Self Made Millionaire Interview: Dani Johnson – From homeless to millionaire in a few short years, now and Author and Speaker

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Dani Johnson – From homeless to millionaire in a few short years, now and Author and Speaker

Dani has an amazing story of being homeless and then earning millions of dollars. She talks about changing your mindset, taking action, and inspiring stories of others who have done it too.

Check out Danijohnson.com.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire Podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Dani Johnson on the show. Dani teaches people about becoming debt free and earning millions. She herself has an amazing story of being homeless and then becoming a millionaire and I can't wait to share it with you guys. She has also been on ABC's Secret Millionaire and I love that Dani really pays attention to the getting rid of debt too as well as increasing your income because it makes a big difference on whether or not you can become a millionaire. So thank you so much for coming on the show today, Dani.

DANI JOHNSON: Thanks for having me, Jaime.

JAIME TARDY: So first I have to get started with your story because everybody needs to hear it that hasn't. So how did you even start and how did you go from homeless to being a millionaire?

DANI JOHNSON: Well, I grew up on welfare in a home that had intense violence and I was exposed to things that honestly no child, Jaime, should ever see. Extreme drug abuse happened on a daily basis which brought in physical, emotional, mental, verbal and sexual abuse and I wasn't the most confident person. I made lots of mistakes early on. In fact, ended up pregnant at 17 out of wedlock. Had all kinds of judgment and major criticism and even almost excommunication. In fact, my parents would not talk to me after that which was so hilarious because the lifestyle they led, what right do they have to judge?

So anyway, 17 I ended up pregnant. At 19, I got introduced to the whole concept of becoming an entrepreneur and I honestly didn't get started because I thought I could succeed. I got started because I knew I could fail. I was told my whole life up to that point that I was nothing but a failure and I could never do anything right and after listening in, kind of like what you're doing right now, there was a panel, I got invited to some symposium by my boyfriend at the time and there were four millionaires that were talking and after I heard them speak about how they started in business and obviously the kind of income that they had generated, I just sat there and I thought to myself, "Man, if I'm the dumbest person in the room, which I know that I am, and it takes me 20 years to figure this out and to learn how to do what they do, and if I fail their income by 90 percent, then I would do better in business for myself than I ever would staying at my job that I had at the mall."

So it did not take me 20 years but the first 6 months that I was in business, I did fail miserably and I mean I failed miserable and I failed until I met two young men who happened to have been at that same exact symposium and yet they were making money and I was not. I knew it wasn't just because of my gender and I knew it wasn't just because I didn't have a college education. In fact, I'm a high school dropout. But I began to ask questions which is one of the things I want to talk to you guys about today. I began to ask questions and they pointed me in a direction where I could go to a training seminar and after that seminar, I had been to six of them in a six-month period, and I made $50,000 with the same industry.

Everything was exactly the same but I started to make some money and then made some other dumb choices. Met and married a guy at one of those training seminars and within seven days I was married to him. At 21, I got married for the first time and he, within a few months, left with everything. I was left with $2.03 to my name, a $35,000 debt, completely homeless, 50 pounds overweight and we're coming up right now to that time. December 1 I was evicted from my house and I was completely homeless December 1990. So I am coming up on 21 years ago that I was homeless.

So after 30 days of just licking my wounds and blaming my ex husband and blaming the people that I had been in business with and blaming my parents for the horrible childhood that they had raised us kids in, I finally got tired of my situation. I got sick to my stomach about who I had become and had to make a change in my life and on December 26 I started another business from the trunk of my car and a payphone booth and my first four days managed to generate $2,000 in income and profit for myself. That means I generated $4,000 worth of sales and then the next month, still working part time because I had gotten a job as a cocktail waitress in the month of December, made $6,500 and my income just continued to skyrocket from there.

Made a quarter of a million dollars my first year, made a million by the end of my second year and today I'm a multimillionaire. We have five companies. I'm a bestselling author, an international speaker. We have sold out crowds wherever it is that I go whether it's London, Australia, the Caribbean, United States, Canada. We sell out wherever it is that we go and we don't share the stage with anybody else. We don't have a panel of speakers. I'm the only speaker for three solid days. I've been a business coach for 20 years. I'm a radio talk show host. My show airs every Wednesday and Sunday live. It airs out of Florida on Heartbeat Radio and we also stream it live on my webpage.

Today I'm passionately married to my husband, Hans. We are also business partners. We've been together 20 years. He was 18 when we first got together and had zero business experience. He's a multimillionaire as well. We have five kids and a fourth grandbaby on the way.

JAIME TARDY: So oh my gosh you lived an amazing life totally. Let alone, let's start at the very beginning because you go way back to when you were 19 to 21 and how much you've learned from 21 just to 23 to be able to increase your income. I think I heard you said it, saying that it's really your personal growth that helps you earn more money. So what did you do within two years to be able to radically increase your income so much? I talk to people every day and people email me going well I'm trying and I'm trying to either get a side business going up, I'm trying to get something going up and it's just not working for them. So what changed from those first six months of not doing it very well yourself to really going out there and actually creating really good income?

DANI JOHNSON: I understand completely where people are coming from. When they are kind of trying to get something off the ground and struggling in the beginning. The main thing that I can tell you is that I focused on one thing and what I focused on was who could I help to succeed with my product line and I actually licensed a product from a manufacturer. So I didn't invent something. So often times it's about find another timely idea that somebody else has already invented or somebody else is already marketing it and market it. Really what I have found in my 22 years, well I don't want to even say what I am. It's almost been, yeah, anyway 23 years of business, including the first business failure, I have focused on what can I do to help other people get what they want.

Often times and we see this all the time in business, gosh there's so much that I could tell you right now. I wish we had more time. The reality is that we don't and I love seeing people start in business and succeed greatly because if someone like me can succeed, anybody can. So I really focused on who could I help succeed with our product and the product was completely insignificant. It could have been widgets but really what it's about is service and how I went from that so broken, desperate, homeless person who had no confidence and believed in nothing who trusted nobody who didn't think I could succeed at anything, what I focused on was my clients or the prospect actually.

I focused on the prospect and I focused on honing my communication skills to be so advanced that we could build trust even though I didn't even have product itself in my hand. I worked on the skill of developing trust and what I call today the core rapport methodology that really set up the relationship between me and the prospect to where they wanted to do business with me and they didn't know I was homeless. They didn't know I didn't have an office. They didn't know I was a complete failure that very first day starting out, that second day, that fourth day, even that first month. They didn't know my personal situation. I just literally focused on diving my life into their lives and how could I serve them in a way they want to pay me to help them do what they wanted to get done.

If the business world today adapted to a couple of key things, they would be dynamically more successful than they are today and I know this because I have clients that range from engineering firms to telecommunication companies to people who market a weight loss product from their house. It all boils down to the same thing - people are people no matter where we go. People love to be served. They love to be catered to. They love to feel special and honored and when you do that with the general public, you stand out so very different than everybody else they are doing business with and they will pay more money to do business with you when you have learned to hone in on those core rapport skills that we teach at DaniJohnson.com.

That is like a long training with very simple steps. Simple steps on how do you honor that general public. How do you communicate in a way where they refer business to you? How do you communicate in a way that even if you don't have anything good to give them, they're willing to pay you and more than they're willing to pay other people because you're providing something that is much deeper than just a product or a service.

JAIME TARDY: That's great advice. How many hours were you working? So when you're in hot pursuit, like really, really going for it or even any of your clients, are you working like 22 hours out of the day and sleeping for 2 and then going?

DANI JOHNSON: No, girl. No, no, no. In fact, I have to tell you, I have to poke a hole in a big facade. The first millionaire that I had the chance to learn from and again I went to training seminars every single month in that very first business venture learning from a millionaire who then turned out to be a full on crook who embezzled me right after I got married which he was half the reason why I went homeless and my husband was the other reason why I went homeless, but one of the things that I did is I really poured into learning and one of the things that I had learned from him which I would never teach was something that I failed because of this particular teaching was sacrifice it all for seven years. Put your head down, work as hard as you have to, sacrifice everything your marriage, your kids everything for seven years.

You'll be so wealthy after seven years of doing that, that you can write a check to fix any problem that you might have created. Well I did that. Initially I didn't. That business that I started from the trunk of my car and a payphone booth, I never started to make a million dollars from it. I never did. I started it to get into an apartment. I started it to make some money to survive. It just so happens I got so addicted to helping people and focusing on helping them to succeed, it was a rush to see my clients that were getting results and then to see, of course, my sales force getting results as I was training and coaching and developing other people to succeed, it was like oh my gosh it was addicting.

So initially I refused to work a lot. I worked very part time. You know that first 10 hours I made two grand. That next 30 hours, because I was working a full time job, I made $6,500. So I pretty much kept, I didn't have a desire for a lot of money. I didn't have a desire to make millions so once my needs were taken care of, I was working part time generating six figures so it didn't really matter. But then, I don't know what changed for me and why the heck I got this into my head like a total dummy but that voice of go for more, go for more and put your head down for seven years, I for some reason changed what I was doing and I started to work harder and work more.

Part of that was a second embezzlement that I had in 1993. I had a second embezzlement and so that year it was gosh I have to do everything I can to pick my life back up again and work hard and I was working 6 days a week, 16 to 18 hours a day. My marriage was a mess. I didn't know my children and my biggest dream was to become a mom and here I was one but really wasn't one. I had the title but I wasn't living it out and I was miserable. I had a heart attack at 24, a nervous breakdown at 25 and my health was a disaster, my marriage was a disaster, I was a disaster. I was suicidal. Under so much pressure and I had forgotten what worked because I got it into my head somehow, I had two companies and I had to do whatever it took to make it work.

That was the biggest mistake that I had ever made in my career was sacrificing my marriage, my health and my kids to try to make money. It's not the best way to go. It makes you incredibly miserable. It destroys your relationships which increases stress if the relationship at home sucks, your business relationships suck. That's the bottom line. So my first initial million was made without sacrificing anything. It was made honestly on a very part time basis. I had a lot of time of rest. I was also pregnant during that first year, the first year I made a quarter of a million dollars, I was pregnant. I had that baby in '92. So I really focused on who can I help to succeed. I focused on keeping my life balanced.

That very first million that I made was made in balance of living life and working efficiently and working efficiently through other people. Raising up other leaders. Raising up other people that can make decisions on my behalf that could lead well, that had highly professional skills that they learned at First Steps to Success, the training seminar that I still do to this day that I just came out of in Washington D.C. last weekend. So raising up other leaders, scaling that business through talent and time of other individuals. That first million I made was made on a very part time basis. Then I changed my game and I about lost my life and made less money which was really stupid and crazy.

JAIME TARDY: That's a great story. It's funny because with the Eventual Millionaire, the whole premise of it is to live life on your terms and eventually become a millionaire. These people that have goals to be millionaires it's not about the head down. It's not about the just keep moving forward. It's about life. I worked at a corporate job, made six figures when I was very young and ended up hating everything that I did and gaining weight just like you did and dealing with stuff like that and realizing that it's not about that. I think that's really important. How do people that are listening right now though keep that path because it's a very fine balance of going well if I just work a little more, I could have a little more and how do you become satisfied with what you have now while you're enjoying and working?

DANI JOHNSON: Well there's two questions there and there's two answers. One, if you are motivated and strangled and enslaved by greed, you will never be satisfied with how much you make ever. I had a part of my life where I was completely controlled by greed and didn't even know it. No matter how much I made, I never was satisfied. The millions never made me feel successful and that is eventually why I almost lost my life was because I was working towards something that I didn't even realize did not even satisfy me. That was because I literally carried a spirit of greed within me. No matter how many things I bought, no matter how many places I traveled to, no matter how many millions I made, I still felt like a failure.

That was because my internal game was off. My internal motivation was off and I was literally being motivated by what the public says success is versus me defining what success is. The other part of that is how in the world do you do that? How can you work on a part time basis and make millions of dollars? I still only work part time. These last 10 years we?ve made far many more millions than I ever did in my first 10 years and the reason why and I mentioned it earlier is you have to learn scalability. There's three things that will cause a business to grow. One is increase your exposure. If you increase your exposure, you increase the amount of people that are looking at your products, service, company or whatever it is that you have.

Number two is increase your conversions. When you increase your conversions, you can double, triple, quadruple your income. Three is increase your scalability. That comes through outsourcing and leadership development. So what a lot of people do is they only focus on increasing exposure. If I work more I make more. Yeah, but if you work more with your current skill set, yeah you kind of make more but when you average out your hours to your pay, you really aren't making more. So you got to increase your skill set with your exposure. The bottom line is the marketplace pays for value, Jaime.

The marketplace pays for value. I learned that when I was 18 years old at a hair show. I got recruited for some hair stylist to work on my hair and the trainer of that hair show said the marketplace pays for value. What determines your value in the marketplace is your skill. I don't know why that stuck with me since I was 18 years old but the bottom line is this - if you take two doctors, one is a general M.D., the other is a brain surgeon, who makes more money? The brain surgeon makes more money not because he's better looking, not because he has a better anything else other than he has specialized knowledge, specialized skill where the general M.D. got his general medical education.

The brain surgeon got specialized knowledge, specialized skill therefore he makes more money really for the same amount of hours. So he's more valuable to the marketplace because of his skill set and so if you are going out there trying to build a business on your current skill set, you're only going to get what you got. Bottom line and if you are focusing too much time on personal growth, I believe in affirmations and thinking positive, have fun with that. Thinking positive is not going to put money in the bank account. It's your skill set. Affirmations, okay, well hold up a pen right now and I want you to tell the pen that it will float one thousand times and I want you to really believe that it's going to float when you let go of it. Jaime, what is the inevitable.

JAIME TARDY: It won't float, no!

DANI JOHNSON: Because there's another law in place and that's the law of gravity. So there is a law. There's law to success. I outline those laws in my free book First Steps to Wealth, first couple of chapters of it I outline the laws of success and the laws are in motion and if you don't know what the laws are, you accidentally break them and if you break the law, the law breaks you. There is a correction out there that happens and so you know what your skills are based on your bank account. Your bank account tells you what your current skill set is. So your skill set of exposure yes determines how much you make.

Your skill set of conversion. Let's use that one as an example. Converting the exposure into actual sales, right. What does that look like? Well, if you get 1 out of 10, you got a 10 percent closing ratio. If you focus on increasing your skill set and using things like what we have available, you know, Prospect and Close Your Way to Millions, Unlimited Success focuses in on helping you to hone in on your closing skills. First Steps to Wealth, I've got some closing skills in that book. Obviously better to learn through audios, better to learn through live trainings like tonight, every Monday night I do a free training call. Sometimes I talk about closing on there because that's one of the ways, the quickest way to increase your income is by increasing your conversion ratios.

So, if you focus in on honing that skill of closing the sale, closing the deal, closing the contract, closing your employees to go to work and get things done, closing is a part of our everyday life including closing your spouse on going on that vacation you want to go on and closing your kids on eating carrots instead of cookies. So, if you increase your closing ratio from 10 percent to 20, you've doubled your income but you have not doubled your hours. It's the same 10 people that you presented your product, service or idea to. The same 10 people. So, if you just focus in on increasing your conversions, you double your income simply by doubling your closing ratios but you didn't double your time. It's the same amount of time because you're still trying to close all 10.

You can do things like one of my clients, Sandy, who is a millionaire today or things like Jeff, who is also a millionaire today, by increasing their conversions, exposure and their scalability. Sandy, when she first came to me, she was 0 for 3,000. She couldn't convert anything. She couldn't even convert an ant. It was sad. I thought oh my gosh, I don't think that I can help this woman. She was that bad. Well she eventually got her closing ratios through studying Prospect and Close Your Way to a Million, First Steps to Success. Every single day she focused in on closing and focused in on honing her skills in that area. Through a lot of coaching between her and I, this woman got her closing ratio up to 90 percent. Ninety percent.

She even tested her closing skills on old, old, I mean old, like old advertising campaigns. People that had responded to an ad campaign six months ago, a year ago, she even tested the closing ratios with old decrepit leads and had a 50 percent closing ratio with unqualified exposure. So today, the woman is a millionaire. Last year she made $1.5 million using these three things - increase exposure, increase conversions, increase scalability. You increase scalability through outsourcing and leadership development.

JAIME TARDY: Great. See, okay, so there's a lot to get into there but first what I want to say before we sort of get into the prospecting because I want to learn more about that too is resistance. So I am sure you hear it a thousand times that people are like oh sales, ick, I don't want to do sales. You talk about closing ratios and I don't like closing ratios and people are like, especially just starting into business, it seems so icky. So what do you do to help people sort of get over that hump? I had the same thing. I worked at Kirby for awhile and was a telemarketer when I was like 16 and was like I hate sales, this is the most horrible thing and it took me awhile to get over that. So what do you do to help people to get through that?

DANI JOHNSON: Listen, if you want to be a millionaire, you're going to have to get over it. That's the bottom stinking line. The bottom line is that you have an improper picture of sales and, for example, what you just said, Kirby, right? That is an amateur form of sales. I'm talking about professional level of sales. There's a big difference between those two populations. The amateurs don't make squat in sales. The professionals make millions in sales. Look at Steve Jobs. The guy was a salesman.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, amazing salesman.

DANI JOHNSON: He was a salesman. The highest paid profession in the world is sales and so the sad thing is that people like you and me have had bad experiences with sales. We don't like the way we feel. We don't like being rejected. We don't like the way other people look at sales people. So don't be like those fools. It's real simple. If you're going to act like them, talk like them, communicate like them, conduct yourself like them, then you deserve to be rejected.

What we have taught for 20 years is a system that is rejection proof. How do you create an environment to where you switch the tables on that prospect to where you're not begging but they're begging you. That is all communication skills. That's all positioning and every corporation, every individual that is a millionaire understands the professional side of sales. Every amateur who is trying to work from home or trying to knock on doors or trying to invent something and hopefully have it found out, they are not making any money.

Here's the bottom line, everybody is in sales, everybody. A teacher sells knowledge and if a teacher doesn't understand sales, her students don't do well. A mechanic sells his skill of fixing an automobile. A paint contractor is in sales. If he cannot bid and close the job, he does not paint anything. A musician is in sales. I've raised up many musicians in fact but a musician is in sales. They have great music but they're going to stay playing in their garage if they don't learn how to market themselves and if they don't learn the art of professional sales, they will never write a hit song. A hit song fills a need and you can tell the difference between a musician who is really selling their song as they're singing it and another who doesn't believe anything that they are talking about.

An actor, an actress, a director, they are all in sales and the ones that know it and the ones that learn a professional form of sales are the ones that make it big. The ones that are waiting to be found, the ones that are hoping that someone knocks on their door and says I've heard of you, those people spend the rest of their lives as a poor pathetic situation of hmm, not making any money in their dream called music. Not making any money in their dream called acting. Not making any money in their dream called directing films. Not making any money in their inventions. Even an inventor has to understand sales because who are you going to sell it to? You can invent something great but if you can?t sell it, it stays in the garage. Everybody is in sales.

Include dating, Jaime. If somebody is listening right now and they are single and they don't want to be, it's because they suck at sales. It has nothing to do with their looks.

JAIME TARDY: That's amazing advice. I mean it's funny how you correlate those two because it's completely true. It's the air and the confidence. So how do we get those skills? Give us a couple of tips on really how to get those.

DANI JOHNSON: There's an entire training that I have called Unlimited Success. It's 10 CDs. You want a couple tips?

JAIME TARDY: Just a few. We don't have too much time. We'd love to hear, give me something that people might be able to put into action like now.

DANI JOHNSON: One is learn to control the conversation. He who is doing all the talking is not in control of the conversation. Find out what people want and let them tell you what it is and help them get it. That's a big difference between those amateurs who only lead with their product and service. Hey I got this new gadget I want you to look at it. That's not filling the need of the public. You're focusing on what you want. If you focus on what you want you're going to find a very small amount of people who care about what you want.

Here's the bottom line about people. People want what they want and they don't care about what anybody else wants. We are inherently selfish. So whenever somebody else steps up and focuses on helping other people get what they want, well, that person stands out. Now there's trust. Now I'm interested in you because you're helping to get what I want. So what amateurs do is they lead in the marketplace with what they are interested in. They also lead with their fears. They lead with their incompetencies. They lead with their doubts like gosh is this going to work? Am I wasting my time?

Then they get on a phone and try to talk to somebody. Okay. Well, guess what you're really communicating because 93 percent of all communication is non verbal. What you are really communicating is you're not sure if this is going to work and the person on the other end of the phone, that prospect, can feel it that you're not sure and that is when you provoke responses from your prospect like, you know, I need to think about it. I don't know if right now is the right time because you reap what you sow friend and if you're sowing into that conversation gosh I don't know if this is going to work, I don't know if I'm wasting my time. Is this ever going to happen for me? They can feel it; 93 percent of all communication is non verbal.

So they can hear it in your tone. They can feel it. It's in your body language when you're face to face with somebody. So they know if you're not sure. So therefore, you have prospects that say they're not sure. That's the bottom line. So there's so many tips that are on Unlimited Success, it's ridiculous or even a negative influence. It's ridiculous. I mean let's talk about remapping all of that non-verbal communication and teaching you how to communicate with that 7 percent using scripts to where you're not wondering what to say. You're setting up the conversation as a professional. That you're getting the bases loaded versus striking out every conversation that you have.

The truth is that this process, what I teach and what I show people how to do is not to sell like an amateur but to professionally set it up to where you are the desirable commodity to the general public and we've shown people how to become the number one recommended person at what they do in their industry, in their town at whatever it is that they want to make happen. Kind of like Tammy Watson. Tammy was failing, Jaime and I mean failing. She was in the real estate business. She actually owned her own real estate company. When the economy fell apart in 2008, she almost shut the doors to her company.

She did not make one single sale from January 2008 all the way to October 2008. She came out to First Steps to Success and she learned this core rapport methodology. She learned the core of five profit skills. She began to implement them immediately. She also studies daily still to this day Unlimited Success. She went home and closed eight deals in four weeks, four of which were cash deals. She no longer was focusing on something that wasn't making her money. She now was focusing on that prospect and focusing on what was their needs and communicating in such a way that they wanted to do business with her. She has built a referral base for that exact same business. That very first year coming out of her first training seminar with us, Jaime, she made $135,000 in that next 12 months. Now, Jaime, I don't know if you watch real estate or not.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, I do.

DANI JOHNSON: If it got better from November and December 2008 and all of 2009, did it get better? No, it got worse. 2009 was worse than 2008 but Tammy now possessed new economy skills. New professional marketing skills that positioned herself as one that received referrals on a weekly basis and people knocking down the doors saying Tammy Watson is our real estate agent and that's the only person we should work with in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

JAIME TARDY: See, okay, and that leads me to this question that I get a lot too and I'm sure you do. With so many people doing the same thing, I mean in real estate it's ridiculous and if she went from barely doing anything, how did she really stand out in the crowd? Was it just communication and mindset and she changed it like that and then it exploded for her or was there other tangible things that she did?

DANI JOHNSON: Advanced communication skills. I'm not talking about, listen, most people think they're great with people. Your bank account tells you whether or not you are. Money comes from people.

JAIME TARDY: That's great.

DANI JOHNSON: Money comes from people and money is always looking for a place to go. If you don't tell money where the money is going to go, the money tells you where it's going to go. Tammy Watson did not just learn pathetic normal 98 percent of people skills. Tammy Watson learned from a millionaire the same people skills that that millionaire uses. She implemented them and went from not selling a single home in 10 months to in the next 12 months making $135,000 selling homes in the same place.

Let's use this one - how about Tiffany? In Las Vegas, Las Vegas in 2009 was the worst, historically worst failure for real estate. She was a rookie. Her first year was 2008. Did not sell a single home in 2008. Not a single home. She came out, she learned core rapport. She learned core profit skills. Studied them. Sold 40 homes in 8 months in the same city of Las Vegas - 40 homes. Not only became number one recommended in Vegas for real estate but her broker promoted her and now had her training the rest of the agents. All she did was say go to First Steps of Success and DaniJohnson.com. She told all those agents do what I did. I went to DaniJohnson.com, I listened every single day. I learned these advanced skills.

You need to have unlimited success. You need to get in front of Dani Johnson for two days. Guess what happened? This company went from almost closing their doors to not only Tiffany being the number one, but Tiffany also got cut in to the broker's profits. He cut her in as a partner because she raised up those other agents who were quitting the real estate business to now they were all making money. Again, what is that? That was okay, exposure. That was increase their conversions. Increase scalability by outsourcing. That real estate company outsourced all their training to DaniJohnson.com so they weren't spending time trying to figure out how to talk to those agents and motivate those agents. They outsourced that to someone else who could which, at the time, was DaniJohnson.com.

They also increased their scalability through leadership development and all of that was advanced people skills, advanced marketing skills, learning how to convert those sales, learning how to build a referral basis to where the client feels like they're needs are being met, so much so that they tell their friends about it. So in a nutshell, that's what it is.

JAIME TARDY: See you have so many amazing stories from people. Do you mostly get them from going to speaking events live and you talk to these people and then follow up or do you do like one-on-one coaching with these people or how does it normally work for you?

DANI JOHNSON: We get emails every single day of testimonials from our clients. You have to know that there are many more testimonials out there that don't contact us. These are the ones that actually contact us and submit testimonials on our website through support suite. They post testimonials on our fan page of Facebook. We've got 110,300. I think it's 110,300 friends on Facebook. Every day there are new testimonials being posted there and we obviously capture those testimonials when people write us in at testimonial.

I do some one-on-one coaching. My waiting list is six months on that. I have trained up some coaches that are doing coaching on my behalf because obviously my time is more limited and again that's scalability, developing leadership of other coaches that can take the message and pull the best out of our clients and they are doing a phenomenal job. We also, when I am speaking live, we have, gosh it's crazy. I mean you should have seen it even just last weekend. Here's something for you - 66 of our clients came up to us at the last First Steps to Success that I did. Sixty six of them, between all 66 combined they paid off $4.4 million worth of debt in an average of 13 months and have $1.6 million in assets and investments and $200,000 in cash.

These 66 also reported that they had increased their income, many of them had doubled and tripled their income in that same 13 month period. So at the live events, my gosh, yeah, people are compelled. They come up to us, oh my gosh I have to tell you or they write it in on a piece of paper or I'll give a time sometimes, not all the time depending on time, how many of you have used this tool or this technique and have improved your business or have grown or gotten a raise in your job? For example, Susie Blake, she used that same exact system of unlimited success and check this out, it's so amazing, she had a $22,000 bonus.

She was about to get fired from her job. She came out through First Steps and check this out, man, she was butting heads with her boss because she didn't understand his communication style. She didn't understand what his personality was and didn't know how to talk to him. She was about to get fired. She flipped that thing around so fast and got a $22,000 bonus over the summer. She said five people were laid off over the summer and she not only kept her job but she got a $22,000 bonus.

JAIME TARDY: See the stories are crazy. Oh my gosh!

DANI JOHNSON: Isn't it, yeah! Check out this one. Ken, Ken McCarl, he works for an environmental safety company down in Alabama. Same thing, you know, he's just plugging around, plugging along on his job not getting raises, not getting promoted. He got a $50,000 promotion this year - $50,000 raise! Come on, that's somebody's entire income, not just a raise. He simply used those skills. I mean he has been to many of our training seminars, he and his wife. His wife owns a boutique store and she grew her boutiques 35 percent. They have a half a million dollars between cash and investments right now and they paid off $200,000 worth of debt in two years. They are completely debt free.

JAIME TARDY: See, I love how you talk about being debt free. What are sort of the steps that you do? Do you suggest people earn more money first and then start paying off their debt or get rid of their debt with their current income or what sort of things do you have people do that are in massive amounts of debt?

DANI JOHNSON: People trying to go out and make more money so they can pay off their debt violates a financial law that is in order. Right now, there's the financial laws that are in place right this very minute. Unfortunately, most people don't know what the financial laws are. So, if the goal is to make more money so they can pay off their debt, it's breaking a financial law. The financial law is this - if you can be faithful with the little things, you'll be made ruler over much. That's a financial law.

So, if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you'll not grow your income because you're spending it all. Money is seed and seed is designed to reproduce itself and if you are eating all of your seed, you have nothing to be reproduced. So being faithful with the little things, I encourage people, show people where the current money is in their lives already, that they already have access to that is simply going to all the wrong places. So find where all the money is going, make some adjustments, make some decisions. Is it worth it to spend $200 a month on coffee?

Is it worth it to spend $500 a month on food for just a single person? Do you even know where your money is going? When was the last time you looked through your bank statement and saw where every single penny was going? The wealthy knows where every penny goes. The impoverished don't have a clue of where their money is. So here's an example. Have you gotten a raise lately? Where did it go? Have you ever gotten a bonus? Where is it? Do you have credit card debt? What was charged on those cards? Most people don't know.

My husband and I were just like that, Jaime. My husband and I, 10, 11 years ago, we were $100,000 in debt between credit cards and cars, not to mention a $700,000 mortgage. It cost us $26,000 a month just to live. We spent $1,200 a month on food and we had little tiny babies at home. I had a newborn, a 18 month old, a 4 - year old and a 7 year old and here we were spending $1,200 a month on food and did not even know it. So we lived under that pressure and burden of debt even though we were millionaires. We lived a facade. Just because you make a million dollars does not make you wealthy at all.

There's tons, in fact, I just did my radio show on this. I don't know if you know the statistics. It's amazing. My last radio show was on the statistics with the NFL that 78 percent of all NFL players after their last game within two years are bankrupt, divorced or unemployed - 78 percent. In fact, a recent retirement of a 41-year-old NFL quarterback has made $50 million in his career and he is flat broke. So just making a million dollars does not make you wealthy. It does not make you wealthy at all. Most people who make millions lose it. Most people who make millions spend it all. Most people who make millions never become financial independent, never.

So I'm not about teaching you how to make millions and spend it and lose it and waste it. I'm about showing you how to accumulate wealth which is something that my husband and I have learned to do over the last 11 years. My first decade of making millions, I spent it all. It's all gone. Poof! It disappeared just like food disappears in a mud belly. Money disappeared into thin air. This last decade, we have accumulated a massive amount of wealth with understanding what financial independence really looks like and one of those ways to financial independence is get rid of your debt. We show people how to do that for free, by the way, on our website. If they got to DaniJohnson.com, they can learn for free how to start paying off that debt or, if they want to study more intently, they can get a hold of a system called War on Debt. There's also a free book on our website First Steps to Wealth. It has two chapters about destroying your debt.

JAIME TARDY: Great. Yeah, you have so much content it's absolutely ridiculous. I was checking out your site and it's sort of amazing how much stuff is on there too and your radio show and then the free training which is Monday nights you said, correct?

DANI JOHNSON: Yeah.

JAIME TARDY: So that would be tonight.

DANI JOHNSON: Every Monday night free.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful. So thank you so much. The last question that I always ask is what is one action that listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

DANI JOHNSON: Money comes from people. You might want to advance your skills with people. Go to our website DaniJohnson.com. Listen to the free training. If you click on free training, you will find a plethora of free training calls that's going to teach you how to communicate with people in such a way that will make you more marketable, more valuable in the workplace whether you are working full time for somebody else or you are working for yourself. The bottom line is money comes from people and if you know how to use the skills that Tammy used, that Tiffany used, that Ken used, then my friend you can make millions of dollars simply by understanding the same exact profound people skills that millionaires or let's call it the more wealthy people.

I think I defined wealth and millionaires. By the way, you can get wealthy without making millions. There is a way to become wealthy without making millions of dollars. I've helped many people do it. So, anyway, I would get over to our site. I would listen now. Listen every single day at least an hour a day and apply what I'm giving you on those calls. Act like I've told you one on one, act like you spend a thousand dollars for each one of that, each hour that you spend with me on that website and do exactly what I show you to do.

Just follow directions and you'll make money just like Mark Whiting who came out of prison two years ago, who made no money. His friend told him on Facebook to go to my public page. He found our website from our Facebook page. Started plugging in and he immediately began to change his life. In the last eight months he has made a tremendous amount of money.

Or like Capri and Darren. Capri used to make $17,000 a year. Capri has made $75,000 from March to October; 75 grand in a six-month period where she used to make $17,000 a year. She has never made big money. She had been married for 20 years. They have suffered financially, struggled financially. She has listened every day on our website. She has plugged into our tools like Unlimited Success or our script books or First Steps to Success. She has also used the leadership development to get other people to do the same. She has outsourced the training for her business which is why her business has grown so very fast.

You can do the same exact things that others have done. It takes following directions. So get to the website right now. Listen online daily. Take advantage of the tools that are available. Follow the instructions that I'm giving you on every single one of those free training calls and you'll start to see a difference in your finances and in your business immediately.

JAIME TARDY: Beautiful and I will definitely link up to everything in the show notes so everyone can take a look at that and I highly suggest checking out DaniJohnson.com because it's a great, great site. I really appreciate you being on today, Dani. I also think everybody should check out the ABC show Secret Millionaire. I think it was Hulu or something like that because that was really inspiring to sort of get to know you a little bit better too. So thank you so much for coming on today.

DANI JOHNSON: You're welcome. God bless you girl.

Just to note, you can download the Top 10 tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on eventualmillionaire.com.

Tags: business failure, Business Growth, business success, Dani Johnson, millionaire interview, Mindset, productivity, Visioning

Categories: All, Business, Debt Freedom, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Millionaire Interviews, Sales

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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