The Butler Project

I had an interesting experience the other day with one of the millionaires I’d been pursuing for an interview. I’d left him two messages on his cell phone, and I was starting to wonder if I had the guts to really keep harassing this man until he spent some time with me.

Then on a Saturday at about 5 pm my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.

Me: “Hello?”

Caller: “Hello Mark, this is Nathan, I was just returning your call.”

Me: (Stammering) “Uh, hello Nathan, thanks for the call back.”

Nathan: “No problem, I got your message and I thought it was interesting. Tell me more about what you’re doing.”

I explained my goal of interviewing as many financially successful people as possible, to which he replied:

“Well I have about ten minutes I can spend with you, go ahead and fire away.”

Now, normally I record the calls and then transcribe them basically word for word, so I asked him if I could drive to my office (which was just a minute or two away) where I was set up to record. His response was great:

“Well, like I said, I’ve got about ten minutes, so we should probably just go ahead.”

It doesn’t come across in a blog post, but his tone of voice said “You’ve got ten minutes, sport. Get on with it.” He wasn’t rude at all, just letting me know that he had other things to do on a Saturday night besides accommodate me.

I bring that part of the story up for two reasons: First, I’m glad I persisted in trying to get in touch with him, because the conversation we had was interesting.

Second, when you’re talking to somebody who is financially out of your league - whether it’s a sales prospect, a potential mentor, or your boss - you need to be both bold and flexible. I’m glad I asked him if I could record the call even though he said no. The request didn’t hurt, and I would have liked to have the recording. The flexibility came in when he said no, and I just had to take what I could get.

I think that’s true in any situation where you’re trying to get something you want. Very often things don’t pan out exactly as you’d like. Take what you can get, keep your bigger goal in mind, and keep working.

So we spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes together (another lesson: people often forget their ‘10 minutes’ when you get them telling stories about themselves) and he shared some great insights with me. The background information on Nathan is that he’s a 47 year-old commercial real estate developer who has made the majority of his money creating luxury resorts on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Here are a couple of his thoughts:

The most important attributes a person can have are a sense of humor, boldness, and integrity.

“When I was young I wasn’t afraid to call people older and more established than me. I knew I had to if I wanted to succeed in those circles.”

That statement made me think of my own time in sales and also of the interactions I’ve had with network marketers. People tend to do what I call “selling down” or in network marketing - “recruiting down” which means you only try to pursue and persuade people you feel are less successful than you.

This habit comes from the idea that “Who am I to ask that person for…” The reality is that success requires you to sell and associate “up” which means you need to seek relationships with people that are more established and more successful than you. If you are the most successful person in your peer group, you need to challenge yourself to expand, or replace, that peer group.

And as far as honesty and integrity go, he said this:

“No matter how smart or talented the person, if they lied to me I let them go. It’s just not worth it. On the other hand, if you’re always completely honest with people, they’ll sense it. You’ll start to get noticed. Inevitably you’ll move up the chain. Success will be inevitable.”

Nathan said this was the best financial advice he could offer:

“Take lots of risks and chance when you’re young. You have to take them if you want to get ahead, so you’re wise to get them out of the way early. When you get to be my age (47) you’ll have a lot further to fall if a deal goes wrong. I don’t risk money anymore. I’m ready to retire and move on to more important things than money.”

Some of you may say “I’m already way past ‘young’. What do I do with this advice?”

My opinion is you can change this quote to be “Take lots of risks at the beginning of your path to financial freedom. You have to take them if you want to get ahead whether you’re 25 or 55, so you might as well get them out of the way as soon as possible. Once you’re secure financially, don’t take risks that jeopardize what you’ve built.”

My favorite quote from my conversation with Nathan:

“At some point you have to decide how much is enough. You can go on making more money forever if you want to. At some point you have to stop and think about more important things you could be dedicating your life to.”

For Nathan that meant leaving his normal life to dedicate three years to a religious mission that will start this summer.

Hopefully a lot more of us will have the opportunity to decide enough is enough and move on to more important things.

Yeah, Mark usually writes about his own millionaire interviews, but this is Emily today. And this segment of Todd’s interview is packed with good stuff.

First, a little background: Todd and his partner own a network marketing business that brings in about a million dollars a year. During his interview, Todd shared with Mark some amazing insights about who he is and how he has built himself into a millionaire.

Mark started out a little sensational, wanting to know if, at the young age of 26, Todd could reasonably retire and actually maintain or even increase his income without ever making another business phone call or holding another meeting. Todd acknowledged, yes, he thought that was a pretty reasonable assumption. In fact, he did take an entire month off recently when his first child was born and his income increased $6,000 that month. But as he thought about retirement, his question to Mark was:

Todd: What the heck would I do? Just sit around and do nothing? I’d just . . . I’d die off I think.

Right now [we're] in a very incredible growth phase . . . I want to participate in that as much as possible.

I see the opportunity much larger than what it is, and that doesn’t mean I’m only driven to make more and more money, but I’m driven to help a lot of the people within our groups make more and more money, and I really feel like . . . we’re changing a lot of people’s lives . . . it’s not just me and my own efforts, it’s built on the efforts of now you know, 10000 + people!

Mark: What does it feel like to wake up in the morning and, if you know what I mean, know that you don’t have to? You’re 26, you’re not like someone who worked for 40 years and hated it and finally you’re free of it. You can get up every morning and say, “Well, I don’t have to, I choose to” What does that feel like?

Todd: Well, honestly, that’s the thing I think everybody should experience because most people go through life completely begrudgingly; they hate what they do. Because of that, everything else in their life suffers: their relationships suffer, their own personal happiness suffers, their growth and development suffers. You know, I, by no stretch of the imagination have a perfect life, but I’m very, very happy. . . my wife loves the fact that there are days when she and I plan — a couple of weeks ago it was her birthday and she wanted to go shopping, so half of one day, when . . . most people would be working, we went and did that and went to a movie. . . [we] have that freedom to be able to do that.

At the same time I think that’s been created because of the passion and the work ethic that I have created for it, and that passion drives me to keep doing it. You know, I wake up excited to do it. . . . I don’t dread when I have to call somebody or when my phone rings or when I have to go meet with people. I really love it. I love people. I love going out and meeting with new people, seeing their lives change, introducing them to a whole new way of thinking and a new concept, and that’s really where my passion lies.

That’s the reason why I want to do more speaking and more teaching and I want to write books, is because I really believe that if people understood and were empowered with the right knowledge and they would apply that and develop in themselves their own purpose, I really think people could have everything they wanted. I don’t think that there’s just a luck factor why some people succeed and some people don’t.

Did you read that?! Todd doesn’t get up in the morning because if he doesn’t he won’t get paid; he gets up in the morning because he is changing people’s lives. He’s introducing them to a whole new way of thinking and how to apply knowledge and understanding to help them have everything they want. What is your passion? What could get you out of bed each morning excited to be up and get going?

Todd: People need to really know their “why,” and that “why” needs to be bigger than any obstacle that they have. They need to have a reason for doing it. And what I’ve found is that money is not a big enough why. What you’re going to do with the money and things you’re going to help and where your life’s going to change, maybe, but they really need to understand their purpose in what they’re doing.

The other thing is if you look at the way . . . Brian Tracy . . . back in the day when he was one of the first people that really started talking about goals, . . . one of the steps that he had was “who has done it?” And so you look at, what is it you want to accomplish [and] somebody [who has already] gone down that road . . . you look at what they had to do to do it and . . . learn from their mistakes.

For example, in [my organization] there are certain people, my sponsors, who I looked at and knew what kind of money they were making . . . I watched them and saw exactly what kind of work they had to put into it, and realized, you know, they were much further down the road in terms of their business experience, their maturity, their credibility, their contact base, and so I probably had to put even more into it than they did just because of my age. And . . . that was the price I had to pay if I wanted to have what they had.

But when you do that, you know what you want and why you want it.

You need to know why. And if you don’t have a big enough “why” in your life right now, you need to start planning how to get to that point. To the point where you’re excited and to the point where you’re doing the things that matter to you.

Our family’s eccomerce site sells trailer hitches. We’re not passionate about selling trailer hitches. So what keeps us going? A few things:

• All four of the Butler siblings live in different states. We’re all in different stages of our lives (some married, some single; some with kids, some without, some going to school, others moving up the corporate ladder, etc.) Working on the business gives us a reason to get together. Our business purchased each of us a MacBook Pro so we could ichat (video conference). We get together at least once a week to work on the business and catch up with each other’s lives.
• The business pays for family vacations. Two years ago we enjoyed “the best snow on earth” for a week over Christmas. Sometimes it just pays travel expenses when we all get together at somebody’s house. Eventually we plan to extend our Christmas vacations to two or three weeks.
• We’re having fun. Our eccomerce site is like a game for us. Higher search engine rankings, getting links, making sales, are all small victories we enjoy together.

The above reasons are all part of the “Why” for each of us. They’re the reason we can spend hours entering new products or tweaking our site design. They’re what keep us going when taxes are due or our drop shippers fail to deliver on time. We have our why, it got us through a year of making very few sales, it will get us through this year when we are growing at a fast rate, and it will keep us going when the challenge is gone and trailer hitches are still boring.

How about this site? We didn’t start this site to make money or for all the fame it’s got us (wink, wink); we started this site because we looked around and saw a lot of people struggling. Struggling with money, struggling with decisions, unhappy with their lives. After Mark did his first millionaire interview and shared it with me, we knew we were onto something powerful. We knew we needed to share.

This site is not about becoming a millionaire. It’s about living the life you want to live. It’s about you making the difference, the positive change, that you can make. Money simply makes your change easier, and, often, bigger. We’re passionate about getting this message out, sharing the experience and wisdom that financially successful people have to offer. And that’s what keeps us going, because if you think it’s easy to get someone who’s busy, passionately working out his or her own dreams to take a minute and sit down to talk about him or herself, well . . . you just haven’t read enough interviews yet.

Let me leave you with the advice Todd said he would give to people just starting out.

Todd: You need to find what your purpose is. You need to find what is it you really want to accomplish, what you want to do. And then you set out and do it. There really are limitless opportunities out there, and the ability to go and create whatever life you want to create, it’s not going to be easy by any stretch of the imagination. The focus that I would put on [you] is to become the person that then will attract the success that they’re looking for. Change the whole thought process from “What is it that I want to have?” to “What is it that I want to become?” Because when [you] do that, everything else really falls into place.

Wow. Let’s quote that again:

Change the whole thought process from “What is it that I want to have?” to “What is it that I want to become?” Because when [you] do that, everything else really falls into place.

Here is more from my interview with Todd, network marketing millionaire. One of the things I love about Todd is that he’s very aware of his own actions–the how and the why he does things.

Mark: What do you feel has been your key attribute that has contributed most to the success you’ve had?

Todd: I think more so than anything is my ability to communicate. You know . . . you can be involved in any different type of business, but you and I and the majority of people out there are involved in the exact same business and that’s the people business. Whether you’re selling x product or whatever it is or you’re selling . . . a service . . . whatever it may be, the ability to communicate clearly and to get your point across and to understand people and develop relationships . . . I think that’s been definitely the most important piece for me.

Mark: Do you feel that is something you were born with? Or even if you were born with it, how did you magnify that ability? How do I help myself develop the skill?

Todd: There are a couple of things. I do feel like, for me personally, I feel like that’s one of the God given gifts that I was given, but I feel like any gift that you’re given, if you don’t develop and hone that skill, it’s going to go away.

I think [there are] a couple of ways you can do that: one, I personally read probably more than anybody I know in terms of leadership books, books on communication, tapes, all those types of things, and so I’m constantly trying to learn from other people in that regard.

The other thing that I’ve done is I have spent a lot of time recording myself and recording other people and going back and listening to it and practicing in assessing my ability to communicate and trying to make that better. You know, I know that in what you do, you have sales calls and . . . I’ve done millions of conference calls and recruiting calls and . . . I’ve recorded hundreds of those and gone back and listened to them and said, “OK, where can I be better? That didn’t make sense. Why did I stutter there? How can I say that a little bit clearer? How can I answer those questions? When I came across those objections, how did I handle it? Did it work? Did it not?”

And then [I] also listen to other people who I respect, who I believe . . . I want to work with them, and spend quite a bit of time assessing what they’ve done, and then try to incorporate that into what I do.

I think that you learn best, and you’re probably the best judge or the most honest judge of your ability to communicate when you listen to yourself, more so than getting feedback from anybody else because you actually listen to it when you give it to yourself.

As I was listening to Todd talk about the value of communication skills and analyzing his interactions with people, it made me think of a good friend, who is now also a business partner of mine. When I first met him, he had been working in sales at the same company as I and he was terrible. You couldn’t point to many other people in our sales force that were worse than he was. He was probably making about $50 per 40 hour work week. Yeah…Fifty Dollars.

But he was determined to succeed in sales, and told me later that he would never have quit. The only way he was going to leave the job was if he was forced out (something I had lobbied for coincidentally).

To make a long story short, he ended up being one of the most successful sales reps in the history of our company, and he has now moved on to pursue our business full time.

How did he go from being so bad to being one of the best? Every week he would go to the Quality Assurance department of our company (we worked in a sales office where all our calls were recorded) and he would ask for recordings of both his own calls and those of the most successful sales reps. He took those CDs home and studied them for hours every night. He wrote down every word the successful rep said, and then practiced saying it how they said it. This went on for weeks and then months, and he started to improve.

An additional benefit of all this study was that he became one of the best listeners I’ve known. As he listened to all these sales calls he started to understand the meaning behind the clients’ tone of voice, and their non-verbal communication.

Now my friend has these skills forever. They served him well in his previous job, they’ll help our company immensely, and he’ll use them to enhance his personal life for a long time to come.

Like Todd said, we’re all in the people business. Whether you’re a stay at home mom, a school teacher, or a construction worker, you interact with people every day. Your communication skills determine how well that interaction goes and the relationships you’ll form.

One of the interviews I’ve done was with Todd, an incredibly successful network marketer. Todd is 26 years old; he’s been working at this for 5 years now, and he brings in over a million dollars a year with his partner, who also happens to be his brother.

Mark: Having been on the path that you’re on for a while now, and having accumulated some money, if you could only give me one piece of financial advice, or a couple, you know, what would the advice be?

Todd: You know, it really comes, my perspective also comes down to understanding the type of money I’ve made because when you make money in network marketing, it really is a different vehicle. And I guess my advice would be to create an income or incomes that are not completely dependent on your showing up. Whether that be through becoming a manager of a sales office where you’re getting paid a percentage of the sales of the other sales people that you have or a percentage of profits, or whether that be investing in things that are going to pay an annuity or a residual income or whatever it may be.

The fatal flaw that most people have in their idea of creating wealth is to work a job to where they make a good income and to save that and put it away, and the majority of people just don’t do that.

If you can create an income that is ongoing; it’s a hard thing to do, but there’s a lot of ways to do it, and I’m not saying that network marketing is the only way to do it. You can do it in real estate, you can do it by owning a parking lot, you can do it by building your own company; I mean there’s a lot of ways to do it. But creating some type of passive, residual income or multiple forms of it is really the only way to create total retirement freedom for yourself.

Mark: And, network marketing, there’s no question that’s a tough business; that’s a business with a lot of rejection in it on a daily basis, but you’ve had success there. Looking back now, five years later, thinking of all the crap that you did have to deal with and go through; was it worth it?

Todd: Oh, absolutely, I mean if you were to do it from a numbers perspective . . . if it were 8000 people that had rejected me in the last five years, I get paid more than 10 dollars for every one of those people who rejected me every single month.

I’m laughing.

Todd: I mean if you break it down to actual numbers, I’d say I’d probably been rejected realistically by maybe 1000 people so I’m making [more than $80] a month off of each of those people

Mark: (Still laughing.) That’s 80 grand!

Todd: You know, if you look at it from that perspective, oh yeah, who cares?!

Mark: That puts it in some pretty amazing terms . Maybe that’s gonna turn some of us on to network marketing.

Todd: Yeah, [you] could definitely do worse.

On Monday we featured John, who spent his career in corporate America and now runs his own company. These excerpts showcase how integrity, networking, and surrounding yourself with the right people are so important to your success.

Mark: What is the one attribute you feel is crucial to your success?

John: I’d have to say integrity. Integrity takes a lot of different forms. If you’re working hard when the boss isn’t watching…if you say something is going to get done then it will be done. There’s no room for excuses, it’s all about results. I found that by becoming known as a person of integrity, being an honest person, it just has so many different tentacles.

People will be more open with you. they won’t have their guard up as much because they won’t feel like you’re trying to stab them in the back, that you’re trying to take their job, that you’re trying to do something to self-promote. You just get a lot of leeway and a lot of freedom. With that leeway and that freedom you’re given the opportunity to really shine and that’s what you have to do.

So I’d have to say the one word would be integrity because integrity is power. I work a lot with vendors, vendor management, and supply management. When you tell somebody like a supplier or a customer that it’s going to happen, it just has to happen. And then when you say something people just check it off as it’s done. You don’t need to have a boss following you up, and what follows out of that is a lot of additional responsibility, opportunities and projects.

Mark: Is there anything else you would share with me about getting ahead?

John: After I read [your] email it caused me to think a little bit, and there are a couple of other things that we haven’t touched that I think are really important.

[First], the importance of networking. Networking expresses itself in a lot of different ways. Look in your career for mentors…people that are a little bit ahead of you in their careers that can kind of take you and they can point you and open doors for you.

I’m kind of past that now but I used to do it quite a bit. [Let's say] you’re looking somebody to hire, you call somebody that’s credible. They help you here, and then you help them. [Maybe] you’re looking for work or if you’re looking for suppliers or manufacturers. That’s where your network comes in. A network in a big corporation is so important because that’s where you get opportunities to move your career.

The last thing I’d say that we haven’t talked about is the importance of surrounding yourself with good people. It’s a real skill to be able to recognize talent and skill and in others. You have to look beyond hiring people just because you like them.

If you’re a a white 40 year-old male and that’s the people you hire…you’re pretty vanilla - you really lose out. I have a good friend, a partner; he’s not college educated. He’s very bright, and he’s extremely business savvy; he just has an innate business sense.

He’s made millions and millions and the way he’s done it is through the people he hires. He hires the best in every field. People that have their Harvard MBAs…that kind of thing. That has been his leverage.

You have to be confident in yourself and not be threatened by that. I have seen in corporations and corporate America…people get threatened by people below them and so they will hire down so they feel safe and secure that somebody won’t come and take their job.

What I learned was quite the opposite in my career. My approach was “I’m going to hire the very best and if they push me then we’ll all win.”

I honestly believe that if you hire the best not only do you come out better but the organization raises up and everybody gets opportunity. I have seen in corporations and some cultures where the incentive is to hire down so you look good. In time you don’t win, because in time you can’t do it all. As you move up the ladder and the responsibilities get big enough, you’ve got to have people you can trust underneath you.

If you’ve established a pattern of hiring down…you’ll mentally implode, and that’s just the way I’ve seen it so many times.

I talk a lot about entrepreneurship, and most of the millionaires I’ve interviewed so far made their money as entrepreneurs. There’s another perspective to be had. The vast majority of people with never pursue their own business (which I consider unfortunate), so I feel like we need to give some attention to how a person that spends her/his career in corporate America can achieve financial independence.

I spoke with John, a successful older gentlemen who spent over ten years with Hewlett Packard “when it was still a great company”. He told me the lessons he learned there have been integral to his success as an entrepreneur.

He first talked with me about the attitude he took into his corporate job.

John: I’ve never really set any financial goal to be at some certain level, and my whole approach to my career has been do the best I could wherever I was and then the opportunities and the doors would just open naturally. A lot of people will have very specific goals of where they want to be by a certain time. I had some very broad goals - I had a goal coming out of college to double my income in the first five years (which I did), and it doubled in the next five years, but it wasn’t anything that I set out in a plan. I approached it more like “I will do the very best I can with whatever I’m given and the rewards will follow.” And that’s what happened.

The attitude of doing the very best with what you’re given isn’t something he saw a lot of during his career:

John: I did a lot of hiring and recruiting of MBAs through my career from some of the top schools in the country, and they’d come in with a little bit of a primadonna attitude. [They acted] like the pick and shovel work was beneath them and they wouldn’t put out…and therefore they’d lose out on opportunities because they saw themselves one or two levels above where they were. They had the potential but it doesn’t matter how bright a person might be – they’ve got to perform where they are. In any organization you’ve gotta perform where you are [or] you’re not going to be given more responsibility.

That’s the whole approach I took with my career. Early on in my career I wanted to be in management, but in order to do that I took a position that didn’t seem very meaningful - it was managing a bunch of people in accounts payable, and it wasn’t by itself a real highly visible kind of position, but it got me into (management) at a company like HP that [had] all the management training. I got the experience, and established the credibility.

I believe an attitude of entitlement and ‘being above that kind of work’ is one of the biggest threats to success for people of my generation. John has gone on from his ‘lowly’ position as an accounts payable manager to being a successful entrepreneur in the health supplements industry. He works now, not because he has to, but because he enjoys it.

Ask yourself: are you more similar to John in your approach to your work? Or are you like one of his primadonna MBAs that saw themselves as above the menial tasks?

Could you recover from a multi-million dollar loss?

Here’s more from my conversation with Mike, an advertising executive. In this excerpt he tells me about overcoming adversity, and his greatest attribute.

Mark: Can you think of … a setback that you’ve experienced and what you learned from it?

Mike: Yeah, in 1985, I had four of my biggest clients go bankrupt on me. It was all within a month of each other. Left me hanging for 2 million dollars.

Mark: 2 million dollars in 1985 - that’s a lot of money in today’s dollars.

Mike: It was a lot of money then.

Mark: How did you bounce back from that? What did you learn from it?

Mike: I learned you just have to be persistent. It took me four years to work out of it. You just face it up front and you deal with the people that you owe money honestly. You call them, you dont wait for them to call you, you give them updates all the time, and then you’re very careful with who you give credit to [in the future].

Mark: [C]an you give me a rough idea of what it’s been worth to your company - the fact that you did persist instead of giving up?

Mike: Oh, its made all the difference - I didnt declare bankruptcy; everybody told me to. Your name is everything in business. Having a name associated with integrity and [meeting] your commitments makes all the difference. It’s meant everything…I can’t place a dollar figure on it; millions and millions.

Mark: What attribute of yours, then, has been the biggest factor in the success you’ve experienced?

Mike: I would say my persistence, and just staying with it, not giving up, showing up every day, attacking the problems every day, and doing a little bit at a time. Having an attitude that you’re not going to get rich overnight. There’s not one little scheme thats going to make you rich. You just get up and go to work every day, and try to work through things, and after a while you’ve built something that has value. It’s persistence.

Are you noticing how often the word persistence comes up in these interviews?

I know we’re barely scraping the surface of Mike’s experience here, so take a minute to think through what he overcame. $2 Million in 1985 dollars is approximately $3,950,000 in 2007 dollars. Try to imagine the feeling of losing almost $4 Million in a month.

Setbacks are a part of life. One of my favorite success authors says life is nothing but a series of problems, only interrupted by the occasional crisis.

If you want success and financial independence, accept the fact that problems and setbacks are guaranteed for all of us. Embrace each one as an opportunity to deal with the next more easily.

In my goal to consistently interview millionaires, I often have to pursue people for weeks before I can finally spend 15 or 20 minutes on the phone with them.

Mike was no exception. He owns an advertising company, with around 50 employees and millions of dollars in contracts ever year. That being the case, he’s a hard man to pin down. I first contacted his assistant in January, and it wasn’t until six weeks later that I finally got him on the phone.

When we finally did talk, the conversation lasted a little over eight minutes. He had this urgency in his voice - completely polite, happy to talk with me, but not wasting any time. It was a nice change of pace from other interviews I’ve done, where the person I was talking to didn’t have to be quite as succinct in his answers.

Mike got straight to the point. Here are two of his answers:

Mark: If you could only give me one piece of financial advice, what would that advice be?

Mike: Get rich slow. Eliminate debt first, don’t go for the home run. Don’t swing for the fences. [A] single at a time is what [will] win. Big risks and betting big on grand opportunities could possibly win big for you, but be careful how you bet, because you could lose it all. So, it’s get rich slow…eliminate debt, and get rich slow. Don’t borrow money. I’ve been able to build this business totally without debt.

[I asked him a question about what he would say to the sales reps I manage, and I've altered it only slightly to make it apply to all of us, whether we're thinking about our careers, our businesses, or our financial goals:]

Mike: You’re the master of your own destiny. If you’re not self motivated, and if you can’t come up with your own business plan, and see your way to move yourself forward, you’re going to lose. You’re going to die. Get in another job. If you’re not self motivated, and can’t make your own business plan, if you’re depending on your company, or somebody else to furnish you with what you need for success, you won’t succeed. You need to figure it out. You’re an entrepreneur. You have figure out how you’re going to do it. The answer isn’t in a book, it’s in your head.

So there you have it. Some might say that a lot of his advice is trite or cliche, but you have to remember that thirty years of business ownership is behind those words. For three decades, this man has managed employees and clients to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, and he’s had some serious setbacks along the way.

So before you pass this advice off as something you’ve heard a thousand times before, think about who is offering it, and think about how closely it mirrors the advice of the other millionaires I’ve interviewed.

For the last two and a half years Dan has built up his multi-million dollar company. Many times during our conversation, the subject of entrepreneurship came up. Dan is passionate and, obviously, very knowledgeable about building your own business. Three times he gave me the same advice:

Mentors and Money

Dan: Be careful with entrepreneurship. . . Number 1, find a mentor, someone who’s done it before that can teach it you. Once you really know the business [and] how to do it, the second thing is [to] make sure you have money.

The industry that I’m in right now, I did it during college; I knew it really well. I had the capital to do it . . . [but] my business took a lot more money than I originally thought it was going to take. I was lucky that I had it sitting in a bank account, and I was able to go to people and say, “Hey can I pay you a little bit later? We sold a lot more than I thought we were going to, so I had to make a much larger investment. I’m a little bit short on cash, but can I wait until this next month and pay you you know, 9% interest or something crazy to make it worth your while to do it?” And all the guys that I did that to were accommodating.

Entrepreneurship wise, that’s what I tell guys if they’re looking into it. 80% of businesses fail in two years. 94% fail in 5. It’s tough to be able to survive; you’ve really got to know what you’re getting into. . . . if you’ve got the experience, and you’ve got the money . . . you can go for it. Get into it. . . start slow.

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People

Dan also talked a lot about people and their importance in the entrepreneurial equation

Dan: My professors used to tell me, “You bet on people, you don’t necessarily bet on a business.” If you’ve got the right guys in place, they’re going to make [the business] work no matter what happens. Come hell or high water, they’re going to find a way to make it profitable and make it successful. . . . It’s almost like you’ve got to find the right person that has that determination.

Recruit the right people with the same mentality. [If you're] working upstream with people that don’t want to follow you, get rid of them! Get the right people on the bus to start out with and grow.

[It's] like the old phrase goes, you know, “show me who your friends are and I’ll tell you where you’re going to be in 5 years.”

But it’s not just people Dan turns to for help. When I asked him about the #1 book he would recommend to people trying to be more successful, he said Dale Carnegie’s book, How To Win Friends and Influence People. He went on to tell me how books can help everyday.

Dan: [Read] self help books– it could be anything, it could be Tony Robbins, it could be sales books, it could be Zig Ziggler, Tom Hopkins, whatever . . . Just get in the habit of reading, even if it’s only for 20 minutes a day or a half hour a day where you wake up and you start your day with that and it just gives you ideas; it gets you in the right mind set. [Basically] you need a personal mentor, and I use a lot of those books kind of as that to get me upbeat and get me going.

Finally I’ll leave you with one of my favorite things Dan told me:

Business is so much fun. There’s so many different games, but most businesses are fairly similar. [And] once you get that safety and security, you realize too it’s not the money. The money is not the thing that you like, it’s the chase. It’s the chase of the money. It’s building something and providing jobs and changing peoples’ lives, that’s the fun thing.

In Friday’s Millionaire Interview post I introduced you to Dan, a 30-year-old multimillionaire. As you may recall, Dan sold home service accounts door to door during the summers he was in college. (To protect Dan’s privacy I’m referring to his company as a “home service company.” Some examples of home services include carpet cleaning, lawn care, window washing, anything you might hire people to come to your home to take care of on a regular basis.)

One summer Dan sold 530 accounts–a new company record. The next summer he “wanted to do something ridiculous.” He said he “was so bored with [selling door to door]. I’d done it for so long. I was naturally good at it but I’d never really put in all the hours; I’d never worked that hard. . . I’d never really tried to push myself to the limit.”

So, knowing that 530 was the all time highest sales record, he set a goal to sell 1000 accounts in one summer.

Dan: [I sold] 903. My goal was 1000. I didn’t quite get there.

Mark: Ok, so you failed miserably and got to 903. . . But how did you do it?

Dan: I started doing everything I possibly could . . . really silly things like, you know, put your goal up on your mirror and read it in the morning and read it at night.

And before I’d said, “That’s lame. I don’t need to do that in order to get my sales.” But I started doing it early . . . four months before I went out in the summertime and by the time I got there . . . the reason why it works is because you’re so committed to it; it becomes part of you. . . part of your personal commandments.

He also talked about distractions that could have ruined his chances of reaching his goal:

Dan: [If] you take an extra 15 minute break or [the other salesmen would say] “Hey, let’s swim in the pool a little bit longer on our break.” Or…”Let’s go to a [late] movie.” You know, “It gets out a little bit later; we’ll get out of the doors a little bit later.”

But with Dan,

There was never a question of that.

And nobody ever would question me, “Hey Dan, do you want to take a little bit of time off?” “Let’s go take a break.” It was, “Hey, I’m here to work with you Dan. Just show me what you’re doing, and I want to sell like you.” And that’s what helped . . . having people around you that . . . inspire you. I think if you surround yourself with successful people you’re going to be in the right position.

Like the old phrase goes, “Show me who your friends are and I’ll tell you where you’re going to be in 5 years.”

See how Dan avoided some typical time traps? He decided early what he was and was not going to do: no breaks, no time spent messing around. He also says the other guys he was working with could see what he was doing; they respected him and supported him. Four months with no breaks sounds like serious self discipline to me; I asked Dan what attribute had contributed most to his success.

Dan: I don’t think there’s any other attribute than just determination. Just being absolutely committed to what you want. You set your mind to something and say, “I’m going to do what ever it takes as long as its honest and ethical to get to that point.” I’m going to work, and it’s hard work.

You know, most of the stuff I do does not take a rocket scientist. I think almost anybody could do it. The place where they fail is in the ability to act and actually go out and do it every day. Not going home and siting in front of the TV and watching TV. I hardly ever watch TV at all. Or feeling like they’ve got to do all these little things all the time that makes them happy. If you can make your business what’s fun for you to do, you’ll do extremely well at it. And that’s what I’ve done.

I don’t look at (laughing) [my home service] as something that’s necessarily fun, but you find ways to make that challenge fun. You find ways to improve it, you try to think outside the box.

I heard once that 90% of the books that people buy (regardless of what kind of book it is)…90% of people who buy them [never] get past the first chapter, and I look at most people out there like that: I think there’s 10% on top, maybe only 5% on top and everybody else is kind of the same way: they just lack the ability to act and commit.

Things come up. They’ve got family. They’re trying to support their kids at the same time they’re trying to do real estate deals on the side or watch the stock market at the same time, and it’s just too much for them and they’re shut down.

In terms of my greatest attribute, I just think it’s just, it’s commitment. You make commitments to yourself and other people and you keep them. And that’s what people respect. And that’s what everybody lacks, I think. People just can’t be committed. There’s so many dreams that are just thrown in the dumpster because they’re not willing to go out a work a little bit. Work hard.

So there you have it–COMMITMENT: doing whatever it takes (as long as it’s honest and ethical) to reach your goal.

Dan set a crazy summer sales goal, and he achieved it. His formula for reaching his goal looks something like this:

1. Know yourself, and set a goal that really pushes you to your limit.
2. Start doing the “silly little things” early, way before you need them.
3. Let people see what you’re doing, but don’t let them distract you from your goal.
4. Surround yourself with people who inspire you.
5. Make your business what’s fun for you.
6. Do the hard work.

What crazy goals are you going to set? What kind of commitment will you give to achieve those goals? How will you avoid obvious pitfalls and time wasters? We’ve all learned something from Dan’s experience, the question now is how will you apply it to your life?