630 – Give your followers something they want: Tom talks Fastest Product on Earth

Episode 630 – Fastest Product
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 630 of Screw the Commute podcast? Today, we're going to talk about the fastest product on earth that you can produce. I bet you don't know what that is. All right. Hope you didn't miss Episode 629 How to Be a Great INTERVIEWER. I was talking to a client in Australia about being a great podcast guest. That was episode 211. And then she asked me, Well, do you have an episode on being a great interviewer? And I said, No, I don't, but I will. And I did one on episode 211. No, excuse me. Episode 629 So check that out any time you want to get to it back episode. Of course you go to screwthecommute.com slash and then the episode number that was 629 How to be a Great INTERVIEWER. And I got to tell you, being a podcast guest can really, really help your career. And if you're great at it, it'll help it even more.

[00:01:29] All right. Let's get to the main event. Guess what the fastest product on earth is? It's coaching or mentoring. And I got to say my piece about this because I don't really like the term coaching.

[00:01:45] And I'll tell you why. Every low life on earth that never did a darn thing in their life. Wants to be your life, coach. Okay. And and for you, professional coaches out there that have really, you know, got into it and and do a great job. Beautiful. Love it. But you're still being surrounded by a bunch of lowlifes that never did anything and kind of confusing and putting a lot of noise in the industry. So I'm against the term coaching. I heard some other person say, Well, coaching isn't the same as mentoring. Oh, I don't care the semantics of it in that case. But what I do know that being a coach is not as high a level as being a mentor. That's why I have a mentor program. See, Mentor was the trusted advisor to Odysseus in Greek mythology, so I'd much rather be a trusted advisor than a coach. And like again, all you great coaches out there, I'm happy that you're doing a great job, but you are being surrounded and your industry is being bastardized by a bunch of people that are just looking for a quick buck. Okay, so that's my little soapbox on coaching versus mentoring, but whatever you call it, it's a beautiful way to make money and help people at the same time. Now. I'll give you some examples.

[00:03:06] Maybe you're good at cleaning carburetors. Okay. Maybe you work full time as an accountant or a sales person. I don't know. You know, the the word job is dirty around here, but. But anyway, let's say you're just really good at cleaning carburetors. Well, you could have made money from me because I was having trouble on a carburetor on my four wheeler. I would have been happy to pay you to get on a zoom call with me and point out what I should be doing and and watching out for on my carburetor. Now, let's take it a step further. What if you are a real, experienced four wheel enthusiast who's been riding and maintaining your bikes for years? Well, since I'm a new four wheeler owner, and what I mean by that is I'm a new four wheeler owner, but the four wheeler is used. In fact, it's 16 years old. All right. There are 100 questions I would have been happy to ask you and pay you for your time. Now, does this make you a four wheeler coach or my four wheeler mentor? Well, I don't really care what you call yourself, but my money would have gone in your pocket had you made yourself available to me on the subject of four wheelers and carburetors. And and guess what? That could be in the evenings or weekends, you know, working around family, whatever.

[00:04:38] You know, I would have been there ready to go, ready to pay you. Okay. So here's another thing from my personal life. Another thing I was desperate to get information on was when I was responsible for both my aging parents. I'm the baby of the family. Nobody else did anything but me. So I was really desperate for information on how to handle all the situations that came up, like stopping my legally blind dad from driving. I mean, he was like, Mr. Magoo, those of you all, enough to remember that driving through the intersection and everybody's crashing around them. He actually said to me, he actually said this, they're young. Let them see me. So. So I was, like pulling my hair out. I'm like going to keep him from killing somebody, killing himself. And, you know, but there was loads of stuff like that and with my mother and everything. So I, I really, I would have easily I remember at the time how desperate I was to talk to somebody about what to do about these situations. I would have paid easily 200 bucks an hour just to talk to somebody and ask him, you know, as long as they knew what they were doing, you know, elder care people or whatever. But I couldn't find anybody. Nobody was doing it. And that's a good field to jump into, folks. So. Back to the beauty of coaching or mentoring, whatever you're going to call it, you get to set the rules that suit you, and people will either like those rules and hire you or they won't.

[00:06:18] So if you set yourself up by letting your students or proteges make the rules, you'll quickly burn out because you won't like what you've obligated yourself to do with them. You know, they might say, Well, I need a certain appointment every week this, that and the other. I don't do that. I say no because I might teach you something that takes a day to create. Why would we wait a week for another call? Sometimes you'll be working on something. It'll take you a couple of weeks to create. Why would we waste a call? You just telling me? Hello. How are you? Tom, you? No, no. So. But maybe you do like the structure of a certain time every week. It's up to you. That's what I'm trying to tell you. So for instance, you might only coach on weekends while working a full time. And I have to be careful because I always want to throw up when I say the word j o. Be well. But let's say if a person devotes weekends to their family, they won't join. But so what? Others may be looking for things to do on the weekend when they can really concentrate on your teachings, like, say, for me, I can be coached on my carburetor any time.

[00:07:36] But others may love weekends because they can go out to the garage and immediately try out what you taught them about their carburetor. And hey, Zoom works in a garage just as well as anywhere else, and you might be able to coach them through fixing their carb live. Now. I found I actually found a guy that will live stream with you to fix your refrigerator if you're a do it yourself or like I am. I think he was like $60 an hour. But it's still way cheaper than, you know, for these 20,000 refrigerator things that got in here. And don't call me Nancy Pelosi because I'm not bragging. They're 30 years old. The nice part about it. But so they were icing up and everything. So it would cost me $100 service call. And then the person since has forced kicked out all the people, the regular service people, and they only have a few around the country. And their job is to sell you a 15 to 20000 new one and not fix the old one. All right. Now, I can't prove that. And that's just my opinion from doing all the research I do. But it seems kind of sleazy to me. It's my opinion that that's what's going on. If you'd like to come on and and say something about it from the other perspective, I'm glad to hear it.

[00:08:57] But if you go online and search it out, it kind of appears to be a force and trying to force people into buying an $18,000 refrigerator. And then another other thing to match the match it on the freezer side when these are enormous things and again, they're great. I mean, they're wonderful. 30 some years they've been here. So anyway, I'm just saying that the guy for 60 bucks an hour was could tell me what to do to fix it myself, which I'm going to do it yourselfer. And the same thing with my dishwasher, it would have cost 3 to $400 easily to replace this one $20 part that I got off of eBay. All right. I've done it twice over the 20 years I've lived here. So I spent $40 and saved $600 because I'm going to do it yourself. But people coached me through this on what to do. That's what I'm saying. All right. So back to you. Get to set the rules. Yeah, I'm pretty much a fanatic on how I run my mentor program, and that's why other online gurus won't put their program up against mine, because they'd be embarrassed on how little they give their students compared to me. But C program. Most programs aren't like mine, and you can set all kinds of boundaries to suit yourself and your lifestyle.

[00:10:18] All I care about is whatever you promise somebody you deliver. If not, I may show up at your place and stick a camera in your face and have you explain why you cheated this person. All right, so. So do what you say you're going to do. I don't care if you charge $1,000,000 an hour if if you do what you promised them and they weren't incapacitated mentally, which you have to be to spend $1,000,000 an hour. All right. You're fine with me, but when you overpromise and under-deliver, that's when you're fraudulent. So don't do that. And by doing it the way I do it, word spreads. I have an advertiser on my program other than talking about it on these podcasts, you know, get referrals. Most of the people that come to me are through referrals. Somebody else had a good experience with me because I took care of them, saved them a fortune on messing up their web stuff and made them money. And so they refer me to other people. So that's great. But if you it's it works even more powerfully. If you screw them over, they're going to tell hundreds of people about you. All right. So don't do that. Just set your boundaries, take care of people, and set up to match your lifestyle. You get to decide how much time the person gets with you and in what format. And just like the carburetor example above, your coaching doesn't even have to be that formal.

[00:11:47] Maybe the carburetor help was just a one shot deal. I pay you and I get help. But sometimes it's ongoing, like people do piano and voice lessons all remotely. See, COVID has opened up people's eyes that you can do way more than you thought you could remotely. It doesn't have to even be your main expertise. Listen to this. So I have fatsotennis.com because I'm a tennis nut. Right. I could easily if I felt like it through tennis coaching remotely. Not so much from actual strokes, but from the where to hit the ball and the strategies and all that stuff when you're overweight and out of shape a little bit. All right then. I have protection dogs elite, so I'm not the biggest dog expert in the world, but I've been six, seven years in the dog industry and especially protection dogs. So I know a lot more than the average person about dogs. All right. So I can help people with that self defense. Now, that's something where I can really help you. I've been my entire life and I've been in over 100 violent encounters with bikers trying to kill me. Gunfights, two gunfights, knife fight. And life was at risk every day for six straight years, you know? So I know what I'm doing there. I've been studying it my entire life so I can really help you with that.

[00:13:15] But again, it's not my main expertise. I'm known for Internet marketing, for small business and teaching professional speakers, and then entrepreneurship, basically because I never had a job. All right. So. I could do that if I if I pushed those other things. You know, I'm totally crazy busy taking care of what I got going, but I could do it easily. And speaking of dog training, they're actually doing dog training on Zoom now. All right. And I also I just interviewed a fitness trainer for an upcoming vet per month, which is every September. We honor our veteran entrepreneurs on here on Screw the commute and he's all online this guy. Unless you happen to be local to him he will do stuff locally. But he's he's even going to get an RV and travel the country with his dog and be still be running his business remotely, which is coaching people on fitness and nutrition and all that stuff. Now I know another couple who call themselves digital nomads. I had them on here a couple of hundred episodes ago. You can just search the word nomad or something in the screw the commute search box and you'll find their thing. But they spend three months living at Airbnbs in different countries every three months and they also have a course on how you can save a ton of money on Airbnbs.

[00:14:42] I think they saved like $50,000 with their strategies in in just a few months and they did tell me, you know, they sold their car, got rid of car payments, car insurance, they rented their house and they're making more money. They're making money off their house. And also, they told me an interesting thing. If you decide you want to be a digital nomad, apparently why this is true, I have no idea. But they said their health insurance is way cheaper traveling internationally. I don't get that. I mean, you think it would be more because of all the risk involved in flying? I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, they're saving a ton and they're keeping their business going all and they only work so many hours a day and then they play in the new country the rest of the the day. So it's just a beautiful thing now. Well, how do you get people to give you the money? Well, you got to put your face out there in front of them. Well, it costs nothing to hang out your shingle on Craigslist. You can start an account at fiverr.com or Upwork.com. Now there's places like Facebook Marketplace and offer up. I do all kinds of business there however you got to have a physical product there. But here's the thing.

[00:16:01] If you really want to take advantage of that free advertising, you could always write a quick pamphlet on your topic. Sell it really cheap. I haven't tried this myself because if you're selling the same product over and over and over again, they might think make charge it for ads or something. But but anyway, whatever you create, make sure it leads back to your coaching or mentoring. See, there's always a way to get the word out. Same, but I hear all the time with people. But I don't have a product. Well, my answer is always this snarky. If you have a mouth, you have a product and not being sexual with that comment, although I guess it does apply to that line of work too. But but now let's let's talk about this other thing that has to do with coaching, mentoring, certification. Now, I don't want to step on the toes of people who have gone through some kind of coaching certification. But I can tell you without a doubt, the people that have are a tiny percentage of the people that are doing what I'm suggesting here. Virtually I mean, virtually 0% of people in the world have gone through the coaching federation and all those places. I'm not knocking those places. Good for them. But you absolutely don't have to do it. I mean, training is great, but really, here's all you have to do.

[00:17:40] Help people achieve what they hired you for. That's really the bottom line. You can have all the training in the world of fancy psychological issues and all this. But if you don't help people get where they want to go, you have failed. Now, admittedly, they must do the work. As a coach, you're not. If you if you try to promote these done for you crap, which almost always is done to you, I've got to tell you, if you hear somebody saying done for you immediately think rip off. And it's done to me because there ain't no way they're going to be able to do all the things that really need done for your success at the low price they're trying to suck you in on. So there's done for you. Stuff is all B.S. but anyway. Yeah, they got to do the work. But you must lead the way. And sure, I agree. There's personality issues to learn about how to handle different people agreements and there's other issues to running a program. But you can learn them as you go. If you just always air on what I just said, help them achieve their goals and you will get referrals and you can refine your program as you go. You'll have some setbacks. Sure. It's just not that complicated to help people. All right. So if you want to enjoy what you're good at all the while helping people and getting paid for it, consider starting a coaching mentor program immediately.

[00:19:15] And I say wipe the word coaching, but don't don't bastardize my mentor program terminology either. You better be good and serious about helping people. Well, if you want help with this and the other 1000 things you need to know about, get into my mentor program if you want to see how it really works in the real world for what's how many years now? 25 years. I've been going at this 1700 plus students and no lawsuits. No complaints. That doesn't mean everybody that was in it was successful. There's no if somebody tries to tell you that, guard your wallet and run, I lay the work on you. But guess what? The the people that do the work, virtually all of them are successful. They've either saved a fortune on their online presence or made a lot of money, or both say so. That's the whole point of my program, is to teach you that. And the way I structured it is so you don't have to spend a fortune to get into it. I don't get my big money unless you make money and then it's capped at a certain amount, so you're not stuck with me forever. Nobody on earth has a program like mine, so check it out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.