‘As entrepreneurs, we have to have a good understanding of the circulation of prosperity. And it starts by you giving.’
Speaker, mentor, and business builder Paul Martinelli shares his three principles to living a rich life. Paul did not have an easy childhood and was a high school dropout. But that did not stop him from building a cleaning business from nothing to millions. And now he helps entrepreneurs achieve their full potential.
‘Mentorship is not about giving advice. A mentor opens up their contacts and says, “What do you need? Let me make that connection with you.”’
In this episode, we talk about
– the importance of a business mentor,
– the definition of true mentorship, creating opportunity in business and personal life for others
– how to discern when making a business transition,
– coaching your employees, and more.
For more successful business stories, listen to previous episodes.
Reach out to Paul here:
Website: paulmartinelli.net
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulmartinelli/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf2Piv-pqwFx2zPUx-HeMcA
John: Thank you for listening to the business sphere, don’t forget to share this episode and subscribe. Joining me today is speaker, mentor, and business builder Paul Martinelli, he built his cleaning business from nothing to millions and now he helps entrepreneurs achieve their full potential, thanks for being on the show today Paul, excited for you to be here.
Paul: Right on, thank you so much for inviting me and great to be with all of you who are tuning in.
John: Yeah, so this is going to be a lot of fun because you being in the cleaning industry to now in helping a lot of entrepreneurs get started, maybe share with the listeners your backstory, how did you get involved in the cleaning business? and even prior to that, what went on in your life to become an entrepreneur?
Paul: Oh my goodness, you know well, I think I know you have interviewed hundreds of people and I bet that within all of us there’s this common DNA that, I do think that maybe you’re born with that drive to become an entrepreneur, I really do and I think you know God Willing your place in an environment that’s conducive for that part of you to mature, and develop, and grow, so I was always an entrepreneur right? I was that kid when I was young, I was knocking on your doors in the winter time, I grow up in Pittsburgh, asking you if I could shovel your snow, in the summer time I was knocking on your door asking if I could you know cut your grass, in the fall I was knocking on your door asking you if I could rake your leaves. I mean, I did anything and everything to earn a buck, I delivered newspapers, I sold light bulbs door to door, I sold peanuts down on the strip district down in Pittsburgh at our flea markets. And so I’ve had this entrepreneurial spirit, but you know my childhood is similar in ways to many others in that, you know I don’t think any of us make it off the playground of life without you know some scars and some wounds right? We’re all aware that we’re not part of the dominant culture of influence, there’s always something different about us from the crowd and then the crowd kind of teases you, or picks on you, for maybe you were tall and skinny, maybe you were short and round, maybe you had you know curly hair or maybe you had freckles whatever it was, for me it was that I had a really bad speech impediment, I was a stutterer so when I spoke, I mean you know early on I’ve had years of speech therapy, you know when I would speak, I spoke spoke spoke like this, and so the kids would just you know have a field day with me and tease me, and you know, my speech impediment came from growing up in a, abusive home. The home of my childhood was not safe emotionally, it wasn’t safe physically for sure, and so I developed a really low self-esteemed and a really poor self-image because of that, and so what I didn’t realized at the time was that, you know in all of that the composite of being in a kind of a non-safe home being picked on at school, you know my beliefs were being form, my beliefs about who I’m, and what I could one day become, and you know our beliefs drive our behavior, we never outperform our own self-concept, you know as a man thinketh in his heart so is he, and so I ended up failing out of school, I dropped out at you know in 10th grade and you know was destined to do nothing, right? I was you know, I was told my whole life is probably where many of your viewers were told that you know, you will amount to nothing without a formal education. The interesting thing and this is I think a really good point, is that my sister who’s older than me and my two older brothers they all did great academically, like my sister you know did fantastic she was graduated number one in her nursing school in college, my brother Tom was graduated from the University of Pittsburgh as a microbiologist and was an apache helicopter pilot in the army they picked the smart ones to fly the apaches, my brother David you know graduated on the full scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University with a PHD in civil engineering, so we you know, we were in the same environment with the same DNA and completely different results, the only thing that was different about us was you know our self-belief. And so, I kind of fell into the cleaning business because I needed to make money, and nobody would hire me because I didn’t have a GED I had a couple of hundred bucks, I bought a used vacuum cleaner, and I started going door to door asking people if I could clean their office at night. And I figured you know any dummy can clean a toilet, and I was you know I was any dummy, and I was able to parlay you know my years of experience of knocking on doors asking people to shovel snow and rake leaves and cut grass into asking if I could you know vacuum their carpets, clean their toilets, and you know take out the trash, and that led me to grow in a really successful business once I got a mentor.
John: That’s amazing so, maybe I would like to ask you like, what age did you start doing this? And at what age did you decide to get a mentor? And what was the impact of it when you started hiring that mentor?
Paul: Yeah, so I was 22 years old, 1988 when I started the commercial cleaning business and I worked really hard for those first two years as all entrepreneurs do, right? I was, you know, cleaning all night long because it’s night time janitorial services, so I was cleaning buildings and restaurants and bars when they close. During the day, I’m out trying to build the business, I’m getting supplies, I’m trying to hire people to help me. After about two years I was earning about twenty, twenty five thousand dollars, I had four or five people working for me, and then all of a sudden everything I was doing stopped working, and I didn’t know why? I would pick up an account and then I would lose another account, I would get a new employee and one of my other supervisors would quit, I was at you know just proverbial gerbil, you know going one step forward two steps back and I didn’t know why? And, I really believe by the grace of God, by Divine Intervention I walked into this one office while I was out cold calling, and there was my angel, his name was Patrick Hayes, he was a retired New York stock, New York trader, he traded bonds on wall street, his brother ran the desk for Shearson Lehman on wall street, his father was the chief legal tax attorney for Exxon Corporation, at that time it was the largest company in the world. And, so Patrick had kind of grown up with the silver spoon in his mouth, he was a trust fund baby but he was also very successful in his own right. And, he had retired, he probably at 45, and said that he was committing his life to helping other people, and then, if I would do what he told me to do, the way he told me to do it, the number of times he told me to do it, that he’d help me grow my business and he handed me a book, and it wasn’t just any book, it was this exact book, now when he gave me the book it was brand new alright, and this is the book ‘Think and Grow Rich’ by Napoleon, oh you’ve got it there it is right? All successful people have it and he gave me this book, and he said what he was going to do is he was going to take me through the book, word for word, sentence by sentence paragraph by paragraph, page by page, chapter by chapter and that we were actually gonna do the book ike we were going to do every exercise in the book. Strange thing happened, within 3 years I was earning, I had earned a quarter of a million dollars, within 5 years I was worth a million dollars, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Now my copy of the says you know seven million copies sold, seven million people didn’t get rich, yeah there were seven million copies sold but you know, how many people buy the book and never open the book? How many people buy the book and never finish the book? How many people bought the book read the book and never did any of the exercises? And how many people may have done the exercises but didn’t have a mentor come a long? And here’s a cool thing you ask: you know what did I pay him? Nothing, he didn’t want any money, and so I’ve you know, I then applied those principles. I’ve built six now multi-million dollar companies, those companies have generated 750 million dollars in revenue so nearly a billion dollars. You know that’s not supposed to happen for a high school dropout, I’ve travelled and worked you know all over the world, speaking, teaching, training and coaching, and that’s not supposed to happen for a high school dropout. I built the largest training organization as far as I know in the world where we certified 36,000 people to become licensed coaches, speakers and trainers. I partnered with John Maxwell ten years ago, I was at lunch with John Maxwell, and John and I became business partners and we built the John Maxwell team, you got John Maxwell book right there. And, John and I partnered up and I said you’ve got the content, I’ve got the entrepreneurial understanding on how to grow business, if you’ll license me, give me the exclusive license to re-license your content exclusively around the world, give it to me for five years I’ll build you an army, I’ll build you an army and you’ll earn more money than you’ve ever made in your life. And that’s saying something to John because John’s done you know pretty well, at this time he was probably number six all-time selling on amazon, and he said yes! He said yes to the deal, the deal was that I had to front all the money and I had to guarantee him a million bucks, and so we did that, I built the infrastructure in the organization within six months, we launched on march 2nd, 2011, and we over those next ten years licensed and certified and trained 36,000 people from 162 countries. It is amazing and I say that not to impress anybody but to impress upon you, you’ve got to understand, I was so broken, I was so broken when I started, so there’s hope for you right? I was you know going in the wrong direction and picking up speed, there’s hope for you! I have made every mistake John, and sometimes I went back and made them again just to make sure I felt right the first time, you know what I mean? And you know he says in this book, he says you know one of the history of the book he spends 20 years interviewing 25,000 people, 500 of which are the most successful people, Ford, Rockefeller, Edison, Alexander Graham bell, four U.S sitting Presidents. And at the culmination of all of that there’s 13 principles of achievement, one of them is the chapter of persistence and he says “persistence is to the character of man that carbon is to steel” it’s what fortifies it. And if there’s something that I think for all of your viewers to take away is, first off it’s not supposed to be easy, it’s not supposed to be easy! So if you thought, if you’re wondering why it’s hard? It’s because it is supposed to be hard, you know, if you’re wondering why you’re failing? You’re failing because it’s a necessary ingredient of success, failure as success is a constant companion! It’s supposed to be. If every single one of those failures is an opportunity for you to fortify your skill, your talent, your resources, your character, your discernment, your ability to make decisions, your vision, it’s unnecessary! You have to be forged in the fire of failure, and I think if there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that you need to embrace failure you have to welcome it, you have to be comfortable in it, you have to learn from it, you can’t be afraid of it, right? You can’t try to avoid it, you gotta you know, I think it was Drucker who said “fail fast, fail first, and fail often” right?.
John: Oh that’s amazing! And you know it sounds so, so long ago right? Because now, maybe it’s like 20-30 years ago and you mentioned you exit maybe, you sold, or you moved on to other successful businesses. Each time you move to a different entrepreneurial you know, journey. What was it that kept you going? In this mindset of instead of retiring, or instead of selling and you know living on the beach or whatever it may be in a comfort setting, what kept you going?.
Paul: Well, I think what keeps all of us going is the nature of who we are, you know you and I simultaneously live on three planes of existence we are spiritual beings, make no mistake about it ‘we are spiritual beings’ this is not religion, I mean this is just reality, we’re spiritual beings I mean we all know this, there’s something beyond your physical body, you have a body but you’re not your body, there’s something beyond your thoughts, you have thoughts but you’re, there’s something more about you than your thoughts, and there’s something about you that’s more than your emotions, you can feel emotion but there’s something beyond that and we all know that about us, so we’re spiritual beings we’ve been gifted with an intellect. He says in this book, it’s the development of our intellectual faculties that separates everybody, it’s not an abundance of specialized or generalized knowledge that led Edison and Ford and Rockefeller and all of these others to great success, it’s that they developed their intellectual mind in such a degree that they could create, attract or manifest anything they wanted without violating the rights of other people. So we’re spiritual, we’ve been gifted with an intellect, and we’re experiencing life in the physical realm, in our physical body, and the spiritual side, the spiritual nature of who we are is always seeking fuller expression and fuller expansion. This morning, probably one of the world’s wealthiest investors, Warren Buffet at age what 93 today? Woke up, wanting to get richer today, wanting to grow Berkshire Hathaway bigger and larger, and you have to think! Why? It’s not because he’s a greedy capitalist, it’s because he’s a spiritual being. We will always seek fuller expression and fuller expansion, we will always want to be, and to do and have more, and so the thought of you know, I don’t know any serious entrepreneur that has a life plan to lay on the beach in Fiji and retire.
John: No, I totally agree right? like when you have bug, that entrepreneurial spirit and it’s been your lifeline and you’ve been evolving and growing and learning and you know getting motivated by just that thrill, desire to want more. It’s hard to kind of give up right? It’s hard to like, let everything go because it took years to harvest these traits right? So I totally get you and you know for me it’s more, how did you mentally prepare yourself for transitioning to other opportunities? Because as a business owner in that cleaning space, and I’m not sure what industries you evolved and got into, what did you utilize or what did you bring to the table that was unique and different to your other ventures? Because you know, every business is different. They require different skill sets it requires different leadership skills, you know what I mean, like what were the major pillars that you brought to these different ventures?.
Paul: Yeah it’s a great question, I think the first is discernment right? Look, it is a natural part of being an entrepreneur, to hate that what you’re doing in the moment right? You have a kind of a love hate relationship with your business at times especially in the beginning, and to always you know especially in the first 3 to 5 years where most businesses fail to be looking to next deal it, right? You know I call it SOS shiny object syndrome right? And so you’ve got to cure yourself of shiny object syndrome alright, so that you don’t you know, like there was a time where I was out cold calling selling my cleaning business and at the same time there was somebody who was going door-to-door selling knife sets, knives, you know they’re selling knives and you know that looked really appealing to me because I thought geez he’s got no employees, he’s got none of the headaches you know, he makes this great commission so maybe I should start selling knives you know, I joined Amway, I joined nu skin, I mean you know for the first 2 or 3 years of the business I didn’t have the discipline of discernment and a persistence and a focus. So I think, discernment is critical especially when you’re looking to make that transition from one thing to the next thing is discerning . Is it really my time to leave this? Have I done all that I can? Or have I extracted all the value that I can extract?, have I delivered all the value I can give?, have I fulfilled the vision, have I fulfilled the vision of what this was?, have I made the most of this? Have I learned all that this has come to teach me? I think that people, I think businesses, I think ideas, it come to our life for you know a reason, a season or a lifetime. And sometimes there’s you know, the cleaning business was a season of my life it was 18 years, and towards probably the last 3 years I felt the static, I just felt the static of you know, this just, it was you know it would be, it would continue to grow larger, but it was no longer challenging, it was gonna be the same thing, it would be groundhog day for me over and over again, just with different clients and that it lost its appeal. I like the startup I like the drive at the beginning so I think one of the key things is discernment. Have you extracted and added as much value as you can? Is it truly the end of the season? And then I think you know when you make that transition into the next phase of your life or deal or opportunity, I think it’s important that you take an honest self-inventory of yourself, a really honest inventory of what really are your skills? What are your talents? What are your resources? What is your potential? And what’s going to be required in this new area, because you know from training 36,000 coaches, all of those who came, almost all of those, 90% of them came from some other industry they were car salesman, they were school teachers, they were insurance agents you know, they were brick layers, they were painters, they were dance instructors, they all came from something else and they were looking to next deal whatever they were doing. So they had one foot in their old life and trying to plant a foot in their new life, and perhaps the biggest mistake they made was they thought that all of the skills, talents, abilities and resources that they had developed in their one deal was gonna automatically transfer, so somebody who was you know a successful insurance agent and selling insurance thought that they could just come over to you know sales in selling speaking services and as you know from I mean your one of the masters in marketing, it doesn’t transfer, you’ve got to build the brand, you’ve got to build your reputation, you’ve got to build your following, you’ve got to build your visibility, you’ve got to, all from scratch and you don’t really get bonus points for what you’ve done in the past, so you know I thought geez! You know I was successful in the cleaning business, I’ll be able to step into the coaching arena very quickly, not so much, I had great skills, talents, abilities from being an entrepreneur in that setting but this was gonna require a whole different level of skill, talent, ability that I didn’t have and I hadn’t developed. And you know nobody starts in the middle and nobody starts at the top, I don’t care who you are when you’re stepping into the new deal you start at the bottom as it should be.
John: Yeah, that’s great that you’re making note of that like self-assessment, self-awareness, making sure that you analyze what you are strong and your desires are and what your strengths are, right? Like what you actually enjoy doing and passionate and you know you get up excited doing those certain things, pursue those things and leverage it, right? So just like when you’re starting a bootstrap kind of business versus something that you’re buying and trying to grow, right? You gonna bring something unique to the table, you’re gonna bring your specific skill set that you can leverage, maybe you have, like for myself digital marketing right? That’s my thing I can bring that to a lot of bricks and mortar stores and opportunities arise right? Like, different audience, different subset of attraction, right? So being self-aware, be understanding of what’s going on in your space and understand when you get bored like you mentioned. Like the last 3 years of running that cleaning business and it’s like groundhog day where you don’t feel you’re as excited as you once were and you feel what’s my next thing, right? And all entrepreneurs go through this if they’ve made it past 5 or 10 years. If you’re just at the beginning of your journey, you don’t even know what entrepreneurship really is, right? So I’ve been in it for 8 years now and I still have that huge desire in learning and growing and you know wanting to do more and until that stops, I’m gonna then pivot, right? But I still am very passionate because it’s a never ending world of this digital age like there’s always something new, so it’s always evolving and I don’t think I will ever be still in this space. So I’m very fortunate to be in this space as opposed to a bricks and mortar trade, where there’s not a lot of technology advancements on a specific product like lawn mowing there’s only so many different brands that you can purchase to do things, maybe you do Roomba online and you just press a button in there, right? It moves away from you as a person, you can automate a lot of things, so understanding like the gaps and opportunities and what you can bring to the table is very very key when building a business, so I love that.
Paul: Yeah, absolutely.
John: And I wanted to ask you, so I know that you’ve been in this space, right? Now you’re, you know working in the coaching mentoring space, how different is it than your previous commercial cleaning business? Or how energetic it is, like what are some of the similarities and what are some of the biggest challenges that now you’re facing? Because you’re dealing with so many coaches and mentors that you have to train and get them up to speed, is it more systems and processes? Is it more meeting accountability? You know and not dealing with customers like what are the biggest gaps that you have to uncover?
Paul: Well I can see, that’s a great question, I can tell you that you know coaching and mentoring people I love to do, I love helping people unlock their potential and I think I’m pretty good at it, I think the reason why I’m good at it is frankly because someone unlock mine, right? Potential is one of those things you can’t see in yourself, you know it’s there, you know there’s more for you like you know you could be doing a better job but you can’t get out of your own way, it’s like you’re in a box and the directions that get out of the box are taped to the top inside of the outside of the box that you can’t get out. And so many ways, what I do today is what made me successful in the cleaning business, see here’s something I learned John, is when I was in the cleaning business, you remember this is 1988 when I started right? So you know if you wanted to advertise there was one play, yellow pages. You know if somebody wanted a janitorial service they grab the yellow pages they went to jay and they looked for whoever had the biggest most colorful ad and that’s you know they called three of the biggest ads that they could find, so you know you had to buy your ad a year in advance you didn’t know what your competitors were gonna buy, so you were kind of forced to pay up. And so, if you wanted to go out and look for new clients like I was wanted to target new clients, I could grab the yellow pages and I can go from a to z from Accountants to Zoologist, right? And I could call on every single one of those companies and say “hey this is Paul, without your service you know quality you know quality cleaning with a white glove touch, I wanted to see if I could come out and give you a free proposal and if they said no and hung up, I could go to the next accountant and all the way down to you know bricklayers to you know, to all the through the alphabet, but there wasn’t a book that was this thick, full of employees and I very quickly realized that there was something more important than the customer, it was the internal customer, see in the first couple of years I thought what I would do you know smart entrepreneur, right? I would price as high as I could park price, I would pay as little as I could pay and I would make the margin, sounds smart right? That wont work that way right? And so what I realized was that, the most important asset I had, my most precious resource were my employees, it’s a lot easier to find a dentist office to clean, my goodness there’s thousands of them within your five-mile radius right? Real estate offices, lawyer offices, engineering firms, architecture, I mean just look around. But to find somebody who’s willing to go out seven o’clock at night, drive their car, put a vacuum cleaner at dirty mop a bucket of water, go to a building, unlock the building, turn off the alarm, turn on all the lights clean the entire building not to steal anything, take out all the trash deposit in the trash in the dumpster so it doesn’t end up being torn all apart by raccoons, you know turn on the alarm lock the door shut up all the lights and be responsible for all that, that’s a lot harder. And so what I realized was my most precious resources my employees and if I could build people, they would build my business, and so I stopped paying them by the hour, if you pay them by the hour you cheat them because you know if you go into the dentist office after cleaning that dentist four or five times you learn how to clean it a little bit quicker, and so I started paying them by the job, if they could do it better and they could do it faster they could make more money. I started giving them percentage of everything that happened inside the account, so if I got the carpet cleaning, the window cleaning, if I sold the supplies, they got the profit sharing and so, and then I started to talk to them about what their dream was, you know finding people to clean toilets is pretty hard, I had employees who worked with me for 15 years, I had three people who still work for me they left the cleaning company and been with me they’ve been with with for 30 years, what’s the difference? Well when I was building the business I would sit down with a husband and wife and say you know ‘what do you want? Do you want some money for college? You want guys want a new car? You want to make, do you want to earn an extra 5,000 dollars this year to go on vacation? Because if you do I’ve got a bank and a doctor’s office right around the corner from your house, I’m gonna show you how to clean it, if you’ll clean it everyday, you guys can earn whatever amount of money and so I learned to dream build with people, I learned to mentor and coach people who were employees, I learned to build, I learned to show them ‘hey look I know you’re not gonna stay in job forever, I want you to stay as long as you can, I want to pay you as much as I can can until your value is so great that you exceed the value that I, the money that I can pay you for it, and then I bless you and go on, I don’t want to enslave anybody, I don’t want to hold you down I want to build you up, and it was amazing, and how you know other companies because I live in south Florida you know seasonally they would lay people off, we would never lay people off, we have jobs all the time, and so I think there’s a lot of similarities there John, between you know what I do now in terms of mentoring that skill of seeing people’s potential, speaking life into them and then most importantly creating an opportunity for them, creating a pathway for them to live there dream. I think you know if you’re gonna mentor people it’s not about giving advice, mentorship is not about giving advice, if you’ve got a mentor that doesn’t open up and it doesn’t take their phone and copy their you know open up all their context and say ‘what do you need? Let me make that connection with you, that’s what true mentorship does, it otherwise you know go to a counselor go to the SBA sign up for a SCORE class ‘service corps retired executives’ get all you know, get all the advice you want, but what you want in mentorship is you want somebody who sees your potential, who believes in you, who will hold the vision that you have, who will afford you the opportunity to have access to other people that they could never get in, you know I’ve been able to introduce people to people that they would never have met, it would have taken them years to be able to get an appointment with a certain person, I’ve been able to make one phone call to send a text message and it’d be done, and so I think those are the things that have been able to help me in this business that serve me really well in the others.
John: Yeah that’s amazing and I love you, first off, just to give you a background I did work at yellow pages for 5years and then I started this agency like 8 years into it which is SEO which is specifically you know what yellow pages was, google replaced it and then, I love you talking about like your people because just like myself 8 years my employees are the my biggest asset, you take care of them, you talk about vision, you talk about road maps, you talk about you know making sure you fulfill their personal endeavors and dreams and you equip them with access information intel and you educate them, you harvest them, you let them grow not just mentally but also like just throughout that journey so that we’re in it together, it’s so inspiring right? Like and it’s so rewarding to see them evolve and I’m very grateful for the people that have been working with me as well as, more so than the actual clients to be honest because I see them daily, I talk to them and I actually get to know them, my clients are a service that I’m providing and they can go and come as they please but really my people are my bread and butter, so I take care of my family right? Which is my people, so I love you mentioning that and, you know you’re hitting on so many good points because in the last couple years I’ve been mentoring as well, and it’s a lot of fun, not only that it’s like rewarding because not only do I have my team like my staff but now I’m helping other entrepreneurs get their foot wet, start of or different stages of their lifespan, not let alone like that mindset of nine to five to starting a business, there’s so much to consider and they don’t even know what they don’t know right? So it’s fun but it’s also exciting right? And I get a lot of thrill in trying to see them progress, not everyone succeeds so, because a lot of people give up like you mentioned persistence, right? And one time, you know a couple times of failure it’s like I just can’t do it, I got too much on my plate, I got family obligations, I’m like, guess what? That’s reality, in business you do what you got to do, you don’t sleep sometimes, you work seven days a week, you just make it happen and if you’re not mentally ready to do this, you wait until you are because you want comfort nine to five, you want stability, sure, but when you kinda are driven by 100% commission or something that is self-driven that you have to work on and get rewarded on, then that is on you to make it happen right? And that’s internal will, internal desire and things that you cannot control as a mentor, a coach or anyone because that’s someone that has to be fully aware of it and unlocking their potential like you mentioned right? Like it’s hard for a lot of people to see their potential as well and not everyone is aware how hard it is gonna be. Everyone thinks it’s a lot easier because they see that tiny object, they see people at the top but they don’t see that 20 years of daily commitment, of, I always do the sports analogy right? Like that NBA player Michael Jordan and Lebron James, they don’t see them when they didn’t win the championship or when they’re 2 or 3 years practicing daily for 12 hours, days, with a nutritionist, with a coach, offensive coach, defensive coach, training, you know all the everything.
Paul: Sacrifice!
John: Sacrifice, do not hangout with their friends, social gatherings, family obligations, whatever travel, that’s what it takes right? If you really want to build something you need to put in the time and effort and commitment, right?
Paul: So true, So true.
John: So I love you mentioning all this and it’s com you know it’s coming in full circle right? Like now that you’re giving back because making impact, making, having a legacy and helping others, I find it as the most rewarding thing, as much as you know I have a son and I want to harvest all the values and traits I have learned over the years, it’s frustrating because he’s so young he doesn’t get it yet, but it’s also you know rewarding to see him interact with others right? And seeing how he mentally prepares himself, right? Have you found that transition? I’m not sure if you have a family or if you know you’re mentoring a lot of people, what’s the most rewarding thing that you’re finding in your business now or your career?
Paul: Yeah, you know I’m really blessed, my fiancé is a lot younger than me, so I’m 55 she’s 30, and she has a 5-year-old and a 4-year-old and so I love it, right? I don’t have any kids of my own so it’s like an opportunity to just you know do life right you know, and get some do-overs right, so how old is your son?
John: He’s 5 as well, so a similar age, it’s so fun at this time but it’s a lot of work.
Paul: Yeah it’s a lot of work, and that, and it’s into commitment and you know of course it’s supposed to be a lot of work
John: Everything is!
Paul: It’s supposed to be a lot of work, you know you think of people who are entrepreneurs, who are in struggle and they’re you know they find themselves you know, sleeping on the floor, they find themselves feeling defeated, they find themselves being taken advantage of other by other people, they find themselves getting shafted by people that they trusted and beat them up that way, they find themselves overextended. And yet what they fail to realize is that’s how Bill Gates made it, that’s how Steve Jobs made it, that’s how Zuckerberg made it, that’s how Bezos made it, they, what do they have in common? They all slept on the floor, they all got taken advantage of at some point in time, they all got defeated at some point in time. I mean Gates and what was that, yeah Gates and Jobs both kind of kicked out of their company, Jobs more famously but you know Gates was invited to leave you know it wasn’t as dramatic as what happens to Jobs but you know, so that’s part of entrepreneurship, that’s part of success, so I think for me the most rewarding time is seeing somebody through the valley, right? I love to be in the valley with people, I love working at people when they’re at their darkest, when they’re having their darkest night of the soul where they can’t see light, that’s when I think I’m best with people, of course then the reward is that as soon as you know, as soon as someone sees the light, wow! You know all of a sudden, boom! You know it’s the road to Damascus experience, it’s the epiphany, it’s the shift in everything, it’s the application of all the lessons from every stumbled footstep that now all of a sudden leads to like certainty, right? And then to be able to walk with that person and see them go you know into the light of their achievement, perhaps the most rewarding thing and then certainly giving back, I wrote you know, I’ve only written one book and people have asked me you know, first off you know John Maxwell, I was John Maxwell’s business partner for 10 years, he’s written 125 books. You know why didn’t, why haven’t I written a book and to be honest with you I thought what am I going to do write a book on goal setting, I mean lots of people have booked, there’s lots of you know there’s great stuff on goal setting, great stuff right? Personal achievement or mindset there’s some fantastic stuff, i mean hard to improve on this, hard to improve on as a man thinketh, hard to improve on anything that Thomas Troward’s ever written right? It would be just my, it would be just my take on something. But I did write a book and I did write a book on think and grow rich because I think there was, there’s three missing chapters of think and grow rich, because I think if you’re really going to think and grow rich if you’re really going to have a rich life, you need more than this three principles because something that’s interesting about the book is, if you do study the lives of the people who he mentions in the book, some of them died miserable, some of them died when their kids didn’t talk to them, where they were ostracized from their family, where they had kind of fallen from grace, that’s not what he, that’s not the richness that he’s talking about in this book, certainly he’s talking about money but he’s also talking about living a rich life, and so I wrote the three missing chapters to the book Think and Grow Rich, was a pretty maybe cocky or arrogant thing that you know, I’m gonna right you know the three missing chapters from Think and Grow Rich, you know who am I? Well, you know I’ve read the book thousands of times, I’ve trained you know, I’ve trained over a hundred thousand people that I can track, that I can trace through the book. I teach people for free one time a year I give back like Patrick gave to me, so I do think I have the authority to write what might be missing in the book and there’s three principles, one is the principle of forgiveness, you cannot live a rich life you know full of resentment and nothing will grow in resentment energy I don’t care, you have to be able to forgive, the second is, is unconditional love right? You have to love people, you have to love life unconditionally, you have to have the capacity to do that and the third is this idea of tithing, that I think what most entrepreneurs understand is the getting side and you know most of our programming from a very young age just be a go-getter go get them, go get them, go get them and yet the first law, the first law of prosperity, first law of prosperity is to give! Givers gain, as a matter of fact, Emerson said that the entire universe operates by law, he said that the law of all laws is the law of cause and effect and in the law of reciprocity the only thing that starts circulation is the cause of giving, you must put out, a farmer understand this they sow then they reap, they don’t reap and then sow, they sow and then they reap and so as an entrepreneur I think we have to have a really good understanding of the circulation of prosperity and it starts by you giving, and when your first idea is how much can I give rather than how much can I get which is really hard to do when you’re first starting, because what do you have to give? You know by nature you’re struggling, you’re a beginner there’s not much you can give but that’s what is required of you, is to give from when you have the smallest amount, because if you can develop the thinking and mindset to give when you’ve got the smallest amount you will be trusted with more to give, to whom much is given much is expected, we are to be you know if you’re an entrepreneur you should understand that all you are, all you are is a channel of distribution for value, that’s all you are as an entrepreneur, all you do is you provide value and you’re a channel through which values, and so it just make sense that the more you provide and the more value you give the more territory you give to give it, the better you serve as a channel for distribution of value the larger the inflow is, it just makes common sense, I mean it’s pretty simple, and so I’ve developed a process of tithing, a practice of tithing, a teaching on tithing and look the tithing isn’t about money because you may not have the money, but do you have time? Can you give 10% of your time? Can you give 10% of your creativity? You know can, you know I have a friend whose mother was 94 years old she lived to be 99 and I knew her for 20 years and for as long as I knew her I was ignorant, I was just unaware, I would meet her name was Stella and Stella would say you know I’m praying for you honey and I would kind of you know ‘oh that’s sweet Stella that’s beautiful you know that’s nice’ and then one day thank God before she died I woke up, and I caught it and she said I’m praying for you honey and I realized that’s all she can do, she’s giving me all that she’s got, all that she has, all that she can do for somebody right now is pray for them and she’s saying I’m doing that for you and for years I was a of jerk kind of patronizing her like ‘oh that’s sweet’ not graciously receiving the gift of her tithe, and so can you hold somebody else’s vision? Maybe you have money but can you say to somebody like tell what your dream is and let me hold that vision with you, let me pray for your dream, let me you know let me speak life into your life, can you do that? So you can tithe even when your bank account is nil and I think when we can understand that as an entrepreneurs, when we can understand our role as channel of distribution of value and we understand that the more we give the more we get, it’s real simple, it’s the basic concept in which the entire universe operates the law of cause and effect, and as spiritual beings we were designed to be causative, we were never designed to live on the effect side of things, we were designed to be the cause of things, and true entrepreneurs, true entrepreneurs are the ones who are on the causative side of everything.
John: That’s amazing Paul, I mean these three bullets I really truly, you know take to heart myself like forgiving, just understanding people right? Like different perspectives it’s so important, like I read The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday a big give and take guy, Adam Grant, you know some great givers out there understanding what’s going on in people’s lives and don’t be objective in terms of like, you don’t have to dig deep like as much as what’s going on in their lives you have no idea, accept it and help as much as possible right? Take it in, slow down because people already have a you know already judge people by how they dress, wear, look, feel, touch, whatever, the stuff they possess, but why? Why are people judging others right? So as I become more globally traveled, world traveler right? Like I’m big into not just here in North America but like durable countries understanding like what people have to go through in their daily undertaking to just have our necessities of water, food, shelter you know just clean clothes right? Like sanitation is not even normal there, you think here we have electricity over there they’re lucky to have it once an hour, one day you get one hour of it. Like things like that and how fortunate and grateful we are, to then want more and then not look at others and say wow! What’s going on? Like why am I you know so petty in terms of certain things and what am I judging others and I have no idea on what’s going on in their lives, their situation, what’s impacting their decisions right? So, as you mature as you become more wise as you you know now that you’ve lived a little bit longer than others and I’m, I believe that as an entrepreneur or any business owner or any human you should have different people in all aspects of your life and I was so fortunate while working at yellow pages, I dealt with tens of thousands of business owners and they were aged from 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 year old’s and each of them gave me so much wisdom of our mentor sessions, every time I had a renewal meeting with them I would ask them, why are you still doing what you do? Like what keeps you going? What excites you today, right? They have this big smile and happy face, it’s like my desire to keep you know taking care of my family, keep keep, my community is everything, without them I have nothing right? It’s like the relate social aspect, these things are pillars of life and you need to make sure that it resonates with your lifestyle, right? So whatever business or life you’re gonna venture into, just make sure you are full, all right? Like make sure you not just dream it but live it to the best of your ability, don’t judge, be a constant giver, reflect as much as possible, live presently and try not to get too caught up don’t stop chasing right? It’s like comparing to others when you should only be comparing to yourself two days ago, two years ago, five years ago right? And all these things I’ve been just learning, learning, reading, learning, talking to others and these are real people as opposed to a social post, right? Someone’s selling you a dream or something, right? Like as you become more wise you know the business aspect over all, as well as what’s in it for you, you realize what your bandwidth is, be in control of it, remove everything that is a distraction, right? And you know as you age and become more wise you’re more control of every aspect of your life, health, exercise, business, relationships, religion, community, all these things are so important right? So Paul thanks a lot I love this conversation, we can go on for hours but I know I respect your time and I just wanted to ask you like, is there final tips that you would like to add to any of the listeners and maybe plug your, how to reach out to you? What’s the best way, your contact information, the website maybe or email, go ahead.
Paul: sure, well thank you my email is just paul@, paulmartinelli.net.com goes to some real estate agent in gan episodes, [email protected] the website’s paulmartinelli.net, um let me leave you with one truth, that I think if you’ll take some time and really contemplate this. Contemplate the consequence of this truth in your life, it has the ability to change the way you do everything, okay? And here it is, it’s a universal impossibility, it’s a universal impossibility for you to have conscious awareness of an idea and not be fully resourced to bring it into physical manifestation. So in other words that dream, that idea to start a million dollar business, you wouldn’t be able to have conscious awareness of that concept, you would not be able to tap into the vibration of frequency of the composite of energy that creates what we call an idea, you wouldn’t be able to tune into that frequency unless, within you, there was an equal measure the potential energy to physically manifest it. It’s like, you could not have the potential for an oak tree inside an acorn, unless an acorn was fully potentiated and resourced to actually manifest an oak tree if it was placed in an environment conducive to its unfoldment, inside every seed is the potential for what it one day could be and if planted in the right environment it manifests this, inside you is desire, desire is the effort of an unexpressed possibility within you, seeking to be expressed within through you, it would be a universal lawful impossibility for you to become aware of your dream and not be resourced to bring it forward. Now it doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy, it doesn’t mean you’re not gonna fail, it doesn’t mean that you’re gonna even know how to access that potential or access those resources but they’re there and because you know they’re there, if you really knew they were there, this is the, you know what would you do if you knew if you wouldn’t quit? You know, if you really knew they were there, then you would dedicate your life to pursuing how to access those resources within you and if you’ve been challenged in finding those resources up until now, I’d love to hear from you because I think I can help you.
John: That’s amazing, well thanks a lot Paul that was great final words because every human has, there’s a, an abundance of opportunity, you need to find it within like you mentioned and you know you being such a mentor, coach with an abundant amount of not just experience but success helping others uncover it, it makes me sound, feel like you’re in it in the right zone like you actually are helping other people pursue their dreams and aspirations by being a true giver and by making the most impact that you can humanly make and seeing people at the trough the low point and getting them out of that is the hardest thing for people to acknowledge and the more people that are not afraid to reach out and that’s a one thing, a lot of people think they have to do it themselves, but when you are able to acknowledge what you don’t know and feel uncomfortable by reaching out, there’s a ton of communities, people like yourself that are willing to support you, guide you, help you uncover what the potential truly is and you know and this is what it’s all about in terms of training, being an employer, being a business owner. The more you help people evolve and grow and figure things out, the more likelihood you’re gonna be successful, right? And I love that Paul so thank you, reach out to Paul, I want to thank you again for spending an abundance amount of time and an abundance amount of great tips for a lot of these entrepreneurs listening today, so thanks a lot Paul for joining me today.
Paul: Thank you so much. Appreciate you, be well!
