Intentionally Dreaming With Michael E. Gerber

On this episode, we take a completely different tack from tactical how to and we get deep with noted business author Michael Gerber who coined the phrase “work on your business, not in your business”. We start at the beginning of the entrepreneurial journey.

Transcript

Jesse: How’s it going, Richard?

Richard: I’m super excited today. It’s a big one for us.

Jesse: This is a big one. Yes so, super excited today. Actually in front of me, I have a book in front of me — that I read probably twenty years ago when I was in college — that I applied at a business that I was in then and I’ve applied ever since. So super pumped to hear from me the original source on this one.

Richard: Yeah. Today we have with us the guru of systems, processes for basically structuring your business for growth from a company of one to a company of one thousand. We have the Michael E. Gerber in house this morning and he is author of multiple books, the most common probably known “The e-myth revisited,” “Beyond e-myth”. He has multiple books in different verticals in which he’s co-authored with other authors as well. And he has some interesting new projects that sound very intriguing that we’re going to learn more about at the end of the show. Right now every week Jesse, we pretty much cover a lot of the technical pieces of e-commerce, but wanted Michael to really go in and help these entrepreneurs. Basically, kind of, take them all the way through why it’s OK to dream and why you should dream. It’s part of the process of becoming an entrepreneur. And then, you know, we’ll take all the way through some of the things they could do when they’re first getting started, and then maybe when they’re telling as well. But first and foremost, let’s bring in Mr. Michael E. Gerber, welcome Michael we’re glad to have you.

Michael: Thank you very much, gentlemen, I love being here.

Richard: And so, when an entrepreneur first starts thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, what do you encourage them to do? I know, I’m familiar with the dreaming room but we don’t necessarily have to go all the way into the dreaming room, but what is, how important is the dream?

Michael: Well it’s everything. It’s everything from the beginning, to the middle, to the end. It’s the reason you’re doing it. And so the reason they’re doing it is what effectively I engage them in. So why are you doing this? So what does this mean to you? So why is this important? So why is this important to the people you believe, you want to take it out to. So what are you going to give to the people you’re taking this out to? So if I don’t find something compelling in that, I know that’s a lot of work to be done. And the problem is having called on literally hundreds, upon hundreds, upon hundreds of thousands of small business owners down the street, knocking on doors. I mean the real doors, not the electronic door, the real door. The doors that people can shut in your face, that nobody wants you to walk into the real doors. The hero is back then, my guys, back then, my guys, my ladies would knock on doors to engage every single small business owner in a story. So I understand the story. So the critical element that’s missing in almost every small company I’ve ever walk into is a compelling story. Human beings live for stories, and so what’s the story. Well understand the Torah it’s a story, you understand, The New Testament, It’s a story, you understand. Apple is a story, Google — it’s a story. Every company that’s ever been started is a story, and so every individual who starts a company has to become and discover the storyteller within them to discover the real reason they’re doing this.

And the problem is for every single one of them the real reason they’re doing this is money, meaning to make a living. So every single person I’ve ever spoken to barn none, their answer would be to make some money. Not just some money to make a living, but not just some living but a really groovy living, and not just a groovy living to make a whole bunch of money, the millionaire next door. That’s why the Millionaire Next Door attracts all that greedy stupid stuff that sits inside of everybody. I want to be free, I want to be independent, I want to have to work my butt off doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. I want, I want, I want, I want. And that’s the beginning of the conversation. That’s a most compelling conversation you can ever have with anybody, because as you begin to, you truly discover what’s missing in this picture, what’s missing inside of this human being, this human being, who’s off the rail, not on the rail. And, you guys know, you’ve been in the business for a long long time, most people you meet are off the rail, not on the rail.

So my job is, first of all, to get them to see that. So what’s missing in this picture is the most important conversation, one can have, in order to get to the most important reason for being in business that one can have, like Steve Jobs, like the Google boys, etc., etc., etc., etc.

Richard: So why do you think so many people have a hard time dreaming in general. Maybe they daydream a lot but, what is it that seems does it, do you think they feel it’s daunting, or they just too quick trying to think of the money piece or?

Michael: Dreaming happens. You go to sleep you have a dream, you don’t go to sleep to dream. Dreaming happens, you don’t make it happen. So first of all nobody’s ever been taught to dream. We never were, we never were taught to dream when, we were four years old. We were never taught to dream, when we were 12 years old. We were never taught to dream, but we are 26 years old, when we went into the military, the sergeant didn’t say “Dream!”

Jesse: I think that’s seems like the last thing you hear.

Michael: The last thing you had in mind, right. And when we went to MIT nobody said “dream”, so effectively it’s because we don’t, it’s foreign to us. So it’s foreign to us, especially what I call “intentional dreaming”.

Intentional dreaming is an act of dreaming for a very specific reason and that reason goes back to what’s missing in this picture. And what’s missing in this picture for the vast majority of people on the planet is what it means to be a human being, what it means to be alive. And so that conversation is in fact the conversation behind the e-myth revisited. So when people tell me: “Michael I read your book and I reread it, and I reread it, and I reread it and so forth or read your book 20 years ago, and then I did your book one time, two times, three times, etc.” They’re really telling me that the book touched them in a way that a business book doesn’t do. Business books don’t touch us, business books make us think. My job wasn’t to make anybody think, my job was to make people feel, but to feel about how we think. So you understand the two are connected to feel heart and head, heart and mind, to feel about how we think and the absence of any true meaning in our lives. Now understand I’m not saying everybody is living a stupid life. Well I would, but that would be upsetting to everybody I’m talking to right now.

Jesse: We have to edit that out! (laughing)

Michael: I’m not saying that, I’m saying, but it’s very close to that. And so that was the motivation for everything I’ve done. So you understand, so what does it mean to lead a stupid life, and what does it mean to lead a true life that has true meaning. Well, I have to come face to face with what does that look like for me.

So in the very first section of the seven steps that I talk about in the “E-myth revisited”, we don’t start with the business we start with your life. The first step is — what’s my primary aim? My primary aim is what do I wish my life to be like, when it’s finally done. I ask the reader to write their own obituary. I mean to actually write their own obituary. They’re now gone and they’ve recorded before they left their obituary. What would you want to say and suddenly you come to the real conversation about meaning. So when you introduced me as the systems guide, the structure guy, etc. — and that’s all afterword. You understand the structure and the systems are all afterward they’re not the primary, they’re the secondary.

Richard: Yeah, because you’ve got to set them up according to the dream.

Michael: Of course the dream is the primary, the systems are the secondary that the means to, they’re not the end. And so most often, I’m misinterpreted by people who are caught in their minds as opposed to their hearts as a deep thinker. I’m not a deep thinker, I’m a deep feeler. In short, I deeply know that the meaning of my life is the whole of my life. Now you know, because you celebrated it, I just celebrated my eighty-second birthday. So, you know, when you get to be 82, you know that there’s 83, there’s 84, and my mom lived to 96. My dad died at 50, so I understand when I say this, I’m saying this with a very truly mortal experience of this. So what does this all mean? And then it’s gone. What does that mean? What was the point of all this?

So the dreamer is the creator, the dreamer is the first principle personality of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is a dreamer, a thinker, a storyteller and a leader. The dreamer has a dream, the thinker has a vision. the storyteller has a purpose, and the leader has a mission. My job is to help my client understand those and to engage with those, and discover those inside of himself or herself, even if it takes him three years to do it. And understand it’s going to piss away that time anyway. Even if it took him three years, five years to do it, wouldn’t make any difference. To suddenly come face to face with the reason you’re here. I mean the reason you’re here.

Richard: Big difference.

Michael: I mean, think about it. And suddenly then we’re working on a business to grow from a company of one to a company of 1000 that has a reason for being here, not just making a living. Do you understand, any dummy can make a living?

Now there are a lot of dummies not making a living and of course I’m interested in those dummies who are not making a living, but understand, it’s not because they’re not making a living. It’s because there is no reason for them being. So we’ve got to find the reason. And that’s the job. That’s your job. That’s my job. That’s your job, Rich. It’s our job. Our job is to find the reason and then dig down deeper, don’t just accept a quickie answer to the: “So what are you here for what are you here?..” Well I’m here to make, I’ve heard so many stupid answers. I’m simply saying it’s not that, we’re looking for the real one. And you’ll know the real one the minute they say it. Just as they will, because it won’t be just something. You follow me?

Jesse: Oh, definitely.

Richard: Well I mean in addition to that some of the things that can kind of be assumed, although, I don’t like to do that too often. But I imagine reading between the lines and knowing a little bit more about you is, it’s going to take work no matter what, right. This is, no one just comes out and hands out a million dollars. Not that I’ve found yet. But it’s going to take work and so having that reason, having that why, having that fuel inside, that inspiration, when you have an inspiration of a dream, energy comes from places you’ve never even really knew you had.

Michael: That’s important. It comes from places you never even were aware of. And that’s energy. So the energy is the source of passion, and passion is the source of imagination, and imagination is the source of vision. So effectively if Steve Jobs weren’t consumed with passion, the passion of the creator, the creator has a passion unlike any passion of any human being on the planet. The creator were born in the image of God, it said, which means were born to create. So you suddenly see there’s a reason for us being here, we’re born to create, we’re born to create what? We’re born to create a world fit for God. So I’m speaking to people who may not even believe in God. Say, I don’t know how anybody could not believe in God. When did you stop believing in God, there’s no other reason, there’s no reason at all.

You understand? No, none, zero. It’s a great story. It’s the great story that people have told from the very beginning from Adam and Eve. So effectively we have to know what that story is, and we have to suddenly come face to face with our role in that story. Something magical happens. It’s just it literally is you both know that, because you both and each done that.

Something magical happens to you. It doesn’t, you don’t make it. It makes you. So it’s not like “I’ve written that book” — it wrote that book. The reality is it does that and it is the creator within. And it’s as separate from Michael sitting here speaking to you right now as anything we could imagine. So it’s not me doing that. It’s IT doing that. My job is to get plugged into it, and in order to get plugged into it, I have to open myself to it to. To open myself to it I’ve got to shut down all the other “yes but, yes but”, and so forth, and so forth. This might sound terribly, terribly. Whatever, but it is. But it’s the truth and every single client I’ve had over 100,000 small business clients in the past 40 years, every single one of those 100,000 plus small business owners who came to us, because they read the story and they said: “I got to do this.” Every single one of them had a belief about something that was inhibiting them from creating. We had to get rid of that belief. We had to get rid of all the stuff that they brought with them to the conversation. So I invented what I call a “blank piece of paper and beginner’s mind.” So the way you approach this is literally a blank piece of paper and a beginner’s mind. It’s how you’ve approached everything you’ve ever created. I don’t start whipping out something and drawing as a schema, I don’t do that. It never happens to me like that. I start writing words. I don’t write them, IT does. You may know, and I’m sure you receive my monologues. Have you received my monologues either of you?

Richard: I have.

Jesse: Yes.

Michael: Yeah. So the monologues, there are now 200 of them and I send one out every week, and there what you might say are what they are entrepreneurial poems, and so I wrote a poem once a week. Now when I say: “I write a poem once a week,” I don’t really write a poem once a week, IT writes a poem once a week, because I sit down without a thought in my head and just start writing, literally without a thought in my head. There’s not a plan has ever been put to work on a monologue. Like today, I think I’ll write about. Never. I disallow it. I’m as interested in what’s going to come as my reader might be.

So we have about ten thousand people subscribers to our monologues. But what you’ll discover if you truly pay attention to the monologues, you’ll discover how creation occurs. That’s a fascinating thing. It’s a fascinating thing. So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 40 years.

Richard: I love it. I could imagine — knowing a little more about you than we’re going to have time to cover this you know 45 minutes an hour. You know I know you could talk about this for the next five years. Just this one piece, because it’s so critical to it. And I would say before we get into anything else, just to maybe bring in, even though you probably hate I’m saying this, to bring in the dream a little bit to where someone can comprehend that, it’s OK to say something, as big as you want to say it like you want to end world hunger. You want to like, you know what I mean, like some people think: “Oh, the dreams got to be, I’m going to make, I’m going to sell this widget and I’ll do pay enough to pay the family house and…” It’s like, that’s not a dream.

Michael: No, those are objectives.

Richard: Yeah, that’s not a dream. So what’s something just in a 2-3 minutes that you would say: “Start with a beginner’s mind, let the dreams start to come out.” At what point knowing that you’ve done this feeling-thinking thing for a while. At what point do you think someone could, they’ll feel something where they might be onto something, they’re starting to touch that real dream is. We know they’ve got to keep doing it, it could take three years and I’m not trying to wrap it all up in a bow here.

Michael: Sure you are.

Richard: Everyone wants a hack, a three year and five minutes just saying, like, how would they know they’re starting to go down the path of actual real..?

Michael: How do you know when you’re when you fall in love?

Richard: Yeah you’re being like my dad when I said “How am I going to know when I’ve tuned a guitar? ‘You’ll know when you go, when you’ve tuned the guitar.’ You tell them, I just never understood that same darn thing.

Michael: Same darn thing. Our dream in 1977, when I started the Michael Thomas corporation — I was Michael, he was Thomas. It was, it came to be the very first business coaching company on the planet. We invented business coaching.

Now that’s an extraordinary thing to say and people say: ‘Oh come on. You couldn’t have invented business coaching. It’s like a one point three billion dollar reality today.’ We invented small business coaching. And, when we decided to do that it was because I’d been working with small business owners by accident. My brother in law owned an ad agency and he had a problem with one of his clients, and he asked if I would go talk to his client about a problem he had — converting leads into sales.

And I told my brother-in-law: ‘I don’t know anything about business. And I don’t know anything about technology’. Because it was just the beginning of the Silicon Valley. And he said: ‘Sure you do, Michael, you know more than you think you do, just come meet with him, please.’ I said: ‘Okay, well, why not.’ No harm done. So I went to meet with Bob, and Bob asked me what I knew about his business and I said: ‘Nothing, Bob.’ And Bob says: ‘Well what do you know about our product?’ And I said: ‘Less than that, Bob. So I don’t know anything about your business, I know nothing about your product.’ He said: ‘How can you help me?’ I said: ‘I haven’t a clue, Bob, Ace thinks I can. We’ve got an hour to kill when Ace comes back. So let’s talk.’ So it began with the assumption that I didn’t know anything about business and Bob did. Bob did because he owned one. So in my mind, at that time if a guy who owns a business he knows about this, otherwise why would he own one, you understand? So I just started asking Bob questions and I discovered every time I asked him a question he gave me back an anecdotal answer. In short, he really didn’t have real answers, just anecdotes. Sort of about kind of like, like that. We got to the point where I asked him about his sales. And he tells me about his sales engineers and what’s a sales engineer, I’m a complete novice. You understand I was 38 years old, I was a complete novice, complete novice in that regard. Where have you been all your life. I’ve been doing, and doing, and doing, and doing what? I learned how to play the saxophone and I learned how to build a house. I mean, just stuff, I learned to do stuff. I was a technician. We come finally to him describing what a sales engineer is. And I said: ‘Why do you needed engineer to sell this?’ He said: ‘Well, they have to understand the problem that the customer has.’ And I said: ‘Well do you understand the problem the customer has?’ He said: ‘Maybe, that’s why we created the product.’ I said: ‘So the product was created because you understood what the problem was that your customer likely had. So effectively, that’s really your positioning statement isn’t it. You’re really the solution to the problem your customers got. So you’re, you don’t need an engineer to figure that out. Obviously, all you need is somebody who is scripted in a sufficiently intelligent way that they get why you’re there and why they need you.

Because that’s all that has to happen at the front. That’s how you convert the lead into the first benchmark, and what we’re calling a sale.’ So the question becomes what’s the first benchmark? And he’s already lost. He said: ‘Wait a second.’ I said: ‘No, let me explain. The problem is you don’t have a selling system because you don’t understand the story. And the story is the ball game.’ He said: ‘Well, do you know how to write that story?’ I said: ‘Sure.’ He said: ‘Will you write it for me? I said: ‘Sure.’ He said Ace would figure out what to pay me, Ace pick me up, I’ll talk to him about it, and then he’ll come back to you. I’ll see you shortly, Bob.’ And that was the end of the conversation.

Ace picks me up he said: ‘What happened?’ I said: ‘He just hired me.’ ‘He just hired you? How?’ I said: ‘Well, I told him to fix his problem.’ He said: ‘But you told me you couldn’t fix his problem because you don’t know anything about business, you don’t know anything about his private guys.’ ‘Well that’s still true. I don’t, but that’s very easy to learn. It’s not the knowing about the product that’s critical. I learned that in about five seconds, asking him a question. What’s missing is how we say that to the consumer, and all he got to do is write that.

So that was the beginning of the second one, the third one, the fourth one, the fifth one, the six one. And I’m suddenly discovering the e-myth right there in front of me. And that is that Bob wasn’t an entrepreneur, Mary wasn’t an entrepreneur, Jimmy wasn’t an entrepreneur, Jerry wasn’t an entrepreneur. There were technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. They started a business to make a living, to sell a product without any understanding of what an entrepreneur really does and goes through in order to create a great growing company. My job I saw, was to teach them. So I’m suddenly in the business of teaching small business owners, whose business I don’t know anything about and don’t even care to, how to grow a great growing company. And that’s I’m doing that, as I’m doing that, as I’m doing that. Suddenly Tom is introduced to me by Ace, because I said I wanted to leave him to start my own company doing this. Tom came in, Tom spent a week with me and he said ‘What do you do, what do you do, what do you do, what do you do?’ And as he’s watching me do that what he said: ‘Where are you going?’ I said: ‘I’m going to start a business.’ He said: ‘I want to go with you.’ So Ace unfortunate lost both of us.

Richard: I’m sorry, Ace, I apologize.

And we started a business do just that, and that was the beginning of Tom’s and my conversation about a dream, a vision, a purpose, and a mission. We didn’t start doing what I knew how to do. We started by asking what is the endgame here. And we discovered our dream. My dream then, my dream still is to transform the state of small business worldwide. Anybody listening to me right now can immediately write that down and say ‘OK, to transform the state of _________ worldwide. That’s the business I’m in.’ You follow me. That’s how easy it is to have a dream. But understand, I was really serious about it. You understand, this was a life’s work. This was my calling. This came to me at the age of 38. I didn’t go out setting out to do what I didn’t go out to. Do you ou follow me? To become an entrepreneur — that wasn’t even in my mind. I was just doing some talking to Bob. It just showed up. That’s what happens when I say it comes to you, and it comes to you. If you’re awake, you understand, I was awake in that conversation with Bob, my entire being was in that conversation with Bob.

Jesse: And you obviously ended it with a beginner’s mind too. It was built in.

Michael: I didn’t know anything about this.That’s how I started everything. I don’t know anything about this. ‘So what?’ — he says that’s a blessing. Better you don’t know anything about this than you do, because if you do that immediately shapes the beginning of your enterprise, and it shapes it in a way that will never turn in much you’re lucky you understand? It wasn’t luck that I showed up at Bob’s. It was something completely different that I could call a destiny. It’s been my life’s work. I could call it destiny. We’ve sold millions, upon millions, upon millions of these e-myth books. I call it destiny because it uncovered something inside of me. I didn’t know what’s there. You follow me, and there was no interest in it whatsoever until it woke me up and said: ‘Hello Michael, guess what, guess what we’re going to do. So my dream, my vision was to invent a McDonalds of small business consulting. My purpose was to make it possible for every small business owner who is called to our story, to our message, to be as successful as a McDonald’s franchisee or even Ray Kroc. And our mission was to invent the business development system that I could apply in every single small company on the planet, no matter what it does, what it sells, how it sells it. The business development system I could deliver through the hands of a minimum wage kid, just like McDonald’s. A minimum wage kid, just like McDonald’s. That was my small business coach, a minimum wage kid who didn’t know anything about business whatsoever could take our system, ‘The Michael Thomas Business Development Program’ and delivered to every small business owner on the planet, that was the idea. That’s what we set out to do. A dream, a vision, a purpose, a mission. That’s what every single person I’m talking to right now, suddenly, when they ask what’s missing in this picture they come face to face — everything.

Richard: One of the things that are, I mean, I could talk to you for days on that, it’s like to try to get on to one other two other quick things. But thank you so much, that obviously, we’re going to give people a chance to get to know you more and where they should go to learn more about what you are doing these days. So we’ll definitely be covering that before it’s over. One of the things I keep hearing you mention all the time is, you know, as Jesse pointed out — work on your business, not in your business. And one of the ingredients in that based on your books, that I’ve read and communicating with you as well, it comes to your other phrase of: ‘How to go from a company of one to a company of 1000.’ And so, let’s just break it down to something, it’s not that simple but let’s try. Your first hire, your first hire, your company of the one you go into a company of two. In most cases, and I know it’s a little different with e-commerce, but not necessarily. From what you’ve learned over decades. Is there a universal first hire, is it totally unique to that business, is it some hybrid of the above what’s your experience for usually hire number one?

Michael: Both are true. It’s universal. It starts with this story. So in our case, we told a story, and we told it we told the story at our case at the Michael Thomas corporation when we did our first hire, and our first hire is to explain who we are and what we do. And so that explanation I gave, and it was scripted, and I memorized it. Now you understand I didn’t really have to memorize it because I invented it, I created it, and I told it every single day, because I told that every single day when I was calling on a small business owner ‘I am Michael Gerber you don’t know me, but I’m the founder of the Michael Thomas corporation, and we’re about to change your life. Now bear with me. It’s only going to take about two minutes, but in two minutes I promise you, I will change your life completely. All I’m going to do is to ask you to take out your calendar and let’s find a date free for you to come to the most important business development seminar you have ever been to. It’s called ‘Key frustrations in a small and growing business, and what to do about them.’ It’s three hours long. I’m delivering it. If you’re not right, you’ll leave in the first 10 minutes. If you are right and 99 percent of the people who come to that seminar are spellbound by the time, it’s done. You’ll see why this call was the most important call of your life and your business, so let’s see your calendar.’

Richard: That’s beautiful. I see how it ties in with the dream too because if you have the dream and the wise bigger than you, and now it’s easier for your employees to buy into the big dream, the employees or hires because, it seems so obvious in hindsight looking back, but if it’s because….

Michael: Google started an ice cream shop above an ice cream shop in Palo Alto their first office was a little one room above an ice cream shop in Palo Alto. Google started in an ice cream shop. Google — you understand one of the wealthiest companies in the world, if not the wealthiest company in the world started a couple of guys above an ice cream shop. But what started it was a dream, and that was it was going to provide the most important information about everything to everybody.

Jesse: The funniest part about you bringing this up is I remember the day that — do you remember the day Google actually went live? I remember seeing it. I remember seeing it might not be the exact day but it was the antithesis of every other search engine every other search engine had all these things everywhere all over it was just clouded and so confusing. And this when you went to it, and it was a just blank page like a beginner’s mind back to your what’s your dream you know typing what you want here in this little box. And we’ll give you the most relevant stuff back, and everyone just made fun of that. I mean they made so much fun. Look at this ugly thing, but that ‘Why?’ was so big and they stayed so true to it.

Michael: You got it. You got it. The story is everything. So understand when I say this the story is everything. It’s not just a piece of it. It’s not a piece of the business development puzzle. It’s the heart of it.

Richard: And the continuation of that story.

Michael: It drives everything.

Richard: Yeah. So now I understand, back to the question your first hire when you say it’s both his first hire has to be someone that can continue to tell the story slightly different in a business way.

Michael: We’ve got a receptionist for our first hire. And we ran an ad in the newspaper, and we did a hire, invited them to a hiring seminar, and that first seminar for a receptionist had about 42 women and a couple of men in it. All in the seminar. So now we’re telling a story to 42 people, we’re not telling his story across a desk from an applicant looking at a resume. I didn’t give a shit about a resume. All I cared about was our resume. She’s not here to tell me about her. She’s here to hear about me. So who are you, what do you do, why is it important and why should you be spending the next 30 minutes of my life to listen to it. You follow me? That was how we found our first receptionist. She was one of the 42. So then Tom and I interviewed each of the 42. At the end of the 30 minutes, we would say ‘Now, if that sounds like something you’re absolutely hungry for, say yes. If not we want to thank you for coming in. Take care. You’ve heard our story. I’m sure you’ll hear it again because we’re going to be everywhere.’ And so many of them raised their hands, and everybody else sort of wandered off, wandered off. And of the people who raised that now we’ve been doing this for 40 years.

Richard: I think I think Paizo stole something from you. Do you know that he actually I don’t know the exact number, but it’s somewhere between three and five thousand dollars? They’ll pay you to not work for him if you get far enough down the process they’ll literally pay you do not work for them because they know you don’t believe in this story if you’re taking that money.

Michael: Yeah yeah. And of course, so you understand my point. My point is the story is everything. That’s sort of everything, and this is not market speak. You understand this is not sales speak. This is consciousness speak. That’s how deeply invested in the Michael Thomas Business Development Program we were is deeply invested, we were in the company the Michael Thomas corporation. This is how deeply invested in transforming the state of small business worldwide, do you understand, the economic reality of the world depends upon small business. And small businesses suffer, suffer, suffers from that. One the year 2010, there were 497,000 companies started and or of 593,000 that went out of business in that same year. You take that number, and you follow that number, and you’re going to see it’s the same, it’s the same, it’s the same more businesses fail than are started. And 99 percent of the businesses that have started fail. So why? I’m saying they don’t have a story. you follow me? They don’t have a story.

Richard: So this is actually bringing me to a few things. One of which is we’re definitely going to have to have Michael back on. Not that it’s over yet, but we’re definitely going to have to have him back on because one of the things as a storyteller myself that I feel compelled to help these business owners with is (you’ve heard me mention when we talked online you know I’m holding up a cell phone right now) and the opportunity is also the obstacle. There are all these other storytellers that are trying to jump in on Facebook, on Instagram, all these different places.

Michael: But they’re terrible stories.

Richard: Of course. Yeah no most of them are. No, I completely agree. That’s why I said we’ll eventually go back. But here’s one question I have for you when it comes to that.

Michael: Let me finish that point.

Richard: OK.

Michael: There’ve terrible stories because they’re made to sell. They’re not made out of meaning they don’t believe them do, you understand? They don’t believe them. Steve Jobs believed that, he told his story in the first Super Bowl that Apple ran their first commercial when you remember that? I mean David and Goliath. I mean IBM and Apple. Tiny, tiny, tiny little Apple. Everybody loved that story. What a powerful — it lived at the heart of Apple forever. And I’m going to say until Steve Jobs left.

Richard: I have to agree even though I am a huge Apple fanboy. Everything changed that I’ve experienced since then. But that’s a whole nother story. So here’s a question. The business they’ve worked on their dream they have their Why they know their stories, so they know when these obstacles hit they don’t even seem sometimes like obstacles to those people they’re temporary bumps in the road to some degree, because they’re there, let’s just say binders aren’t the right word but the blinkers for the horse or whatever. You know because they’re super focused. And so now they’ve started they’ve got their first hire, their first hire is someone that’s going to be telling the story, good, and I’m assuming every hire they’re after should be there telling the story.

Michael: The can tell a story, but more importantly, they’re being the story.

Richard: Perfect. So then it’s perfect. So and now all of a sudden maybe this business finds itself plateauing at one point because like you said your businesses evolve over time and it kind of it creates itself along with you, sounds like it’s a bit of a co-creation going on. When you’re plat toeing in a business, What’s what’s a way to think or feel about it in that. Do I just need to stay the course and push through this and tell the story more or does it can it be that proverbial ‘What I did to get me here isn’t going to get me there.’ What do you feel about a plateau?

Michael: First of all you’re speaking about a hypothetical that doesn’t exist. That is we’re assuring them that the company we’re talking about that’s reached a plateau has a story. They’ve done that work. They found their dream but you left out that they found their vision and you left out that they’ve found their purpose, and you left out that they found their mission and you left out that they then went to work on the job which is the client fulfillment system to organize their client fulfillment system to deliver a profound positive impact that is literally alive with the dream, the vision, the purpose, and the mission.

Richard: You gave me an easy answer, so if you find yourself plateauing go back to the beginning.

Michael: First of all, you always go back to the beginning. That first always goes back to the beginning and what you’ll discover is we have a system, and we’re not using it, or we don’t have a system, and we’re making it up as we go or, or. And a whole subset of other possibilities. But you understand there’s a process for all this. So the thing that we have learned over all these years these 40 plus years now is that there’s a process and the process is a religion. I mean you believe in the process we call it the ‘eightfold path.’.

Jesse: Speaking of let’s just let you have the rest of this time, let’s start with New Beginnings we’re coming up. We’ve got about eight-nine minutes here. I want to hear what you’re beginning what your new dream that you’ve been creating with your wife and what it is you’re about with this radical you. Can cause that has to do with this Eightfold Path, and I would love in whatever way you want to spend this last bit of time whether you want to go through the Eightfold Path first and then invite someone to learn more about where they can go to learn more about radikal you, however, you want to do it. The mike is yours. We both look up to you greatly.

Michael: Wonderful, thank you. We came to the realization that my 80th birthday. Dahlia always celebrates my birthdays and the most outrageous ways. I think we have about 70,000 people on the 80th birthday and that was online. We had about 220 of them live. And Dahlia` fooled me into speaking, she told me it was a speaking gig and it was a gig, I knew the business and I knew the place.

So I went there and got up to speak, and I did my 45-minute speech, and then they all rose and standing ovation well. I knew everybody in the audience.

Richard: Something fishy, something strange here.

Michael: But at that birthday we made the commitment that we have so much time and what we have created while it’s spectacular and while it truly transforms the lives of literally millions of small business owners throughout the world. Now in 145 countries, we haven’t really done it. We’ve done it for individuals, but we haven’t done it for the world of small business which is what I set out to do in nineteen seventy-seven. So we raised the question of how are we going to do that. Well, now what we have to do is do it online. And now we have to do it in such a way that everybody can afford it, and now we have to do it in a way that everybody can do it. So we set down to create a school, and we call it a ‘Trade school for new entrepreneurs.’

Now understand when I say new entrepreneurs I mean every person who’s inclined to start a small business or already has started a small business. Inclined to start a small business — for whatever reason they have thought to create a small business or has already started a small business and is finding themselves stuck as you were describing earlier.

How to engage those people in the process? Well, we created the Eightfold Path to do that, and we called it ‘From a company of one to a company of 1000. The evolution of an enterprise.’ Because in fact, every single job on the planet is an enterprise in the making. If I was a painter painting the house that job is an enterprise waiting to happen. If I was a dog walker meaning, I’m making a living walking somebody dogs, and there are lots of people doing that, and you wouldn’t believe it, it’s a billion dollar business today. Think about that. A billion dollar business today walking dogs. So what we had to do is to make a list of every job on the planet. And then invite every single human being on the planet to transform their lives by awakening the New Entrepreneur within them to transform the lives of everybody else. And to do that by creating a company of one and growing it to a company of 1000 and that is built upon what I’ve just spoken about the Eightfold Path. And it starts online, and it’s very straightforward:

1. I have a dream
2. I have a vision
3. I have a purpose
4. I have a mission
5. I have a job
6. I have a practice
7. I have a business
8. I have an enterprise.

And the process online of doing that. So radically you is a series of sessions. One each week 52 sessions a year. All video sessions delivered by a radical teacher. And that radical teacher is that kid that I was talking about. A spectacular kid spectacular person who truly is invested in our story and then the story of the lives of every student who’s called to us and she learns and delivers our script. To understand our script, it’s the script for discovering your dream. Step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 6, 7, 8 for discovering your vision. Step 1, step 2 through 8 discovering your purpose your dream, the great result you intend to produce. So if I were to say to you, what does the great result you intend to produce through the company you’ve got. You would have to go inside and find that and where would you find that you’d find in two places one inside you, what you’re called to do and outside you when you’re thinking of your most important customer. And when you think about your most important customer, you have to understand what is keeping that person from being who they truly are called to be. What’s missing in this picture.

So Radical You, it’s a stunning reality that was launched on March 4th, my wife’s birthday, 2018. And we have not begun to enroll people in it. We only have 100 faithful students today, but by the time we’re done, five years from today, there will be 5 million students learning how to grow, to grow, to grow, be under their comfort zone. Here I will be under their comfort zone be on what makes them feel good about themselves to the point where there’s someone they’ve never met before. And the beauty of it all is everybody can afford it. The Dreaming room tuition for a year. Our entrepreneurial development school is only $479 and 40 cents for whole year of tuition.

Richard: I love it! We’re closing up on time here, and the place that I have here from your lovely wife that’s for people to go to learn more is Radical You. That’s just u/invite, and there’s I’m not 100 percent mistaken. There’s there’s a process that you’ll go through I’m sure to some degree, all of which they’ll get to learn more about you. But thank you so much for all your time and your wisdom and even the way you explain at the end, there’s nobility in every job, and you can grow into something great.

Jesse: Awesome. Thank you, thank you for Michael Gerber for being with us. Really appreciate it.

Michael: Thanks Jesse, thanks, Rich.