Blue Collar Culture

Business Results the Old Fashioned Way

Mitch Russo | Taking Steps Towards Intentionality

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In this episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast, we sit down with Mitch Russo. Mitch started a software company in his garage, sold it for eight figures, and then went on to work directly with Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes to build a $25 million dollar business together! Mitch is also an author and has been nominated twice as Entrepreneur of the Year. 

“Ask questions, get help, be open to mentorship and coaching, go beyond what you think is right, be inquisitive, constantly be asking questions. There is no place for ego, but confidence is imperative,” says Mitch when asked about the advice he would give to business owners.

We’ll chat with Mitch about how setting intentions can help you succeed in business, different ways opportunities may arise, as well as…

  • How to take steps towards intentionality
  • Why you may need to pivot to find success
  • The ways setting intentions can help you reach your goals
  • How asking questions of those who have experience with your goals and aspirations can blaze your own path to success

Listen now…

Mentioned in this episode:

Transcript

Ryan Englin: Welcome back to another episode of the Blue Collar Culture Podcast. I'm your co-host Ryan Englin and I am here with Jeremy Macliver.

Jeremy Macliver: Welcome back, everyone.

Ryan: And today we are so excited to have a conversation with Mitch Russo. He actually started a software company in his garage, sold it for eight figures, and then went on to work directly with Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes to build a $25 million business together. He was nominated twice for Entrepreneur of the Year. Mitch helps companies scale rapidly. His first book is The Invisible Organization. How ingenious CEOs are creating thriving virtual companies. And he's here with us today with a new book called Power Tribes, How Certification Can Explode Your Business. Mitch, thank you so much for joining us today.

Mitch Russo: Hey, guys. I'm thrilled to be here. I love what you're doing and delighted to be having this conversation with you.

Ryan: Awesome. Well, hey, Mitch, I love to always start out with the first conversation, I want to get to know you a little bit better. I want our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. Tell us a journey, how you got to where you are today. And maybe even if there's, if you feel like it, throw some great wisdom that you've learned on that journey out for our listeners.

Three Words That Changed Everything

Mitch: Sure. Well, you know, again, like all of our stories, you know, we start out as kids, you know, and a lot of the impressions about life are formed when we're kids, when we're children. And, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and I was, you know, I was a little guy, you know? I was not a jock in any way. So, you know, most of the time I was the last one picked for teams at school and none of the girls paid any attention to me. And, you know, and I was okay with that. I was pretty introverted.

I got into science and electronics and had a good time with that. But there came that time when I said, You know what? It sure would be nice to have a date. And so I thought, Well, how do you do that? I mean, like I said, I didn't think of myself as particularly attractive or interesting to girls. So I figured, well, maybe if I start a rock band, that would attract some girls. And I thought, well, I don't really know how to play the guitar. I guess that would come first.

So I started taking some guitar lessons. And I literally started at 12. And then by the time I was 15, we got a band together. And at first it was just, you know, like a bunch of guys in a room hanging out with our instruments and jammin, which, you know, of course, doesn't really constitute music. It's just noise in effect. And finally, we got organized, you know? And we said, you know, what, if we're going to do this, why don't we learn some songs? And we saw you learn some songs.

And then, you know, one song would take us three or four practice sessions to perfect and it was boring. But at the end of the fourth one, we had a great song, we could play it really well. And we weren't really writing anything unique. It was all cover stuff, you know, from the, from the 60s and 70s. So we kept doing this. And then eventually, we said, You know, I think we're ready to like, maybe play for other people. And so we put some flyers together and put them up in the neighborhood.

And we got a couple of, you know, of jobs that way. And we played those jobs. And, you know, I had the idea, you know, probably what I should do is take a clipboard with me and ask the moms that hire us for their daughters' sweet 16 to write a little note about how we did. We now call those testimonials. And on and on. So it was in this formative time of 15, 16 years old, that I was learning the basics of business. And so, you know, I learned that, you know, progress, not perfection makes a great product.

I learned that testimonials are super important. I learned that if the more flyers you put up, the more interest you get, so I learned about promotion. So this is all the stuff that my life started with. And I was in an entrepreneurial family to begin with. So that was just great. But then later in life, you know, as I progressed my way through college, and then eventually into a job, I found that the profession that I love most was engineering.

And while I loved studying engineering and doing engineering, the job itself was quite boring. In fact, only 10% of my time was spent in engineering. 90% of it was spent doing busy work and paperwork and arguing with staff members and being in stupid meetings and I hated it. So I thought, Wait a minute, I just spent my whole life preparing to be an engineer and I don't really like it. What do I do? What do I do? So I happen to get called on by a sales guy.

And I really thought he was really smart and fun to be with and we had a good time and they always bought me lunch. So that was good. Until one day I said to him, you know, Boy, I'd love to learn what you do. Maybe I could do that too. And I'll skip the whole interim how that happened. But ultimately, I did. And I went, I asked him how he learned and he told me. So I enrolled in the Dale Carnegie Sales School, and I learned how to sell. And now I'm still an engineer, and I'm speaking to the head of the sales division for my company, and I said, You know, I really would love to be in sales.

I think I could do really well. I could do as well as all the other guy's too. So would you give me a shot? And this, I'm about to tell you what was the pivot point in my life that changed everything changed the way I thought about everything. So he looks at me and that's one of these like, condescending smiles while he's shaking his head and saying, you know, Mitch, great salespeople are born and, you know, you're really not one of those. You should just keep doing what you're doing. And I sat there quietly, and I feel the blood in my body boiling, and three words came to mind. Now, Jeremy, Ryan, do you want to guess what those three words were?

Jeremy: I've got no idea. It's not I quit because that'd be two.

Mitch: That'd be two here's the three words. And it wasn't go f yourself. That's what somebody once told me that. No, it was I’ll show you. Those three words changed the direction of my life. This man didn't realize it, but he just gave me the motivation to do something that I really was only fishing about, you know, maybe trying out. So now I decided that I was going to go all out and I quit. I quit my job where I was making a lot of money.

And I took a job making a quarter or a third of what I was making before with the promise of commissions. And I went to work for a small company. And I struggled, and I struggled and I struggled. But I had some gifts that I didn't realize. And the reason I'm telling you this story is because we all do. We all have gifts, every single individual in this world has gifts. But unfortunately, some of us go our whole lifetime without realizing them or even if we realize them without taking advantage of them.

And so part of what I'm about to share is the reason why you should because there's so much power in your gifts if you just allow them to evolve naturally but with a little bit of attention. And so what ended up happening to me is 14 months go by and my commission checks are ranging from 200 to $300 a month. And I had some savings so I wasn't financially struggling. But it wasn't really what I wanted. I happened to like what I was doing now a lot better than before. I was interacting with people. I had my trunk filled with cassette programs, learning more about self-development, growth, selling.

I mean, so this whole 14 month period was a period of almost incubation for me if you will. And it was in this period of time that I had really listened to some of the greats over and over again on cassette tape, while I drove from appointment to appointment. So lifelong learning became my theme. Everything I did, I'd never would listen to music in the car because it was a waste of time. I wanted to learn. If I was in the car, I realized that being in the car gave me the chance to learn.

Finally, after 14 months, and I had been working on this deal for a long time. My first real commission check came in, and I want to remind you of a few things here. It was 1984. And I know that's a while ago, maybe you guys weren't even born yet. But in 1984, I was somewhere in the range of 26, 28 years old or so. A little, little older, maybe 29. And this commission check showed up. And that first check was $34,000. Now, today, that wouldn't be a bad check, either. But go back in time and think about what $34,000 was worth back then.

Jeremy: Buy a house.

Mitch: Yeah, right. Exactly. And that was just my first check. And then they started rolling in month after month after month. And I was very unsophisticated financially. So what I did is I would go to the bank and I would deposit of two or three of these checks until it reached 100,000 and then I would take the passbook. Remember passbooks from banks? Does anyone remember that?

Jeremy: I'm sure we have a couple listeners here that remember that but that might be pre my time.

The Power of Intention

Mitch: Yeah, right. So when you used to go into a bank and they give you like a blue passbook and every time you deposit money, they'd stamp it in your passbook. So think about that little blue book as your database and it contained a record of all your money. Anyway, make a long story short, I just threw these past books in the top sock drawer of my house. I kind of lost track, really of how many I had. I just kept collecting them, which is kind of cool.

I mean, after all, that's not a bad thing to do. But at the same time, I was wasting, I was really wasting an opportunity which I didn't realize back then. So all of a sudden now I'm doing this and I'm making great money and I'm saving best that I can. I'm also spending and splurging a little bit. I bought my very first new car at the age of 29, 30. And it was thrilling to me cuz no one in my family, I don't think we've ever had a new car before. And then all of a sudden the bottom dropped out of the market completely.

So at this stage where I'm at in my life is I banked some great money but the future looks very bleak. And I went to one of the other sales guys in my industry and I said, What's going on here? I mean, what's all of a sudden all my clients are, all my customers basically, are shutting their shipping dock. They won't let our parts in. They get returned to the factory and, you know, my commission check has dropped by 90%. What's happening? He goes, oh, this is the electronics business and, you know, there's a downturn and there's cycles in the electronics business and we're just entering one of those down cycles.

I said, Really? I said it gets pretty bad. It goes, Oh yeah, it'll get pretty bad. I said, How long does it last? He goes Oh, don't worry, it'll only last five or six years. I said, What? Five or six years? You think I'm gonna stick around for five or six years, wait for this to come back. I'm out of here. And now, I, and this is important, guys. And this is so important listeners. This is the critical part that changes worlds. I set an intention. Every great thing ever done in this world by any individual started with an intention.

And this comes down to your everyday life right now, Jeremy, Ryan, when you set an intention, like you set an intention to have a podcast, look what you guys did. You built this amazing podcast. Well, listeners, I'm asking you to do the same thing. I want you to set intentions because I set an intention and my intention was to exit this position and go into business. And why? Why business? Well, you know, I had enough money where I could probably travel for a year and not earn anything or take a couple of years off and then go back to work later.

But then I said, you know, I'm only 30 years old. Why don't I build a company and create lifetime wealth instead of just temporary wealth? And so that's what I did. And when I set that intention, magic happened. It didn't happen right away. And it didn't happen in an obvious way, either. So my intention was to build a business, my intention was to set a business, and then things started to show up in my world. So I walk into a client almost the next week and like, maybe a week or two later, and I asked him how he's doing.

He goes, Well, I just want to let you know I'm going to be leaving. I said what? He goes yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been working in the Far East all this time. And, you know, I've been manhandling manufacturing there as the vice president of manufacturing and it's time for me to open up my own company. I said, Really? He said, Yeah, in fact, you might be interested in what I'm doing. I said, Sure, tell me. And he ended up basically inviting me to be 50/50 partners with him in that business.

And you see, I don't know that would have happened unless I set that intention. But that wasn't the only thing that happened. Then I got a call from another friend who said, I have an idea. I want to share it with you. So I said, Great, come on over. Let's set some time aside and talk about your idea. And then something else like that happened as well and I can get into the details. But at the end of the day, I had five business opportunities inside of 60 days.

And here's the interesting part, the one that was the least exciting in a sense, the one that had the least potential was when my neighbor, my new next-door neighbor and I started chatting over coffee about some software that I would like to build to help me in my work. And he got excited about it. And he actually went off and he created a template for how it should look and all that behind my back without me knowing about it, and then called me over and said, I want to show you something. So of all the things I started, think of them as plates spinning on pegs.

You know, I had started five of these spinning plates and I didn't know which one of them or how many of them would fall to the ground and then crash. And my feeling was, it wouldn't really matter because I would start five more because my intention was to create wealth, to create an opportunity for me to take everything I've learned in all these years of selling and go to the next step. And so, it turns out that one of the least likely of those businesses was the software company, which became Timeslips Corporation.

So fast-forwarding to the end, it turns out Timeslips Corporation, over the course of about nine years, grew from zero, which is just me and my partner sitting in my, in the room above my garage, to an eight-figure company, which we then sold internationally to Sage PLC in the UK for over $10 million. Now back then $10 million used to be a lot of money. You know, today with VC and billion-dollar buyouts, you might say, yeah, it's not much.

But, you know, for us, it was a pretty good resolution. And we were only at the time when we sold the company, we were only 40, 42 years old. 40 years old, really. So here we weren't 40-year-olds, and, you know, my buddy went his way and I went mine. To this day, we're still best of friends. But I didn't realize what an incredible learning experience. The growth that I had selling was nothing compared to the growth that I obtained in building, starting, growing, running a company.

Ryan: Wow, I'm just so engaged in that story. That was fantastic. I love the journey you just took us on there. And I loved what you said about intention. I think a lot of listeners that we're going to have here, you know, they had this intention to go create something that they weren't getting from their old employer. But as part of what you had said in your journey as well, the intention is one piece, but then there's the, you actually got to execute on it.

You got to be open to it. You've got to be available when these opportunities present themselves. Mitch, what are some of the things that as you were going on that journey, or even from when you sold that to where you are today, what are some of the things that helped you along that journey? I mean, being open, of course, I heard that in the story. But what are some other things that, practical things that you executed on that you said, you know, if it wasn't for these things, I wouldn't have been able to make it the way I did?

Ask the People Who Are Where You Want to Be

Mitch: Well, I am, I alluded to it when I first started thinking about sales. I spoke to other salespeople and asked them how they got started, what they did, how did they learn how to sell. So the lesson for me was, you know, ask questions. Seek out the people in your business that are the best at what they do and ask them if you could take them to lunch. In fact, later when we were starting the software company, I called executives at large software companies and said, Hey, you know, we're just beginners here and I admire everything you've done.

I've read this that you wrote. I'm really a big fan. Would you be open to maybe having a cup of coffee with me or can I buy you lunch? And these were pivotal moments in some cases. And the other part about it is that about two years into my business, I was in a position where I was in over my head. I had never done this before. We had a rapidly growing company, and you say, well, gee, Mitch, that's a great problem to have.

Yeah. Except of course that now I'm responsible for the lives of, at that point there was 30 employees and their families. So realistically, I was terrified. I could make one move and crash the whole thing. And there were times when I actually did and almost crashed the whole thing. But what happened was, I was able to find a business coach who was able to help me and guide me through these moments where I needed to really understand what I had to do in order to be successful whether I wanted to do them or not.

So ask questions, get help, be open to mentorship and coaching and go beyond what you think is right. Be inquisitive. Constantly be asking questions. There is no place for ego, but confidence is imperative. So always have confidence that you are going to be successful no matter how it feels today. And I could tell you stories about, we were about 50 people at this point in the company's history and we had some fairly large orders that had been placed, but we haven't been paid and we had no payroll money.

And so my partner and I dug into our wallets. And we had pulled out our credit cards and we put payroll on credit cards because I knew and I had confidence that we would not only get the money that we had outstanding, but we would continue to grow and generate more. At that point in time, it had been two, two and a half years into the business. We had not taken salaries those two, first two and a half years.

So we were spending our savings, which is what our savings was intended for, as well as funding the company. And in the end, you know, it took almost three years before we were able to make a paycheck. But it was scary. And here we are, depleting our savings, had almost nothing left at one point. In fact, there was a point three years later when I said to my partner said, Neil, I think it's time for us to draw salaries. He says, Why? I said because I don't have any money left. So I think it's time that we start drawing salaries because we were plowing every penny back into the company. Every penny.

Jeremy: Mitch, I love this story. I connect so much with it. And I get to work with a lot of different entrepreneurs and at some point they, they've all started out with this vision, this just dream. Mine, you know, I was working in a body shop. Actually, I'll step back a little bit. I was in high school running side jobs through a body shop class making money at it. And our English teacher, I remember her saying what do you want to be 10 years after graduation? And I wrote down that I wanted to be running a body shop.

Eight years after graduation, I was owning a body shop. And it's about pursuing that. But I remember, you know, and I'm gonna want to dig into this with you a little bit here, but I had the dream of owning a body shop and as I was working in them I was building and I was, you know, learning and saving. The time came for me to set out on my own, but I had shared it with just a few people that knew that that was my dream. And actually, the opportunity came from a co-worker who was having a conversation with somebody else.

And that perfect opportunity to step in, stepped in. You know, those who are having a conversation and said, Hey, you know, I heard about this body shop is for sale. It's kind of almost a fire sale type situation. And lo and behold, that guy got excited because he knew my dream. And he was able to come get me and say, hey, maybe you didn't know about this opportunity, which I didn't, and literally from that point to starting was two weeks. Like I was in business.

Mitch: Yeah, because you set an intention. That's what happens.

Jeremy: I set an intention. Another one that comes to mind that I think is just so much, it's so funny is obviously I do EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Gino Wickman founded it. The URL for it and the company name has been EOS Worldwide since day one. Now when Gino and Don Tinney named it EOS Worldwide at a Starbucks one day, that's what they collectively decided this was what the thing was going to be called, they went home and told their wives, we've named the company.

And they laughed. EOS Worldwide? It's just the two of you in Detroit. Lo and behold, I have seen the EOS model translated in Chinese. I was just with the Australian implementers. In fact, I was just with an implementer last week, who was in some funky country island out in the middle of the Pacific that has its own little whatever culture, and EOS has spread to that island out there. But that was the dream. That was Geno's dream. That's what he believed it could be. It is there and it is headed across and it's in Europe now, surging through, you know, that continent and making a difference, but it was a clear defined dream. So

Mitch: Very powerful.

Jeremy: I love it. So tell me a little bit about how do you encourage, or what's some recommendations you would give to our audience about sharing or defining that dream? How can they make theirs come to life?

Intention Followed By Proper Implementation

Mitch: Well, part of what, by the way, just as a side note, Gino and I are going to be recording a show together next week. So I invited him onto the show. A big admirer of EOS. And I'm excited about chatting with Gino, and even the little information you just gave me will assist me in having the interview with him. So thank you for that.

Jeremy: Well tell him I said hi. I was just with him last week and I'll talk, I'll be talking to him in a couple weeks here.

Mitch: Oh, good, good. Tell him we were on the show together. So here's what it really comes down to. People say, you know, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's implementation that matters. And I would agree for the most part, but there's a part of that that needs to be better defined. And here's that part. Ideas are, of course, common because we're human beings and human beings are idea generation machines.

But the research that goes into whether or not an idea is viable, is essential. And, you know, I didn't tell this story because it's a bit of a long story, but when we first started our software company, the intention of what we wanted to build was to solve a problem that literally disappeared by the time we got finished developing the software. So we had done enormous amounts of research, we had made sure that the solution we were going to generate was going to be needed and wanted. And even still, the solution itself was made irrelevant the day after we announced that we had completed the product and we were ready to start selling it.

So the research became super important because a lot, that allowed us to take what we had done and pivot rapidly. Pivot is a keyword here because entrepreneurs, for the most part, can try something for years and years and years and years and years, have it fail and then give up. Well, that, my friend, is called a failure. And we don't really tolerate failure. What we do is we think about what we can do with what we have to do something better than what we did before. And in our case, we took that technology and we were able to repurpose it.

Instead of keeping track of time so that you could deduct your computer from the IRS group, your IRS tax return, instead of that, we repurposed our time tracking technology to build legal time and billing software. And we will, we were not lawyers. We knew nothing about legal time and billing software. But another very important element to know about is that innovation almost exclusively comes from outside an existing industry. Think about Tesla. Tesla should have been invented by Ford or GM, right? But instead, it took some wacko crazy guy with a huge dream and ambition to start it himself. That's the point I wanted to make.

Jeremy: Very cool. Yeah, I was growing a steel company and I was running operations and HR, which basically meant I had to get all the people to do all the work, right? And we had sales who promised the world and we had the accounting department who accounted for all my mistakes. And so we were building our vision of what a success looked like. And I remember going through that dialogue and really challenging a couple things that they felt like we really need to go after this. We need to do this in the next three years.

And I'm like there's no way. You're crazy. You're off your rocker. I was, it was my self-limiting beliefs. There's no way we can do this. Ultimately, the team collectively decided that that was what we should be pursuing. It was worth it. And so because I was part of the team, I engaged in it and would be out there preaching we're going to do this. I sure hope so. But I can't let the team know that, right? And because we had to had a unified front and a unified dream, guess what happened. Six months from the time we started announcing it, one of those things that I believe could not be done, was done.

Mitch: Well, you know, what you're doing is you're telling the story of intention, which is what we had talked about before. In the face of unbelievable odds, you had an intention. And as a result, that intention came to life. I mean, that's the story of John F. Kennedy and the US Space Program. Space Program was declared by the president of the US but he knew, he knew well that we did not have the technology to go into space.

In fact, we didn't even have a glimmer of an understanding of what it would take to go into space. But the intention was set and as a result, the country rallied around that and made it happen. So you did the same thing. And that's what I'm advising anybody listening to the show, who is an entrepreneur is to set your intention and allow the universe to bring you the solutions.

But that doesn't mean, just be very careful here, that doesn't mean that you just now you can kind of drink beer and wait for it to show up. It doesn't work that way. It just makes you, it puts you into action. It makes sure that you're curious enough to see the solutions as they show up because sometimes they show up in ways that we don't want them to. They show up as problems. Opportunities and solutions can show up as problems needing to be solved. And if you don't solve those problems, you never find the solution that the universe intended you to find. Does that make sense?

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely. So what's one like, what's, what have you found is the best way to become intentional? So you have, I'm sure you Have some goals for your future. And so how can we help those that are listening to take that first step towards intentionality?

Mitch: Well, there's a difference between setting an intention and not understanding what it is that you need to get that intention done. So, for example, you can't set an intention to, and I'm gonna think of something now that would make sense here. You can't set an intention to do something that you're not equipped to do. Whether that's physically or emotionally. For example, I could never have set the intention to become an award-winning football player. I mean, I, there wasn't a possibility because it just wasn't making sense or realistic.

But I could have set an intention to create a football talent agency or to do something in that industry if that were my goals. And they would have been realistic based on what I'm capable of and what I am, you know, that that's within my realm. Just like Elon Musk, and I use him a lot because I love Elon and I love his spirit and I love his creativity. But just like Elon Musk, you know, he set this intention to go into space. And all he knew for sure is that he was smart enough to do it. And that comes back to confidence as well. But it also comes down to understanding the fundamentals of what it takes. And he did.

That's the thing about Elon Musk is that he's a genius scientist and researcher and has a way of going deeper into a topic than most people ever dreamed of. And when, for example, much of the battery technology that drives Teslas today was invented by Elon and his team based on Elon's understanding of physics and science, not because he knew how. And that's the point, you don't need to know how, but you need to understand the pathway on how to get there. And sometimes that pathway is not clear, and that's okay too. Set the intention, allow what the universe has in store for you to show up and be surprised and appreciative when it does.

Jeremy: That's great. I really like it. So let's just talk about that in the business. And I can't believe it, we are almost to the point of concluding here. So as we wrap this up, I would love to just talk about bringing it into the business. You know, I have my business that I'm growing. I find that every business owner jumped out into this journey for a reason. There was something along that pathway that they desired.

But unfortunately, a lot of times the very thing that they were after, the very first thing they created to get what they wanted is the thing that's taking away from what they wanted, whether it's time, they wanted more time now they're working harder than they've ever worked. They wanted more money. As you said earlier, you were taking credit cards out to cover payroll. I spent my 10th wedding anniversary on the beaches of South Carolina making transfers and trying to cover payroll.

My employees thinking that I was just some rich business owner out there vacationing on the beach. So sometimes this business world can get so monotonous, it can get so tactical, that these visions, these dreams began to fade. They began to get buried under the piles of papers in the office. So as we bring that to it, how do you help them kind of dig back down underneath that thing and say, okay, where were we going? What do we want to accomplish here?

Lifelong Learning is the Way Out For Everybody

Mitch: Well, this goes back to the idea of pivoting. And so when anybody does the research, like you had an intention to have a body shop. But let's think about, let's unpack that a bit. So you had an intention to start a body shop but you already knew how to do bodywork. You already knew all the suppliers of all the Bondo and other materials needed for running a body shop. You already knew what type of customers your ideal client was going to be.

You already knew how to attract your ideal clients as well. So it wasn't much of a stretch, really, for you to think about starting a shop like the one that you've grown up in basically, in your adult life. The real stretch comes, and this is a stretch of both your abilities as well as the idea itself, is that once you start, once it gets started, and all of a sudden you realize you don't have enough business, the suppliers are shutting you down, rent was doubled on you and you don't know what to do.

These are the day to day problems. And that's where you need to stop again and say, wait a minute, how do I solve this problem? How do I pivot around this? You know, and I realize you can't do bodywork from your bedroom, you know? But there are many examples of people who did things that did not seem realistic when they did them and later became known to be the standard way of doing things.

And I'll give you an example that doesn't apply necessarily to blue collar work but I think it illustrates the example pretty well. Many people to this day don't realize that when they call an airline to make a reservation, that they're actually speaking to somebody who is probably in their slippers at home, maybe taking that phone call between walking the dog in their pajamas. Did you know that by the way?

Jeremy: I didn't know that for an airline. No, I did not know that. I thought I was calling a call center.

Mitch: Exactly. Call centers, basically were eradicated over the last 10 years for a very important reason. Because they were so inefficient that they just didn't work anymore. And of course, don't forget airlines were making acquisitions and acquiring other airlines. So I mean, jeez, what do you do when you acquire other airlines?

Do you have to move all their people from, you know, from Atlanta to Phoenix? No, you just changed the login and on their virtual call centers and all of a sudden, that same call center is going to work exactly as it did before without missing a beat. Well, even in a body shop, even and things like that you need to look for creative solutions.

You need to find ways to do things that solve the problem that maybe you never solved before. You know, I had a friend who had a business that was born out of brilliance. And here's the idea and this is an example of how creativity and creative thinking can make enormous changes in a person's life. So it turns out that he lived in the northeast and, you know, every year in the northeast, we have these things called winters. They kind of suck. You probably, you guys are in Phoenix. Maybe you moved from a cold winter's

Jeremy: We have summers. We don't have winters.

Mitch: Right. Okay. Well, it turns out that isn't, and now think about this for a second, there's this network of oil trucks that deliver oil, home heating oil that are basically unused half of the year. They're just sitting idle because it's summertime, and who needs a heating oil truck in the middle of the summer? Well, this guy said, Well, wait a minute.

What about if I were to fill those oil tanks with diesel fuel and drive over to the overnight lots where trucks stay, you know, to rest between, you know, multi long leg drives and offer to sell them fuel so they don't have to get off the highway and refuel? Well, over the course of five years, that business exploded and he sold it for $20 million. So think about the things that you're doing and the ways that you can solve problems that are different than others.

And try. Try it out. You know what? He didn't, after that go out and buy, you know, 100 oil trucks. He borrowed one and decided to give it a try. He wanted to see, hey, if I took this oil truck out to that parking lot, do you think anybody would want to buy fuel from me? And boy, was he right. So my advice is, do it. Do your research. Go out with as much knowledge as you can. And the other thing, which I think everybody has heard, and I can only confirm this so true, is have enough money in the bank to make it at least six months out.

Don't start a business when you're broke. I mean, unless it's a necessity, and you have to and you have this opportunity that you could see doesn't require a lot of money. An example of that is, I know a guy in school when I was a young man. He had a newspaper route, but he realized that the best way to make money delivering newspapers is if he had 20 or 30 routes. So he didn't have any money to start, but he just hired a bunch of kids with bicycles and then went to the newspaper and negotiated 30 routes. So you can start a business without money, but it makes it harder.

Jeremy: Yeah. I love the part there you had about, you know, challenge the norm, challenge the difference. You know, Ryan, and I work in the blue collar trades. I love them. I just love what they do for our economy. And I just love, that's where I grew up. But I have over half of my clients now have some form of game-changing vision. Because the world is moving, the world is growing.

And just because we've trimmed trees or done HVC this way for the last 50 years does not mean that that is how it has to go for the future. So those are the people that recognize it that become the difference makers. And they change the status quo forever. So, love it. Mitch, I can't believe that we are at this point. This has been a great, great time. I appreciated having you on the show. I look forward to sharing this and getting feedback from all of our listeners. And so thank you so much for being with us.

Mitch: My pleasure. Thank you guys.

Ryan: Hey, Mitch, if people want to learn more about what you do, I'm sure you've got, I know you have got the book. You get that new book that just came out. I'm sure you've got a podcast, a blog. I mean, there's a bunch of ways for people to engage with you online. What's the way they can get ahold of you?

Mitch: Yeah, the best way would be to go to my website, mitchrusso.com. And on mitchrusso.com they'll see the link to my podcast called Your First Thousand Clients. And also from there, they can get ahold of me. They could read, I have over 300 blog posts. over 200 interviews. So a lot of great resources for people in all different industries and businesses. So it's all free. Go there and use it.

I mean, I was, we were joking before that, you know, here guys like you and I, we spend our lives building wisdom and knowledge and then put them in a book between, you know, 30 years between two covers and sells for $10. I mean, for heaven's sakes, there's so much great content out there. Don't be lazy. Don't sit around and watch TV when you could be learning. Lifelong learning is the way out for everybody.

Ryan: I love that. Thank you, Mitch. Thank you so much for the time today. I, like Jeremy, I can't believe it's over. But really enjoyed today's lessons from you and the insight that you have for our audience. So thanks again, Mitch.

Mitch: My pleasure. Thank you guys.

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