December 22, 2025 – Failing to Success Phillip Cantrell and Publisher Justin Sachs

0:04 Intro 1
Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion: Jim Beach.

0:27 Jim Beach
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting edition of School for Startups Radio. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, all of that. I hope you’re having a great week with your family and friends, and while you drive around, put on a show and listen and learn, and don’t yell at the other people around you. They’re listening to bad stuff. So anyway, I hope you’re having a great holiday week. We’ve got a great show for you today to listen to as you drive around. We have Philip Cantrell. I will introduce him in just a second, but I promise you, he is damn, damn impressive, and you will really enjoy the interview. After that, we have a greatest hits with Justin Sachs, who you may not have heard of, but is one of the publishing superstars in the United States. We had to get those back up from a dead server, so it is a greatest hits as well. We’re going to get started right now. Here we go.

We’ve got a great guest to introduce you to. First, though, we got to make some money here before we go on holiday. Right? Please welcome Philip Cantrell to the show. Very successful career. Boy, listen to this: founder and CEO of Benchmark Realty, which he grew to one of the top, let’s say, 100 or so in the industry of 20,000, so an amazing success. He has some 25,000 agents and 35 billion in revenue underneath him at United, which is a real estate residential brokerage that he also is involved with. And he has a new book out that is incredibly successful. It actually has more reviews than mine, which is very rare, I must say. The book is called Failing My Way to Success: Lessons from Forty-Two Years of Winning (and Losing) in Business, and has 169 five-star reviews. That is amazingly impressive. Philip, welcome to the show. How you doing?

2:34 Phillip Cantrell
Thank you, Jim. I’m glad to be here. I’m doing great. You know, it’s kind of chilly in Tennessee right now, but other than that, I’m okay.

2:39 Jim Beach
It’s chilly here in Atlanta as well. Are you in the Nashville area?

2:44 Phillip Cantrell
I am. I actually live in Franklin, Tennessee, which is about 20 minutes south of Nashville.

2:49 Jim Beach
Yes, I am well familiar with it. Lots of entrepreneurs there, and a lot of media people live in Franklin too.

2:56 Phillip Cantrell
Yes, a lot of country music stars. It’s not uncommon to run into them at Starbucks, for sure.

3:02 Jim Beach
Oh, yeah, kind of funny. I ran into Whitney Houston and—what was her husband’s name? Oh, you’re the guy. That guy—at Starbucks one time. Yeah.

3:17 Phillip Cantrell
Well, interesting story. I was in Starbucks a few months ago, and I didn’t pay much attention. I was going in the back door, and a fellow paused and opened the door, let me go through. I looked up. It was Keith Urban. Wow. It’s not uncommon to find that in this area, for sure, which is kind of interesting. I’m actually a native Nashvillian, so having grown up around country music all my life, I’m really not that enamored with it, but it’s good, and it brings great economic benefits to our economy here locally, for sure.

3:48 Jim Beach
Yeah, for sure. It’s great for the economy. So yeah, yeah. All right. Let’s talk about your book to start. Tell us about it. Yeah, My Way to Success.

3:58 Phillip Cantrell
Say, interesting story. I mean, anytime somebody has lived a long time, they’ve accumulated a tremendous amount of experiences, not all of them positive, not all of them good. So what I tried to do in this book was accumulate those and share them with future entrepreneurs. That is the avatar for the book, basically, is the fledgling entrepreneur that is attempting to get started and doesn’t really know what he does—he or she doesn’t know. They don’t know what they don’t know yet, and generally they find them out by stepping on a landmine and figuratively blowing the leg off. And so what I’ve tried to do in this book is share my experiences so hopefully they can avoid some of that pain.

4:40 Jim Beach
All right. Yes. Yeah. Let’s go through some of the lessons. Yeah. Okay.

4:48 Phillip Cantrell
Well, you know, just kind of give you a little more background, if I may. I have, in my career, founded 10 separate companies in two separate industries. The first one is commercial printing. The second is real estate brokerage. And in those businesses, some have been successes. Some have not been successes. If you put it in sporting team terms, my record would be four, four, and two: four wins, four losses, and two ties. So you learn a lot in that. And some of those lessons I learned is that you have to develop a set of systems. So I kind of broke it down in the book and analyzed—and I’m a big note taker. I take notes wherever I go. I have a little black binder I carry with me, and I’m constantly jotting ideas and things that I discover. And now, in analyzing all of that, I realized that I can break it down into four basic pillars of leadership success, if you will. And they’re named observation, delegation, working smart, and compassion. And that kind of summarizes the whole concept of the book, really.
So observation is number one: looking outside your industry and seeing what’s going on in other industries that are best practices that can be applied within your industry. In many cases, we get in this rote learning mode in an industry and think, well, this is the only way to do it. And the words, “because we’ve always done it that way,” are the worst seven words ever invented in the English language. So observing and then installing those.
Delegation is learning that you cannot do it all yourself. You must delegate certain critical tasks to other people. And this is a failing of mine, a tremendous failing of mine throughout the years, is that I felt like nobody can do it better than me, and I can do it faster than I can explain it to somebody else. Does that sound familiar to anybody out there listening?

6:41 Jim Beach
Oh, it’s so true. I still do that. I mean, when it’s true that it takes longer to explain it than just do it, don’t you just still do it?

6:52 Phillip Cantrell
The first time, that’s absolutely true. The second time it’s not. The third time, it gets easier. The fourth time, you don’t even have to talk about it anymore. So it’s making that little investment up front to yield big benefits later on. And that’s the secret. The delegation of understanding that when you do delegate, when you do assign someone a task and hold them accountable for performance of that task, then you should be done with it. If you’re not, then you’ve got the wrong person and you got the wrong people in the wrong seats on the bus. Working smart is another one I mentioned earlier: I’m a note taker. I constantly have binders that. I carry with me, and I’m always writing down important things. And that’s when you see something, a function stream within your business that you consistently perform over and over again, to develop a system, a standardized system, to accomplish those tasks. And that’s called working smart. If you don’t do that, you are effectively reinventing the wheel every time you perform that task or that function. You can take any business and break it down into micro sections, and when you break it down into micro sections, and then you document those micro sections, then you have a standard policy procedure for each process that you perform in that business. And then you achieve what Jim Collins talks about: the flywheel, the flywheel effect. It takes really hard to get it going the first time, but after a while, it takes minimal effort to keep that flywheel going. And the secret to that flywheel, in my opinion, is working smart and documenting the processes that you’re doing.

The fourth pillar of leadership, for me, is compassion: understanding that you are working with humans. You are not working—there may be machines involved in your business, but the humans are the ones that make the creativity of those machines function correctly. And so understanding that and realizing that people have lives outside your business, and try to make it better for them in a place that they want to go to work instead of a place that they have to go to work. And that’s an important differential.

The big thing for me has always been understanding that you in business, if you focus solely on the money, you already lost. That’s like trying to play football staring at the scoreboard. You have to focus on the game. You have to focus on helping others get what they want, and then the money is the scoreboard of your service to others. And that’s what the compassion means. So those are important: four pillars, observation, delegation, working, smart and compassion.

9:30 Jim Beach
I love it. Great. Absolutely great. Philip, tell us about a failure.

8:53 Jim Beach
Okay. Do you know about neuroplasticity, Calvin? I think that neuroplasticity may be the coolest word on Earth. I just love that word. It’s up there with like serendipity and plethora, some of the other just great fun words to play with. Or perambulator.

9:16 Calvin Correli
Perambulator. Is one of my favorite ones, too. What was that one? Perambulator?

9:20 Jim Beach
Oh, that’s a good one. I don’t know what it does, but it sounds neat.

9:27 Calvin Correli
It’s like—it’s like, I don’t even know the actual English word, but like, the thing that you carry your kid around and then you drive your kid around in. That’s what it is.

9:43 Jim Beach
Yes. Okay. All right, so talk to me about neuroplasticity and what that means. Does that mean that I can beat the shyness out of myself, or that I can learn to become different? What does that mean to you? Yeah, exactly, right. So, so—

9:58 Calvin Correli
Yeah, exactly, right. So, so— So the phrase that I return to is: neurons that fire together wire together. So I’ll give you an example. Like one of my clients—she’s a beautiful Norwegian lady—she’s created an incredible online business teaching painting to thousands of people in Norway. And one of her core patterns was like, “People are going to leave me. They’re going to reject me.” In her teenage years, like, she had this situation where there’s a group of, like, 10, a dozen girls, and from one day to the next, they didn’t want to have anything to do with her. She was part of the group one day, and the next day she was not. And her mind bug was, “Oh, shit. They left me. They rejected me. I must have done something wrong. What did I do wrong?” And then she would like spend hours, years, decades, trying to figure, like, what am I doing wrong? What was I doing wrong? Making sure I never do anything wrong so people don’t reject me. Now, she created a business with thousands of clients, and she was constantly worried she was going to do something wrong so they would leave. And it’s just—that’s the pattern. But the beautiful thing, and where neuroplasticity comes in, is the moment you really see, “Oh, crap, that’s the pattern I’m playing, and it came from here.” There’s probably something even earlier in her case, but we don’t need to go that. We just need to see, “Oh, that this is where the energy in this pattern is coming from.” Once you see it, now when that comes up again, you have the choice: do I keep going down that same path that I’ve been down, you know, a thousand times before, or do I choose to take a step back and just be like, “No, that’s not the truth.” And so, as you make that choice more, that old highway of, “Oh my God, they’re going to reject me if I do something wrong or if I say something wrong,” and blah, blah, blah—that highway is going to start to get overgrown, because those neurons no longer fire together, and so they don’t keep wiring together. So yeah, neuroplasticity is awesome, and it’s exactly it. Like, what I love about my work is we just need to see it and really touch it once, where you really get it and you feel, “Oh, this is the pattern.” And then from that moment on, it’s shifted forever. Doesn’t mean that there won’t be a situation where you go down that path again, but you will catch yourself and just stop it real soon, because now it’s a friend, it’s familiar, you know? Like, okay, I know what I’m looking at here.

12:04 Phillip Cantrell
Well, in many cases you have to do something to change your physical state. In my case, I realized that, you know, you have an urgent situation that comes up and you get in this—you know, your blood pressure goes up, you break out into a sweat, you engage in feverish activity without really even thinking, believing that you’re a fireman putting out a fire. But if you stop and you actually do something physical, in my case, I will stop and clap my hands—literally clap my hands. And that physical action breaks the physical response, the rote memory muscle response, to the stimulus. And it is. It’s an interesting effect how that works, because we don’t realize we’re doing it, right? It’s just one of those things that happens automatically. We go into the mode. But the key then is not to immediately know what you’re going to do. The key is to immediately stop the physical response that’s automated within your DNA, and that works very effectively for me.

13:10 Jim Beach
That would be weird to see you just start clapping in the middle of a conversation.

13:15 Phillip Cantrell
To be clear, I don’t have multiple claps. It’s just like one clap. Or maybe I’ll pat myself on the side of the head or smack my jaw sometimes, you know. But yeah, it is kind of interesting. And then I have had people observe that and say, “What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I just changed the whole conversation, didn’t I?” Just in that one physical act, I changed the entire conversation. And now the emergency is not so much an emergency. And that’s the thing. You know, we get in these scenarios where we just handle things the same way every time, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it, and we just need to stop and think for a second: how can this outcome be different? And it’s really powerful once you once you get a handle on that. 

14:01 Jim Beach
That is very impressive. And you do that on the way home, as you’re driving home, go over these situations in your head?

14:10 Phillip Cantrell
Yeah, I am a big— —the what’s—what’s the proper word for a big—analyzer, I will—forensic accounting is a good example. In other words, studying something after the fact. So I do a lot of forensic thinking on my way home. Fortunately, I don’t live far from the office, and many days I actually work at home now. But going through the processes of the day, not to dwell upon the negativity, but to say, “Okay, this happened. I recognize that this happened. Now, when that happens again, how can I do that better?” 

And then the key point in leadership here, though, is you can’t keep that to yourself. You have to go share that with your team, and you have to engage in a forensic discussion and analyze the process and what happened. So many people in business, the first thing they want to do is place blame. And the blame—this is a news flash for everybody—the blame here rests with a guy or gal at the top, period. It happened on your watch. It’s your responsibility to fix it, to change your system, to change your processes so that it doesn’t happen again. And you cannot do that without looking at it in a fair and unbiased manner and trying to figure out a better way to do it: better, faster, cheaper, better, faster, cheaper, better, faster, cheaper. All of it designed around the concept of helping others get what they want. And you help enough other people get what they want, you will never have to worry about your own success. It will be guaranteed.

15:46 Jim Beach
I love it. That is a great line. Tweak that one out.

15:51 Phillip Cantrell
Well, it’s something I’ve learned most of the time because I’ve been bludgeoned, you know? And all of that leads into personal growth, right? So, as a leader, you’re not going to be effective. As a business person, as an entrepreneur, you’re never going to be effective unless you are constantly striving to become better yourself. I’m an avid reader. I will read 50 books a year, most of them on Audible, because I do a lot of exercising. I’m a big walker. I do a lot of walking—you know, three, four miles a day if I can. And learning, always learning something. And so that is, you know, I believe the brain is a muscle, and it’s like any muscle. If you don’t exercise it, then it will atrophy. And so I exercise my brain through trying to learn more stuff. And then that has translated to a theme that I have tried to communicate to all of my people also.
And being in the real estate brokerage business, I am working with lots of independent contractors and trying to help them understand the key importance of doing just one more thing every day than you did yesterday. And here’s a math thing for you. I’ll give you—I’ll back that up with real math. So, you know, one to the 365th power is what. It’s still one, right? We’re going to do math here. Are you with me?

17:19 Jim Beach
I was really glad that you answered that question yourself. You didn’t make me answer it, because I thought it was one, but I wasn’t 100% sure.

11:57 Jim Beach
And how do you slow down before you get out of stupid response?

17:27 Phillip Cantrell
I understand, I understand. It’s one. So if you don’t improve some way, somehow, each day, then you’re going to be exactly where you are today, one year from today. And that’s what most people end up being if they’re not improving. So let’s do some more. Let’s take that math problem one step further. So 1% more effective: so 1.01 to the 365th power is 37.8%, so by simply making a 1% improvement in your daily tasks in a year, you will be nearly 40% more effective than you were today. Or it gets even more stupid. And beyond that, a 2% improvement: 1.02 to the 365th power, right? 365 days in a year. So that’s where that 365 comes in. 2% improvement equals a 1,377.4% improvement in your productivity and activity, a 14 100% improvement in 12 months, simply by a 2% improvement on a daily basis. So that’s the key to success. Break it down into bite-size increments. Goes back to how to eat an elephant: one bite at a time. That’s how you do it. So if you do a 2% improvement, you will be 14 100% better in a year than you are today. Is that not something everyone would like to see, but you have to have dedication. You have to stay after it.

You cannot stop. You cannot let up. You cannot stop for a moment. If you back off and go back to one to the 365th—in other words, you had zero improvement for one day—you just shaved off a percentage, two or three percentage points of that. But anyway, you get the point, and it’s incremental. Improvement is where success lies in any business, in any career, and that requires staying focused in what you’re doing and being aware of destination addiction, right? So work in the incremental baby steps, as opposed to working in the “I want to get to that place down there.” You have to have goals, 100%. You have to have goals. But you cannot focus on the goal to the extent that you are ignoring your daily tasks and daily activities that are required to achieve that goal. That’s a very important lesson that took me a very long time to learn. I hope that makes sense.

20:14 Jim Beach
It does. It does. I loved your description of continual improvement. The Japanese term is kanzan, and you described it almost word for word, the way a Japanese would.

20:14 Phillip Cantrell
Well, well, I’m a little southern boy, but you know, it just makes common sense to me. And these are things that I have learned over time. I have studied Deming philosophy—brought a lot of that to the Japanese. I have most of a master’s degree in economics. I’ve studied quite a bit of that: just-in-time delivery and all that. In fact, my first half of my career—19 years of commercial printing—I ran a manufacturing plant. So my brain is a manufacturing-trained brain, not a sales-trained brain, if that makes sense. And that’s where a lot of this stuff comes from. I mean, I got in this industry, and I said, “I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but the way you guys are doing business makes no sense to me at all. So I’ve started a company, and I’m going to do it different.” And Benchmark Realty is actually the company that I sold to United Real Estate. In fact, the stats that you quoted were United Real Estate stats, but Benchmark itself is $5 billion in sales this year and about 2,000 affiliated real estate brokers and agents, and we’ve done really well. I sold it to United Real Estate five years ago. I’ve been hanging around, helping grow the company, helping secure and stabilize the company for the last five years. And then, effective January 1, I’m going to switch from a W-2 employee to a 1099 consultant, still on retainer with Benchmark, but not nearly at the money I was making as a CEO. It’s time.
And that’s an important lesson in that too, is that when you find yourself in that transition, if you get to a merger acquisition condition, where you do sell your company, the worst thing you can do is hang around too long. You don’t want to let go too fast, but you also don’t want to inhibit the growth of others that are coming behind you. And so that’s my intent, and that is the plan that I’ve been working for five years. And now it’s time to pull that in, put that into play. We got a lot of good people here that are going to continue to grow this company. And that’s how you build solid society, changing companies is by making sure that your legacy and those that come behind you are prepared for what they’re asked to do. Works really well.

22:24 Jim Beach
You’re the easiest person in the world to interview, Philip. You just keep going like the bunny. What do you see in the real estate residential market right now?

22:48 Phillip Cantrell
Well, I mean, we did our budgets for 2026. We’re anticipating a 13% improvement in our market in this area. Of course, the thing to understand is that all real estate is local. So I could give you a lesson on real estate economics that would not apply in Atlanta or not apply in California. It’s just different worlds in different areas. And I get that.

Overall, I think we have, generally speaking, a stability in the market. We are specifically budgeting a 13% increase, but we are an anomaly in our business, because we don’t hire newbies here; we only hire experienced real estate agents. So we usually, typically do—blessed by the fact that we do better than the local market. Our local market is actually down about three to 4% right now, but I think we’re going to look along here.

I don’t see tremendous rate drops in mortgages. And I’m not real sure that it matters. We had the problem we have—if you want to get into that part of it—the problem we have is that we had a huge, tremendous run-up in prices because the government was just pumping cheap money in the economy. And anytime you pump free money out there and cheap money out there, then you have a lot of it, and that drives prices of assets up. And that’s exactly what happened with home prices in America, particularly in our area. Between 2015 and 2022, we had a 100% price increase in the median home price in greater Nashville area. 100% increase in eight years is not sustainable in anybody’s book. It’s not real, and it’s strictly driven by cheap money. So when that happens, it takes a while for the markets to reach equilibrium, and they can only reach equilibrium by settling out and calming down. And so we’re settling out and going through that calming down period right now.

The U.S., we will close about 4 million homes in the United States total—the whole United States. That’s down from six and a half in the go-go years of 2021, where we had a lot of pent-up demand, and they were just pumping money into the economy like crazy. So it’s kind of one of those things where we have to just take a breath. Just take a breath. I know there’s a lot of noise in the media right now about the Federal Reserve and what they’re doing and what they’re doing. They’re going to drop the rates again here shortly, but you will not see the mortgage rates drop, because the investors, the mortgage-backed securities, already have those anticipated. They already built it into the price. So you’re not going to see much movement. So they will calm down and settle out and be around 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 for the next 12 months, maybe the next 15 months. Beyond that, it’s hard to visualize, to be honest with you.
And so it’s a matter of right now in our market—well, nationally, there are 37.8% more buyers in the market than there are sellers right now. I’m sorry—other way around. Said that wrong. More sellers than there are buyers. So it’s a buyer’s market, but a lot of people don’t want to move because of the money. That’s rough— I could go deep on that if you want to.

25:58 Jim Beach
We are out of time, I’m afraid.

26:02 Phillip Cantrell
Yeah, it’s master for everything.

26:04 Jim Beach
Philip. Great information, and I can see why you are so incredibly successful. How do we find out more, get a copy of the book, come have dinner with you, all that stuff, please.

26:16 Phillip Cantrell
Well, all that good stuff. My website is probably the best way to catch me. It’s philipcantrell.com. It’s Philip with two L’s. Last name is C-A-N-T-R-E-L-L dot com. You can order the book from there. I’m on Amazon in all four formats: hard copy—soft copy, excuse me—hardcover, softcover, Audible, and Kindle is all on Amazon. And just remember, there’s two L’s in Philip, and my email address and contact info is there on the website: philip@philipcantrell.com. Pretty straightforward stuff.

26:49 Jim Beach
Fantastic, Philip. Thank you so very, very much for being with us. Happy holidays, and we’d love to have you back next year.

26:53 Phillip Cantrell
Thanks a lot. Thank you so much, Jim.

26:56 Jim Beach
And we will be right back. You.

27:13 Intro 2
Well, that’s a wonderful question. Oh my gosh. I love the opportunity to do this. Thank you, Jim. Wow. That’s—that’s—all. That’s a great one. That is a phenomenal question. That’s a great question, and I don’t have a great answer. Great question. Oh, that is such a loaded question, and that’s actually a really good question. School for Startups Radio

27:35 Jim Beach
And welcome back to School for Startups Radio. Again, thank you so much for being with us today. I am very excited and honored to introduce you to our guest today. His name is Justin Sachs. He was on the show, oh, about three years ago, and his background is just amazing. He started off working with people like Tony Robbins and some other people like Mark Victor Hansen, who’s absolutely one of my favorites. I love his columns. And at the age of 18, he published his first book. He now has, I think, six books out. He’s produced three movies. He has five international bestsellers. He’s been featured in MSNBC, CNBC, Fox, Yahoo, all of these sort of places. He is also the owner of Motivational Press, which is one of the top publishing companies out there, and has gotten books published for hundreds of other people. And if you go on the Amazon site for him, he has quotes from people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, President Bush, people like that, who are talking about his amazing accomplishments and what he has been able to do at such a young age.

He is also very dedicated to giving back to the community. He’s won lots of awards and accolades, including the Prudential Spirit of Community Award for his efforts there. Justin, welcome back to the show. Congratulations on getting married. How you doing today?

29:02 Justin Sachs
Thank you. I’m doing great. Thanks. I’m excited to be with you, and I’m certainly looking forward to sharing a bit with you and chatting further.

29:10 Jim Beach
Well, I’m just excited that you’re getting married. It is the world’s greatest and the world’s worst thing that can happen to a man.

29:19 Justin Sachs
Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

29:22 Jim Beach
Talk to us about getting your very first job. I think your first job was working for Tony Robbins—your first real job. Was that true?

29:29 Justin Sachs
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I did little stuff, you know, helping the parents around with their work and everything. But the real—my real first job where I got to kind of create my own employment, if you will, was at Tony Robbins, and it was in 2004. It was at a time when, you know, for him, his business was growing really steadily. You know, things were really exciting for him at that time. And I got to see really a lot of transformation occur in the personal development industry as the recession hit and going through that turmoil, you know, where he really took a leading role in guiding and transforming people through those challenges, and then coming out of that on the other side, the industry changed, because you really had to focus on online marketing more than ever before.

You know, up until then, he was doing a lot of grassroots, on-the-ground marketing, where he would go into corporations and speak, and he’d have his team do the same and those types of things. But it stopped. It stopped working the same way that it used to, which really required a unique new taste of marketing, a new strategy around how to get things done. And so what we like to focus on—I mean, we in our organization look at that all the time—of, you know, in times of change, which in the—you know, I run a book publishing company—we are always in times of change. There’s, you know, whether we’re in ebooks or print books has just changed back again. You know, things are constantly changing in this business. And so for me, it was the perfect lesson way back then to see how quickly you can adapt change and grow with the changing economy and with the changing infrastructure that a lot of industries find.

31:22 Jim Beach
How did you get the job, though? I bet he had 1,000 applicants for the one position.

31:28 Justin Sachs
Yeah, you know, I say it was—it’s kind of a lesson for me and for those that I work with. For me, it was give first. I volunteered for his nonprofit organization. I was well connected within his organization before I ever got hired, you know. And so, you know, it’s a great lesson for me on giving before you expect to receive. And it, you know, is something that I think really I’ve carried with me and my organization for quite a while, is that how important it is to be focused on giving first, and then everything else seems to just follow organically.

32:05 Jim Beach
And weren’t you, like, 17 or something at the time?

32:08 Justin Sachs
At the time, I was only 14. At the time, I worked for him for five or six years till I was 19, and then I started with Mark Victor Hansen following that.

32:16 Jim Beach
Wow. Unbelievable. And you were going to school at the same time, and all of that.

32:22 Justin Sachs
I was, yeah. I was in high school at the time, so I worked in his office after school—after high school—and then on the weekends, I was at his events, helping him sell, helping him, you know, train, work in different environments. So it was a great opportunity for me to learn on two sides, right: the traditional education that so many of us, you know, get to experience, and then on the other side, something that was nowhere near the same, right? I mean, for anyone who’s been to a Tony Robbins event knows that he believes in giving you as much as you possibly can, as far as education goes, as far as value goes, and doing it as quickly as he possibly can. So for us, it was very—it was mind boggling to see how quickly you could learn something in one environment and how long it took to teach in the other environment.

33:10 Jim Beach
And why in the world did you think at the age of 18 you could publish your own book? I mean, talk to us about the mindset behind that decision. Most 18-year-olds are just trying to get some illegal liquor, and here you are thinking that you can publish a book. Why are you so special, Justin, that you can do this? What’s the mindset behind someone who makes that decision?

33:31 Justin Sachs
You know, it’s a great question. I was 80% through the book before someone ever said, “Who are you to write the book?” Not so I was very lucky in that I had already decided to write the book. I’d already written most of it before anyone ever told me I couldn’t do it. And when they told me I couldn’t do it, the question wasn’t so much to say you can’t—you can’t write a book. It was to say you better figure out your uniqueness in the marketplace. You better figure out, you know, what makes you so special that you think you can tell people what you’re trying to tell them. And the question was something I struggled with for a while, as I think most of us do when they try to define what makes them them in any business or even personally in their lives. And so going through that process really allowed me to, I think, in a large respect, open up to the possibilities that, you know, came along with really being actively focused on growth in my own life, and what opportunities that meant and made available to others.

34:37 Jim Beach
Was that Your Mailbox Is Full? Is that the first book you did?

34:42 Justin Sachs
That’s right, yeah. Real Teens in the Real World: Your Mailbox Is Full. It was one of my favorite books. Actually, it’s really an incredible read.

34:49 Jim Beach
Why is that one your favorite? You’ve done so many other things. Why does that one still have a special place in your heart?

34:55 Justin Sachs
You know, that one—it, the funny thing is, it almost expresses my innocence from the market, right? Because for me, I was brand new to business. I was brand new to the world of authorship. But what I had was a large amount of experience—seven, eight years of experience, by that point—in personal development and self help. And I was lucky enough to have one of the most extraordinary mentors in the world guide me through a lot of that over the course of those first five years. And so for me, it was about as raw as you could get in terms of real, hardcore content from personal development specifically focused for teens. Like there is, you know, I don’t think there’s a better book in the marketplace for teenagers looking to find what’s going to work for them and what’s going to create their success. There just isn’t anything better out there.

35:54 Jim Beach
Should I give it to my 18-year-old son, 16-year-old daughter? Is it still relevant to them?

35:59 Justin Sachs
Absolutely, yeah. Anywhere between—you know, I mean, I’ve had adults read it and love it, but ultimately, it’s for kids between the ages of 12 and 22.

36:08 Jim Beach
Okay, what would the lesson be that they would take away? What’s the thesis?

36:12 Justin Sachs
Well, either it’s written in a way that every day you can read one page and take something different. So whether one day it’s goal setting, another day it’s time management, another day it’s avoid drugs and alcohol, another day it’s, you know—you name it. There’s so many different lessons that you take. And every day, the goal is that you read a page a day for 150 days. Six months, you’re living in a different way, or you have a different perception of how you live your life.

It talks about the types of words that you use. The words you use influence the way you live your life, and the questions that you ask and how important those are. So it incorporates so many different lessons, and we tried to really give a taste of most of the major lessons you’ll get in any personal development seminar, all packaged into a really unique and crazy book that allows teens to take it in in a different way than if they were reading a lengthy book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or something like that, right?

37:12 Jim Beach
How do you decide what to write about next? And I’m particularly interested in the incredibly broad spectrum of things you’ve written about. You’ve written about philanthropy, you’ve written about sales, you’ve written about persistence, customer loyalty. You just did a book earlier this year on innovative women and top female entrepreneurs. Such a broad spectrum there. Justin, how do you decide what’s next?

37:38 Justin Sachs
It’s an interesting question, because for me, the reason I said I liked the first book best is because that was what I really wanted to write about. The rest of the books that I’ve written really have been finding a hole in the marketplace, finding somewhere where people really need a certain message. Women need to hear about the powerful business leaders that women in today’s business climates are and can continue to be, and it’s really meant to be an inspiration for them to then go and start their own businesses or enter into a further leadership role within their corporation, or what have you. And so that was the message that was a fit for that time.
And I think all of the books I wrote after Your Mailbox Is Full, really, were looking for, you know, what’s a message that needs to be sent today, and then writing the book that provides that message. So, you know, at first it was really writing the book for what I wanted to share. And then the rest of the books I’ve written is what they needed to hear so much more than what I necessarily wanted to write about.

38:51 Jim Beach
All right, then why in the world are you qualified to write about female entrepreneurs? It seems to me that—and I’ll give you the fact that you did have a female co-author, Emily Espy—but still, that’s a little: as a man, I’m going to tell females how to be entrepreneurial. Some feminists may not like that.

39:13 Justin Sachs
Well, the premise of the book is not so much that I tell you what to do. The premise of that book specifically is: here’s a whole bunch of extraordinary women who have done it, and let me tell you their story. Let me tell you how they’ve done it. I’m not going to give you the secrets. I’m not going to give you the tools. I don’t know them. As you know, I’m a male, I’m an author. I don’t necessarily know how you as a woman should become an entrepreneur or a small business executive or a thought leader or a leader in your corporation, but I can tell you the stories of those that do. And if you can hear those stories in a way that matches your experience, that matches where you’re coming from today, then you’re going to have a different perspective walking away from.

39:56 Jim Beach
Makes sense. I like that. And who are the females that you cover in the book?

40:01 Justin Sachs
Gosh, we cover so many different females, from, you know, leadership executives in major corporations to PR—you know, individual small business PR firm, you know, people who have founded small businesses, people who have founded medium-sized businesses, and people who are emerging in a large-scale corporation. You know, there’s so many different ways for females in business to take on a higher level, higher role, and there’s a lot of room for females to emerge in that way. I mean, I think there’s a lot of opportunity for women in the marketplace today, and certainly we’re seeing that across all different elements in all different industries and businesses.

40:46 Jim Beach
All right. Now, in your role as the founder of Motivational Press, I am obsessed with the listeners publishing a book, getting out there and becoming a thought leader, and the entire shtick, right? We’ve all heard this 1,000 times. As the guy making the decision, or someone responsible for the people making the decision, Justin, tell me about the perfect author—new author—that comes to you and says, “I want to write a book.” Tell me the dream scenario. What does that author say? What have they done in preparation? Give me the dream package.

41:23 Justin Sachs
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are absolutely the dream clients in the marketplace right now. You know, we just heard that Donald Trump released a new book as part of his campaign. And so, you know, certainly, the more media exposure we can get, the more attention we can get to any title is the dream client. So what does that look like for the normal author? I think the simple answer is: the more platform in today’s marketplace, the better off you’re going to be. So you want to be building your social media community. You want to be speaking at your local communities, at networking functions, at meetup groups, and start building that platform. Really get out there. The more people you’re exposed to on a consistent basis, the better off you’re going to be, and the more attractive you’re going to be to a publisher.

42:10 Jim Beach
You ever look at Klout score or anything like that? You mentioned social media. Are you more excited if someone’s got 100,000 Twitter followers or a huge Instagram? How far do you take that?

42:22 Justin Sachs
Yeah, certainly. I mean, those numbers certainly matter as far as social media goes. And if you had no social media following whatsoever, but you were speaking in your local community, you know, one to two times a week, which would I prefer? I’d probably prefer the person speaking one to two times a week, you know. But then there’s the other side of, you know, are you in the media? Are you being interviewed in your local newspaper, or in national media, or what have you. I mean, we look very much at the holistic package, very much at who you are as a whole, as a thought leader on a large scale, much more so than do we look necessarily at your individual social media profile, or any one thing. No one thing is going to make or break you.

43:14 Jim Beach
And then how important is the title, the thesis, the topic, all of that kind of stuff? You didn’t even mention that, Justin. 

43:23 Justin Sachs
It is it important? Yes. Is it going to make or break you? Not necessarily. And the reason I say that is simply because, for authors today, the publisher is going to help you craft the best title. The publisher is going to help you create the marketing plan. The publisher is going to help you to create the table of contents that sells the book the best.

And so is your content important? Yes, it has to be. It’s either a hit or miss. It’s not necessarily this gets an eight out of 10 or, you know—it’s either this is good content or this is not good content. And then the next question is: how do we package it effectively to make that really work and to make that really so.

44:01 Jim Beach
Okay, and this is a stupid question, I’ve got to admit that, but I need to ask it. Motivational Press: are you mostly interested in motivational books, or have you grown way past that now?

44:14 Justin Sachs
Yeah, we have grown past it. We do all kinds of nonfiction work. I don’t do vampires, I don’t do fantasy novels, but I do anything nonfiction. And our basis for our decisions is: is this going to help people in their lives today? Is this going to help them, you know, take their lives to whatever’s next for them? And if the answer is yes, then we’re there 100% every time.

44:34 Jim Beach
What kind of parents did you have? The reason I ask this is I have a friend whose father was a motivational speaker in the 80s, and he grew up where the father said, “I don’t care what your grades are. Hell, I don’t even care if you go to school. But I want you to read this book by Brian Tracy,” or, you know, some of the incredible speakers from the 20s and 30s—people like that. Og Mandino—what kind of parents did you have? And now that you’re getting married, and I’m sure your wife is pestering you to get her pregnant within the next five years, because that’s the way they are, what kind of parent do you want to be? Justin, are you going to care about grades? Because I bet you that you’ve now learned that grades have nothing to do with long, long-term success.

45:21 Justin Sachs
Well, I’ll tell you, my dad’s a doctor. So, you know, he went the traditional education route, and so he very much cares about the education. And I think for me, becoming a parent myself, I absolutely think that how a student does—how a child does—in elementary school and middle school, it shapes them in a certain way. And it can’t be the only thing to build a well-rounded individual in today’s society. You can’t just expect that the school systems are going to do it, because I can tell you, they’re not. But ultimately, it’s good groundwork, and I think it’s important to start there.

And of course, you know, I think my kids are going to have to do exceptionally well in school, but they’re also going to have to focus a lot more attention on learning a foreign language than the schools require. They’re going to have to focus on, you know, some of those critical extracurricular activities that, if you read Inc. Magazine or you read Fast Company, or any of the magazines, they’ve been talking a lot lately about some of the most important things to exercise your brain and get you to be a creative thinker. And what they talk about is learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, and, you know, doing the brain teasers that you see on all these iPhone and Android apps. You know, they say, if you exercise your brain in a different way, you’re going to be able to think more critically.

Our schools teach you to think literally—linearly—which is critically important. You need to be able to think. But you need to be able to think creatively just as much as you need to be able to think linearly. And that’s not something our schools teach.

46:59 Jim Beach
Did you go to college, Justin?

47:02 Justin Sachs
For about two weeks.

47:05 Jim Beach
And how did your father respond when you told him that you weren’t going to do that anymore?

47:11 Justin Sachs
Well, you know, it’s funny. He says, “You’re going to be a college dropout.” I said, “No, I just left, because to be a dropout, you actually have to sign papers.” But I literally got on a plane and went home. So it’s, you know, it’s kind of a different story for me. But ultimately, I think where I was is I was taking marketing classes where they were talking about buying and selling radio and television and print media ads. And I was saying, “Let’s see here. We’re in the age of social media. No.” And anyone who’s buying ads on radio instead of buying Facebook ads is way behind in their marketing and advertising initiatives. And so for me, it was like, you’re not even talking about the things that are really mattering in today’s market. But why am I here? I can go learn it by doing it much more effectively than will I ever sitting in this classroom hearing you talk about something that’s age-old wisdom in marketing.

48:00 Jim Beach
It must be hard having the background that you did, listening to a 50-year-old professor talking about something that’s 100 years old.

48:08 Justin Sachs
Oh, it certainly did. You know, they say those who can’t do teach.

48:13 Jim Beach
And those who can’t teach administrate teachers. So let me just finish. And you know, I was a university professor for nine years, Justin, so I am very familiar with this.

48:25 Justin Sachs
Yeah, no, I think the best teachers are those that are still doing it, you know? Because even in this industry, you find there are people that—they did it 10 years ago when they were starting their business, but now they have a whole team around them. They don’t do it themselves. And when you start listening to them talk about some of the strategies, actually having done it myself now in my business—and you know, other business owners have done the same—you find that they’re five years old in their marketing and in their wisdom and in their strategies, and they’re trying to teach people how to do this. Well, I’m sorry, but what’s working today isn’t what worked five years ago.

48:57 Jim Beach
Do you have any desire—and I do not mean this in any sort of a negative way or pejoratively or anything like that—but do you have any desire to build a business in trucking or restaurants or not related to media and self improvement or anything like that? But if someone came to you with a really interesting investment and said, “But Justin, we want you to run the thing, and we want to start a paving company, and it’s going to innovate paving more than anything that happened in the paving industry in the last 200 years,” but you have—or we want you to run an energy company or a health care company—you have any interest in doing that? Are you on your path?

49:47 Justin Sachs
I think it depends on the company. I mean, I certainly would be interested in taking a larger role in a more, you know, in a large-scale corporation. I think it would allow me a lot more opportunity to impact. But I will say that my—you know—there’s two requirements for me. First is that we have to be influencing and serving the audience at a high level. I don’t think a paving company is right for me, but as a health care company, if I can make a difference, absolutely.
But with that being said, what I know about today’s market is you have to be able to change fast. No matter how big of a company you are, you have to be able to move at a quick pace. The only thing that’s kept us alive as a publishing house against the top publishing houses in the world is our ability to innovate and change our strategies very quickly, when the big publishers take five years to change their strategies.

And so, you know, what I know is that if I was ever to lead a major corporation, which, you know, I’ve been offered a couple, and I certainly would consider a major corporation if it came, you have to be able to innovate. You have to be able to move quickly, and you have to be able to change with the times. And a lot of times, companies on a large level are struggling to innovate.
You know, one of our authors talks about what it took to create the mission tomorrow—the mission to the moon. He was actively engaged with NASA and helping them to create those different components. And what he talks about is our corporations are not prepared to be able to innovate at the level that they need to, and most of them are focusing on management rather than innovation. And if they focused on innovation, their revenues would skyrocket.

51:29 Jim Beach
I published a book about four years ago with McGraw Hill, and it took them over a year to get it out. And one of my big frustrations, especially as I look at publishing something next, you know, I don’t want to write a book on social media and then have some publisher take a year to get it out. That’s going to kill the book, right? Right? What do you think that Motivational Press does differently that makes it better than an old-timey publishing house?

52:00 Justin Sachs
Well, first of all, we move very quickly. Our books are released within three to six months, you know. So—and that is usually the time it takes to build up the marketing momentum. But what really makes us different is major—the top five, top 10 publishers in today’s market, they’re looking for authors to have a huge platform today. We help our authors build that platform. We don’t expect that you’re going to come to us being Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Trust me, if you do, I’m not going to say no. But we don’t expect that that’s going to happen. And so the authors that we work with are emerging. They’re on their way to becoming established, and we help them through that process. We help them identify what the next path forward is and what makes the most sense for them. And those are not easy things to work through, especially in today’s time.

52:46 Jim Beach
Very well said. Three to six months, that’s very impressive for a big house like what you have. So I’m very impressed. And Justin, I just love everything about you: your attitude, your ability to give back to others, your insistence on making a difference. And again, congratulations on the marriage. It will be the most enjoyable thing you ever do in your life, I am sure. How can people find you on social media, follow you, learn more from you? Oh, I forgot to mention the magazine that just came out, the Motivational Press magazine. How can we get involved in all things Justin Sachs?

53:22 Justin Sachs
You can find me on Facebook, of course. You can also find us at motivationalpress.com. And of course, we’re always looking for new authors, and you know, that’s our core focus.

53:34 Jim Beach
Thank you so much, Justin. I hope you have a wonderful honeymoon, and I hope you never think of me on your honeymoon.

53:41 Justin Sachs
Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

53:43 Jim Beach
We are out of time. Have a great day, everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Bye. Now you.