Podcast Archives - Victoria Wieck

The Importance Of Picking Up A Book Today With Danny Brassell

Did you know that students who average reading only 1 minute a day end up getting bad grades? While student who read at least 20 minutes a day get As. That is based on a study done by the University of London back in 2009. Reading can really help you find success in life. All the great leaders that you’ve heard off are all avid readers. Now is the time to pick up that book and start reading.

Join Victoria Wieck as she talks to former inner-city teacher, now a sought-after speaker and coach, Danny Brassell, as he discusses why reading is so important.

Listen in as Danny answers these questions:

Why don’t people read?

How do we get people to read more?

Why is reading important?

What role does reading play in leadership?

What’s the relationship between reading and success?

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Importance Of Picking Up A Book Today With Danny Brassell

I have an amazing guest to talk about a topic that’s been very close to my heart for probably all my life. Danny Brassell is my guest. He’s going to unlock all the stuff that I was curious about. Many of you who read all these other episodes know that I am committed to education, especially children’s education, what’s wrong with our system, how that could help entrepreneurs be better employers, parents, friends and citizens and how we can impact the world. Without further ado, I want to introduce to you Danny Brassell, this episode’s guest. Welcome to the show, Danny.

Thanks so much for having me, Victoria. Thanks for spreading some joy. Entrepreneurs need a lot more of it.

We’ve got the real tough end of the stick in the last few years. In a few minutes, can you explain to us a little bit about your background and what you’ve learned teaching kids in the inner city? Many people here, including my TV audience over the years, know my background. I grew up in the inner city. I went to school in the inner city. It’s a pretty tough environment to be a student there.

Teachers like yourself have choices to go to other schools but you chose to stay in the inner city and impact their world, which is very admirable. Tell me a little bit about how you became a teacher. Was that your dream your whole life? Tell me about your experience there a little bit, the things that you wish were different or how you want to impact the world.

That’s a lot to uncover. Ironically, I’m considered America’s leading reading ambassador because I hated reading growing up. My father was a librarian. I always hated the public library. It always smelled funny. The furniture was uncomfortable. There was always some elderly woman telling me to be quiet. There was always some freaky homeless guy that thought he was a vampire hanging out by the bookshelves. I always hated it.

I had started my career as a journalist. I had the greatest job in the world in Washington, DC, working with all these editors of major dailies. I got offered the CityBeat for major daily for $16,500 a year. A friend told me that they were hiring teachers in South Central Los Angeles for $25,000 a year. I became a teacher for the noblest of reasons. It was for the high pay. It turned out I loved it. I was working with my little ones and all of a sudden, I noticed that they didn’t have a lot of the advantages I had growing up.

I was blessed. I was lower middle class but we always had food on the table. Both of my parents run the home. My parents would always read to us and in front of us. We always had plenty of access to reading materials. That became my passion. Schools do an adequate job of teaching kids how to read. The question I always ask people is, “What good is teaching a kid how to read if they never want to read?” I teach kids why to read.

The reason a lot of people don’t read is because they were forced to read things they didn’t want to read in school.

I’ve never had to tell a kid, “Go watch TV. Go play a video game.” I never want to have to tell a kid, “Go read a book.” I want them to choose to do it because they love it. That’s my passion. I always stress to entrepreneurs, “I’ve read about plenty of readers that don’t necessarily become effective leaders but I have never read about an effective leader who is not an avid reader.” Look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Warren Buffett reads ten hours a day in his office. Elon Musk still reads at least one book a day. There’s a model for all of us to pay attention to.

Let me ask you then. Why don’t people read?

The reason a lot of people don’t read is that they were forced to read things they didn’t want to read in school. When I was in high school, I was forced to read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. No offense to the people who love The Scarlet Letter but the book is about Hester Prynne who commits adultery so she’s forced to wear an A on her chest. I asked my teacher, “Can I wear a B on my chest because I’m so bored reading this book?”

I want everybody reading to understand this. The research is very clear about this. It doesn’t matter what you read. What matters is how much you read. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading James Joyce or James the Giant Peach. People who read more, read better. For the entrepreneurs out there, if you feel bad because you haven’t read Don Quixote or War and Peace but instead you’re reading Ryan Holiday, John Maxwell, Russell Brunson and entrepreneurial books, that’s fine. Go with that. That’s what you should be reading.

When I don’t have anything to read because my house is under construction, I’ll go get an encyclopedia that’s 30 years old. For me, reading allowed me to virtually travel before the internet. Back in the ‘70s, it allowed me to expand my horizons and get an understanding of how other people live and how other people before me who lived centuries ago did things. You get an appreciation for how much easier it is for you when you do things.

The other thing I love about reading is I don’t have time to stress about anything. I’d rather read another chapter. In your opinion, what do you think will motivate people to read? When I say people, I mean even young people. It’s important that young people learn to read. I am concerned that the next generation of people who are in middle school or elementary school are running around with iPads. They’re getting answers to whatever they want on Google. A lot of times, they’re not accurate. It’s anybody who pays to be on the top of whatever list it is. How do we get people interested in reading? I’m assuming that has a little bit to do with motivation. It’s easier if they want to do it.

Reading Importance: It doesn’t matter what you read. What matters is how much you read. It doesn’t matter if you’re reading James and the Giant Peach, people who read more read better.

I love your audience because I’m an entrepreneur myself. I always say that entrepreneurs are always paying attention to opportunities where other people see challenges and dangers. The pandemic was a blessing to me. As a speaker, I lost all my income speaking because there weren’t any public events. I had to figure out another way to earn income.

During the pandemic, I created the world’s top reading engagement program online, which parents use for 2 months, working with their kids for about 10 minutes a day. In two months, we’ll get the kid to read, read more, read better and most importantly, love reading. We boost their reading by about 2 to 3-grade levels. All I’m doing every single day with parents and teachers as well is giving them tips on how they can get their kids engaged in reading.

Two numbers are secrets in my program. The first one is 67. A lot of people will tell you, “It takes 21 days to change a habit.” To those people, I say, “Show me the research on that.” It’s a fabricated number. I know exactly where the number comes from. It comes from a wonderful book written in 1960 by Dr. Maxwell Maltz called Psycho-Cybernetics. Dr. Maltz was a plastic surgeon. In the preface of the book, he said he noticed it took most of his patients about 21 days to get used to their new faces. A lot of self-help gurus, people I respect, started telling people, “It takes 21 days to change a habit.” That’s based on no research whatsoever.

In 2009, the University of London did a research study on habit formation. They found it took anywhere from 18 to 254 days to change a habit. The average was 66 days. I don’t like the number 66 so I threw in a bonus day. It’s 67 days. It depends on the type of habit you’re trying to change. For example, if you’re trying to drink a glass of water before breakfast every day, that might take eighteen days to form that into a habit.

If you’re trying to quit smoking, that’s going to take 254 days to change a habit. Here’s why this is critical. Let’s say you go on a diet. You follow it religiously for 21 days but on day 22, you fall off the wagon. Will you blame yourself? That’s wrong because research shows us that it takes at least three times on average to form that habit.

The second number I want everybody to remember is twenty. Researchers were trying to figure out what the successful habits of successful students around the world were. They found a variable that baffled them. They couldn’t believe it. It was the number of minutes spent reading outside of school. They looked at the low kids, the average kids and the high kids. For the low kids, the kids in the 20th percentile, the F students or the bottom feeders, they average less than 1 minute a day. That didn’t surprise anybody. That’s probably why the kids are at the bottom of the class but this did start all the research.

A quick tip, if your children are watching TV, put subtitles. That’ll improve their reading comprehension.

The kids in the 70th percentile, those that are in the middle, the C students or the average students, their average is 9.6 minutes a day. When I’m doing live training with parents, this is usually when the room gets quiet. The first-hand raises and the parents say, “Are you telling me if I can get my kid to read for ten minutes at home every day, I can take them from an F to a C?” I’m like, “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. There is a lot of research to support this.”

This was what startled researchers. For the kids in the 90th percentile, the top students or the A minus students, do they spend 3 hours a day reading for fun? No. Do they spend one hour a day reading for fun? No. The average was over twenty minutes a day. My job is to help parents find those twenty minutes a day. There are two things that people have to be aware of. First of all, being read aloud counts as well as reading on your own. For example, I ask parents, “How long does it take you to drive your kid back and forth to school?” They say, “Ten minutes each way.” I suggest, “Why don’t you put it in an audiobook? You took care of your twenty minutes going back and forth to school.”

The second important thing is they don’t have to be consecutive. I’m like, “You can do 2 minutes here and 5 minutes here rather than listen to somebody spout off their extreme political positions,” which I have no interest in. I’d much rather sit there and read an article in that amount of time. That’s all I’m trying to do with people. I show them ways to get engaged and read.

Let me give your audience a quick tip. I work with a lot of people in the inner city that say, “I have nothing to read at home.” I’d be like, “You do.” President Bush senior many years ago signed a very important law in this country that says every television set in America has to have closed captioning. The first tip I give parents is to turn on the closed captioning on the television. Parents will say, “If the show’s in English and the subtitles are in English, what good does that do?” I’m like, “That’s a fair point but let me make a point. Have you ever watched a show with subtitles and not looked at the subtitles?” It’s very difficult to do. Your brain is directed towards the text. There’s research to support this.

If you look at reading scores around the world, the more kids watch TV, the lower their reading scores are. That’s in every single country except for one. The country with the highest reading scores in the world and that watches the most TV in the world is Finland. People always ask, “How can that be?” Finland makes bad TV shows so what they have to do is import The Brady Bunch and Gilligan’s Island and translate them and put subtitles on them. It’s a quick tip for all the parents out there. Start reading the subtitles if nothing else.

Parents themselves have to read as well. I’ve got a whole family of school teachers and they’re dealing with a lot of parents who grew up not reading themselves. They have no interest in reading. I talked to a pretty good friend of mine. I wrote a couple of books and sent her a book for her to give me real feedback. She said, “I’ve never read a book.” She’s old. She said, “I was forced to read books in school and I was horrible at it. I did the minimum number of paragraphs.” That was the last book she ever read. She never read another book. You got parents who don’t want to read either. That’s the other thing.

Reading Importance: Research says that A to A- students don’t spend three hours a day reading for fun. They don’t even spend one hour. The average time for reading was just over 20 minutes a day.

Danny Brassell is the Founder of TheReadingHabit.com. We are dealing with the generation of Millennial parents that have not read. I’ve got two Millenial kids at home myself. Luckily for me, my kids were addicted to reading because I read to them since they were very little. I didn’t watch TV because I’d rather read than watch TV. My kids also grew up not watching TV. They were reading. I see a lot of my daughter’s friends who are 30 to 35 years old that had mobile phones on their hips by the time they were in middle school. They were Google searching for quick fixes and haven’t been able to read.

When I grew up, I grew up with a role model. My parents read all the time. We had over 10,000 books when we lived in Korea. We had books in English and Chinese. My father had an incredible curiosity about reading. I didn’t speak English or Chinese but I was wondering. My father would say, “It was such a pretty cover. I was curious about this person so I bought it.” I was like, “How are you going to read it? You don’t speak Chinese,” but he had them.

Imagine that you can get your children to be addicted to reading as I was. If you’re interested in that, go ahead and check out both TheREADINGHabit.com and FreeReadingTraining.com. There are disclaimers on everything. We got disclaimers on aspirin, drugs or whether or not you’re eating a certain kind of food but there never needs to be a disclaimer on reading. No harm can ever be done by reading a great book and it could be anything in any language.

To any parents and grandparents reading this, maybe you might even have nieces, nephews or maybe even yourself, when you read great fiction, for example, or a how-to book on how to make more money, usually, the story starts with something. There’s a premise of a story. You’re living through all the consequences of all the different actions, whether you’re talking about a memoir or a how-to book.

In my book, I go through twenty different major mistakes that I wish I had never made or I thought were good. I talk about why I was thinking that this was going to be the next biggest thing and it flopped. You learn and do it again thinking you’ve learned everything. You paid a huge price. At this time, you’re a lot more careful but then the next thing flops. It could be inspirational or motivational. It’s all these things. Books are so inexpensive. You can download outdated books that are great content for $2.

There are plenty of sites you can do it for free.

It doesn’t take 21 days to change a habit. That is based on no research. It takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days to change a habit. On the average, it’s 66 days.

My kids didn’t have phones. I told them, “There’s no reason for twelve-year-olds to have an iPad.” My kids argued with me, “Every other kid has a phone.” I was like, “Do I look like every other parent? I’m not doing that.” I feel that reading is important and we should all get back to reading. If you read a lot, you have an understanding and appreciation for things outside of your little circle or world. It expands your knowledge base, understanding of people, tolerance and all these things that we wish we had more of as a society. It starts with you, the entrepreneur, then your children and your inner circle of people.

When I was pregnant, I was thinking, “How do I make sure that I’m doing the right thing?” Nobody has a manual on parenting 101 for your unique child. I read somewhere that when they looked at kids who were highly successful or were at the top 1% of all the Ivy League schools, it wasn’t that parents put the kids in nursery school when they were eighteen months old. It wasn’t the parents who pushed them to be better. It was the parent who read a lot and had tons of books at home. I’m making a point that you, as an entrepreneur, can do the same thing.

To those of you who read my show, you know I’ve been on TV for many years. I came here and spoke no English and have been doing nine-figure businesses. You would think that I would stop reading but I had already read 30 books by July 2022. I was able to go on vacation so I made up the time. COVID allowed me to do a lot of my work without having to show up to a TV station. I was able to Zoom. It cuts out a lot of time as well. The day you stop learning is the day you start to die slowly. If not physically, it’s mentally. That’s my philosophy.

Here is the other thing. My mother-in-law passed away a few weeks shy of 101. Three weeks before she died, she knew everything about our treatment. She talked to her heart surgeon and everybody. They gave her options. She had a health directive to not interfere with any artificial devices. She didn’t want to prolong her life. All this stuff was done years ago.

Towards the end, her loved ones, grandchildren and children were trying to tell her, “You need a feeding tube. It’s a little tube for five days.” She was reading this document at age 100. She used to be a school teacher. She died in July 2021 and in that year, she had already read 50 books. I wrote a book. It’s a 94,000-word science fiction book. She has never read science fiction before. I printed it all out like a manuscript. It was pretty thick. It was 350 pages.

I paid $5,000 for my editor to go through all the spelling mistakes. I had a former HarperCollins editor go through my manuscript. It was combed through. My mother-in-law is like, “Whose uncle is this?” She wrote all this stuff out. She would say, “This U in the uncle should be capitalized.” She found 58 different mistakes that my editors didn’t catch at age 100.

“Read, Lead & Succeed” Daily Quote Book: 365 Daily Tweets to Produce Extraordinary Results in Business and Life

She was done with the whole manuscript in two days. She was so sharp. Everybody asks, “How can her mind be that sharp?” I met a lot of other people that were aged 80 or 90 at a place where she was recuperating. What I found out was that the minds of people who are avid readers stay sharp until the end. That’s crazy. She had a high-quality time until the last two days when she was pretty much on medication. She read her Bible. She did her normal activities. She still had a book there. She lived a pretty high-quality life even though she didn’t travel very much.

For those of you who are reading, if you’re a school teacher, hats off to you. I’ve got one grandchild and sometimes, I’m exhausted taking care of her for one hour. You’ve got 30 kids in a classroom. That’s a lot of responsibility. If you’re a great teacher, you care about the children that are in your classroom. You’re looking for answers to motivate them. This would be a great place for you to start. Go to TheREADINGHabit.com and FreeReadingTraining.com.

Let me give you a better site than that. If you go to FreeGiftFromDanny.com, I’ll give everybody an eCopy of my book, Read, Lead & Succeed, which is a book I wrote for a principal who was trying to keep his faculty positively engaged. I said, “I’ll write you a book.” Every week, I give you a concept, an inspirational quote, an inspirational story and a book recommendation on a book you should read but you’re probably too lazy because you’re an adult. I also give you a children’s picture book recommendation that demonstrates the same concept. You can read that in five minutes.

I’m also going to give everybody access to a five-day reading challenge I did with about 700 parents online. Every day for five consecutive days, I spent an hour giving all kinds of tips on how to get them more excited about reading. The more excited you are to read, the more likely you are to read. The more you read, the better you get. Those are my gift at FreeGiftFromDanny.com.

You had said something, which I loved. A lot of people are told to learn from their mistakes. I’m like, “That’s crazy. Why should I learn from my mistakes as an entrepreneur when Victoria mentioned to her entire audience that she has a book out there?” People should be buying that book and looking at your entrepreneurial journey and figuring out, “What were her missteps? How do I avoid those missteps? How do I surround myself with people that lift me rather than pull me down?”

My dad used to always say that a smart person learns from their mistakes but a super smart person learns from other people’s mistakes. You don’t have to make those mistakes. I love this topic. Thank you so much for coming in and sharing your knowledge and dedication to this topic of reading. Quite a few of my audience are successful. They’re seven-figure women who’ve been in business for many years.

Some people are starting. A lot of my audience are people that have somehow persevered and balanced their families. The one complaint and question I always get is, “How do I balance my life? How do I live a more balanced life? How do I take care of my family, customers and everybody else and not feel exhausted?” The number one thing I always get is, “I don’t have time.”

I always tell people, “There’s no such thing as time management. There’s only priority management.”

You can make time for things that are important to you. In my courses, whenever I speak, I talk about how every morning I wake up, there are 30 things for me to do. I always do the most important thing to me first thing in the morning. I don’t leave it to last. If reading is important to you, you can schedule twenty minutes. I read for 2 or 3 hours a day. I’ve got a show, a TV show and books I’m writing. Plus, I do a lot of speaking. I’ve got kids and grandkids. I’m taking care of my mother. I got plenty of money to take care of her but at this time in her life, she needs family. I’m the oldest so I take care of her every day.

Here’s the thing. You can always find time for things that are important to you and your life and the things that are going to change your life long-term. If I had my choice, I’d be reading a lot more but I can still do two hours a day, which is quite a bit. Thank you so much for coming in. For those of you who are reading, this is an incredibly serious topic that’s very close to my heart. I cannot recommend enough to you to get all these free resources.

If you find that your children like to read certain types of books, that’s huge progress instead of not reading anything. You’re going to be a happier person and a much more productive person in the end. Thank you so much. Check out all the resources. If you have not subscribed to this show, please go ahead and do so. Especially this episode, share it with somebody you know so that we can impact the world together. Until next time. Please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you.

Important Links

About Danny Brassell

A highly sought-after speaker, trainer and coach known as “Jim Carrey with a Ph.D.,” Dr. Danny Brassell has spoken to over 3,000 audiences worldwide and authored 16 books, including his latest, Leadership Begins with Motivation. He is the co-founder of www.theREADINGhabit.com, the world’s top reading engagement program.

August 31, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

How To Successfully Win And Crush Your Product Launch

You have done all the preparations. Your product is ready. Your target audience is identified. The only thing left is for you to take it out for the world to see. How can you guarantee success and not put your efforts to waste? In this episode, Victoria Wieck shares with us how to achieve a successful product launch. She breaks down the process from the soft launch to the actual opening/launch date. Victoria also puts emphasis on feedback and how you can take each insight to strengthen your product. Are you interested in more? Tune in to the show to win and crush your launch game.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Successfully Win And Crush Your Product Launch

In this episode, we’re going to talk about how you finally launch your business, or maybe you already have a business, and you want to launch a new product, division, or category. How do you launch? This is the final chapter of my book. It’s called Win the Game, but for this show, it’s How to Win and How to Crush Your Launch Game.

If you’ve been reading the last few episodes, you’ve already identified your dream, set your realistic aspirational goals, your target market, your one big idea that you can monetize, and negotiating skills and all of that. If you missed one of those episodes, please go ahead and click on it. It’s very simple. I also made them very short so that it’s not a long, boring thing.

Here it is. How do we launch so that it guarantees you success? I can’t sit here and say that every single thing you do is going to be a success. If you follow this episode, it’s very critical because you have put so much work into this already. I should say that you should have a reasonable expectation of success with the techniques that I’m giving you here.

When you’re launching something, try not to think of it. A lot of beginner entrepreneurs think, “I’ve done all the homework. I did all the right advertising and everything. I can’t wait until I launch. When I launch, it’s going to be an amazing thing. All these people are going to flock to my store or online courses,” or whatever you’re launching.

Let’s say it doesn’t show up, you expected 300 people to show up to your restaurant’s opening night, and you ended up with 30. What do you do then? Let me explain to you how I would go about doing it and how I recommend that everyone go ahead and launch your business. Think of launching your business almost like a job interview.

If you’re looking at a job interview, you wouldn’t go up to the first employer or a bunch of employers and say, “I’m Victoria Wieck. I’m qualified. I can do amazing things. Hire me.” You’re not going to do that. Most people will do their homework and find out if it’s a company you even want to be in, but you’ll do your homework and find out what they are looking for, the qualifications, who they have interviewed before, and who are the people that work there. You’re going to do all your research on Google to see what the corporate culture is, what they pay, and all these things.

Let’s say it’s a very conservative-looking bank. Everybody looks like they’re all dressed in a suit. You’re not going to show up with your Sperry boat shoes. You’re going to try to get into a culture that they’re looking for. It’s the same thing here. You’re going to do your homework, then show up to an interview, practice that interview, and ask people, “How do I answer these questions? What are the most asked questions?” You practice that and nail your interview.

Once you do that, provided that everything went well, you’re going to then follow up. You’re going to send them a thank you letter, “Thank you so much for interviewing me. I would love to work in your company. I loved when you asked me these questions.” You want to at least send them a thank you interview. You want to then follow it up and say, “I haven’t heard from you. I don’t want to be a pass, but you said you’re going to get back to me in two weeks. It’s been three weeks. I wanted to know if I’m still in the running.”

Treat the launch as a whole process that lasts a lifetime because you’re going to do this over and over and over again.

When you have a business and if you have a restaurant, you’re asking the customers to hire you to be a chef or entertainer for that day. Again, treat this as a job interview. It’s a process. I don’t want to like trivialize your launch with the dating site, but let’s say you’re on a dating site. You wouldn’t meet somebody online and say, “Do you want to marry me? I got all the qualifications to be a great husband.” You wouldn’t do that. Before you even go on a date, you want to know a little bit more about the person. What are they looking for? Is he or she a nice fit? You might want to have a safe lunch date or something before you move on to the next thing. Again, it’s a whole process.

It’s very similar. Treat this as a whole process that lasts a lifetime because you’re going to do this over and over again. How does this apply to a real product launch or business launch? Let’s say you are starting a restaurant. I happen to love Spanish tapas, like food from Spain as opposed to Cuba or Mexico, Latin American food, but let’s say you wanted to open a Spanish restaurant. I’ll pick someplace like San Diego. What you do is before you spend all the money, you might want to invite almost all the country clubs around the country, not just in San Diego, whether that’s a tennis club, a golf club, a country club, or a yacht club.

Most clubs are closed on Mondays. If not Mondays, they’re closed on at least one day because that’s the day that the employees get the days off. It’s much more efficient if they could close one to clean and maintain. It’s also cost-effective. Most clubs in San Diego at least are closed on Mondays. You might pick a Monday when you’re not competing with the club for food.

If your restaurant is Spanish tapas, you’re not competing with country club food. Go to the country club and say, “We want to invite you guys to come over. You’re such a special club. We’d love to get some feedback. It’s going to be a private gathering of twenty people.” You can serve them for very little money, but this way, you get a lot of feedback. You go club after club and could do a different club every Monday.

Those twenty people that come to your club will A) Give you feedback, and B) Most likely, if you help them and you give them an amazing experience of food, they’ll tell every other member. Every Monday when their restaurant is closed and they have no place to go, they’ll come to your club. By the time you do this twenty times, let’s say you do this every Monday for 3 or 4 months, you would hit all the clubs in San Diego. Not everyone is going to say yes, but they got boat clubs, yacht clubs, and all these clubs that basically provide a great experience for the members.

Again, you’re getting some feedback on the type of dishes you have on the menu. When you finally do open your restaurant, you can give these people the first crack. A lot of the time, they’re the ones that know the local PR people, broadcasters, producers, and honorary members of these clubs because their clubs want to have a great relationship.

This is a very easy way for you to do a soft launch, work out all your kinks and even get some of the customers already baked in. When you have an opening, they will come and support you because you’ve made them feel special. That’s one way to do it. You’ve already done the homework that they’re closed on Mondays, and it’s an easy day for you to get customers. Number two is what they want to eat. Number three, you’re doing your homework, providing a little bit of tweaking, and getting more homework, so each time you go to a new club, you’re getting much better at this.

Once you launch it, you can then do a follow-up like, “Can you give us a rating?” Cleanness, promptness of service, the quality of food, the quantity of food, and all these things so that they feel like they matter. You can also send them, “Thank you so much for coming to our opening.” It’s like your job interview. You did the homework, killed the interview when you first invited these people to come and do the thing, and then you follow it up. If you do this over and over, you don’t even have to open a restaurant yet. You could rent a venue. You will get a lot of information.

Successful Product Launch: Treat every day like your launch day. Be on your best behavior. Be on your toes and make sure that everybody gets that attention.

I can also give you one other example in this chapter. Let’s say you are a carpenter and want to start your carpenter business, but you don’t have a whole lot of money and a showroom. That shouldn’t stop you. There are a lot of places where you can get sympathetic people who are going to want to use you. For example, I had a friend of mine who was a world-class carpenter. This guy is an artist and he used to do beautifully carved woodwork at cathedrals, churches, and museums. When he came to this country, he didn’t know where to start. Most people in this country didn’t want something that amazing in their homes.

A lot of children’s hospitals have very stale white and gray things that are about 30 years old. The utility cabinets to house medicine are not fun and beautiful or anything like that. He went to the children’s hospital and bought some materials himself. They didn’t have a lot of cabinets there, but he made it very fun, interesting, and beautiful for little children. He painted them. The only thing he asked the children’s hospital for was that he be able to put, “Cabinets donated by so-and-so.”

He did it. The patrons of that hospital or the people who are donors and parents, their response was so overwhelming that before he launched it, it was at zero cost. We’re talking about a few cabinets that he bought some lumber and things like that, and he did this during his time when he didn’t have a whole lot of business going. His phone was literally ringing off the wall. He had to hire a team of people to start his business. Some of these donors were millionaires that saw that. They’re like, “We can’t find amazing carpentry ever in this country.”

He now has a multimillion-dollar business doing high-end or upper-end cabinets, custom carpentry work, and a lot of built-ins that are amazing. That’s one way. You can show them who your target market is, and this guy went ahead and did that. He went ahead and started doing this at local private schools. Even private schools have horrible cabinets because kids have stuff all over.

Those are two examples of people who’ve launched it softly and did some homework. This guy did the museum-quality carpentry and wasn’t looking for everyday Home Depot work. He knew exactly where to go. He approached them, and it was very easy to do. In the local hospitals that he went to, the custom carpentries are still there because it’s high quality. By the time he launched it, these people had got all the PR. He was on TV like crazy on Business Insider, FOX, and CNN, everything.

Again, doing a little bit of homework, understanding where your target market is, meeting their needs, demonstrating it, following it up, and care. These are two examples of how I explain to you how to crush your launch game. Launching is a process. It’s a 3 to 4-step process, and if you follow that closely, you’re going to have much better success than otherwise.

It’s a lot more effective than buying ads and hoping other people will do it. When you’re buying ads, whether you’re buying Facebook Ads, direct mailers, or billboards, you have no control over what’s going to happen. It’s like throwing good money after bad money because it’s a numbers game. You need to reach 1 million people so you can get 10,000 people to respond to something. They’re not emotionally attached to or emotionally invested in you.

This hospital thing, for example, these people are very invested in your success because they saw your heart. For what it’s worth, if you need to go back and reread this episode because it’s really critical. The last thing I want to say is that treat every day like it’s your launch day. Be on your best behavior and toes and make sure that everybody gets that attention.

A lot of times, people have a huge opening day and you think that that’s what you do. The next day, it’s the second day. Don’t ever run a business like it’s the second day in business. Thank you so much for reading. I hope you are sharing these episodes and getting a lot of value from every episode. Please stay healthy and happy. Make sure to understand that happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Until next time, bye-bye.

August 24, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

Optimize To Maximize: The Four Business Models For Explosive And Sustainable Growth

Most people dreamt of turning your passion into a very profitable business. After all, what is better than having fun while making money? In this episode, Victoria Wieck teases out a chapter from her upcoming book, Million Dollar Passion, called Optimize to Maximize. One way to make a profitable business is by learning how to maximize your business idea, using your time efficiently, so you’re working the least number of hours and, at the same time, making the most amount of profits. Victoria spills the four business models you can employ to achieve explosive, sustainable growth! You don’t want to miss out on this conversation!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Optimize To Maximize: The Four Business Models For Explosive And Sustainable Growth

We’re in the middle of a series. If you’ve been tuning into the last few episodes, we were talking about how you turn your passion and purpose into a profitable business and build yourself a nice little empire that you can sustain. In this episode, we’re going to talk about optimizing your business idea. In my book called Million Dollar Passion that’s coming up, there’s a chapter called Optimize to Maximize. It is about maximizing your business idea in terms of how you use your time efficiently so that you’re working the least number of hours and making the most amount of profits.

Four Business Models For Explosive, Sustainable Growth

Let’s get right down to the various ways you can achieve your desired profits and experience explosive growth that’s sustainable. I love the word sustainable in this phrase because it’s important that you achieve fast and explosive but controllable growth. It’s the growth that you can control. If you’re growing out of control, there is a phenomenon called The Growing Broke as opposed to going broke.

When I was at HSN, I saw many entrepreneurs, and I’m talking probably a couple of hundred people, that achieved beyond their dreams. They were doing somewhere between $2 million to $10 million a year and they grew broke. I’ll do an episode on how people grow broke, but right now, let’s focus on growing controlled growth.

These are just the basics. A lot of you may have some portions of this already in your business or some idea of how you achieve the various different business models. I’m going to get right down to business here. There are four major business models. People use different terminologies for this, but there are four different ways you can achieve explosive but sustainable growth.

Number one is business-to-consumer. You are selling mostly to individual consumers. If you’re a hairdresser and you’re cutting hair and your clients are mostly women in your neighborhood coming to get their haircut, that would be considered business-to-consumer. A restaurant, for example, would be a business-to-consumer.

Business-to-business, if you’re a manufacturer and you’re selling to retailers, that would be considered business-to-business. You’re a manufacturer only to wholesalers or somebody who goes to one business. Maybe you don’t even manufacture the stuff yourself, but you have expertise in exporting and you understand the laws of different countries, freight rates, custom duties, and all that stuff.

You are helping a bunch of business people pick their products overseas. It could be to Europe, Asia, South America or wherever. That would be considered business-to-business. If you’re a hairdresser and want to create your own shampoo line and you want to sell it to a department store, that would be considered business-to-business.

There’s a combination business where you can sell business-to-consumer or a portion of it. The hairdresser was an example. She’s selling her haircutting services to consumers, but also selling her shampoo products to other hairdressers, a department store, on TV or whatever. That could be business-to-business.

The fourth model is becoming an affiliate for someone or having affiliates under your umbrella. That is a new phenomenon that happened. It has always been around, but it exploded in the 1990s with the dot-com bubble. That’s one of the things that came out of that and stayed with us, and it’s benefiting a lot of businesses.

Business-to-business is tougher in the beginning, but you can grow faster.

Understand Who Your Ideal Target Market Is

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of doing business with each business model. Before I even get there, I want to explain to you the most important thing before you even talk about any business model you have. It is to understand who your ideal target market is. Who’s going to use your products? What does that person want? How do they shop? What do they shop for? What time of the year do they shop? What time of the day do they shop? Where do they congregate in very large numbers?

For example, you are selling fitness classes. You’re running a business as a yoga studio and you find out that they want a Zen-type of environment. They also want somebody who’s on time. They don’t want to pay more than $15 per class. They don’t want to have any more than twenty people per class. There are all these requirements people want to have ideally.

You understand that and then you want to come up with yoga clothing, for example. You understand who they are, what they want to pay for, and how often they use yoga products. Let’s say you find that in your neighborhood, a lot of them live in a certain area of town. That gives you a lot of information to work with. Understand who your target market is.

Business-To-Consumer

For my jewelry business, I have combinations of several of these businesses. Number one, I do business-to-consumer. In my one-of-a-kind business, we do concierge service for somebody who wants above and beyond. She wants something very unique for herself and she’s willing to pay a lot of money for this. It’s something highly unusual.

I have that business on the RachelAndVictoria.com site. If you go there, you’ll see what we’re talking about there. Our average price point there is about $10,000. We don’t do volumes of them, but we do enough business where that’s very profitable. The average price of $10,000 means some things are $5,000 and some things are $50,000.

Business-to-consumer is the easiest because you just have to convince a few people. If you’re a hairdresser, you got to convince ten people and do ten people’s hair. They then talk to ten other people or they go to the golf club or a restaurant and they say, “You got such a cute hairdo. Where did you get that haircut?” It’s very easy. That’s how most people start their businesses.

In business-to-consumer, you know a few people who need your services or you think you can sell enough to sustain yourself with a few people without having to go through a lot of expense. The drawback is you grow very slowly because you run out of people. The example that I gave of the first ten people who then tell ten more people, and then they all tell ten more people, even if you do all that, it’s slow growth. You’re not growing at 20%, 30% or 40% per month. You might grow a little bit, but you’re not going to build an empire in that model.

Having said that, I know people who have built their empires this way. That’s a different type of business. They’re very internet savvy. Maybe you came up with a tote bag for photographers and found a bunch of photographers that needed a tote bag that organizes. It’s lightweight and keeps their professional camera equipment very safe so they can check it into the airline, that kind of stuff. You can easily find photographers at conferences, associations, where they congregate or even on the internet. You can go and market to them. I know people who have done that as well.

For most people, the growth is very slow. Even in that example of a photographer, you have to learn how to do the internet. You got to come up with great sales funnels. You have to understand how many times you can touch them. There’s a whole other art to talking to consumers because when you’re doing business-to-consumer, more than the need, you’re talking about emotional connection. You need to connect with each person emotionally because they need to fall in love with you, trust you, and understand that they’re getting something special. That’s tough.

Business Growth Models: When you’re doing business-to-consumer, you need to connect with each person emotionally because they need to fall in love with you, trust you, and understand that they’re getting something special.

Business-To-Business

Business-to-business is tougher in the beginning, but you can grow faster. In the example of the shampoo and a hairdresser cutting hair, I don’t know what haircuts cost in your area, but where I live in California, they go anywhere from $80 to $300 to $400 a haircut. In the best-case scenario, let’s say you’re charging $200 a haircut. Since you’re cutting your hair yourself, you might be able to do 8 to 10 people a day. It still limits you to how much money you can make. You got to pay rent, the shampoo person, and all that stuff.

Most people don’t do ten customers a day, seven days a week. Let’s say you’re averaging 5 or 6 a day and you’re charging $100, and you’re working 5 to 6 days a week, Tuesday through Sunday or Monday through Saturday. You’re paying rent and doing all that stuff. You can make a profit, but you can’t grow that fast. If you are coming up with your own unique shampoo product and it sells well, and you are selling to beauty salons, you might sell 1,000 or 10,000 bottles at a time. If you’re on TV, you might sell 30,000 bottles at a time.

When you do that, you can grow very fast, even if you’re making a lot less money. Let’s say you’re making $4 a bottle of shampoo and you’re selling 10,000 of them. That’s $40,000. That’s a lot of money. You can grow very fast by attracting businesses so that they can make money. Businesses don’t care what you sell. If you give them a plan where they can make more money with your products and other people that they’re carrying, they’ll try you out.

That’s tougher to attract in the beginning, but you can get economies of scale, meaning you can also buy your ingredients. If you want to buy a single shampoo bottle, you can go to Ulta or a bottle supplier. They’ll sell you a plastic bottle for $2, $3 or $4 a bottle. If you’re doing 30,000 bottles at a time, you get them for $0.25 a bottle. That’s how economies of scale work. If you can buy things at a cheaper price, you can grow up faster.

A Manufacturer To Wholesalers

You can do a combination of both. I gave you the example of the hairdresser. I do jewelry, so I do one of a kind. Sometimes I’ll make it easier to manufacture by the thousands of them. When I sell to TV stations, our runs are usually somewhere between $1,000 to 10,000 pieces. I’ve occasionally had pieces that were sold over a million pieces of that same item. In my one-of-a-kind business, because I’m looking for a truly one-of-a-kind unique stone, I don’t get to buy them in large quantities because of the nature of that business. We can charge the most amount of money for that one item that nobody can have except you.

If you do the business model where blue Topaz-Amethyst is very plentiful, I can get 5,000 to 10,000 pieces at a time. Even if you only make $10 a piece, that’s a lot of money to make. You can do a combination of both, but not with the exact same product. That’s important because, let’s say, you sell to somebody for $10 a bottle, so they sell it for $25 a bottle, but then you sell it to your consumer at $18 a bottle. You’re undercutting yourself. Most of your customers aren’t going to like it.

If they know that you’re going directly to the consumers for anything less than what they’re selling it for at any time, they won’t carry you. They want to see that they were selling it lower than what you were selling to your consumer. When you are selling on your website for $25, make sure that the business people that you’re selling to can meet their margins.

Let’s say they want to double the money, in most cases, they want to make more than double the money. They want to get a 70% margin. For $18, you would have to give it to them for $6.50 or $7 max. You can see how the margins are a lot smaller, but if your actual cost is $5, it’s still making sense to do at least both or do the business-to-business model.

Let’s back up a little bit. If you’re going to do business-to-business, it’s tough. A lot of times you’re going to end up with sales reps that specialize in that part of the business because you’re running your business. You’re manufacturing and doing all this stuff. You’re making sure that people show up to work and things are shipped out on time.

The affiliate model is so easy to do that it would be a shame if you don’t incorporate some portion of that in your business.

You can’t be traveling all the time looking for businesses. Typically speaking, you hire somebody who has expertise. A lot of times, these are executives that used to work at Nordstrom or VP of some division at a huge major store that’s networking with other department stores that they’re now consulting. You can hire them for a percentage of the cut.

Business-to-business is tougher because of the added layer of personnel and the type of personnel that you have to attract to get that business. With the combination of the two, the challenge is that most of your business partners or business customers like Nordstrom’s or a TV station want to see if you carry it elsewhere. They want to be the cheapest because right now, consumers can Google all day long.

In jewelry, it’s very easy to do because even though it’s the same brand name, styles can be very different. I can design a completely separate collection of jewelry for Saks that I don’t do for Neiman’s. Many of you don’t have that option. If you have shampoo, you can’t say, “I’m selling my shampoo with a purple bottle here and a yellow bottle somewhere else.” That becomes a little challenging. In some cases, depending on how big that retail customer is, they may limit who else you sell to. It becomes a little tougher game. I’ll get into that a little bit more when we talk about scaling our businesses.

Becoming An Affiliate

With affiliates, I would say you could do a combination of all three. You could get an affiliate or a bunch of affiliates to you. An example I’m going to give you is if you’re selling some weight loss program, cryotherapy, or you have your own way of losing weight. You’re also recommending that they do some exercise but you’re not a fitness instructor and you don’t want to open a fitness store. You don’t want to be responsible for that because there’s a whole liability that comes with that.

Let’s say you own a cryotherapy/weight-loss center and you see four blocks down the street, there is a bunch of yoga or Pilates places, or there could be cardio or a gym. You could easily recommend them and you could even sell them as a package and get a cut from that studio. The studio also might do it the other way around where they can sell a package and give you a cut.

If you are selling facials or laser treatments, which are exploding. A lot of people want to take care of themselves and their bodies. Out here in California, that’s a huge thing. I have a friend who does this. She’s an aesthetician. She’s not a nurse or anything. A lot of these medical spas need a doctor. She would rent a space inside a doctor’s office. What she found out was that a lot of times, a plastic surgeon or somebody who does gastro surgery will package in a bunch of lasers/facials and smoothing type of treatment. They then get a cut. These are all what they call affiliates.

You can easily recommend it. If you’re a hairdresser, you end up recommending a bunch of hair products that you don’t sell. You don’t have to inventory them, buy them and take a risk, but you could give them a company recommendation. You might even have some of the samples at your place where they can then order it and you get a cut from that. The model is so easy to do that it would be a shame if you don’t incorporate some portion of that in your business. There are very few drawbacks to the affiliate model.

Here’s the other thing, a lot of times you get customers that you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Let’s say you’re doing cryotherapy and you get somebody from fitness centers. You’ll get a bunch of people who would have never gotten before because until they got to you, they thought all they got to do is exercise, but now they’re doing all of the above. That’s a source of a new customer for you and them. That’s a true win-win situation where the end-user wins because she’ll get the results that she needs by incorporating weight loss and exercise. You win a little and get extra money, and then they get all the extra money that they wouldn’t have gotten.

Conclusion

Think about what business model you want to have. The thing that I want to talk about a little bit is to give it a lot of thought. If you do business-to-consumer and you want to incorporate the business-to-business what’s going to happen is that you’ll be able to buy even all the things that you are buying and buy it cheaper because people see the potential that they can do a lot more business with you.

Business Growth Models: Businesses don’t care what you sell. If you give them a plan where they can make more money with your products and other people that they’re carrying, they’ll try you out.

That’s a huge benefit but at the same time, it does come with little strings. You have added expense of hiring somebody who’s an expert in that area. The standards are higher when you’re doing business-to-business. If you’re a jewelry designer like I was, when I went to HSN standards, I had to deal with QA departments that were horrendously difficult to deal with. I understand why they did that because if you’re doing business one-on-one and I’m making a piece of jewelry that falls apart, I made a mistake on the one piece. If you do 10,000 pieces and you made a mistake, the mistake is repeated 10,000 times so the cost is high.

All the standards and expenses go up high, but it’s something that you might want to consider when you have a certain base of customers. I wanted to expose you a little bit to all the different business models. If any of you have any questions about this, go ahead and write to me. It’s VicWieck@Gmail.com or you can sign up for any of my classes on my website.

I go through all this pretty extensively because I’ve had personal experience with all four of the models. I started as a business-to-consumer then I went to business-to-consumer/business-to-business. I then went to business-to-consumer, plus business-to-business, plus the affiliates. I’m still in all of the above. It’s worked out pretty well.

Sign up for any of my classes on my website, which is VictoriaWieck.com. You’ll see a monthly webinar there. It’s all free, or you can visit MillionDollarPassion.com. It’s all about turning your passion into profits, sustaining it, and working fewer hours as a result of working more efficiently and effectively. Thank you so much for reading.

If you haven’t already, please go ahead and leave me a review. If you can give me a five-star review, that would be great. Please share this episode with at least one person that you know could benefit from this because that’s how we multiply our voice and how we can serve our community better. Until the next episode, please have a great safe and happy week. Remember, happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you.

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August 17, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

Mastering The Art Of Negotiation For Business Growth

Negotiating deals is crucial in being an entrepreneur. You must analyze and evaluate what you want and how you’ll offer that to a client so you can close a deal. Set your goals and expectations because you have to figure out the specific things your company needs. Join your host Victoria Wieck in this episode as she dives deep into the dos and don’ts in negotiating. She shares how you can optimize strategies and talk with people most effectively to achieve the process and meet your goals. Learn how to maximize value creation in your agreements and watch your clients grow!

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Mastering The Art Of Negotiation For Business Growth

I’m excited to share with you this episode’s lesson. It’s about negotiating mastery. Mastering how to negotiate or negotiating skills is the most underestimated skill of all skills for business owners, especially for small business owners like ourselves. If you’re a huge business, usually, you have a legal department or have access to lawyers who specialize in your expertise.

If you’re a small business owner, you don’t even know how to go and find a lawyer who understands your business. Most of the time, your business has got a special niche. There are some amazing things about your business that differentiates your business from all the big corporations. This is a skill that is a must-have for everyone who is in business or who thinks about going into business.

First of all, there was a myth that when you start negotiating, you need to hire a lawyer to negotiate because you are not qualified to negotiate or you think that your lawyer is going to do a better job. I have to tell you from my personal experience, that’s one of the worst things you could do because most lawyers are not trained as business people. They go to law school. They understand the legal lease, courtrooms, and law books, but they don’t understand your business.

Half of the time, you are calling your lawyer to try and explain what your business is all about and what you’re trying to negotiate from the other side. They don’t know anything about the other side, so then they do all this homework and bill you on an hourly basis. Before they even get to the other side, you’re looking at a $5,000 or $10,000 bill. Sometimes they want you to sign a retainer of $5,000 or $10,000 a month before they even start talking to you at all.

Even when you pay $5,000 or $10,000 a month, if they get you the deal you want or a position of strength so that all you got to do is run your business, that’s a different story. Half the time, they don’t do that. They come back with a lukewarm version of what you wanted or a few things from the list that you wanted, and the other side gets away with the rest of it because most lawyers go with a road to least resistance. That’s my personal experience.

Most lawyers are not trained as businesspeople. They understand legalities, courtrooms, law books, but they don’t understand your business.

Do’s And Don’ts About Negotiating

Having said that, let’s think about all the dos and don’ts of negotiating. I’m very passionate about this because I’ve had to negotiate some of the biggest contracts in my industry. It’s a jewelry specialty within the retail industry. I’ve negotiated deals in Japan, England, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and in the US. I have to negotiate the biggest contracts in my life anyway at HSN and then now at ShopHQ. I’ve done business with places like Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus. In every single one of them, you need to learn how to negotiate. There were all different. Each company looks for specific things and this is what we’re going to talk about here.

Here are some of the dos, and we’re going to get into the don’ts as well. The dos are to start treating the person on the other side as your business partner. I know it goes contrary to what you think. First of all, let’s think about what are we negotiating. For example, if you own a physical store, you have to negotiate rents with your landlord and hotel rooms for your employees when you’re doing a lot of traveling.

Maybe you have airline tickets. If you’ve got even five employees traveling on a quarterly basis, you can negotiate with an airline. I don’t know if you knew that or not. You are negotiating your employees’ compensation. If you’re an employer, it’s the same thing. You are negotiating with the employee, all the suppliers, customers, and outside consultants. All these require some negotiation.

Win-Win Situation

We talk about the win-win, but I want to talk about the win-win-win situation. There are three wins. There are usually three parties involved. They’re not just two parties. Let’s go to some of the examples. For example, you’re an employee and you want to get paid pretty high. This is typical in a retail or wholesale type of business, a manufacturer, for example. You might want to pay them a salary plus some bonus or commission above a certain amount if we tell that their business that they’re doing.

Let’s say that you say, “I want to get paid $150,000 base salary, plus all the travel, all the expenses, hotel room, my meals, everything paid, and 10% from everything I generate above $1 million.” That sounds good for the employee, especially if you can bring in $10 million or $20 million worth of business them. You’re making $200,000 over or above your $150,000 base salary, plus all your expense is paid. That sounds good for it. The problem is this is an expense to the employer when they bake that into the price. Instead of somebody who was getting paid $150,000, you got somebody who could make $250,000. That’s coming out of their pocket.

Art Of Negotiation: You need to learn how to negotiate. Each company is different and looks for very specific things.

Ultimately, they’re going to price that into their price. I’m going to get something concrete. Let’s say I have a necklace. You’re trying to sell 50,000 pieces of it to a department store or TV station. Your cost is $50. You want to sell it to the station for $75 to cover your rent and employees. You have more than just that employee. You’ve got a secretary, a receptionist, and warehousing people. You got to pay for all of their health insurance and everything else. Let’s say, a 25% margin for that. You also have defects and all the other stuff that comes back. You want to get that.

When you do that, let’s say, this is what you want. If you’ve got an employee who would demand $150,000 plus the 10%, 10% of $75 is already $7.50. Your margin gets shrunk by quite a bit. Since you need the $25 margin to pay for everyone else in your company, you’re going to bump that price up to at least $85. Even if the customer buys it from you, the actual retail price on that instead of going at $150 is going to go at $185 or something like that. It has to sell at the store for a much higher price.

I wonder about it for a long way, but at some point, you need to make it so that your end user, the consumer, wins because they always know where to get the best buy. They always know where they can count on high-quality products at the lowest prices. They determine in the end where they shop. Let’s say you’re dealing with a department store A. This department store, even if somebody is friends with you and they say, “That sounds pretty reasonable.” If a lot of end-users don’t end up buying it from department store A, you’re going to be stuck with all this data inventory as a direct result of this one example.

Since they’re going to get fired until they get a bit of this merchandise, they either put it on extreme sale, or they call you, the manufacturer, and say, “I need some help. I need you to take this back because I can’t buy anything else. I’m overbought. My boss won’t give me any more money to buy anything until I clear this inventory out.” At the least, they will not buy from you again because they got burned. Treat the other party as your partner. You need to make sure that whatever you sell them, you do it at whatever you can to make sure that that stuff sells once they buy it. That’s your responsibility. It is their responsibility, but it is your responsibility, too.

Perspective

The second thing here is you got to do homework always. I can’t stress this enough. If you’ve read this whole series, you read this in every episode. You understand what the other side needs and wants from you in the end, what they will and won’t negotiate. If you’re dealing with public companies like Macy’s, Nordstrom’s, and TV stations, they usually have these earnings calls. Call up their investment department and get their perspectives. If you want to buy one single share of stock, you should look at their perspective. They will tell you what their goals are, where they excel, what their challenges are, and what they expect.

Start negotiating and start treating the person on the other side as your business partner

Let’s say you’re selling candles and dealing with a TV station. They say, “Our goal is to increase our soft home.” Candles would be considered a soft home. They are not like vacuum cleaners or computers that would be called a hard home. Linens and candles go into all those softer areas of your home. Let’s say you look at them and they say, “We see a huge opportunity in a soft home.” TV stations don’t do candles too well because they can’t smell and all kinds of reasons for it. Let’s say you see that in the perspective, saying, “There’s telling other investors that we’re going to focus on a soft home,” which is where this falls in.

When you start to negotiate with them, you understand that you have something they want and are actively looking for. You’ve got a much better position than if you’re looking at the prospectus and they say, “We try soft home last week and that’s where we took a huge margin hint. It’s tough, but we’re going to trim down the soft home area, specifically things that we can’t smell like candles, fragrances, or whatever.”

You’re not in a position of strength at that point. Do your homework because we all have a limited amount of time. Your customers have a limited amount of time. Why try to swim uphill? Why try to go to a place where they just took a huge hit on margins and they’re trying to clear out what they already have? You want to go to places where they’re looking for your type of product. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is they also will tell you who they want. If you listen to QVC and HSN, their earnings call every quarter. That’s all public information. You can type in Google, “Earnings Call,” every quarter. Quarter, meaning they follow the calendar year or so. Usually, the earnings call for the first quarter is sometime in April or May because they got to finish by March 31st. They do all their books and then they have called in front of their stockholders and Wall Street.

New Customers

The second quarter ends on June 30th and their earnings call is about mid-July or early August, and it goes on. Everything is recorded and published. They are legal statements. They will tell you the truth, what they did well and don’t do well with. They constantly talk about getting new customers. New customers are a huge thing for all Wall Street types of environments. They want to get new customers specifically. They want to get younger customers because Millennials have a much longer span to buy from you once they become your customer and there are more of them.

Art Of Negotiation: Treat the other party as your partner. You need to make sure that whatever you sell them, you do it at whatever you can to make sure the stuff actually sells once they buy it.

Millennials are the number one buying block. When they tell you what they want, for example, where customers are Millenials. If you’re selling candles and you say, “We’ve tested all the scents. Millennials like things that are natural and fresh. We focused on that,” they listen. The buyers are trained to listen. Do your homework. They will tell you everything you need to know before you ever set your foot in the door.

These are the things that your lawyer won’t do. They don’t know. It’s not their job to know. It’s your job to know the law. It’s not their job to do market research on the type of products that you’re doing. Going back to my original conversation about hiring lawyers, there is room for lawyers to come in once you finish your negotiating. They can put it into the legal lease. That’s when you use a law.

What’s important is at the end of the whole thing, you do need to get away from this meeting what you need out of it as a small business to survive, grow, and make a profit. You need a list of things that are non-negotiable for you. For example, what’s non-negotiable for me would be to go and do a ton of business with somebody only to lose money or have the potential to lose money. That’s not good.

Make a list of things that you are not willing to negotiate because you have to understand what they are. You don’t want to go, “Let me go and see. I’m going to fill it out.” You can fill out a lot of other things, but you need to have some non-negotiables. One of those things for me was when I was negotiating my contract initially when I first went to HSN. I’m going to say this because it was the most recent big contract I’ve had to negotiate. By the time I got to the second network, the framework for what I wanted from a TV network was already done.

With HSN, both they and I had to chart new waters because they had never done a contract like mine before. There’s a whole long story as to why that is. Most of the people that I negotiated with are not there anymore because that was many years ago and the contract kept renewing. What I was proud of with them was that we negotiated with the idea that we were partners. They were interested in making sure that I succeeded in their network.

You need to have non-negotiables when negotiating your contract.

I was very interested in making sure that they succeeded as a network, even if that involves them bringing in my competitors and launching new brands that are similar to mine. I wanted to make sure that they could pay their bills, and continue to grow. The bigger the umbrella, the more people can succeed. When it comes to things like return rate, actual pricing, and delivery dates, I was willing to negotiate all of those, but what I wasn’t willing to negotiate was how much time they get to have from me.

I was a brand new mom of two children. It was within a few months after I had the second baby, plus I had my parents who still didn’t speak English and I needed to be with them. I had my grandmother who was in her late ‘90s. I’m the firstborn and I had a lot of responsibilities. I started my business to spend more time with my family. My first instinct was, “You get to have me eight times a year because that required me to get on a plane and travel.” It worked out fine, but many of you might want to have a lot more time, but I didn’t want that in the beginning. It evolved later on to a different thing.

Make sure that you understand what your non-negotiables are. The return rate is the same thing. You don’t want an open-ended return rate. You want them to succeed and be able to return some things to you, especially if it’s defective and whatnot. What you don’t want to do is say, “If it doesn’t sell, you can return everything.” What happens is then the buyer buys everything because there was no cost for them to make a bad decision. if you give them a reasonable amount of return rate, something doesn’t sell, you’re giving them a little bit of a safety net, but they then also have to work hard to make sure that that merchandise gets cleaned out pretty quickly so that you can keep buying them.

Partnership

Every decision is a partnership type of thing. Figure out what’s non-negotiable for you. Also, figure out what is non-negotiable for them. A lot of times, if you’re working with TV stations, they don’t want to negotiate air times with you. They don’t want to say Victoria, Brandon, or anybody can come in and have primetime hours because that’s all they have.

The most precious asset they have is primetime air time. They don’t want to negotiate that with you. That’s a non-negotiable for most networks. I’m not going to say all because I haven’t done business with all 40 networks around the world. In my experience with the ones that I’ve dealt with, the major ones don’t want to say, “You get to have 9:00 to 11:00 primetime once a month.” They don’t want to do that because they do 80% of their business at primetime.

Art Of Negotiation: When you start to negotiate with them, understand that you have something they actually want and something that they are actively looking for.

Understand what they don’t want to negotiate with and work with it. If you do all this homework and come to the table with what you are willing to give, not willing to give, understanding before you even walk in the door what they are not going to negotiate with, you may use it to negotiate other things, but understand that’s not something they’re going to have a negotiate with.

I’ve done business with department stores, Macy’s, Saks, and Neiman’s. They all have different requirements, margin requirements, and return rates. Can you imagine if you hired a lawyer to find out what those are? It would be incredibly costly for you to do it. These are simple things you can find out by doing some research. Talk to other people. Network with other people. Listen to their earnings calls. Call up the buyer before you get into a room with them negotiating. Homework is important.

What’s important for you to understand more than anything is what the end user, your final customer, the customer that buys your product wants from their buying experience. For candles, for example, if the going rate out there for 8-ounce candles is $15 and yours is special, if you want to charge $25 or $30, it’s fine. If you want to charge $300, understand that you got some big obstacles.

I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m saying that if you’re going to go out that way, make sure that you understand what the end user wants because if they don’t buy it, they are not as passionate about spending $300 on an 8-ounce candle. It’s going to all come back to you. I’m using extreme examples. It’s going to end up with a lot of problems for your partner, the business you’re trying to sell to, and for you as well because their problems become your problems. They have usually 30 to 60 days to pay you, and they can play all kinds of games. You should read those contracts and the purchase orders before you get into that realm.

I hope this was helpful to you. I covered a lot of ground here. I would suggest that you go back and reread this again. Please make sure you share this episode with at least one friend. That’s how we can grow my audience and also how we grow as a community. Please review this episode if you have a little bit of time, that’s how we get judged by the podcasting industry. Thank you so much for reading. Please have a safe and happy week. I hope you make great choices. Remember, happiness is a choice. Thank you until next time.

Important Links

August 10, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

How To Niche Down And Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

Identifying your ideal target audience is critical to the success of your business. Bigger isn’t always better. In today’s episode, Victoria Wieck explains why niching down your business and trimming down how you define your market is key to earning more. If you do this right, you can achieve greater returns even without doing advertising. Tune in as she shares essential tips on determining your niche and adding the best value for your customers.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Niche Down And Identify Your Ideal Target Audience

I’m so excited to get into this session. This is part of the multi-week series of the Do It Now System that I wrote a book about. The book is titled Million Dollar Passion: How to Turn an Idea into a Multimillion-Dollar Business. I speak from my heart and from my own experience. I broke it down to very few bite-sized information so that you can follow along my journey.

This is week five. If you have not read weeks 1 through 4, I highly suggest that you do that because you can take your passion into a profitable business. You can start that business with no experience, no money, no outside capital, and no real connections of any kind. I can tell you I did it and did it in a very big way. Read the other four weeks.

Before I get into this, if you find this information interesting or you found other episodes interesting, please go ahead and subscribe. Share any of my episodes with at least one friend so we can amplify and elevate the topic here. Without further ado, let’s go get into the target market and target your audience. If I can think of one thing other than your product or service itself, it is critical that you understand who your target market is. It’s important.

I’m going to try to make it as simple as possible. There are masterminds on this topic. There are courses being taught on this topic but I’m going to try to break it down to a twenty-minute segment so that you can get the basics of it and understand it. Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you are going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

Make It As Small A Niche As Possible

Let’s get into this. The first thing is to try to make it as small of a niche as possible. I didn’t originate this saying. I don’t know who originally came up with that, but a lot of people would agree with me, “The riches are in the niches.” Make sure that you break it down to as small of a niche as possible. Whatever you are doing, try to find the first 200 people that are going to buy your product. Not the first 20. That first 20s are your friends, family, and the people who are obligated to buy something from you but the first 200 or 400 are critical because you have to understand who they are, what they are buying, what their needs are, and how you can provide solutions to their life.

If you have not read the first four weeks, you are going to see a common theme there in everything I do, which is the only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives. People don’t pay for information anymore. It’s all free on Google. People don’t pay for frivolous things that they don’t need. They usually try and return it. You have to learn how to add value to other people’s lives. For you to do that, you have to understand who they are. There was a saying that if you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one but if you try to be everything to just a few people or if you try to be everything within a topic, you can be that.

The only way you make money as an entrepreneur is if you learn how to add value to other people’s lives.

Enough with the general. I want to give you an example. For example, I turned my passion for jewelry into a multimillion-dollar business. I’ve done nine figures in this space. I could say that jewelry is for everyone. This is the number one mistake people make. They define their target market as too big. I could say that women love jewelry. People get married. Men love jewelry some men jewelry for themselves. Most men have a mother, sister, wife, daughter, female friends or grandmothers. You can think about how you can justify, “Maybe I should target the men who buy the jewelry for the women in their life.”

You can see how I could sit there and say, “I could design jewelry for all women and most men.” It is everybody. Men who are older or younger love jewelry. This isn’t an heirloom piece. They all love it. If you were to identify your market as that, how would you design for that market? How would your jewelry be different than everything else out there on the market? I’m going to get back to that in a little bit. If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising or any outside influences. I will show you how you can do that with my jewelry. Keep that in mind.

Let Them Know, Trust, and Like You

Also, remember that before people buy anything of significance, whether it’s a course or jewelry they are going to wear to a sorority party, a high school reunion or maybe for them to get married, they still have to like you. They have to trust you. They have to know that it’s going to be good for them. If I come across on TV or on my mailers that I’m not a likable person because I come across as braggadocious or a very loud person who talks about herself all the time, they are probably not going to want to deal with me for their intimately and emotionally connected purchase.

If they like you, they still have to trust you. They have to trust that you are the best jeweler they could find. They also have to trust that you probably aren’t going to screw them over. Those are the two factors of trust there. They have to trust you as an expert that you know what you are talking about and bringing real value to their life. They also have to trust that you are not going to overcharge them and the information you are giving them is true. They will ask, “Is this going to be good for me?”

Let’s say you are teaching an online course on how to do digital marketing, and you are charging them $5,000. They have to know, “Is this personal likable? I’m going to be Zooming with that person for the next twelve weeks.” If you find that person is always about talking about himself or herself and less about the content, you may not want to spend the money.

Provided that they trust you, they still have to know, “Is this going to work for me? Do I have the type of business that can benefit from the type of online course that this person is teaching? Do I have the infrastructure for that? Do I have all the other stuff? Can I get the same information from a person who is more experienced for less money?” That’s when pricing comes in.

Ideal Target Audience: Understanding the target market is directly related to how successful you’re going to be and how fast you can achieve that success.

Pricing only matters after they find out that they love you, like you, fall in love with your story or journey, you have some expertise that they can trust, and you have their interests at heart. They are going to be like, “It’s good for me. It happens to be an amazing price.” That is the perfect formula for that. Instead of all these generals, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal journey.

Identify Your Target Audience

My personal journey happens to be in jewelry design, which is a huge market. It is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. It is one of the oldest industries worldwide. It also happens to be the most competitive industry anywhere in the world. Many of you know that I’ve traveled extensively around the world. I have been to some countries that most people didn’t even know existed.

In every country you go to, from South Africa, Kenya, Dubai, all over Europe to all of a sudden, Latin America, in any little port or airport when you go to any shopping environment, there is a jewelry store every few blocks. It’s not as quite as many as Starbucks but it has a lot of jewelry stores all over the world. It’s one of the most competitive businesses. It’s also a business that’s known for having the good old boys around the world owning 80% to 90% of their business.

In that environment, I started a small company targeting a very specific small group of women. Remember, I said that in jewelry, I could have identified my market as all women who love jewelry, even if that’s generalistic. Most women who get married want to have some ring that says, “I’m married.” Your tastes may differ. That’s a piece of jewelry. If you think about the choices women make, in a christening, bar mitzvah, and all these events, they are wearing jewelry. Maybe it’s the heirloom piece that was given, you inherited, and was passed down.

You could say, “My target is all women and most of the men who buy for their wives, significant other, friends, mothers or sisters.” If you do that and say, “My jewelry caters to all women. I’m going to design for all women,” Let’s say you somehow can do that. You understand what women want. If you were going to create a Facebook ad, what would that ad say? “I design beautiful pieces of jewelry. I have a whole collection for you. I understand that you are a woman. All women have jewelry. I have a large selection of jewelry. It is very inexpensive. I’m 25% lower than your local department store. We are having a sale here. Come to come to my store.”

That’s pretty much what you could say because you can’t talk to every woman. When you talk to every woman, it sounds that way. You are not talking to that woman. How I did it, though, is when I was starting my company, I found that most of the jewelry was sold that way by the major department and jewelry stores. They talk to every woman like, “We have bridal. We have this. We have that. We have all the things that you all love. Women love jewelry. We have what women want. We are the cheapest.” The precise language is different than what I said but that’s genetically what most of the ad said.

If you try to be everything to everybody, you are nothing to no one. But if you try to be everything to just a few people, you can be that.

Some of them had better models or different styles but the messaging was the same. “Women have jewelry. I know you love jewelry. We have high-quality jewelry, and our prices are the best. Our jewelry is routinely sold at 70% off,” which also was a lie. They would jack up the price so that they could take the 70% off, which then became the regular price.

In fact, many jewelry stores and department stores were sued by the FTC about that. If they say that every two weeks, you can take the 70% discount, then that discounted price is a retail price. They’ve gone through lawsuits but I digressed on that. What happened was when I came to this country, I realized that in South Korea, most of the jewelry was heirloom pieces. They were 24 karat gold pieces that were given to a child as their future inheritance. It was more of a monetary value.

The heirloom pieces that they wanted to hand out to the next generation were highly personalized. They were mostly custom-made pieces by a local jeweler for their family. They might even have a family emblem. Some of them might have their favorite gemstones as opposed to diamonds. For example, if a region was known for fishing, it might have little fisherman knots embedded into it. If they lived on a farm, they might have little wheat patterns.

When I came to America, I was astonished at the lack of selection. It was mostly sold on snob appeal. I was mostly sold on, “I have a 2 karat diamond from Tiffany’s or I have a 1 karat diamond from whatever store.” It has a little bit of a snob appeal but it was a stone set in four prong setting with the bond. That was what it was. I saw a huge opportunity to speak to different women. When I say different women, they were women who had different emotional needs for reasons why they bought jewelry.

1989, which is when I started my company, was a time when many women in America were going to work outside their homes. It was the first time in history that most of these women went outside their homes to work. I say that because taking care of your children at home is a full-time job. They went outside their homes to work. They had titles like marketing director, vice president of something or senior manager of something. They had managerial positions for the first time. They were making decent money. There were still huge inequities in salaries but they were still making good money.

They went to work looking like miniature men. I was one of those women. I had to wear button-down cotton shirts. I had a business suit in gray, navy, and black. They didn’t have jewelry at that point. They had jewelry but were nighttime jewelry. They were very fancy. You don’t want to go to work looking like you are a show-off. These women had a need. They needed to look polished. They needed to look intelligent, sophisticated but understated.

Ideal Target Audience: If you identify your target market correctly, you can almost build a business without any advertising, without any outside influences.

At that time, in the marketplace, they had junk jewelry. They were plastic. They were brassy. They clinked and made all these sounds. It looked like a tortoise. They had animal prints on them. They looked cheap and junky. You could go buy the expensive jewelry that had the snob appeal. You would to these places to pay $10,000, $15,000 or $20,000 for once-in-a-lifetime jewelry and wore until you die.

I designed jewelry that was much more for daytime to go to work. It looked understated, fun, and beautiful but had a little sparkle or a little metal. They also had little florals. They had ways that were still timeless but very classic. They had florals or little critters like ladybugs. They had a little accent here and there. It didn’t look like it was wild but it had interesting topics that you can talk about. People are curious. Other women are complimenting you. You stood out as somebody who takes care of herself and is successful.

I sold high-quality jewelry at lower prices that were emotionally connecting and personality reflective jewelry. I catered to the professional working woman who made a ton of money for the first time. Before our generation, men went to work. The money was tight, so she didn’t go outside the home. She didn’t need daytime jewelry. I was defining my target market as professional working women in a professional environment. It is only that woman.

My Facebook ad would say something to the effect of, “Come and experience sophisticated, understated jewelry that you can wear to work, semi-formal or a cocktail party. You can save all this money. You can stand out for all the right reasons. Someday in the future, your daughters or granddaughters can inherit this because these are very high-quality products. They are custom designed for you.” They were just for a few people because I didn’t have a huge distribution. I would also say, “For the next two weeks, you could have it at a 25% off discount.”

Luckily for me, there was nobody doing that. I ended up with a huge market share. This is how I sold over ten million pieces of jewelry in America. This is the power of understanding who your target market is, providing products for your target market, and messaging that in a way that you can connect with them emotionally. All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

I understand that most of you are not going to be in the jewelry space. For example, if you are a real estate broker, you can’t go and say, “I’m a real estate broker. I specialize in Beverly Hills to Compton, to Newport Beach or to San Diego.” Nobody is going to believe you. A lot of entry-level home markets are catered to younger families that want great schools. They want a place that has great little parks around, and that’s safe. Your messaging will be different than if you were selling a $3 million to $10 million property. They are looking for something completely different than entry-level homes. You can’t be a specialist at both ends.

All your marketing message needs to sound like you are speaking to that person alone.

Maybe you are in the vacation home market. Maybe you are in Palm Springs or places where older retirees buy their retirement homes or vacation home. They have very different needs. Make sure that you understand who you are talking to. If you need Lasik surgery for your eyes, you are not going to go to a general practitioner for your eye surgery. You are going to go to the best Lasik surgeon.

I went to a Lasik surgeon several years ago. She had done 7,000 Lasik surgeries. Most of them were successful but 1% of the people ended up with dry eye or something like that. I chose to go to her for the reason that she did nothing but that. She does not do cataract surgery. She doesn’t do anything else. This is the woman that does nothing but this one thing.

If you are a pain management expert, you help people manage pain. If you specialize in Olympic athletes, tennis professionals or high school athletes that need to fix up, be at peak performance every day, are healthy otherwise and are watching their body for every single little joint, that’s a different market than senior citizens who are in chronic pain that is on Medicare or Medicaid.

I’m giving you two very extreme examples of how a generalist can’t survive in either of those places. If you say, “I’m a pain management specialist. No matter what your pain is, I can help you,” and you don’t explain exactly why you are best for that person, you are not going to get the high school athletes. They are going to look for athletic physios and athletic professionals.

I’m going to give you the most extreme example of a restaurant in Los Angeles. I lived in LA for 40 years. It’s funny. Across from my office, there was a fish restaurant that stayed there. They were there for 30 years. Before I was even in that office space, this was an iconic restaurant. For some reason, this family decided to close up several years ago. Every six months, it seemed like there was a new restaurant that came in. None of them made it.

The last one that I remember was called Global Cuisine. Their menu had Salvadoran food, halal food, sushi, and vegan food. The owner was very proud of the fact that he had a very large family. He had a son who married an Israeli girl that moved to Israel and spoke Hebrew. He also had one of his daughters marry somebody in Japan. He was very proud of the fact that his family is so diverse, and they eat this food all the time.

Ideal Target Audience: Getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it.

He opened a restaurant called Global Cuisine. If you wanted to have pizza and pasta for lunch, would you go to a global cuisine like this, where they serve everything under the sun? If you are a sushi connoisseur, would you go to a restaurant that serves vegan or El Salvadoran? You would probably go to a sushi restaurant that has nothing but sushi. This family did not last either. They didn’t last even six months. It was a tough sell. Nobody wanted to go in there. They were curious. It was a neighborhood joke but nobody ate anything that I knew other than his own family. It didn’t work out.

Remember, getting your target audience nailed down helps you attract new customers at a much faster rate than if you try to broaden it. I know it’s very counterintuitive to think that you have to make the target market so small as opposed to bigger but trust me on this one. You do have to make sure that your target market might get as small of a niche as possible. Once you start to achieve some success, you can then branch out into other things.

For example, my target market for the longest time was professional working women. They grew older with me. I was in my twenties when I started my business. I’m not even going to tell you how old I am because I have been through so many decades where a lot of my customers are ages 45 to 65, and some of them are even older. I thought, “I can help Millennial woman navigate their bridal things,” so I created a separate company that deals with Millennial bridles who want great choices and custom-made jewelry. That’s doing well. I figured it out but I don’t mix those two.

My Millennial bridal site is called RachelAndVictoria.com. You should check that out. It’s a beautiful site. All the model pictures are actual pictures of my daughter, Rachel, who is partnering with me on this. The messaging is very different. The Millennials want choice. They want to experience. They want uniqueness. They don’t want anything that’s mass-produced. They don’t want to buy things at a department store. They want things that are made for them and only for them. They are very concerned about ecology and what their footprint is in the world in terms of their carbon footprint, climate change, and all that.

On that site, we spell out our philosophy. All the metals that we use, gold and silver, are all recycled. We don’t do any Earth-mined gemstones. It means that anything that we have to dig deep through the Earth, we don’t deal with that. All the diamonds are lab-grown or above Earth. All our packaging is recycled paper. For the women that are aged 45 to 65, they understand my philosophy is the same but it’s not a huge deciding factor. It’s a plus factor. They like the fact that I am very conscious about saving the planet Earth but it’s not the determinant factor for them. Your messaging, products, and price point changes based on who your target market is.

Determine How You Add Value

Lastly, once you clearly identify your target market like this person with pain points who’s a pain expert remember, the only way you make money is if you add value to somebody else’s life consistently as an entrepreneur. That means, how do you add value to somebody else’s life? Does your product help them save money? Does it help them save time?

Messaging changes based on who your target market is.

Does it help them right social wrongs? Does that help them prevent a problem in the future? If you are selling alarms, security systems, vitamins or insurance, does it help people feel significantly better emotionally? You might be selling entertainment. You might be selling them how you connect with your customers if you are business-to-business.

There’s a whole other list I can give you but I’m trying to keep this very simple and short. If you can help them save money and time and prevent a future disaster from happening, these are great. You got to check at least one off of this. If you can’t, you must keep working on your target market, products, and how you can solve their problems or add value to their lives. You will see a huge difference in how you start your business. You can see why you can start your business with no money and no expertise. It’s simple, basic common sense.

Thank you for tuning in to this lesson. I love this topic. I may revisit this topic at the end of the series because it is such a critical topic. It’s a topic that’s counter-intuitive to most entrepreneurs and needs a little bit of getting used to. Thank you, again, for tuning in. Until next time, please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is your choice. Also, if you can rate and review the show, I would be ever so grateful.

Important Links

August 3, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

Turning Your Passion Into Business

What do you do best, and what differentiates you from the rest? Join Victoria Wieck as she continues to give us tips on how to turn your passion into a business. In this episode, learn tips on how to identify your strength and find what gives you the greatest opportunity to make a positive impact.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Turning Your Passion Into Business

We’re still in the middle of my Do It Now System to help you figure out how you can turn your passion and purpose into a dream business and make a few dollars of profit along the way. We discussed defining the dream and how to set your goals. If you haven’t done so, go back and start over. It may sound like it’s a simple thing, how to define your dream and your American dream but trust me. Go ahead and read it because there’s a systematic way for you to figure out the dreams, not just a pie in the sky kind of dreams, but dreams that you can turn into reality.

It doesn’t have to stay a dream life. Go ahead and read the last episodes about your dream, what you’re willing to do for it and how you’re going to go ahead and achieve your dream, and how realistic it is. In this episode, we’re going to talk about the opportunity. We’re going to talk about the many business ideas you might have, or maybe you just have one. If you have more than one business idea, what’s the big idea that gives you the greatest opportunity to make a positive impact in the world and also to make the most amount of profits?

We would all love that. Ideally, that is easily possible for you. Again, this show is all about real transformation for people who don’t want to waste a lot of time or a ton of money learning how to do it. You don’t want to have to wait years to do it. You can do this now, especially if you’re talking about a side hustle. Let’s talk about what opportunities are out there for you.

Everyone is born with some kind of gift.

Before that, I’d like you to think about what is your why and what is your what. Why do you do what you do and what do you do better than other people? That’s important. These seem like there are philosophical questions, and they are philosophical, but I want you to think about that because when you have your business, go out, and start hustling, you start marketing your business, and you talk about all the things you do or your company does and all the things. They don’t care about what you do. They care about why you do what you do because it matters. To our consumers, it matters.

For example, if you’ve got a healthy food/protein bar that gives you a lot of energy with very low carbs and no sugar, you could sit here and say, “I manufacture protein bars that have no sugar, zero carbs, zero this and that.” You can go on all the things about it, but if you came in and said, “As a young child, I have diagnosed a diabetic. I had a heart condition. All the males in my family died young, and I was determined to make sure that I stayed healthy.”

Once I’ve known how to do that, I couldn’t wait to share it with everybody. That’s a completely different kind of marketing message. Think about your why, why do you want to do what you do, and what you want to do. Think about what is your God-given given gift. In other words, even if you don’t believe in God, I believe that everyone is born with some kind of gift. No gift is any more precious than others, but some people have the gift of gab. Some people have an amazing eye for things. Some people are great mathematicians. Some people love having conversations. Some people are healers. Some people are teachers.

Turning Passion Into Business: Whatever your gift is, find it, even if it’s something you don’t want to do.

Whatever your gift is, find it, even if it’s something you don’t want to do. I know that one of my children is very gifted in writing, but she doesn’t want to have any to do with writing. She doesn’t want to make a living doing writing. She’d write every once in a while when she wanted to. She doesn’t want to be on a schedule about writing. She doesn’t think she’s talented enough, so it’s a no-go. She does other things with her talents that she’s not talented in, but she has a lot of passion for it.

We’re going to discuss this as we move along in this episode. Figure out your why, and then figure out what you’re better at than most people. I’m going to give you some examples. Maybe you’re passionate about photography or food. Maybe you like a certain food. Maybe you want to be a chef or a food blogger. Maybe you want to be a photographer. There are a lot of different ways you can go with the category of food.

It could be gardening and yoga. You could be a yoga teacher or create yoga clothing lines. You could write books. There are all kinds of things you can do, like general fitness, hair, and makeup. We talked about this writing. Maybe you play a musical instrument. Maybe you’re a great writer of music. You like automobiles. Do you like to talk? Maybe it could be a talk show host or a YouTuber. Are you a jogger?

Turn your passion-based business idea into a highly profitable dream business so that you can live the life you want to live, not the life you think you have to live because you’ve got to pay your bills.

We can, believe it or not, know how to monetize your passion for jogging as well. I listed a few things. If you’re like most people, you might have more than one thing that you’re good at. For example, I love to read. I have been reading when I was growing up in South Korea. I read a lot because that’s how I saw the world. You’re living on a tiny island. I lived literally on an island within Korea. Korea is a peninsula. We had no internet. Nobody had internet at that time around the world. We had a TV, but the connectivity wasn’t there. It didn’t get as far to a remote island at that time.

We got mostly snow, and sometimes we’d get one little slip snippet of news, but we were sheltered there. I have read a lot since I was maybe four years old. I read picture books then. As I got older, I read fiction and historical novels. Everything I could get my hands on, I read. I love books, and then eventually, I learned to write and wanted to write. I love writing. I was very talented in art like painting and designing. What do you do? Do you become a writer? Do you become a writer and a designer? Do you become a writer and a painter?

Most people have more than one thing they’re good at, and it’s natural. I also love photography. Now, list out all the things you see yourself doing passionately for the rest of your life. If you don’t know how to go about doing that, and you’re like, “I don’t know. Is this going to make money? I don’t know if I’m going to love this. If I do this eight hours a day, would I love it?” don’t conflate all these other decisions. Only think about what you see yourself doing. Can you see yourself taking pictures, traveling, taking more pictures, and editing for the rest of your life if you’re a photographer? Can you picture yourself constantly evolving, educating other people about fitness, and sharing your passion?

Turning Passion Into Business: Pick the one idea that represents the biggest monetary potential with the least amount of effort.

Can you imagine yourself doing that? Envision what your life would be like if you chose one thing out of the whole list. There’s a lot, more or less. It’s important that you narrow it down to one thing. It’s tough to start three businesses and make them all succeed at the same time. Pick one idea, and we’re going to pick the one idea that gives you the most that represents the biggest monetary potential with the least amount of effort on your part. Next episode, we’ll talk about the target audience, how you identify them, how you reach out to them, and how you message them.

Let’s go back to this lesson about how you find the idea with the greatest opportunity. I have a worksheet that helps you do this. You can go to my website, VictoriaWieck.com, and download this worksheet so that you can plug in all your hobbies and interests, and you’ll be able to figure out exactly where you belong in terms of which idea is going to give you the most amount of satisfaction and profits.

In the meantime, I will tell you this. I’ll give you a hint. A simple way to figure out this is, “What would you do with your time if you knew you never had to worry about money?” If you’re competing with several ideas, you might be good at photography. You might be good at musical instruments. You might be good at cars, fixing cars, or buying and trading cars. This exercise will teach you how to figure out where you are going to get the most enjoyment and where you are going to get the most amount of money. Which idea is going to get the most amount of money?

It gives you a self-examination of competing ideas. Come to VictoriaWieck.com or MillionDollarPassion.com and download that worksheet, and you’ll find that very interesting. This is all about turning your passion-based business idea into a highly profitable dream business so that you can live the life you want to live, not the life you think you have to live because you’ve got to pay your bills and you’re stuck at a job.

I look forward to the next episode because we’re going to kick it up in high gear and get into your target audience, pricing, and negotiating. All of that happens in the next few episodes. Until next time, please stay happy and healthy. Remember, happiness is a choice, and I hope you make great choices. Please do me a favor. Can you please share this episode with at least one friend or person? Please hit the subscribe button. I know I’m asking for a lot, but please leave me a review because that’s how other people find me. Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll talk to you next episode.

Important Links

June 15, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

Goal Setting For Success

Everybody has a dream but those dreams need a set goal. As an entrepreneur, you don’t have the risk to make a mistake. It’s important that you learn how to set goals so that you succeed with very low monetary risk. Join Victoria Wieck as she talks about the goal-setting system she uses, called the SMAART System. Your goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, accountable, repeatable, and time-sensitive. Learn more in today’s episode as Victoria goes through each process so that you can start achieving your goals.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Goal Setting For Success

Welcome to another episode of the show. This is a special series where I discuss my own journey to entrepreneurship or my own journey to how I started with nothing but under a few hundred dollars to build my eventual empire. Many of you have requested that I do that. You want to know how I did it and whether or not I could share my own personal journey with you. Here we are.

I try to make it very doable for everybody. I do believe that every single person reading this can achieve their dream life. Their dream life could be becoming a multimillionaire or somebody who has all that plus having an amazing family or building back the community you live in and impacting the world in a positive way. Dream big. Let’s tackle this.

This is part two. If you haven’t checked the last episode, it’s about defining the dream. This whole series is about the do-it-now system, which I broke down into seven steps. They are defining your dream, defining the biggest opportunity, igniting that big idea within you, finding your target audience, how to negotiate everything with your employees, landlord, customers, or everybody else that is in your ecosystem, and how to monetize your opportunity, and then how to win the game. It’s called the do-it-now system. This is still within that first defining your dream phase.

Setting Goals

A lot of people have a dream. They’re like, “I want to leave my horrible boss. I’m going to ditch the commute. I want to make a lot of money. I want to work half the amount of time.” All of that is great, but you got to start learning how to set goals that will cause you to achieve that. Set goals so that you have a reasonable guarantee that your goals will come true, and there is a real trick to this. I’ve walked through this myself. This episode is all about setting your goals based on the dream that you have defined in the last episode. If you have not read it, please check it out because it’s very important that you go through this in order. There are only seven steps, so it’s doable.

First of all, I want to differentiate how you’re normally taught to set goals. If you go to MBA school or do a lot of digital learning, there are all these buzzwords about how you set your goals, and I’ve done all that. What I found out was that in the MBA school system or any other marketing guru’s special system, you were taught how to plug into a corporate world, how to plug into a marketing department, or how to plug into a system that’s already in existing, and then you survive in that.

If you’re on your own and you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have a chance to make a bunch of mistakes on somebody else’s dime. You make the mistakes on your own dime. It’s important that you learn how to set goals so that you succeed with very low monetary and time risk. It’s one thing to lose the money you invest, but then also to give it your all and then not make any money. That’s a double whammy in a bad way. I didn’t have parents or colleagues who could support me. I didn’t have anybody who would give me a loan, so I had to do it on my own. It’s low risk but has a high chance of succeeding.

Learn how to set goals so that you have a reasonable guarantee that your dreams will come true.

SMAART System

Let’s get to this. This goal-setting system is called a SMART system. Some version of this is out there, but I have my own way, which is a slightly different version. The S stands for Specific. Be very specific. The M is to make sure it’s Measurable. It’s important that you find something that’s achievable or attainable. The A is to be Accountable. Somebody has to account for the goals you set. If you don’t meet those goals, you got to hold yourself accountable or have a system or somebody remind you, “You didn’t do this. You got to go back and try harder to meet that.”

The goals that you set must be repeatable. It’s not a one-off. For example, you set a goal this month and want to make $20,000. You make it but did it at the expense of last month’s income and next month’s income. You gave everybody discounts. You did everything you could, and it’s not repeatable next month. That’s not sustainable. The R is to make sure that it’s Repeatable. The last thing is to make sure it can be done in a timely manner. When you say, “I want to make $100,000 this 2022 with my side hustle,” 2022 is a time-sensitive thing. It’s not, “I want to make $100,000 some year.” That could be 10 or 20 years from now. Those things don’t count.

Specific

Let’s go back to my way of calling it a SMART system goal. Number one, what do I mean when I say be specific? Let’s say you set your goal of defining your American dream. You want to work less. You want to spend more time with your family. You want to have the financial means to take care of everybody around you, which could be your neighbor, parents, or sisters, and you want to do it in your own way by doing something that you love to do. These are your goals. If you break it down, be very specific.

In my own case, back in 1989, when I started my company, I worked for somebody else for several years before that. I realized that the lifestyle I was living was not attainable. I was commuting 90 minutes to work each day, and I was working somewhere between 10 to 15 hours a day, depending on the stress level that my boss had. That wasn’t sustainable. I was not going to be a healthy employee. I was coming to work mostly exhausted. I was sleep-deprived, so during the weekends, I slept. That was not sustainable.

I could not imagine how I could be a good mother to my two children, so I wanted to leave, but then, I had to figure out how I was going to make it work. Back then, I was making a lot more money than my initial goal. If everything went my way and I hit my home run that month, I wanted to be able to make $2,000 per month, which is $24,000 a year. I was making more money than that with my MBA degree, but I was not willing to work the hours that I was working or the commute. I was willing to work about 20 to 25 hours. I would grudgingly work up to 30 hours a week, but no more than that.

My ideal scenario was working for twenty hours a week and earning $2,000 every month. If you break it down to those units, you think to yourself, “How do I get the $2,000 a month?” I started a small jewelry company. I worked with the numbers that were already out there because I didn’t have a whole lot of experience with direct mailing or anything else. The industry standard at that time in 1989 was that we did a lot of direct mailing. I didn’t have money to buy the mailing list, so I borrowed lists.

Goal Setting: Use the SMAART System for goal setting. Your goals should be specific. They must be measurable and achievable. You have to be accountable. And, they should be repeatable and time-sensitive.

There used to be a whole industry called travel agencies, and those travel agencies had phone numbers to stores and places you could visit. They had the gift shop managers’ names and corporate addresses, but their contact points were dusted everywhere, so I would jot them down and mail them. I sent that mail with a postage stamp. The industry standard was that the return rate on your direct mail was something between 5%$ to 10%, depending on the quality of your mailing list and also the quality of your product, and how well they are matched.

I thought to myself, “I’m going to go on the low side. I’m going to figure out that there should be a 5% return.” When they returned it, they didn’t tell me that when they respond, you still only have a 50% chance of closing the deal. They might be interested in you, but when they find out that you’re brand-new and you don’t have an office, they don’t know who you are, they don’t know if they can trust you, meaning they don’t know if you can take care of their money or deliver the goods, you don’t have a chance to close the deal.

I would get those lists, and I would type up those little letters. It was mostly formed letters, so it was pretty easy to do. If I sent out 50 letters a day, that’s 250 letters a week. Those letters didn’t take me more than a couple of hours a day. Five days a week is not a whole lot. The research took me some time, but you can see that if I got 10%, that’s 25 people, getting back to me, or 5%, that’s 12 or 13 people, I can close five of those people. If I did that for four and a half weeks a month, I could make the $2,000 a month possible. If I couldn’t do it, I would up the number. I would do 75 letters a day, which is a little bit more challenging within that twenty-hour period.

I broke it down to specific numbers. I was like, “How many hours am I willing to work? How much money do I need to make?” I then broke it down to, “How am I going to accomplish this?” It turns out that my conversion rate was high. I got closer to 10% of the people responding, and I was able to close on more than 70% of them. I made more than $2,000 a month from the first month. That was an amazing thing. In fact, within the first eighteen months, I hit a number of $1 million. I never even thought about a number like that. I’ll go over how we did it in the next segments about how you identify your target audience, market to them, and all that other stuff, but in this episode, let’s go back and focus on setting goals.

Being very specific is important. Break down your goals to the smallest units you can possibly get. I can even get down to how many hours I could work. Also, when you are specific, you have to be specific about the non-negotiables. What are your non-negotiables? What are the things that you don’t want to negotiate at all? For me, a 40-hour workweek was a non-negotiable. I don’t care if it’s temporary or long-term. I didn’t want to work 40 hours a week.

Measurable

When my kids were younger, they didn’t get sick from Monday to Friday. They don’t need mommy 40 hours a week. You have to put your foot down and work around their schedule, and I did that. The next category is being measurable. Make sure that you can measure your progress. You can measure by thinking, “Am I making $2,000 a month? Am I sending out so many letters a month or a week that justifies a $2,000 a month?” The other thing you have to figure out is you got to measure everything, like your return rates and conversion rates.

Break down your goals to the smallest units you can possibly get.

If your conversion rate is 60% to 70%, that’s great. You’re going to make $2,000, $4,000, $5,000, or $10,000 a month, but let’s say you send out 250 letters. You get back something very small. Only 10 or 20 people are calling you back, so then you have to convert even lower. You’re measuring those yards with a certain yardstick and go, “This isn’t working.” You either have to figure out how to enhance your marketing message, or in your product category, maybe you can’t get a list that’s ideally matched for you, so you have to work harder. Whatever it is, when you measure, you know what to do.

Let’s say you’re getting 10% of the people responding, but you’re only converting 1% of the 10% of the people. It means that when they give you a chance, you are not converting somehow. You got to figure out, “What am I doing wrong where I’m getting people interested in me but not converting?” It gets you back to where you can track your progress, where you need to tweak, where you need to work harder, and where you can work less. Your conversion rate is 10%. Maybe you don’t need to write that many letters because you only need 5%, but maybe you need to work on your conversion method.

Being measurable is very important. For me, I always track how many hours I’m working. It’s easy to think, “I’m working for myself. I’m my own boss. I can do this later or tomorrow.” If I look at my calendar and I’ve already worked for six hours, I can be like, “I can work another fourteen hours sometime on Friday.” You got to be disciplined and figure out which days you’re going to work and how you can continue to measure. We’re going to talk about accountability a little bit later, but it’s important that you measure your progress every day so that you can hone in on your technique for setting your goals and making sure that you give yourself the best chance of succeeding.

Achievable

Also, make sure that your goals are achievable. When I say that, you have to have a short-term goal, a midterm goal, and then a long-term goal. If your long-term goal is to make a whole boatload of money, or you want to be known in your industry, or you want to help out everybody that’s poor or all the pets that are suffering, whatever your goal is, that’s 10 or 15 years from now. You might work your whole life on that, but you may not mind it.

For me, the journey is the most beautiful thing. What can you achieve in the next measurable time? A monthly goal of $2,000 a month was very achievable. Instead of saying, “I want to make $10,000 a month,” right from the get-go, I wanted to have a great foundation for my company so that every customer is real and I can continue to build on it. I want the customers to test me to make sure that I like them and that they like me. I didn’t want a huge order. I wanted them to test me with a small order so that there was not a whole lot of risk for them and for me either.

Make sure that your goals are achievable. I overachieved, so the next year, I increased my goal a little bit, and then the following year, I increased even more. I increased my goal for my monetary income, but I also reduced the number of hours I was willing to work. I became a lot more efficient over the years. Make sure that your goals are achievable and have a way to measure what you’ve achieved against your goal.

Goal Setting: You have to have a short-term goal, a mid-term goal, and then a long-term goal. Make sure that they are all achievable and that you have a way to measure what you’ve achieved against your goal.

Accountable

The next category is being accountable. This is a huge thing. It’s true with weight loss, bodybuilding, fitness, and making money. Everything has to do with accountability. You got to hold yourself accountable, especially when you work for yourself. Every day, for 24 hours, you can sleep or go to the beach and come back. It’s hard to be disciplined and say, “I want to give my company the best chance to succeed.” Some people overwork. Some people work from 6:00 AM until 12:00 AM every day. They don’t know when to stop and take a breather. Some people are procrastinators, and they don’t do what they said they were going to do. They check the boxes or think there’s a tomorrow.

Make sure that you have a support system. I know that for me, in the first few weeks, things were rough. Back in those days, I gave them 30 to 45-day terms, so even when I did sell things, when I invoice people, they didn’t pay me back for the first 30 days or more. If we’re manufacturing this stuff, I’ve already paid my vendors. When I receive it, I have to send it to my customer, and they have 30 to 45 days to pay me. There was a gap between what I paid my vendor to what I was going to get paid, so there were times when I was short of money.

I would never explain that to my parents, but my mom would always ask me, “How did you do? How many letters did you send out? It’s amazing that you’re able to like send out these letters every single day. It has to get boring.” She didn’t realize she was holding me accountable because sometimes, I would be having lunch with her, and I think to myself, “I forgot I took Monday off. I should have made up for Monday by sending out 100 letters today. I’m now having lunch with her, so today’s already shot. That means that I should cancel the time that I have with my husband this weekend. We’re supposed to watch a movie. I’m going to use those 3 hours and pump out 150 letters that I didn’t do the last 2 or 3 days.”

Sometimes, when you send out a letter with a postage stamp, which was all I had because we didn’t have an email back then, it goes over 3 or 4 days. Some people would write back to you. Some people would call you back on the telephone. It may be a week before you see any results from anybody. Even the people that are responding to you could take a week. That whole week is very excruciating for you to wait. You could get discouraged to say, “I don’t want to do it. Why bother? I haven’t heard from the last 1,000 people I sent a letter to.” All those things could happen, but if somebody is being accountable and asking you what you have done, what’s working for you, and what’s not working for you, it is a trigger.

We didn’t have a whole lot of money. My parents always would tell me, “I’ve heard it’s hard to start a business in America. I’ve heard that most businesses fail, but if anyone can do it, it’s you because you’re persistent and don’t take no for an answer.” My parents would always tell me these things, but I’m sitting there knowing that I blew it off. I used to watch Charlie’s Angels and Mission Impossible way back when they were a weekly series. Sometimes, I go from episode to episode because I have nobody to talk to during the day. Everybody I knew was at work. I wasn’t helping out my family and my company at that point, so being accountable or having somebody hold you accountable is important.

Repeatable

There is this idea that whatever goals you set should be sustainable so that they can be repeatable on demand. If you say, “$2,000 a month is something I could do with my eyes closed. That’s something that I could be paid every single month. I can count on it. That’s my safety net,” then you can up your goals. It’s something that’s doable, sustainable, and repeatable every month and every year so that you can work with what’s working. It’s important that you continue to build on that.

Your goals should be sustainable so that they can be repeatable on demand.

Time-sensitive

Lastly, make sure that every goal you set is time-sensitive. For me, I started with monthly goals. Once a month, I would check how many letters I sent and how much money I got. When I broke it out to weekly, it added the urgency. I needed to make $400 to $500 a week. In my memory, what I did last week was a lot closer than what I did last month. I thought, “I had a zero week last week. Nobody bought anything. I better get on the stick here. I need to at least find three customers even if they buy very few things so that I have a little bit of a cushion for next week in case I have two bad weeks in a row.” Make sure that it’s time-sensitive and not someday in the future. You should think of a time that’s tied into action.

Even back then, a lot of people didn’t make money. I made more money, but what’s important to me is that I was able to make the $2,000 a month by working twenty hours a week by myself with no outside help. I didn’t have any help. I didn’t have an assistant. I did buy a 1-800 number, which was $200 a month. That added to my expenses, but I was able to do more every single month.

I hope this lesson about goal setting has been very helpful to you. In the next episode, we’re going to go into what’s the biggest opportunity you have to monetize in a big way with the least amount of effort and the lowest risk factor financially, time-wise, and career-wise possible. I hope you enjoyed this. In the upcoming episodes, we’re going to pick up the pace and go down to the whole seven-week program. Then, I have three weeks of bonus. After you reach all that, I’ll give you a little bit of extra information on how to scale your business and a lot of the basic stuff about building websites. That’s one of the few things you do need that I didn’t need back in 1989.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. This whole series of episodes was created based on the audience’s requests. Many of you have written to me wanting to know how I did it personally and if I would ever share it. I would share it. That’s why I started this show. It’s so that I can help other people succeed. In my family, it has always been a family belief that successful people don’t have to talk about how successful they are. Successful people go out and help other people succeed. That’s what I want to do. I want to be successful and create a lot of successful people. I will share everything.

I would appreciate any feedback you have. I would also greatly appreciate you sharing this episode with at least one friend so that they can benefit from it and our voices can be elevated and amplified. Until next time. Remember to stay healthy and happy. Also, remember that happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you.

Important Links

June 8, 2022/by victoriawieck

MDH 73 Dr. Victor | Empowering Your Reality

Podcast

The Road To Greatness: Empowering Your Reality With Dr. Victor Manzo Jr.

Have you ever wished to do what you’ve always loved or found a way to work fewer hours and still have all your career dreams come true to enjoy life fully? In this episode, Victoria Wieck’s guest is somebody who did just that. The author of two books, business mindset coach, Certified Pediatric Chiropractor, and holistic practitioner, Dr. Victor Manzo Jr. helps individuals gain clarity and break habits and patterns that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Today, get to know more about his journey to finding his passion and purpose and gain insights on how you can empower your own reality.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Road To Greatness: Empowering Your Reality With Dr. Victor Manzo Jr.

You have heard me talk about this one topic over and over again. How do we all do what we love and find a way to work fewer hours and still have all our career dreams come true so that we could enjoy life and live the life that we deserve to live, not the life we think we have to live. In this episode, I am so excited to have a conversation with somebody who did that. Not only did he do it, but he did it in the category of business that is extremely difficult to position yourself and get ahead.

He used to be a full-time chiropractor. He still does this if somebody needs it, but he spends time coaching other people on how to do exactly what he did because he has found the formula for success. What I mean by success is not fast fame, fortune, and money, but about how to achieve your financial peak while at the same time still having all of the gifts of life that come your way. Without further ado, I want to introduce Dr. Vic Manzo. Welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.

I said about you being a chiropractor but long before that when you were first born, you are the most unlikely chiropractor I have ever met because my father was an acupuncturist, which falls into the same category. He was the president of several different universities that taught that. It is a tough way to let people know what you do, especially if you are not in one of those big cities, people do not even know what a chiropractor is. They are like, “Is that a real science?” Most people do not realize that is a four-year course after you graduate from college so it is a Doctorate degree.

You came from a very blue-collar background. Your parents were not rich. They were not particularly hyper-educated. You somehow had to have some motivation that was given to you, like your DNA or you are self-motivated to go in that direction. From that beginning, tell us how you achieved all that you achieved and what you do now.

One of the things that always kept me moving forward was seeing the suffering that was going on and the arguments that you see. As a child, you do not pay attention to what people say. It is the reactions and the modeling that you saw. I saw this heavy presence and heavy attachment to finances, but we did not experience much of that.

My parents lived paycheck-to-paycheck going through that. For me, maybe it was by design in some way, but my father always had me go work hard and lay carpet with him. He is like, “I am going to show you what hard work is all about so you do not do what I do.” My grandfather used to make me go work with him. He was very successful in business from a restaurant standpoint, but then he gambled all his fortune away.

He had to work and he is like, “I do not want you to be a dummy like me.” I got to see that and they were trying to teach me their lessons. Throughout my life, it was always like, “I am not going to do that. I am going to be something different. I do not want to go down that path.” I have seen the emotional struggle, the limitedness, and the fears. I am an empath so I felt that even deeper. I was like, “What do I even want to do?” I was always thinking of the big stuff, like a lawyer, accountant, or maybe a chef. These are all these different things until chiropractic showed up and found me because I used to be very big in health and fitness and did everything from supplements and exercise.

My mom is a fitness instructor. I was doing everything right at nineteen years old. I have been doing it for six years and then all of a sudden, my health kept going lower. Long story short, I went to a chiropractor. I came back to the one I used to see when I was a kid. Within three months, I was in the best shape of my life. I felt absolutely amazing. That is where it, all of a sudden, sparked something. I am like, “What is this chiropractic thing? I want to learn more about this.”

I was telling the chiropractor, I am like, “You do this thing to me and that is going to take care of the laundry list of stuff I have going on?” He was like, “Yes. Pretty much.” I was like, “I got to learn and understand this.” That is where my drive came from there. I wanted to be the best chiropractor that I can possibly be for whoever I am serving and to continue to do that. That was a drive that kept me going through my career to get to the levels of what I was doing and so forth.

Embrace the darkness and see it as a teacher. See the wisdom that it teaches us. Have a different perspective rather than thinking, “This isn’t good.”

I am going to unpack that because I am going to get into how the work of chiropractic or the journey of it is very similar to the entrepreneurship journey. There are no quick fixes. You have to take care and have a pulse on your body, have a pulse on what is going on, and you keep on tweaking. A lot of this is art and trial and error as well. There is real well-proven science to that, but still, everybody is different. Your parents tried their hardest and they failed at many things. A lot of people either succeeded or made one mistake and then they are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Your father did not make a check until he was working with his hands or his body manually. You got yourself motivated and you get into chiropractic. I am sure you found out that as much as you loved it, believed in it, and you want to go fix everybody drug-free, there was such a resistance to the science of chiropractic. Everywhere I go, I have a chiropractor on retainer. I travel a lot. I have traveled 4 million miles before COVID happened. I kid you not when I go to Minnesota, I have a chiropractor there. Not that I feel like I need to go see them the minute I land, but if I ever got in trouble, I want to know there was somebody there rather than going to a hospital.

I am a firm believer in that but I also know that having been recommended by chiropractors to other people that I know who suffer, there is such resistance. A lot of Americans would rather get surgery on their shoulders before they will even try it. It is amazing that you somehow found your financial peak in that area. That had to be hard for you to build a practice and business in that chiropractic.

Yes and no. I had to figure out what my message about chiropractic was because there is such a misunderstanding. Let’s say I adjust a newborn and patients would go, “Why does a newborn have to come here?” I am like, “Do you want the short answer to the long answer? What time do you have?” They say, “I only got ten seconds so I will give you the short answer.” I will explain how the brain is developed, how fast it grows, and all that. I say, “Would you want that for your child to be on track making sure it is developing the way it goes? Symptoms may not show up, but there will be things that will be going on, or do you want to take it by chance?”

They are like, “I did not know that. That is interesting.” When you talk to an adult and mention chiropractic, the first thing they are going to think of is, “Chiropractors just take care of back pain, neck pain, and headaches.” This is me figuring out my message of how I wanted to explain chiropractic because once I got authentic and congruent with myself, then all of a sudden, I set goals. It was happening because I was being true to me and what mattered most to me. I would tell people, “Chiropractic does not treat any illness, conditions, symptom, or disease.” Scientifically, we do not.

The reason why is because if I make an adjustment, no matter where I am adjusting, it may be the neck or lower back, how do I know it is helping the lower back? I can make an adjustment to your neck and someone can regain bladder function. A kid can get an adjustment at the mid part of their neck and all of a sudden, they are not peeing in bed at night anymore. There is no one thing to one thing. A lot of times, what happens in society, and this is mainly because we are mainstream medical driven, is that we think treatment is for everything. Chiropractic is not a treatment.

We do not do one-to-one. It is one-to-many. That is where the difference comes in. When I started educating my community on that, they started to see how it was more related to health just like working out, eating right, and sleeping right. The more you do those things, the better your health is going to be. The same thing came in with chiropractic.

You were dialed in on your messaging. What you said is interesting because a lot of chiropractors get so defensive and they do not know how to explain what they do. They do not like doctors. They talk badly about the medical community. There are a lot of things that they do that I do not agree with, but still, a lot of chiropractors are not clear on their own messaging. They do not believe that their messaging is going to work. You being brutally honest about what you can and cannot do, you are serving your community even if they do not come to you.

Simply by educating and setting an example, you were able to attract a certain number of your target audience. That is how you grow your chiropractic business. After you hit what you thought was your American dream, which is to be making a living and doing what you love to do. You became a chiropractor because you believed in it and then you are at your financial peak yet you were not happy according to your bio. Why were you not happy or not emotionally fulfilled?

It was one of the things where I looked at my wife and said, “We can have almost anything we want. We can enjoy what matters most to us. I was shocked that this was it.” I was conditioned to listen to other successful chiropractors telling me what success was. When I got to that point, I looked at my practice and I was like, “This is not what I want. I am not feeling like I am making a dent in the movement of health care and why I became a chiropractor in the first place.” Within a six-month period, I was letting go of patients that did not fit into the office anymore. We took a 40% hit financially, but all of a sudden, I was like, “This is where I want to go.” It was being a pediatric chiropractor.

Rediscover Your Greatness: A Guide to an INSPIRED and FULFILLED Life

I wanted to get into pregnancy and fertility. When you talk about pregnancy, there is so much fear being into the mindset and the psyche of women. My wife is pregnant and one of those things is the stories that people will say where it is like, “We are going to have a home birth.” They are going, “I wish you the best of luck with that.”

The advice that you give is you would never give that to someone who is starting a business or trying to heal from something, but for pregnancy, it is all this fear. I was like, “I want to be that person. I do not care what happens. If we succeed, we succeed. If we do not, we do not. I am going to go all in. I am going to help out kiddos because their health is declining like crazy. I want to be able to help make a dent in my community at least.”

We went to pregnancy and so forth, and I made that whole shift. Six months later, we were breaking records in the office. We were soaring back a year later to where we were and we maintain growth from that point. I was so less stressed. I was working less. The process was amazing because I was living my truth and what mattered to me now.

What was a chiropractor to Vic Manzo? What did that mean to be a chiropractor? What was my purpose? What do I want to do to serve at that level? We served about 50% of pediatrics in our office. It was kids coming in, getting adjusted regularly, and making sure their nervous systems are in alignment so they could show up being the best version of themselves.

My granddaughter was ten months old and I went through with this exact same thing. I am going to digress and backtrack for all of you who are reading this message. Many of you have known me for many years on TV. You may not have known that my father was an acupuncturist who believed in anything other than going to prescription drugs or surgery as a first thing.

He was a medical doctor back home, but he used to always say, “I do not understand why they call acupuncturists, chiropractors, and acupressure alternative medicine. That should be the primary way you treat your body. What is worse? Getting a bad adjustment from your chiropractor or a surgery went bad?” It is pretty drastic.

Don’t you at least owe yourself to try to do other assets? Here is a true story. My granddaughter is ten months. My daughter went through natural birth. She did not realize she was already for epidural and everything else, but because she was so well-prepared with her body, by the time she felt something moving, she thought, “I do not know if I am in contractions or not.”

Long story short, by the time they got in the car and got to the hospital, which was twenty minutes away, they were telling us she was at 5 centimeters dilated. They took her to the ER. She had the baby within 30 minutes of it then they admitted her to the hospital. They do not have time to give her admission forms. She is chilling out in her room with a healthy newborn.

The next day, they came back with like, “We forgot to admit you to the hospital. Here is your admissions form and a discharge form.” A lot of people do not realize this, but most babies actually are born with their heads favoring one way or the other. Her pediatrician recommended seeing a specialist for this.

There were going to recommend a $5,000 helmet for a baby. Coming from my background, I had questions like, “How uncomfortable is it for a newborn to be in a helmet? Does it sweat? What does it do?” They said, “It sweats and it is quite uncomfortable. They will have some problems with sleep.” I looked into alternative ways to fix this. We went to the osteopath once a week for about four weeks and then once every other week for the next month, and then once a month. Her head is perfect. No medications and the kids still sleep twelve hours a day. Every night, she goes to bed at 6:00 PM and gets up at 6:00 AM. It is amazing. That is what I wanted to tell you about pregnancy and children.

Instead of doing time management, which is fine and good, do energy management. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck?

Let’s face it, professional marketers know that fear is one of the most profitable businesses so they sell fear. If you go to a chiropractor, they might break your bone when in fact, when you look at the real risks of the treatments, surgery going bad or you are not waking up from anesthesia or recovery going back, all those things are much more drastic than natural ways of healing yourself.

Getting back to your story, I see why you wrote the book entitled Rediscover Your Greatness because here you were, you thought you were doing an amazing business. You are an amazing chiropractor, you thought you have achieved the pinnacle of your success, but then you had to rediscover within that framework something that is even greater than what you were already doing. Is that when you wrote the book or did you write the book after?

It was a couple of years after. I was looking at what can help the greatness of individuals thrive and what that looks like. I walked through and talked about the different fabrics of life from the Law of Focus of who we are, how are we a creator, and how we choose our lives, and because of all the things I did in those few years before.

By shifting your focus and going in the direction that you wanted to go, wanted to own your chiropractic business, and practice your chiropractic skills on your terms on the people that you thought you would have a positive impact on. You went from working full-time to working fewer hours, and you have got absolutely more emotional freedom, but did it also help you financially? Did you grow up financially or was it at a cost?

Being a family wellness chiropractor, I was always told, “You have to work at least four days a week plus a weekend.” I started to build this confidence and I was like, “I chose to do these pediatrics.” I had to cancel my weekends and my practice grew. There is a law of least effort which states, “Anything in the world, anything in life, anything always has a minimum amount of effort to get the maximum gain.” That does not mean you can do more effort, but you are not going to maximize the gain. There is only a certain point that you are going to get to for every effort that is created. I was like, “What is the least effort I can do to keep my practice where it is or continue to grow?”

We started looking at our hours and getting creative. We are like, “What are the times that I want to work compared to what I was told to do or what most chiropractors do?” For a few years, we worked fourteen and a half hours a week, which means I was in the office fourteen and a half hours a week. The average chiropractor works about 24, 25, or 26 hours, give or take. I was almost half of that. It was one of those things where at the same time, I continue my growth. I was still growing at least at a minimum of 10% to 20% per year from a profit side, not a sales side. We never had a negative down year and it was wonderful. We were breaking records still. It was unreal.

Even during COVID where most chiropractors took hits of 35%, 80%, roughly. We took a 40% hit, but we regrouped and re-centered, and then we were breaking records in that year and continuing. I sound like a broken record, but it is what it was. Being authentic is what mattered to me. I am all about, “What is the least amount of work I have to do to get the greatest gain possible?” That has been my model in my life of trying to figure that out. We did it with the practice and it worked wonders.

The Law of Diminishing Returns is real. The military is a great place where they discover all kinds of experimental scientific backgrounds. If you are shipping something to QVC or HSN and I will make a piece of jewelry and they will sell 10,000 pieces of the same item, on any given month, I will be on TV and we go through 100,000 of something.

What happens is when they do a QA control, if you have twenty people checking the 10,000 of the exact same piece over and over again, the first few hours are very productive. They catch everything, every single stone that is missing, but after they hit about 8 hours, the next 10 hours, even if they are going to sleep, the next day they come back, they do not catch everything.

They are almost better off that they randomly pick 125 pieces. You can pick blindly and make sure that they check those. Believe it or not, they are more accurate in checking the 125 pieces than having somebody check all 10,000 pieces. That is a real deal. That is how most of these companies do their QA control. That is what we described as the Law of Diminishing Returns because your eyes cannot see the difference after a certain amount of time. A of times, many of you have spoken to me personally after a speech that you are exhausted and working.

Empowering Your Reality: What is the least amount of work you have to do to get the greatest gain possible?

You used to work 60 hours a week in corporate then you leave. You loved it when you were working 35 hours a week because you had to make enough money. You are now working 60 hours a week and making half the money. You are worried about whether or not your kids are eating healthy food or they are driving through a fast food thing with their dad. You certainly have found a way to maximize returns where your efforts are at their peak, not by working too many hours but by working the right amount of hours. You now have a path forward. Is that what you are sharing with your audience and how do you help other people?

It is all about health. You shared it greatly and the same thing with the mind. They have done studies on peak performance in the mind and what it can handle. A lot of times we think we got to keep grinding things out and what we know is that is so the opposite. That was old research about muscles and it was like, “We challenged a muscle,” and then they started seeing similarities in the brain.

What we know is the opposite. The brain likes to rest. Your heart beats all the time. It never stops. It never rests, but if you look at what the heart does, it works nine hours a day when you add up the time. It contracts and then relaxes. The reason why I shifted these gears is I wanted to maximize my energy in what I do and maximize my focus so that when I am doing something, I am 100% there.

I may have worked only fourteen and a half hours in the office. I probably worked about twenty hours a week in my business for chiropractic. I did podcasts. I had a book. I had another coaching business that I was doing but I was able to jump into each of those and it was that. The more you can laser focus in and hone in, some people call this flow state, and some people in athletics call it the zone, this is a true place to be when you are hyper-focused on what you are doing.

Do you have infinite energy? I can continue to go and go. It is one of those simplest things, but it is knowing how you can break this up so you can manage your energy. I teach a lot of my clients and I share a lot of this stuff instead of doing time management, which is fine and good, do energy management. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for your buck? For me, I am more effective when it comes to creative ideas first thing in the morning. All my good stuff comes in the morning. That is why I do it in the morning.

In the afternoon, I am doing more of the stuff that I got to get done. It is not the good creative stuff. It is maybe my socials. I will get that stuff out then because I know how my brain works, I know what works for me. This is something I share with my clients a lot. Knowing your type, are you a bear, and look at where your performance is going to be at most time.

I do not work out in the mornings because I do not have the energy there. I can work out but I do not hit the levels of where I want to go in my workouts. If I work out between 12:00 PM and 2:00 PM, that is prime time for me. I can go in, do a hard workout, hit the numbers, break some personal records, and go exert as much as I can.

When you are doing mental work, research has shown that it is anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours max peaks. You got to find what works for you. You got to play with this. You will know because your productivity or creativity starts to slow down or you start to get a little tired then you know you hit your max and you start playing with this until you figure it out. Mine is an hour and a half. That is what I know I can go to the max with then I need to take a break.

I completely agree with you on that. I am a very productive person in the morning. I am in the middle of writing my second book. I wrote science fiction, I am writing my second. I wrote from 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM because that is when I am most creative, but if I asked twenty entrepreneurs, “What is your most productive time?”

The truth is they do not know because you are too absorbed in your schedule and going with what is on your calendar, what your admin assistant tells you what you got to do, and you are just going until you mentally crash. You do not even realize it. The whole idea of taking an inventory of why you are here? What is your purpose in life? What are you passionate about? What impact do you want to have? What do you want to focus on? What do you want to align yourself with the belief system?

The universe is always there to support us. Every step of the way, it’s always there for the good. Everything’s always a win in life.

Also, take an inventory of your body. You got to understand that if you are a morning person, you probably are going to be most productive in the morning. You want to do the most important things in your life when you are most productive. I could not care less if I am burning 200 calories or 20 calories. I do not do that in the morning.

I love my science fiction. I presented it to a bunch of publishers and they all loved it. They asked me to write three books. Not only because they told me, but I loved the story and I wanted to write it so I am willing to get up an hour earlier than I normally do and write between 5:00 AM and 7:00 AM no matter what.

When you are talking about rediscovering your greatness, as your book said, you do have to have some inventory of what your skillset is, why you are here, what your purpose is, and what you want. You need to go, “I am here now, grinding it out. If I want to be over there, how do I get there?” Part of that is taking an assessment of yourself.

If you are not healthy enough to have a full schedule, maybe you should have an inventory of your health, too. Understanding what your strengths are, who you are, and what your mission is. If you do not have that dialed in, you cannot help other people. You cannot serve other people in a way that could be maximumly affected by that. I am glad you shared that with me. Now, let me ask you. You wrote another book called A Walk in the Dark. What is that book about?

It is all about the darkness that we face in life. It is obstacles, challenges, and traumas. The whole purpose of the book was to end mental suffering, but also to embrace the darkness and see it as a teacher, see the wisdom that it teaches us, and have a different perspective rather than thinking, “This is not good. I had this happen to me in the past.”

We resist it, which only affects our mental health and also our physical health, and to have the dance of life and return people back to that. They can understand that, “This challenge may be showing up or maybe this hiccup showed in my life, but Dr. Vic said in that book, the universe is always there to support us every step of the way. It is always there for the good. There is always a win in life. How can that be a win?” If you ask that question, “How can this be a win?” You will start to see that. Things will start to show up. If you truly believe it, it will start to show up.

One of my friends was sharing a story about how he had a flat tire and he goes, “Most people would be upset about that. All of a sudden, I had someone call me I have not talked to in years. I am waiting for someone to come. I had a great time being able to have a conversation. If I held myself being frustrated in my conversation with that person, I would not have time, but if it was, I would have been complaining. Instead, we were reminiscing about life and I have not talked to him a lot. We talked about how we have not seen each other. Now we are getting together next week for lunch.” If you had that shift, you would have known there is something always good coming out of that. That was the main purpose of the book.

I love the title of the book and when you explained what is in the book. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the thought of embracing the darkness. Without the rain, you will not have a rainbow. Personally, it is very Asian thinking, I believe that a certain amount of darkness is given to you. It is built into your life so that you can learn and grow.

If your life never has any challenges, you do not have a dark day at all in your life. Number one, it would be pretty boring. Secondly, I believe and I know you believe this too based on your own background, it is all those dark moments that you have survived and endured that shaped your future. Only because you embraced it and you did not resent your father for working being a manual laborer or maybe your uncle or grandfather are telling you, “I lost all my money. Do not be like me.”

You embraced what they were telling you. You learn from their mistakes and watch other people suffer that you did not want to suffer. You were looking for a pathway out of that. I am so happy that you came on this show and shared your story and your journey. I am excited to see many of you go and check out Dr. Manzo’s website. It is EmpowerYourReality.com. As we close this episode, if you were to give somebody who started a business or who is in the process of starting a business like they are in that transition period to side hustle, what advice would you give them?

A Walk in the Dark: A Guide to Finding Your TRUE LIGHT

The thing I share with my clients when I started work with them on day one, and that is you got to create your vision. What is the vision that you see in your overall life? The reason why I say it is because success happens because we are congruent with something. When we do not have congruencies, we have blockages.

When you have blockages, it is going to be a hard battle to get up there. When you have crystal clear in your vision of what you are being here in this world like mine is to raise the consciousness of every human being I can come and touch with. All the work I do from every element of what I do aligns with that. That is why I write books because I want to help elevate the consciousness of a human beings.

I was a chiropractor because I want to elevate the consciousness of the human being that I am working through the art of chiropractic. Being a business mindset coach, mindset is everything. The mind is all ends and starts. That is why I do those things. When I have that, that is the one thing you want to get so crystal clear on. A lot of businesspeople miss that.

I was a Business major so I was like, “We heard about the vision statement. We heard about vision, but it was not that. We got the mission and we talked about what to do.” I have seen the radical change in my life and others. When we can get crystal clear on the vision, you are starting to utilize the universal principles, the laws, and how to interact in so many different ways.

Quantum Physics supports this, too, that you make the path a little easier because now when you make choices and if it is not aligned with your vision, you are not going to take it because that is a distraction. When you have a shortcoming coming up, you are not going to let the negative energy come in so much or lower vibration of emotions because you could stay centered on the vision of what you want to create. That is what the billionaires that I have studied done. Elon Musk is one of the prime examples. It is one of those things where if you can have that, that will set the tone for everything else.

Get clear on your vision and that directs all your efforts, your thinking, and your mind-body aligned with your vision because that vision is the end goal. If everything hits the right way, that is what you are going to end up with. That is important that you start with that, not something you are going to stumble into because there are a lot of other things before you get to the end. Can you share how other people can get ahold of you and when they get to you, what they can find on your website?

The easiest way to get ahold of me and find me on social media is EmpowerYourReality.com. At the top, you will see all the socials that I am connected with. My podcast, my blog, I have got some freebies on there. I got a book on the power of visualization sharing some science on how the mind can change matter. I share some studies there, and then you can contact me there and so much more.

Do not forget about the two books that he had authored. I believe everybody is great. You just have to rediscover your unique greatness. Believe me, you do have the greatness that you can share. Rediscover Your Greatness and A Walk in the Dark by Dr. Vic Manzo. Thank you so much for coming on. For those of you who are reading, please go ahead and subscribe to the show. If you have not shared it already, please share it with at least one other person so we can amplify and elevate our message out there. Until next week, please stay happy and healthy. Remember, happiness is a choice and I hope you make great choices.

Important Links

About Dr. Victor Manzo Jr.

I am a business mindset coach, certified pediatric chiropractor, holistic practitioner, author, podcaster and speaker.

I am the author of two books, “Rediscover Your Greatness,” and “A Walk in the Dark.” I am currently working on my third book which will be released May 2022 called, “Decoding The Matrix.”

I am a podcaster for two podcasts, “The Mindful Experiment” which has over 360 episodes and has 30,000 downloads per month and The Mindful Chiropractor Podcast which started in Oct 2021.

I help business owners get truly clear on what they want to create in business and life, review where they are and what they have tried, help come up with and options to create action and hold them accountable by agreeing to the plan of action.

But, what separates me different is the mindset side of things. On top of the 4 things above, I go deeper to uncover their beliefs, blocks, behaviours, habits and patterns of thinking that prevent them from living the life or creating the business they like to experience.

From there, I use a box of tools to help reprogram the mind, reshift focus, teach spiritual truths and bring quantum physics into the mix to unveil their true potential and then, make that a reality.

With this breakthrough process and systems, it helps my clients achieve faster results, greater and deeper transformations and long-term success.
For more info, visit www.empoweryourreality.com
It is a copy of my first 3 chapters of my 2nd book, “A Walk in the Dark.”

May 25, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

Achieving Explosive Growth With Non-Food Franchising With Jon Ostenson

There was a time when franchising a business almost always involved food. Famous brands like McDonald’s, Popeyes, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Starbucks were some of the most well-known in the food franchising sector. But soon enough, non-food franchising businesses such as pharmacies, nail salons, and travel agencies entered the scene. Today’s episode will talk about non-food franchising with a national franchise broker, investor, author, and international speaker, Jon Ostenson. Tune in to get expert advice and useful insights on franchising as well as how to achieve explosive growth in the business.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Achieving Explosive Growth With Non-Food Franchising With Jon Ostenson

Welcome to another episode of the show. I have a very hot and interesting topic to discuss. It’s a topic that I’ve always been curious about, but we’ve never presented it on this show before. I’m excited to learn about franchising, specifically non-food franchising. I have somebody who has been in the space for a very long time and is an expert. We can break it down into small bite-sized pieces so that we can understand the whole process of franchising from the point of view of the franchisee as well as somebody who has a concept of what’s a franchise business in a big way. Without further ado, I’d like to welcome my guest, Jon Ostenson.

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Welcome to the show.

Thanks. I’m excited to be here. I love the show. I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Franchising is such a hot topic. I know you are in the non-food franchising, but I have some friends who are in the fast-food franchising and they’re all multi-millionaires, so apparently, franchising as a concept works. It’s working for the franchisor, but it also works for some of the franchisees. Why is franchising such a hot topic? Before we get there, tell us a little bit about your own background and how you got into this. Did you get stumbled into this?

I had a long run in the corporate world and, like so many of your audience, climbed the ladder and enjoyed the benefits that come with Corporate America, but I had that itch to do something a little more entrepreneurial. That’s where I stumbled from Corporate America into franchising and took a little bit of a different route. I then came in on the franchisor side. I served as President of the ShelfGenie franchise system.

We experienced some great growth. ShelfGenie did custom pull-out shelving for kitchens and pantries and had the opportunity to come in and run all of our supporting teams that were supporting our owners all across North America on a daily basis. For me, that opened up my eyes to this world of franchising outside of fast food, which I’d always associated with franchising as a lot of people do.

Long story short, I ended up becoming a franchisee of a few brands myself with some business partners, including the founder of ShelfGenie. For the most part, we’ve got good people running those businesses for us. It allows me to spend most of my time playing matchmaker going deep with all these different brands in different industries, representing a couple of hundred franchise brands and then helping them find great candidates to step in and take on new markets. We get to have a lot of fun working with our clients, taking them through a streamlined process, and introducing them to the opportunities that are the best fit for them.

Let’s get down to why franchising is so hot. Something becomes hot when it is a win-win situation. It’s when people get into something that is making a lot of money or making a lot of noise and becoming inventive. That’s why I’m guessing franchising is hot. It has been an upward trend for a long time, but people didn’t think about franchising. When you say franchising, they think of things like Subway, McDonald’s, or Burger King. They don’t think about other industries such as health and wellness that could be, for example, tanning salons. Massage Envy is probably another one. Why is it so hot, in your opinion?

A lot of times, people don’t realize they’re shopping at different franchises or they’re using franchise services. They don’t realize it’s a franchise. Franchising itself is an $800 billion industry, so it’s very important to the GDP of the country. There are 800 establishments leading to 8 million jobs out there. It’s a huge industry. In the past couple of years, franchising was experiencing an upward trend and then COVID accelerated that. QSRs and fast-food restaurants had a tough time during COVID, but a lot of other industries thrived.

What COVID did was it caused a lot of people to question the path they’re on and say, “Maybe now is the time to scratch out the entrepreneurial itch. Maybe I need to go build my own empire instead of someone else’s,” but oftentimes, they don’t know where to start. How do you enter into business ownership? What is the right opportunity?

A lot of times, people do associate franchising with fast food, and what they don’t know is that of the 4,000 franchise brands in the US alone, half of those are in non-food industries, which I know we’ll dig into in a minute. Once the light bulb comes on and they realize that there are these other paths to business ownership, we see a lot of interest from a wide variety of backgrounds.

We’ve done deals with those in their 20s all the way through their 60s, but certainly, there’s a lot of activity in the late 30s, 40s, and 50s where maybe half of our clients are those that are looking to make a jump into full-time business ownership and run the day-to-day as an operator. The other half are looking for the executive model or what we’d call a semi-absentee where they stand up a general manager from day one, and then they provide some coaching along the way. It comes down to having the right person, but we are able to coach them around that.

Non Food Franchising: Franchising is an $800-billion industry, so it’s very important to the country’s GDP. There are 800 establishments leading to 8 million jobs out there. It’s a huge industry.

You hit a lot of topics here that are in the news. I wrote my book, Million Dollar Passion, some time ago, in 2017 and 2018. In that time, the world has changed. We had COVID from 2020 to 2022. We’re now living in what they call the great resignation era, where we have upwards of 4 million Americans who quit their jobs every month.

I hear from a lot of them. Every time I give a speech or a free webinar, I’d say that a good 1/3 of the people tuning in have already started a side hustle or want to start a side hustle. They’re in a corporate world. They don’t know how to make that transition because they feel like the higher they are in a corporate environment, the harder it is for them to leave the job. It seems like the job sucks and they don’t have a lot of job security, but they’re still getting a huge paycheck, so they have to invest money.

There’s this conception that when you leave the corporate world, your only choice is to run an active business or become a silent investor in somebody else’s business that you don’t know who they are. In the middle of that, you’ve got the franchising. If you’re reading this and thinking about starting a business or you’ve already started a business and you realize you’re working longer hours than you used to in corporate and making less money, franchising could be something you could explore. What advice would you have for those people? What are the real benefits of franchising? Let’s go to that.

I’d start out by saying franchising is not right for everyone. I’ve got some clients that are too entrepreneurial. They want to put their thumbprints all over it and don’t want to live within the boundaries, but for so many, franchising is a better path to business ownership. You look at the numbers and after five years, over 90% of franchises are still in business, whereas less than 10% of startups would be. I like to say that with franchising, you’re in business for yourself but not by yourself. You do have a supporting mechanism. You’ve got that franchisor, and the better that you perform, the better they do. It’s a coach on the sidelines.

You’ve got other franchise owners and other markets that are living the same thing day-in and day-out. It’s a peer group that you can learn from. I’ve been a franchisee myself, and I’ve seen how we’ve traded marketing tips, tested different types of hiring practices, or found talent. We’re constantly exchanging best practices. The big thing is you’ve got that playbook. You’re not testing product-market fit on day one. You know it’s a proven model and a path to profitability. It’s all about going out there and executing it. That’s a huge win.

From an exit value standpoint, you’re building a business that’s going to have cashflow along the way. You’re going to be able to write off expenses that you couldn’t as a W-2 employee, but then lastly, you’re going to be able to sell that business down the road. There was an interesting study that came out by the Rinker School of Business that looked at 2,000 business exits over a twenty-year period. They looked at franchise versus non-franchised in like-kind industries. What they found was franchise businesses traded at multiple one and a half times that non-franchised in similar industries. There’s a lot of value that are resell-buyers down the road as well.

You brought up some great points. One of the biggest drawbacks of being a solo entrepreneur or a true entrepreneur is your business. The easiest way for you to succeed as a true solo entrepreneur is to become the personal branding yourself. A lot of the relationships with your suppliers are with you, not with your employees. All the important things are with you.

Therefore, you’ve got to be there the whole time, and then when you want to exit the business or if your kids don’t want to take it over, it’s tough to sell it without you being there. Having something like a franchise, your exit is somewhat guaranteed. You may not make a fortune off of it, but you’re still not going to lose everything when you leave.

There are a lot more exit options down the road. That franchisor has probably collected names of people in your market that have wanted to buy, but they haven’t been able to because you own the rights there. That’s a great lead list for us. One of the franchises that I’m invested in is a driveway repair business and concrete coating business. It’s going gangbusters, but we bought out two other franchise owners in the Atlanta market where we’re based. You do have those roll-ups naturally as well.

Is there such thing as minimum startup money that you need to start a franchise? I’m assuming it varies depending on location and as well as the industries, but can someone truly get into the franchising business with very little money?

A big piece of that comes down to the type of business, whether it’s real estate-related and that it’s got a brick and mortar customer-facing retail type of environment, which you think of when you think of franchising, but I’d say 50% to 60% of the deals that we’ve been doing don’t have a physical location. That’s where people have been gravitating towards as well coming out of COVID, not being tied down. I’d say 75% of the placements that we do fall in the range of 1$25,000 to $300,000. That’s the range that we see most deals falling into. Some are a little north of that and some are south of that.

There are different ways for funding that. In some cases, people are using SBA loans. Those are very common. Believe it or not, the government still supports small businesses in some ways like SBA loans, and then you’ve got the ROBS program, which is a retirement program. Another option is the self-directed IRA or 401(k). Portfolio loans are very common.

Franchising is not right for everyone, but for so many, franchising is a better path to business ownership.

That’s something that I do personally because the interest rates are so low. It’s an arbitrage type of opportunity. With the record levels of cash on the sidelines, you do have some people who are self-funding the business, but when I quote the $125,000 to $300,000, that would be an all-in, including working capital and everything.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this or not. My publisher told me that it’s not good enough to cite a recent Forbes article. You would have to write, “Forbes article on February, whatever of 2021,” and a written by so-and-so. It was in Forbes and it was something like 63% of Americans want to start their businesses. It’s interesting because 63% of Millennials want to start their businesses because they’re tired of horrible bosses, horrible pay, and horrible working conditions, and they don’t see a huge upside in the next ten years.

At the same time, 63% of the people that are looking at retirement age, 50 and up, are saying that they would prefer owning a business to retirement if money was not a huge issue because they feel like they have so much more knowledge than when they were in their twenties. They’re in a better position to fund their venture because they’d have some savings. They have all this money in there.

It was an interesting study that 63% was so consistent. That’s in every age group. This might be why franchising is hard because people would be evaluating their priorities and how they live. That sounds great. In every industry, even in franchising, there are some trends that are hot. What would you say are in the non-food industry that’s hot for franchising to jump in as a franchisee? We’re going to get into the franchise or thing in a minute.

We see things moving and coming out of COVID in the home and property services. That has been the hottest area. It’s a $600 billion market. I did three separate deals on gutters. We had a Wall Street attorney buying a gutter business. We had a couple of Corporate America executives buying a gutter business. They never thought they’d be in that space, but they loved the financials, the model, and the support on the backend.

I mentioned my driveway business, but I joke that non-sexy is the new sexy. I’ve got clients that are buying roll-off dumpster businesses or SERVPRO-type models that are services that Amazon or COVID is not going to disrupt. Recessions won’t ever put it out of style. Then, you also have health and wellness and fitness. I had a client in Arkansas. She’s a PhD from the University of Arkansas. She bought a fitness concept that’s a smaller box and technology-driven that caters to those 60 and above, which are largely not catered to by the big box retail type of shops. They care more about their health and wellness than ever before.

The people are about their health, homes, kids, and pets. Those are other areas that businesses can cater to. You think about the aging population. There are a lot of businesses that are not just in-home care but retrofitting bathrooms, chairlifts, wheelchair ramps, and letting people age in place. There are even oil changes. We know electric vehicles are coming, but less than 10% of cars on the road will still be electric fifteen years from now. There’s still a long runway.

We did another ten-unit deal where they used prefabricated buildings backed by an investor group in unused parking spaces of a retail shopping center. That concept’s on fire. They’d probably done 100 deals in the past. It’s because people are realizing, “This is a great model in an age-old industry and we can do it a little bit better.”

I’ve been looking for a gutter person to deal with my gutters here for almost a year. It’s hard to get anybody out. You don’t know who to call. We don’t have gutter franchisees out here in San Diego, where I’m at. I’m in a very affluent area where all these homes are very large. I used to have everybody on a schedule. I had a chimney cleaner guy go over all the chimneys in my home. The last guy who did the gutters moved to Arizona a couple of years ago and I haven’t found somebody consistent that can go up and do it. Roofers is another one.

When it comes to health and wellness, I’m in my 60s and my mother-in-law is 100 years old. For the last few years, we have had to go through all that. We had to do the chairs and we had to retrofit our bathrooms. We had to get everything for health and fitness. I’ve got pets. We used a franchisee called Just Dogs. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them or not. My dog had IBD and this company has a nutritionist there and they cook all the food. You go pick it up every Tuesday for the week. It was $400 a week for the dog food, but I was glad to have found them. I can imagine they made a whole lot of money doing that.

The driveway is another thing. My whole house is hardwired. A lot of that wiring is under the driveway. Even if you are not sure, at least with the franchisee, you have recourse if they do a horrible job. I hear you. Everything you mentioned makes a lot of sense to me. As far as the whole world is catering to the Millennials, I’m thinking about the Millennials and most of them don’t own homes, so in this list of things, if they don’t own a home, they’re not buying a home and property services.

To me, 60-plus is an overlooked market because they have the money. They care about their health, their children, and their pets. That’s interesting. Let’s jump back to the franchisor model. If you had a killer concept, for example, consistently helping to change eating habits, weight loss, or maybe a way for you to get a certain amount of calories, how hard is it for you to go from concept to franchising something?

Non Food Franchising: A lot of times, people associate franchising with fast food. They don’t know that of the 4,000 franchise brands in the US alone, half of those are in non-food industries.

It’s a great way for a lot of companies to scale. I think that a lot of business owners I talk to through the entrepreneurs’ organization and other groups are realizing, “Maybe I should consider franchising as a way to scale.” Think about that as a business owner. You always want your employees to act like owners, but here’s a way as a franchisor where people are putting skin in the game and you’re using other people’s money to scale. They know their local markets. They care about the business. You’re able to do that typically more quickly than if you were to go build it out yourself across the country.

There are a lot of benefits to that side. You’re able to buy in bulk on the back end. There are a lot of synergies. There’s a feel-good side to it too. You’re creating new business owners and jobs. You’re contributing to the economy and to their families as well. The flip side is, and I’ve been a franchisor, so I’m speaking from experience here, one day, you’ll wake up and realize you’ve got kids all across the country that have expectations of you. It does change your day-to-day.

I always encourage people that don’t have a franchising background to augment their industry experience with someone that has franchise experience. Hiring someone in-house that understands that the franchisor-franchisee dynamic is wise. Franchising makes a lot of sense for many different businesses in different industries. I always encourage people to have something unique. Do you have some barrier to entry or have you figured out a better way to do something versus competition that would entice people to want to buy into your business? Are you someone that they would want to partner with?

One thing that is attractive is when you think about that exit strategy from the franchisor’s standpoint. Private equity loves franchising. If you do some Googling, you’ll see all the acquisitions that have been happening. I’ve got private equity firms reaching out to me at least every other day saying, “What are you seeing out there? What franchisors would you recommend we take a look at?” You’re seeing the deal flow. They’ve got more money than they know what to do with. They love the whole model of franchising, so it does set you up for a good exit potentially as well.

Everything you said makes complete sense. When you look at something like SoulCycle, the idea that you’re riding a bike is not new, but the way they’ve packaged the whole thing is different. You ride a bicycle doing yoga. There’s also the music. They got all the DJs, at least the ones in New York. What they’re doing is they’re doing something that everybody’s already doing, but packaged in a different form that’s very unique to them.

I think of a franchise that I use, Drybar. I love Drybar. I was probably the very first customer they had in Los Angeles. I use them twice a week because it’s very convenient. It is not that expensive. Can somebody just blow-dry your hair? It’s not that difficult to do that, but it’s a pain to have to call your hairdresser. Going on to Drybar after booking myself every week is so easy. Sometimes, it’s not necessarily that you’ve invented the new wheel, but it’s how you do it so much better, cheaper, and faster than everybody else.

You’re bringing a degree of professionalism to oftentimes a highly fragmented space. That may be a white-collar approach to a blue-collar industry, or in that case, you are adding in the technology and professionalism in an industry that’s sporadic and fragmented.

If somebody was interested in looking at franchising as an option and maybe moving from corporate to starting their own business via franchisee, or maybe they used to work crazy hours, or you’re a brand new mom, but you missed the second income and you still want to have some connections with the outside world other than the baby babble, what advice would you give in terms of how you go about doing that? I know that you have a website that helps you go through that, FranBridgeCapital.com, but other than that, what practical advice would you have on that?

I started doing some research. We talked about those leaving the corporate world as well as those looking for a side hustle. We also have a lot of clients that are existing business owners that are looking for additional opportunities to complement their core business. We had a real estate broker buy a property management franchise. He could have started it himself, but he said, “I’d rather start on third base than first base. Let’s get going.”

In some cases, it’s a different industry than their core business, and they like to diversify. We work with a lot of existing business owners as well. If you do some googling out there online, you’ll find that there are a lot of franchise opportunities and they’re all putting their best foot forward. They’re going to show you their marketing message and the challenges you don’t get to see behind the scenes, and that’s where we come in. The way we engage with clients is entirely free. We never get paid a nickel by our clients. We get paid by the franchisors on the backend. For them, it’s a sales and marketing expense and none of that ever gets passed on to our clients in any way.

What we’ve done is we’ve streamlined the process, helping you narrow down those opportunities that are available in your market that are the best fit. What we’ll do is we’ll get to know you. We’ll pull together the opportunities that are the best fit and available based on what you’ve shared with us and based on what we’ve seen resonating with others with similar backgrounds to you around the country. We’ll typically present 8 to 10 opportunities.

We’ll walk through those together and let you choose the top 2, 3, and 4, to then have an initial call with where you’re going to learn a lot. You’re going to start to build that framework. How do you analyze business A versus B versus C? We’re going to serve as a sounding board through that process, help you think about the funding decisions and the legal side of it, and hold your hand as you walk through it and then narrow it down to the right opportunity.

Franchising makes a lot of sense for many different businesses in different industries, but have something unique. Figure out a better way to do something versus the competition that would entice people to want to buy into your business.

The franchisor has a very concise time process within their timeline where they hit on unit economics and the franchise disclosure document review. You get to meet their team. You get to talk to other franchisees, the current owners of that business, so you get to hear their perspectives. The goal is to give you an eyes wide open view as you go through the process to make sure you’re making the right decision. We’ve seen success story after success story. We’ve had a Wall Street attorney, a couple of corporate executives, and stay-at-home moms. They come from all sorts of backgrounds but lend themselves to business ownership in one form or fashion.

I thought about one more question, which is, when you’re franchising, the hiring and firing decisions, do franchisors typically have something that replaces that traditional human resources department? I’m in California and I have a team. I have a nice group of people that work for me. The labor laws and everything changes all the time. They’re not major, but it’s all those little things that you want to check off. Do they have something like that? Do they provide you with something along those lines?

For things like the payroll, I use a paycheck service that does that for me. They do a lot of the things that have to do with monetary changes when it comes to employee relations, but when it comes to other stuff, I don’t have a human resources person that’s high level enough to handle the 6 or 7 people that are in this office. How does that work?

I’d say most franchise stores have systems that you’re able to use for your processing of payments and such. For payroll, it’s very common for them to offer a shared platform. They may say, “If you already have a preferred provider, go for it.” A lot of them do help you on the recruitment side, too, especially when it’s more specialized, whether it’s a martial arts trainer or a licensed contractor.

When I was at ShelfGenie, we’d have franchise owners say, “You’re making the phones ring with your marketing. You’re answering the phones with your call center. You’re supporting us in all these different ways. What do we do day-in and day-out?” I’d say two things. One, get involved in your local Chamber of Commerce and in your community. Sponsor the Little League baseball. It’s those grassroots efforts. Second, find good talent, incentivize, and retain them. Make tough calls when needed. It’s that local level and being able to work with people that I’d say separated our top owners from the average.

I always tell people when you serve people the way they want to be served, they will bring ten other people. Franchising makes it easier for you to go out and do it because a lot of small business owners are stuck doing the day-to-day work and they never get out. That’s one of the biggest problems they have. Thank you so much for coming in. How can people learn more about you and what you do? If they want to connect with you and contact you, what are all of the ways they can contact you?

I’d say as a first step, come out to FranBridgeCapital.com. We have an agency putting out a new website. Come out to our website and sign up for our newsletter. We deliver great content on a monthly basis. If you sign up for our newsletter, make sure you get a copy of our book that comes out in the third quarter of 2022. We’re excited about that. We’re putting the finishing touches on it about all things food franchising. Follow us on LinkedIn on social media as well. We put out good content 5 or 6 times a week. LinkedIn is our primary place.

What’s your Linkedin? Is it under Jon Ostenson?

Yes. Feel free to email me at Jon@FranBridgeConsulting.com. We’d love to set up even a 10 or 15-minute call, chat a little bit more, get to know you, and certainly help you think about whether it makes sense to jump into the process and explore franchises.

Thank you so much for coming by and sharing your incredible knowledge about this. You have made it very relatable and something that we can understand because a lot of times when we get into an area we don’t understand, we’re very lost, but you broke it down very easily for us. For those of you who are reading, please go ahead and subscribe, and make sure to share this episode with at least one other person that you know is thinking about career changes or franchising. As I always say, stay happy and healthy. Happiness is a choice, and I hope you make great choices. Until next time, stay happy. Thank you.

Important Links

About Jon Ostenson

Jon is a top 1% national franchise broker, investor, author, and international speaker specializing in the area he has coined as ‘Non-Food Franchising’. Having served as the President of an Inc. 500 franchise system and now as a multi-brand franchisee, himself, Jon is uniquely positioned to educate others on franchising and franchise selection.

Jon serves as CEO of FranBridge Consulting and has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and investors explore business ownership and investment opportunities.

Jon is the author of ‘The Book on Non-Food Franchising’’ and is a frequent contributor and thought leader for publications on the topic of franchising and franchise investments. Prior to FranBridge, Jon was the President of ShelfGenie, a national franchise system with 200+ locations.

Sign up for our newsletter and book a free consultation call with Jon.

May 18, 2022/by victoriawieck

Podcast

How To Grow Your Money Through A Passive Income Stream With Edwin Carrion

How do you create a passive income stream with little money? God-made millionaire and investor, Edwin Carrion is here to tell you. He joins host Victoria Wieck to define passive income streams and offer tips on the many ways you can start. You don’t need to have a million dollars to start investing. Tune in to get expert advice that will help boost your financial situation.

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Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

How To Grow Your Money Through A Passive Income Stream With Edwin Carrion

I’m so excited to be here every week to bring you some amazing conversations with guests that are fabulous and address our needs, concerns and more than anything, hope for the future. Talking about hope for the future, one topic I hear from you from my workshops and speeches over and over again more than ever now after COVID is the idea of creating a sustainable passive income stream. Even if it’s not huge, it’s something that you can work toward.

I finally found a guest who knows how to do that and who has done that many times over. He also helped other people achieve their financial freedom by starting a small passive income strategy. Without further ado, I’m going to introduce you to our guest. His name is Edwin Carrion. Welcome to the show, Edwin.

Victoria, thank you for having me on the show and everybody, thank you. It’s a great show and you’re going to get a lot of golden nuggets.

First of all, if you haven’t subscribed to the show already, please do so. Also, please share my show with at least one other human being, so that we can amplify and elevate the expertise of every one of our guests who have put their heart and soul into what they do. Especially with Edwin, he’s an immigrant to this country. I am an immigrant myself and immigrant life isn’t easy, especially if you come here with no money.

Having done what he has done, he started his first company at age fourteen and served in the Marine Corps. Anything about Marine Corps, they’re very disciplined, honorable and honest. All those things come into play. These are the tools that I’ve used to build my business and these principles go a long way. Edwin, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you’re passionate about.

I am a loyal husband, a God-made millionaire, a United States Marine, a loving father of two beautiful girls, and that was my God-given dream as well, an investor and a mentor. I love teaching people and sharing my story of life to success in order to help other people become successful and live life to the fullest. That’s what Edwin Carrion is.

You’re preaching to the choir. My American dream was very small and simple. I wanted to be able to pay for my own apartment that I could rent, and be able to find money to pay for insurance on a car that I already owned. At that time, the whole car was $2,000. For those of us who do it and have found a systematic way to achieve our next measurable goal, we can’t wait to share the joy, knowledge and journey with somebody else who’s struggling. Am I saying that accurately?

Yes, extremely correct. The thing is, it’s good to share it, but it’s amazing when people take action on the things they hear on how you get to success. There have been many times when I share my stories or people ask me, “How do you do this? How do you become successful?” I teach them the step by step but then they don’t do anything about it.

Once you’re happy, you make everybody else happy.

We’re going to talk about that part about the action because that’s why this particular show exists. I had been interviewed on other podcasts and had been on numerous TV shows and everything. People tell you, “Your story is so inspiring and encouraging.” They walk away with these incredible aspirations and inspirations with them. If you don’t take any action, it dies. It is just inspiration. That’s it. It doesn’t transform your life or my life. The whole reason why I’m giving free speeches is so that it can transform their lives, so I can get some joy back. It doesn’t.

I talk about action all the time. It doesn’t have to be huge action. I’m not asking anybody to go to the bank, withdraw money, and invest in something new. We’re talking about small steps. Think about the one tiny little thing you can do today. Not tomorrow, not next week, not next year, not when you find some time.

It’s important and you got to take that action today. It could be small little things. It could be setting aside an hour a day to research what you want to do. In my case, learning to speak English when I first came to America was a goal. I broke it down to I don’t have money. We didn’t have ESL classes or English as second language classes when I came.

My father had a dictionary because he didn’t speak English either. I looked at every word that was under five letters. My dad would circle it. I learned English to English translation. That was the only thing a thirteen-year-old could do, so you do it. Every day there’s something you could do to impact your life for the future.

Let’s get down to the meat of this whole interview. You’re very passionate about creating passive income and I love that. If you don’t understand the importance of passive income, it’s income that comes to you whether you’re sleeping or on the beach. Whether you’re having a good day or a bad hair day, it doesn’t matter. That income comes in whether you’re working or not.

It could be small but the problem is there was this perception that in order for you to create a passive income strategy or passive income of any kind, you have to start with a ton of money. You can take an example of you could put millions of dollars in the bank, the interest that comes is passive income. Now, interest is very low and most people don’t have enough money saved to make that interest a real income. If you don’t have a whole lot of money, what are some of the things that you know how to do? I know that you didn’t start with $10 million. How did you do it?

The first thing is taking that action. It goes back to what you were saying, you don’t have to have $1 million in the bank account. You don’t have to have $1 million to start creating passive income. You could start with $100. Passive income is free money or money that you don’t have to work for. The money works for you. As we work very hard for our money, it comes to a time that we have to let the money work for us. It starts at any age. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 18 years old or 50 years old, it’s never too late to start.

The first thing to do is open an investment account, then start putting $10 a week or $10 a month, whatever you could afford to lose that’s not going to hurt you that you’re putting aside. Eventually, you’re going to see those small little returns. When you start seeing those small returns, then you get hooked to it because you’re training your mind to start putting money away and to start having your money work for you. Eventually, you’ll see that money grow. You’re like, “I’m making $100 a month without having to do anything. This is good.”

Passive Income Stream: When you train your mind and your mindset changes to passive income, then you start looking for the opportunities.

When you train your mind and your mindset changes to passive income then you start looking for the opportunities. “I have $20,000 in the bank. Where can I put this money that somebody else is going to work for me and is going to give me passive income?” You then start investing. There are a lot of different forms of investment. There are syndication deals in real estate.

There are new ventures. Maybe a good friend of yours could be opening a brand-new business and tells you, “Why don’t you let me borrow some money? I’ll pay you high interest, more than what you’re going to get having that money sitting in the bank.” If you know he’s reliable, it has collateral and that money is secure, and you’re going to get a good return of interest, that’s called passive income. That’s how you start. Start very little.

My mother-in-law passed away. She was 100 years old. She lived a good quality life until the very last month or so. She lost her husband at age 53. She never remarried or anything like that. When she lost her husband, the family was pretty much bankrupt because, in those days, insurance didn’t cover a lot of things. It sucked up everything and she was a housewife. She never even learned how to drive. It was a very traditional marriage. She had to learn how to catch the bus. She educated herself and went through a school after several years became a school teacher at age 58 or so.

She passed away and I had no clue. She was a good saver. She put her money away, as you said, $100, $50. She never wasted money on a Starbucks or things like that. She saved all this money. When she passed away, her accountant informed us of her estate. It’s mind-boggling. It was over $1 million that the woman saved on a teacher’s income. It’s the power of how much the compound interest was paid in her case. We still have CDs that are coming due now long after she has been gone.

You start saving, that’s the first step. The second step is you’re going to start to invest little bits of money in places where you know who they are. You’re going to check out the investment opportunities. The mistake that a lot of people make is once they have a little money, they want to make that money quickly. They don’t vet the investment. They’re going to invest money in things that you don’t know much about.

They gamble. That’s what happens. It becomes a gambling game. You could gamble too because there are some times that I gamble. What I mean by gambling is when the big companies are on it or when everybody is on it, that was a time that I gambled because I know that I’m going to make a quick return on my investment. I’m either going to lose it all or I’m going to make it all. That’s when I jumped into it, but it was with money that I could afford to lose. I then have other money which is long-term. I’m always thinking long-term. When I talk about long-term, as you said with your grandmother, there are 10 to 20-year plans. The compound interest is amazing because it started growing so much little by little.

In our case, it was like $10 a week or something. That is crazy. Let’s go to another topic that you’re very passionate about. You and I share this a lot. I don’t know about your story specifically, but for mine, the idea that I wasn’t willing to give up my family life. I wasn’t willing to give up the quality of life that I’m giving to my children and parents.

When you are an entrepreneur, working by yourself with no outside money and you’re juggling 40 different things, somehow success comes at the price of family life. I tell people every week that that’s not true. It doesn’t have to be true unless you make it true. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve done that. People have heard until they’re blue in the face how I did it. What were some of the strategies you employed to make sure that your family didn’t suffer because you were chasing the dream?

Ninety percent of young entrepreneurs that get into business fail because they don’t have a business plan.

I was fortunate enough that I went bankrupt at 27 years old. I realized that I worked so much that I put everything away, everything that mattered to me, my religion, faith, family, friends and health, which are the most important things. To top it all off, I put aside my time. I went from 22 years old to 27 years old working all the time. That time that I lost, I was never able to get back because that’s the only commodity in life we can never get back. I learned that I need to have a balance in life. I need to live life to the fullest and enjoy every single day because we only have one day. When the day is gone, it’s gone. We cannot get that time back.

How do I balance my life and running multiple different companies? What I do is set priorities. My priorities are very simple. 9:00 to 5:00 is my free time. I get to work, have fun, and do the things that I want to do. That’s my set time. That’s my priority. After 5:00 PM, family time. Every Friday on the calendar is date night. Sundays, we go to church as a family. Saturday and Sunday, I spend time with the family.

We have to start setting those priorities straight. As business owners, we think that we have to work 12 to 13 hours a day and we don’t. Sometimes they come to the office and in two hours, I’m super productive and effective that I could take the rest of the day off and do the things that I love to do. There are times that I sit down in my office the whole eight hours and I don’t do anything. I sit here and I’m twiddling my thumbs trying to be productive. Those are the days that I don’t want to do anything.

If you set your priorities straight, that’s when you start having the balance in life. Make sure that you put the same priority on the same standards for your family, work and yourself because you have to be happy. When I’m happy, I make everybody else happy. I make my family, wife, kids, employees and everybody happy. I always tell people, “Be selfish. Make yourself happy first. Once you’re happy, you make everybody else happy.”

I’m glad you said that. Setting priorities is important. When I say set priorities, what are the most important things to you? That also includes some boundaries of things that you’re not willing to do. When I started my company, I didn’t have to make a whole lot of money. I just wanted to make $2,000 a month. What I wasn’t willing to do is work more than twenty hours a week because I was a full-time mom. I drove the kids to school. I organize and track all accounts, the soccer games and everything else. I was the mom who did all that.

I wanted to have a meaningful decent income, but I also had hours that I couldn’t work. It turns out that when you set those priorities straight, you become much more productive because you don’t have a whole lot of time. If you say, “I’m not working on weekends, evenings or at the crack of dawn. You find ways to be very efficient. You cut out the trips and the chit-chats. In my mind, you end up with better quality friends because you’re going to connect with only those friends that matter to you. At that point, you’re either giving up time at work or time with the family.

You end up with better quality customers because a lot of borderline customers, I wouldn’t take them. I wouldn’t call them. If they don’t pay me on time and if they are very needy and call me in all hours day or night, I’m like, “This customer isn’t worth it.” I look at my margin and I’m thinking to myself, “I’m not making any money and they happened to be the most needy and demanding. They don’t respect my employees or my time. You don’t get rid of them right away, but you try to get a better-quality customer to replace the one that is causing 90% of your agony for 10% of the volume.

You learned that quality over quantity.

Passive Income Stream: Make sure that you put the same priority on the same standards for your family, for your work, for yourself, because you have to be happy.

What Edwin and I are saying is there are some entrepreneurs who will go and chase after every deal and customer at all hours of the day. If you do that, what happens is you are going to pay a price. That price could be your own health or the quality of the relationship you have with the people that are closest to you. You’re unhappy even though you’re making money, and then you start resenting yourself, “I’m doing everything for everybody else, my customers, employees, community and family, and I don’t have any time.” You end up justifying not going to church and not doing things because there’s a lot of stuff that happens.

A lot of people set priorities and they understand them. If you’re reading this and you’re like, “These people are making complete sense.” When it comes to doing it and implementing your priorities, there are seem to be a disconnect between what you know is right for you and what you are willing to do. I love that. There are four million people quitting their jobs every month. A lot of them have started their own businesses. How do I know that? It’s because of the census bureau. There are 700,000 patent applications by the American people at the USPTO. You can look at this.

There have been more applications for business licenses from 2020 to 2021 ever in our history. Those are the people that we know about. There are people that started a side hustle without even asking for a business license. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see that people are making at the startup phase of their business?

The biggest mistake that they make is they do not follow the business process. You mentioned that when you started your business, you knew what you wanted. You have clarity. You said, “I wanted to make $2,000 a month and that’s what I want.” You have your business. You have your address for your business. A lot of people go, “I want to get into business and I want to do this.” They jump right in without having a solid plan or an idea of what is it that they want. Ninety percent of young entrepreneurs or people that get into business fail because they don’t create a business plan.

To me, having a vision board in life is my business plan. In business, every time that I started something from scratch, “Here’s our business plan. This is who we are. That’s what our values are.” It goes back to what you’re saying. Your values were, “I’m not going to work more than twenty hours a week.” That’s a value. “I don’t want needy clients.” You knew what you want. You had clarity. Creating a business plan is important. Besides the business plan, the second thing that I always teach people is you need to have a business plan, and then you need to have a cashflow sheet.

You’re going to work backwards. You’re going to go from a macro to a micro-environment. Meaning if you want to make $120,000 a year, it’s going to tell you how much money you need to make per month or per day. It’s going to tell you how many clients you need per day. Ninety percent of people don’t do that and it’s so simple. That’s where they tend to fail or they stay being an employee for their business for the rest of their life.

That’s exactly true. If you have a vague goal like, “I’m going to start my business, spend more time with my family, and make a lot of money.” These are all vague words. What’s a lot of money? Is it $100 or $100 million? If you say, “I’m going to spend a lot of time with my family,” what’s a lot of time? For me, I was making more money as an employee. My rent was $1,000 at the time. I had a two-bedroom apartment. If I can make my rent and I can pay whatever I needed, I could have survived on $1,500 a month, but my whole month scenario is $2,000 a month.

How am I going to make the $2,000 a month? If I wanted to make $2,000 a month, what do I have to do to make the $2,000? I designed jewelry. I thought to myself, “If I sent 50 letters out every day to all the major department stores and I got 10% of those people back, and the average sale was $10,000, is it possible? What if my term is only 2%, can I make that number?” The answer was yes. It wasn’t a huge goal.

Everybody changes in life but not everyone improves. We have to continue improving in life. That’s what makes us better every time.

The other thing too is if I’m writing 50 letters a day because they are mostly form letters, I thought to myself, “That’s more than plenty.” If you look at right now and start a business with twenty hours a week and you were spending three hours on social media. Three hours a week is a lot of time for social media. Trust me. I could do it in 30 minutes to create a post and post it, three times a week.

Even with that, you should have a plan. I do Motivation Mondays and some quotes. On Wednesdays, I show people how to use the product. Fridays are fun Friday. You can do that. You could have it all done in three hours at eternity. If you’re writing emails to solicit, you want to do five hours, that’s eternity. If you’re sitting there doing that all day, it’s a lot of time.

If you’re doing an hour to two hours a day in follow up and that includes phone calls or follow-up emails, again, that’s plenty of time. Nobody is going to talk to you for an hour. It’s going to be a five-minute conversation with anybody. If you think about how you can run a business in twenty hours, that’s plenty of time.

If you got 25 hours, it’s more than enough because when you’re in a corporate world, you’re going to sessions and useless meetings. You’re being called to by your boss or some department that you probably didn’t even know existed and somehow, they needed your opinion. You’re going through all this crazy stuff that you’re not even doing. It’s breaking it down to bite-size information that you can act on. We’re not asking you to go out or hire an MBA to come up with one. This is a common-sense type thing.

When you and I started doing this years ago, we didn’t have all the resources that all these people have nowadays. They have so many resources. Life is so much simpler now. You go to YouTube, join a group, go to Facebook and Instagram, and you can find all these resources. We didn’t have that when we were starting. It was so much harder for us.

When I started back in ’89, we didn’t even have internet. I had to type it on an electric typewriter. People are telling me, “It was a different time back then.” Now, a small company could have the same resources for focus groups, testing your stuff, or getting opinions as any other big company. In the old days, people naturally gravitated to the known quantity and going to the biggest names. Now, Americans love the underdogs who are not perfect and try hard to help you. I feel like you do have everything in your hands now.

With all this connection that we have worldwide, the audience just got bigger. Our customer base got bigger. Before, we were restricted to that area. Growing up, I was restricted to only working in my area. Nowadays, it’s so amazing. You can be worldwide with no problem.

You can work at any hour of the day too. If you were to give young Edwin or somebody who’s 22 years old and starting out, what would that one advice be?

Passive Income Stream: The biggest mistake that they make is they do not follow the business process.

I will say keep doing everything that you have done. I will not change one thing in my life because if I would change one thing in my life, I don’t know how my life will be now. I love this life. I love what I have, where I am, and what I have been through. Everybody should be the same. We should not keep living with a victim mentality. We should become the victor. Those struggles made me who I am now. Everybody changes in life, but not everyone improves. We have to continue improving in life and that’s what makes us better every time.

Look for more information about Edwin and the amazing life that he has lived and is living because of some of the mistakes, misfortunes, and incredible struggles that he has gone through. He’s gone broke at age 27, which was a blessing. You don’t want to go broke at age 60, trust me. That’s pretty hard. You don’t get to have a do-over at age 60. You do and you don’t. At 27, your whole life is still ahead of you.

The moral of this story is to believe in yourself. Live the life you want to live from day one, not when you make it someday. The journey is important. Set your priorities straight and stick to them no matter what. You’re either going to succeed right there and then, or you’re going to have a detour of some sort like bankruptcy or setback. You’re going to be richer because you chose to use that experience to enrich your life for the future.

When you enrich your life, as Edwin said, you’re not only enriching your life. Even if you’re not doing it consciously, you are reaching everybody else’s life. Every business has suppliers, vendors, manufacturers, and somebody who’s going to benefit from the one business that succeeds. Keep that in mind. Check out his website, EdwinCarrion.com, and his social media, Facebook and Instagram are @EdwinCarrion78. Until next time, please stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is your choice. I hope you make great choices. Thank you so much for coming by, Edwin. I enjoyed this interview.

Thank you, everybody. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there, so have a plan.

Important Links

Edwin Carrion
Facebook – Edwin Carrion
Instagram – Edwin Carrion
https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/EdwinCarrion/

About Edwin Carrion

Edwin Carrion is a God-made millionaire, family-oriented, investor, and mentor. Throughout his run, he has founded several multimillion-dollar companies that specialize in real estate development, transportation and logistics, investment, and business education and consulting.

Backed by 20 years of extensive experience in various industries, Edwin Carrion now shares his passion for entrepreneurship by mentoring others, since he realized most people don’t live a fulfilled life. Simply because people believe success comes at the cost of poor family life, unbalanced life, or compromising their values to achieve success.

Edwin guides people in the path to living life to the fullest, by having balance in all areas. Edwin says, “I am here to share knowledge with aspiring entrepreneurs and to address the problems by sharing what I know and learned from experiences.”

May 11, 2022/by victoriawieck

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