 Today, I'm really excited to interview somebody who has been talking about authentic business, authentic marketing for much longer than I have. Now, he doesn't necessarily use those words, he's welcome to if he wants to, but his name is Mark Silver. You may have heard of him. His business is called Heart of Business, and that's the website, heartofbusiness.com. Heartofbusiness.com, and lots of us who are in the space of bringing a more heart-centered way of doing business into the world, lots of us have learned from Mark, so I'm super excited to bring him on. Mark, thanks for doing this interview. I'm delighted to be here. I love you, George. So thank you. Thanks for inviting me. There's a lot of things, I mean, you've written so many things over the years, and you have a lot of different kinds of group programs. You also do some one-on-one coaching, and one of the topics I want to ask you about is, I mean, you have been, Heart of Business has been around since 2001. And first, I just want to acknowledge that, and how remarkable that is, because I have worked with so many colleagues, I mean, I started in 2009, and I've worked with so many colleagues of the years who are not around anymore, and in their business, they're doing something totally different. And to have that kind of longevity says a lot about the offerings you provide and how, obviously, word of mouth is really the true lifeblood of marketing, longevity, word of mouth. And word of mouth means that you're doing something that people actually want and are benefiting from. So I appreciate that very much. Having all this experience working with thousands of people, I don't know how many you've worked with over the years, you have seen the sort of the stages of what a self-employed person goes through. From, should I become self-employed? Can I really make it work to, well, which of the ideas in my head should I choose to, oh my gosh, now how do I find an audience that will want what I have? And what if they say no, and, oh, somebody said yes. This whole journey into scaling up and now being able to offer group programs and working with other people. So let's have that conversation. What have you learned about these stages of the self-employed? Yeah. Thank you, George. Oh, my God. I know. 2001. It's been a while. You know, one of the benefits that I've had from being in business that long and being able to make lots of mistakes along the way and being able to just observe, you know, it's really been thousands of people at this point, is that there's a large enough sample of people that I've actually been able to identify, you know, just what you said stages of business development that entrepreneurs go through and it's a funny thing because, you know, people can go through these consciously or unconsciously and when people go through them unconsciously, they tend to get stuck in certain places. There's certain things that they don't put into place. One of the analogies I use is that if you're, somebody is texting me, pardon me, silence. Nice person, I'm sure. But, you know, one of the analogies I use is that if you're building a bridge, you know, you can have, you know, part that touches one shore, part that touches another shore, you have the middle part and a lot of times what happens is that people work on what they're comfortable with, right? They work on what they're comfortable with, what their personality naturally connects with or what they know or what they've been taught. And so they'll do something and then they'll do it over and over again and they'll try to make it better and better and better and you can have what I've seen businesses that have brilliant pieces built out and yet they think the business is broken and it's not broken. It's just incomplete. It's just pieces missing. Like it's far better to have a footbridge that crosses it than a huge, beautiful, gothic one-third of a bridge that ends over open water, you know? And it's been, it's just, it's painful to watch that, mainly because a lot of people have really beautiful skills that good hearts, like really helping people think that their business is broken, think that they can't make it when it's really just a developmental issue. You know, it's like to change metaphors to mix metaphors. It's, you know, I'm a parent. We have twin boys who are 10 years old. And, you know, now we do, you know, we clean the house as a family once a week and they're actually helpful. They could vacuum, they could clean, you know, and the place is actually clean. It's like, oh my God, they did that work, you know? But they're too young to like go out and earn a job, you know, to have a job. And when they were younger, their attempts at helping were more for me to help them feel better rather than they weren't actually helpful when they were four years old. And so I think that what I'm putting all of this in place before talking about the actual stages because I want people to have a sense of compassion and gentleness with themselves that your business is not going to be earning, you know, a high level equivalent high level professional salary in just a few months time. It's not fair to you. It's not fair to your business to expect to move through developmental stages faster than, you know, you can integrate than you can really put into place. I love that perspective because and talking about the toddler and now they're able to do something and be helping productive. Yeah, it's like you said, it's not fair for yourself to expect that. It's not fair for your business as its own entity, but it's also not fair for an audience. You know, it's like, hey, I'm just getting to know you and you want, like I just saw your Facebook ad or I just, you know, heard about you last week and you want me to buy your thing. I like, I barely know. Right, right, right, exactly. And that is, that is the, and not just me, but you want enough people to buy your thing to pay all your bills. You know, it's like, it's, but that is the, that Mark, I mean, I just, I think it's important to say, why do, why do so many of us have that fantasy? Well, I think it's just survival, right? I mean, like there's a very legitimate need to like earn a living. Like, oh my God, I got to pay the bills. I, I, I, um, oh my God, my first couple of years in business, you know, my wife had a chronic illness, you know, we were, I mean, there's scary moments, like long periods when I say moments, I mean periods. I mean, like, you know, where, oh my God, is it going to work? Is it not going to work? Are we going to, you know, pay the bills? Like, are we going to, you know, buy like, okay, beans and rice this week? It's like, you know, it's, um, it's not, you know, like, if you go into it with your eyes wide open, instead of like how I did and how many people do thinking that it's going to immediately pop up, um, then you can plan for it. Then you don't think something's wrong. Then it, what I've observed and thank God, it doesn't take as long as my boys are taking to go to adulthood, you know, it doesn't take 20 years to get a business to momentum, but it often takes at the purest minimum by somebody who's like, you know, really in a ready to go place, which most people are not minimum of 18 months and more like three to four years to get to momentum. Now, momentum is what I call a business that's developed enough that you can really depend on a healthy income coming in. And that's three or four years of focusing on business development, not just three years, three to four years of having your shingle out and not really doing the developmental work. Um, I have my website, I mean, Mark, I put a website up. Isn't that enough? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so luckily there's, there's rewards and, you know, successes all along the way, you start earning money long before that, you know, um, but there's gonna, it's gonna be inconsistent. And I, and, you know, for some people that brings up fear, but for a lot of our clients, there's actually like a real, oh, I'm not doing anything wrong, you know, it's like all those stories of, yeah, six figures in six months or six weeks or whatever those ridiculous things were that I was going to say, like that is one of the, I think the big reasons why we have this fantasy is because it's so easy to sell people on the dream of quick, easy money. The way I like to think of it is it's like, you can have a quick, easy money with integrity. Those three factors can't happen all at once. You can have quick money, probably not easy and probably not with integrity. You can have easy money. It's not going to be quick. Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. But so it might not be sustainable either. Like a lot of people, that's right. I've seen like a clients have come to us that have gone to these really high adrenaline, like, you know, rocket your business forward programs and they're burnt out. And maybe most of them didn't get any results, but even the ones that did don't have any way of replicating it. Like there's no system. There's no structure. There's no infrastructure. There's no sense of development because a business isn't just born into the form that it's ultimately going to be in. Right. It's like when we're toddlers, we're short, which is a good thing because we fall a lot. That's why we're called toddlers. And, you know, like the system and structure of the human being changes over time and your business will change over time. It's like it's going to the easiest way for it to grow in early stages is not the form that it's going to be in to be. It's not the business model or the way that it's structured that's going to give you sustainable, healthy income in later stages. But if you try to start out with a later stage structure, you won't be able. It won't generate for you like you have to go through these steps and the way and if you follow the developmental progress of the business, it actually is so much easier because it is organic. There's an organic nature to the way the business is developed to the order that you put things in place that you don't put the cart before the horse that you don't try to build something big and sophisticated before you even know what you're doing. Yeah, so what are the names you put to these stages? I know I've been talking about it like these mysterious stages. So there's four names to the stages and the first three are necessary and the fourth one is optional. So the first stage I call creation and it's really about getting your feet on the ground, figuring out who you're trying to talk to, getting the very basics of going from zero to one. Like what's your offer? Who are you talking to? How do you enroll somebody? How do you price something? How do you craft an offer? Like the very, very basics of what do you have to sell and can you get a client with it? There's no huge marketing push. There's no website in that stage. It's like it's the very basics and there's experimentation there. There's, yeah, you're just trying to get your feet under you. The second stage, I use the term concentration and it's really taking what you found out works in the first stage and you start to just do more of it. You start to expand your reach. You have a website. You have a more sophisticated message. You start to experiment with different types of outreach of growing your audience so that instead of just enrolling a couple clients, you can start to enroll more and more clients more steadily. You start to experiment with different types of business models. Are you going to do groups? Are you going to do this? Are you going to do that? There's different ways that it's structured. And then you go from concentration into the third stage that I call momentum. And momentum is when you start to morph into a dependable business. And what happens in moving from concentration to momentum is that this is where the proverbial feast or famine comes in because the business has been, it's not that sophisticated yet. There's not, by design, there's not a lot of systems. There's not a lot of structures. There's not a lot of, you know, you haven't been able to afford hiring administrative help maybe sometimes. And so what happens is that your marketing is working. You get clients. You get busy. You stop marketing. Your clients complete. You're like, oh, and then you start marketing again, but there's that lag time. And so you start to, I've seen this so many times. And it's completely normal. It's this kind of feast or famine. And so moving into momentum by being aware of it, you can make that as short as possible. It's hard to avoid completely. But you make it as short as possible where you start to have the cash flow to implement more sophisticated systems and structures. You start to play with different kinds of business models so you can break through income ceilings. You can, you know, really start to have the business stand on its own feet and be dependable at a very sustainable, thriving level. That's awesome. So, so got creation, got concentration, got momentum. So those are the required stages. And then you said there's a fourth option. Yeah, the fourth stage, I call it independence. And it's when you take a business that's in momentum and you turn it into something where you might ultimately not be required. You know, you might like for someone and you are my position, we might have coaches working for us. You know, you might have, you know, you have a situation where you shift from being a solo practitioner with a little, with some help to being a CEO with a team. And it's optional because most people who have come, like if somebody comes to me going, that's what I want. I want that. I push back hard because usually what they're wanting is a smooth running business in momentum with some help. Because if you're gonna go into that fourth stage, it takes a lot of resources. It takes a lot of money. It takes time. It's a completely different job for a while. You're not working with clients directly. You know, it's like there's a shift that is frankly can be quite exhausting and overwhelming. It has the benefits of, you know, that's, I mean, that's a business that does, you know, a million dollars or more. That's a business that does, that, you know, you could sell or you can disappear for six months or a year and it still runs and brings in income. And you know, that's a business that you're an owner of, but it's a completely different job. And you have to really be prepared for it because it requires completely different skillset than the prior three stages. And how do people, you guys have an assessment on your website, is that right? I think you saw that. So if those watching this, if you wanna assess yourself on which of these three or four three stages, particularly you're in, where do they find that? It's heartofbusiness.com. Yeah, heartofbusiness.com. And then you go to free stuff and there's, you know, and it's called the readiness assessment. The readiness assessment, okay. Yeah, and what most people find is that they have pieces in all three stages, kind of scattered because, you know, you take a workshop, you talk to somebody, you read a book and you put different things in place and so there's all these incomplete places involved. But if you, you'll be walked through these stages in more detail and be able to really look at your business and assess where you are. And oh my God, you know, whether you work with us or not after that, it just brings a sigh of relief to so, oh, this is the next thing. The biggest thing that I want people to get out of an assessment like that is that there's a million things to get done to make a business successful. And by looking at it developmentally, you can cross 90% off of your now list and just focus on the few things that your business needs next to develop before you move on. I love that because all of us have too much on our plate because we get the marketing from this expert or that expert says, oh, you have to do this. You have to do this. Everyone says you have to do something else. And now we have 1,000 things that we were supposed to have to do to make a business successful. But and those 100 things or 1,000 things, yes, you might eventually do them over the next 10 years or 20 years, but you don't have to do them in your first year. And so I love that you've created this assessment. So I'll be sure to, of course, link people to it in the notes of this video. So look for that or go to heart of business, heart of business, H-E-A-R-T, of business.com and then click on free stuff from there. Mark, do you want to mention anything about your programs or your offerings? Yeah, well, I'll mention that we've moved our whole business to a pay from the heart model people. Yeah, there's very little in our business that's like a fixed price. That is awesome. Wow. Yeah, it's, it was a big step. It's just that it's about treating our clients as adults, you know, that people want to pay us. Most people want us to do well and we want them to do well. So that, so there's kind of two things to kind of keep an eye out on. Actually this summer we're enrolling the starting in May, 2019, if that's when you're listening to this, we're starting to enroll for once a year, we run a program called the heart of your business. And it's a nine week course that helps you have a really healthy relationship with business and with your business. Get the big picture, get spiritual healing piece, because we haven't talked about my background as a, with a master's of divinity and a Sufi teacher because we bring that spiritual healing piece in. It's really important piece in this time, these times to have an essence of love and access to that in all things in your business. And it really helps people understand what it takes for the business to really be successful in a number of levels. And again, that's pay from the heart. And then I discovered that it's really, like people don't really develop businesses in a real way and a complete way in the context of courses. And so we took all of our learning modules or most of them and put them in a learning community, a community of practice, again, pay from the heart that allows people to receive that a sustainably priced container to get coaching, to get spiritual nourishment, to get the training and the learning over the course of the 18 months to three years that it takes to get to momentum without worrying about, oh, the course is coming to an end and I haven't gotten everything done. So those are kind of like the two main things I want people to know about. But the main thing is, if you're just learning about us right now, like just check out the assessment, check out our material, just see if we even resonated for the right people for you. And if so, you can ask questions. All the information is on the website, so. Awesome. And of course you've got a Facebook page as well and I'll link to that and you have regular content that comes out there too. So yeah, I hope folks will check out your website, check out the Facebook and any questions you have for Mark. Feel free to comment below this video. I'll make sure he sees it and Mark, thank you so much for doing this interview. George, thank you so much. Thank you for the work you do in the world. I just, yeah, I just have great respect and honor for what you've been bringing out. It makes my heart happy. And yes, yeah, for sure. Thanks, Mark. All right, peace.