The Mentors

1.5 Million children die each year due to diarrhea. Proper handwashing with soap can prevent over two-thirds of those deaths. Amanat Anand didn't know that she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but when she came across this statistic she instantly knew what she wanted to do. She entered a business plan competition with a simple idea. Children need access to soap and a reason to wash their hands consistently. By making their products affordable and fun to use for kids, SoaPen can accomplished both goals. In this episode we learn how Amanat and her co-founder Shubham, both voted Forbes 30 Under 30, focused on being relentlessly resourceful in their first year of operation to secure funding, develop their chemical formula, and refine the supply chain process for their soap concept. We cover how they were able to quickly sell over 100 units of their product, leading them to their first major production run of 10,000 units. We also discuss how the first time entrepreneurs think about team dynamics, from dividing responsibilities and roles, to refining their decision making process to stay on track. If you're interested in physical product businesses with a social good component, this interview is the ideal case study for how to approach the first few years of building this type of company, from ideation to execution.

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This week's 5 Minute Pick Me Up was inspired by my Uber ride from the airport this morning when I was picked up by an ordinary gentleman that was secretly building an extraordinary business. The reason he was driving an Uber today? Market research. I knew something was different about him when he started telling me that he never flies from LaGuardia airport. It turns out that he used to fly a lot for his job, which of course lead me to dig deeper. I learned that he not only ran his own IT consulting business, but that he was starting a new driving service after hearing complaints from many of the Uber drivers he met. In 5 minutes you will: -Learn how he came up with the idea for his business-Find out the first steps he took to research the market, and identify value before investing his own money-Understand how he's been able to attract customers, and his plans for growing in the future-Vadim RevzinCo-Host of The Mentors

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Quitting a job can feel exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. In a perfect world, you're leaving on good terms and have a supportive boss that offers you future opportunities for mentorship and references. Unfortunately, these circumstances are usually far from perfect. Many people leave their jobs because they're unhappy, and the source of this unhappiness typically comes from the people that they work for. There's many misconceptions about what to expect from this process, and how to handle the conversation with your employer when the time finally comes. We start this episode with a role play, giving you a real life example of how to handle a boss that reacts horribly to the news of you leaving. A situation like this can often be fraught with emotions on both sides, so it's important to be fully prepared going into the conversation. We breakdown how you can anticipate questions and objections from your boss, and what to do to prepare ahead of time. Whether you're quitting your job to work on a new business, or leaving for a better opportunity it's important to know your rights as an employee. These tips will help you stay calm and at ease throughout the process, and remember - it's only one conversation. Soon you'll be on your way to a happier you.

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Here at The Mentors, we're all about explaining how people just like us can go from having no experience, to running a successful company. Today we’re launching a new series called 5 Minute Pick Me Up.One of the recurring themes on this show, shared by everyone from Max Altchuler, who just sold his company Sales Hacker to Outreach.io, to the Hey Lady shoes twins Emily and Jessica, and even to our story about our father, is that most people don't get started with a fully baked brilliant idea for a business. I want to share with you a story about a true entrepreneur, Mack of Superior Auto Steam, who I met this weekend who is motivating me this week with his lesson.I found him when I was searching for car wash options in NYC for my classic 300zx, and he was the only hand wash service with a Yelp account.Listen to hear why I will gladly refer anyone to him, and what I learned from him about running a business like this. In 5 minutes you will: Discover the NOTABLE SERVICE he provided, Understand the NOTABLE CHANNEL he found to acquire customersHear the MAIN TAKEAWAY from this interview.-Sergei Revzin Co-Host of The Mentors

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How do you mint 15 new millionaires over night? Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans knows how. He committed to growing his industrial fan company for as long as it took, until he was certain that his most hardworking employees could also become rich from the sale of his company. That meant waiting until he could sell it for $500 million, giving away 10% of that to his team. Carey doesn't like to call himself an entrepreneur. He's been creating businesses since he was a teenager, and it's simply part of who he is - it was never going to be any other way. Still, when you listen to his story you start to understand how his background shaped his thinking, and how someone with no experience managing a team was able to successfully lead a company of over 1,000 employees. In this episode we discuss how he came up with his business idea, uncovering a massive opportunity that would lead to owning more than 75% of the entire market he worked in. We also dig into the day to day of his work as CEO, and his relentless attention to detail when it came to his tribe of employees and his customers. Carey has done many interviews over the years, including a feature on PBS, but the stories you'll hear on this show will not be found anywhere else.

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We get stopped on the streets quite a lot. Not because we were secretly star child actors, or because people recognize us from the Open Mics we do around the city. It's because we're twins. Okay - once on an uptown bus we sat in front of two elderly women who kept starring at us, later getting up the nerve to ask us what TV show they saw us in (still wonder who they were mistaking us for) - but that's about it.Yesterday, as we were walking down the street to grab some lunch in Philly, we got recognized not once, but on three separate occasions. We're here for a conference called Podcast Movement, and in this episode we detail the steps we took to get an opportunity to speak in front of over 250 people at the beginning of the conference, and how we ended up standing out from all of the other speakers to make sure that people remember us. This week at the conference we also got to meet some incredible people like JLD of the Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast, Lewis Howes of School of Greatness, and Aaron Mahnke of Lore. We'll tell you what we learned about attaining success and growth from each of those conversations so you can apply it to your own career and life.

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How To Make It In AmericaThis is the third and final part of our series about our father, Samuel Revzin, who built one of the most successful schools in Soviet Belarus, only to have to start all over in a new career at the age of 54. In this episode we tell the story of how our mother and father made the difficult decision to pack their bags and move halfway around the world to make a better life for their children here in the United States. With few employment prospects for recent immigrants, they had to do menial work for years to support the family.Listen to find out how our father was able to use the same entrepreneurial instincts he developed in Belarus to start a business in a shopping mall that he grew to three locations and multiple employees. This small business was effectively our real world MBA, where at the age of 12 we were thrust into the day to day of the business to learn what it takes to run a company.

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Most startups seem to have advisors listed in their pitch decks, but it's not always clear what they actually do.Not every company needs a formal advisory board, but there's a reason why it's common practice for many startups to have one. Even the most experienced CEOs can't possibly be experts in every single aspect of their business and industry, and advisors are the people they often turn to to answer difficult questions, or help make critical industry introductions. This is especially true for early stage companies that can't always afford to hire experts until they have enough revenue. In this episode we discuss what advisors do, what the difference is between formal and informal advisors, how to compensate your advisors and more.We tell a few stories about how we were able to find very experienced and sought after advisors for our own startup, and how we negotiated with them. We include real information about equity percentages that we offered, and give you some tips about how you can decide how much equity to give.Listen here to make sure that you have all the information you need to put together your advisory board, and leverage them in the most effective way.

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This is a continuation of How To Do What You Love In a Communist Country Part I - a story of our father, a man who didn't finish high school until he was 29 years old, and ended up building an education empire in one of the most oppressive areas of the world, only to have to start his career all over again in the United States in his early 50s.We walk you through his rise in Soviet Belarus, from the workaholic nature that compelled him to take on triple the work load of any other educator, to the opportunities he was given as a notorious community organizer. By the time he was 42 years old, he had established deep ties in the Department of Education, and was presented with a rare opportunity (especially for a jew) - build a new school in one of the worst areas of the city. He quickly developed a massive vision - he wasn't simply going to build a school. He was going to create an organization that brought resources, aide and opportunities for the whole community. We discuss how he negotiated additional funding to completely change the way an academic institution operated, attracting families from from the entire city, and what lead him to become a prominent innovator in education across the entire Soviet Union. Music by: www.purple-planet.com

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One in five children in the United States goes hungry every day. That statistic might be surprising to most, but to Michael Levine, it became a calling - a reason to build an organization whose guiding mission is to reduce that number drastically. 500 food products and seven brands later, Global Food Solutions is continuing their work by partnering with government institutions, all without raising a single dollar of outside capital. Entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. Over the course of a decade, Michael focused on building a business on his terms. In this episode, we uncover how this promising executive chef decided to start a food business after suffering a major injury, preventing him from ever working in the kitchen again. The early opportunity was initially driven by changing government regulations that forced public schools to look for healthier food providers. Coupled with his dedication to create an impact on kid's lives, Michael and his team created a proprietary way to make food that was both cost-effective and nutritious. In this episode, we discuss how he landed his first major client with the New York City public school system, and the two main factors that contributed to his ongoing success - placing incredible importance on building face to face relationships and managing financials with relentless focus.

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