Beyond 8 Figures

Jonny Cooper is a British entrepreneur, piano player, international racing driver, and business coach. He’s the founder of JonnyHatesMarketing.com, where he helps coaches, trainers, and therapists find more of their ideal clients more efficiently.

What businesses does Jonny run, their current revenue, and what were some of his previous exits? (1:27)

• Jonny exited a business about ten years ago. They had just cleared £10 Million in the last year and walked away with about £1 Million. 
• Jonny’s current business is in the growth stage, and he is enjoying it. He is working on the company because he wants to instead of because he needs to. 
• The business has just hit the mid-six-figure revenue mark and is working its way up to a 7 figure mark. 
• The exit ten years ago was Jonny’s most significant sale outcome. 
• When a business moves into the 7th Figure net profit, it puts your business into a whole different multiple in its value. 
• His former business was within the financial service sector. They were advising people on pension strategies and investments.

What was the original idea for Jonny’s business, and where did he find the opportunity? (4:08)

• At the time, Jonny was working as an insurance salesman.
• He was a bit bored working for the man in an insurance company, and he thought he could better himself. 
• The UK has a concept called an independent financial advisor, which is a broker in the U.S.
• Jonny saw an opportunity and started his own business with another guy from the original insurance company.
• Putting heads together was an excellent way to start a business because the more perspectives are involved, the more ideas can come into the business. 
• Jonny considers their superpower at that time to have been their combined understanding of the market and how to create leads to their business. 
• These days most insurance salespeople are bumping around on the bottom, finding it very difficult to find clients. 
• Jonny felt like he and his partner cracked the code at the time, and when they did not, there was a completely separate division to their business that was solely devoted to marketing. 
• They got so good at what they were doing that they started marketing for some of their competitors as well. 
• So the catalyst for growing the business was that they could create leads and thereby attract salespeople to go and work for them.

What were some problems that Jonny ran in to and how did he overcome them? (14:33)

• Jonny says they were hopeless when it came to human resources. 
• They had no idea how to manage a workforce of people, and they were continually bewildered at some of the things that would happen. 
• So they had to build an HR department from scratch. 
• That obstacle felt like a complete blackhole to both of them. They never went into the office and left HR to do what they did. 
• It turned into a complete blackout. They winged it to about 20 employees and at least during that time managed to get to the £1 Million turnover. 
• The thing about putting someone else in charge made them realize that they weren’t good at it, and they didn’t want to do it either. 
• This is something that Jonny sees within business owners because they force themselves to do things that they aren’t very good at just because they feel like they have to. 
• One of Jonny’s core teachings is that you should only ever do what you love to do, and if you’re not enjoying it, get someone else who does want to do it. 

Jonny Hates Marketing

Jonny Hates Marketing is a coaching platform on which professional coaches, therapists, trainers, or consultants can find information, tips, and genuine advice on how to build, manage, and scale their businesses.

Resources

Connect with Jonny: LinkedIn

Jonny Hates Marketing: Website

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Christopher served as a chief marketing officer of software juggernaut Mercury Interactive which was acquired but Hewlett-Packard in 2006 for $4.5 Billion. He has co-founded marketing consulting firm Lochhead, was the founding CMO of Internet Consulting firm Scient and served as head of marketing at Vantive, a CRM software firm. 

How did Christopher get involved with Mercury Interactive? (2:12) 

• Chris joined the company when it was approximately $350 Million in zie. 
• So it was already a 6 figure company. The interesting thing is that they took it to $1 Billion.
• They repositioned the company around a whole new category and they set a whole new agenda for their space.
• They crushed a bunch of their competitors by doing that and that increased their market cap materially. 
• Eventually, Hewlett Packard gave them an offer that they couldn’t refuse.
• Chris started as an outside advisor for the company for a little over a year.
• Chris considers that his ‘dating’ phase with the company. 
• After that and he ended up coming on board in the actual company, Chris considered that the ‘marriage’ stage. 
• He built a great relationship with Amon Land and the CEO and the rest of the executive team.
• There are certain times in your life where you meet a group of people and you just know. Chris felt very comfortable within the culture of the company and so quickly fit in and helped propel the business upward.
• He felt like he just fit in instantly. 

How did Christopher approach things when the big influx of cash came in from exiting Mercury Interactive? (7:05)

• Chris decided to retire. 
• He started his first business at 18 after being thrown out of school for being stupid.
• He found out at age 21 that he was dyslexic and suddenly his education experience finally made sense to him.
• He started his first when he was 18 but he started many companies at the start of his career. 
• He was living in Canada and his second company turned out to be a wonderful exit. 
• With that exit, he moved to Silicon Valley. He sold his boutique consultancy at the time to a Silicon Valley tech company that was already public and became their head of marketing.
• At 28 years old, he was living in Silicon Valley and he was on the entrepreneurial path. 
• By the time the mercury exit happened, Christopher had been working non-stop from 18 to 38. 
• The end of Mercury was super challenging and Chris go to that point in his life where he thought he might as well hit the reset button. 
• He went through a divorce, moved to Tahoe. He had purchased a vacation home in Tahoe several years prior.
• He did what some people do, but backward, he did not have time in his 20’s to go and backpack Europe.
• He always had this dream of being a ski-bum and so he moved to his ski-house in Tahoe and is now what he considers a Ski-Bum. 

What was something that Christopher had to ‘break’ to grow the company to where it was for the exit? (20:15)

• The company’s economic buyer for the company at the time was a sort of community audience. 
• An extremely well-known company, with its software quality managers, or leaders within large organizations, people were depending on the size and already existing success of the company to keep growing it. 
• However, Chris says even though they had a good economic buyer involved who was spending $40-70,000 with the company in order for them to execute the vision of a new category. 
• The category being Business Technology Optimization. They had to go from selling that at a marketing level.
• Building products from that level to selling to the C-suite, somebody with a board seat who typically reports to the CEO with the gigantic budget. 
• Christopher was not well known to that person and they did not know much about them either. This person knew them as a Niché player. 
• They had to figure out a way to have the moxie to walk into that person’s office and say they have a strategy on how she should run the business going forward. 
• They also offered her the technology to do it and so Chris ended up breaking 2 or 4  levels of the organization to be able to have conversations like those. 

Mercury Interactive

Mercury Interactive is a former Israeli company that has been acquired by the HP Software Division. Mercury offered software for application management, application delivery, change and configuration management, service-oriented architecture, change request, quality assurance, and IT governance.

Resources

Connect with Christopher: LinkedIn

Mercury Interactive: LinkedIn

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Reid Tracy is the president and CEO of Hay House, Inc. Reid has played a crucial role in the strategic development of authors such as Dr Wayne Dyer, Dr Christiane Northrup, Jerry, and Esther Hicks, and Anthony William’s The Medical Medium”. Reid is also directly responsible for establishing Hay House’s offices in New York, London, Sydney, and New Delhi.

Reid is also the president of the Hay Foundation which is a non-profit foundation founded by Louise Hay dedicated to the empowerment of women, children, and animals.

What were some of the jumping-off points for Reid that led to his initial success? (3:10)

• Louise Hay founded hay House when she was only 16 years old.
• Reid started working at Hay House in 1988 as a CPA and a financial director for the company. 
• In 1988 they have three books and five tapes and about $1 Million in revenue. This grew steadily by the year until they hit $100 Million in 2008.
• Louise wrote her first book in 1976, it was called Heal Your Body. She printed about 5,000 copies of the book and sent them out to Religious Science and Unity churches.
•  Within a year she sold the first 5,000 for a very small amount of money. 
• Over the next few years, she became more and more well known before writing her next book in 1984 titled ‘You Can Heal Your Life’ which turned into the backbone for Hay House and her work. 
• In 1987, Louise started Hay House so that she could publish some of her friends’ books. 
• If Louise hadn’t wanted to publish her friends’ books too, she would have never started a publishing house. 
• More and more people came to Louise to have their books published and over the next few years she happened to also go on Oprah and Donahue’s tv shows and in March 1988 She was on both of those shows in the same week. 
• Those interviews took the company from zero to a million very quickly. 

How did Reid end up transitioning into the Leadership role? (5:48)

• The company was growing quickly at that point and like a lot of companies starting out, everyone thought the initial success was very easy.
• Everyone figured that it would just continue the way it has been. Then they started adding more employees and moved their office down to the beach in Santa Monica.
• They started to release other people’s books and these books did not have the same success that Louise’s did. 
• As Financial Director, Reid was telling the president and other employees that they should control their costs better and no one really wanted to hear this from a 25-year-old kid. 
• One morning he had to tell the president of the company that Reid was not sure how he would make payroll and the president ended up telling Louise who then told a friend of hers at Max Factor.
• The guy helped start Max Factor and so he called a meeting with their 42 employees and 30 vice presidents. The man asked each employee what they could do to get the business out of its crisis. 
• Reid replied and said they should fire all of the people, including himnself.
• The Max Factor man agreed and they fired everybody in the room. Louise asked Reid if he would run the company for them. 
• Reid initially said no because he did not know enough about book publishing but he would run it with another guy named Jim who did know about book publishing. 
• So Jim and Reid ran Hay House together for a year or two and then Jim left and Reid was left to run it himself as he has done so alongside Louise for the last 26 years before she passed in 2019.

How much of Reid’s success came down to his willingness to learn and timing? (19:13)

• The biggest thing that helped them when they started Hay House was that there wasn’t a self-help section in bookstores yet. 
• In Louise’s books, you can hear her life went into either a call or an alternative message. She did not like the usual kind of categories you would find in a bookstore.
• Then a bookstore came into existence called BHorder’s Books, the standard bookstore before Border’s had about 10,000 books in it.
• Border’s then came and made stores with over 100,000 books in them. Border’s would take every single book that Hay House published into their shops. 
• Whereas other bookstores would make take three or four of their books into their stores.
• The expansion of Border’s superstores at that time had a huge impact on Hay House and many other publishers. 
• Border’s started noticing that the self-help books were selling the best in the non-fiction section of the bookstore. 
• They decided to create a huge self-improvement section that housed a lot of Hay House’s books. 
• They also started a section called New Age books which Hay house again had the most books in and ended up selling a large amount of. 
• Those two sections became huge selling points for Border’s and so that really helped Hay House start to become recognized.
• Barnes and Nobles Books then appear and along with it the exponential growth Hay House was riding on from Border’s only expanded more. 
• Eventually, somewhere in 2009, Border’s went bankrupt and that was the first year that hay House’s sales went down. 
• Hay House had to rebuild from that again but that is where the initial success came from. 

Hay House

Hay House is a publisher founded in 1984 by author Louise Hay, who is known for her books on New Thought. Hay House has its headquarters in Carlsbad, California, and is run by Reid Tracy. Hay House describes itself as a "mind-body-spirit and transformational enterprise".

Resources

Connect with Reid: FaceBook

Hay House: Website

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Anik Singal

Anik Singal is an online entrepreneur. He is best known for his company, Lurn. Anik Singal has sold over $100 Million worth of products online, all by just using a computer and simple systems. He has made it his personal mission now to teach his secrets to Entrepreneurs around the world looking for true financial freedom.

How would Anik define what he is doing? (1:58)

• Anik is working against people assuming he only does internet marketing, and that’s the only thing he has accomplished. 
• He loves digital marketing, and it has been an obsession and hobby since he was very young. 
• His bigger goal, however, is actually to not just do digital marketing but rather to serve entrepreneurs. 
• Today, Anik will do something like work with a baker who owns a bakery shop or he will help the person who does his car’s detailing scale their business, etc.
• Anik’s business does not have a mission or a vision, but rather a purpose statement. 
• The statement is that they want to be a transformational home for entrepreneurs.
• They have a physical and virtual home for entrepreneurs that acts as a ‘playground’ for them as they can run through several training courses to further their businesses and build their network. 
• Being an entrepreneur is a lonely and tough business. As a developer, you have to work every day and your people surround you.
• But as an entrepreneur. You just do not have the time for those people, and so Anik made it his company’s purpose statement to make that community available for entrepreneurs all over the world.

Where did Anik come from, and how did he get to where he is now? (3:44) 

• When Anik started to get interested in digital marketing, he didn’t understand nor care for the concept of scaling. 
• All Anik wanted was to get started. But with $100 on his name he wasn’t about to go and just buy a franchise.
• What initially attracted Anik to the online world was the fact that the startup capital was so minimal. 
• Especially today, there are so many tools that can do the hard, heavy lifting for you in the online business world. 
• What really addicted Anik to digital marketing, however, were the margins.
• He didn’t have to deal with physical production, warehousing, design, prototyping, or patenting as a virtual product.   
• An online virtual product is delivered instantaneously when someone buys it. So those profit margins help you advertise more as you grow and upscale, faster. 
• The scalability of an online, virtual product is amazing, Lurn’s customer base is now 56% outside of the United States. 

What did Anik sell and how did he do it? (13:06)

• Anik tried many different things and he felt that some things he had, he had to reshape and put them together differently.
• Anik likened it to building your own pizza. You take all the ingredients but if you don’t assemble them in the right order and do it right, it’s not going to be a pizza.
• So what Anik was able to do was find out that he had to stop driving traffic to the sales page of someone else.
• He was trying to be an affiliate, he did not have his own product. He was trying to promote software he had already has gotten good at using and he was trying to send traffic straight to the person he was an affiliate to. 
• The affiliate asked Anik to mix things up a bit and write an actual page. Using a took called Microsoft front page, which Anik reveres highly, he wrote an ugly page. 
• Essentially what he did was write a review page for the product rather than sending people straight to the product. 
• He wrote a pre-sale page and before bonuses were even a thing, the affiliate asked Anik to write a bonus page too. 
• Anik’s bonus at the time was, that if you bought his software you got his cellp[hone number for free, and he would offer support on the software for free. 
• This strategy only lasted a few days before that offer was taken off of the table. 
• But the strategy did end up working and it gave Anik a creative way to create traffic for his product. 

Lurn

Lurn is an online (and offline) transformational home for entrepreneurs everywhere.

Founded by Anik Singal in 2004, our approach has always been a straight forward one:

To empower others to create and grow passion-based businesses, to encourage big ideas that will change the world. To educate people about how to be the best entrepreneurs they can be. 

Resources

Connect with Anik: LinkedIn

Lurn: Website

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Naveen Jain is an entrepreneur driven to solve grand global challenges through innovation. He is the founder of several successful companies, including Moon Express, Viome, Bluedot, TalentWise, Intelius, and InfoSpace. Naveen is a director of the board at the Singularity University and the  X PRIZE Foundation. 

Naveen Jain has been awarded many honors for his entrepreneurial successes, including “Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year,” “Albert Einstein Technology Medal” for pioneers in technology, Recipient of “Ellis Island Medal of Honor,” and many more. 

How did Naveen come to be so successful? (0:54)

• Naveen does not define success by how much money you have in the bank but rather by how many people’s lives are positively impacted by what you do.
• Naveen likes to instead focus on what people can learn from one another.
• It’s not just about money. When people start focusing on money, they always end up falling into the same trap. 
• If you focus too much on making money, you’re never going to get it. You have to enjoy the process, and that means doing things that you care about. 
• After that, everything will start falling into place.
• Naveen grew up poor, never really having a place to eat or sleep, and this shows that anyone can make something of themselves, and it all comes down to finding your true passion or obsession in life. 
• You have to find out what you would die for and then live for it, and the money will come. 

What did Naveen do to make a positive impact on so many people through his business workings? (5:32)

• Naveen is a firm believer that to have a good life; you need to do a tremendous amount of good first.
• The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunities. If you can find a product that is will help a  billion people, there is nothing that can stand in your way to make an enterprise from it.   
• The reason for this is that doing good and doing well are not mutually exclusive.
• That is why Naveen encourages us to focus on the most significant problems currently facing humanity. If you start working on fixing those problems, those are multi-hundred billion-dollar problems. 
• So to be a billionaire, you have to solve a $10 billion problem. 
• These problems are what humanity should be thinking about; even if you can only solve a tiny part of it, you still make a difference. 
• The reason people get so focused on things like money is that they believe in scarcity and that there is only a finite number of what they seek. 
• Naveen said, and so forth. 
• Naveen used his savings to start his first business, and it turned out quite successful because they tackled a major problem. 
•  The business was about seven years before smartphones came out around 2003. Naveen had an interview with Leslie Walker in Washington Post about how soon there would be phones you can carry around you.
• That would also have your email, calendar, weather, stocks, and even using your phone to make a payment without a credit card. 
• The interviewer did not believe Naveen. But Naveen started a company solely on the premonition that was going to happen, and it did seven years later. 
• When you notice a problem, you have to ask yourself if this is the problem everyone wants to solve, and then you know it will have a massive market. 
• Once you find the root cause of problems, it becomes straightforward to see the patterns of what you need to do to solve them.
• You don’t have to make the technology yourself. There are plenty of qualified people you can get to make your technology. Your job is to define the problem and the solution clearly. 

Moon Express 

Moon Express is a company with the mission to redefine possibilities by returning to the Moon and unlocking the many mysteries and resources for the benefit of humanity. Moon Express was the first company to receive U.S. government approval to send a robotic spacecraft beyond traditional Earth orbit and to the Moon. 

Resources

Connect with Naveen: LinkedIn

Moon Express: Website

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Brian Smith was born in Australia. As a chartered accountant, he used $500 startup money and founded UGG Imports to bring sheepskin footwear to America. After 17 years, as sales reached $15 Million, he sold the business to Deckers Outdoor Corporation. The UGG brand has since exceeded over $1 Billion in international sales. 

Brian is a passionate innovator and entrepreneur, and he is considered one of the most sought-after business leaders in the country today. As a media guest and an Inspiring speaker, he is committed to teaching his breakthrough business strategies to new entrepreneurs. 

How did Brian start UGG? (1:12)

• Brian had just graduated after studying for ten years to become a chartered accountant, and he quit the job the same day. 
• Brian hadn’t wanted to give up before graduating, wasting all that time he had spent studying, but he did hate it the whole time.
• Something inside of Brian wanted to be entrepreneurial. 
• After a lot of meditating on his way back to Australia, Brian figured he would go to California and find the next big trend. 
• He chose California because all the big brands like Levi’s, waterbeds, and surfing brands were going there and doing well, so it seemed the natural thing to do. 
• He spent the first few months surfing and making friends in Malibu. It was when it started getting cold in late October, and he was pulling on his sheepskin boots from Australia that Brian realized no one in America has sheepskin boots. 
• That was the lightbulb moment for Brian and started the journey of building the UGG Brand. 
• UGG is now a brand so widely recognized that almost anyone brings up the brand with a fond memory as soon as they find out Brian is the founder. 
• There was an initial rejection from Americans as they found the idea of sheepskin footwear alien. A friend of Brian mused that the weather in California was too hot, and Brian reasoned that California and Australia were identical in climate. 
• Brain realized it was the American’s lack of knowledge of sheepskin footwear; that was the real problem. Australias innate knew sheepskin footwear, and how rugged it is, you cannot rip sheepskin, you can get it wet, even when it’s wet it insulates so your feet stay warm even in snow, etc. 
• To be a good entrepreneur, you have to have a level of ignorance when you start because if you knew your obstacles, you wouldn’t have gone for it. 
• Brian was faced with really considering giving up. Still, he kept brainstorming; he realized the reason all of his friends in Malibu thought it was such a good idea was that they had already been to Australia and had come back with a couple of pairs of boots for their buddies as well. 
• So it was through the surfing community already knowing sheepskin footwear and spreading the word that UGG boots eventually started picking up speed. 

How did Brian procure funding once he had a demand going for the footwear? (9:02)

• Brian and his friends borrowed around $500 to send to Australia to get samples, so they were initially underfunded. 
• The samples arrived back while Brian still had zero orders, but he and his friends were sure they would be instant millionaires with how good the stores were that would be selling them. 
• That’s when they realized they needed money to get the ball rolling. Brian’s roommate overheard them talking and told Brian about some guys in his office looking for investments.
• They received $20,000, which is like $75,000 by today’s standards, and they sent $15,000 of that down to Australia and ordered 500 pairs, which arrived swiftly. 
• Buying pairs at about $30 a pair and planned on wholesaling them for $50 - $65, the retail price was usually $60-70-80 a pair.
• However, once they had the inventory and went back to the store manager that said he loved the footwear and idea but could not sell it in his store. Going store to store after that, every store ended up rejecting the boots. 
• So all the stores initially excited about the concept wouldn’t actually try and sell any of the footwear. 
• In their first year, they sold 28 pairs, making only about $1,000. To make a living, Brian and his friends did any job they could find. 
• Obviously feeling somewhat disappointed, Brian decided not to give up, likening starting up a business to raising a child. He states, “You can’t birth adults.” 
• And so the birth of UGG was those initial six samples, every store rejecting the idea and the business went into this horrible ‘infancy’ where it laid dormant for a while and Brian had to nurse it and care for it through it not giving anything back. 
• So eventually, the boots started to pick up speed with Briand and his friends, never giving up on the idea. 

What does Brian think is the most critical strategy that helped him leap from idea to enterprise? (13:50)

• In Brian’s case, he knew how popular the footwear was in Australia, and he knew how big the American market is. 
• He also knew how similar Americans and Australians are, so he had to figure out precisely what causes the aversion Americans were feeling to the product. 
• Brian was at a trade show in Las Vegas, the Ski show, and after five days of talking to ski shop owners, they still did not have a single order. 
• On the last day of the show, a woman came up to Brian talking about Madden Slash, and he told her to try on the footwear. She slid one boot on before getting really excited and saying she could sell them as after ski boots. 
• She ended up ordering 60 pairs from them, which was the most significant order they ever received. 
• And Brian finally realized that you should never try and sell a shoe to a sales representative without insisting they try on the shoe themselves first.
• He considers this his most significant breakthrough for UGG in the 20 years that he owned it. 

UGG

Founded in 1978 by an Australian surfer on the coast of California, UGG® is a global lifestyle brand renowned for its iconic Classic boot. First worn by Hollywood royalty, fashion editors, and then the world, UGG® designs and retails footwear, apparel, accessories, and homewares with an uncompromising attitude toward quality and craftsmanship.

Resources

Connect with Brian: LinkedIn

UGG: Website

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Beyond 8 Figures is a podcast that takes you through accomplished entrepreneurs’ stories as they share their knowledge, advice, and history about starting their businesses, scaling them, and exiting them in a lucrative state.

The Ins and Outs of Beyond 8 figures (0:13)

• Beyond 8, Figures focuses on sitting down with outstanding entrepreneurs as they share their tools, tactics, and strategies that they used to get to where they are now.
• Starting a business is hard, but lately, it’s easier than ever to start. Scaling and selling your business is where the real challenge appears.  
• They also speak about mistakes that you might make and how they could discourage you, and how to tackle objectives that discourage you. 

Some exciting guest stories (1:09)

• Some entrepreneurs had to literally break everything, from their business to their mindset, to learn how to thrive in the business world. 
• Sometimes starting a business, especially one that’s never existed before in the business sector, can feel like throwing spaghetti at the wall, waiting to see what sticks. 
• Real success comes from focusing your time and energy on your business, figuring out your business plan, and pushing for that growth. 

Sharing Success (3:27)

• Many of the guests are very transparent and honest about what went down in their personal lives while they were in the process of scaling their businesses. 
• They were sharing the ups and downs and how they persevered through it. Sometimes they wanted to give up, and that shows that even if someone is a millionaire or a billionaire, we are all still human, and that means anyone can reach success. 
• That willingness to share that Beyond 8 Figures manages to pull out of their guests ensures audience members are receiving quality advice. 
• The guests on the show try and share as much advice as they can, bar violating confidentiality agreements from exiting businesses, on how they started, scaled, and eventually exited the business. 

Types of guests Beyond 8 Figures try and procure for each episode (5:13)

• Beyond eight figures tries and bring you successful entrepreneurs that have hit or gone over the $10 million marks with their businesses. 
• They look for passionate people willing to share both the business and personal side of starting, growing, and exiting a business successfully.
• They get accomplished entrepreneurs who will spill the beans some millionaire/billionaires try and keep to themselves. 

Resources

Beyond 8 Figures: Website

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