ABOUT THIS EPISODE
I love meeting entrepreneurs who’ve created multiple successful businesses.
Because starting one successful company is great. But you can be lucky once.
If you do it again and again and again, that’s not luck. That’s a skill.
John Abbas, the founder of Mentr, is one of those entrepreneurs who’s succeeded over and over again. And that’s why I was thrilled to have him on the show.
We talked about everything from how he got his start in business (believe it or not it was a roofing company) … to his first failure with a restaurant … to how he started in network marketing … to how he scaled his first eCommerce business to $160,000 in sales in under 2 years.
Now John is focused on building a company called Mentr, which is completely disrupting the online course world.
You’re going to want to tune into the full show, but here are a few of my big takeaways.
MONEY LOVES SPEED.
So many people have great business ideas locked in their heads. But because they never act on them, nothing happens. John Abbas takes the opposite approach. Whenever he has an idea for a business, he acts on it and works to test it out. This is a common thread throughout his entire life. When he was younger, he met a man who made millions fixing roofs. It sounded like a way better opportunity than what he was doing at the time. So instead of think about it all day, he and his brother packed up their bags and went down to Louisiana in the wake of hurricane Katrina and they fixed roofs. That business fixing roofs gave John the initial capital he needed to start his coffee shop in Las Vegas. And when his restaurant shut down (when the economy collapsed in 2009), he threw himself into building a network marketing business. It’s common theme in John’s career to see a path toward succeeding and immediately go after. I believe this is one of the biggest keys to John’s track record as an entrepreneur.
SIMPLE BUSINESSES CAN MAKE YOU A MILLIONAIRE.
What’s the most successful product in Shark Tank history? A simple sponge called The Scrubdaddy. But it solved a unique problem in a BIG market so it deserved every penny that it made. The point is instead of thinking about the grandest idea possible, think “What’s frustrating lots of people?” And what can I start to help them? For John, people kept asking him the same questions about network marketing every day. So he started his business to solve the problem. The simple planner company turned into a 6-figure business in less than 2 years.
GET MULTIPLE INCOME STREAMS.
When John started his ecommerce business, NemoPro, he didn’t have to take a penny out of the business to pay his business. Since he’d built up a nice, steady, residual income through his network marketing company, he had the freedom of time and money to invest in starting his new company. He also has income from a day care business and crypto mining company. Where other people aren’t able to take risk and pull money out of their company, he’s able to be aggressive and pour money back into advertising and growth. This is a HUGE advantage for John and can’t be overstated. If you can, always try to de-risk your life and diversify your income.
SALES IS THE ULTIMATE SKILL.
The foundation of all business is selling. And John attributes a HUGE portion of his success to learning how to sell in network marketing. And he’s right. In fact, they’ve done studies and found that the #1 job that all self-made billionaires and multimillionaires had in common was working in sales.
START SMALL AND ITERATE.
John Abbas sold his first batch of planners at the convention…He brought 1500 of them and only sold 100. If he looked at the numbers from that event alone, he would have just lost $5k. But selling 100 told him he was on to something. So he kept at it and looked up a year later selling THOUSANDS a year.
PERSONAL BRANDING MATTERS.
If you have a personal brand, you can sell anything when you have the brand. It’s how The Rock is able to sell out Under Armour products in an instant and create the biggest hit movies in the world. And it’s how John is able to move into new businesses all the time and immediately get traction with them.
For more the full interview, tune in here. And don’t forget to find John on Facebook here.
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
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