How Much Should You Risk in Business? With Jayson Gaignard

Founder of MastermindTalks, Mastermind Retreats, and The Early to Rise Podcast – Jayson Gaignard

Jayson built one of the largest ticket companies in Canada, which he eventually let die. Why? We go into what the causes of his burn out were and why he didn’t jump off of the sinking boat beforehand. We also go into how he started his new venture, and it all started with an $84,000 risk!

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Go to MastermindTalks.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Announcer: Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast - with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you - the Eventual Millionaire.

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I have my friend Jayson Gaignard on the show today. He's the founder of MastermindTalks.com and he also used to own TicketsCanada.com, which was a really cool company that he built to over $3 million. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Jayson.

Jayson: Thank you for having me.

Jaime: We met in New York City way back when, it was a couple of years ago and you were in the process of dwindling down your role in Tickets Canada. Can we talk a little bit about that? Because I know, in your head, it was a bit of a failure and a bit of a success. Can we talk about that?

Jayson: How that business came to be, really quickly, was that I left high school, became a mechanic, didn't want to be a mechanic, wanted to be an entrepreneur, started a service based business, which was a personal concierge business, so we'd run errands for people, and realized that service based businesses are really hard to scale. What happened was, from a positioning perspective, when people thought of the word "concierge" they thought of a hotel concierge and when they thought of a hotel concierge they thought of concert tickets and because our slogan was "If it's legal, moral and would save you time, we'll take care of it," people started to come to us for concert tickets, so we started sourcing these tickets for people. We'd go to these big name brokers and they just charged a fortune and we'd pass this along to our customers and I never felt good about it. We started to stock a little inventory and, over time, people just kept coming back and coming back and we kept on growing our inventory until that started to eclipse the service side of the business which we then kind of killed off and became a ticketing business - a ticketing wholesaler - that's how we first starting, wholesaling concert tickets. So all of those big sites, eBay and Stub Hub, they would get their tickets from us, so we were able to have a really nice, lean business that made a lot of money at the time and that's how Tickets Canada came to be.

Jaime: That's really interesting - so you didn't even have a front facing website, you were using them?

Jayson: Exactly. It's basically almost like an affiliate model. So there's two sides to that industry - there's the wholesale side, so there are a couple hundred wholesalers across North America that have all the tickets, and then the retail side where they make their money on service fees. What happened, how Tickets Canada came to be, was we were just a wholesaler with no front-facing at all and, over time, we saw that the wholesale side of the business was slowly starting to get squeezed, our margins were getting squeezed, because it was only a matter of time - the model of the industry was that we would buy a ticket at face value for $50 and sell it for $100 and we'd make that $50 but, over time, the promoters were getting smarter and TicketMaster was getting smarter and the box offices were getting smarter so what we used to be able to buy for $50 was now $70, $80, and it was squeezing us that way. So we saw that we had to pivot a little bit, change our company and actually build a retailmodel instead, which is what a lot of those other websites do where tickets can be priced above cost, below cost from a wholesaler's perspective, it doesn't matter - they make a flat service fee of 25-30%. So we wanted to get both sides of the transaction and that's the avenue we went down. We opened two retail stores, which was kind of a first in Canada, and also the ticketing website.

Jaime: I want to take about the retail thing in just a second, but what's really interesting is that you were the middle man, as a wholesaler, and then you ended up grabbing the retail side too, so you were both sides of the coin.

Jayson: Yeah, so when we did add sales to our website, it was a really nice payday because we made the wholesale margin and we also made the retail margin as well.

Jaime: That's smart. So tell me why retail - I mean, if you have a website why bother to have a retail location?

Jayson: Because the one thing with the ticketing industry, the number one concern, was "Are my tickets real?" There's a lot of people that were worried about scams, obviously there are scams and it's relatively easy to scam people, especially with e-tickets because a lot of people just print multiple ones and sell them, so there's no way to test their validity until you get to the venue the night of and then they scan it, which is a little heart rending.

Jaime: A slap in the face right there!

Jayson: Exactly. We decided to open a retail store because firstly we were looking for office space and it wasn't that much more money to have a retail store and I thought if we had an actual retail presence it's going to help to alleviate a lot of that worry that our tickets are a scam. I'd still have people coming into our retail store sometimes and say "How do I know these are not fake?" and I'd say "We're on a four year lease - you can come back and break my window tomorrow, we're not going anywhere!" So it did help alleviate that, plus, in Ontario, which is where we started out of, there's a law against ticket scalping but it's a 40 year old law so it's very lax, so it was very borderline for us to open a retail store and be like "Hey, here we are." Once we had two police officers walk in - I remember they walked by the front window and all of my staff were like "Oh my God, what's going down?" and they actually came in to buy tickets, just like anybody else. It was an interesting industry.

Jaime: That's awesome. So what happened to it? Because the last time I chatted with you, you were trying to find someone to sell it to. You had it for a long time so tell me how long you owned it and what happened to it.

Jayson: I started the concierge business in 2005 and I probably pivoted in 2007, 2008 because, like I said, it was a gradual process. What happened with the business was that it was doing really well, financially - we were in the $3-5 million range, depending on the year and it was always spiking - but what happened was that I was living a "four hour work week", I was travelling the world, I was making a ton of money, but it's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs - once you have your basic needs taken care of, you start asking yourself "Why am I here?" and "How many people will turn up to my funeral?" and those kinds of things, and I was just not happy with the answers I was giving myself so at the time I consciously wanted to sell the business and subconsciously I started to sabotage it. One of the core reasons I did that was because, to me, in my model of the world, as long as I had a Plan B, which was a business that took care of all of my wants and needs, financially, I would never follow through with Plan A, which was to create a business that would just light me up. I was always one of those entrepreneurs who works best with their back against the wall. It makes no sense from an outsider's perspective but to me it was just one of those things. It's that whole Tim Ferriss thing about stress versus eustress - putting yourself in situations that really force you to grow. For me that was, I guess, an opportunity. The flip side of that is that one thing that I'm not good at, as an entrepreneur, is hiring great people and managing them so I had a lot of C and D level people in the company and as soon as I started to remove myself they were just like a cancer and they killed the business. I was so done with the business, I was so over it, that I just really wanted nothing to do with it. When we connected, I was looking for somebody to purchase it. It was weird because, although I wanted to sell it, part of me didn't want to sell it. I had people within my network who wanted to purchase the company or wanted to discuss it and, to me, the business was a source of pain because I had made so much money and was still unfulfilled that I felt at the time that if I sold the business to somebody I didn't want them coming back to me two years later, saying "I'm miserable as well." It was weird, in hindsight, but I think it's just something that a lot of entrepreneurs go through and don't talk about a lot. I saw Gary Vaynerchuk in D.C. two months ago - a friend of mine put on a bet with him last year - he was talking about considering sabotaging everything that he had, because he started from scratch, to prove everybody wrong. But he's Gary V, bestselling author, has a huge company. Lot's something that a lot of us struggle with but that's kind of what happened in my case.

Jaime: This is why I wanted you to bring that up. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs and so do you and this is stuff that people don't want to talk about. It sounds silly, as you're talking about it I'm sure it feels weird, going "Subconsciously I wanted to sabotage myself." But, seriously, that stuff is real and people don't understand it. Even we don't understand it going through it. As you're going through it, you're like "I don't get it." Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20. How do you recover from that? You're miserable where you are and then you start tanking so you're even more miserable, but it's your baby so you have lots of emotional ties - how did that work out and how did you start doing something else?

Jayson: Well I was pretty done with the business, if truth be told. I was comfortable with letting the business land at zero. I was totally fine with that, however two things happened that were beyond my control - two big things. It was like death by a thousand paper cuts - I had bad employees, I was not good at managing staff, I had a few concerts that didn't go as well as we thought they would - but two major things happened, going down, that were beyond my control, that landed me in a quarter of a million dollars of cash debt in August 2012, so that's about a year and a half ago. That's when I was at my "rock bottom" and I had to work my way back up.

Jaime: So what did you do then? Thankfully you're good with your back against the wall - you look at the debt, you're like "Shoot, my bank is against the wall!" What do you do?

Jayson: I was definitely against the wall; that was a very tough time for me. I was getting married to my wife, we had a six month old daughter. It's tough, sometimes, when you have a business that is doing $1 million in cash flow a month and that just stops. That was a huge luxury for me - I was never good at tracking finances all that well but whenever I needed money it was there. I had the freedom of time and money; I could buy whatever I wanted at the time. When that stopped, that was terrifying. Another terrifying thing was that I knew I had the mental capacity to pull myself out - again, going back to that whole putting yourself against the wall type of thing - but without the stress of being in a business and not knowing what's coming next and all of this debt now, I had no energy. That whole can't get of bed in the morning?, that was me for a good couple of months. It was scary because it was like having a Ferrari for a brain but with no gas in the tank. It was a scary time. The first thing I had to tackle was getting my energy back up and getting my health. Once I got on track there, then I started slowly trying to come up with business ideas. James Altrucher's idea generation, I've given him credit for that quite a few times, definitely helped and got the gears rolling a little bit. What happened was somebody gave me a ticket to go and see Seth Godin in New York. I've always been a huge fan of Seth's but I've never had an opportunity to see him speak in person. So I went to his workshop, it was in October of 2012, and the theme for this workshop was connection economy and how there's a huge value being the catalyst connecting like-minded individuals. So I went to this and at the time I thought there was no group as disconnected as entrepreneurs, because everyone's working in their own little silos and that kind of thing, so I decided I was going to do these dinners, and I called them mastermind dinners. I held them in Toronto and I held them in New York and now I hold them wherever I go but at the time those were the two places I would hold them and I basically invite 6-8 entrepreneurs who don't know each other and they connect over dinner. Truth be told, the first one I did I almost cancelled two hours prior because I thought no one was going to see value in it, they were going to think I've wasted their time - all of those fears that you get as a new entrepreneur were coming back up, the fear of being judged, of failure, all of those kinds of things. It's funny because when I'm successful in business I have people come up to me and say "I really want to become an entrepreneur - how do I do it?" and I say "It's easy, just do it," but when I was back at square one I had all of these fears of building back up. But thankfully I went through with that dinner and I got clarity on two things. First, we had people who were in the tech scene, we had people who were in moving companies, and in that discussion it became clear to me that no matter what business you're in we all face very similar pains - raising cash, managing employees, those kinds of things. The second thing was, the first dinner lasted four and a half hours and we did not skip a beat and I just felt this instant rush of energy and clarity that connecting entrepreneurs was something I wanted to do and also I long track of time, that was a big thing for me, it went by so, so fast. So I continue to do these dinners. I was paying for these dinners at the time, they cost me $6-800 per dinner to do and I was putting that on whatever little credit I had left and the reason I continued to do these dinners was that my mindset was that the bank could take my car, they could take whatever measly assets I have left, but they couldn't take my network, they couldn't take my relationships and a portion of the money I invested in myself as well, so I started joining more masterminds and those kinds of types. From that, I had an opportunity to do an event with Tim Ferriss. I've known Tim for quite some time but I had an opportunity to do an event with him. Tim is, by far, one of the best book marketers I know. His last book, "Four Hour Chef", was banned from all of the Barnes & Nobles, so 1100 book stores, and he had to scramble, last minute, and create these book packages where if you bought 500 books you'd get a webinar, buy 1000 books, you get this, buy 50 books you get something else. He had one package where if you bought 4000 books he would do two speaking engagements and when I saw that I actually thought of a friend of mine. I saw the blog post early in the morning - I used to wake up at 4am at the time and he had just posted that blog post at 3:30 in the morning so I was one of the first to see it - and I thought of a good friend of mine who puts on these huge events in Canada where 2-3000 people show up to them and I thought that would be a huge opportunity for him so I sent him an e-mail and the minute I clicked send I thought "This is a great opportunity for anybody, really," because it was $84,000 for two speaking engagements and I thought "Is it fair enough to say that you could get Tim in two major metropolitan cities and get 42 entrepreneurs to spend $1000 to spend an hour with him.That's worst case scenario. Is it feasible? Somewhat." So I e-mailed Tim directly and I said "You know what? I'll take the package," so that morning I had to raise $84,000 and thankfully I was able to do it. I reached out to three people, the first two people agreed, and that's the first time I've ever tried to raise money, I've never asked for money from anybody, everything else was on credit cards in my last business and stuff like that. I reached out to three people and the first two people said they would front the money, no questions asked, and that was huge for me and because of that I'm a firm believer that you never know the value of your network until you really need it. I was able to raise the money that day and I procrastinated a bit after that and Tim said "We need to pick a date," so I picked a date, which was May 23rd and May 24th of last year, of 2013, and built up an event. The reason why I did it was that I thought "Here's an opportunity to do what I do at these dinner parties on a larger scale," so I really saw it as a social capital play. Anyone who's in the events space will swear that you don't make any money at it. It's very difficult to make money in the event space - most often you lose money for the first three or four events, so my goal was to break even and put a hundred incredible people in the room. I thought if I could put a hundred incredible people in the room that would be huge value to me. So that was part of the plan and that's how we built it out. I was just planning to do the one event and I was joking at the event that I was going to be unemployed afterwards, saying "I don't know what I'm going to do next!" but thankfully it was a huge success so we're doing another one in June and we'll see where it goes from there.

Jaime: That's awesome. I definitely want to talk about that piece in general but at the very beginning you talked about getting your health back. That's something that we ignore a lot, so how did you get your energy and health back?

Jayson: There was a ton of things - I'm about 60lbs lighter than I was then. I've lost weight before - oddly enough, in high school, the biggest I got was 252lb and I lost all the weight the wrong way, eating very little and working out like mad and I got down to 168lb, which is almost anorexic and then I levelled out at about 180-85lb for about seven years and then, with all of this business stuff happening, I got back up to exactly 252lb. the first thing I did was build the habit of getting back to the gym and stuff like that. I read Charles Duhigg's "The Power of Habit" and that was a big thing for me, just understanding how habits are structured, the triggers and rewards and all that kind of stuff, and just getting back into the habit of going to the gym and that shaved off a bit and after that I had to take up the intensity of my workouts and then start eating healthy. Another big thing is the importance of sleep. It's almost like a badge of honor for entrepreneurs to say "I don't sleep." It's funny, I was talking to another group of entrepreneurs about this last week and these guys are sleeping for four or five hours a night and they're just stuck in this model where it's the way to go about things but a huge thing is the importance of sleep. If you dig into the importance of sleep, it affects all aspects of your life - you can have an incredible diet, you can have a seriousworkout regime, but if you're only sleeping five or six hours a night it's not going to do you any good whatsoever. So sleep is a big, big thing and that's tough when you're stressed. My sleep wasn't too bad, except for my daughter who was six months old, but I have friends who wake up shaking at two in the morning just because of all of the stress and anxiety from their business so that is the first thing that you've got to nail down, is sleep.

Jaime: Did it only take four months for you to build these habits? Did you all of a sudden get your energy back? You said you didn't even want to get out of bed so how did that transition happen?

Jayson: In hindsight it seems like it was easy but it probably wasn't the case at the time. It took a while because also what happens is, as an entrepreneur, you want results yesterday and with habits it takes time. For me it was probably four or five months before I really started to get into the motion of things. The first month was just me showing up at the gym for 15 minutes and not have a schedule at all, it was just me making the action of going to the gym three times a week. After I made that habit and didn't do anything above that, then I started to step up the intensity. I was doing these one month increments and since then I've changed up my routine based on my morning rituals and stuff like that but definitely habits were a key thing, because it's much easier to be pulled by something than push yourself using willpower to go to the gym and that kind of stuff.

Jaime: Definitely, so everybody pick up "The Power of Habit". I haven't read it and I've been told to over and over again so I've actually written it down so I can pick it up too because I'm always looking for good books.

Jayson: Do you want to know a hack in regards to that book?

Jaime: Yes I do.

Jayson: I read "The Power of Habit" from beginning to end, which was great, but as you know, especially as somebody who's written a book,a lot of books can probably boil down their principles to 10 pages and the remainder is fluff because that's what the publisher wants so if you watch Charles Duhigg's interview with Jonathan Fields on the Good Life Project it is incredible. It covers 80% of the book without the fluff and you get all the value. I've been practicing by reading the book and then I listened to the interview and I got 80% of it from the interview. I need to start watching more interviews.

Jaime: You just saved me so much time.

Jayson: That one, especially, is a fantastic interview. You'll get the gist of it from that interview.

Jaime: Exactly what I wanted because I don't have enough time to read the book. I wrote it down because I was going to get it on my Kindle and helpfully have enough time to read it.

Jayson: It's a great interview and you can probably listen to it at 2x so it's like 20 minutes. That would be amazing.

Jaime: You've saved me so much time. So tell me abbot the thing with Tim Ferriss, because someone else told me the story, I think it was maybe Clay, I can't remember, but it was interesting because I was like "Wait a minute, he's the guy who bought that thing?" because I asked everybody how you got such amazing speakers for Mastermind Talks because I had interviewed half the people that were on your stage and I was like "I know how much money the charge. It's insane." So what gave you the balls to go ahead and go "$84,000? Yes, Tim, I say okay?"

Jayson: I think Tony Robbins has a quote that says that eight seconds of courage can change your life. It was just making that decision and once I'd made that decision I knew I was committedto it. As soon as I clicked send on that e-mail I was like "I've got to follow through, I've got to come up with the money," and thank God for my wife who stuck by my side through all of this stuff because she's generally a worrier and this was definitely a time to worry. It was one of those things; it was a Hail Mary. I went by my intuition. I had no clue if I could raise the money; I knew I could find the money somehow. The problem in my last business was that I had so much money coming in all the time that when you think "$84,000" you don't think that's a big deal - sometimes we had $84,000 coming in per day but when that stops you're still in that old mindset and that's a problem I had when I was going into debt and I knew there was going to be some rough waters, I was still spending like I was before just because I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that times were changing. So I think part of it was that, even though $84,000 was a lot of money I had been exposed to a lot more so it wasn't that extreme but I still definitely didn't know where the money was going to come from. The bank dollar wouldn't touch me with a $5 loan, never mind $84,000, but thankfully it worked out.

Jaime: I think that's a huge point to talk about because the thing is, when you make a lot of money, it levels you up in mindset, where $84,000 is not that big of a deal. When somebody is scrimping, their mindset is "$84,000 is so much money, I can't imagine even trying to scrape together that much," but like you said, the opposite side of it is "$84,000 isn't a lot of money." I see that with some people - they look like they're going to be tanking and yet they're spending as if it's no problem, it will come in eventually. Did you have that mindset - "It's $84,000. Eventually I'll make it back." Because some people just dig themselves further and further and further into the hole.

Jayson: That's something I definitely struggled with and still struggle with from time to time. Every time I'd do a dinner I would do a dinner for like 12 people and I'd cover the bill and people would say "What are you doing?" and every time I would say "Don't worry, I'll be rich soon. Don't worry about me." I definitely think that it's one of those things where you have to get out of the mindset because it is a slippery slope. But to what you said about being exposed to different monies, to me it was a different standard - I have a different standard for business now. Making $5-6 million in business is not a big deal to me anymore. I used to have a mentor and I was very lucky in how I got this mentor. It's one of those things where you look back on your life and you wonder if you'd met that one person at that one specific time if everything else would have lined up. I had this mentor and I was in my concierge business and I was probably doing $6-7000 in revenue and he said "Picture a day when you're doing $80,000 a month," and I was like "Dude, that's impossible." I was agreeing with him just to please him but that wasn't even remotely possible for me. Then, two and a half to three years later, we were doing $600,000 a month and I remember looking at my balance sheet and thinking "My God, to think that three years ago, I didn't think I was going to get much higher than $8000." It's amazing how limiting our beliefs can be sometimes. It's definitely a big thing. That's why, when you see a lot of entrepreneurs do that bounce back, they bounce back a lot faster than they would otherwise because they've been exposed to much more and those limiting beliefs have been shattered - until you reach a new level. If I ever hit $80 million, $7 million won't seem like a big deal. So those limiting beliefs are huge.

Jaime: Exactly. What was it like to go from $6-7000 to $60,000? Because what we're told, and I've experienced this too, you're like "Oh, it's just extra zeroes." When you've had the biggest check you've ever had, you're just like "It's still check. It still just goes in the bank account and there's still just money in there." That stuff doesn't change, it is just more zeroes, but what is that like for you? Was it really a big difference? What did you see?

Jayson: It grew kind of gradually. You hear of some people that are scraping the bottom of the barrel and all of a sudden they get a $10,000 contract or a $10 million contract or something like that - that would be a game changer. For me, it went up every month, month over month for three years, we grew, so it kind of went up and I was just so involved in business, so busy riding by the seat of my pants, that I didn't even stop to realize these things and it wasn't until that one random time, for some reason, that I kind of reflected back and it was crazy. One thing that reminds me of this is that, as entrepreneurs, we have a tough time celebrating our wins; we forget how far we've come. I have some great people who I met last week who are uber successful in business but you ask them "What are you most proud of accomplishing in the last three months?" and they can't think of it. You're like "Are you serious'" and you have a conversation with them and you're like "There's so much here to be proud of, yet you overlook it and just keep going forward." There's something to be said about keeping going forward, there's huge value in that, but every once in a while you have to stop and reflect on how far you've come because there are a lot of unhappy entrepreneurs who are still pursuing and pushing and pushing and they haven't really reflected or appreciated what they've overcome.

Jaime: I see this all the time with my coaching clients and I think one of the funny things is that I have to sometimes be like "Hey, stop talking for a second and look at what you just did," which is so funny. Don't get me wrong, I do it too, because when we're driven it's never good enough because there's always something better. It's both an amazing thing that we have, because entrepreneurs are really amazing at that, like "There's always something better, I can drive forward, I see that vision of the future," but then there's also "That's not that good because that is better," no matter what it is. We don't look back. What advice or tips do you have for us to look back?

Jayson: I can't! It's funny - with Mastermind Talks I was petrified about doing the event all the way all the way up until the event. I woke up the morning of and I couldn't go back to sleep. I got to the venue at two in the morning because I couldn't sleep. It was this huge highlight of my life. I planned the event a week before my birthday because every birthday I have is like the most miserable day of the year because I always feel that I haven't accomplished enough and any of those kinds of things, so I planned the event the week before because if the event was a success I would feel good on my birthday and my wife orchestrated them bringing me a cake and they actually sang Happy Birthday. I had Tim Ferris and Mark Eccles singing my Happy Birthday. I had three standing ovations. It was the highlight of my life, career-wise, and after the event happened I had two weeks book in Saint Lucia with my wife, we were supposed to be disconnected, but as soon as we land I get right back to work because I was not happy. I was like "Could have been better, could have improved." We had glowing feedback from everybody, everybody wanted to attend again but I was not happy. So for me, I kind of live my live 90 days at a time where every 90 days I set my desired results for the next 90 days, what does the next 90 days look like, and I also do a check-in where I try to say what I am most proud of accomplishing, the top three things over the last three months, and I actually have an accountability partner that I do that with, but I think journaling is a big thing as well and that's something that I didn't do to its fullest extent when I was at my lowest of the low and that is something I will regret for the rest of my life. Now that I I have it, it's unconscious, though, so I wish I'd had that I could have painted a vivid picture of what it was like back then. So I think journaling is huge and celebration in general and if you have a hard time doing it alone, get an accountability partner.

Jaime: I agree with that. It's so funny - we can't do it on our own. Most of the time we can't do it on our own. Having that support system, someone to smack you upside the head and go "Do you not see what you did just there?" is huge. It's interesting hearing your side of the story because when I saw you create Mastermind Talks I was going "Oh my gosh, what is he doing? This is awesome!" It?s good to hear that you were scared also because I've always wanted to do that and I still haven't had a chance to and look at him, he just came out of nowhere and just did.

Jayson: There's a quote that someone posted on Facebook a while ago that people are basically comparing their backstory to other people's highlight reels. I was petrified. I'm a little nervous for next year's Mastermind Talks because, as the last one was so good, I'm all about over delivering, as we all are, so it's about how do we raise that bar again. But that's what forces you to grow, you feel alive when that's the case, so I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Jaime: What have you been doing in the meantime? We've talked about the Mastermind Talks but the reason you're on the show is because you have a net worth of $1 million or more still, and we confirmed this and chatted about it before, having to do with all of your real estate and stuff that you have, just in case anyone is wondering. But what have you been doing in between? Have you just been prepping for the other one? Did that other one make so much money that you didn?t have to worry about other stuff? Is events going to be your main thing?

Jayson: Well two days prior to the actual Mastermind Talks event, someone pulled me aside and said "What's something you spend a lot of money on that you see huge value in?" and to me it was masterminds. Because events are great, I love events, and the testimonials we got were amazing, just like most events, everyone says "This is the greatest thing ever, it changed my life," and then they get back to the office on Monday morning and life hits, business hits and it just all falls by the wayside. So, to me, implementation is a big, big thing and that's where I think the structure of a mastermind can be really valuable, so at the event I said, really kind of last minute, "How many people here would be interested in a mastermind?" and gave a quick overview of what it should look like and then handed out interest forms, saying "If you're interested, let me know." At the event we had 110 people in attendance and 67 people said they were interested so I identified the top 15 people I wanted in the group because just like the event, the event had a ton of applications and we handpick the top 100 people, so for the group I identified the top 15 and 10 signed up. I guess it was like a test pilot, to a certain degree, because I was starting to learn how to facilitate masterminds on my own, because I get clarity from doing things, I get clarity through progress and those kind of things. I couldn't sit down and design a mastermind, I had to start doing it. So now that I'm much clearer on that we'll see what it turns into at the next Mastermind Talks event but the other side of the event is the mastermind group.

Jaime: Which makes perfect sense because it's called Mastermind Talks.

Jayson: Yeah, it works out.

Jaime: What a great plan! That's awesome.

Jayson: I was surprised that the domain name was on GoDaddy. I went there, it was $9.99, it was meant to be.

Jaime: Perfect. It's a great name. We have to start wrapping up, so what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Jayson: I think one of the biggest things, I think I touched on it, is the value of your network. There's a great quote but it's slipping my mind. John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches of all time, has a quote that nobody really knows about, which is "Show me your friends and I'll show you your future." IO think being very conscious of who you surround yourself, not necessarily letting people go - that's a common misconception that if you make new friends you have to let people go - it's really about how you allocate your energy and who are some people in your network who have what you want and how you can surround yourself with them some more, how you can deliver value to them and those kinds of things. When you talk about limiting beliefs, when your business does $10,000 a month and you hang around somebody that does $1 million a month, if you hang around with them enough you're going to start to believe what they believe and you're going to start to change your standards so that's a huge, huge thing, being conscious of who you surround yourself with, because there's another great quote - "You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with." I'll let that one sink in.

Jaime: From a girl from the middle of nowhere in Maine to the network I have now is just astounding, and we're thankful, right' These are amazing people - yeah, they make a lot of money but they're amazing people in general, so being able to surround yourself with amazing people just makes your life so much better anyway.

Jayson: What an incredible time to live - I'm just outside of Toronto and I'm connected with a bunch of incredible people, you're connected with even more incredible people than I am and it's because of these tools and technologies. 20-30 years ago, we'd be stuck reading about these people in a library.

Jaime: I know, I thought the same thing. I'd be looking around at trees, going "Okay?" Thank you so much, Jayson. Can you tell us where we can find out more about your stuff?

Jayson: Pretty much whatever I'm up to can be found at MastermindTalks.com

Jaime: Perfect. Everybody should check that out and add Jayson on Facebook and Twitter and all your social stuff too. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Jayson. I appreciate it.

Jayson: I appreciate this immensely. Thank you for all you do.

Announcer: Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: business risk, business startup, Jayson Gaignard, Mastermind, Mastermind Group, Mentor, Mentoring, millionaire interview, Startup

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Relationships

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

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