$3.2 million in 8 days with Mike Dillard and Robert Hirsch

Taking You Inside The Secret Black Box Investment Strategies Of The Rich – The Elevation Group

Right Click to Download the MP3

Right Click to Download the Video

Packed content in amazing HD video for this special episode of EM. Mike and Robert explain how they started from nothing and climbed their way to the top using mentors, mindset, and strategies to help. You don’t want to miss this one!

Resources Mentioned on this Podcast:

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
• The Go-Giver by Bob Burg

Check out TheElevationGroup.com for more info!

You can follow The Elevation Group on Facebook

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy, and today I'm actually right near Austin, Texas at a ranch with Mike Dillard and Robert Hirsch. Right? Okay. They own the Elevation Group. It's an amazing company. When they first launched back in 2010, they made three point two million in eight days. That's a little ridiculous. So I'm really excited to have them on the show, even though I'm here. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Mike: I'm glad you could make it down.

Jaime: Tell me a little bit about what the Elevation Group is because I went on your website, and it ended up saying things are changing. I have no real clue, I guess, of what it really is. Tell me a little bit more.

Mike: It's something we have to work on. 

Robert: Awesome. Thanks for the great frame job.

Jaime: You're totally welcome. It's amazing. 

Mike: The Elevation Group was started back in the end of 2010. It was really inspired by the crash, the market crash of 2008. You know I saw personally a lot of my family members and their friends in the baby boomer generation take a huge hit as far as their retirement went. A lot of them were under a lot of stress, a lot of pressure, wondering if they could even retire moving forward. You know I had at that point started several successful businesses and made, done quite well for myself. I'd just turned thirty in oh-eight. I had no idea what to do with the money, and I saw what was happening to my parents and their friends. I said, "This is what I don't want to do." Which is to really follow in their path, what Robert and I like to call Wall Street's promise, which is give Wall Street your money every year for the next forty years, and you'll have enough leftover to retire, which has proven to be not the case. The frustrating part was we couldn't find an alternative, an answer. We have a group of very wealthy people who tend to make money whether the market goes up or down, and then we have the rest of the middle class who is really reactionary and typically victims of any kind of market event. There's no bridge between the two. If we couldn't find the answer of how do we invest like the rich invest, so we can get results like they get, then we decided that we'd go really figure that out ourselves and share the lessons learned with the rest of the world. Our real mission statement is the Elevation Group is really here to empower the middle class with the investing strategies of the wealthy. With the premise being that if you want to become wealthy and get a specific result, you have to do what the wealthy are doing. 

Jaime: That's awesome. That's actually exactly like what Eventual Millionaire is all about, except you went on the investing side. Anyone that's listening, if they're excited about investing, I get asked about that quite a bit. Go talk to them. 

Mike: That was the whole thing. Nobody in this industry ever talked about it. They talk about how to make money but not what to do with it. 

Jaime: Now that's the funny thing though. It seems like a hard niche to get into because there's so much already out there having to do with investing. Some of it's crap and all that fun stuff. How do you dive into a niche like that and do so well in such a short period of time?

Robert: The biggest issue is I remember when, and both of us are fans of Robert Kiyosaki, I remember when I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was the mid-nineties, and I was living in San Francisco. I was running venture backed start-ups. It was great, and I was an entrepreneur, but I still had a job so to speak. Meaning I had to show up, or my investors and my board would fire me. I realized that the poor lust after doodads; the middle class invest in liabilities that they think are assets; and the wealthy invest in assets. Although he would talk about that, he wouldn't get into the specifics of what is an asset. That was really where I was left. I was very excited about the book, but I had no where to go. That came down to really Mike and I. Mike and I, you know I had a private equity fund up in Colorado, and I was on the board of the Elevation Group. What we would spend our time talking about was how do we invest our money. Actually this was before the Elevation Group, this was your previous company when I was doing coaching. We'd talk, after we'd get done working during the day, we'd then go into the night. During the night what we talked about is "What are you doing?" It felt like throwing spaghetti against the wall, but there was very little rhyme or reason. The biggest issue is if you go to my parents, who are very middle class as are Mike's, they have a financial advisor who will show you this pyramid of six things. Have you ever seen that pyramid?

Jaime: I think I have.

Robert: They show this pyramid of six things, and you can start buying these. You can eventually buy these. Coincidentally they sell all of those six items, to you. It's a great pitch, but the problem is it didn't work for my parents. Now why am I going to go do it? What we thought at this point, you know, we've gone through the cars and the houses and the toys, but I really didn't have anything to show for it. What we wanted to do was take our active income and translate it as effectively as we could into passive income. We thought if we're having this problem, two successful entrepreneurs, then a lot of other people are having those problems. 

Jaime: Yeah.

Robert: That was really the kernel that became the Elevation Group. 

Jaime: So you had a need, and you're like "Oh, I actually want to figure this out for myself. I should go do this and help other people as well."

Mike: That tends to be our formula. Find a problem that we have. If there are other people who have it as well, which is usually the case, then there's a huge business opportunity waiting to happen right there. 

Jaime: You're okay. That's what I want to talk about. You guys are both ridiculously experienced in business, right? It's interesting to sort of hear your story of "I did really well in business, and then of course I didn't know how to do the investing part." A lot of people that are listening are still getting to the business side of things, so I really want to talk about that. You guys have two separate stories. Everybody knows I usually don't interview two people, so we're going to go with this. Mike, why don't you start? It's funny because I was reading through your bio and seeing that Magnetic Sponsoring was your previous company. I bought Magnetic Sponsoring. I didn't know that this was the guy that did it. 

Mike: You did? Oh, wow.

Jaime: Yeah. Good to know. Thanks. Appreciate it. Why don't you go through and sort of tell us a quick history, I know we have a ton of stuff to dive into, a quick history of how you became an entrepreneur and some of the companies you've started.

Mike: Sure, I've started specifically in the network marketing industry. I was in college from 1996 until 2000, which is kind of in web one point oh days, where if a website had a video on it, it was a really big deal. 

Jaime: Oh yeah.

Robert: And I come from web zero point zero.

Mike: It was that gap. I got, the opportunities today out there to become an entrepreneur online were not there specifically at that point in time. That was when Corey Rudl came out with his first e-book on how to get out of a traffic ticket.  That was revolutionary that you could sell a digital book online. The network marketing industry had been much bigger. It's been around for decades, I know with Herbalife, Mary Kay, and Amway. They find, those opportunities find their way specifically through college campuses pretty easily because you've got a bunch of broke students who are looking for business opportunities. I happened to be one of them. I got involved in that industry and failed miserably for four or five years. 

Jaime: I love hearing that. I have to stop you for a second. What did you start, and what failed? Because we want to know details on how you failed.

Mike: Yeah, it took me many years to find out, but I used to look for success in the opportunity itself with the compensation plan or the new wonder product of the month, whatever it may be. I'd always wonder "Why isn't this working for me when other people are having success?" I finally realized that it came down to value. I really didn't have any value at the age of twenty to offer anybody. I was a broke college student with no particular skill set trying to pretend to be an entrepreneur. What I finally figured out is you have to create value to give to others. They way that I've learned how to do that was to acquire skill sets. I started studying direct response marketing and copywriting from Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert, John Carlton, and all those people. All of the sudden, I kind of figured out that I had a knack for marketing and for writing. I learned how to use direct response marketing in Google AdWords which is when it first came out to build my network marketing business. I went from doing meetings in hotel rooms and living rooms to doing this all online, and that really transformed my career. Magnetic Sponsoring was actually written as a training manual for my downline on how to use this direct response attraction marketing techniques instead of the whole make a list of your friends and family kind of deal. Which really went on to kind of revolutionize that industry. That was the inception of that business which went from an e-book and turning into an eight-figure business with two offices and a dozen employees. 

Jaime: That's a little insane to go from five years of not being able to figure things out and sort of a switch going I need a skill set that's worth something. 

Mike: All I had previously was the exact same opportunity and product that a hundred thousand other distributors had. There was nothing unique for me to actually offer my customers or my business partners. Once I kind of figured that out, that the opportunity is not with the business itself, it's with you as an individual. That's really when things changed.

Jaime: What's the difference for you though? A lot of people come and go network marketing is sort of easy to get into and I've had, just had MJ DeMarco on the show who's like "You want to be the owner of the MLM, not necessarily the person in it." We talked a lot about that stuff. What was the difference between doing the network marketing stuff and starting your own business? It seems like it's different.

Mike: I think it has to do with personality styles. I'm fairly introverted. People tended to annoy me fairly, specifically in the network marketing.

Jaime: I love hearing that.

Mike: Well, the network marketing industry is constantly dealing with new people that you then have to train, and you have to take them through the process of transformation from an employee to entrepreneur, all the personal development that happens around that. I just didn't have the patience level I needed for that. I just realized I don't really enjoy talking to people in person or on the phone, but I love reading and writing and being creative, putting things creative online. It was just a personality fit. Where for other people who are super extroverted love that industry and do very, very well in it.

Jaime: Awesome. Really you are saying is figuring out your skills and what you're good at, using that. It's funny because I just had a guy on the show who talked about doing the hard stuff that maybe you're not really good at. What are your feelings on, actually that interview hasn't gone out yet, so... One of the things that he was saying was that someone who's really, really good at something, sometimes they tend to coast and don't sort of look at some of the harder stuff. Really a lot of the stuff can be on that little hard stuff that you don't want to work on.

Mike: That's where Robert came into play. I got really, really good at marketing and copywriting, but I learned that I was bad at running a business then. You know, growing a team, being a CEO, dealing with firing and hiring, and all of those things. 

Robert: That's true.

Jaime: He's the CEO by the way.

Mike: For me it's an ego thing. You can either recognize what you're good at and really master that, or you can say "I'm the boss. I want to be the boss, even if I suck at being the boss." That to me is a really stupid decision. I realized that I was not a good boss, and you know, that's where Robert came in. He was actually my coach to help me build and run Magnetic Sponsoring. He eventually realized that our skill sets are super symbiotic.

Jaime: Instead of him teaching you everything, yourself.

Robert: We're like the hippo and the bird in the... 

Mike: That's probably a great segue way into Robert's.

Robert: I'd love to come back to that leaning into the hard stuff. I think that, to me, it's the exact opposite of what I'd recommend. 

Jaime: That's what I hear, and that's good. 

Robert: The way I would do this is you figure out one thing that you're really good at it. It's funny. Mike and I were doing a little bit of filming earlier in the week on an entrepreneurial product. Our formula is really simple. We both arrived at that very independently. The first part is you identify a problem. If you want to start a business, go identify a problem. Find an elegant solution. The key to that is elegance. Elegance is often simplicity. Warren Buffett says that you don't get points in business for degree of difficulty. That is so true. When I think of the hard stuff, it evokes this really strong reaction in me. If you can find, and what I mean by elegant is really high yield and very low drag meaning high results, low effort. And low work for you. Doing things like interviewing is really easy for you. Right, Jaime? But it doesn't make it less valuable to your readership

Jaime: Yeah.

Robert: Maybe you don't like to write, or maybe you don't like to manage, or maybe you don't like to operate. I wouldn't recommend doing any of that. I would say go get somebody, partner with somebody to do the pieces that you can't do. Go do as many interviews as you possibly can. The third part of that formula is to acquire a rainmaking skill. 

Jaime: Everybody wants another rainmaking skill. 

Robert: If you don't know a rainmaking skill, you don't have a business. You know Zig Ziglar that passed away recently said "Nothing happens until something gets sold." I mean you don't have accounts receivable unless you have a sale. Right? 

Jaime: You don't really have a business unless you have a sale.

Robert: It's a pretty simple equation. With Mike and I, Mike was describing in his four or five years, and I've had, I've been in business twenty-three years and been a partner in over fifty-five businesses. Some of them were absolute rocket ships. We've had some great exits; we had an IPO. Conversely we had some smoldering holes in the ground as well. What's the difference is acquiring that rainmaking skill. Whether you're one of the best copywriters on the planet like Mike is, kind of capital "M" marketing, meaning strategic marketing, not SEO. You know for me, I learned how to sell. My background was raising capital in Silicon Valley which is essentially selling an idea for millions of dollars. If you can't taste it, touch it, smell it, feel it, I sell it. That's a different level of salesmanship. 

Jaime: Oh yeah.

Robert: You have to acquire some skill to make it rain. I had a mentor of mine along the way that, a guy named Bill Phillips, Body for Life. I remember that Bill told me, and I was at his place, this beautiful I don't know how many square foot home. It felt at the time like over 20,000 square feet. It felt palatial. I mean there was a pool on the side, there was a pool on the other side. There's a pool in back. Just in case your first two pools aren't working, you can go to your third. I remember looking around; I was in awe. He just watched me. He said "What do you think?" I'm like "It's not bad." You know I was pretty intimidated. 

Jaime: You played it cool. Good job.

Robert: I tried to. He saw right through it. He said "The amount of money you make is directly proportionate to the amount of people that you helped." That really resonated. If you take those three things: if you identify a problem, you validate that other people have that problem. Like where do I invest my money? We're entrepreneurs, made a lot in sales, somewhere in the eight or nine figures, however you count it, in the businesses. If we didn't know where to invest, why would we use a financial advisor that's sitting in a strip mall from nine to five? He's going to tell us where to invest? It doesn't make a lot of sense. Find someone that's living the life that you want to, and that is really what came down to Elevation Group, what was so passionate. We've ended up with reclusive, successful, amazing people up in Aspen, down to Necker Island for a week with Richard Branson, and everywhere in between. There was always one common denominator which was really interesting. Each person owned their own business. Every person had their own business. If you have a job, no matter how successful you are, you're always going to be disadvantaged by the taxes. You're always going to be disadvantaged by a host of things. You're essentially running into a buzz saw. You make your money, and your taxes are taken out before you get your money. Then you get to spend the difference. As a business owner, it's the exact opposite. You earn your revenue. You spend a reasonable business expense, and you're taxed on your profits. In one way you're really incentivized to succeed and create jobs. In the other way it becomes very punitive. Reaching that inflection point and making the jump is a really critical point for anybody. Everyone we've encountered for the last three years of the Elevation Group, every wildly successful millionaire or billionaire that we've found, owned their own business. 

Jaime: I agree, and I think everybody listening totally agrees with that. That's why we're trying to do this. What we hear from you, find a need. A lot of people are like "Okay, I've found needs. I can find needs everywhere." Especially entrepreneurial mindset people are like "Squirrel!" We find needs everywhere we go. But a lot of the problems that we have are with rainmaking, so that's the sort of thing that I'd love to ask you about. Actually in regards to the Elevation Group, if you can in eight days make that amount of money, that seems almost impossible to the people that are listening. 

Mike: If you don't mind, I'll throw in how that was done. So at that point you're looking at the end results of the previous equity that had been put into Magnetic Sponsoring and growing that business. That was the result of the previous seven years of work. At the end of the day, what that represents was cashing in on personal brand equity. The Elevation Group business offer was very interesting in the fact that what we were selling was the fact that we are not financial experts in any way, shape, or form. We have no idea what we're doing when it comes to investing. Didn't have a clue. We're going to go sell a membership where we're going to go figure this puzzle out and solve this problem for ourselves. Let you join us and look over our shoulder and kind of learn from the people that we learn from. We were just going to document everything that we did with our money, kind of almost like a virtual online diary. That was the pitch; that was the offer. The reason that it worked the way it did was the honesty and authenticity of that, where we weren't pretending to be people that we weren't. We were very straightforward of what this project was going to consist of, that we weren't the experts here. In the first month, we had ten thousand members join. We had huge affiliate support from all over the industry which was another reason that was possible. Because at the end of the day, what people were buying into was not a sophisticated, stock trading financial program because nobody's into that. If you're an average everyday person, you don't get involved in that. That's why you have a financial advisor, so you don't have to do that stuff. So it was more of the promise of an adventure to make finance interesting and to turn it into a journey, and I think everybody kind of has a voyeuristic side at one level or another, that's why we watch reality television shows and all of those things. That was the interesting part about it, and at the end of the day it just became this mission where it became "Hey, we're going to pick up the torch and start this movement to really empower the world against the crappy options that they've had before." The market really just resonated with that. 

Jaime: Something that they could all get behind. It's interesting. I get a lot of people that go "Well, I don't have an expert or a skill. Me showing people how I'm learning it doesn't seem, that's really kind of icky." How did you get over that, or did you have to? 

Mike: I didn't think it was icky at all. I don't think it is. But people use that as an excuse.

Jaime: An excuse, oh yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. So it was kind of fun to disprove that. I think if you're just super open and transparent about it, and you can say here's what we've got planned and here's what we've done when we've launched. We had three lessons in the members' area, and now we're well over twenty. They were going to get something from day one. They could log in, see if there was value to it or not. We could do that with any topic; anybody could do that with any topic. If you pretend, people are going to see through that, and you become you know pick your negative word that you like to use.

Jaime: One of those guys. Hey, yeah. That's what I think is really cool about you guys. You're real. That's why I do these interviews because I want to go "You're a real person, you're not this fake persona or anything like that." What I think is really interesting that you said before is that it took seven years of trying. We hear the huge success story ? eight days, it was awesome, it was amazing. It's so easy to hear that. You guys have a separate special thing that we don't have, therefore we couldn't do that. You mentioned seven years of hard work, finding people and making relationships and doing all that sort of stuff before. Take me through some of that. What should people, especially when they're sitting there right now going "I could do that. I could be really transparent. I'm going to try to figure this problem. Come along with me." Where does that start?

Robert: There a lot of places where you can start. Ultimately the one thing, at least for me, that gets you over the edge entrepreneurially is you develop a skill that allows you to make it rain. There's an entrepreneurial piece there. It might sound like a broken record, but it's like that because it's true. If you have a business, right, and you have great sales, and you have bad accounting, what do you do? Well, you fire your accountant and you hire another one. Now if you have a business, and you have great accounting and bad sales, what do you do? Well, you sell your house. Right, that's kind of the reality of it. If you can't sell and make it rain, you're going back to your old job, back to waiting tables, and you're going to do whatever it was. 

Jaime: Yeah.

Robert: It's really acquiring that skill set. And for some people it takes a year; for me it took much longer. You have to, a lot of people learn faster than we do. The resources that are available today are so much better than what was available. For me it was well pre-internet. In terms of what resources were out there, I was pretty much limited to the book Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, who doesn't. Learn the lessons. It can be as fast or as slow as it takes. It's a predetermined end point. There are ways that you can get there where you have this rainmaking skill, and there are ways that sometimes you go over the river and through the woods to get there, and there's direct paths. The sooner that you apply yourself to really learn that, the more successful you can be. I think what interesting with the Elevation Group in particular is that we are not the experts. You get a chance to watch over our shoulder as we learn. 

Mike: That includes the wins and the smoldering holes in the ground as well. 

Robert: Yeah, and we've had both. We've had both. As a company, it's been really successful, but follow us on an adventure. Every adventure wasn't preplanned with a set Disneyland moment at the end. We have...

Jaime: Oh that's not how we want it to end. Okay, yeah. 

Robert: We had, it was a learning experience. We encountered great people, and we encountered a couple bad people too. What we learned, it was interesting. Mike and I at the beginning were both really enchanted by these promises of big returns, 30 percent, 40 percent. What we've found is those returns don't seem to be realistic on a passive basis, on a consistent basis. From a business perspective or an entrepreneurial perspective, those are really possible. When you're working on it, but when you're changing that to passive, what you really want is wealth preservation as well as capital appreciation as well as passive income. Instead of getting seduced by the biggest number you can find, find things that make sense to you. If it doesn't make sense, if you can explain it... How old is your oldest child now?

Jaime: Six.

Robert: If your six year old can understand it, then it makes sense. And if you can't understand, it really comes down to a couple things, either it was a communication issue or it was above your head, or whatever the case may be. Generally if you can't understand it, don't do it. For example, Mike has done really well doing apartment complexes. I've ended up in oil and gas, in oil wells because it makes more sense. We have a partner, and all of this is documented within the Elevation Group. What appeals to one person doesn't necessarily appeal to the other. But if you can't understand it, don't do it. 

Jaime: So that's what I sort of want to talk to you about in terms of the business there. Like you said, you need to have a skill. You need to figure out how to do this. That's exactly what you guys did with the Elevation Group. You tried to figure it out as you went. We're inundated with information. We don't know what's right; we don't know what's wrong. We don't know what's right for us because it might not work for us. That's kind of a pain in the butt to go through and figure out, especially for someone who doesn't have a lot of resources. They're like "I really want to quit my job" or "I'm starting this business and it's not going as well as I hoped. I don't know how much longer this is going to last." So what can you give us to try and help that? Because you said we don't want to go over the river and through the woods, how can we get it a little bit straighter? 

Mike: I'll stab at this real quick. You're in what I would call information overload. That's typically how it's referred to, at least in the education publishing world. There were definitely many years, especially when I was first starting, where that was the case. You know, you have five courses that you just bought. They're all similar in some ways and they're all slightly different in other ways. You're like "What do I do?" The bad news is I never, my solution, the way I got through it was I just kept working through it and just kept thinking about what was the end goal that I want. What do I want my business to look like? What's the lifestyle that I want? What am I good at? Then coming up with a model that really fits that. Robert and I's first goal to give any new entrepreneur is just to make your first sale. That's it, just make your first transaction. I've got some friends that are going through our entrepreneur course right now. One of them's doing a jewelry line. One of them is writing an e-book on parenthood. Another one is doing an e-book on nutrition and health and weight loss. It's funny to walk them through this process. Because they'll come back and be like "Should I get this software and that? Should I buy this course or go do this coaching thing?" I'm just like "No. Buy the really cheap version of the software. Don't buy any other courses. Just take that next step, and come back and tell me when you're done." The whole goal is just to get them to make that first sale. After that, you know, go do whatever you are interested in and want to pursue. For me, I went through all of the courses, and I just had to wade through it until I got that solid idea that I wanted to pursue. Then I shut everything else out. I unsubscribed from all the email lists. I just focused until it was done. It was just one brick a day, you know, to build your house kind of thing. 

Jaime: It's so hard because it feels slow when you're in it, like when you're hearing this success story. But when you're actually in it and things fail, and you're still going "How come it's taking so long and that sort of thing?" I know you're the scale guy. Even after we get the first sale, it cannot feel fast. What suggestions would you give in terms of say, you got your first sale? You feel like you've got some the market says I've got my first sale.

Mike: Repeat that process over and over again as fast as possible.

Jaime: Yeah. Good, so tell me how.

Robert: Do it again. Find out if they have a sibling. No. What's interesting, and it depends on what kind of business you're in, right? Let's say that from between the zero to between one and five million in sales, now the skills that get you from there, not only are different from the ones that get you from five to fifty, but they're juxtaposed. Which is really difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs. This really kind of the entrepreneurial hump that a lot of people have and have a hard time getting over. So what get's you from zero to one, or zero to five is really stick-to-it-ive-ness. You know, hitting the same nail on the head. Persistence, education, learning, and going out, going to every trade show you can and staying up until twelve o'clock, meeting as many people at the bar, and doing all those types of things. 

Mike: It becomes your trick. It becomes your move. 

Robert: It does. You've got to move. 

Mike: My move is I can start as many businesses as I want in the zero to five range every single time and do it because it's become my move. At the same time, as soon as I hit the five million dollar range, I have to start hiring and building a team, then I'm going to fall on my face. Which is where he comes in...

Robert: Yeah.

Jaime: Your move is different from his move.

Robert: We have different moves. The big issue is what takes you from five to fifty. If do the stick-to-it-ive-ness, keep hitting the same nail on the head, those will actually prevent you from succeeding. It's like the classic jump in corporate America, where you go from a first line manager to a second line manager. It's a difficult one. Then it becomes the ability to really empower people, which is delegating without absconding. You know delegating and giving them the tools they need to succeed and getting out of the way. Your skill in the zero to five is getting in the way. Your skill in the five to fifty is really getting out of the way. 

Mike: It's doing the thing versus getting the thing done.

Robert: Exactly. So that is the really big entrepreneurial hump that a lot of people go through. For example, when Mike talks about what happened at the beginning of Elevation Group, and that's exciting because it's a great sound bite.

Jaime: Yes. 

Robert: Especially in the business you're in. There's a lot of hard work that goes into that. For me the biggest thing for an entrepreneur listening, it's interesting we're going through a lot of coaching for young entrepreneurs listening through this process. I've mentored a lot of people along the way, and I continue to work with people, both mentors and mentees. It's great on the entrepreneurial life cycle. I think I've had so many great mentors through the life cycle; it's been incredible. The biggest learning opportunity is being able to find and groom a mentor. 

Jaime: Let's talk about that.

Robert: So there's a skill set to being a good mentee. That's what a lot of people don't realize. A lot of people are thinking maybe the CEO wants to give something back. Which giving back is a phrase I hate.

Jaime: Let's hope he does. 

Robert: Giving back implies that you've taken something, which I don't think about it that way. I just think about it as giving more. Being a good mentee you understand that they have a limited amount of time. After a period of time, you need to make room for other people in his life. You need to make room in your life. If you think of a mentorship life cycle, it usually lasts between nine and twenty-four months. You want to really make it low drag on the mentor and really rewarding as a mentee. If you can give them some element of where you are going to mentor the next generation and offer that piece of legacy, which is often what the mentor is looking for. They're moving from growth to legacy in the entrepreneurial life cycle. That's a really key piece. The way that I've groomed mentors is one, making it real low drag on them. One hour a month at your favorite lunch spot, on me, and you say the word, I'll be there. Two is I know it's a limited life cycle. I know this isn't going to last longer than two years. You know it won't be forever. 

Jaime: Because that's scary to some people. It's like oh great.

Robert: It's very scary you're signing up for, and that mentor, He has a choice, being with you once a month or being on the board of another company once a month. That's a really big opportunity cost for him. Recognizing that for him or her, recognizing that is a big piece. The third is give them actionable, give him actionable steps where he can really feel like he's helping. As opposed to showing up and saying "Jaime, help me. Teach me. Show me the words of the wise." Well...

Jaime: Where should I start?

Robert: It begins this whole process where if you come to him and you explain to him "Hey, I'm having a problem growing my sales department. I know you've been successful at that. You know, what are the two or three things that could really help me get over the hump? And this is where I'm having problems." It gives him a very specific thing, and at the end he feels like he made a big difference. Giving them the opportunity to win is a really part of mentorship. I think in many ways, for example you know, you and I used the same quote earlier before the interview. We were both just taking what we've rightfully stolen from someone else. You don't even know if anybody's had an original thought in their entire life. We're just the amalgamation of the best people that we've encountered. Really grooming those people has been such as shortcut for me in learning. That would be for an entrepreneur, find someone on the next level. If you have a business where you're doing one or two sales, and you need to find a guy that's doing one million to five million, or find a guy that's doing five million to twenty million. Always look up, and always offer a hand. 

Jaime: There's a whole chapter in the book all about finding a mentor. Tell me, give me examples. Like how someone can go out and find a mentor, especially if they don't have a lot of relationships beforehand. 

Robert: Sure. There's an entrepreneurial community wherever you live. I just moved to Austin. I'm one of Austin's newest residents. I moved here from...

Jaime: I don't live in Austin, but I want to.

Robert: I moved here from Boulder, Denver. There's a huge, we have a big entrepreneurial community there. You get a lot of private equity guys and tech stars, a bunch of young entrepreneurial groups. What I'd do is I'd find an entrepreneurial group, and also a great way that I did it was I was looking for money. 

Jaime: Oh that's good. Can I have money? No.

Robert: A lot of angel investors. Instead of going up and saying "Jaime, would you like to invest in my business?" which makes a very defensive situation, if I said "Jaime, I know you've been in the entrepreneurial community for a long time, and what I'd like to do is show you my business, and maybe you would suggest a couple people that it would be a likely fit for. It's probably not you, but I'd love just to borrow an hour of your time just to tell me what you think of the idea." Ironically I did a company in the adventure travel business.

Jaime: Oh really?

Robert: Yeah, we did software for the operators, and we plugged them in together, and we powered the tabs on Orbitz, Expedia, and Travelocity. Sold it in oh-seven. The way we found our first venture capitalist was what we call "off-Broadway," which we went up to him and we didn't pitch him, but we said "Hey, we're going to go out to the Valley. I'd love a practice session and to get feedback." It happened like that. 

Jaime: That's good.

Robert: It is. It's totally not intimidating. "Look I'm going out to the Valley. I'd love to get feedback. It's our first time pitching, the A round for this company."

Jaime: You just approached him cold? Like you didn't know him beforehand though?

Robert: He was at an angel conference. It was at a conference called Venture Capital in the Rockies. It happens every year, and we went up and had a good conversation. I said "What do you do?" He said "I'm a venture capitalist. What do you do?" "I'm raising venture capital. I'm an entrepreneur." I said "Hey, I've a trip coming up." It was true. I had a meeting out in the Valley, but I used it as almost kind of a soft launch type structure. 

Jaime: Yeah, because you don't want to go up to someone, and "Hey, will you mentor me? Sound like a good idea?"

Mike: It's like the network marketing business. "Hey, you want to join my downline?" 

Robert: Exactly.

Mike: It doesn't really work that well.

Robert: You can get that real soft approach. Frankly the more people you talk to, the basic philosophy that I've found for mentorship is make strangers your friends, and make friends your mentors. 

Jaime: Cool. I like that.

Robert: But if you're authentically who you are, and occasionally you might light it up, and occasionally they might say we don't have any match. The other people will say "I know a guy who was early in Trip dot com, or early in Cendant, who founded Expedia, and all those are true. All those examples are true. From that initial off-Broadway, where all I was doing was practicing my pitch for the deck. 

Jaime: I like that. Have you had mentors who have been really?

Mike: Yeah, yeah, I've been. Actually I've got a specific strategy as Robert did. In the internet world when I first became aware of this invention, this business model, and so when I was just a young kid in my twenties with my e-book business, selling Magnetic. I went to Yanik Silver's Underground conference. I went to the second one, Underground Two. It was the first internet event that I'd ever gone to, and you know here I was the newest kid on the block, wanting to find mentors, and people to help like Yanik, right? What I would do is try to demonstrate value for them first. So instead of asking them for something, I would give something first. I found that the best way to do that was to really endorse or promote their product as an affiliate or even for free or send them a testimonial. I remember Yanik was having some kind of conference call or something at the time for his readers. About thirty minutes before the call, I emailed him a big one page testimonial of how he had impacted my life and what I learned. He read it right before he got on the call, and it was fresh on his brain, so he actually read it on the call. He was like "Oh, awesome." That was kind of intentional. I've found that there are two things that work really, really well. One, saying thank you. You know this can be a thankless gig a lot of times. You think you've helped a lot of people, but you only hear from one out of ten who bother to send something if that many. 

Robert: One out of a thousand.

Mike: When you see them in person, they'll say it, but you're like "Why didn't you send an email?" 

Jaime: I did buy your product. 

Robert: Did you send a testimonial?

Mike: I've found that saying thank you works really, really, really well, and it gets you on their radar. Earning their time by really sending them business. For me, people always want my time, but if you really want my time, and you want me to actually notice it is if you're going to promote a product or do whatever. It's like "Oh, this kid is taking action, and is doing something, rather than "Oh my god, help me, I'm drowning,' scenario where it's just not rewarding frame to approach someone with."

Robert: All of that applies to finding mentors.

Mike: Right.

Robert: In terms of the "Help me, I'm drowning." A lot of them when they come to you with that energy it becomes really repelling. 

Jaime: Yeah. I get those too. I'm like "I'm sorry."

Robert: You're afraid you'll drown with them.

Jaime: Yeah. 

Robert: And it's interesting to go down what Mike said. I think the basic way your mind frames it when you meet someone, I think beginning entrepreneurs it's what can you do for me. My perspective is what can I do for you. How can we help serve your membership or your readership? By the way, if you help people, it will come back to you a hundred times. Whether you see it or you don't, when you meet someone in a different industry and you say "I can do this for you." They'll say "Well, what do you want," and you say "I don't want anything." It's great. All of the sudden when it will come around, all of the sudden what you have are a bunch of people that want to help you. The more people that want to help you, the more successful you're going to be.

Jaime: That's seven years where work your butt off helping other people. We just had Bob Burg, the Go-Giver on the show, and he talks about that. 

Mike: He talks about that book all the time.

Robert: I do talk about it. 

Jaime: It's amazing, and it's so nice to be able to hear that put in practice too. Reading a book is one thing, but hearing it works for you guys too is really kind of amazing. I know we have to start wrapping up unfortunately. I always ask the same last question. Normally I give everyone a head's up, and I totally forgot to do the head's up before.

Mike: The answer is?

Jaime: Forty-two. The last question I'd love for you to separately answer this. It's what's one action listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

Mike: Thanks for putting me on the spot first.

Jaime: And it's you.

Mike: I have an email that I wrote years ago. The subject line or the title line was "The Lamest Success Secret that You'll Ever Hear." I'd like to share that with you now. 

Jaime: Yes.

Mike: It's true. It's just not very exciting. Back in the day, especially in the beginning, but still to this very day, my entire businesses have been run, started on notepad, that little word pad app that every computer has. Now it's Evernote.

Jaime: I'm still using the word pad. Is that wrong? 

Mike: Yeah, no. From day one, because you run into that information overload thing, and you've only got a given amount of time, especially if you've got a job. The number one real secret that enabled me to make that journey and to get to where we are today was to just sit down every night and put the three to five tasks down that I had to get done next day. A lot of them were super unglamorous whether it was redirect the domain name, tweak the AdWord group, write the email to the list, or call so-and-so. It was waking up and completing as many of those as I could every single day, and then doing that, if you think of each one as a brick, and doing three to five bricks a day, two to three years later you've got a house and a business.  I wish the secret to success was more sexy than that, but that's really the difference between people that make it over the long term and people who try and start over, and try and start over because they're buying into kind of the dream. The difference is the guy who shows up and goes to work every day for three years.  That's just what keeps you on task. That's the big secret behind success is that you just grind through when most people get sick of grinding and they quit. 

Jaime: I love that. That's the thing that people don't understand before they get into it. They either get excited, and go "Why didn't this take off? I must suck," instead of knowing that this is a long term process, and I won't necessarily have this huge three point four million dollars in eight days right away kind of a thing. Being able to do the actions step-by-step. Even if they're unsexy. 

Mike: The vast majority of them are.

Jaime: I'm glad that you said that though because we tend to think that there's something wrong. That we should be doing some kind of crazy strategy, and it is like redirect the domain name. I did it. Sweet.

Mike: I literally bought the HTML books for dummies and all of that stuff because I couldn't afford to hire programmers. You know, so?

Robert: I used to, I couldn't buy them. There was an old bookstore, a great bookstore in Denver called the Tattered Cover, and I used to walk my dog. There were a lot of dogs there, and they served coffee. I would sit there with my dog, and I would read the HTML bible in there. I couldn't buy it, and I'd take these notes. I'd go back home, and I'd do it, and I'd go back in there. 

Jaime: That's awesome.

Robert: It's interesting. What would be something that you could do this week? I talk a lot in my consulting, which will sound really esoteric, around the concept of bending time, which is sexy. 

Jaime: Good, you need that. 

Robert: I needed to juxtapose it to Mike's answer. The way that you bend time is actually really unsexy. The way that people bend time is they do what their natural ability is. What I call their stupid human trick. The one thing that you do better than anybody else. You know, when I was a child, I grew up in the days of Atari and video games, but now they have a hundred buttons on the controller. They used to have two or one. Everyone had the common move, and then they had the special move. One guy could breathe fire; one guy could do a back flip. One guy could do that. For example Jaime, you're great at interviewing. It's a very natural skill for you. But that doesn't make it less valuable for your readership. I mean just because this is really easy for you...

Jaime: This is fun. Yeah.

Robert: It's fun and easy, and that's what you do for a living. You set it up to be fun and easy. But it doesn't make it less valuable for them, and so, for a lot of people they think it has to be hard to be worthwhile. It has to be difficult to be worthwhile. My father is eighty-eight years old, and a child of the Depression, World War Two. He, I was raised with the story that it has to be difficult to be worthwhile. The one thing that I would say this is really to identify your stupid human trick. I'll give you tools to be able to do it. That's really the one thing that you can do better than anyone else. It's going to be really natural, and it's going to be really easy. The thing that makes it difficult for people to see is because it's natural and easy for them, they assume everyone can do it. That's not true. Not everybody can interview naturally or not everybody can write naturally. The best way I know to figure that out is to go out and find five people that you love, friends and family. Ask them to write a paragraph about what you're great at. Then go ask five of your coworkers, if you're still in corporate America. It could be a peer if you're just starting your own business, whatever the case may be. Ask five coworkers to do the same thing. What you usually find, if you don't know what your stupid human trick is, is there's going to be a delta between the five people that love you - what they say you're good at. You're great at bringing the best out in people. You're great at interviews. You're great at this and that. The five people that you work with often they're not going to recognize that. What I would try and do is I would try and close that gap. That really simple exercise is really about self-identification for what you are amazing at. When you understand that, I would get everything else off your plate. And I would set it up so all you do is your back flip all day. For example...

Jaime: I wish you guys could do a back flip. Oh go ahead.

Robert: Well, I...

Mike: Are you ready for your demonstration? We brought the trampoline out for a reason.

Robert: Really, it's just about doing your back flip. My advice, in your business, I don't know how many people are in your business, but I would have you out and doing as many interviews as you possible can. Every time you go to reply to an email, I would think don't do that. There's so many traps. If you really want to bend time, do the one thing that provides the most value for your customers. If you can focus on the one thing that provides the most value, everything else takes care of itself. If you're doing something, and it feels hard, and it feels difficult, stop. Really get focus on what it is that you do best. Build your business around your stupid human trick. That will provide scale and lift.

Jaime: I love it that you call it a stupid human trick. I think that's great. It makes it seem so much easier. Thank you so much guys. I really, really appreciate it. Where can we find more information on you online?

Mike: I'd say just go to the Elevation Group dot com or dot net, and that would probably be the best spot. 

Robert: Yep, you can find everything out from there. 

Mike: Thanks for having us.

Jaime: You're on Facebook; you're at. We'll link up to everything 

Mike: That's awesome. 

Jaime: Thanks

Mike: Awesome
Robert: Thanks for coming, Jaime.

Jaime: Take care.

Tags: Business Growth, business strategy, Decision Making, Mastermind, Mentor, Mentoring, Mike Dillard, millionaire interview, Mindset, Robert Hirsch

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Mentors and Mastermind, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

Learn More