128. Uprising Series: Why being different is better than being better with Rich Schefren

00:00:00

Welcome to the 6th and last episode of the uprising series. And this episode is one where I know each and every one of us entrepreneurs can learn so much from, because I bet that there has been a time, perhaps even right now, where you felt like you've been working so incredibly hard on your business, but you're maybe just not seeing results. Not seeing at least not the results that you want. Almost like no matter what you do, the success and the goals you're looking for seems to always be out of reach. Might you be feeling a little bit of this right now? Well, today's guest knows that feeling all too well. Rich Schefren went from struggling entrepreneur to multimillionaire coach and consultant, and he's here to share the pivotal moments and mindset shifts that turned it all around for him. You'll learn about the power of leveraging new marketing tactics, the importance of designing your business around your true self, flaws and all, and why different is often better than better when it comes to standing out online. If you've ever felt stuck or frustrated in your business, this episode is for you. Rich drops some serious knowledge bombs that just might make the difference and give you the breakthroughs that you've been looking for. My name is Deirdre Tshien CEO and co founder of Capsho. The fastest way to create content that gets you more leads, and this is win the content game.

00:01:25

All right, so when we're talking about struggle, I came from an offline world, and I actually was quite successful offline. I had a clothing store that became like the hot store in Manhattan, and that was really successful and that moved into music, and then I had a music label, and that was successful. Then I semi retired. Then I got into the hypnosis business, and that was successful. It grew from, like zero to 13 and a half million, a little under four years. And then 911 happened, and it decimated my business. And I had over 60 full time hypnotists on staff and about another 100 support employees. And so when the business was in trouble, I, like making payroll every two weeks was a grind. And in the hypnosis business is when I learned direct response marketing and copywriting and things like that. When I got out of the hypnosis business, I had decided I wanted to go online, because online I had this belief that I could have no employees. I could just leverage my copywriting and marketing skill and check emails from the beach. I got online and I struggled immensely. I was a fat kid who had lost weight and got in shape. And then when I got online, I got fat again, because all I did was sit in front of my computer 24/7 trying to figure out and make things work. And I was buried at the time, and we had just had a baby and my wife didn't work. So all pressure was on me to kind of like, make things happen. And I jumped from thing to thing to thing. And that was one of the mistakes I made back then. You know, there was no YouTube, there was no Facebook, there was none of these things. So I was doing ebooks and, you know, I did one in the golf niche, one in the parenting niche, one in getting a refund, one how to pass a drug test, all different types of stuff. And, and I really was not thinking the way I used to think. And it. I remember the days of just, of working day and night, trying to do everything, trying to learn way too much, do way too much, etcetera, and not really making the progress that I wanted to with the continual feeling of every night, my head hitting the pillow, knowing that I wasn't any closer to really where I wanted to get to. And this probably lasted for over a year, maybe a year and a half, maybe even close to two years, where I really would be asking myself, what the hell is wrong with me? I feel like I'm smarter than a lot of these other people, and yet I'm struggling and they're successful. And it wasn't until. It's kind of interesting, because before we started recording, you kind of told me about sharing what I needed to share. And the breakthrough, while different, compounded. So my original breakthrough was when I was writing in my journal, complaining about how frustrated I was and how I didn't see myself continuing down this path, that this, what I was doing was not sustainable. I was not really making any money, and I was going without sleep, gaining weight, like totally just fixated in front of my computer. And the first real, like, epiphany, aha. Breakthrough type a thought I had was that I didn't treat any of my businesses offline, I was treating my online business, that when I was in the clothing business, I didn't have any desire or inclination to design the clothes, get the clothes made, all of these steps in the process, and yet here I was trying to do everything in my little business, or when I had my hypnosis centers, or when I was in the music business. And so the very first thing that I did was kind of like, list out everything that I was doing, everything I felt responsible for. And when I saw it, I saw how absurd it was. And that was when I saw all of this activity without much to show for it, what I also like in my mind, where it leapt to, was that I was under leveraged. Like everything. I got no leverage from anything I was doing. And when I started to take that perspective, I recognized that even not only was the actions I was taking not leveraged, but the projects I was taking on were kind of forcing me to remain unleveraged, because a customer that I generated here would not be good for anything else, and so on and so forth. So the very first. But that epiphany stuck with me in my journal, like, recognizing that I had to treat this business like I treated every other business. And that was the beginning of a change for me. And that change then had me focus in on just ebooks, because that was what we sold back then in the parenting niche. And soon I had 25 different ebooks, but they were all targeted to the same consumer. And so when one sold one, it set up a potential customer for 24 other ones. That allowed me to be profitable on day one of having another book made and another funnel made around it. And we grew from there. And what's interesting is, is that once I started to actually experience that difference in my life, some of my friends that I had met at seminars had asked me for help, and I started helping them, but I realized that they didn't have the same business background that I had. So for me, like, I should have probably never made the mistake. I made the mistake. I recognized it was a mistake, but I already had over ten years of running businesses offline, so it was easy for me to kind of revert back. But with them, they didn't have that. So it took me more to explain fast forward, maybe like another six months or so forward, I started a coaching program. Jay, Abraham, myself, and one other, the three of us, we created a coaching program because I was bringing Jay online. So we ended up selling that coaching program much better than we anticipated because it was like a teleseminar series and then a coaching program. The coaching program came with. It was six months, and then it came with a free event at the end, no pitch, just delivering content. And I was the third man on that totem pole. There was Jay Abraham. He was the marquee name. There was Stephen Pierce, who was a big name in Internet marketing at that time. And then there was me, who was a no name, right? So I did a lot of the work, but Steven and Jay got more of the glory. And when it came time, and it sold much better than we ever anticipated. So we did numerous groups, and the very first group, their six months was up, and we had to give a presentation, right? We were going to do Steven, Jay and I were going to be doing presentations all weekend. Now, Jay and Stephen had been on numerous stages their whole, like, for years, I had never been on a stage. So I was really sweating. Like, what am I going to share with people? So one of the presentations I created was based on that epiphany that I had, that breakthrough about how I was trying to do everything and how nothing was going right, where, like, how the mistakes I made and what I did to change it. And that presentation went over so well. Like, it was the best presentation of the event. And I'm not just saying that because it was mine, right? It was better than my other ones, and it was better than anything. Jay and Steven, like, people were crying in the audience. Like, I hit them viscerally. So two years later, when that partnership dissolved, like, Jay and I have stayed close friends and we've been partners in a lot of things, but Stephen and Jay, they had a falling out. So that was the end of it. And that's when I started coaching myself. I used that same presentation from the stage to actually pitch my coaching program. That's where I got Russell and Ryan and Mike Felsett and all those people. But then I coached two groups, and I was, like, still an unknown coach behind the scenes. Right. This is now 2003. Four, five. Right. I had this project coming up with Agora mid 2006, and I had just finished a coaching group, my last coaching group, and now I had this three month window, and I was hoping to get maybe a dozen clients to work with in between this project I had, starting with Agora in three months and the end of this coaching program. So I decided I would write a report, a free report that I would post on my blog about the mistakes that I see people making and what could be different. And like I said, I was hoping to get a dozen clients, and that ended up going super viral. It's been downloaded millions and millions of times, but it was downloaded, like, about 30 or 40,000 people downloaded it within the first couple of weeks, and then it just grew from there. But that put my name on the map, and then my whole life changed. So really, like, when I talk to people about my life, not that I do that very often, but when I do, there is my life before I wrote that 31 page report, and there's my life after very, very different. Because within, yeah, within a month of me writing that report, like three and a half million dollars, like, came into my life, like, through, through people paying in advance for wanting me to coach them. And then another thousand people signed up for a $400 a month program. So that was another, like $4 million. And then the numbers just, like, grew and grew from there. I've had a couple of experiences like that in my life. I mean, so after that, I wrote a series of other reports trying to understand what I did that made it work so well. And I kind of figured it out after about six or seven of them. But when I, so that was 2006. So from 2006 to 2008, all I did was write free reports. And that's how I grew my business. And every, the least I made on a free report, I think, was like about two and a half million. And the ones that were uber successful, like, well over 10 million. And then in 2007, we were the first to live stream from a live event. And that we also had something, we had a promo attached to that, and that did spectacular. In 2007. I also brought the VSL to Agora because John Benson had invented it at the end of 2005, in December of 2005, and shared it with me. And thats why I brought it there. And then in 2008, I invented the automated webinar. And then we had another big kind of thing. I then retired in 2012 for about five or six years. And when I came back, it was the experience of the reports, like, because when I did the free lead magnet, no one else was doing that at that time. Right. Something very basic today. Same with live streaming, same with vsls. All the things I'm talking about now are very basic. But when what I realized about what, when I leveraged them, they weren't, they were not being used. So when it was time for me to reenter the market, those experiences really stood out for me as a way of helping other people find their liftoff point. Right. I would say that, like, there really is a tremendous power to bringing in something from another world. And I mean that on numerous fronts. So when one of my mentors is Jay Abraham, he's been a business partner of mine, too, but I certainly have learned a lot from him. Overdose my life. One of the ways, and I'm not saying this enough, this is not flattering or unflattering, one of the ways you could look at what Jay Abraham did was he took the concepts of direct response and introduced it to the entrepreneurial market. So his whole curriculum, at least in the beginning years, was really a curriculum from somewhere else that he brought into the entrepreneurial market. And I did the same thing. I brought the education that I got from Arthur Andersen and Accenture or Anderson Consulting and took that knowledge and brought it to the entrepreneurial market. So there was a tremendous amount of benefit there. And it wasn't until I didn't think that who was I to teach people how to grow an online business, not recognizing that I had grown many offline businesses, and it's very similar. I thought I had to have certain chops there when really I didn't have. And I brought that knowledge over. And then all of those, like, marketing successes were really bringing marketing tactics from other places in. And so there's tremendous power in being different. Like, I've taught my clients for years, like, different is better than better, because better is subjective. And it's when you're struggling that you have the least to lose by being different. And yet most actually grip on to being like everyone else. At a time when it is actually easiest to be different. It's not working, so why not be different? So I know the struggle, and I know how easy it is to internalize that struggle, to believe that there's something wrong with you. I definitely had that experience and really beat myself up for a lot of things that really, in other places, at other times, following other strategies were actually my biggest strengths, but misapplied with the amount of information available online, the different ways that you can promote something, all the different things that you could sell. All of these good qualities, I had a. Became really bad qualities, like wanting, like my drive for curiosity became actually info overload, overwhelm, et cetera, as opposed to someone who is always seeking out just answers. And so I think it's. I was thinking about this last night, totally unrelated to this conversation, but I had a couple of bad days recently. Nothing anything bad going on in my life. Just me not feeling at my best and really exploring, like, what's going on with me that I'm not, because I can't. I'm sleeping well, like, I'm physically healthy. And I, you know, a couple pages into this journal entry kind of hit some pay dirt. And I then went on this tangent in my journal, just how appreciative I am of my journal, because I don't know if I'm different, like we're different, or if other. But if I didn't have a journal, I don't know if I'd ever be thinking about these things, like more than a passing second, as I don't think about what's going on with myself very often. Except when I'm writing in my journal, right? And that's why, for me, my journal is one of my most precious things. Nothing. My past journals, although I have a ridiculous number of them, right? Because I've been. I still have my moments of struggle, that epiphany, like all those things in my. In my old journals. But this checking in with yourself, where are you at? Have you had a lot of nights where your head has hit the pillow and you're not satisfied with what you got done that day because you know where it's not going to lead to. Those kinds of things are, I don't know, like, very, very valuable. And the other thing, it's great no matter where someone is at, that they're here listening to this. My girlfriend, who I've been with for the last 13 years, she retired from private equity. So she was a hotshot, like, on Wall street, made lots of money. And now she was doing Airbnbs, and she was working in front of her computer, like, all the time. Like, extremely frustrated, dealing with challenge after challenge. For the longest time, I was trying to get her to go to an event, participate in an event. I was telling her to do that because being online can be one of the loneliest places in the world. And as long as she wasn't talking to and had a group of friends that were in the same business as she was, she was really doing it alone. So it's like, wake up in the morning, get out of bed, go down to a computer, sit in front of that computer all day long, experience problem, frustration, problem, frustration, problem, frustration. End the day, go to bed to repeat it again. It can be a grind. And so I was like, my life changed for me the very first time I went to an event because I made some friends. And then when I got out of bed and came down to work another day, at least there were some people on Skype that I could talk to that were going through this, like, the same shit that I was going through. And when I hit a snag, maybe they had hit that snag before and they could help me or I could help them, but it turned this, like, very isolated experience into something easier, better, and something that, like, more of a human experience. I think it is very easy to blame oneself if they're struggling. And, look, if you haven't tried very much, if you're watching YouTube all day long, then probably the blame is in the right place. But if you're working really hard and you're not getting results, odds are is that you might not be working on the right things, and then it pays to take a step back. And I guess if we have the time, just one quick last thing and then any questions you have, people used to ask me, like nowadays I have steal our winners, which is based on this idea that a lot of the breakthrough that I had in my life and with my clients came from leveraging a marketing tactic at the beginning of its lifecycle. But back in my older days, when I was doing a lot of business coaching, people would often come up to me and ask me, like, well, if I join your coaching program, how much am I going to be making in three months? And to me, it was like the most naive question, right? I dont even know if youre going to be making money in three months. Like, how would I know what you're going to be making, right? I wasn't sure, like if that was a naivete about business or it was something else. And over time, what I realized, what I came to believe, not realize, because I don't know that there is any truth to it. Just what I believe, right, was that people who are asking me that question were really looking for this illusion of security. And the entrepreneurial path is the path of uncertainty. Like no business knows what its income is going to be next year. Zero. None. And so the illusion of security is that anyone can give you certainty about these areas, which are your business, which very few if can, because it doesn't exist. The reality of the entrepreneurial path is the reality of uncertainty. And it's one of the reasons that even though I don't do CrossFit, I'm a huge CrossFit Games fan. And I'm a huge crosskit crossFit games fan because they don't know what they're going to be competing in. So the top athletes in the world have to show up and they got to compete. And oftentimes it's the same people that win year after year. But the way they have to train is just to be great at everything. Be great at everything, right? Because you don't know what's going to show up during the CrossFit games. And to me, entrepreneurship is a lot like that, too. The truth is, is that you got to walk down the path of uncertainty. So what? How do you confidently walk down that path? You confidently walk down that path by having confidence in the skills that you need to get down that path. And the more time you put in, the more things you try, the better your perspective becomes. And as long as you're not jumping you know, I think it was like Brian Tracy. I heard this from Brian Tracy. I don't know if there's any truth to it, but I liked it, so I'm going to share it. You know, the failure rate for businesses is like, you know, one out of ten succeed, but the failure rate for an entrepreneur changes based on whether they're jumping from thing to thing with no relation, or whether when this business fails, they move to another business where that previous experience helps inform them and have them make better decisions. And when that happens, the odds of having three failures is very low, whereas if you just jump from thing to thing to thing, the odds are still more probable that you'll fail. So I find that most people start too slow and then they pull the plug too slow as well. But if you're active, if you're doing things, your results will let you know one way or the other. And if you're, if it doesn't work out, try and understand why it doesn't work out, then move to something one step removed. Not 100% different, but either different customers, different products, but not different customers, different products, different way of selling, everything different. And I think eventually you move towards success. And I will also just say lastly, that my thought about what the f is wrong with me is a thought that I know a lot of, I've coached a lot of really successful online entrepreneurs. I can tell you that I wasn't alone in asking myself that, that many of my most successful clients, people that have become billionaires, had that frustration early on in their development as well.

00:23:44

And oh my gosh, this is rich. Thank you so much. Because I literally, this was one of the interviews I was most looking forward to because I knew that you were going to just be able to share and teach, we would be able to learn so much from you. And one of the things that really stood out, even in terms of what you said, was like, it feels like it kind of never goes away in a way. Even you talk about your pre report days, which to me was like, man, you were still really successful in definitely a lot of the things that you did pre that time as well as posts, but even post, I mean, did, and you even mentioned like very recently, you had those thoughts of like, what is wrong with it doesn't feel like it ever kind of goes away. Am I right in saying that self.

00:24:28

Doubt doesn't ever go away unless you're like a narcissist or a sociopath, I guess. But, you know, I guess you could look at the positive side of it or the negative side of it. Like, what I was gonna say is, nothing really changes that much. When I was poor, I thought getting rich would make me happy. It didn't. When I was fat, I thought getting skinny would make me happy. It didn't. These all made me happy for, like, a week or two. But, like, you know, and there is a lot of truth to, like, the problems that you come across magnify, like, as you grow. So the. I wouldn't say that my life is easier than, like, someone who might be struggling right now in the sense that, yeah, I might not have the same struggles, and I don't have to worry about having enough money to pay for my kids school or my wife fill up the car with gas or something like that. So, yeah, those issues are gone, but now the decisions I make have a lot bigger consequences, and there's a. A lot of numbers attached to it, and it doesn't only impact me, it impacts a lot of other people who work for me and things like that. And so it's like, I had to get really focused to grow my business a long time ago. And had I not had to have gotten that focused early on, then after I wrote the manifesto, and all of a sudden, like, everybody and their brother was reaching out to me with different ideas, I would have easily, like, gotten destroyed because I needed to kind of learn the ability to say no before that happened. Fortunately, I did and stayed focused. So there's something that in every challenge I've ever had, there's been something to learn. And I also would say that I don't know if it's unique to me. I don't think it is unique to me. But I've had a really good run online over 20 years, and I'm really proud of, like, the products we put out, the people we've helped, et cetera. And what I would say is probably, like, the biggest. The biggest cause of all that has been maybe I don't think of myself as a very egotistical person, which kind of surprises some people. But there is one area where I have a big ego, and that one area where I have a big ego is that if I'm struggling with something, I assume other people are, too. And it's actually something I used to teach a lot in my marketing courses. That which is most personal is most general. So one way that, like, that first report I wrote, the Internet business manifesto that went viral, one way that, like, I thought about it was I was writing it to my old self because I knew the pain right and the people reading it could feel like I knew their pain because I was really writing it. I didn't know their pain, but I knew my pain. And so I was writing it to myself. And every big product that I ever had was built on a problem that I had, that I had to solve. And the ego that said, if I have this problem, other people must have this problem, too. So the COVID of the manifesto was this diagram called the, you, diagram that became probably like the best graphic I ever came up with. But that graphic that people identified with was originally drawn in my journal when I was writing about what I was doing. So there are, I would be lying if I said, now every time I come up against a problem, I get excited because there's going to be a huge windfall opportunity behind it. That is true. I don't get that excited about it, though. But I've always had this belief that if I come up against a problem, there are other people coming up against it, too. And I think that is a great way of looking at things because we all are very, people are like, oh, well, every good opportunity has been taken and there's nothing out there for me. Do you experience problems? If you do, then there are opportunities. Right? Because when people experience problems, they're looking for solutions.

00:28:47

Wow, I love that I got so much out of that. Thank you. That was, oh, I cannot express enough how, how amazing that was. Rich, I wanted to leave some time for you to talk about stellar winners because all of this actually leads to, as you said, like how still our winners even came about was really because of your journey and what you went through and going and trying to find the things that were working and being first to market with them, in a sense. And so tell us about how you, how you brought still our winners to life and how people can find out more about it.

00:29:17

Yeah. So when I first started, like I said, I was a business coach and I was always looking for things that I felt that I learned that were powerful to me, that had solved my problems and bring it to the market. And im extremely proud of that. Like, its one of the things im most proud of that when the very last big kind of launch I did was in 2012. So this is twelve years ago, but I started that video with a, I said if this was your normal video, you would see a bunch of testimonials and case studies, but this is not a normal video. In fact, on the right hand side of this video, you'll see a button and if you click that button, it will open up a new page with my names and quotes. Searching Google, there you'll see over 100,000 pages about me. Go read them. You'll be hard pressed to find anything that would dissuade you from wanting to do business with me. Buy something from me, whatever. Now there's a lot less pages because I was retired for a long time. But that ethos, right? If you're going to create a sale, if you're going to go through the effort of marketing, well, it is idiotic to not over deliver because getting a customer is the hardest thing possible. And if you have people that are satisfied, likelihood of being able to sell them again and again, again, much higher. So it's not only a morality play, it's also just a good business play. But I've been very proud of, like I said earlier, pretty much there were very few things that I brought to market that were really original creations, right? Like when I was teaching business, I was teaching, like, the best business concepts out there. I taught theory of constraints. It was the best. That was a few. That was a methodology invented by someone else. But my choice in choosing those things was that I was convinced of its power and I knew that people would get tremendous benefit from it. But then I retired, and then I came back. Agora Publishing bought half of strategic profits, and so now it was time to relaunch it. And I was really reflecting on my own experiences and those of my clients. And really the biggest pivot points in my life came from leveraging a tactic or strategy that no one else was using at that moment in my market. Not that no one else was using, but no one else was using in my market. And same with my clients, like Agora and stuff like that. And so I felt personally that this is now like 2019, right? Like, I stepped away from online marketing after, like soon after 2012. But when I came back, I didn't feel like knowing business well gave you an advantage anymore. It just was kind of like the anti, you need to know it. It's anti, but knowing it isn't going to be enough now to break out. And a lot of the stuff that I had taught over the years, like, very effective at the time, I taught it gave people an advantage at that time, but now no longer an Advantage. And so it was really important that I don't want to do anything where now I'm not selling stuff that I'm a big believer in, zealot in, that gives people an advantage. What I came to was steal our winners. Then the question was like, could I pull something like that off. Could I create a platform we didn't start as a platform. It started as a newsletter. But could I create something where we could deliver strategies and tactics that are currently crushing it that most people don't know about yet? And could we do it consistently? And the answer has been yes. We now have over like, close to 300 contributors. We produce 104 episodes a year. And people can. There's a FreE trial. It's $97 a month. It's $500 a year. The goal is not to have every piece of your marketing arsenal be something that's the beginning of that was just invented. That's not the case at all. What is the case though, is that if you don't have anything that gives you an advantage, then you have no advantage. And if you have no advantage online, you will pay a price for that because you're competing with people worldwide for the same customers that are ideal for you or an ideal for them. And if you have no way to stand out above those people, then you are at a loss. And so what steel our winners provides are strategies and tactics that are crushing it right now most people don't know about. And that's where you can find that one or two tactic or strategy that really provides liftoff for you. For me, the first time I ever got to experience that was with free reports. It was like turning, pouring gasoline on my business. We more than ten x and I've seen it time and time again. When you employ something that is as powerful as that is, every strategy in steel. Are winners like that? No. No. But every strategy is working and is fresh. Now, whether or not anyone in your market is using that, that's what you got to kind of like figure out. But it is the raw material that actually makes businesses grow. And that is the thing that I think to just wrap up everything that we're talking about here. What we try to do at steel hour winners is provide people a marketing advantage. And I think we're really good at it. And if someone needs that, then I don't know of anyone that does a better job of it. Because like I said, we produce 104 episodes a year. That's two a week. And it's the best minds doing the best things out there and then reporting back results. So that is where you can find a marketing advantage. But in the bigger play of business, I would say that business is the biggest game that you're ever going to play for money in your life. Like, if it's successful, it will be worth more than your house. It'll be worth more than anything else. Right? So it's the single biggest game that you're going to play for money. And I used to have this client, Gene Carlo, and Gene Carlo was ranked like 200th in the world in tennis, okay? I used to play tennis competitively when I was younger. I am not 200th in the world. I am not 2000th in the world. I'm probably not even 20,000th in the world. So if I'm going to play. If I'm going to play a game for money with Giancarlo, it's not going to be tennis. Right? Like, because that would be a recipe to lose money. Like, he would have an advantage over me. If I was going to play Giancarlo, a game for money, I'd probably want to play in poker because I know I'm better at poker than he is. Well, the biggest game you're ever going to play for money is your business, and you better have an advantage with. That could be your experience, it could be your perspective, it could be anything. But there needs to be something, right? And I find that what is missed in following someone else's method exactly, or buying a business in a box or any of those types of things, is that it discounts the one thing where the advantage needs to come from, which is you. So my business is a very, like, is reflective of who I am, and your business will be reflective of who you are. And you don't want to diminish that. You want to really accentuate that. And the last, the really last thing I'll say, I know I say this too much, but just because it's rare that I get to talk about these things, the other big mistake that I see people make in their business, and if someone's struggling, this might be a reason why is, and I made this mistake when I was much younger. They designed their business around some mythical version of themselves that, okay, you as the entrepreneur can design the business any which way you want it to be. But most people, most entrepreneurs, when they think about their business, they think of some idealized version of themselves. I'm a procrastinator. I'm a perfectionist. I have a lot of flaws. It would be foolish of me to design a business where I did not have those problems, like assuming someday magically, I'm not going to have those problems, right. If the business needs me to be different than who I am now, I am putting a bunch of personal goals in front of the success of my business. So we had this product years ago, we sold it pretty well. It was called out. Fox your flaws. We don't even have it anymore. I mean, it's an old, but it was based on that idea that I'm not money motivated. So. But a business needs to be money motivated. So how do I build a business that is motivated by money when I'm not right? Instead of me trying to change it, how do I, if I'm a perfectionist and a procrastinator, how do I create a course when I always want to keep working on it? Well, I have to sell that course before it ever exists, and I have to be put. And so that was my model. Like, I wrote the reports that sold a live coaching program that totally didn't exist. Then I was under the gun to have to get it done every Wednesday by 03:00 p.m. and I'd finish at 02:59 p.m. but that's what was necessary for me to get it done. And my point is that you might be trying to force, it's your business. You make the rules. That's one of the benefits of owning a business. And if you've never reflected on who you really are and what traits you have that give the business some positives, but also what traits you have that give the business some negatives and then try and design around that, then you're not leveraging. One of the biggest benefits that you get from owning your own business, which is that you can build the world around yourself to get the best outcome. And the mistake that people make is designing a business around themselves thinking that they somehow magically do not have the same problems that they've always had, that they're somehow magically going to get rid of those problems. Those problems will not be gotten rid of. My therapist has told me this is a cop out for not having to change. And I was like, this is a cop out for not having to change. Not necessarily not wanting to change, but it is a mistake I see a lot of people still make. Like, you make the rules, you can design the business any way you want, and there's no character flaw that cannot be designed around. Wow.

00:39:19

Okay. Well, I'm glad, rich, that you kept saying, this is gonna be the last thing, because everything that you spent in the last few years has just been. I'm literally, like, sitting here going, there are so many things that I know that I can do better, like, that I've learned and can now actually take away and be like, yeah, how do I actually build a better business? Like, this is the purpose of this event, it is how do we just all rise up together? And learning from someone like you, rich, has been invaluable. Thank you. Where can people go to check out steal our winners?

00:39:50

Someday they'll be able to go to steal our winners. We own that site, but we've never made the domain there. So the name of my company is strategic profits. So it's strategic profits. And that's where you can find steal our winners. So strategicprofits.com.

00:40:02

Amazing. Thank you so much.

00:40:04

My pleasure.

00:40:05

Wow. What an incredible conversation with Rich Schefren. There were so, so many golden nuggets in there. So I'd love to hear from you. What was your biggest takeaway from this episode? Was it Rich's advice on finding your unique advantage? Maybe his insights on designing your business around your true self? Or maybe his perspective on leveraging new marketing tactics? Let me know in the comments if you're watching on YouTube or via the link in in the show notes if you're listening to this on the podcast, and if you want to learn more about Rich's Steal our Winners program, then you can check that out @strategicprofits.com. We've left the link to that in the show notes as well. And last thing, if you want the nitty gritty on implementing my entire content marketing system, it's called the honey trap method. The Honey Trap Method. Then you have to listen to my limited podcast series called content marketing tips because I literally break each episode is a breakdown of one piece of that method. I will leave that link in the description or in the show notes if you're on podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in today's episode. My name is Deirdre Tshien and as always, stay intelligently lazy.