Meet Today’s Guest: Michele Mere

Michele Mere is a decisive, driven and committed entrepreneur who helps successful business owners expand, duplicate or sell their companies and make big profits using her business valuation and consulting skills. Michele’s business expertise has been highlighted during her speeches at Harvard and on NBC, CBS, Fox, Entrepreneur.com and Forbes.com. She is a Stevie Award winning business consultant, best-selling author and the Founder of Decisive Minds. She is a serial entrepreneur who knows how it feels to fail miserably at business, at one time the bank called demanding their $1.5 million and knows how it feels to sign the contract to sell her company for $9 million. Business building tips- DecisiveMinds.com

Can you share your incredible journey with the audience today?

Life has been and is still and probably will be till the day I die, about business, about entrepreneurship, about creating your own life and your own existence. So I was born into a family who had kids to guarantee they had employees. We had a grocery store, a mobile home park. My dad started the trucking company. We had a laundromat. I mean, if we thought we could make a dime, we did it. The school bus dropped me off at the grocery store in the afternoon because I went to work after school. I thought everybody did that and I found out later they didn't. And I think that really is what began my love, and of business and entrepreneurs. Learning at the at the knees of my father and my grandfather and watching them negotiate and sell and treat people the way people should be treated.

In 2007 we had the opportunity to sell our trucking company and our grocery store that year. We retired, my entire family, everyone retired when we sold those two companies. I found myself on the couch every day asking, who is Michele, at this point? What am I going to do? I did a couple of things. I started a company flipping houses, that was a lot of fun. And then the credit stuff happened in 2009. And that fell apart. I was surfing the internet one day. I don't know how I ended up on this site. And I end up on this thing that's talking about how to build businesses and the online world and all this kind of stuff. And I go to a marketing seminar in California about building businesses. It's just one little tweak. I had never done it online. I had no clue what to do there.

I started Decisive Minds in January of 2010. And I really just thought I was going to build this online business. I was never going to speak. I wasn't going to network. I wasn't going to leave my house. Because I'm an extreme introvert. What I found out at the end of 2010 was that that doesn't necessarily work. I spent a bunch of money and made none. In January 2011, I had to sit at my father's table, this man, this entrepreneur who helped me to understand who I am, and telling him that I didn't quite make any money with all this time I spent in this business. And I'll never forget this. He said, I don't think that's a viable company. I think you should stop doing that. We need to look for something else for you. I like turned on a dime. And within the next 18 months, I was doing six figures. That was the thing that lit my fire.

And that's really why I started this business, I started Decisive Minds, because everything I have been through in my life and you know, we had the failures. I'll never forget the day the bank called and said, hey, we want our $1.5 million back. So I've been through the trenches in all the businesses that we've had, and including Decisive Minds, and come out the other side on many of them. I've done it all when it comes to business. I think I bring a unique perspective to the business consulting world, because of my experience in the past.

Can you share some of your tips with our audience today and share a little bit about what you think 2021 is going to look like?

I had a magazine reach out to me not too long ago and ask me this exact question like, what do you see is going to be different in the world in 2021 for entrepreneurs. And first, I want to say, I really hope that people take the time to look for the opportunity. And don't just fall back into old habits. What I see different in 2021 is what we're experiencing right now, which is, it's gonna be all businesses will be way more virtual. It doesn't matter what kind of business you're running right now. You're realizing maybe I don't need to have everyone in one office, maybe I can have a more virtual team or let my employees work from home.

My business, Decisive Minds, as a consulting business from day one, I set it up as a virtual company, because almost none of my clients are in the same town as me. So we did most of our consulting through Zoom activities, and then a couple of times a year we come together in person. I think that that's going to just kind of become the new norm, the new mainstream opportunity.

The second thing is that there's a lot of business owners who do things because that's the way they've always been done. Challenge the status quo. You don't need to do it just because it's always been that way. I think that what we see in 2021 moving forward is it's going to be a more virtual world. For those of you who need to start to make those changes, start to embrace and move forward in that and don't just go back to I have to do everything the way I used to do.

You're a master content creator, but you still had to make some shifts you mentioned. So tell us a little bit about that.

I had to make some changes. I seriously went after getting seen and getting known and getting heard and putting out a lot of content, like sucking it up and going to networking events, and doing all those things that I absolutely did not want to do.

I was invited by the director for eWomen in Houston to talk about my book which I turned into an e-book. I walked into that event terrified. I gave a 15-minute talk. My first ever real talk in this world. And 20 women handed me a check for $100 apiece. I walked out with $2,000 in my pocket. And from the little course that I sold, and they got the e-book for free with the course. I call my coach and said, okay, I can do this. How do I how do I make this bigger at that moment? That was my first real win.

Then I came out and I really just I got it that I had to go do those pieces. I had to be seen. That first year, I made a lot of videos. Not a single one of them has my face on it. I knew at that point I had to shift. That people have to engage with me and that they need to see me. So relationship, there's voice, they hear you. That's one level of relationship. They see you. That's another level of relationship. They meet you in person. That's a different level of relationship.

The shift for me, has been that I built a really big business. Decisive Minds got huge. And then I went, oh wait, this isn't really what I want. All of a sudden, I woke up one day and didn’t want to do all of this. And so 2019 was a really rough year health wise for me. And things started to kind of kind of slow down. And then who knew 2020 would look like it does, right? But here's what I realized, this is the opportunity for me to shift into something that's the other thing I love.

I have a degree in accounting, I love the numbers, the reason I can help you build your business is because I understand all of that. My dad told me when I was really little, he's like, look, you don't have to become an accountant. But you should go get an accounting degree. Because when you understand the numbers, you can build any business you want. So that's one of the things I do with all of my clients is make them pay attention to their numbers. I realized I should really be speaking on those topics and building that. What you will more than likely see from me in 2021 is a virtual bookkeeping service tied in to a training type of scenario around this whole conversation of if you're failing, and we look at the numbers, what can we do different? What can we see different? Where is the issue coming from?

You are a master of content creation. Can you share some tips on that?

#1 - Consistency is the key to success in content marketing and creating content. You say you’re going to put out a blog three times a week. You do that every week for a long time. Guess what you have? You end up with 1,000 blog posts on your site like me. Use content in multiple ways. When I create something, how can I use it five times?

#2 - Partner with others. You do not have to be the creator of the content to get value from the content. Bring in people who are going to share great content with your community.

#3 - I don't I don't necessarily write my own stuff. I use PLR, which is private label rights content. So I have writers who write things that I purchased from them and can put my name on, I might modify them slightly. When I hire someone to write things for me, and they give it to me, I barely change anything. It's more important that I was being consistent and putting out great content. Until I tell them that it's not really me writing it. No one knows.

Michele’s Free Gift:

I have a little course called 28 Days to Grow Your List. Don't let anyone tell you that email is dead. It's 12 videos with each of the videos on a different topic.

Free Gift Link: 28DayListBuild.com

How to connect with Michele:

Website: DecisiveMinds.com

“There is opportunity in what looks like a disaster right now.” – Michele Mere