Trevor Blake is a New York Times best-selling author and entrepreneur who has founded three multi-million dollar companies. You can find him at www.trevorgblake.com In this episode we talk to Trevor about the difference between chasing profit and chasing the mission, hiring the right people at the right time and how to re-energize yourself when things become stale.
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Transcript
Trevor: Billionaires like Ray Dalio, Richard Branson and Bill Gates. All of them do what I call they simply taking quiet time. And so 20 minutes every day they sit down and do nothing. Henry Ford use to do it in his father’s old rundown ranch. This is where I first learned about it from Henry Ford’s autobiography and all biographies. And then he’d sit there and he’d say I have cured all of my problems in 20 minutes of doing nothing.
Kevin: How is it going everyone! Welcome to the Fitness Founders Podcast. I’m Kevin Mannion, VP Marketing here at Glofox. This week I chat with Trevor Blake a serial entrepreneur and author who has founded a number of multi-million dollar businesses. In this episode, we talk about the balance between chasing profit and chasing emission, hiring the right people at the right time, how to re-energize yourself in plateau. Let’s kick off.
Trevor Blake, welcome to the show.
Trevor: Hi Kevin, glad to be on.
Kevin: Great to have you here. Maybe, Trevor, let’s start just maybe give us a little bit of background on yourself. What are you up to these days?
Trevor: Yes. Other people describe me as a serial entrepreneur which always sounds a bit sinister to me but I guess you become that… I’ve built and sold three companies and I’m currently negotiating to sell what would be my fourth company. But I’m a bit also of a late bloomer so I didn’t start my first company until I was 43. And I’ve started each of the companies with a very clear mindset of what the exits are going to be, so build the company, increase profits, exit for a significant multiples. I’ve done successfully three times and hopefully soon be the fourth time.
The industries that I’m in are always healthcare but I’ve been in different fields within the healthcare. So to sort of put the things in context, I started the first company with $200 in 2003 and sold it for $105 million. So it doesn’t make me Google but it’s I’m not [unclear – 02:05] Obviously, being the first company you learn so much that first time so I used my learning experience to start a second which is more on the research and development side. I sold that in two parts close to $300 million by seven years later. You know, again, it doesn’t make me Google, or Facebook, or anything but as a sort of single entrepreneur with a business model that is very much a non-employee type of model. It is a successful endeavor if you like. And so what I haven’t learned through all of that then I took some time out. Actually, I said to my wife I was going to take a sabbatical but she laughed at me. This would be my 38 years so she knows me better than everybody else and then after two weeks of pacing the kitchen floor she said, if I didn’t start something new she would kill me. So I decided to write a book that I’ve been thinking about writing for many years, and I finally felt that I’ve gained the credibility to write this book which is basically it is called Three Simple Steps, and launched it on 2012 and it’s gone off on its own journey. It’s got quite a cool following around the world. It’s in 8 different languages now. So I kind of been busy for a couple of years and then I decided to start this final company which I think will be my last company for a while.
Kevin: Nice. You’ve been busy. Maybe let’s wind back the clock to that first company that you started. What were you doing before that what made you take the plunge into entrepreneurship?
Trevor: I had a pretty regular career in pharmaceuticals and biotechnology who creates successful created pays extremely well and most people are quite content with that. But I think, one of the things that I think makes us, separates an entrepreneur from everybody else that sometimes things get under your skin and they make you mad and you want to do something about it. So in the pharmaceutical industry there was a particular aspect that just made me mad and that was that we tend to ignore groups of patients that had very, very rare diseases because it seems impossible to make a business out of it. The pharmaceutical companies and the biotechnology companies make so much profit. They really should have just sort of charitable approach to those disease population but they didn’t. I had many arguments with the CEO about we need to do this for this small group of patients and then eventually she said to me, “Look, if you feel so strongly about it bug off and do it yourself.” So I did and that’s one of the things that I’ve learned in all the businesses is that… I meet a lot of people who run a business because it is something that they are good at or something that they love to do. I’m not sure always the motivation is there to succeed at the highest level but if you start something because something has made you really mad. Like Richard Branson said, there is no point starting a company unless it makes you totally insane trying to fix something. You know, you have a really strong motivation I always think you have a better chance to success in that situation.
So all of these companies that I’ve started were born from that one thing that made me mad which was we need to take care of these rare disease populations and find a way to make a business model that works. And that’s where I learned my first sort of entrepreneurial tricks was how to make a profitable business without trying to charge people hundreds of thousands of dollars per treatment. And the way I did it really was to go with an outsourced model to limit the number of people that I hired so that we kept the cash flow very positive from day one because you probably know better than I do. A lot of companies fail, but 82% of failures are all for the same reason and that is poor cash flow management. A lot of people understand cash and understand profit but they don’t understand cash flow. That’s what trips most companies up especially in the early days.
Kevin: And tell me you obviously had a good outcome the first time around. What are some of the mistakes or learnings that you had in those very early days?
Trevor: You know a lot of people who start a company come from a regular career where they only know one or two things, so they come from the finance background or in my case the sales and marketing background. The tendency then is when you start your own company is not maybe have the highest degree of confidence and so you say, “Okay, I don’t know anything about the regularity side of the business or I don’t know anything about the manufacturing so I’ll go and hire somebody.” I fortunately couldn’t afford to hire all the people I thought I needed so instead I went and learn those aspects of the business myself. I really was kicking myself that I had not taken the time earlier in my career to go into the finance department and find out what that big issues are or to talk to the manufacturing and distribution guys and find out how a company works together, how all the different functions come together to make an overall success. I sort of scrambled through the first two years of my first company partly to keep the company alive but also trying to understand all these other aspects of the business because I couldn’t afford to hire experts at that time, What I found out was that it is possible to learn it all. You don’t really need to hire experts. And so from that point forward and through my other companies as well I hired consultants as I need them but I really have never hired a full time employee. A lot of people find it hard to believe when they hear the numbers, $300-400 million in enterprise value surely must have an army of people but actually it’s just be me and a bunch of consultants basically.
Kevin: Okay, that’s interesting. I think a lot of people listening here will be starting a business because of a passion or because they see the need to change people’s lives for the better. How do you get the balance right between profitability and that mission you were on to cure disease?
Trevor: I find it follows naturally. My companies have had the one mantle in all the businesses and that is make a positive difference in people’s lives. Have fun doing it, that’s essential, and then enjoy all the rewards about financial and spiritual rewards that come as a natural result of that. And that’s really one of the things I wrote about in three simple steps was that if you start out with a sense of purpose which has in your business it will be having changing people’s lives for the best so that they feel better about themselves so they have more confidence, so they have more energy, all of these positive things. It is very hard to be in a business where you are having that impact on people and not enjoy it and not get both spiritual and profitable reward because if you have to satisfy a customer they come back all the time. I never really worry about profit. I always knew that if I do the right job which was… so the way my business work was we help physicians indentify that they may have this population of patients, you know this is the patient that keeps coming back all the time, they can’t solve it. So we provided them with a diagnostic kit whereby they could test do they really have this very rare disease. And if they did we had a really satisfied customer because the doctor felt like a hero for identifying and then treating the disease. And then we ship medicine immediately to the patient without asking any questions and then sorted out insurance and finance later on. Some people couldn’t afford it so they got it for free but other people have to pay $30 co-pay or whatever. We ended up in a situation where just because we are passionate about wanting to making a difference we found solutions both the happy physician, the happy nurse and also the happy patient. I just think it all flows naturally if you go in with the right attitude.
Kevin: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Tell me, when you came to do the second business, what did you do differently? What had you learned by the time that came around?
Trevor: I’ve become really opinionated about how not to fail a business. I’ve seen so many other companies starting in different fields not just necessarily in the healthcare field. I became an investor or an advisor on the boards of many of these and my advice, and it is the only advice I was ever asked for and nobody ever took my advice. My advice always was be really careful on the early days because the tendency is to immediately hire people that you don’t really need or you think you need them but if you look carefully you will find it is too early, it’s too many people too early and too costly. And then they become a huge distraction because you’d become like father confessor to this people. Everyone gets excited working for a startup but then a year into it they kind of knocking on the door asking for the pay rise, and if you don’t give me this I’m walking because they then have the power over you. And so I advice everybody, and so my second company, I was very careful not to hire anybody in the first couple of years. I tell people think really hard about it. Do you really need a personal assistant? Do you really need a sales guy and a marketing guy? Should you be the one that’s out there talking to your customers and then a lot of people they just dismiss it. And they two years later they’d say to me, I wish I had taken that advice because we’re having to do another round of financing. You are far earlier than you expect it.
For me on the second company and the third company that was the critical part of it. I started to advertise business model whereas before was born out of necessity. But second, third and fourth time, it was the deliberate decision on my part, we are going to go with an outsource model; which doesn’t particularly apply to your business I don’t think because you are a brick and mortar business and you have to have employees to get the right level of customer satisfaction. But I still see it in every business. I just see over hiring in every business and that’s what kills businesses early because people need to be paid on time. You can’t say well I’ll pay in three months time whereas with your suppliers you’ll be saying to them you want three month terms etc. People are the hardest part of a business I think. It is a big cash drain early on and if you can’t find ways to slow down that cash drain or about it in certain circumstances then you really should do.
Kevin: Yeah, because I love the people that I talk to here, successful business people talk about empowering their teams, finding people to do somewhat the busy work that they are doing. How do you think you get the balance right there? Or what do you say to counteract that advice?
Trevor: I’ll use a little analogy, so if you just bought a new house you wouldn’t hire a full time handyman to sleep in the house just in case something went wrong. But that’s typically what people do in a business. They hire all these people and a lot of times they’re not busy, they might one day be busy. Let’s say your house is successful and you end up buying four houses, at that point it might make sense to hire a full time handyman because the economy scale there. There are enough things going wrong in four houses where this person he was going to be busy. But often in a lot of businesses if they are honest with themselves, and often a lot of entrepreneurs, we get an ego boost by hiring people. That makes us feel good to organize and lead the team and do all those things. But if you are honest with yourself, you ask yourself the question, do I really need all of these people right now or can I get away with some part time people? Can I get away with doing some of that stuff that really I’ve had someone to do because actually I just don’t enjoy doing it. Well, sorry, roll up yourselves and find out a way to do it. You might find you do enjoy it in the end. I find with a lot of entrepreneurs, I’m an investor in a number of companies now, they are typically afraid. A lot of entrepreneurs are surprisingly a little introverted then, I’m an introvert myself, and they are afraid of going out there and dreaming a business, sales and marketing and talking to potential customers. So they hire people to do the stuff they don’t like and they’ll sit in their office and play with finances. It is fatal to a young company.
Kevin: Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that side of us. How do these companies differ? So say your third company specifically what do they do that was different to the first two?
Trevor: Well, cash makes all the difference. On the first one I started with nothing. Second one obviously I took a nice profit. I didn’t get all the $105 million because I brought in investors eventually. With a little bit of a track record I realized that bringing in investors does far more for the company than just bringing cash. They bring in a network, they bring in ideas, they connect you with all kinds of opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise see. And so on the second company and in the third company I made I brought investors into it really early even though you could say theoretically I didn’t need the cash like I did in the first company. The challenge with that is entrepreneurs are always unwilling to give up equity and return for the funds. It is a hard thing to do but I believe it is better to own 10% of a $100 million company than 100% of nothing, so mentally you have to get over that factor.
On a small company, I think I can get through with the money I have on hand. But I guarantee you probably can’t go out and get an investor just to give you that little bit of that delta so that you don’t run into cash flow problem somewhere down the line. There is a lot of cash flow problems on the entrepreneurs vault. On the business’ vault it is something that happens to one of your suppliers or one of your vendors and suddenly you find yourself in a crunch where you have to go out and replace them and that’s very expensive. A manufacturer just turned around and said we’re not making this project for you anymore. And they were making it for about $50,000 a year, so I went out to find another manufacturer and the minimum I could get was $3 million a year. So if you don’t have investors with you at that point you are pretty much dead. I recommend everybody if you are in a business model where it is possible to bring in investment, and it doesn’t have to be venture capital or angel capital, it can be in a form of lending through convertible notes and things like that, do that as early as possible because I’ll guarantee you’ll never regret it.
Kevin: Yes. You are a fan of definitely bringing people along the journey but more of on the perspective of getting investors in who maybe take a slice but give you that extra cash versus a ton of employees who maybe the money leaks out of the business before you have got time to grow the business.
Trevor: Exactly. Some are better than I have.
Kevin: Okay, alright, very good, very good, makes a lot of sense. We will move on a little bit so after your success, I think three instances, you wrote out a book in 2012 call Three Simple Steps. So maybe tell me a little bit about the book and why did you decide to write a book?
Trevor: Because I’ve seen so many people start and fail, that was one thing. Secondly, I believe wholeheartedly you have to give back in whatever way so life has been very good to me. I’ve had successes and I’ve also formed strong opinions during those successes. I’ve made a lot of mistakes and so I think it is only appropriate to share that experience with other people who might be interested in learning about it and avoiding making the same mistakes and maybe stealing a little bit of the good ideas. And there are sort of entrepreneur groups that are about, and that is really what I want to do with the book.
But also I was born in Liverpool, but I grew up in North Wales. We were really poor. I mean my father was at work my whole life and my mother died of cancer when I was very young. It was hard to get out of that sort of quagmire and get the mental strength to become a business success to fill comfortable with having money and all these kind of thing. So I need to write about that too, that journey, and so Three Simple Steps that just start as a simple idea. It was sort of self help type of book. I don’t like self help books. I passionately dislike self help books and the main reason being the most self help books are written by people who have never actually done very much. Their success is a fact that the book caught on. I wanted to write the book a long time ago but I decided to wait until I felt I have the credibility. So here is a guy who comes out of living in an old farm house in North Wales, pretty heavy bullied as a kid, and I escape from the bullies by hiding in the reference library in the town. And it was there that I started kind of kill time a little bit. I started reading autobiographies of successful men and women of all kinds of success, sport, and adventure, and business, and the rest of it. I saw these patterns of behavior and I realized that they were no different to me. They had all manage to get out of their version of quicksand and so I kind of cherry picked their ideas and so [unclear – 16:26] three things that I started to do and that changed my whole life. And so I wrote… that’s why it is called Three Simple Steps. It was just three changes in behavior so I wanted to pass that on.
The book itself has done okay, and all my proceeds go to cancer research development. I’ve not even attempted to market it because that would defeat the object, and it sort of grown a following, so that’s now backed up by two online courses. There is an online course called Transformation which is basically the physics, which is behind… I am a physicist by education so physics of success, quantum physics is behind these three simple steps. And then there is also a course called Secrets to A Successful Startup which has many of the things that we’re talking about in terms of entrepreneurship.
Kevin: Okay. I want to dig in to these steps in a minute, but just wind back a small bit, when you’re in that library whose books did you read? Who inspired you back then?
Trevor: My biggest inspiration actually as a kid, fortunate enough even though my mother died when I was young, she was such a strong spirit and I saw how powerful that female energy can be. And so I am always been inspired actually by people who have to swim against the tides, so CJ Walker, I don’t know if you’ve heard of CJ Walker. She was born to slaves and then she grew up in an area even though she was free she was enslaved by the local regulations. She was badly abused, she was pregnant when she was fourteen and then the husband run off, she was so malnourished and so ill that her hair falls out. And that was common for people in that situation back in the 1850s. She tried all the local hair products that people used. They made them out of whatever they could find going on trees and stuff like that and nothing worked. But she managed to make one work and everybody else said can we use that, and so she started going door to door as a saleswoman. You have to keep in mind several things. One, she is female in a male world. She is a woman of color in a totally white dominated world. She is poor and has nothing. She became America’s first female millionaire and I think it’s an astonishing story. She also worked equally hard on legislation to eliminate the passion for lynching that was still around in those place. It is hard to imagine, it is so recent but that was she was involved in. So that is really inspiring and I used this thing, “Gosh, she had to overcome 10x more difficult things than I think I’m facing, so why I am feeling sorry for myself.” And that’s what helped me get out of my version of quicksand. You know, she was also someone a great believer of meditation so she meditated and that’s where she got her brilliant ideas. So if I started meditating that’s where I started to get my brilliant ideas for businesses and stuff like that. All of that is passed on through this book and the next book which comes out this year which is “Secrets to A Successful Startup”.
Kevin: Got it. And tell me, okay, the Three Simple Steps, they are mapped to success in business and life. Which is it more applicable for? Is it a business book or is it a self help book? It is a personal development book. But, you know, rare is the person who gets rich working to someone else. So inevitably once you learn to take control of your own destiny then for most people that would say, “Okay, I’m going to do something whether it is in business or in the art, but I am going to do it by myself.” Typically that becomes an entrepreneurial adventure at that point. It is very rare that people who gain control of their mentalities would then say I’m going to go and work for Bob because it is just too frustrating. It is both really. It is taking control of the mentality that put you in a position where you have the confidence to say now I’m going to go and do what I always dreamed of doing.
Kevin: I got it. And tell me, okay so maybe let’s see, what are the steps?
Trevor: First one is control the mentality. It is a practical guide. There are lots of tips and tools which I’ve relocated from all those autobiographies. There are hundreds of them in my life so a lot of tools and techniques that worked really well because most people don’t control their mentality. They are very, very susceptible to the opinions of others and you can’t afford that. The true measure of freedom is to be independent of the good opinion of other people, so you have to learn that confidence. There are tools and techniques which you can do which [unclear – 20:22] mentally but also physically. You know, most people don’t understand that the TV news is there to paralyzed them and fill them with fear because otherwise they can’t sell the commercials. And so you have to learn to sort of change your lifestyle a little bit where you start to control the influences. If you want to start a company and then you sit down in front of a movie and there is a commercial comes one about debt, so like credit card debt, you just killed your dream right there because you immediately start thinking about debt and what it feels like. And then you put it off, you said, maybe I’ll start a company next year or after the next recession; or something like that. You have to control what comes into your brain so that you can focus on what it is you want to achieve.
After you do that you need a winning idea, and the winning idea comes through to aspects. One is meditation and the second is that if you learn to meditate and use that correctly to create winning business ideas. How do you then cement that business idea in the world? So there are certain things you have to do to reinforce that idea of practical, physical things. That’s step two.
And then step three, is about how to use the illusions of time and physics to intend your success. And so it is impossible to get the book and just read step three because it would make any sense.
Kevin: Yeah, so tell me a little bit more about step three.
Trevor: Step three is intention, so the difference between goals and intentions. There is a huge difference. And so we talk about the need to get into a state of knowing whereby you don’t just hope or wish for you success but you are absolutely guaranteeing it to yourself, and that’s a very strong mental place to be. And so that’s why when I start my companies I know what the x is going to be the day I started. And so intention is a very deliberate use of mental techniques in order to put yourself in a position where you know you’re going to succeed. You don’t wish for it or hope for it. You know it. There are very few people that have that mentality, very few. But everybody who follows Three Simple Steps, or the course Transformation which you can get through my website, trevorgblake.com, all proceeds go to cancer research and development. So you can do yourself a favor, you can read the first chapter of Three Simple Steps for free, and you can look at what the content of the courses is and make a decision for yourself. But at the end of doing those three things will be that you have this knowing mentality and that’s that difference I believe between people who hope to be successful and people [unclear – 22:25]
Kevin: Got it. So had my paraphrasing book part 1, or step one we’ll say is controlling your mentality so not letting other people’s opinion, maybe external forces impact how you are feeling and how you are thinking about things.
Trevor: That’s right. And that builds the confidence to trust your intuition because a lot of people have an idea for a business, so I’ve got an idea for how to increase the number of customers that I have in my business. That idea is very easy to erase unless you this strong mentality because you might make the mistake of sharing it with somebody and they’ll say, “I don’t talk rubbish. That’s a silly idea.” And it is immediately destroyed. You have to learn this mentality of owning the thought and seeing it through, so that’s really important.
Kevin: Okay, so that’s step one. Step two then is about a winning idea. So is this how to come up with a winning idea?
Trevor: Yeah, there is a process.
Kevin: Okay.
Trevor: So there is a process and of course as all great thinkers, free thinkers would say, the path to everything is through the way of nothing. So it is very important to take some time out. I’m not saying wear a purple dressing gown and sit on a pointed rock. But that is very important to take time out every day to just like, billionaires like Ray Dalio, Richard Branson and Bill Gates. All of them do what I call they simply taking quiet time. And so 20 minutes every day they sit down and do nothing. Henry Ford use to do it in his father’s old rundown ranch. This is where I first learned about it from Henry Ford’s autobiography and all biographies. And then he’d sit there and he’d say I have cured all of my problems in 20 minutes of doing nothing. And most people think that’s crazy stuff, that’s new age stuff honestly, but it is actually based in science. And so Three Simple Steps has the science of that.
Okay, why does that work? It works because your hundred billion neurons breathe, and that’s probably the only time that day. The rest of the day your neurons are flowing right down so that we can enact our lives out in the world which is basically multi-functions, and creating thoughts and all these things that are really slow process for the brain. But if you give your brain 20 minutes to do nothing it can connect universally and then I guarantee later on that day a brilliant idea will just come into your head and you’ll smack yourself in the forehead and say why I haven’t thought of that before? And that’s what the benefit of meditation is for me anyway. Other people do it for other reasons, health reasons or whatever, but for me this is where I’ve had all my great ideas. And the ideas come not just, oh wouldn’t that be cool. The idea comes as like a blueprint, the whole thing. It is overwhelming. It is 3-dimensional, maybe even more than 3-dimnesional. And you think, my god that’s been in my head all these years and I didn’t realize. That’s the benefit of step two.
Kevin: Got it. So really giving yourself the space, maybe the mental space, to come up with something good. How do you know it is a good idea?
Trevor: You can’t stop thinking about it. [unclear – 25:03] And it has two aspects to it. It is a great question actually, Kevin, because people don’t often ask that. It has two aspects to it. One is awe and the other is flow. If you don’t have this incredible sense of awe when you think about it then it is not a good idea. Okay? You’ll know because your stomach flips over with excitement. You have this incredible awe and you will build to hold yourself back. So after awe comes flow, when this amazing flow which is basically I’ve got to do something about this, you immediately go and take action. The book talks about what actions you should take as to the courses. You probably hear it in my voice now because my voice is raised. You know, as I think about the business I get this incredible rush of energy, and the sense of awe, and this need to do something. Then that’s when you know it is a great idea.
Kevin: Okay, very good. And then, like we said, I know we’re digging deep here. Step three then is guaranteeing to yourself that it is going to be a success from day one.
Trevor: Yes, and so it is how you direct that sense of awe and flow so where you go with that. And there are some mental techniques that I stole from great adventurers and great business people and they’ve always work for me. I’ve never had a situation where they don’t work. You know we have now quite a following for Three Simple Steps. I mean, tens and thousands of people all over the world follow closely, listen to the podcast, and do that kind of stuff. I’ve never had anybody ever contact me and say, “Well, I did it but it didn’t work.” All I get are these amazing stories, and they are amazing stories. I had people they said they prepared to commit suicide. They’ve gone through the whole process of writing the note, cleaning because they don’t want to leave a mess, and apparently when they want to commit suicide. They have prepared their life and all the rest of it and somehow Three Simple Steps got into their hands and everything has changed, and those people had successful lives instead. One of my favorite successes is this guy who was sent the book as a gift and opened it, and he was mad because the package is really hard to open. And when he saw it it was like a self help book, he got even mad at it. Because like me, he doesn’t like self help books. But he flicked through it and it something about it just inspired him so he decided to follow it and he started his first company. He is 87 years old. That’s brilliant, who is a retired economist at the University of Virginia and he started this company. He’s been lacking confidence to do because I’m old, or because I miss the boat or because it is a young man’s world. Whatever his reasons were he decided and said. He starts his company at 87. This is probably about 3-4 years ago so he is now in his 90s, and he is like a child. He is having the time of his life.
Kevin: Okay, very interesting. Okay, let us just move it on a small bit then and make it really concrete for maybe some of the people that are listening here that are either running a business, or thinking about starting a fitness business, or think small business essentially bricks and mortar. Someone in that situation what is the biggest mistake they are probably making right now?
Trevor: Procrastinating about wanting to start a business. I wish I had done it 10 years before I started. Like I said I am a late bloomer, 43 when I started my first company. I wish I had started it at 33 or even 23. It is a blast. There is nothing like it. Of course, it’s got its stresses. Like everything in life has got its ups and downs and these good days bad days type of thing. But you will never regret going on your own and having the courage to start. It is the most empowering thing that I’ve ever done in my life. The other thing I always want to try to advice people is people think there is a good time to start and the bad time for businesses. There is no such thing. I mean, half of the companies that make up [unclear – 28:12] started in the recession. I started two of my four companies bang in the middle of a recession, the last one in 2008. There is never a bad time to start a company and there is never a bad time to re-invent yourself. It doesn’t matter what your background is, doesn’t matter what is going on in your life, you know, just do it. You’ll never regret it. My biggest mistake was waiting until I was 43.
Kevin: Okay, got it. That’s good. That’s very candid. I really appreciate that. So say they go, they decided they are going to do it, what is the number one thing they can do to not fail?
Trevor: Mental attitude is everything. So there is such a thing, there is a millionaire’s mentality. I forget who said that. [unclear – 28:44] I think said that. There is a mentality to success. Sometime I can’t believe I’m hearing myself say these things because when I use to read those things in book. You know, I used to reach for sick bag you get on the back of the seat in front of you in the plane. I really hate all those corny, new age catch phrases but it is so true that there is a mentality, so you got to get yourself mentality prepared. As you’re starting, you don’t have to get yourself prepared mentally and then start. But as you’re starting work on your attitude as much as you work on your business. That’s the number one secret to success I think is to have the right mentality for it.
Kevin: Yeah, and if I’m in a business and say it’s been going for a while and it’s been relatively successful but maybe I’m feeling that it’s plateauing or that it could be doing better. Probably it is down to mentality. What can people do to refresh things a bit and get themselves maybe a new lease of life.
Trevor: You know, you’ve already answered it because it is also mentality. And that’s one of the benefits actually of taking quiet time as I called it. You know, doing something that works. When you meditate you do all kinds of things to your brain that you wouldn’t know unless you studied but meditation is. And so you empower yourself basically, you basically reboot your brain by meditating. And if you are sort of feeling a bit stagnated in business, for me the analogy would be like, it is an old iPad or an old computer. You need to refresh it. You need to reboot, get it back to manufacture settings and go again, and update the software. So when we meditate that’s what we do to our brains basically, so we reboot ourselves and update our software. And I find from that, you could wake in the morning and think, I got to go into this place and we’re losing customers and my staffs are losing faith in me and all that kind of thing, and then you can go into the place of work. Or you can get up in the morning have those thoughts and then meditate, reboot yourself and I guarantee as you go into work you’ll think, “You know what? I’m going to get us all together. We’re going to have a brainstorming. We are going to talk about how we can increase our customer base in this particular area.” And you will get what originally felt like a bit of a problem or a bit of stagnation suddenly becomes like the rebirth. And it is all done mentality. You do have to do the techniques or use the techniques in order to have that reboot. And I do it every day. You know, I am a living proof. Yes, you know, I’ve got real challenges with the company that I’m accessing right now because it is cancer. Okay, so, we’re going to face one clinical trial really well but the patients… We are only allowed to give our drug to the sickest of patients. And these are patients who have been on all kinds of drugs. The very late stage cancer patients and some of them have only weeks to live and they are very bravely, as a last resort, saying, “Okay. We will let this hospital inject us with this stuff that this guy has come up with.” And that whole process can be a real challenge. And so if I didn’t do the mental reboot every day it would be very hard for me to be… You know in that situation it could be very depressing. When I do that mental reboot then I get energized. I get all kinds of ideas of what else we can do to support those patients and to make it comfortable for them in that situation. So I am a living proof that it works that I have to do it myself every day.
Kevin: Okay. Well, you’re definitely busy now and you’re up to great work and tell me before we finish. What is next for you? What is your next challenge is going to be?
Trevor: My next book comes out probably the end of this year which is called Secrets to A Successful Startup. I wrote it a few years ago and I got a few offers for it but intuitively I just didn’t like the companies that I would have had to work with because they wanted to sort of change some of my concepts and ideas which would generalize the book and make it worse as I thought. So I put the book on the shelf knowing that one day someone will pop into my life and they’ll come back and offer again, and that happened very recently. And so now it is going to be published by a brilliant company called The New World Library. That’s going to be a huge success. So with that will come opportunities I think to build an entrepreneurial network around that book which is what I want to do. But I have a course called Secrets to A Successful Startup and that’s already starting to develop a community ahead of the book. The content of the course I think is valuable but what is so much more valuable is the grouping of entrepreneurs that are doing the course. Because the ideas that we are sharing, and the questions that are coming in, and the brainstorming that goes into that forum is beyond probably 10x more valuable than the content of the course itself. And after that I believe I will invest in some of those ideas. That’s my goal anyway.
Kevin: Nice. So you are educating but you are also finding ways to get involve.
Trevor: Yeah. I mean, when Google came out I didn’t have money to invest. I’d like to be one of the first to invest in the next Google type of thing. And I believe quite strongly, they will come out of this forum that I’m building around the course.
Kevin: Excellent. Alright, well, Trevor, first of all thank you very much. It was a pleasure talking to you. Before we wrap up just maybe tell everyone how they can get in touch and where they can find you online.
Trevor: Yes, it is very simple. It is my name .com, so it is trevorgblake.com. On there you can check out the book that is currently available. There will be some news about the new book when it is near the launch time. And you can also check out the courses and also interact with me. I’m very transparent because I believe there is such a lack of authenticity and personal development. One way to make it authentic is that you are accessible, and so people can email me and we can exchange ideas. And if can help them we would like to.
Kevin: Okay. Well, Trevor, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Trevor: You are very welcome. Thank you. I enjoyed it, Kevin.
Kevin: Thank you.
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