How Sam Ovens is helping everyday people start their own consulting businesses – Business Podcast for Startups

Andrew: Hey, everyone. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com. I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. I’ll be honest with you. I felt guilt about an interview that I did years ago with today’s guest. This was back in, let me see here, 2013. I interviewed Sam Ovens about how he built up this consulting business and was teaching people how to do consulting.

I thought maybe I got taken for a ride. I probably did get taken for a ride. He’s probably just making up his numbers. It was too good to be true. He’s maybe trying to do this to get people to sign up. I felt like guilt. I said, “Maybe I shouldn’t even be doing these kinds of interviews.” Anyway, for months I felt that, maybe a couple years. Then I started hearing people who were in his program talk about how big the program is. Then I started hearing more and more people say they were in the program.

I realized, “Actually maybe I underestimated the guy. Maybe I’ve been like beating myself up for no good reason. Maybe Sam’s program actually not only works, but it’s been generating real revenue and the numbers I had weren’t wrong. They’re actually bigger now.” And the more research I did into it, the more I realized that was true. Then I went hat in hand and said, “Hey, Sam, can I interview you again on Mixergy?” He had a positive experience. He emailed back. He said yes. That’s what we’re talking about here today.

Sam Ovens is the founder of–here’s a new domain new–it’s Consulting.com is the new domain name. What a freaking good domain name. It offers online training programs to help everyday people start their own consulting businesses. We’re going to talk about how he got here from where he was years ago.

The whole thing is sponsored by two companies that I’ll tell you more about later. The first will help you hire a great developer. It’s called Toptal. The second will help you close more sales. It’s called Pipedrive. I’ll tell you more about them later. Hey, Sam, how did it feel to hear me talk–did you notice, by the way, that I was feeling like maybe you were snowing me and telling me more than was there?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, I’m not surprised at all. I’ve had that experience–every entrepreneur kind of has that experience when they’re starting a lot. Most of it is to do with the fact that I was feeling like that a little bit as well, like I kind of always used to feel like a little bit of a fraud because you’re pushing yourself so much.

You’re not really comfortable in your own skin. You are doing some things well, but you’re also reminding yourself like of who you are. You’ve built such a strong self-image. These two are constantly in conflict. You feel like that. When you feel like that, other people can smell it on you. So, I’m not surprised at all.

Andrew: I didn’t realize you were feeling that. If anything, it seems like you were very confident. You were at the time when we talked about doing that interview on a boat fishing somewhere. It felt like you had no care in the world. That’s why I thought, “How is he running his business like that?”

Sam: Yeah. I’m pretty introverted and shy. So, I mean, it’s just hidden quite well. But I do feel like that a lot of the time.

Andrew: So, I talked to someone who’s fairly close to you about where your revenues were today. He gave me the number but he gave it to me in private. So, I won’t reveal it. Do you feel comfortable saying where your revenues were in 2016?

Sam: Sure. So, it’s $18.25 million.

Andrew: $18.25 million selling what?

Sam: Selling online training programs or only really it was mostly one online training program helping everyday people start and grow their own consulting business.

Andrew: And at the time that you and I met, you were like the big success story at The Foundation. The company that you had was called what?

Sam: SnapInspect.

Andrew: And you had this idea. You did this interview where you talked about how you found a problem that home inspectors had. You created software for it. I remember when you and I met in Vegas, people were telling me, “Andrew, you’ve got to hear how he had the money to even invest in The Foundation to learn how to do that and how he was able to do it.”

They were telling me about this consulting thing you did and mailings you would send out. Do you remember what that was? This is before SnapInspect. How did you get customers and what were you selling them?

Sam: Sure. So The Foundation and Dane taught me a huge lesson, which was you don’t come up with cool ideas. You go out and you look for problems instead and then the solution to that problem is your idea. And that was a breakthrough moment for me. So I did that. I went out to the property management market. I found a problem they had. Then I knew that if I could create the solution, I’d have a viable business. But I ran into a massive obstacle, which was, “How do I get the money to build this thing?” Software is pretty expensive to build.

That was the massive obstacle. I figured, “Well, Dane’s figured out how to do this thing in the software market, but who’s to say this wouldn’t work in a different market, this finding problems thing?” So, I went out to other businesses and I looked for problems again. I found that a massive problem they had was getting customers. I figured, well, I could provide a service because that doesn’t cost as much money as developing software and I could help solve that problem with a service and get some money that way and then use that money to develop my software product.

So, I took basically the same pattern of thinking and application and just applied it slightly differently. With service businesses, they don’t have a trough in the cash flow model, but with product businesses, they have a very big trough. By trough I mean capital expenditure and outlay before revenues start coming in. So, I just paired a service business model with a product business model to remove that trough.

Andrew: I see. There is no investing in software for months before you see it actually developed and out there in the world. There’s making money as soon as you get your first customer because they pay you for your consulting.

Sam: Exactly.

Andrew: At the time you were doing–was it web critiques? From what I remember, you would send out this lumpy mail–lumpy mail meaning mail that had bulk in it so it stood out in a collection of letters and envelopes that people got. There was a lump in it. People wanted to see what was inside it. They would open it up. They would say, “This guy sent me maybe a garbage can, a tiny one in a packet. Let me see what it is.” The letter might say something like, “Your website is garbage. I think I can fix it.” You describe it, actually, because I think I’m exaggerating.

Sam: That’s close. That trashcan, to this day it’s still pretty effective. I hear of people still sending them. We basically just sent a mini-trashcan and we said, “Spending money on this Yellow Pages ad,” because what we’d do is we’d grab a copy of the yellow pages. Back then it was three, four years ago. It was more popular than it is today. We would go through the Yellow Pages and look for companies that were buying half or full-page ads because we knew those things cost a lot of money.

We’d tear out their ad from the Yellow Pages and put it in a trashcan and then put it in an envelope with like a bubble-wrap bag with a two-page letter and the headline of the letter said like, “Andrew, spending money on Yellow Pages ads in today’s market is like throwing money in the bin.” So we were basically like kicking their bruised their knee, saying, “You’re spending your money on the wrong stuff.” And then our letter would position digital marketing as a more effective way to be spending their money.

Andrew: I see. Then you’d send them a video showing them how you could help them do that, right? And it was all customized?

Sam: Yeah, it’s had lots of iterations. Back in the beginning, we’d also send a video critique of us where we’d just do a screen record of our computer on their website and say, “You’re making this mistake. You’re making this one. You’re making this one. It’s just really powerful to point out actual mistakes instead of going to someone and saying, “I’m so good, I can help you.” Everyone’s first reaction is, “Prove it.” So, it’s so much more powerful to go in and identify problems.

Andrew: Okay. So that’s what you were selling at first, a program that taught people how to take that model and use it to build their own consulting company.

Sam: Yeah. I actually started doing it myself, had no idea that anyone else could make it work because that’s what everyone always thinks about their own stuff. Then this guy Stanley, he was also in The Foundation and he kept bugging me to teach him how to do it. He offered to pay me $1,000 to teach him how to do it. So, I said yes.

Then I just taught him on Skype and we recorded the calls. Then he started doing it, started sending out these lump email packages. I honestly had no idea if it was going to work or not. Then he ended up getting a $10,000 client. I hadn’t got a $10,000 client by that point. So, I was like, “What is going on? How did he just get a client bigger than the ones I’ve been able to get?”

That’s when it really shook me, “Maybe this thing is better than I thought.” So then I didn’t even create a training. I literally just gave other people access to the same Dropbox folder which had Stanley’s Skype calls in it. That was like the first version of it. I think I sold like 12 people into that thing.

Andrew: What were you charging for that?

Sam: Just $1,000.

Andrew: Wow, just $1,000 but what they were getting was just a Skype conversation between you and Stanley.

Sam: They also got a lot of my time, like they were able to call me, email me, like I patched the holes in the–if you can even call it a product. I don’t even know if you could call it a product. But I patched the holes in it with my own time.

Andrew: Okay.

Sam: So I put a lot of my own time in it. That worked out pretty well. I mean people started to get results and then it’s evolved so much since then. It’s just been iterations and improvements, but I turned it into a more polished product and I launched that and it got quite a lot of customers. Fast forward to this current day, I think we’ve had 10,500 customers for the different iterations–if you add up all the different iterations, all the different customers, about 10,500.

Andrew: Stanley is a pretty quiet guy too. He works hard. He doesn’t leave his computer, it seems to me. He’s not as social as I am, for example. I would even say he’s more reserved than you. So it’s impressive that he sold it. Did he actually get to collect the full $10,000 from that deal?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: He did. So, then you had that first program. The more polished version I remember hearing people say had like an online message board on your site and people would get to talk to each other and talk about what worked for them and egg each other on to keep promoting it. Then the next version of it looked like what?

Sam: Well, it’s just patching holes in it, really. People would send these trashcans out and then they would eventually get a strike where someone would say, “Okay, when can we talk?” And then the person would freak out. They’re like, “What do I say?” And I was just like, “I don’t know, just talk to them and find out what his problems are and then try to tell them how you’ll solve that and then make them an offer.”

But giving people who were beginners that much or being that vague, it has huge problems because people really need something to follow for everything because they’re in total unchartered water. So I started creating scripts for doing everything, like this is the structure of how we do–

Andrew: You would tell them specifically what to say, like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” that segment in the movie where he gives his stock sales people line for line scripts for what they should say.

Sam: Yeah. I’ve even got it down to where to pause, like where to raise your voice up at the end of a sentence so it kind of looks/sounds like a question but it isn’t really. You know, lots of different things like that, it’s been polished. Because I’ve been actively doing it myself, I mean, I was getting better at the same time as the students were getting better. It’s just evolved from there.

Andrew: Do you know what? I’m looking for the name of the person, but I talked to someone last week and I said, “Can you send me this script you’re so excited about that Sam gave you?” You know what he said? This is a guy who I spent a freaking hour helping. He’s someone in my audience. I helped him out. I followed up with him. I asked him for the script. I said, “Let me just see what you’re excited about.” Do you know what he said?

Sam: What?

Andrew: He said no. He said, “I can’t.” He didn’t outright say no. I think he was too embarrassed to say no. I’m looking for his name, but I should just let it got. He said, “Let me check with Sam.” And then he never got back to me about it. Then I checked with someone who I worked with and I said, “Can I see the script?” And he said, “I don’t think I can.” It’s a secret.

Sam: Well, I think a lot of people feel like they don’t want other people to know about it because they–you know what it’s like when you’re getting started? You feel like when you learn something that works for you, you don’t want anyone else to see it.

Andrew: I see.

Sam: I think there’s a little bit of that going on because I tell people not to share it, but I mean, that is obviously their own decision.

Andrew: I wouldn’t have told him. I mean I wouldn’t have told you that they shared it with me. It would have been secret. Walk me through the script or the thinking behind the script. What’s in there?

Sam: So with pretty much everything I try and do, I try and go completely different than what the normal way of doing things is because I’ve learned that–

Andrew: What’s the normal way of doing a consulting call?

Sam: It’s quite like high energy. The person who’s selling is talking a lot. They’re talking, talking, talking. The close is very much them pushing it and it’s kind of like–it kind of feels like the classic sort of high pressure telesales person, right?

Sam: So, when I created this script, I wanted to kind of be–it’s like an introvert sort of script because that’s what I was like. I ask a lot of carefully engineered questions to kind of lead the person down the path where they literally are in a corner themselves. They’ve put themselves in the corner and they’re thinking to themselves–well, to really explain it the best way possible, people understand things as one thing. They see everything as a whole. They’re like, “This is me. This is my situation.”

Andrew: Yeah.

Sam: What I like to do is create like duality and play the sides off each other. So, at first I have to create some sort of separation out of the one whole. So, I have to pull out their current situation, which is where they are right now and get a very accurate understand of that. then I have to ask them about their desired situation, which is where they want to be in the future because this is really what makes the whole global economy tick is people are just out there buying a better version of themselves each day.

Andrew: Okay.

Sam: So, I want to find out where they are now and then where they want to be. I know that all causes of their pain and the reason why they would have got on that call is to try and bridge that gap.

Andrew: Okay.

Sam: So once I understand that gap in between those two things, the current self and the desired future self, my question is–at first in the script, I separate those two, I get clear definition of it and then I ask them what’s stopping them from bridging that gap on their own right now. They tell me. The words come out naturally like–because it’s engineered so well. They say, “I don’t have a proven path to follow. I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a map. I don’t know the steps to take.”

Andrew: Okay.

Sam: And then we ask them, “Well, have you attempted to do this before?” And they will have attempted it. And it didn’t work out. Now we’ve kind of covered the bases which is, “You can’t do this on your own. You’ve tried to do it on your own. It didn’t work.” So, instead of me saying those words for them, I ask questions which make them say that to themselves. It’s so much more powerful that way. If I come on and I’m like, “I’m so good. I’ve got this amazing thing for you. It’s going to do all these things for you,” the person’s first reaction is, “I doubt it.”

Andrew: Right.

Sam: So then we basically lead them into a corner, which is we ask those questions, and then we just say, “Okay, what do you want to do about it? I can help you with this. Is this something that you want to do?”

Andrew: I see.

Sam: Then it’s just silent. I use a lot of silence in it because it’s just letting the person sit with that. They’re confronted in their own mind. They’re like, “I’m an idiot if I say no because this is exactly what I want and this guy can help me.” If you get what I’m saying–

Andrew: I do. Yeah.

Sam: And still there could be anything in that path from where they are now to where they want to be. It could be hiring more people. It could be buying more ads. It could be refreshing a website. It could be adding an app. But you’re telling people to be very focused on what they do, how they fill the gap, how they help their client go from where they are now to where they’re going to be in the future. That took you a while to get to, as I understand that. Let’s get into that in a moment.

First, I’ve got to tell people about my first of two sponsors. The company is called Pipedrive. I’ve used Pipedrive for years. I guess they heard me talk about it so much and they said, “You know what? Let’s throw Andrew some money because what do we have to lose? He’s already sent us a lot of clients.” The ads have been going so well, so they keep coming back.

The reason I love Pipedrive is because Pipedrive helps people have an organized sales process. In fact, I’m about to teach people how to do bots, how to create messenger bots. I have a bunch of people who expressed interest in it.

Usually what I would do is I would try to go into automation software for it. I realized that’s not the personal touch that I want at this stage. Or the next thing I’d do is say, “I can keep track of it. It’s 30 people who expressed deep interest. I can go through my inbox and respond to them when I need to.” That’s just a surefire way to lose touch with people and to be disorganized.

Spreadsheet is the next thing I thought. I want to talk to them and I want to be aware of how often I talk to them, where they are in the decision making process. Spreadsheets are easy to start, but they also get messy and I can’t store people’s phone numbers and email addresses and be aware of how many times I call them.

So what I did instead was I just created a whole new Pipedrive account. Everyone who expressed interest goes into what is the left-most column. I’ve got five columns. One is for people who expressed interest, left-most column. The final column on the far right is people who bought. Every column in between is the steps that I take, making phone calls, sending in emails, understanding where they are in their decision making process, why they want to do this.

So now I have a Pipedrive account which has a collection of columns. Each step of my process is organized. I have people in the left most column. Every day I work to move them one column over to the right. What do you think of that, Sam, by the way, as a guy who calls on the phone? Am I being pushy with that process?

Sam: No. I think if you don’t have a process, then it’s all just going to explode with a certain volume of conversations. It’s mandatory, really.

Andrew: Right. Okay. Good. I was looking at you and I thought, “Maybe Sam’s thinking I’m not asking enough questions or I’m trying to push people towards the close,” but it’s not exactly push towards a close because if I find at any point that they’re not right for this, I drag their card from whatever column they happen to be in to the lost bucket.

Anyway, it’s very visual. That’s the whole idea behind Pipedrive. It helps you organize your sales process in a very visual way. The problem with a podcast like this is that I can’t show it to you very easily. So, I work with Pipedrive. They’re long-time fans of Mixergy. They’ve got a free account for everyone who’s listening to me right now so you can actually experience this for yourself.

If you’re selling one on one via phone, via email, if you’re doing it as a team or as an individual, you owe it to yourself to go check out Pipedrive and really experience this visual interaction and you’ll see how it helps me at Mixergy close more sales, get more guests to do interviews on my podcast and really organize my whole team.

So all you have to do to get this free time with Pipedrive, two months free, is go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy. We use it to book guest like Sam. Sam’s been in Pipedrive. Now you’re in our final column, which is record the interview. After this, I move you to one, which is we did it.

Sam: What a privilege.

Andrew: So, in the past, I saw that people would build websites for their clients, they did a whole bunch of stuff. It seems like you found that that doesn’t work and you started to focus them. Am I right?

Sam: Yeah. Well, in the beginning, we were nowhere near as involved as we are now. We didn’t really know how to diagnose a true business issue. We would just find companies that had a really bad looking website and we’d say, “Look, we can help you get a better looking website.” That was how we knew how to create value. Because truthfully, that’s all we really knew how to do.

But over time, I learned how to really dissect a company and figure out what its real problem is. It’s never really a website. Websites are great, but it’s not going to make or break your company. If you look at my website, it’s so bad. It’s kind of funny. But my revenues are completely different. Most people would look at them and they wouldn’t even understand how that’s possible.

So it’s not a mandatory thing, but I found that the biggest problem is people just kind of–they’ve lost touch with their core reason why they started the business in the first place. That’s the massive thing which everyone forgets. The story is always pretty much the same. Someone sees a big problem in a marketplace or they see a wrong which they want to right.

They feel like it’s their duty to go in and do this thing. It’s very specific and it’s very powerful in the beginning, but over time, they add on this service and this product and then they start doing this thing and that and they’ve kind of gotten broad and the company has gotten flabby and they’ve forgotten who they are and their profits are pretty much eroded.

That’s the real problem. But what they’re saying to themselves is, “I just need more customers,” or, “I need a new website,” or, “I need to Facebook ads,” or, “I need more staff.” People say one thing, but they’re just symptoms of a deeper underlying problem, really.

Andrew: How do you get at the deeper underlying problem them?

Sam: It’s just a series of questions, really. The first one would be like who is your target customer and what problem are you solving for them? Most people can’t even describe who their target customer is. If they say, “It’s everyone,” that’s the first sign that it’s lost its focus. If they can’t specifically describe the problem or the use case which they’re solving, then that’s–

Andrew: You mean the client?

Sam: Yes.

Andrew: So, if your client doesn’t know who their customer is or what their customer’s problem is, how can you help them get that?

Sam: Because we can get them to ask the right questions.

Andrew: Oh, get your client or potential client to ask their customers the right questions to understand, is that right?

Sam: Yeah. It never changes, what I’m doing. My course consults people on how to start their own consulting business the same way in which those people are going to consult their clients on how to improve their business. There’s no–these are such fundamental laws of nature and business that they’re not right or wrong at any level. People are going to keep just applying them down. Having a focus and a clearly identified customer and solving a problem, it’s going to work at any level, you know what I mean?

Andrew: But if I, Sam, at Mixergy don’t know who my ideal client is, how can you help me get to that understanding or how can one of your consultants help me get to that understanding?

Sam: We’d start by seeing who your power users are, really. So, the people who–if I was to take your data set of people who have signed up to your Premium program, those are pretty much the only people we’re going to look at because the rest of it’s noise. We’re going to look for a power law which is basically an off-balance equation where, say, 2% of the people on that list are driving 80% of the revenue. What characteristics those people have in common, what use case those people have in common.

Andrew: I see.

Sam: Focus everything on that.

Andrew: I see. I would take all my Premium customers. I wouldn’t even have to ask them or survey them. I’d just probably put them in a Gmail email and mouse over them and because I used Reportive as a plugin, I could see what they do and I get a sense of who they are. They’re also in our Facebook group, so I go to their Facebook profile and get a sense of who they are. If I start to see that the people who have been with me the longest have something in common, that is who my target customer is.

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: I see. If your consultants, someone trained by you, were to work with me, they would help me do that and then they would say, “Andrew, now your next challenge you told me is to get more of those people. What have you tried?” And I’ll tell them, “I tried Facebook ads. It didn’t work. I tried more content. That didn’t work,” and go through the list of stuff. They say, “It didn’t work for you. Do you want help getting there?” And I’d say, “Yes, I see.” That’s the process?

Sam: It depends what someone becomes a consultant in. In the beginning, I told people we’re going out and we’re going to sell websites. Then it was digital marketing. We were digital marketing consultants. Over time, I’ve been able to step back further and further and add–and now Consulting.com and my new programs, they show people how to start a consulting business in any niche. Now we have yoga instructors, spiritual people. I’ve seen so many different types of niches.

Andrew: But they’re not helping them build websites. They’re not helping them get more marketing. They’re helping them with anything. They just need to pick something, but it can be any of those things.

Sam: Yeah. We start off by helping them pick a niche. Their niche might be yoga instructing. It might be horse dentistry or something like that.

Andrew: Let’s say it’s yoga instructors. If someone says, “I want to be a consultant. I want to work with yoga instructors because I love yoga,” what would they do for those yoga instructors?

Sam: We need to find the problem.

Andrew: I see. That’s when you’d have them call up their potential customers, the people who are yoga instructors, understand their problem, find a commonality and then as a consultant, their job would be to solve that common problem. Is that right?

Sam: Well, it’s going to be the same. People are going to have their current situation, which is who they are right now and how they feel and everything. Then they’re going to have their desired self. They’ve convinced themselves that yoga is the vehicle to bring themselves to that destination. That’s how all of business works. People have just convinced themselves that this is the vehicle to bridge to that thing there.

We want to understand that clearer than anyone else in the market. A lot of people think that people are buying yoga because they want yoga. No one buys yoga because they want yoga. No one buys Mixergy because they want Mixergy. They buy it to achieve something and to get a desired version of themselves, which they’ve got on their mind. So, that’s how I help my consultants differentiate themselves from everyone else. We just solve the problem better than anybody else.

Andrew: How many phone calls does it take to yoga instructors, for example, before you understand what the solution is that you’re going to be selling as a consultant?

Sam: That’s so. . . I couldn’t give a number there.

Andrew: Are we talking about 3 or 30 or it could be anywhere in between?

Sam: If someone has been doing yoga for a while and as soon as they understand my way of thinking, it could click without any calls because it’s been right in front of their face for years. No one has ever told them to think like this. It could just come immediately. But if someone is brand new and they’ve never done anything to do with yoga and this is just something they want to do, it could be 100 or more.

Andrew: You have people who have done this, who have made hundreds of phone calls?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: And they don’t give up? They just will keep making those phone calls?

Sam: Of course. Some people give up.

Andrew: What do you do to keep them making those phone calls? Frankly, making ten phone calls is tough for people.

Sam: Well, I don’t make them do anything. I mean, it’s really simple. What I say is you have to work out which is more painful, failure in not getting what you want or making some phone calls.

Andrew: Mindset. People who work with you said, “Ask him about mindset,” right? You’ve worked on mindset. You’ve done YouTube videos on mindset for your people, right?

Sam: Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of my time, too much of my time, trying to figure out that hidden thing which is always blocking everyone because you can show someone some tactics. You can show them a path to follow and they don’t do it. You’ve seen that a million times. It happened to me too. For most of my business life, I knew exactly what I needed to do but I couldn’t do it. That bugged me a lot was like, “What is this hidden invisible thing which is just pulling on my heals all the time?”

Andrew: Give me an example. What’s one thing that you knew you should have done but you didn’t do? You seem like a go-getter. You seem like someone who’s working hard.

Sam: Well, back when I was in The Foundation, I think it took me three months before I started making calls to the property management.

Andrew: Really?

Sam: Yeah. I couldn’t even get out of bed.

Andrew: Literally couldn’t get out of bed because you were depressed?

Sam: It’s so much cozier staying asleep, right? I forget about this now because I’ve been able to build my character and hunger a lot since then, but if I think back to those times, yeah, the biggest problem I had was getting out of bed in the morning.

Andrew: And so if you find someone who can’t get out of bed in the morning, what can you say to them that gets them to make a dozen phone calls or a hundred phone calls?

Sam: You have to rewire your whole brain, really. What I’ve found is it’s just this conflict of self. So, your whole life, people grow up and they try and define, “Who am I?” That’s the question that everyone has kind of got all the time. They’re like, “Who am I?” They try something, “That’s not me. This is me. These people are like me. I associate with this thing. I am this person.” This sense of self and this sense of character gets very strong and defined over time.

And then as humans, it’s just natural for us to desire something more than who we are. So then you start thinking of this person who you want to be. That’s when all the conflict comes because now you’ve got who you are and now you’ve got who you want to be and whenever you try and be this other person, those two selves are just at war.

This is why you picked up and thought maybe I had kind of been like fraudulent when I first spoke to you is because that’s how I felt. I was always torn all the time. I was like, “I’m saying I’m this person but I’m this like kid from New Zealand. I’m young and no one is probably going to believe me.” These thoughts are going through my mind all the time. So, that’s what naturally I evoke from other people.

This is the massive battle which everyone has every single day in business. The problem I have noticed is that people try and define, “Who am I?” and that’s a hopeless thing to define because once you define that, it can be massively inaccurate. At the time, if you’re feeling really down, who am I is not a very good situation. Now your actions each day are going to align with making that self-fulfilled, right?

Andrew: Right.

Sam: So, people have been asking the wrong question their whole life. It’s not, “Who am I?” but it’s, “Who am I becoming?” That’s the real question. Life isn’t static. You’re not someone and then that’s it. If it was, it’s hopeless if you started in a poor situation. That means you were forever doomed. So, it’s, “Who am I becoming?” That’s the question you’ve got to start asking yourself. I get people to take time to carefully design and articulate who that person is one year out, two years out down to how they dress, how a friend would talk about them if they were like gossiping about them–

Andrew: You want them to say that to you? What format does that take the way that they tell it to you?

Sam: They don’t tell it to me. I give them the course and the course tells them to complete these exercises.

Andrew: And where do they do that? This is like getting too technical, but are we talking about like a PDF and they’re supposed to do this on their own?

Sam: Yeah. It’s quite a fun thing to do.

Andrew: This is very Buddhist. The reason I say it’s Buddhist because I don’t know if you know the book “Becoming Steve Jobs.” It’s the Steve Jobs biography that the Apple people, the executives at Apple recommend. They seem to be behind it. The whole premise of that book is that if you try to understand who Steve Jobs is, you miss it. That’s the problem with the Steve Jobs biography, the one by Walter Isaacson. It just kept trying to understand who he was at any given moment.

But Steve jobs, according to “Becoming Steve Jobs” was someone who was becoming. Who was he becoming? He was in this evolutionary state and unless you understand that he was constantly in that becoming state, you failed to get who he is and instead you pick up on how, as Walter Isaacson did, he’ll order a bunch of different orange juice glasses and then toss them back or he’ll park in the wrong parking spot. You pick up on the details without understanding the journey that those details are a small part of.

Sam: There’s no like–have you heard of like the Hegelian dialectic?

Andrew: No.

Sam: It’s fascinating stuff. But it’s basically where you have a thesis and then an antithesis and then the two collide and there synthesis. It’s basically how–it’s the law of nature. It’s how everything in the world works. And it’s like if you have being and nothing, you can’t describe being without nothing and you can’t describe nothing without being. They cancel each other out and it becomes becoming. This is what we do in the sales script.

This is what we do in everything. I play on this duality constantly. There is no like, “Who am I?” and there is no, “Who am I not?” It’s constantly, “Who am I becoming?” and people get things wrong all the time because they just define it as one static thing. Then they have no idea that now once they’ve done that, every action they take is going to self-fulfill what they define that as.

Andrew: You talk about this in this program?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: I’m on one of your websites. In that accelerator program you talk about this?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: Where did you even get this stuff? I feel this is a part of you I’ve never known before.

Sam: I read so much different stuff.

Andrew: It was always there?

Sam: It was nowhere near this good. It’s taken five or six years of me reading our mindset, trying to hack my own brain and trying to do it with 10,000 other people to get it this clear, right? But in the beginning, it was nowhere near as clear, as articulate as how I’m saying it now. I’ve always been trying to figure out that extra piece.

That’s always been that x-factor that has made my course go so well. It’s not just tactics and strategies. It’s how to hack your own brain so that you can make progress. Once you identify who you want to be, now your daily choice of actions are going to be in line with that instead of in line with who you currently are. And you do feel pretty awkward when you do those things, but that is 100% mandatory in order to change.

Andrew: What’s a book that you read about this that you recommend?

Sam: The ones where I’ve got all the good stuff from are very out there, like strange books.

Andrew: I like that.

Sam: What’s one which would have helped me a lot?

Andrew: Do you want to spend some time thinking about it? I’ll talk about Toptal and then we’ll come back into it.

Sam: Hegel and “The Science of Logic.”

Andrew: What is it called?

Sam: No one should buy this book because it’s so heavy duty. But understanding the science of logic was really important for me. Logic is our like computer which we have in our brain and I wanted to know who invented this thing. It was a guy called Hegel.

Andrew: George Hegel, “The Science of Logic?”

Sam: Yeah. I understood how logic came about from the beginning of time for humans and society.

Andrew: An 844-page book on logic. And you really read this thing? It’s not like it’s–

Sam: I’ve read like 16 of Hegel’s books, not just that one.

Andrew: This is the kind of book that from what I can see here, you just talk about it and you sound smart. But this is a thing. You’ve read it.

Sam: On its own, it’s not going to do anything. It’s going to go really intense on the science of logic. But the science of logic is nothing without all of this other stuff. Where people go wrong, they’re always looking for that one secret thing. Truthfully, there isn’t that one secret thing. You’ve got to learn quite a lot of different things in order to create a successful business or really change who you are and your situation and all of that.

But you asked where I got the duality of things. I understood that from Hegel because human beings can’t describe, can’t understand anything without an opposite. So, if I was to tell you, “Hey, Andrew, right now in this room I’m in, it’s 436 purple carpet monkey degrees,” and I was to ask you, “Is that hot or cold?”

Andrew: Right.

Sam: You have no idea. You need something to measure that against.

Andrew: You give me a temperature of 70 and I compare it to a warm day in San Francisco and I think, “It’s a little cooler than that.”

Sam: But you see, as soon as you’ve done that, that is now false because you have no idea that what you compared that to was accurate or not.

Andrew: Why not? Don’t I know what a warm day here is?

Sam: If I said it was 436 purple monkey degrees–

Andrew: Right. At that point, I can’t. It’s only if you give me a number.

Sam: You have no idea what scale purple monkey degrees works on compared to degrees Fahrenheit. The point I’m trying to make is you need something to compare it to, to understand one thing. That’s the human brain. It needs two sides. One thing on its own makes no sense, right?

Andrew: Okay. Fair point. I’m actually just sending this to my Kindle, this book by Hegel. Why don’t I talk about my sponsor? The second company is called Toptal. We’re going to get into this because I’ve got more to ask you about, like why did you make phone calls to every single person who signed up to one of your programs? I also want to know about Tai Lopez, what happened there. I want to know about rebuilding your course. Why do you keep rebuilding it? Do you charge people for it?

But first, I’ve got to tell people about Toptal. Actually, Sam, when you and I did–you did a course for me with Mixergy. A course is where I bring someone on who is especially good at something to teach it. You taught how to find developers because hiring good developers is really tough if you’re building software.

Well, that’s where Toptal comes in. The people at Toptal said, “You know what? There are these excellent developers out there in the world. They just don’t want to live in San Francisco. They don’t want to live near Mountain View. They want to live wherever they happen to live right now. Frankly, it’s harder and harder for smart people to get to the US, so maybe they don’t want to bother trying, but they’re great developers.”

So, Toptal said, “We’re going to put together a network of these developers. We’ll test the heck out of them.” They probably said, “We’ll test the hell out of them. We’ll really test them because smart developers want to be tested. They want to be put through the paces because they’re proud of how well they do and they like solving puzzles to try to see if they could be one of the best of the best.” So, Toptal said, “We’re going to put together a series of tests to see who the best of the best developers are and we’ll only say to the top three percent, “You can be in our network.’”

Once they got the top three percent into their network, it started to build on itself where people in the development world knew, “If you pass that test, you’re one of the best.” It became a badge of honor, a point of pride. So, once Toptal got that reputation, once they got that database of people who are fantastic developers, they said, “Look, if you are out there and if you’re trying to hire developers, we’ve got them right here.” People started hiring from Toptal part-time, full-time, whole development teams. This is something that took me a while to understand.

There are some dev shops that only focus on one thing they’re good at, like iOS development. When you say, “Can you also build an Android app?” They say, “Yeah, we can.” The thing is, they don’t have Android developers in house. They call up Toptal and say, “It’s time to get some Android developers. You know how we work,” and Toptal understands the way they work. Boom. They bring developers from Toptal that act as if they’re working for the company, the consulting company that’s hiring them out. So, now an iOS shop also has Android capabilities. They also have Windows capabilities, etc.

That’s the way people have been using Toptal for years because they’re that good. There are actual whole companies that are like ghost companies where there are one or two people working in them, but when it’s time to get on a job, they will go to Toptal and they’ll hire all the developers from there and that’s who they contract out for their clients.

All right. Toptal is a great company. I got an email from someone as we’re talking from a guy named Jason saying, “Hey, Andrew, quick note. I visited the URL you’ve been talking about for Toptal. It goes to a 404 page.” It doesn’t. He has a typo. I hope everyone else understands not to make this typo.

If you want to get the special offer they’re giving Mixergy people, which is 80 hours of Toptal developer credit when you pay your first 80 hours in addition to a no risk trial period of up to two weeks, if you want that, go to Toptal.com/Mixergy. The misspelling that this guy had was he typed in Mixer and then the letter G. No. It’s Mixergy, M-I-X-E-R-G-Y. So, it’s top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, Toptal.com/Mixergy.

Sam, who are you becoming? Who is it that you envision yourself being two years from now?

Sam: It’s important that this is not static. It changes all the time, right? I learned all that–that thing I was aiming for wasn’t the best thing to aim for. I needed to change that a little bit. So, it’s forever changing. But right now, I like to see myself as like the Henry Ford of consulting because back in the day, motor vehicles were only for the elite.

They only for the top tier of society and normal people didn’t have a motor vehicle. Henry Ford looked at motor vehicles and thought, “Why can’t they be for everybody? Why can’t everyone own one of those and have the benefits of one of those?” That’s what he did. He took something out of reach of most people and made it in reach of everyone.

With consulting, I like the word consulting because it has this sort of–when people hear that word, they think it’s like something reserved for only the elite people, like you have to go to Harvard. You have to have an MBA. You have to wear a suit and you go and work for a company like Boston Consulting Group. That’s what people think consulting is. People think, “I can’t be a consultant. I don’t have a degree. I’m not from Harvard.

Andrew: Or the opposite. They think if you’re a consultant, it just means unemployed and you’ll take any shred of a job that you can get, right?

Sam: That’s typically what people think of coaching. That’s why I chose consulting specifically because these words all really mean the same thing, but they don’t have the same effect on people. That’s why I like playing with words a lot and that’s specifically why I chose consulting, because it has that more formal appeal to it.

Andrew: Consulting also–your people don’t just do coaching. They actually do the work, don’t they? If I hire somebody to do ad buys for me, one of your students, they’ll actually buy the ads, right? They don’t coach me through doing it.

Sam: It totally depends. They could be doing a full service thing. They could be just doing advising. That’s all up to them and at which stage in the journey they’re at. The better you get at something, the more hands off you can be from it. When you’re starting, you’ve got to do it all. That’s the only way you learn.

What I like to think of is most people see consulting as something which is out of reach. I like to see myself as someone who is making it so that everyone can be a consultant and it doesn’t matter what you’re consulting on. It can be anything–diet, relationships, your wardrobe, anything. Now I want to really change the traditional path from people going to college and then going and getting a job. I want to change it to where people go to Consulting.com and then become a consultant.

Andrew: Instead of getting a job?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: What did you pay for Consulting.com the domain?

Sam: It was in between $1 million and $300,000, somewhere in there?

Andrew: So, over $300,000, no more than $1 million.

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: Why not say the exact number?

Sam: Because I think with a company like mine, I’ve got some plans for it in terms of like I do want to float it eventually. The speculative value of some things can mean a lot. It’s not a wise idea to mention every asset on the balance sheet, you know what I mean?

Andrew: Okay. Let’s see here. . . Building beyond you is one of the questions that I had. You started out just you. In fact, I felt like if you couldn’t get to respond to people’s comments in the message boards back when it was message boards, then they weren’t going to get a response from anyone at the company. Now you’re going beyond you. Can you talk through how you’re thinking of hiring people?

Sam: Sure. It’s been my biggest challenge for the last year in terms of hiring people. I’ve been–I’m one of those people who found it very hard to let go of anything. But I’ve been forced into a situation where I have no choice anymore. That was when I finally started to try things. So, what was the question specifically?

Andrew: I want to know how you’re thinking about hiring people. I think that hiring is really challenging, finding the right people, figuring out how to get them into a team where it’s just been Sam and you’re the guy identified with the company so closely. It’s hard. What’s your process? How are you thinking about that? Or is it too early for you?

Sam: Well, the first–the place where I got my first employees, we’ve got about 25 now. So, we do have them. A lot of them are really good. The best place to start is in your customers because you have a lot of people in your customer list who understand they’re very early in their journey and it would probably be a smart idea to go work for a company for a year because you’re going to pick up a lot of skills and they’re happy to do that.

So just going out to your customer list and saying, “Hey, look this is who I’m looking for. If any of you are interested, let me know.” That’s the best place to start because these people care so much about the vision that they’ve paid money for it. When you go out and you post on a job board like Indeed or something, people are coming to you and they’re asking for money. If you go from your customer list, these people have paid money to be a customer. They know your product.

Andrew: They’ve literally bought into your mission.

Sam: Yes, exactly. So, that is the best place to get people from, hands down. My first probably five, six people came from there.

Andrew: Okay. Then how were you think about the way you structure your company?

Sam: This one has changed a lot as I try different things, make mistakes. I quite like Jeff Bezos’ idea of small teams, like no more than like four people. I like his saying you should be able to feed your team with one pizza.

Andrew: Sorry, you were saying the whole team should be about four people and everyone should be able to eat on one pizza. You just need one pie to feed the whole team. When you’re thinking about organizing your teams, what kinds of teams do you have? What are they focused on?

Sam: Well, right now I’ve got one team which does webinar, chat moderation. That’s nine people on its own.

Andrew: Just moderating chats while you do webinars?

Sam: It’s automated webinars.

Andrew: I see.

Sam: There’s only one. I only have one of them. But there are people on there 24/7, 365 who if you ask a question on there, they will respond to that. It’s very important and it’s such a basic thing. If someone’s asking a question, they’re obviously pretty interested. They should be able to have someone to respond to them. So, I’ve got webinar moderators. I have website live chat moderators. I have coaches.

My customer community is quite big now. We have Facebook groups. We put all of our customers in one Facebook group together. I like it because it’s a pretty ballsy thing to do because if your product sucks, you’re going to get ruined. It forces you into a situation where you have to make sure your stuff works. There’s no other possible way. Otherwise you’re just going to get destroyed.

Andrew: I see. You’ve got a team of people who are helping with that too?

Sam: Yeah. There are people moderating in there. I recently hired a community manager to make sure the community runs smoothly. I’ve now got an HR person because just hiring people has become a full-time job. It’s moving quite quickly now and we’ve got quite a lot of people, should have in between 50 and 60 by the end of the year?

Andrew: Okay. You used to make these phone calls. I was so fascinated by why you would do it. Sachit on our team is someone who went through your program. I remember him saying that he decided to sign up for something but only after he got on a phone call with you. I said, “This guy is an Infusionsoft guy.” You, Sam, you do marketing automation, why are you getting on the phone with someone instead of just having a webpage that explains it all? Why’d you do it back then?

Sam: Because I didn’t know what needed to be on that webpage.

Andrew: Okay. So, if Sachit said, “I want to do some consulting. This guy Sam is talking about it. He’ll get on a call with me. He’ll take you up on that phone call and you’ll understand his problems and that’s what you’ll put on a website and say, “I think I can solve that problem.”

Sam: I need to understand what the person’s current is and what their desired situation is. I need to be able to play those two sides off against each other. If I’m new in a niche or an industry, I don’t know enough about the market to write good copy that can evoke those emotions out of somebody. I had to do thousands of phone calls before I understood my market good enough that I could write copy and strike those nerves. After doing so many of these calls, all the patterns start to pop out of the screen and they appear to you. You’re like, “Everyone is this currently and they all want to be this and they believe these things are blocking them but all of these are actually false. It turns out these things are actually blocking them.” If you do enough of anything and one specific thing, the patterns emerge and you know what’s going on at a whole other level, like it’s like if you’re zoomed in real close and talking to one person, it seems like they’re really unique, but if you do enough of one thing in a specific area and then step back, they all fall into a particular pattern.

Andrew: All right. I get that. So, that’s how you did the–at the time the program was more expensive. I think it was like $5,800 or something. Now the accelerator we talked about is like under $2,000 right?

Sam: Yes.

Andrew: Because it takes less of your time in the accelerator?

Sam: I still have that other program which is called Uplevel Consulting. Uplevel Consulting is designed for someone who’s already got a consulting business and is already making money and they want to take up to that next level, whereas Consulting Accelerator is for people who are really just getting started.

Andrew: Okay. Let’s see what else. Another thing I heard was once you got into Facebook advertising, that’s when things took off. You were a maniac when it comes to advertising, true?

Sam: I spent a lot of money on it.

Andrew: How much did you spend on Facebook advertising?

Sam: Most of the time $30,000 a day.

Andrew: $30,000 a day?

Sam: Yeah.

Andrew: What are you doing differently? What have you figured out about Facebook marketing that others hadn’t? There’s a big smile.

Sam: I love this so much.

Andrew: You do, huh?

Sam: Yeah because it’s the complete opposite to what everyone thinks. Everyone obsesses over the market, the parameters of the audience. They’re like, “Who is Sam targeting? Is he targeting Mixergy page or Frank Kern page? What’s he targeting?” That’s where everyone gets tripped up with Facebook. They go and define the specific thing and then they throw ads in front of these people. You’ll be able to shake a few people out of that group, but now you’ve exhausted it. Now what?

The thing to understand about Facebook is that it has a brain, like now that it can optimize for conversions, it has like an invisible hand that is constantly shuffling things around trying to find people. Because I’ve trained my conversion pixels so much, I started originally by targeting specific things. When people purchased or they registered for a webinar, it would fire a conversion pixel and say, “This person did this thing.”

After you fire, say, a thousand fires on a pixel, it starts to build up a lot of intelligence of who this person looks like. It starts to recognize all these things. The more intelligence that pixel acquires, the larger the audience you can set for it. It can go in there and hunt for those people based on what it knows. So, I’ve put over 700,000 fires on my conversion pixel so it is so smart that I can target America and I do.

Andrew: What do you mean by–oh I see, you don’t have to buy Mixergy.

Sam: I go United States.

Andrew: You don’t even have to customize it.

Sam: And my pixel goes in there and it’s looking. It’s so smart and so well-trained that it just finds people.

Andrew: You teach this also in the course, right, Facebook?

Sam: Yeah, not to this extreme because no one spends enough money to need to know it to that extreme, but I do teach how to do it, yeah.

Andrew: Tai Lopez, what’s the deal with him? I’m going to interview him in a little bit. The reason I’ve held off on interviewing him for so long is I didn’t know what to make of the guy. I think I’ve got an angle on him. What are you working on with him? What did you do with him?

Sam: It’s quite interesting because we’re such opposites. Ty is a very extroverted and is very out there and I’m extremely introverted. I do like one Facebook post every two months. He’s on Facebook Live like for four hours a day. What actually happened is my friend Shawn works with Tai and he knew my conversion numbers and he knew my numbers were insanely high in terms of ROI and everything.

He was looking at Tai’s numbers and he was making a lot of money but his conversion numbers weren’t as good. He thought, “Tai’s got so much volume and he’s got so much fame. Sam has so much finesse and so much–his conversion numbers are so good but he has nowhere near the fame.” He thought, “What if we combine these two together?”

It was really a very powerful partnership because Tai could just throw volume into my system like nothing else I’d ever seen and I could provide those really optimal conversion rates. So, together the two things were really good.

Andrew: What do you mean he sends you volume?

Sam: Tai’s kind of like an Oprah. He has a platform. He has fame and he has awareness and he has a massive list and a massive following. He didn’t really have something specific to sell people. So, Oprah has people on her show who are a specific expert in this one thing. The specific expert on their own doesn’t have enough fame. Oprah on her own, she’s got the fame but not the specificity. You put the two together and it works really well. It’s exactly what happened with Tai and myself.

Andrew: I see. So he’s got his list and you sell your stuff to his list on an affiliate basis?

Sam: Yeah. So he gets a commission on every single person he sends through.

Andrew: So, when we say last year $18.25 million, what percentage of that went to partnerships like and including Tai?

Sam: Tai alone, I don’t want to give specific numbers just because it’s private for him, but it’s in between $4 million and $6 million just from Tai’s traffic.

Andrew: Yeah. His list is unbelievable. His fame is unbelievable.

Sam: It’s got to be in the millions.

Andrew: I think that some people may not know who he is, but they’ll recognize him as the guy that has all the cars behind him and the books.

Sam: That, “Here in my garage” ad, that turned into a meme.

Andrew: It did. You’re right. It turned into a meme. People created takeoffs on that. It was him in his garage with his Lamborghini and his bookcase and an explanation of why those two need to go together.

Sam: That one ad built him. You learn that too. It’s like one thing can be so powerful. That one ad built everything for him.

Andrew: I said earlier that we talk about rebuilding the course, but rebuilding the course basically means you create a course and you keep scrapping it and coming up with like version two and now you’re coming up with version 3.0.

Sam: It’s more like, honestly, it’s probably version 17 or 18. Even when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it and people tell me this is the best course I’ve ever done or this is the best course in the world, I still just for fun because I just am like, “I’m going to make it even better.” I just try and do that at least two times a year. I want to completely throw it out.

Andrew: Delete the videos, the whole thing?

Sam: Completely rebuild it from scratch.

Andrew: So, if I go onto this page right now and I buy it, do I get it all at once? I see. Each week I get a new section, right?

Sam: Uh-huh.

Andrew: Fucking A. I’m buying it right now. I don’t know what the hell I’m getting, but I want to see the mindset stuff. I don’t even want to be a consultant. I’m going to say it right now. I’m not going to be one of your success stories because I have no interest in being a consultant. All I want to know is what the fuck are you doing? I want to know how are you getting people to tell you their problems on the phone. I want to know what you’re talking about with mindset. I’m really curious about that. I’m always into that. I’m buying it right now.

Sam: The mindset stuff is really what gets people.

Andrew: What is it?

Sam: What is what?

Andrew: That what really gets people?

Sam: The mindset piece.

Andrew: The mindset. I’m curious about that. I’m curious about the scripts. I’ve never bought anything while I was on a call. It’s a good thing or maybe a bad thing that I have LastPass. I should have actually asked you for a freaking discount. I don’t care about that. Here. Awesome choice. Look forward to working with you. There’s a letter for you. Looking forward to it. The email is going to come from @SamOvens. You can expect a response within 12 hours, 24 hours max.

Sam: That’s if you don’t get your login.

Andrew: Oh, got it. Okay.

Sam: You should be emailed your logins pretty much immediately.

Andrew: My invoice receipt. I know invoice, people in Europe always ask for invoices. There. I got it. Here’s a copy of your receipt. The receipt is coming in. I got the address. This is your address right now, 750 3rd Avenue in Manhattan?

Sam: That’s not my personal address. I used to have my personal one there and I actually had started to get visitors. Now we have an address for postage and my personal address is different.

Andrew: Okay. Cool. You know what? I should have asked you for a discount for me. I know you wanted to offer something for the audience. You were going to offer some kind of URL. Why don’t you think about what’s at that URL and what it is. While you do that, I’ll say thank you to my two sponsors and then we’ll close out with that.

So, my two sponsors if you’re listening to me–now I’ve got another call. I wish I could just like spend 20 minutes at least going through what I just bought. But I’ll finish this off by saying my two sponsors are the company that will help you hire your next great developer. They’ve done it for so many people in my audience. It’s called Toptal, top as in top of the mountain, tal as in talent, Toptal.com/Mixergy.

And the second one is the company that will help you close more sales because they keep you or your team organized. It’s just too hard for me to explain here. Once you see it, you’re going to get it instantly. It’s like me telling you what’s so special about the Mona Lisa using words instead of saying, “Look at it. It will make sense.” So, here it is, go to Pipedrive.com/Mixergy and you’ll totally get why I’ve been raving about this for years.

All right. Sam, what are we closing out with? What’s your URL? Do we send people to Consulting.com, to SamOvens.com? Do you have a special URL?

Sam: Sure. So just go to Sam–it’s probably easier to go to Consulting.com/Mixergy.

Andrew: Consulting.com/Mixergy. There’s nothing there now, right?

Sam: There will be something there by the time it needs to be there.

Andrew: You want to say what’s going to be there.

Sam: The best way is to attend a free webinar. Regardless if you want to buy or not, you’re going to go away with some valuable lessons just from that webinar alone.

Andrew: All right. Cool. Well, thanks for doing this, Sam. When do I get in? Now that I’ve bought this, when do I actually get to get into this community?

Sam: You should receive logins.

Andrew: You’re right. I did get it. Here it is. Welcome to the accelerator, a consulting accelerator. There’s my username and crazy passwords that no one can figure it out. Cool. One more thing–I’m writing a book on people who understand problems and create businesses based on it. Is there one of your students who’s like really good at understanding problems their customers have and creating solutions and selling them?

Sam: I’m extremely good at it. Who else would be?

Andrew: Think about it. I want to follow up with you. I’ve got like Airbnb in there.

Sam: I’m happy to help you out with it. I love solving problems. That’s what I love doing.

Andrew: Okay. I want to understand clear examples of how you talk to customers, understood their problems and then created solutions for them. All right. Cool, Sam. Thank you so much for being on here. It’s consulting.com/Mixergy. Thank you all for being a part of Mixergy. Bye, everyone.