionate about. For me, there were two challenges that I saw in the world at the time that I wanted to solve, and one was on the food side. I've always been very into eating healthy, organic foods. I live right across the street from the whole food headquarters here in Austin. So I'm essentially there every day. I've done a lot of juicing. I've done raw food diets. I appreciate the value that good food has that is not covered in poison. And yet at the same time, if you want to go buy produce that's not covered in poison, you basically have to have a six figure income per year. I thought, that's crazy. That's just effed up when you've got to pay a premium price for food that's not going to make you sick. So at that time, I started studying Peter Diamandis and what he was doing with XPrize and had observed how a lot of these companies had come into existence that were decentralizing their prospective industries, like Odesk for the workforce, or 99designs or Airbnb, whatever it may be, Uber. All of these companies are coming in and decentralizing these monopolistic industries. And I was like, well, why can't we decentralize the ag industry? Why can't we decentralize farming? Because the reason this produce is so expensive, there's a huge distribution channel involved. There's the farm, there's the farmer, there's the pesticides, the seeds, there's the 18 wheelers, there's the distribution warehouses, there's the grocery store and every other point in between. And this head of lettuce that might cost $0.20 to grow by the time it gets to you, it's two, three, four bucks. I was like, okay, well, what if we could solve that problem? It's 2015, 2016, whatever the year is. It's kind of silly that that's an issue. That was my big inspiration and my big idea. And I was like, I want to decentralize and revolutionize the ag industry and how food is grown. Never grown anything before. I went on Amazon and I bought five or six ebooks on hydroponics and growing food. I came up with kind of a rough sketch in Photoshop where I went on 99 or oDesk, and I took a Voss water bottle, a glass Voss water bottle, and I gave it to the designer. And I said, fill the middle with plants and put a sign on the top that says a little symbol or says Evergrow, which was the name that I'd come up with for it. Then take that and put it in a kitchen on this photo. So this Photoshop guy basically created this little representation of my concept for 100, 200 bucks. Then I just started cold calling industrial design firms here in Austin. I had no idea who they did or who I should call. So I'm literally looking these up on Google and I'm just saying, hey, I have an idea I want to build. Who do I talk to? I sent them the photo and that kind of started that conversation. And so I finally ended up going with a company in Silicon Valley. And we went to work and essentially we started designing this system that would grow all of your produce and vegetables for you automatically. It had to look Beautiful. Because it was going to be in your house, it had to grow enough food to replace your trip to the produce section. It's not going to grow basil or mint on your kitchen counter. It needs to be its own self contained farm, basically. And it needs to be completely automated so that anyone can use it and you don't have to know anything. You drop in the seed and that's all you have to do. So it has to have WI fi, it has to have an app, it has to have nutrient bottles in the base that automatically dose when it should, and when the bottle is empty, it needs to tell you on your app that you need to replace it. Right.

Yeah. This whole thing was. I remember you first telling me about it. I thought it was brilliant.

Yeah, yeah. So we started going to work and I would sit around at night with a sketchbook and I would try to figure out, what does this design look like? How do we get the most yield out of the size constraint that we would have? And ultimately, the size constraint we would have is the fact that whatever we built would have to fit through a standard size door frame.

Sure.

Keeping in mind the thickness of the cardboard and the protection, the foam from shipping. Right. Because UPS guy shows up and he can't get the box through your door. Big problem. So that was our size constraint. We've now got measurements and then, okay, how do we grow as many plants as we possibly can within that given amount of space? How much water does it need to hold? And we just. I just started figuring this stuff out and working with the design team until we, we got a prototype in place. And that was just super freaking cool to know that. I've got this marquee firm in Silicon Valley and we've invented something that no one's ever built before. And they're sending me videos and photos of the water running and the plants growing and the roots moving about. And it was just amazing. It was awesome. So that goes on for about two and a half years. And we get to the point where we've got a fully functional prototype in its final form, which is sitting probably 20ft to my left right now here in the living room. But the challenge is that it cost over a million dollars to produce, which was basically every penny I had at the time. And we still weren't live and we still had a long way to go. And the problem here was the stupid tax that I was paying, which is basically the tax for my lack of experience when it comes to design and manufacturing. So we get to the point where we start to have conversations around manufacturing. They're like, well, we need to make molds and, and do all of the safety testing and tooling for it. And then we've got to do probably a Test run of 100 units and check for durability and whatnot. And I'm like, okay, how much is that going to cost? And they're like, probably another year and a half and another two to $3 million.

Oh, my gosh.

And I'm just like, not good. So I didn't have the ability to keep funding it at that point, especially for that period of time. Now I've put all of my money into this project that's basically at a standstill. I can't sell it yet. And I've got two choices, which is I can pull the plug or I can go find investors. Unfortunately, right at that time, a competing company came out with three new models. They'd had a little countertop that will grow your basil and your mint three plants at a time.

Okay?

But that was it. And that's all they had for, like, five years. So it's like, these guys are idiots. They're missing. They're missing the zeitgeist moment here. And that comes back to that timing conversation. And then right at that time, they come out with three new products that grows nine plants, 35 plants and 51 plants. And so ours grew 36. So now they've got two models that are at. We're at or better. And the worst part is their design is more efficient. So we'd have to retail our unit at probably three grand apiece, where they were retailing their big one for $1,000.

Wow.

As a marketer, I know that that's not a position I want to be in. I don't want to have to be competing in a side by side comparison of this other system that produces more for less money. It's going to have fewer problems because it's a simpler design. I can't in good faith go try to raise money to take us into that position. Now I'm really screwed. I end up calling the founder of the business of that company up. These guys are super sophisticated. They're out of Y Combinator. It's one of the most preeminent incubators in Silicon Valley. They've got 20, 30 million dollars in funding. They've got 20 employees. They've been in business for seven or eight years now. They've got two or three offices around the world, and they've just been working underground until poof. They've got these new products coming out, so any. Anyway, I ended up calling him, and I was like, hey, you know, we're in the same industry. Your system has some advantages. Ours has some other advantages. Why don't we figure out a way to work together here? I know marketing really well. You know, we can figure out how to join forces. And at the end of the day, it wasn't a good fit for them. They had already. You know, they're already three years down the road further with stuff that they can't even tell me about. But he's like, we have some room left in our A round if you're interested in investing. And I was like, okay. So that was a conversation that a mentor and I had where it's like, this is clearly not going your way, but it's really, really important to know when to stop, when to change your path, and then ask yourself again how you can turn this into some kind of a win. How do you turn your lemons into lemonade? And so that ended up being the route that I went. I invested a pretty substantial amount of money into them at that time, which was still very early in their company. I pulled the plug on mine and wrote the entire thing off as a loss. And they're doing quite well now, so there's a very good chance they'll get acquired in the next three or four years. And ideally, I'll make all of the money back that I put into Evergrow.

You are such an example. I can listen to your stories all day. You're such an example of, you don't stay in that bottom like you. No matter what life throws at you, you are amazing at taking a new spin on it, a new twist, creating an opportunity. Like, you're a master at that. You could sell a program on that. My gosh, I've never encountered somebody with so many just amazing stories of that.

Well, what's interesting is that it doesn't occur to me. It's not something I'm trying to do. I'm just looking at my current situation and my choices, and I'm like, A or B, okay, well, that's the better decision. So that's the way I go.

But I guess, where is that rigor from? Like, where does that come from? Like, how are you able to shift like that? Because so many people would have gotten stuck, you know, 10 businesses ago. And you literally, everything you touch, no matter what happens to it, there's an upswing from it later.

I just don't know what my other choice Is what is my other option?

Like, you've just. You've recently decided there is no other option. I mean, I think that's what it is. It sounds like you just decide there's no other choice. This is what I mean.

If I want to pay my bills, I have to figure out a way to do it, you know? And I mean, there's no other option. It's either quit and go get a job or figure it out.

Yeah, you. I mean, but that. But that is what you don't even see in yourself is that you. There is no quit option. It doesn't happen to you. It's like you figure it out. And I think so many people default to the other.

See that. That's just fascinating to me because it would never even be an option. It is an option, but it's not one I would ever accept.

Yeah. So what I hear from you and what I hope listeners take away is that. Is that. That rigor, that commitment, that decision like that you decide things and it happens. It's period. There's no option. You don't give it a choice. You don't say, I'm going to try. You don't say, I'm giving up. You don't say, it didn't work. You don't get stuck in a story. You say, it's happening. I'm deciding, I'm figuring it out. And that works for you? Over and over again, I guess. Yeah. I mean, I'm just amazed by it. So, I mean, I've got. So I've got some more questions. Obviously, we could go. You probably have 50 more stories. I love this. What I want to know is how do you, like, do you have a process for how you even start? I want to know how do you start your day? And how do you do a process for how you pump yourself up with it to get creative?

Not really. It's so funny. I'm always jealous of people who have a really productive routine that they stick to because I can see the advantages of that. But there's a side of me that goes back to the part of me that became an entrepreneur because I don't want to be told what to do, that doesn't want to tell myself what to do.

Interesting.

So things, having things on my calendar, obligations, meetings, appointments, stress me out because now I feel like I have a boss, basically. And if I set an alarm or if I want a routine, well, I feel like now I've got. I'm becoming the boss of myself. And it's like that's not why I became an entrepreneur, because I want freedom. If I want to sleep until 8:30 today, that's what I'm going to do. That's why I chose this path. Right. So no, I really don't have a routine. The only thing that I've really ever built my entire businesses off of are Evernote. Meaning in Evernote, I have my to do page. And every day when I sit down or the night before, I put down the tasks that I need to get done for the day. And that could be something really stupid like going to the DMV to renew my license or writing this email, recording this podcast, working on the sales video, whatever it may be, where I know what I need to get done that week, whatever project we're on. And I just have the little itty bitty task that I have to check off the list in order to keep that ball moving forward. And that's been my entire methodology for 12 years now. And it's just kind of, it keeps me focused. If I ever sit down, what do I do? I just pull up that list and I'm like, boom. Okay, just pick one of these items to check off and that's it.

Who's in your circle, Mike? What kind of people do you surround yourself with?

That's changed over the years. It used to very much be the Internet marketing kind of typical crew until I went through that challenge or that phase and then I came out of it and I wanted to, especially around Evergrow, I needed to start hanging around people who were at the hundred million dollar plus level, who were in the VC world. And so the people that I associate with now or that I call friends, especially in this town, are really all at that level. Yeah, it's not. If you're hanging around with people who are around your same level of success, you're going to get stuck in that. And so for me, that group's transition to folks who are all at $100 million plus businesses who are all VC guys and who are just basically much smarter and more successful than I am.

I love that you just said that because that is truly the essence of leveling up. I mean, you put yourself around those people, you become that start thinking like them and acting like them. That's amazing.

Yeah, so that's something you've just got to be aware of. And I love, I love everybody that I've been friends with in the past in that group. But there, there was no more growth there. And you know, I was the big dog in the pond. It might Feel good to like, be in that position at local events or whatever where you're kind of the dude until you realize that it's totally holding you back and you're just going to be pretty soon the 50 or 60 year old dude who's still doing the same thing. And the world's gonna pass you by because if you don't keep pushing yourself and growing, you're just gonna get run over.

Yeah. Now tell us about Self Made man and what you've done with your shows, because I feel that that falls into this as well. It's about surrounding yourself with the right people.

Yeah. So Self Made man was the other option I had at Tony Robbins, where I was like, the other challenge I see is the way that the world, specifically the United States, has been changing culturally over the last 15 to 20 years and the fact that there are not a lot of good male role models around the world today that young men can look up to and learn from. And so I thought that that was another huge problem that I could help fix. So that was the backup plan B for Evergrow. But it started at the same time. So I started the Self Made man podcast in 2014, 2015, when I started developing Evergrow, which, by the way, is.

A phenomenal podcast for the reasons that.

Thank you. Thank you very much. And I appreciate your support of the platform and the fact that you came and made a class for us too, which has been awesome. The reason I started the podcast was to provide great content to my existing newsletter list on a weekly basis without it having to take up any of my time. It was a side project and it was never really the focus until I pulled the plug on Evergrow and I was like, wow, this is, this is my biggest asset right now. It's got momentum, it's got a big fan base. Clearly the best decision is for me to go all in on this. That's what I started to do a year, year and a half ago. You came out and filmed a phenomenal couple of classes with us, along with probably 30 or 40 other people. And luckily, I've had those relationships that I've built over the years that I could allow that to happen, which was just a big blessing. And then we launched in March of. In March of this year.

Now, I will say, if you think again, you don't even see in yourself. But no one will say no to you. And the reason they will not say no to you is because you are so real, genuine, authentic, and you do help people and give and give and give. And I don't even know if you know that about yourself, but you do come from a place of I'm going to give and I'm going to help. And it really makes, has people attracted to you. That's. That's for sure. So it doesn't surprise me that people say yes to you and want to be in your presence and help you with whatever you need.

Yeah, no, I mean I've, I can see that. I can see that. And you know, I mean, I think I just learned that a long time ago where it's the more you give, the more you get. And one of the big lessons that I took way back from my network marketing days was you have to be willing to give before you can expect to receive.

And I don't even know that you go in expecting to receive. You come off very. I don't think you ask really for anything in return. Typically you're a giver.

Usually. Yeah. I mean usually not. I think it just kind of just kind of goes. What goes around comes around kind of a deal. Right. So yeah, I mean this really, any industry, any career is built upon making the right decisions over the long term. And that has to do with your customers and how you treat your customers or your email subscribers or how you treat your potential or associates. A lot of people make really dumb short term decisions for money instead of seeing the bigger picture long term. I think that's one of the best things I've noticed about getting older. I just turned 40 last year. That after a decade or plus in this industry, you really start to see the fruits of those relationships and all of those investments. And I think that that's just really important to have a long term perspective.

What would you give my final question for you, And I do ask this everybody. If you're talking to somebody who is starting right now from one of those rock bottom spots and you've had many, they're feeling like a failure, they're. Their business collapsed, you know, they lost their business, their spouse left them, whatever it is. What would you tell them if you were to give them three pieces of advice so they can start leveling up?

This is going to be probably an unexpected answer from me, but one that I think you'll agree with or appreciate and that's the fact that I became very aware going through those couple of years of depression and things like that, that if you want to do something creative and put out good energy into the world, which is what's necessary if you want to build a customer base or Tribe or whatever, nobody's going to come buy from what's the Donkey and Winnie the Pooh, right, Eeyore? Nobody's going to be attracted to that energy. You've got to have a different kind of energy, which is very hard to do if you find yourself broken in a lawsuit, your friends die, and you've lost your marriage. Like, how the eff are you going to do that? And the one thing that I finally figured out that I've paid attention to ever since is that your emotional state is driven by your body and your hormones. And if you're going to sit around and drink alcohol and lay on your couch all day, you're going to produce a different set of hormones that's going to continue to perpetuate that cycle, and it's not going to allow you to see differently. It's not going to allow you to have a more positive outlook or attitude in life, which is the catalyst you need to start making better decisions to change things. Right. So for me, my biggest piece of advice for someone who's in that situation is to go essentially to the bottom core of who you are as a living being. And you've got to change your hormone levels, which means you've got to get in the gym and you've got to start with your body. So that, to me is the foundation of it, is get in the gym every day for an hour, burn off the cortisol, put a podcast like this in your ears, start to change your mindset. And I know you know this better than anybody. If you do that for two to three weeks, you're going to come out feeling completely different.

For sure.

The depression is going to go away, you're going to look in the mirror, you're going to start to feel more confident and happier with what you see. And I think those little sparks of self confidence, then get the ball rolling for everything else.

Yeah.

I think if you try to do something, start reading ebooks or learning marketing, without that piece of the puzzle, you're just kind of fighting through this fog that's gonna be really hard to get through. So for me, that's it. It's get in the gym, change your physical routine, get outside, whatever it may be. And I know that's not the super sexy special.

I love it. I think it's actually great. That's better than three random answers. So I love it. I think it's perfect.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Mike. You're so inspiring. I love these stories and I'm. Thank you so much for being here and sharing. Where can people find you?

You know self mademan.com would be great you know or mike dillard.com but it's pretty easy. And yeah this has been awesome. I appreciate you having me on and it's been a pleasure to be in yalls life, you and Brooks and get to play together. So it's been great.

Thanks for leveling up with us today. Please share this episode if you found it helpful so others can join in. And don't forget to hit that subscribe so you don't miss out on future your shows. And if you would leave me a five star review. I appreciate those so much. I read all of them and it's how I know that I'm giving you information that you find valuable. And come interact with me over on Instagram at nataliejlfit. I read all the direct messages and comments over there. Make it a great day. Creating everything from nothing.

Sam.