Visualize Transformation, Create Transformation With Mitch Russo
If there is anyone who can visualize transformations, it’s Mitch Russo. The founder of Timeslips Corp. and the inventor of the Power Tribes concept, Mitch has been through a lot and learned from it, transforming himself into the person he is today. Chad Burmeister hosts Mitch for a conversation that touches on Mitch’s personal journey and the challenges he faced to get to where he is today. Mitch also talks about his work in guiding clients into transforming their business, and the process he uses to help his clients. This is an inspirational story that will point you towards the direction you need to go to transform your life for the better – a story you wouldn’t want to miss.
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Visualize Transformation, Create Transformation With Mitch Russo
I’m here with Mitch Russo. He is a business coach. He originally started in software development where he built the company in his early twenties and then sold it. Since then, he’s been an author. He helps other companies scale their organization so that they can also exit in a similar way to what Mitch exited if that’s their target. He wrote Power Tribes. I’m enthused and eager to dig into a little bit of that because a lot of what we do in business relates to Power Tribes. I’m interested. The book is in the mail. I’m looking forward to reading it. Mitch, welcome to the conversation. Thanks for being here.
Chad, thanks for inviting me. This sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
The best way to understand you as a person is to go back in time. If you think about when you’re young, 5, 6 or whatever age is you’re having the first memories at, what was your passion? What did you enjoy doing when you were a young child?
I was always fascinated by Science. Science and electricity were my passion since I was 6 or 7 years old. My interest in electricity started by reading a book at 8 or 9 on Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the light bulb. I have the personality type that many entrepreneurs do. I get obsessed with things. When I like something, I dive in completely. I don’t pay a lot of attention to other things when I do that. While my grades were falling in school, my Science grades were at the top of the range because I became immersed in learning about Science in particular. After reading every book in the Brooklyn Public Library on Thomas Alva Edison, at that point, my mom started writing publishers and asking them if they have any others I should read. It became my passion. I followed that passion as a young man into my adult life as well.
Nowadays, they try to rebrand that skill as ADD or ADHD. I’ve always felt similar. When you get on task, you want to get to the bottom of it. If I’m programming them a website, I’m going to be there for eight hours and get that thing cranked out at least to a 98% level. It’s interesting. It can be a two-edged sword that you’ve probably had to work through in your life.
I feel gifted to have that ability. I can focus well and zero in on something and stick with it for a long time. To me, that brings me a lot of joy.
If you were to tie the thread between then and now to how does that apply to what it is you’re helping companies with, how does that tie together to the work that you’re doing?
Over the decades, I have developed the methodology by which I can look at a company through the eyes of the CEO. Together, we create a visual map of their entire organization on one screen in 1 hour or 90 minutes sometimes. The reason I do this is that to find growth opportunities for my clients, I first have to see the entire business three-dimensionally. For me, that starts by building this particular type of visual map. It’s based on a mind map structure. By the time I’m done with it, it’s much more than that. It combines the equivalent of a mind map and a flowchart. It shows us exactly past, present and future all at the same time.
From there, we start assigning initiatives and then we work towards those initiatives with accountability every session. That is what I’m doing. After helping Tony Robbins as a founder to build Business Breakthroughs International, one of the things that I learned a lot about are the different business models that people engage in. Over the years, it’s become intuitive for me to see a business model that is maybe different than all the ones around that particular individual. Pull from my experience a possibility of exploring new sales channels, new marketing channels, which is partially why I invented the Power Tribes concept.
I did not recognize that you’ve been part of that program. Do you know Carl Gould from the Board of Advisors who was also with Tony Robbins at one point?
Carl and I are good friends. We became friends at the first meeting. It’s like a few birds of a feather. It was terrific.
I hit it off with him the first time he spoke. He told the story of how he was in San Diego and he had to get to LA with no money and then get back by the time the class was. He left at 8:00 PM or 10:00 PM. He thought he was going to get a good night’s sleep that night. He made it in time. That story was compelling.
It turns out that we have a lot of cross points. Carl turned out to have coached Chet Holmes before he started working with Tony originally. I met Tony through my friendship with Chet. It was great to connect all the dots when we finally started talking.
You’ve rubbed elbows with some of the best of the best in the world. My next question is around the painful things we go through. When you look at them and face them, they seem like mountains in a lot of cases, “How am I going to get over around or under that thing?” You do it, look back and go, “Huh?” Is there a big one that you can talk about that you faced that you’re comfortable talking about and now looking back might have turned into a gift for you? What were some of those for you?
Power Tribes - How Certification Can Explode Your Business
I’ll go back a lot of years. In high school, I had a rock band and we were having a lot of fun. The dark side of having a rock band was I got involved with drugs. I get obsessed with things once I become interested in them. I became addicted to hard narcotics. I was shooting heroin at the age of sixteen. When I give my keynote, I have a whole story about how I was ten seconds from death. It was real. All of a sudden, I got a second chance. I had to face the possibility of recovering from severe drug addiction on my own until eventually, I got help. That was one of the times in my life. The other times related to life are the relationships, failed marriages and then in business. I built this company from scratch. I didn’t know what I was doing when I did and then almost lost it all. All of these things are what make us richer as individuals and provide us with incredibly valuable lessons that we could then teach others.
I did have an interaction with drugs when I was around sixteen but it wasn’t ten seconds from death level. It certainly had an eye-opening experience when my dad came to pick me up from a rock concert. I wasn’t doing so well and we went into the ER. That was a good fork in the road. That’s big time. If someone is reading and maybe they’re in their teens or 50 years old, it doesn’t matter and they found themselves, “I love to drink wine three days a week. I drink the whole bottle. Maybe I’m doing something in drugs I shouldn’t be doing.” It sounds like it took getting to rock bottom for you to get to a level where you’ve figured it out. Is there something that you could advise people on that? How do you avoid getting ten seconds from death?
That’s a hard question to answer because it’d be different for everybody. Most of us need to hit bottom to bounce. It’s hard to bounce off the air. The hard bottom is where you bounce. That’s where I bounced. The simplest advice I can offer you is most people don’t realize the pain that they’re inflicting on those around them. Maybe that would be a way to realize how bad you’re doing. If you look around you and you see the pain you’re inflicting, it might be a good opportunity to take a second look and see maybe if you’re doing some type of behavior that’s affecting others that you can change.
In alcoholism, we have an Al-Anon program. I went through it because I married an alcoholic wife. We were together for years. Without Al-anon, I would have had a lot of more difficult problems with my family in life. Al-anon has helped me deal with being the family of an alcoholic. I’d say get involved with a program like Al-anon if there is addiction in your life and you’re not the addicted person. If you are, start doing the research and look for a place where you can get help because that’s the only way out. It’s hard to do it on your own or maybe impossible.
You’ve been successful in helping other entrepreneurs. You exited a company. If you were to wave the proverbial magic wand and change something, is there anything that you would say would change everything? It sounds like you’re doing it because you’re moving down the street to a beach house. Is there anything else that comes to mind? What would you like to accomplish in life that would change everything for you?
At this stage in my life, I’m not looking to change anything. I’m at a point where I meditate every day. I have my life arranged exactly the way I want it. I’m in good physical health. I have a beautiful circle of friends and family members. I have resources too that I could use to enjoy my life, travel and do what I like. The only thing I could say is more of the same. I’ve immersed myself in crypto, have learned a lot about that, have had some success with it and continue to do that as well. I am simply looking for things that make me happy. That’s all I care about.
I love that answer because if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, “Are you successful?” There would be a hesitancy in my voice and it’s because I hadn’t owned what does success means for me? What would the blueprint look like? When you walk out of your house in the morning, what car are you driving? Who are you married to? What is your relationship with your children? All these questions, you can blueprint and architect it. That’s what you’ve been able to do. It’s like, “Every day I know I’m doing exactly what I need to do.”
That’s what Living A Better Story is about. We partnered with a guy named Robert White who was part of the original Human Potential Movement. He knows of all the people you’re talking about. He’s trained in China and other places. Living an Extraordinary Life is the book that he wrote and that’s what you’re living. That’s a neat answer to the question that gives a lot of people hope to say, “What do you want it to be? Go do that.”
A lot of times, people are confused about what success is. When you walk outside and look at the car you’re driving, if you truly believe that’s what success is, you’d be mistaken. There’s nothing wrong with having a great car. I happen to have a great car but not because I care about it. In other words, if I cared enough about it where I was taking a substantial part of my savings or my income to divert to have a status symbol, that is what I would call a red flag.
I remember many years ago, I was a little boy and my dad bought a Cadillac. I said to my dad, “That’s incredible. How long did it take you to save up to buy a Cadillac?” I’m a little boy and I think everybody gets an allowance. He said to me, “I would never buy a car like this unless I had 10 to 20 times the amount of this car costs in the bank.” I said, “I understand.” That was the first hint. You don’t live to create status. You create status from the way you live.
I’m going to pivot a little bit and ask business questions. What do you find missing when you’re working with successful companies that change everything for a business? A lot of the questions we’re asking about your success and where you came from. Businesses are also born. They act like a human in many ways with a lot of different pieces to it. What do you find is missing inside of the companies that you often work with?
Many of the companies that have had some successes are trapped by it. For example, one of my clients was doing a certain type of marketing. When lead flow started to dry up, their initial response was, “Let’s do more of that.” It’s what they knew to be successful. When I came along and showed them a whole different way, it was like a revelation. Although what I was teaching them was not something particularly unique. It was guiding them to do it right. In this case, it turned out to be how to use a podcast for a generation of client leads.
Once I showed them the system, the process that I had built and had taught now to dozens of other private clients, they immediately said, “I want to do that too.” It’s not a matter of me inventing anything. I can arrange things in a certain order. Most of what I help people with are things that are out there but they don’t know about or perfecting things that, frankly, could deliver much better results if they did them a little bit differently. That may be too vague. If it is, let me know.
The unique set of eyeballs on a business is what you’re saying. They’re used to things being a certain way. Something changes and they’re going to solve it by doing more of what’s not working. You come in and say, “There’s A to B strategy. Let’s move over to the B track and get off the track that doesn’t work.”
Visualize Transformation: All of these experiences make us richer as individuals and provide us with incredible, valuable lessons that we could then teach others.
When I start with any new client, I build a map first. I’m already looking 360 at their entire business, sales channels, marketing channels, budgets, revenue and product lines. I do a full analysis of their financials as well. At the end of the day, it’s going to be easy for me as a completely objective third party to see what’s missing after I’ve done this. Now I’m thinking 1,000 times or more. There’s not much new I’m going to see when I look at this stuff but I will see things missing and that’s how I operate when I work with clients.
Once you identify the 360 views or the mind map that you talked about, I understand you’ve developed or leveraged a SaaS application for coaching. How does that work? I assume that is part of after you do the 60 to 90-minute session, then it’s, “Now what?” That’s probably where the SaaS application fits.
What I’m about to tell you is completely unimpressive, quite boring and probably most people don’t even want to do it. I’ll tell you anyway because it’s my process. Once we build the map and come up with what I think of as a plan moving forward, at that point, I do something quite mundane. I say, “We’re going to be meeting for the next 6 or 8 weeks. Let’s set goals. What are the trackable numeric goals we can set week to week over the next eight weeks? Can we measure how we’ve done from week to week or session to session?” Most people go, “No problem. Let’s do that.” It’s amazing what that shows up and what we end up doing. That’s step one.
I immediately implement a goal tracking system with clients. The second thing I do is work with them to understand what they want to be held accountable for. I build a series of accountability questions that are managed by my software and then deployed every week via a verbal conversation and then recorded by my software as the system progresses. Finally, with each session, I take notes, provide guidance as to that what their goals and homework are, in essence, for the next session.
We set up the next session using a calendar link. They also want a recording of the session. We grab that recording. All of what I’ve described is done automatically inside of ClientFol.io, which is my new SaaS platform for coaches. It’s a one-screen system. On my desktop, without a ClientFol.io, I have 5 or 6 applications open. I have Trello, spreadsheet, Evernote and multiple tabs on my browser open for calendaring. After the session is over, I have to go to each of these screens, collect all that data, drop it into an email and then send it to a client.
When I start with that client in the following week, I have to go and open all those screens again and reread what I wrote the previous time. I was wasting about 30-plus minutes per session on admin. This is cognitive time. This is the middle of the day, peak performance time that I could be used to help clients instead, I’m doing $9 an hour admin work which is not suitable for any of my clients or any coaches. What I did is a built a SaaS platform that encapsulates everything I’ve described into a single browser window.
I’m assuming you’ve deployed those multiple times. For someone who doesn’t have the software yet, are there some of the aspects that a coach could use to increase their value to their clients with or without the software?
What I’m doing is somewhat basic and mundane, create a spreadsheet and have a spreadsheet or a tab for every client. I then create the goals on the left, whatever their goals will be. I recommend tracking a minimum of 3 to 6 along the top of the dates of your meetings and then use the spreadsheet to graph the collected content every single week and then copy and paste that graph into the email that you send with your assignment. There you go. You could do it with a spreadsheet. With ClientFol.io, it’s all right there.
These apps aren’t that expensive these days. If someone wanted to sign up, what’s the standard subscription package?
It’s expensive. I’m only talking to your most wealthy clients because it can be as low as $16.66 a month. If that’s too much, I understand. We priced it at this level because we believe that we want to help as many people as we can.
In this inflationary market that we live in, that’s probably about the price of a cup of coffee.
I ran into limitations with other coaching systems where as soon as I went from 3 to 4 clients, I had to pay more money. I resented that because I don’t think that’s required. I don’t think it should be. I set up a system that you can create as many clients as you want, as many goals as you want, as many accountability questions as you want, as many as anything you want in your business for you as a coach. If you have a multicultural organization, you could add as many coaches as you want at the same price at $16.66 per month for each of your coaches. The software rolls up all their data so you can get a coach management report showing you the productivity of all your teams as well.
My last question is about faith. Before we started, you said you’ve done some work in spirituality applications before or you worked with a company that does that. As you shared, you were ten seconds away. That’s a quick stopwatch. You know you’re there. What impact does faith have on your approach to life and the journey that you’re on?
I would call what I practice tuning into my higher power. You can call it source, God, higher power, Jesus, Buddha, pick a name, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same. My process is simple. I’ve studied about twelve different religious models over the years. I was born and raised in a Jewish home. Judaism can be a beautiful religion but there are parts of it that I don’t resonate with as it is with almost every religion. I settled in on something simple. I like to simplify and find a better way. My why is to find a better way.
For me, the best way is to meditate every day. I start with that. I systematically remove the things from my life that don’t make me happy. Fear is not a problem. I see and feel fear. I know when I do, that if I can work through it, I will raise my vibration to a higher level where I will no longer ever feel that again when it comes to that topic. I remember once being afraid to speak on stage for a long time until finally, I broke through that fear. I spoke on stage and never afraid again.
Don’t be stupid. If you’re afraid of jumping off a building, that’s a good fear. If you’re afraid of doing something, maybe getting out there, being public, having a persona bigger than what you think you have or are, do it, work through it and you will no longer be afraid of those things. Part of what it takes to be happy is to make progress and grow. I like to grow in some way every day, whether it’s playing guitar, my photography which is my true passion or the business processes that I learned and deploy. Every day, I want to grow in some way.
Visualize Transformation: Fear is not a problem. We see fear and we feel fear. We can work through it. We can raise our vibration to a higher level where we will no longer ever feel fear again.
I heard someone, a coach named Rich Litvin, once talk for a four-day session. One of his main themes was, “It’s either hell yes or hell no. Get rid of the hell noes.” What I’m getting you say here is what are those things that don’t make you happy? When you can clear those out, all it takes is a couple. We all have dozens that try to get on our shoulders and follow us around. When you meditate, the world becomes clear. One time, I remember even in my bedroom on the dresser, there was too much clutter. It’s such a simple, stupid thing that most people would say, “What are you talking about?” It mattered. Now I have one little piece on there and that’s calming for me. If you can pay attention to things, people in your lives, all of it, I love that. It’s like getting a haircut.
The other good thing about it is that if you have a focus on staying happy, there’s an amazing thing happens. You only attract happy people. If you’re negative in your life, you’re going to attract negative people. No one could be 100% happy all the time. There’s a level of insanity that would be called. If you’re staying happy most of the time, I will tell you for certain that you will attract people who are also staying happy most of the time too. That’s valuable to me. It was an observation. I’ve heard it said before. I never quite figured it out until I watched it unfold for me in my life.
The coaching app that you built sounds like our initial Go at 77 praise. It’s an accountability app. It says, “Connect with your higher power in the morning and at night and everything else throughout the day.” Now you’ve got the bookends of connecting with your higher power, Buddha or whichever higher power you’re connecting to. If you cause yourself to remember to do that, that’s what your app helps people do. That’s what the Excel spreadsheet with the email accountability helps you do. If you put one foot in front of the other, it’s amazing how by the time you’re done, you could travel from California to New York.
It’s a good thing to be making progress. Tony teaches this quite a bit, “When people are not moving forward or not evolving, they’re not going to feel good.” For me, that’s true. Even in retirement, it doesn’t mean I’ll stop learning or evolving. It means I’ll stop doing things for the purpose of making money.
If people want to get ahold of you, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?
If they would like to take a peek at the software, it’s ClientFol.io. For $1, you get two weeks of usage and you can see how you like it. To know a little more about me in general, go to MitchRusso.com.
It’s been a fabulous conversation. I’m glad we got to know each other more. I look forward to seeing you at the next event in Florida. Maybe we’ll have to come in a day early and check out the place at the beach or something.
Let’s do it. That would be great.
Everybody, thanks for joining the show. We’ve been talking with Mitch Russo. What an awesome story. Be in your zone and discover your talents. Don’t get ten seconds away from the end as Mitch did. There are things you can do to understand that you are there and figure out that you’re at the bottom. Let’s let Mitch’s life be a beacon to turn on the light bulb for you to go figure that out. The help is there. Thank you, Mitch.
Thank you, Chad. Talk to you again soon.
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About Mitch Russo
In 1985, he entered the software business as the founder of Timeslips Corp (sold to Sage Plc) after creating the largest network of Certified Consultants in the software industry. After selling his company, he then ran Sage Plc in the US as the COO, with over 300 staff.
Independently wealthy at the age of 42, he wanted to give back to other entrepreneurs. He got involved in the VC community, first as an advisor to startups and then as the CEO of the largest furniture shopping site early in 2000, FurnitureFan.com.
