“If you have the proper mindset, you have the proper strategy, it all comes down to, are you taking consistent action on your plans every day and really living your plan?”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

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Mike:
Hey everyone, I’m Mike Sullivan. Thanks for joining us again today at MO.com, where we feature small business owners and entrepreneurs and then bring you hints, tips, insights, and perspectives on what it takes to be successful.

Today I’m excited to have with us Jairek Robbins. He’s a professional speaker and a peak performance coach. Jairek, thanks for joining us today. You have a pretty intense background. Would you mind kind of talking about what it is that you do and a little bit about your background leading up to the founding of your own company?

Jairek:
I got started in my industry, which I don’t know if people know what it is, so I’ll explain it; but coaching, speaking, training. I get to travel all around the globe, and I get to speak at different conferences, different forums. I get invited to everything from CEO retreats to sales conferences to personal development and empowerment seminars, as well as educational forums for coaches, speakers, consultants, people just getting started in the industry. A lot of times what they ask me to talk on is what is my history?

To give you my history, I started my company just roughly two years ago. Prior to that, I had spent six years working for a family member’s company. I started working in the non-profit, and I just did everything they needed me to do, whether it was stamp an envelope or run some errands or answer the phones. I was there for about three years.

I switched over to a coaching department, where I got trained in about 250 hours of personal development coaching and training on how you actually coach people and how you make sure their getting consistent results. From there, I went into sales on the road for two years where I literally traveled 48 weeks out of the year going from city to city to city giving anywhere between four to seven presentations a day. That was roughly six days a week consistently. So I did about 1,000 presentations in two years and got to live in every major city in the U.S. from New York, Atlanta, Florida. I lived in Tampa for a while. I lived in Los Angeles, Irvine, San Diego, Boston, and that was all in a two-year period of time, three to four months at a time, which was really cool at that stage in my life.

From there, I followed my heart and went back into coaching and was there for about another year and a half before I decided to start my own company. I built it off the ground, literally just me and a little website, and I built up my business from that point forward.

Mike:
Jairek, you’ve created your own successful business. What are some of the strategies you’ve used to get to where you’re at today?

Jairek:
Some of the strategies that I’ve used to get to where I’m at today, I would say it mainly starts from just consistently having a vision of where I want to go. I sat down in the beginning and I mapped out. I literally learned it from the guy who started Panasonic. When he started Panasonic, he literally created I think it’s a 100 year vision, for the company if I remember reading it correctly. It’s amazing. Still today, 30, 40, 50, 60, however old they are, years later, they’re still on track with that 100 year vision.

I remember reading that, thinking wow. That just seemed intelligent for my business that instead of starting with my monthly vision of how I’m going to make cash now, which is how most companies start. Or what’s my year goal for the company? I said, “What would my 10, 15, 20, 30, maybe 40 year vision for my company look like, from day one, before I even start?” I mapped up this gigantic vision of what was possible and where I wanted to go. From there, I just worked backwards. I said, “What are the things that I have to do, from now until then, to make it happen?”

I held in my mind the fact that 95% of new businesses fail within the first five years. I’m about two years strong. I’ve got my fingers crossed. I’m looking good. In knowing that, I looked for, if I’m going to get started, what are all the things I have to know that happen in just about every business, and how can I learn them ahead of time, so as I approach them, it’s like I know that’s coming? How can I set myself up for success instead of just having it happen and going oh, shoot didn’t even know that was coming?

Mike:
In our previous phone conversation, you mentioned you had this rule of five. Would you mind talking about that?

Jairek:
Of course. I created this rule of five on the fly. I was actually doing an interview with a friend of mine in London, and he says, “What’s your rule on pricing? So many people are having trouble with how do you price your services, as far as coaching and consulting is concerned.” It just kind of hit me. It was right in the beginning of my business, about three months in. I said, “Well, I have a rule of five.” He’s says, “What’s that?”

I was thinking, shit I don’t even know. Excuse the language. I jumped on it. Well, the rule of five is every five clients, I raise my price incrementally. He was like, “Wow, that sounds really smart.” And I said, “I know.” I went with it and literally just started applying it in my business. My rule is, though, I have another rule that goes with it. Not just raise the price, but also anytime I charge something, my personal rule is I have to be able to deliver at least five or ten times the value of what I’m charging somebody. My rule is if I’m going to raise the price every five clients, I have to find a way to consistently raise the value five to ten times every time I incrementally raise the price.

Mike:
Have you been able to do that?

Jairek:
Completely, and that’s where my mind went to is okay, I’m constantly searching for how do I add more value to this person’s life? How do I add more value to their business? How do I add more value to what it is that they’re after and [inaudible 05:49] causes me to constantly have to grow, to constantly have to research, to constantly have to strive and pick other people’s brains. I’m in that constant perpetual motion of educating myself and learning and growing and expanding so that I always have even more to share with the people that I’m working with.

Mike:
Performance coaching is your core service. Is that correct?

Jairek:
Yes. I’ll tell you how I created that core. I looked at my business and I said, “Okay. I’m going to need something that personally no matter where the economy goes, no matter where the industry goes, no matter where the money goes or any of those different things,” I said, “personally I control how much I make.” Literally, if I want to make more money, I just have to go sell more packages. Simple as that. I said, “That’s a service that I can provide.” So I’m not counting on someone to produce something for me that I have to get shipped on time somewhere to make something happen. For me personally, I wanted something I could completely control.

When I looked at coaching, I said, “That’s something that’s solely me. I get 100% control. It’ll allow me to have a high paying job, but it won’t let me have a business.” I’ll differentiate in a second. In knowing that, I started with coaching.

I said, “I’m going to build my coaching up to six figures a year, if not more. Once I hit that point, then my next layer will be speaking.” So coaching 100% is my core business. That’s where I started from, and I built that up in about eight months to a six figure businesses. Then the next year, my plan was to layer on top of it speaking. Now I travel around the world and speaking, getting paid to go speak different places. Then just recently, I just layered another layer of income producing or income generating piece, which is products, online products that people can buy. They can still get coaching from me, but I don’t have to physically be there.

Mike:
Tell me exactly what is performance coaching and how can entrepreneurs and business owners benefit from this?

Jairek:
The biggest thing with performance coaching is the fact that most people know what to do, but they’re not consistently doing what they know. People know they have got to run their numbers every month. People know they’ve got to make so many calls per day. They’ve got to reach so many new clients. They’ve got to take so much action each day to get the result they want. There are only three things they need to focus on.

Number one, what is their mindset? Meaning, what are the things telling themselves? How are they approaching a new client? What are they saying to themselves every single day when they start the day, when they finish the day, and halfway through?

Second, what’s their strategy? Do they literally have a strategy on paper that they can follow that says, “Hey, if I make these numbers by this date, by this time, I win. If I don’t get this number by this day and this time, I’m behind and I’ve got to step up my game.” It’s just their overall game plan or their strategy and how to approach it. The best way to get one of those is to go find someone in your industry who is doing exceptionally well and model their plan to start with. Then obviously, make it your own.

Last piece, you have of mindset, strategy, and last piece is action. If you have the proper mindset, you have the proper strategy, it all comes down to, are you taking consistent action on your plans every day and really living your plan? My coaching stems around how do you get people to discover, make sure they have the proper mindset, discover where they are and really get them on track with that, help make sure they literally have a plan of action they can use every day, and get them to actually consistently, consistently is the big word, follow through with that plan of action and go get the results that they want?

Mike:
Wow. It all really boils down to those three pieces.

Jairek:
Those three pieces. I mean, you do those three pieces, you’ve got massive results coming for you. Here’s the scary part, though. You leave any one of those three out, you’re going to have a lot of trouble in your business. If you have the right mindset and you take tons of action, but you don’t have the right plan, oh boy, that’s like running east looking for a sunset. It ain’t over there. You have the right plan and you take tons of action, but you don’t have the right mindset, you’re never going to learn how to enjoy it and you’re always going to be struggling mentally and emotionally. No matter how good it gets, it’ll never be enough.

Again, if you have the right mindset, the right strategy and you take no action, you’re not going anywhere.

Mike:
What’s the difference between a coach and a mentor?

Jairek:
Good question. A lot of people confuse these, and a lot of coaches and mentors confuse this, as well. A mentor is someone who has literally walked the path or achieved the result you’re looking to achieve yourself, in the specific are you’re looking to achieve it. Someone who can say, “Hey you want to be a coach? I’m a coach. You want to make six figures? I made six figures. Let me show you exactly what I did day to day to get there.” That’s a mentor.

A coach is someone who says, “Hey I’ll help you discover what the right actions to take are. I help you discover what the right mindset is and what the right strategy is. Now that we have that, it’s my job to hold you accountable to apply it to your life and business every day.” A coach is more someone who isn’t in the game playing with you. They’re standing on the sideline saying, “Hey I’m going to watch you and I’m going to make sure I can find tune anything you’re not doing at the highest level and fine tune you to make sure that you fully apply yourself at that level.”

Mike:
Can you provide us with some examples of the impact you’ve had on some of your clients, personally or professionally?

Jairek:
Sure. It depends on where you want to go. I’ll start with professionally, because I’m sure most professionals here are looking for that. I had a client who came on and he sold his business. He had a partner-ownership of like a Brooks Brothers, a suit company down in Florida. He sold his business. He had about $100,000 in the bank. He had a family with four children and a wife. His goal, starting in a sales position, his goal was to be able to make $1,500 a month in his brand new sales position. If he could make $1,500 a month, he would be able to keep even and not go into debt or have to use his savings to pay for his house, his bills and all that stuff.

Within a six-month period of time, we came up with the right mindset to start with. We got him a really solid strategy or system of what he was going to do every day. We got him to take more action in that six months than he had ever taken before. We literally got him up to making $15,000 a week. He was making about $60,000 a month within six months. Over that period of time, with him and I working together, I think he made right around $600,000 total, in less than a year. For him, that was the biggest he’d made ever in one year of his life, so he was out of his mind. It comes down to those three pieces. You align them and you take full action and you get the results.

As far as personal is concerned, I’ve helped all kinds of people in different areas. The biggest one I would say, that has to do with emotions, yet still business, is I had a few clients call me, probably three or four all at the same time, and literally these guys had built companies. Multiple, probably three of them sold it for more than $1,000,000 each. When they called me, it was right when the economy got shaky here in the U.S.

What had happened was, they had all this money, multi-millions of dollars and over the past so many months and years, all of a sudden because of the economy, the stock market, businesses failing, all these different things, they had 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 million dollars and it turned into, like $500,000. Emotionally, they were freaking out, like, “Oh my god, I had all this money and now I’ve got almost nothing. Help!”

It was my job to help them turn it around. Figure out again, where’s their mindset? They obviously know how to make money, because they know the system. They’ve done it before. That’s the cool part. But their mindset was completely underground, because it’s like all hell broke loose. All of a sudden they freaked out. Now, we had to get their mindset on track. We had to get their strategy back in place, their old strategy that used to work. Eventually, we had to get their actions in pattern again. As soon as we did that, all of a sudden emotionally, regardless of how much money they had or didn’t have, they felt friggin’ amazing.

They were like, “Wow when I do this stuff, I feel amazing every day. I feel like I’m alive, I’m on track, things are going well.” It was very cool to watch them turn those pieces around.

Mike:
You stress the importance of mindset. What’s the key to keeping a successful mindset?

Jairek:
Patterns. Habits. The biggest thing comes down to conditioning. It’s what you do consistently, what you feed your mind. I created a product that I released recently, and part of the product has a day where I have people go out and say, “I want you to pay attention to everything you put into your mind. What you watch, what you read, what you listen to, and I want you to rate it 0 to 10, 10 being totally inspiring, exciting and something that moves me to action and forward in my life. 0 being something that slows me down, pulls me back and makes me feel like horrible. Literally track everything you put, for 24 hours, into your own mind.” It’s fascinating to see what people consistently feed their mind.

Same thing, if you wanted to lose weight or get in better shape, you track everything you put in your mouth. If you want to become healthier or more positive or more passionate or more aligned with where you’re going mentally, it would almost make sense that you watch everything that you put into your mind.

Mike:
In your opinion, can anyone be successful? That is, are there certain skills and strategies that anyone can learn and become successful, or are some of us just pre-wired that way?

Jairek:
My thought, anyone can be successful. I have family members where my grandma when she first started, her and my grandpa didn’t have enough money to afford to have their own apartment when they first got married. Literally, they bartered, where she was the cleaning lady and he was the maintenance guy at a motel, so they could have a place to live. To me, that doesn’t sound like the genetics of success. As they got started, they worked and worked and worked and hustled and hustled and hustled. My grandma ended up having five kids. When they had five kids, my grandpa took three jobs and worked his tail off just to take care of everybody and feed everybody and make sure everyone’s taken care of.

Eventually, grandma started working too, once the kids grew up a little. Literally, if you go into her office, she has every single award you can imagine, from the key to the City of Los Angeles to business woman of the year, to everything. Every plaque, every sales competition she’s won or come close to winning. She was on the cover of Newsweek Magazine, and she was life insurance story of the year a few years back, for all of the life insurance industry.

When you look at that, it all started off being a young girl who got married young to my grandpa and they were working at a motel just to have a place to live. My thoughts, if she can go from there to where she is today, granted she’s 73 or 74 years old and she still cold calls three days a week. If you can go from one side to the other, I’m pretty sure anyone can figure that one out.

Mike:
All right, thanks. Any final tips for small business owners?

Jairek:
A big thing. It’s becoming, it’s an awareness factor. It’s something that I’ve learned. Even though I “have a successful business” in my eyes, it’s really a successful high paying job. The difference between a high paying job and a business is a business can run itself whether you’re there or not. A high paying job requires you to be there in some way, shape, or form at all times for it to even run. I think most people starting out, call themselves a business when in actuality they’ve got a real nice high paying job. If you can make that transition and start to understand and comprehend, I learned that at an event I went to. It was called business mastery. When I attended that event, they distinctively mapped that out and said, “This is a high paying job. This is actually a business. Which one do you have?”

I remember sitting there, because I was so proud of myself that I was successful in my business, and it felt like I got punched in the gut. I’m like, “You guys are mean. You’re telling me I have a high paying job and I don’t even have a business.” I was so frustrated in that moment, but they started to map out literally what it takes to go from a high paying job to an actual business. I was like, ooh, I know the plan now. I can do that.

The last tip I’d have for people, is really make sure, if you want to have a successful business, to set it up that way from the beginning. To get the right strategies in place, to set up the right systems, so that eventually, regardless if you’re there running it or not, you have it in place for it to perpetually move itself forward and become a real business.

Mike:
Great, Jairek. Thanks a lot. Appreciate your time.

Jairek:
You too, man. Have a good day.