 Today, I'm excited to be here with Mark Silver. Some of you may have heard of Mark. If not, you should definitely know about Mark Silver and the Heart of Business, which is the name of his company. First, I want to say hi to you, Mark. Thanks so much for being here and doing this. Yay! Thank you, George. I'm delighted to be here with you. Thank you. Yeah. So, I love interviewing Mark because there are few people I interview who actually have all this grounded experience in entrepreneurship and in helping thousands of people in building their businesses and doing it with infusing spirit, spirituality into how they do it. So Mark, you have been in business and doing this, helping people create businesses since I think 1999. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Yes. And you've been, I mean, I heard about you well before we actually met. Great things about what you've done and you have many of the people that I've worked with have had their foundation in their business being helped by you and your programs. So I'm just really grateful that you are kind of leading the way in our industry in bringing spirituality into business. And the spirituality you bring is also, I feel, very grounded. It's not, I mean, you know, it's not in some of the general terms, but you actually have a framework that you bring to your spirituality and, well, it's grounded in ancient wisdom and also your business framework and knowledge is also grounded in experience of many, many entrepreneurs having been through your programs. So thank you for doing this interview. And I guess I want to ask you, I mean, there's so many things I could ask you, but one of the things that you have seen over the years, well, you've seen many kind of business strategies come and go and ways of helping entrepreneurs and everyone watching this, most everyone watching this is either building a business or wants to build a business. You've seen so many strategies come and go. Have you noticed any patterns? I guess that's a really big question. But, you know, kind of starting to pick your brain here and like, tell us what you've learned in 20 years, you know, like what are the patterns, like what doesn't really work for people and what works better? Let's kind of start the conversation there. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, thank you and thank you. There's, I think, you know, there are a number of things that don't work. And, you know, a lot of what doesn't work boils down to people trying to move too quickly and trying to fit things too much into a box. You know, I've seen a lot of business programs come and go. I've, you know, taught my share of business programs, obviously, you know, and one of the conclusions that I've come to is that it's really hard. It's, if not impossible to develop a business within a course, you know. And, you know, and I don't, I'm not obviously against education. We're in the business, you know, we're in the business of business education, as are you, and it's really, really important to learn. But what I've seen over the years and we've taught them, I've taught them myself, you know, in the past, is that there's these six months or one year business building programs that say, we'll take you from, you know, from the beginning to the, I've rarely seen people get results out of that. And when we have seen people get results, they usually are not results that can be repeated. They usually end up feeling squeezed, used up, you know, their adrenals burned out and starting back at zero at the end. And it's, and there's, you know, there's six specific reasons for that that I've kind of looked at, but it's like this, this hope that you can in six months or a year go from, oh, I want to start a business or, oh, I have this brand new business to look, I'm in complete momentum and things are going really well and it's dependable and everything's working well. It's just not, it's not realistic. It's not compassionate towards yourself to believe that and it's not honest to sell especially high priced programs that promise that because it just doesn't happen that way. I am in agreement with you and I say that because I have, you know, been in such programs myself in the early days and then I have worked with business partners who have sold such programs and of course I have sold such programs before like $2,000, you know, go from nothing, no idea, no idea what you're supposed to do supposedly to, oh my gosh, you know, you're doing so well and full-time income and all that stuff and like I said, six months, nine months, 12 months, whatever may be. So why, why is it? Because I know, you know, when we are recording this during the beginning of a year, but this is really evergreen information. You can, you'll find launches of this stuff beginning of the year, sometimes middle of the year, definitely during the fall, you know, at the end of the year sometimes. So whenever you're watching this people, you're going to be getting emails from different sources or Facebook posts, whatever, selling you an A to Z business building program course that's supposed to help you solve all the problems and forever more, you know. So why, why isn't it, why, and by the way, I should, I should, I'm really, as we talk about this, I also am really curious what elements, you know, differentiate your programs with that kind of thing. And then the elements about my program might be, but yeah, so, so why don't you do that work? Yeah. And I, you know, and I do, and I think it is important at the beginning, at the outset to kind of differentiate like the courses that you teach. I mean, I, I mean, we have clients in our programs or clients that are in our community that are like, you know, they're constantly raving about your work, which, you know, rightfully so. And, and because what you're doing is you're teaching a specific strategy or a specific skill set, like something that gets added into the mix, which of course, you know, you need to, you know, take those pieces on, you know, in a set piece. It's the, it's these big picture A to Z pieces that are really like where it doesn't work. So there's kind of like six different, you know, because I've really, like I was really struggling a while ago, kind of thinking about this problem and going like, is what, like, what's, what's really going on here? And, you know, why do so few people really see success from these kinds of programs? The first, the first piece is diagnosis. Really, people who come to this, come to these programs have many different starting points. They have many different personal histories. They have many different places where their skills are excellent and many places where maybe they have personal story or trauma or, you know, challenges from their past that make certain things difficult, more difficult for them. And, and, you know, we have a free assessment on our, you know, on our website and I, you know, I see so many assessments come over and they assess people according to different stages of business development that we've identified. And it's really typical for people that are self-employed to have their business be all over the map. They have a little bit in stage one, a little bit in stage two, a little bit in stage three and, you know, and, and they have these different pieces and because it's a hot podge, it's like, that's how people have collected information. They've collected things and implemented according to what's comfortable to them. So when everybody has the same, the same starting point and are going through at a set pace, invariably, there's going to be this, some people excelling in some parts, other people getting stuck in certain things and like never moving on, even though the course is moving on, it's like, there's, you know, and so that's a, so there's just this horrible, horrible problem that you don't have an accurate, compassionate way of identifying the start point for each person. They're kind of like, need to go through this, you know, set timing and set curriculum. So that's the first piece. You know, I totally agree with that. You know, I, I actually do run a sort of a year long mentoring group, but in that group, it's so funny because members here and there have requested a step by step, A to Z, week one, do this, week two, do this, week three, and I'm like, it doesn't really work that way. You know, everybody, there's, if there's 50 members, there's 50 starting points, you know, and so I, I love how clear you are about this diagnosis, and I have recommended your assessment to a lot of people. So those who are watching this, if you haven't taken the heart of business, it's on the Heart of Business website, the assessment, I'll put the link in the notes of the video, but Mark, I just want to make sure people know exactly where to find it. It's heartofbusiness.com, and then is there a, yeah, go, go to our free stuff page. You can go. Okay, so heartofbusiness.com slash free dash stuff. If you go to heartofbusiness.com and then click on free stuff on the top, you'll see where the assessment is. So take the assessment, because of course it comes with the 20 years of experience with Mark's, you know, diagnosing where people are at. Okay, so that's the, that's one reason that's really important for us. And by the way, some people watching this are actually designers of business programs and coaches and trainers, mentors. So, you know, let's, let's make ours better given this, given this framework. So diagnosis, that's important. All right. Yes. Yeah. So, so there's a second thing is that, and then I think this is, this is just generally true in life is what's missing in these programs is iteration. You know, the first, you know, the first time you do something new, it's crap, at least for me, you know, sometimes we get beginner's luck. Sometimes there is beginner's luck, but most of the time, including for myself, it's not really the case. Exactly. Like whether you're working on niching or working on marketing messaging or working on, you know, like it's sales conversation, you're working on offer creation, like it's all iteration, like you do something and you test it and it's like, did it work? What, how does it need to be tweaked? Does it get better? You know, business model, for instance, businesses, almost as a rule, what is going to make them really successful is a way different business model than they start out with. It's just like things just change over time. You can't leap into a sophisticated business model and you can't get to really like flying business with the business model that you need at the very beginning, all of these different things require iteration and a program that only lasts a year, you know, I say only, doesn't have time. It's like, oh, here's the first module. Let's spend a bunch of time doing the first version and the second version and the third version. Let's get to the fourth module and then go back to the first and iterate and, you know, it's like all these different pieces affect each other and it's like you, you get to different parts and you need, it informs, oh, I need to go shift that first thing I did because I've learned something new here. So there's this organic system wide iteration that needs to happen in a business as you learn and as you grow to make it successful and it just can't happen in these kinds of A to Z step one, step two, step three processes. A lot of people have told me when they've gone through such programs that it's that if somehow they have failed because they weren't able to follow the formula, right, and there must be that because the formula was sold to them as being full proof. Still the thing is like, oh, absolutely. You can't, you can't lose. You can't not succeed if you follow the step by step formula and if you don't succeed, well, then it must be you. You can follow the formula correctly. By the way, if anybody ever says that it's always a lie, it's never true. It's never true. So, yeah, yeah, I'm I'm I'm so glad you spoke that it's so important because the third part of this, the third piece is what I was referring to as time, like over 20 years, watching thousands of people build businesses. What I have concluded is that the fastest that people will go from kind of zero, excuse me, zero to momentum is maybe 18 months to two years. But much more commonly three, four, five years to really because of this area of nature, you do something, you test it, it takes time to put it in place and to work it out and see how it's working and then you go back and fix it and then you put something else in place and it's you've got to have the spaciousness to do that. And so what happens in these six month, nine month, one year programs is that just at the point where you're kind of maybe implemented 20% of what's been talked about over the year and you're just kind of wondering, God, do I need to go? You're done. You're out and you haven't implemented near enough of it to really see the kind of results that you'd want to see. And there's no, there's there's anyway, all of these, all of these pieces are missing. It's so great. So the six, I should stop selling my six figures in six months program. No, but it really is. There's there's so many people who, you know, the email me says, George, this is legit. I'm like, well, look at the timeline they're suggesting here. Oh, no, it's not legit. You know, but I love, thank you for, I'm so glad we've got this, you know, on record. You know, somebody with with your experience and I totally agree based on my what I've seen is that it doesn't happen for people in the timeline that's promised by most marketing gurus and business gurus. Now, the question, of course, is how do we deal with the disappointment or the or the you know, it's it's sort of like, well, then if those things aren't true, what should I do? Because I have to make money yesterday or, you know, I know, I know, like, is it possible? Is it possible to to eat out a livelihood? Yeah. Or do I need to get a job? And then, you know, yeah. So that's a I mean, it's a great it's a great point. So first of all, it's not like you struggle with zero results. And then suddenly at the four year mark, you get all your results. You get, you know, it's like if you're implementing effective business strategies and going through it and, you know, like really doing the work, you should see results along the way. And it can be disappointing. I'll tell you, by far, the largest the most common response I get from people when I give them this timing is actually kind of a compassionate relief because they realize that it's not personal to them. Like they're not personally failing. And when you know, realistically, what the timeline is, you don't make decisions that are financially really painful and, you know, like a self-sabotage. And like you don't, you know, suddenly quit your job and expect to replace the income in a few months. You know, it's like, oh, you know, keep your job. Work part-time at your business. You know, get the basics, the very basic first stage elements in place until you start to get a little bit of traction. You know, it's like when I talk about transitioning from having a job or having another form of support to letting your business, you want to identify your squeak by number. And the squeak by number is not your ideal income. It's not the income where you're fully, you know, funding your retirement and, you know, you've got your savings accounts full. It's like, what's the minimum amount you need to keep the lights on and food on the table and take care of your basic needs so that you can go full-time in your business and then really have the time and space to help accelerate the pieces that you already know are working because you're already at your squeak by number. And that's the transition that I like to see people go through and it's such a more successful thing because somebody who's got a squeak by number of, you know, ideally they'd like to be at $5,000 or $8,000 a month, you know, because of family and other things, but they, but their squeak by number is maybe 3,500 and they can get their business part-time to like 2,000, 2,500, you know, and then they realize, oh, if I do this, this and this, if I just had space for more clients, oh, I've got like, it's working, I can jump to 3,500 like this, I can leave my job and then I know what I'm doing enough to be able to move it into more sustainable place. That's how I like to see people work that transition. I love that. Thank you. Yes, and I agree with you. It is a relief to know that, okay, it's not somehow there's something wrong with me, but I am on the trajectory. I am, you know, actually learning what I need to learn and growing the kind of sort of internal skills, you know, mindset and emotion kind of skills to build a successful business long-term. So thank you for that, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so the other piece that's often missing from these programs is the right kind of support. You know, I've identified kind of three different kinds of support. There's expert support where somebody who knows something about, something that you don't know about can tell you, you know, like George, you have amazing information about what's currently working with Facebook ads, for instance, or you know, about live webinars or these pieces, like you've got these pieces of information that are just gold and you know, you just, sometimes you just gotta learn skills and you learn how to do things and you need to learn those pieces. We need that kind of support. Another kind of support is peer support. A lot of people who are self-employed don't have other people who are self-employed to really know what it's like to go through that. And so they get a lot of messages from other folks, you know, from other people in their life going, oh my God, you're gonna fail, are you gonna starve or everything's gonna fall apart or how can you possibly do that? And that can be really undermining. And there's also an aspect of spiritual support where we need to be able to have a consistent connection to confidence, to love, to service, to something larger than ourselves, to our deeper values, to that deep place inside us that fills us up and keeps us moving and helps to guide us and helps us to make difficult decisions to face the challenging parts of business because there are challenging parts to business, right? You don't wanna push through, but you don't wanna stay frozen. There needs to be a way to heal and move forward. The combination of expert support and peer support and spiritual support is where I see people really gaining traction, you know? Peer support alone, people can spin because they don't know what they're doing. Expert support alone and some of the things that we've talked about, you know, about feeling like a failure because oh my God, I haven't implemented what this person who's been doing it for 20 years or 10 years or whatever, they're so good at it. And when I do it, you know, it doesn't work. It's like, that can feel really hard. You bring these three types of support together and it's rare to see those three kinds of support. You know, what's the word? You know, effectively, skillfully woven together in these programs, mainly because one type of support or another tends to predominate, you know? And it's usually in these year-long programs or six-month programs, it's the expert kind of support. Like, do this no matter what. If you don't do it, you're not committed enough. You know, where's your willingness to show up for this? And a lot of these other pieces are missing. Yes, yes, I agree. And sometimes there are programs that have peer support and expert support but the spiritual part is still very lacking. It's still, I love the way you talk about it, sort of love and trust. And it's like, you know, yeah, I mean, I am with you on this because, you know, if it's just about building business or otherwise you will starve and then miss out on life, it's very scary and it's intimidating and, but wait, but what if there was a ground of security that we could really believe in and trust in? So, Mark, you have a learning community and you have created based on having seen what hasn't worked and of course experimented with many things yourself and seen peers experiment. You've created a program that or a community that kind of weave together these three parts for your expert spiritual. I did, I did because I've like, okay, so how can, I was like really stumped for a while, kind of just really thinking through, like how can we give people the information that they need, the support that they need and the container that they need so that they can move through this? Yes, there needs to be some systematic way. Yes, there does need to be some kind of a roadmap in terms of what's needed, but that they can do it in a way that really fits their own pacing, their own learning style, their own needs around life. Cause they, I mean, the other two pieces that I just want to mention quickly have to do with compassion and accountability that take into account that, you know, sometimes we have things going on in our life and the business is not the first priority or sometimes we miss following through with something because something else is going on and that really deserves to be attended to. Like this week, Mark, our kids came home from school with lice. And I'll tell you all of my, you know, and this is normal, you know, it's like even you have kids is what happens. It's not a huge deal, but it does mean that for two days our lives were turned upside down and all of the, I did the bare minimum to show up for clients and things like that, but all of the proactive projects I was working on were like out the window and my productivity goals for this week are kind of out the window. My little guide sheet, you know, it's like kind of out the window. This is life. There needs to be space for that in whatever container you're, you know, it's for your business. And so, and the last piece has to do with unethical or unethical, what I call unethical pricing. When people are in early stages of business development and your business is not going to grow that quickly, if you pay a lot for something and it ends up creating a debt and it's not a reasonable expectation for the business to be able to pay that back for two or three years or four years, that can create a burden that increases the pressure to be successful that then undermines the ability to be successful. So when I was kind of dreaming this up, I was thinking, okay, so it's going to be some kind of a membership community. You know, we've seen membership communities and it, can we have compassion and accountability? Can we have the learn modules? Can we have the assessment so that people can identify where they are and what they actually need and do it at their own pace? Can we have the spiritual support? You know, we do virtual retreats every other month, 24 hours. We have regular spiritual guidance and support and meditation and in that way. We have coaching and feedback. We have all of this. And then we created, I created it at a pay from the heart pricing like people get to pick how much they're paying a month. So that they, you know, with the mind that, oh yeah, I'm going to need to sustain this probably over 18 months or two years or three years like while I'm building my business, you know, what is sustainable so that if I have a month where I'm sick or I have a month, because my kid's getting married or I have a month where what, you know, whatever that I can still stay on track, but I can, but I'm not going to be as productive or as engaged during this time. And so that's what I really did was had this thought about like how can we do it so that the rug doesn't get pulled out on them after six months or 12 months and only 20% has been implemented and where there's the time and space. I just was talking to somebody today on a coaching call. They said, oh yeah, I went through the learning modules in the community and I'm not yet getting those results I'm needing. I'm going to go back through, right? The iteration, I'm going to go back and like tweak and refine and make it better. And, you know, this is a totally natural and normal part of the process, but she has access to that because of the structure that I really wanted to put in place for that. That is awesome. I love that you put a pay from the heart price around it. And I agree with you about the ethical pricing. I, you know, you and I probably have had clients come to us after they've already spent thousands, if not sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on things. And it's always like, oh my gosh, I wish. But sometimes I think, you know, maybe they had to because it's like they were so intrigued by that kind of marketing copy and that kind of possibility. I don't think so. So marketing and marketing and advertising got its official start, like in a big way, just as the field of psychology was growing, right? In the late 1800s, early 1900s, you know, Madison Avenue and the, you know, the marketing, the big first marketing, you know, it's like all took it out of the psychologically manipulative tactics taken straight from the infancy of psychology. And so if people are intrigued by that, it's not a natural organic intrigue. It's a manipulated, hyped, unethical sales process. There's no way, I think, that someone who is really grounded, who really has the space and time to consider who can consult with people they trust and look at something, honestly, have a brand new business and say, okay, I'm gonna spend $10,000 or $15,000 on this program, you know, but I'm gonna put it on my credit card or I'm gonna spend the last of my savings or it's just, it's like there's, I'm not saying there's not a space for higher price, more premium programs, but those are for, you know, advanced sophisticated businesses that have the wherewithal to pay for them and they're getting the kind of support and training that's needed at the level that their business is. Sometimes I see testimonials about, oh, this program, you know, allowed me to add another six figures or make six figures. And then what we don't know behind the scenes is that that business was already at such a level where they needed just a few tweaks to add, you know, add 10 to 20% to their income and that was got them to six figures or whatever it may be. It's like, we don't know the story. It sounds like they were coming from nothing and suddenly they made, you know, so yes, thank you for, you know, kind of helping to get this message out there too. Yeah, because I've been ranting about this for years. Right. So Mark, if people, you know, I hope those watching this are interested in what Mark has been talking about, go take the assessment. If you haven't already done so, it's on heartofbusiness.com. Go there, heart of business, heart has an H-E-A-R-T, heartof-o-f-business, heartofbusiness.com. Go there, click on free stuff and you'll see the assessment. The learning community is something, when can people join? Is it something that happens once a year? What's the... Yeah, that's an excellent question. You know, we chose, I chose not to leave the learning community open all the time because we have a really precious culture inside the, that we're one of generosity and of safety and of courage. And so rather than having it open all the time, we open it generally twice a year. One, it's kind of, you know, if you're, I mean, who knows when you're listening to this, but one of the periods is coming up soon. You can also get on the wait list, right? Just if you go to heartofbusiness.com slash community that will describe what's in the community and see if it resonates for you and see if it's right. And then if it's not open, you can join the wait list and take a look. And we do occasionally let people in from the wait list because sometimes people complete, you know, I mean, people complete and leave the community from time to time and sometimes enough space will open up that we'll say, okay, we're between enrollments but we'll let a few people in because, you know, we want folks in. And so that's an option. But it's, you know, it's, you're going to want to make sure that you resonate with how we do business. So I would just recommend just, you know, either getting on our email list or just taking a good look around our website, looking at some of our free content and making sure that the way we do things resonates with you, you know? And you can always ask the question of us, I'm of me or, you know, I'm always happy to respond. Yeah, thank you. I have known people and I still know people who are in your community and I always hear great things about it. So if those of you interested, go check it out, heartofbusiness.com slash community. It describes very well what the community is like there. It's a beautiful, beautifully put together page, by the way. So yeah, go check it out. And Mark, thank you so much for the work that you do. I'm delighted, I'm delighted that you invited me here. Thank you so much, George. I always like spending time with you. Yeah, absolutely. Same here. Go check it out, everyone, heartofbusiness.com. Lots of content, free content there. Mark has also, Heart of Business, the Facebook page is also quite active. So I'll put all the links in there. So I hope you all check it out. All right, everyone. Thanks for watching.