Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I’m Jaime Tardy and today we have J.V. Crum, III on the show. J.V. and I actually met at Blog World out in New York City and then again I saw him when I was out in Portland, Oregon for WDS. He has been awesome and really helpful. He actually became a millionaire in his 20s and realized though, at that time, that it’s not really about the money. He’s actually writing a book called the conscious millionaire, which should be out in early 2013. I’m really excited to have him on the show. Thanks so much for coming on, J.V.

J.V. CRUM, III: Hi, thanks for having me on.

JAIME TARDY: So your beginning story is very similar to mine, which is weird, because I haven’t heard this before and you wanted to be a millionaire since you were little. Tell me a little bit about that.
 

JC: It was interesting. I grew up in let’s just say modest middle class family where money was always a problem. My dad was in agriculture so if the rains didn’t come or the weather was bad or we had a freeze, we didn’t have any money. My mom taught school so there was no money there and there were a lot of fights about money. It was back when we were watching television and I would see just about anybody on a television sitcom was living in a better house than we were. Some of them, when you’d see the rich people, you’re like they’re really living in a nice house. I’m going like I want one of those houses. I don’t want to live like this when I grow up.

One day, it was a transformation experience. I had this vision that I was going to be a millionaire when I grew up and it was so strong, so powerful that it literally transformed me permanently and I ran in the house and I looked at my parents and I said, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a millionaire.” Here’s the real thing that happened. My mother, we went to church three times a week, right. My mother turns to me, shakes her finger and says, “Don’t tell anybody.” Now I was a little kid so I went around and I told everybody. What I realized is that they had a belief system that there had to be something wrong, you have to maybe done something criminal to have that kind of money, which probably is why we didn’t have any money.

JT: Maybe, yeah.

JC: But by the time I was 8, I was sketching little floor plans. Well they weren’t little floor plans, huge floor plans for mansions and I had never been in a mansion but I kept thinking well I really want to have a nice house when I grow up and it had three rooms. It had a breakfast room. It had a lunch room. It had a dinner room. It had this big pool. I was always doing little entrepreneur things and from that point forward, it felt really strange to me that we didn’t have any money. It felt wrong. I kept going how did I get in this family. I’m supposed to be rich. I just knew.

JT: You had this knowing.

JC: Yes, I just knew that I was going to grow up and I was going to have money and it wasn’t going to be any different than that. In fact, when I talk about my visualization, at some point today, what I created as my visualization, which is very unique, is I went back because I had a lot of NOP training, neuro-linguistic programming, and I literally reversed engineered ? I put myself into state numerous times for what happened when I was 5 and I literally reversed that and got all the pieces for what actually happened at a sensory level and then I created a visualization process that I teach people and they get fast results because what happened then got results.

JT: First, that’s awesome. I was 8 when I had my and I didn’t realize, because I actually drew mansions too. This is really weird. I did the exact same thing. I drew like a river in my huge mansion. I’m going that’s so weird that he did the same thing.

JC: So you got waterfall.

JT: Yes, I had water, which I don’t have in my house right now. Maybe I should try and get it. But let’s actually dive into that. We’ll talk about the company you created after and all that business success, but let’s talk about visualization since we’re there right now. Tell me about what this technique is so everybody can do it too.

JC: Sure. Well, the visualization is actually based on my formula, that’s the book. The book is conscious, the formula for creating wealth. So maybe we should talk about the formula first and we’ll apply it to visualization.

JT: Sounds perfect.

JC: What I was doing, I think in threes, which is fortunate because it turns out people learn in threes so it’s a good match. When I was writing the book, I wanted and I think in formulas. I think in like what’s the strategy, when I go like what’s the problem so what’s the strategy to do that? That’s just kind of my natural thing. I spend a lot of time looking at things that happened in my life and when had I been my maximum success and what was I doing consistently in terms of the process.

For example, elementary school was kind of a waste for me, in terms of learning I guess. I got really bad grades. In the seventh grade I was still bringing home pretty mediocre grades and mom was a school teacher. This does relate to being a millionaire, by the way.

JT: Good.

JC: Every six weeks I bring home this, I wish they just tattled. It would have been so much easier but I had to hear about it for six weeks. So by the end of the seventh grade I’m going okay I’m really tired of putting up with this, I’m going to figure out how to make an A. There has got to be a trick to making an A. That’s what I called it. My junior high was eighth and ninth grade. We didn’t start high school until tenth grade then. It has gone back and forth. So I spent the next two years trial and error. How do you take a test? How do you write a paper? How do you take notes?

By the end of the ninth grade I had figured out how to make an A. So my first semester of high school, at the end of the semester I had a 4.0 and I looked at my report card and I immediately said I am going to be valedictorian and I was valedictorian with a 4.0 and then when I went to college, I took a lot of courses and I went to two summer schools but I was 19 as a senior in college with a 4.0, in my major, for my first grad degree. Remember I have three grad degrees. The first one got a 4.0, started when I was 20 because I had figured out a process and that’s part of the secret.

JT: That’s what we all want to hear. We all want to hear we apply this thing and we become amazingly good at everything we do. So yes, okay, good.

JC: So here it is. I look back at all of that and I also looked at the first year I turned around a family business, paid off nine years of liens, quadrupled the company, started another company and created a profit at the end of 12 months and I had never read a business book, business article, business course and I was 23 years old. At the end of that time, I said okay obviously you’re doing something that works because it worked in school, it worked in making money real quickly and by 25 I had my dream home, my Mercedes, my trips to Europe, which was pretty unusual because you didn’t have the internet quite yet. So you actually had to work for it pretty hard.

When I started writing the book, I looked back at all those situations; that’s why I am bringing them up. I said I was doing three things consistently. The first thing is, in the formula, the first step is I became conscious. So I became conscious in the trial and errors what’s working. I became conscious first and foremost what did I want to achieve. I became conscious of what’s going on in my environment and I paid very close attention and literally every night, like with the company, I would go home and I kept notes all day long and I’d review my notes and I’d go okay well this didn’t work, this didn’t seem to work. I’d go back the next day and I’d put the stuff that worked and I’d try some more. There was also a learning going on.

But all of that’s about being conscious. It’s about being aware, like I started reading. Which habits? How should I study? How do I, by the time I was a senior in college, halfway through the semester I would have had everything read, everything outlined. I was working on my papers and I was tutoring other people by giving them little lectures because I found that if I taught people, I was never worried about them making a better grade because I was just going to learn it better. I’d get more distinctions. All of that is about getting conscious. That’s the first step. But conscious of what is really the question.

So it really starts back with what do you want and how to best achieve it. So once you know what you want, you get crystal clear because most people actually have no clear results that they are going for. It’s beyond goals because people talk about goals. It’s kind of a morphis. We can talk about goals, if you want, but I think of goals like what result are you committed to. So I got clear about what I was committed to so I was looking for this result and I’d go okay only ? second step ? focus on that result. I eliminated all the distraction and my mind, not just my mind, my emotions, my body, all of me would be completely just laser focused, like you couldn’t unglue me from what it was that I was going for.

So once I was focused on that result, then the third piece, which is where so many people don’t do it, is I just execute it. But I took only the actions that would lead to that result and everything else I eliminated. I’d be absolutely conscious of what I wanted and then being clear about what that focus was so that I eliminated everything else not just in my mind but in my emotions. Think about how your emotions are all over the place. Your emotions have to be just as focused as your mind and, in fact, when we talk about visualization, the heart institute has found that the heart has like 5,000 times more energy than your mind.

One of the real secrets is having your heart and then you go like I want to have my heart fully in it. Is your heart in it? That is so critical. If it’s just a mental thing with you, I mean that’s the problem with most people’s visualizations. They’re talking about well you got to focus your mind. Yeah, big deal but focus your heart, bigger deal. Then your body has got to be just in this ready state of action to move you forward and you’re only taking actions that are going to lead one after another exactly to that result and anything that’s not getting you there, just keep being conscious. It’s an iterative process.

So you’re consciously conscious of what you’re focusing on. You’re constantly conscious of your actions and looking at what results you’re getting at all times and then shifting based on those results. But it’s conscious focused action. It’s the key to doing anything you want and it’s the key to making money. If you leave out one of those pieces and a lot of people want to start in the middle. They just want to go take massive action. How many times have you had, oh great but you’re conscious of like what you want. Are you conscious of other things that have worked? Have you looked at information about what’s the best way to do something? Have you looked at what your options are for your strategies? If you don’t do all those pieces up front, you could be just completely wasting your energy taking the wrong actions. But a lot of people jump in at that level and it’s just a huge mistake.

JT: So this is what I want to talk about because formulas, and we’ll get into visualization, but formulas make everything sound so easy. When in reality things aren’t necessarily as crystal clear. So tell me about some other problems. That’s one problem that people run into when they’re trying to do this but what are some of the other issues that when people try or maybe they don’t even know about your formula yet but they’re trying to be successful and they feel like they’re doing everything they need to, what are some of those common mistakes that they’re making?

JC: I broke that down also and I think there are five things that, when I look at entrepreneurs, because I coach entrepreneurs, that they’re doing when they’re not getting the results they want. The first one is huge is they don’t have the right mindset. That’s more than the simple believing in abundance. Poverty and abundance are really important but it’s also a belief about how you add value. Let me give you an example ? there are really three ways that you can look at this value proposition. So some entrepreneurs want to get as much value back as they gave. So they give a dollars worth of value they want to get paid a dollar. That can work but it’s not going to make you massively rich, because how attractive are you to an offer where you go okay sounds like a fair exchange but that doesn’t sound too exciting.

JT: Everyone wants a deal, right?

JC: You want a deal. When I go to buy something, I go okay I have a $100,000 Mercedes but I wanted a deal. I don’t want to pay $100,000 for it. You got to give me something off. You’ve got to give me some bells and whistles here. So it doesn’t matter what you’re buying, you want a deal. Then there are the entrepreneurs that are working from the how can I separate people from their wallet mentality. All they really care about isn’t the value, they want to sell you a box I put it. They’ve got a box to sell you. Something is in it, it doesn’t matter. All they care about is how much money can I get people to give me.

As I put it, you can trick people for awhile and you can trick a certain number of people, but what kind of reputation do you build, who really wants to do business with you? Everybody out there in the market place, especially if you’re doing this on the internet because we know a lot of people do, right, everybody is going to talk. So that’s not the route to long term. You might make the million dollars and you hear the person oh they made a million dollars last year on the internet. Yeah, but what are they making five years from now and are they even in the same business? They got to change businesses, got to have a new business name, right?

Here’s the way you do it. You want people to get multiple value versus what they paid for. When I do coaching with people, if they have an ongoing business, I say at the end of three months, you should have gotten three to five fold what you invested in coaching. If you’re going out to buy a product and it’s an audio product, what does it cost to create that versus if somebody listens to it the real value that they can get? So you want to pack things with value. You want to give ten times value in your products to what it’s really costing or what you’re even charging for them.

So that’s what I mean by wealth mindset. A real wealth mindset isn’t about how much money can I make. It’s really about how much value can I provide in a way the marketplace wants to digest it. It’s at a price point they want, it’s delivered in the way that they want. It’s the color that they want, but you’re there to give massive value. To me, that’s one of the main reasons people don’t make a lot of money is they’re not even looking at it. But a lot of people just have a lousy business model. I have nine parts of a business model I teach people and I call it the nine keys to high profit business. Most people are missing at least half of them.

They haven’t clearly defined their business model and particularly they don’t have a clear vision for their business. I find with smaller businesses and I’m talking not just a business of several million but up to ten million but certainly in those first few million, most the business owners I engage with they don’t have a clear vision for their business, there’s not a clear purpose and worse it’s not connected to who they are. Instead, it’s like well what can I do in the marketplace that people will pay me for and I can build a business, which is kind of the traditional way.

I don’t find it to be the most meaningful way nor do I think it’s the path to your greatest profits because, if you wake up in the morning and you’re excited because you want to go out and make this difference for people, and the cool thing is they’re actually going to pay you on top of that, when you’re giving the joy from this is really what I love to do and you’ve turned it into a high profit business, because you’re doing the business part right. So that’s the other piece about the business model is you and I both know, because we meet a lot of people who have their heart in the right place, right, but we also meet a lot of people who have the heart in the right place but they’re broke.

JT: Yes, a lot of those.

JC: Here’s my joke about that. I do little jokes about things. So the phrase is do what you love and the money will follow. I go but only if you have the right business model. That’s the problem, that’s what’s missing and half the time they’re giving the stuff away a lot of times because they feel great about helping other people but they’re coming from a place that they have, a lot of times there’s this wound. I call it the money purpose wound. They’ve confused here’s my gifts and this is how I’m supposed to be helping. They get that part but they don’t get that oh by the way that’s how you’re supposed to be making your money which means you’re adding value so they should be paying you money and it’s okay to get money because you added value to somebody’s life.

JT: That’s another mindset thing of them though too.

JC: That goes back to the mindset right. A lot of people don’t even have a real success plan. I’m shocked but not shocked in the sense that, it’s just mind boggling to me that most people I start working with do not have a 3-year goal for their business. A large number of them don’t even have a clearly articulated set of goals for 12 months from now and if you don’t have that?

JT: Me too. That’s why they hire us, right?

JC: Yes but if you don’t have all that clear and it isn’t in sync with your vision and who you are and your values which is a big part, to me, your values is a part of your business model.

JT: I agree.

JC: Because you’re bringing that into your business. If you don’t even have goals that are in sync with all of that, what are your chances of success? You don’t know what you should be doing today so you could be busy for 12 hours. Again, you’re jumping in and you’re taking all this action but you never get the conscious part. You got to do the conscious part up front of what’s the business all about. What’s my real purpose in doing this?

As we’ve talked, people just don’t execute. I mean that’s huge. And again, a lot of times part of is mindset and then a lot of times it’s just they don’t feel like they have the skills so they need to get more comfortable with the skills. Like you go just go sell. Well that’s kind of useless. There’s really steps to selling, steps to acquiring customers. So someone will be more comfortable if they have a plan and they have a script and they have these are my ten steps I’m going to do to acquire my customers and this is how I am going to work with them. Then it makes sense. It’s broken down.

Then you get the mindset mixed with that and you can go out and acquire customers but if you just go oh I’m supposed to acquire customers you don’t know what to do. So sometimes failure to execute is you just don’t actually know the steps and you need to learn the steps. Once you know them and you start applying, kind of like I didn’t know how to make an A. Why was I making Cs? Was it because I was a bad person? No. Was it because I was stupid? No. Was it because I didn’t know how to make an A? Yes. I didn’t know how to make an A. So mom telling me, with all good intentions, like you’re not performing to your potential, that was the story I got.

JT: That was what she said? Your potential, yeah, everybody says that.

JC: But I didn’t know how to perform to my potential. It took me two years of playing around because when I did that there were no books on how do you make an A. Now there are courses people take on how to make an A. I actually had to figure it out. But once I figured it out, I knew the steps and I went oh this is easy. Once you know how to do, how to make an A is easy once you know how to do it but until it isn’t. How to make a million dollars is actually easy once you know all the steps you need to be taking.

That’s why when you apply the formula and I have seven habits, when you have the right habits, when you’ve got the business model right, when you’ve got a one-year success plan, when you have the steps for this month and then you can choose the steps for next month, once you know the things you need to be doing, it’s work. It’s not like you don’t have to work but now you know how to do it. Before it wasn’t really even accomplishable. I couldn’t make an A when I only knew how to make a C.

JT: I have a question though. How do we know if they’re right? How do we know if we have the right business model or if we have the right selling technique or whatever it is? How do we know if something is right?

JC: I’m going to give you two answers. One is not the typical answer you’re going to get so I’ll give it to you first. A lot of the work I do and it’s core to what Conscious Millionaire is about, it’s one of the reasons it’s different from other millionaire programs. It’s not just about making money. It’s really taking on an authentic journey. So I am constantly, myself and with all my clients, I’m going is that step feeling authentic for you? If it doesn’t feel authentic then it’s probably not the right step for you and guess what, if it’s not authentic for you, it’s probably not the right one for your clients either. So that’s one answer. I always look for that authentic guidance.

Then the second one is going to be look consciously. Look at the results you’re getting and go out there and survey your customers. I’m putting together a program, we were talking about that. I’ve been listening to what people were saying and going, it sounds like they would rather have it packaged this way. Maybe they want a different name or for a different length of time. So you go out there and you really survey and you find out what your customers want and then you give it to them their way. This doesn’t change your purpose. It doesn’t change.

I can put a coaching program together many different ways. It’s the one that my customer wants and that will give them what they’re looking for that matters so it’s delivered in the way they’re wanting it, not the way that I conceive a coaching program ought to be. If they want it three months, it’s three months. If they want it twelve months, it’s twelve months. Would it be called this or that doesn’t matter. It’s about what they want and you got to go out and ask your customers. So many entrepreneurs sit around thinking up what they think people want. Oh but that’s what I want to do. Well that’s great but does anybody else want you to do it quite that way?

Maybe you’ll have to do it, maybe you have to wash the dishes with the spoons first because that’s the way they want them washed. Maybe you have to deliver this piece because that’s what they want and then they’ll be interested in another piece. You got to do it the way they’re wanting it. People miss that and it’s so simple. I just want to give you something that someone could do is everybody, if you go out, even if you don’t have 25 clients it doesn’t matter, 25 people who would fit your ideal client. Go out and survey them, sit with them and say, “Look, I’m trying to understand better what you would want and how I can meet the needs.” Just take 10 minutes and survey them about what’s important, what their problems are, what their aspirations are and pay attention when they have a strong emotion when they’re talking to you. Identify that strong emotion because that problem with that emotion is why they will buy.

JT: It’s funny, you weren’t there at my World Domination Summit speech but this is exactly what I said. Go out, talk to the people, really get their feedback and really know what they’re feeling having to do with that. That’s really cool.

JC: That’s their hotspot. Their problem, exactly the way they word it, with their feeling and you go here’s, are you feeling frustrated and down because your dog bites everybody in your neighborhood. We have a solution for dog biting and we can train your dog with the gentlest, child friendly dog in the neighborhood.

JT: The language, like you said, when you get the feedback, you know what language you need to talk to them in and also it helps with copywriting. It helps with selling. It helps with all that sort of stuff.

JC: Yes, everything. So it all starts with listening. So you start your business from listening to what’s your purpose. However, you build your business by listening to what your customer is wanting, what they’re needing, but then you design the product because they may not know exactly what they want in terms of the product but they do know what their problems are and they know what their aspirations are. You just have to ask them and find out which ones they seem emotionally.

I want to give you one more piece about that, because we’re really talking about customer acquisition now, is that a lot of people will go out and they’ll find out people are frustrated about this or they talk about this. You have to pay attention. Are they really actively looking for a solution or is this their story they’re always going to tell. Like I never have time for this. I never have time for that. Okay, but are they really looking for better time management or is that just that story but that’s not what they’re actively looking for. They will only buy what they’re actively looking for. It doesn’t matter how big a problem is to them. If they aren’t actively looking for a solution, you aren’t in the right place.

JT: Sometimes even if they are looking for a solution, they want a free solution instead of a paid. They’re not even willing to front their cash for it too, which is dumb to me to ask.

JC: Hello, this isn’t a nonprofit. I have a nonprofit where I work with kids. I can clearly go this is a nonprofit thing. They don’t have to pay for it. I want to help them. That’s nonprofit. Conscious Millionaire is not a nonprofit, it is a business. Therefore, I can only work with people who genuinely want to pay to do better and they get that if they pay $1,000 and they get $3,000 for their bottom line that this is a pretty good deal and they should do it more.

JT: Yes, multiple that and I’ll be a millionaire.

JC: But first, that they are willing to pay. If they aren’t real buyers, you’re not going to sell them. You might sell them a little bit but you’ve got to have people who are actively looking for a solution and they want to pay.

JT: Awesome. So I want to make sure that we don’t forget about, I know we’re sort of, we can talk for a really long time. I know when we actually saw each other we ended up chatting for a really long time so I’ll probably have you back on, especially when you have your book come out we can definitely chat. But let’s talk a little bit about visualization because I know we teased it at the beginning and I really want to make sure we come around.

JC: So remembering the formula conscious focused actions. So there are going to be three major steps to visualization and I’ll just walk you through it. First of all, you become conscious of that result. Don’t think of it as a goal. Think of it as a result. The result that you specifically want. You become conscious of it and you visualize it in your mind with great sensory acuity. So you want to see what you see, what you feel, what you hear. So that is the first step is to become completely conscious and to see it in front of you.

However, the second step is completely different than what most people do. So the second step is you want to focus, remember you want to laser focus all of your thoughts on achieving that but even more important you want to put your full heart in it. You want to feel the passion, the joy, the excitement. Whatever your feelings are that you’re going to feel when that’s completely realized. Remember when I was five I had that transformational experience because I felt myself as a millionaire and I never again thought of myself as someone who wouldn’t be a millionaire.

To me, here’s the clue, to me it was like it was already done. That’s why I kept going oh my God I’m in the wrong family. What happened here? Like why don’t we already have money? Like why don’t we have the Rolls Royce? Why aren’t we living a nice house? Where’s our swimming pool? And your body. So you want to imagine your body taking those steps and focus your mind, your heart and your body. As you focus that, a lot of times you will go, a lot of people go then walk into the experience completely backwards.

This is why it doesn’t work too well. No, you want to move the future into you so that you see it coming towards you, that result, that ideal state that you want to create and it’s moving towards you and then you allow it to come into your body and totally infuse your mind and your heart and your body so that you experience it as occurring right now. So no longer are you visualizing the future, the future is now and that completely changes how you think, feel and begin to act.

Then the action part with the rest of the focus is you imagine the steps that you need to take. So in the action part, you see those in your mind like what’s the first three steps you need to take and you start living them out in your mind and then I consider it part of visualization ? conscious focused action ? you take the first three steps while you’re still in this state that you’ve already accomplished the result. So you’re seeking them to use the millionaire example, you’re now taking the steps as a millionaire, not something you hope to have some time in the future. You’ve already, in your mind, heart and body, in that moment, you have become the state of a millionaire and you’re taking actions in that state. The results are just tremendous.

JT: That’s awesome.

JC: I mean people get very fast results doing that.

JT: Really? Do you have any examples, because we’d love to?

JC: That’s the process of visualization.

JT: That’s awesome. Do you usually walk people through that? I think the hard thing is if we’re just sitting there laying down by ourselves trying.

JC: I take people both in a group and individual and I take them through the process so they experience it and learn it from experience. I’m very big on experiential learning. I mean most of us do not, I mean that’s why I go back and I laugh at school. I mean you learn to memorize things. So I got good. I figured out the deal.

JT: Yes, that’s how you got A’s.

JC: I learned how to make the A. I realized and then I got out of college and I did graduate work and it was the same thing. The things that I’ve learned the most from myself are the experiential learning I’ve done, which is why that’s the kind of learning that I use with people is that only when you experience something do most people really learn it. Then you go oh well here is my question. Did I do this quite right or whatever.

JT: Yes, then you can ask. Education, like really specific questions instead of just going hypothetically if I were to do that, how would I do this?

JC: Yes, absolutely.

JT: Awesome. Do you have any examples? You said people get massive results. Do you have any examples of really cool stuff?

JC: Yes. I work with one client and it was a lot of fun. We worked together for six months. We had a million dollar business. He has done lots of testimonials because he was quite happy. He had a million dollar business. We took it to two million in revenue one week with tripling of the profits in five months.

JT: Tripling of the profits sounds very nice!

JC: It was fun. So I looked at that and I said, “Okay, so how did we accomplish it that fast?” Because it was fast and I reversed engineered and it was the same thing. I work on strategy. I work on mindset and I work on execution. Those are my three areas that I work on in coaching. So every week, we were creating strategies. I create a custom, with my 101 clients, I create a custom hypnotic audio, because there are certifications under hypnosis.

JT: Oh you do?

JC: Yes, nine years in NOP.

JT: I just got hypnotized for the first time two days ago. That’s really funny.

JC: What I do is I get clear about their belief system and I have a form they fill out and I listen to them in the first few sessions and then I script and record a custom hypnotic audio that’s designed to take their beliefs, their specific beliefs and shift them so that the beliefs will now support the goals that they’ve created and I have them listen to it three times a day. I’m telling you how I do all this. So these are the inside.

JT: The inside secrets.

JC: This is what I do and they listen to it three times a day and then I have them loop it so that when they go to the gym?

JT: How long is it?

JC: It would be like five minutes. It’s short.

JT: So three times a day it’s not like an hour or anything like that.

JC: It’s powerful because it’s exactly what they need to hear and they need to hear it over and over and over again, because that’s how the program works and the shifts occur. When they go to the gym I say well loop it and just listen to it for a half hour or hour at a time. So he was doing all of that and the execution is the other part.

JT: You can listen to as many audio as you want but it doesn’t actually matter if you don’t do anything with it.

JC: You execute. Every week he did what we outlined as a strategy. I got to know how his mind worked so well that I remember he was in the, he created air conditioning and other parts for classic cars.

JT: Oh really?

JC: That was one of his passions. So he was going to the little exhibitions two or three day events they would have all over the country. We set a goal so every time he was going to one we would set how much you’re going to do. So he’d focus his mind. I remember it was $10,000 and I went to sleep that night and I woke up the next morning, the first thing in my mind was no, the real number is 20. He can do 20 and here’s exactly, because I knew his believe system so well, I knew exactly how to focus his mind.

I called him up. We talked literally three minutes. I said, “No, you’re number is $20,000. Here’s what I want you to do exactly.” He came back the next week and we both decided we’d call it 20. It’s close enough. It was like $19,682.

JT: What did you have him do? Did you have him do anything really that different or just change his mindset that he could get 20?

JC: It was a way that I had him focus and see in his mind exactly that number. I just changed the way he was looking at it through his mind. But I knew that he was capable. I knew that the belief systems, I guess the big thing is that because he was constantly listening to this audio, in my sleep, because before I go to sleep at night I ask a question. Otherwise you’re kind of wasting that mind power of that time and then the next morning I’ll have an answer. When I was in school, part of how I got the A was that I would read all my notes right before I went to bed.

JT: Yes, because your brain turns even though you’re sleeping.

JC: I was working on those notes. So I work on business problems and things like that at night while I sleep. When I woke up I realized his beliefs and side supported $20,000 not $10,000. So he could do the 20 so let’s just change how he’s looking at it so that he can fully actualize that belief and accomplish the $20,000. That’s how we made all those changes is that we were constantly doing the strategies and every week he executed whereas I’ve had clients, I’ve had the opposite client was, I really liked him, nice person.

Worked for four months together, accomplished nothing. That was early on. That was like seven years ago and at the end of four months we both concluded that there was no point in going forward and the reason was every week I would work with him on why he hadn’t done any of the things from the week before.

JT: Waste of the time.

JC: What it really came down to without getting, I very much respect confidentiality, is I’ll just say that it actually kind of came down to being authentic with who he was and realized that he didn’t want to work that hard. He thought he wanted to be a million but he didn’t really want to do any of the things that we talked about and I said, “That’s fine. It’s fine that you don’t want to be a millionaire. Now you know and you don’t have to keep battering yourself about this.” He’d rather have a lot of time off to play. That’s fine.

JT: And that’s okay.

JC: That’s okay, but there was no point in us going forward on a path to become a millionaire when you’ve now decided you don’t want to do that path.

JT: Well then I have one question in regards to that too and I know we’re sort of coming up on time, but I have a ton more questions. But in general, so tell me about the time thing because I talk to, when I ask people, all the millionaires that I’ve interviewed, do you have to work 70 hours a week, every single day in order to hit your goals or do you have to work for three years really, really hard. What have you found in regard to that sort of thing?

JC: I’m kind of the real straightforward guy. I think early on honestly you need to be prepared to work a lot of hours. I mean this is just the bottom line. I tell people the first three years, 60/70 hours is not unusual, if you’re going to build something because you’ve got to get all the systems working. You’ve got to figure out all the policies. You’ve got to get the right people in place. You’re going to hire someone. We’ll hopefully have a good fit. Sometimes it isn’t.

There’s a lot of work to getting the momentum moving. Once you have the momentum moving and you’ve got good people in place, then it becomes easier. Then you can start having that millionaire lifestyle. I’ll analogize it to this. When I bought my second home, I was 25. The one that was the beautiful home on the water. It was a luxury townhouse and even though I had already become a millionaire before it was paid for, I paid it off in 6? years. I just realized after three months of paying the payment I’m going wow, I don’t think I’m going to like this. So I think we should get rid of it.

It was interesting because all the financial advisors were going, now in today’s world when you’re paying 3? percent I don’t know if you’re sick of it.

JT: Yes, that’s different.

JC: But I was paying initially 16 percent that they brought down to 13? and then it was 11?. This was the ?80s but this is really the opposite of what’s going on now. Now I think you get a 30-year loan and it’s 3? just never pay it off and it’s a totally different world. But anyway, you can see why I was going wow I’m just getting really tired of this. It took me three months to do that. So I said I’m going to figure out how to pay off the house. I didn’t have everything furnished in the house until I had it paid off. I spent five years that I didn’t go on vacations, even though I could afford it, because I said I want to put the money on the house. I want to put savings up. So I paid my dues up front.

It seems to me, just to comment, that what we went through in this last decade where all the houses went up like crazy. People who were making $40,000 were living like they were making $80,000 and I’m going wow this is the opposite of how I did it. So I did it and if you read Stanley’s book, The Millionaire Next Door. I was the millionaire next door type. I was being very conservative. Remember I grew up in a poor family. I was like thrilled at 25 that I had a nice home and a Mercedes and a good income. I’m going let’s make sure this always stays this way.

To me, the best way to do that was to be secure. So I was sorting for I don’t want to lose the house so I figured no matter what happens I can figure out how to pay the taxes and the utilities and insurance. I’ll keep the house. So I just said pay off the house. When I paid off the house and I had a paid for home. I had money in the bank. Now I finally started living like a millionaire. That’s how I did it. I still think a more conservative route to get things taken care of, get the money rolling in as opposed to the first time you’ve got money you want to go out and stay at the Ritz Carlton suite. This is a better way to do it because then you can feel really comfortable as opposed to I’m just paying the bills every month. You’ve got to put money away.

You’ve got to invest money and you got to build your business. Your business, if it’s really put together right, when people ask me what should I invest in. I go you’re business. If your business is really put together right, sell your business. Duplicate it. Sell it and then take the cash and buy or start another business and buy real estate and diversify. Your business is always, if you’re doing it right, your business is always your best investment.

JT: Yes, I agree. It’s funny. I have a friend. He had money, made his money in hedge funds and he’s saying the same thing to me. He’s like invest in your business right now. Invest in your business and it’s so amazing to realize that yes, we have more control over that sort of thing. Like you said, if it seems to be running right, that just makes perfect sense to go that way.

JC: Right, I mean if you’re going to be doing it right, that’s where you’re going to make the most money. Build more products. Get more marketing so that your list is built, so you can sell more products to a bigger list. That’s investing in your business.

JT: So tell me, because I’m just really curious. What was your family business? Can you tell me what actually it was in so that way we just have a general idea?

JC: Yes, and I think it’s part of the passion that I have for telling people to do what’s authentic for you because my father was not doing well. I finished my masters in clinical psyche. I was going to go do my Ph.D. but I was kind of thinking I would work for a year at a psychiatric hospital. I’m kind of thinking I don’t think this is really what I want to do. So I was actually thinking of going to law school, which I ultimately did. My dad had a trucking line and I figured out after, when it was not doing well, like it was about to go into bankruptcy. We’d always had on and off, on and off, on and off. He’d start to get something going and then it would have trouble again. So I said I would help him for six months.

JT: And he actually said yes? Sometimes parents won’t take advice from kids.

JC: He actually came to me and asked me to help him and I think he knew because I did well in school that somehow I would figure some stuff out. It turned out that, now that I can look back and I can say okay what was it that dad was doing right and what was it he was doing wrong. He was a good entrepreneur in the sense that he was very visionary. I can remember the number, my father died last year. I thought a lot about my dad and what was his life about. He was very visionary in that he could tell you oh over here is where the money is going to be made. He was good at that.

He was good at acquiring customers. People loved him. He was not good at creating systems or policies or doing things in a structured way that he found worked and then repeating them. In fact, he was missing all of that. So what I realized?

JT: He’d recreate the wheel over and over and over again.

JC: It was more like putting out fires because there was no plan. Do you know what I mean? So he had the vision but he didn’t have a really good plan in place. So I was working with him and I was taking all those notes, remember? At the end of the third month, it was one weekend I said, “Dad, I figured out what’s wrong with the business.” Remember I had not had any business so I didn’t even know how to read a financial statement. I didn’t know what a balance sheet was. I didn’t even know the word cash flow but I said, “Dad, you’re taking in less money every week than you pay out so we have to do something about that.”

So me being a pretty aggressive 23 year old, Monday I raised all our rates. I mean significantly and fortunately there was a shortage of trucks in our area so what we did and the kind of product that we were hauling, so that worked. I mean I went up like 25 percent and then I called in all our suppliers and I figured okay they’re overcharging us. I created this process of taking three bids and I took them, everybody would go well what’s the other person’s bid? That only took my like having that question a couple of times to go oh okay so I won’t tell them what the other person’s bid is. I’ll have them blind bid and that seemed to work really well because then I got lower prices.

About that same time we were having all the trucks repaired by truck repair places. I figured out that they were kind of overcharging and keeping trucks for two and three days when it really was a three-hour job but they had all these other jobs. I go well we can’t do that. So I opened up our own maintenance company and hired a couple of mechanics to fix all our stuff so we could keep it on the road and fix it at a cheaper price.

JT: What’s so funny is that this makes perfect sense.

JC: I was being conscious. What’s working? What’s missing? What isn’t working? What’s a better strategy? Then I was constantly focused on, my focus was simple. Let’s make money. It was a very simple focus at that point. The next year was when I started to focus on customer service because I realized our customer service was still bad. I spent six weeks. I read a book Ron Zemke, Service America. It’s still in print, I think. It gave you a formula, again, right, for how to create your customer service and I sat with our team, everybody who worked in the office, once a week and I said, “Okay, imagine, not us, because we were still having service problems, right.” But we figured out how to make money so that was the first piece.

JT: That’s better. That helps. It buys time.

JC: But I realized we still have this horrible service problem. I said, “Not us, but the ideal customer would want from the ideal trucking line, what would they want from that trucking line” and we really got it down to two things ? dependable and timely service. They wanted you to be dependable and they wanted you to be timely. We operationally defined what does it mean to be dependable because in trucking we’re going to have accidents on the road that slow traffic. We’re going to have a driver that doesn’t show up. We’re going to have equipment break down and so dependable and timely also included we’re going to be the one who calls them.

They’re not going to be the one who calls us and we’re going to have a plan when we call. That’s how we’re going to solve the problem that even though we might not have completely created it like the accident or the rain or whatever but we’re going to solve the problem for them and tell them what we’re going to do. That was how I built that business.

JT: That’s awesome. Okay, so for the last question that I always ask, what’s one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of a million? I know they learned a whole bunch in this, but what’s just one action that they can take?

JC: I would start, wherever you are, I would start at the beginning. I would get clear about who do you really want as your ideal customer because that ideal customer would be the person that not only are you going to be most effective with, they are going to be the person who can get the greatest value out of what you have to offer and therefore they are going to be that customer who is going to buy the most from you and you’re going to have the best relationship. So a lot of people go out and they try to work with all kinds of different customers and they don’t get clear about what their niche is all about.

Well your niche is really all about that ideal customer because even within your niche, there’s one type of customer that is your sweet spot. Get clear about that and that could involve you going out and doing some of those interviews we talked about where you’re getting clear about what do they want. So you start asking yourself like okay well they have this kind of problem, this kind of problem, and this kind of problem. Which one of those am I am best at and by the way which one of those would I enjoy spending a lot of my time creating products and services for?

This is how you’re going to be spending your life. I am a strong believer you ought to be enjoying your life and that you’d be more successful when you’re doing something that feels real for you and that you’re going to have a lot of enjoyment and it feels right for the customer.

JT: That’s awesome. Definitely and I’ve heard that. I think that’s sort of the sentiment from all the millionaires. That sort of sums it up that I keep getting back ? talking to the people that you really want to work with, finding out what they need and helping them get it and that pretty much sums up everything. So tell me where we can find you online. I know you might have a program coming up and stuff. Tell us a little bit more about how we can move forward with you.

JC: I do have a couple of programs coming up. The website for Conscious Millionaires is just consciousmillionaire.com. However, I have a special bonus for your group for eventual millionaires, if you will go to coachedbyamillionaire.com/em, for Eventual Millionaire, so coachedbyamillionaire.com/em. I have five videos, the five keys to millionaire results now. You can sign up. You get those absolutely free as my gift to you and that will begin our relationship which I look forward to hearing from you as well.

JT: Awesome. Now we are your target market, right. We are eventual millionaires and you are a coach by millionaire so it pretty much works out really well. I hope everybody that loved this interview goes ahead and signs up. I’ll definitely put that in the show notes and also on the website so everyone can check it out. Thank you so much, J.V. I’m sure I am going to see you again. I’m going to see you in January in Vegas but hopefully we’ll chat again soon.

JC: Yes, that will be great. Thanks a lot for having me.

JT: Thanks so much.

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