For Episode 147 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie is joined by Mitch Axelrod. Mitch is a 45-year entrepreneur, speaker, trainer, advisor, and #1 Wall St. Journal, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon bestselling author. He has delivered 3,500 seminars, workshops, keynotes, executive briefings, and coaching clinics to more than a million people on business, entrepreneurship, sales, leadership, values, intellectual property, and life skills.
For Episode 147 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast, Rennie is joined by Mitch Axelrod. Mitch is a 45-year entrepreneur, speaker, trainer, advisor, and #1 Wall St. Journal, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon bestselling author. He has delivered 3,500 seminars, workshops, keynotes, executive briefings, and coaching clinics to more than a million people on business, entrepreneurship, sales, leadership, values, intellectual property, and life skills.
Mitch has appeared in dozens of media and taught at NYU, USC, Notre Dame, and Harvard. He has helped his clients generate $3 billion of revenue.
Do you know the value of your intellect and IP (intellectual property)?
In this episode, Rennie and Mitch cover:
02:20 How Mitch’s experience as a 16-year-old helped him to create his life’s mantra that still serves him today.
03:58 Mitch gives away 10% of his time each year and has helped hundreds of others – he believes that time is irreplaceable and extremely valuable.
05:16 Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and how Mitch likes to reduce things to an elemental level.
06:01 The two target markets that Mitch works with and how he helps them to generate millions of dollars.
07:39 An example of how Mitch threw away the box to sell a chapter of his book for the same value as his whole book.
09:21 Mitch shares with us his biggest business failure and how that led him to embrace doing what he loved.
10:44 The lesson Mitch learned from that is to not be wedded to your ideas – that the way you think something should be may be limiting you to have peripheral vision as well.
12:51 How to get in touch with Mitch. You can get his video The New Game of Selling & Service by visiting http://www.thenewgameofselling.comor learn to sell, rent and license your IP with his video The New Game of IP visit http://www.thenewgameofip.com. You can also email Mitch directly at MitchellAxelrod@gmail.com.
13:58 Mitch shares with us why more people don’t throw the box away and realize the value of their intellect and their intellectual property.
“If I could tell my 30-year-old self something what would I tell them? And fortunately, I had my failure relatively early in my 30’s so I still had time to recover. That bounce-back ability, adaptability, flexibility is more important than ever. You can't get wedded to your ideas, your thinking, I have a full book I've been threatening to come out with for years. I have about 100 original quotes. And one of them is – Is the way you think it should be stopping you from having it the way it could be” - Mitch Axelrod
To get Mitch’s videos The New Game of Selling & Service visit http://www.thenewgameofselling.com or learn to sell, rent and license your IP – The New Game of IP visit http://www.thenewgameofip.com
You can also email Mitch directly at MitchellAxelrod@gmail.com
To learn more about Mitch visit http://mitchaxelrod.com/about-mitch/
If you'd like to know how books, movies, and society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is visit wealthonanyincome.com/tedx. You'll hear Rennie's TEDx talk and can request a free 27-page Roadmap to Complete Financial Choice® and receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or money.
AND if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth and donate to the causes that touch your heart. Please check out our affordable program ‘Wealth with Purpose’.
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Rennie Gabriel 00:10
Hi folks, welcome to Episode 147 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration around your business and your money. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel. In past episodes, we spoke about how to understand the numbers from your business, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in 5 to 10 seconds, what determines how close you are to Complete Financial Choice®, and how to run your business without being in your business. Last week, we had Dr. Stuart Fischbein, a specialist in home birthing that saves both money and the health of the mother by avoiding unnecessary C-sections. Today we have as our guest, Mitch Axelrod. I've known Mitch for several years through one of my mastermind groups. He's an entrepreneur for 45 years. As a speaker, trainer, advisor and number one Wall Street Journal, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon best selling author, he's delivered 3500 seminars, workshops, keynotes, executive briefings, and coaching clinics to more than a million people on business, entrepreneurship, sales, leadership, values, intellectual property and life skills. Mitch has appeared in dozens of media and taught at NYU, USC, Notre Dame, and Harvard. He's helped his clients generate 3 billion - with a B - $3 billion of revenue. Mitch, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast.
Mitch Axelrod 02:07
Great to be with you, Rennie. I'm looking forward to this chat.
Rennie Gabriel 02:11
Thank you, Mitch. Now, got an idea what you do, and it's a lot of stuff, but tell me why you do what you've been doing?
Mitch Axelrod 02:20
Well, I'll take it back to when I was 16 years old. I worked in a what's known as a lunch net serving food to over-the-counter, and one day, a guy put $1 bill in my hand, and I had never gotten a tip more than 50 cents up until that time. And I said, 'Well, you already paid your bill'. I thought he was paying his bill. He said, 'No. He says, I want you to know, you served me, you smiled, you were clean, and I want you to know you're worth it'. Up until that point, nobody had ever told me I was worth it. And it stuck with me. And from that experience, I developed my life's mantra. I love and serve people, and they reward me with their money. That's been my driving motivation, for now, I won't say how many years, but over 50 years and 45 years in business. It's truly the driving force - I just love to serve people. Over the years, I've had the great fortune in various ways to serve a million people. So, very gratifying.
Rennie Gabriel 03:32
Thank you, Mitch. And now you're probably aware I donate 100% of the profits from the work that I do to animal and veteran charities. Now I know there's not a particular charity that you support with your money, but what I do know about you, because you've done it for me, is you give up very freely of your time to support people. So, I mean, do you want to expand on that at all?
Mitch Axelrod 03:58
Sure. I try to give away 10% of my yearly time to help and support new entrepreneurs, people who are stuck, people who are trying to make decisions. And truly time is irreplaceable.
Rennie Gabriel 04:14
Yeah.
Mitch Axelrod 04:15
Money is replaceable. So for me, giving up your time is giving up the most precious irreplaceable resource. And I give up my wisdom. I give out my experience. So I've worked with, you know, hundreds of people who are just - especially in the JVMM in meetings and groups. Anybody who wants a half hour of time with me, I just give it to them pro bono and give them what I call a second opinion. And something they can really latch on to that they can do and capitalize and monetize.
Rennie Gabriel 04:49
And I know that's true because you've done that for me. You did that presentation recently for Dov's mastermind group. And it was among the best presentations anyone in the mastermind has done, because like Albert Einstein says, If you can't explain it simply enough for an eight year old to understand it, you don't know it well enough. And so you did a fabulous job. Thank you.
Mitch Axelrod 05:16
Thank you. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Rennie Gabriel 05:21
Exactly.
Mitch Axelrod 05:22
Leonardo da Vinci. The first five words in my book, The New Game of Selling, were those words, because I think in today's world, it's so complex, it's so complicated, when you . . . It's much harder to make something simple then it is to make it complicated. So I try to reduce. I believe it's elemental. If I can reduce everything to its elements, then you can mix the elements as you see fit in the way that they will work for you. So that's how I've approached all of my work over the years.
Rennie Gabriel 05:55
And I agree with you completely. Now, tell me who your target markets are?
Mitch Axelrod 06:01
Well, we have, I have two really, companies that want to grow their top-line revenue, and bottom-line profit with virtually no expense by redirecting their energy, attention, and activities, from the most expensive part of the business, which is getting a customer, to maximizing on the back-end, getting lifetime value customer referrals and whatnot. And that's what I do for businesses and organizations. What I do for individuals who have intellectual property content - courses, programs, packages - is I show them how to sell, rent, and license those programs, or the parts and pieces of those programs, to other businesses and companies and organizations. And so I've helped quite a few people generate millions and millions of dollars, redeploying their courses and programs as intellectual property. And a lot of companies, businesses of all sizes, I see that they're not capitalizing on mindset. And so part of it is paying attention, seeing where the value is, and then deploying that in a way that benefits you and the ultimate use.
Rennie Gabriel 07:21
Yeah, I remember you explaining to me when we had a conversation about how you had licensed a chapter of your book to a company, that didn't want the whole book for their sales force, they just wanted that one chapter. And you licensed the chapter. I think it was for $25,000.
Mitch Axelrod 07:39
Right. The guy came to me and said, We have 25 grand, I read your book, I loved your book. But if we buy the book, we can only buy like, even after I've sold it them at cost, five bucks. He'd buy 5000. And I asked him a really important question I discovered 40 years ago. What do you like best about it? Or what do you want to do? He said, Well, this chapter on successability, unbelievable. Everybody was raving about it. So I said to him, Would you rather have that chapter and be able to give it to everybody, or just buy the book and only be able to buy 5000? He said, How could you give me a chapter? I said, I own the book. I put it into PDF, and I send it to you, and you send me the money. And that's what he did. So again, it's thinking, not outside the box, you got to throw the box away, and realize that every chapter, every segment, every section of your book, your program, is IP unto itself. And sometimes the parts and the pieces could be worth as much as the whole. And I don't know too many people who have, you know, replicated that. I've told that story for 20 years. And I have yet to see somebody come to me, I sold a chapter of my book! Because we think in whole, you know, the whole program, the whole story, the whole product. So it's a different way of thinking.
Rennie Gabriel 09:10
Yeah, I think it's brilliant, Mitch. Now, here's a two part question. One of them is what was your biggest failure, and what insight did you gain from that?
Mitch Axelrod 09:21
Well, without a question of a doubt, I lost a million dollars in a year in a restaurant investment. Unfortunately, I bought the restaurant and two months later, medical waste washed up on the Jersey Shore that summer. And we went from like 300 dinners a night to 50 dinners. At the end of the summer, we had more employees than we had customers. After that I just said, Okay, I got to do what I love. And you know, I'm not going to worry about making money and so I really changed my whole approach to going about my career. And I got into speaking and training, which I was always good at, but I always used it as a marketing tool to develop my financial planning business. And then, so when we lost all that money, I said, my wife said, What are you really going to do? You're psychologically unemployable, you know? So it turns out within about 6 months, I was back up to 100,000 a year and having an impact.
Rennie Gabriel 10:26
Sometimes when I ask that question, someone says, Well, I have no failures, but I had some major challenges. And the point is gaining the insight from it, like moving from just making money or something with a restaurant, to doing what you really love and enjoy doing.
Mitch Axelrod 10:44
Yeah, now that we have a little bit of time, a lot of water under the bridge, as they say, you look back, and you say that if I could tell my 30-year-old self something, what would I tell them? And fortunately, I had my failure relatively early in my 30s so I still had time to recover. But you know, that bounce-back ability, adaptability, flexibility is more important than ever. You can't get wedded to your ideas, your thinking, I have a full book I've been threatening to come out with for years. I have about 100 original quotes. And one of them is - "Is the way you think it should be stopping you from having it the way it could be".
Rennie Gabriel 11:35
That's a "writer-downer".
Mitch Axelrod 11:37
That is a writer-downer, and everything I come up with, like, come up with it myself, and I'm thinking, I always think it should be a certain way, and then you back off. It's like, I got to keep my eyes on the goal. You know, one of my friends and mentors, Brian Tracy, who gave me a very nice quote, he used to say, Keep your eyes fixated, Don't divert them. Keep your eyes on your goal. And I said, Hey, Brian, what if there's a Learjet right over here to your side, willing to take you where you want to go, but you're not going to because you are so fixated on the march. You have to have peripheral vision today. You have to be able to see the whole 360 degree panoramic view of things. Very often, we get stuck in the way we think it should be and then we get into that tunnel. And we don't look at what could be way better.
Rennie Gabriel 12:29
Yeah, we completely miss what could be. So now I know that some of my listeners, many of my listeners want to know how to get a hold of you to help grow their businesses, maybe what they can do with their intellectual property? Do you have something that would be a value for them to reach out and connect with you?
Mitch Axelrod 12:51
Sure, I actually have two links they can go to and watch a really good video. And if they like the video, then they can reach out. I have, The New Game of Selling, where I have a 19-minute video that talks about the whole approach, The New Game of Selling and Service. And then, The New Game of IP - it stands for Intellectual Property. The New Game of IP, I have a 40-minute interview there, where I take people through my whole history of how I got started, how I did deals, and things I discovered, the possibilities that are out there for people. And then from there, they can get in touch with me. If they want to email me, just my full name, mitchellaxelrod@gmail.com, and I will respond to my email faithfully.
Rennie Gabriel 13:38
Beautiful. And while you're saying that I was typing that up for the show notes, so that people can just click on the links and get right there. And the last thing, is there a question that I should have asked you that would also give some great value to those who are listening?
Mitch Axelrod 13:58
The question I would say would be, why don't more people throw the box away and realize the value of their intellect and their intellectual property? So I distinguish between the two. A lot of times, we create courses and programs and packages and books, okay? That's the material manifestation. I say go back from form to essence. This is essence. What's up here. And sometimes, the essence if you deploy it a different way, could be dramatically worth more than the form it's in. A doctor I just coached last year, had no product, had no book, but we taught him how to ask questions, and we get to the point where some medical firm offers him a quarter of a million dollars, in one meeting, because he was so adept at being able to ask questions and then display his intellect. And so sometimes you don't even need to have a product or sales page or a pitch. It's just knowing what you want, where your value is, and then being able to either deploy it on the essence, or create a new form in that you didn't have before. So, you know, I always wonder why don't people think this way? But I guess that's a good thing.
Rennie Gabriel 15:27
Yeah. And now that they've listened to this podcast, they may be thinking differently.
Mitch Axelrod 15:33
So maybe.
Rennie Gabriel 15:34
Yeah. Mitch, thank you for being on the Wealth On Any Income Podcast.
Mitch Axelrod 15:40
My pleasure, always a pleasure to be with you, Rennie.
Rennie Gabriel 15:42
Thank you, Mitch. And to all those who are listening. If you'd like to know how books, movies and Society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx, you'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free 9-Step Roadmap to Complete Financial Choice®, and philanthropy. And receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or your money. And if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth, and donate money to the causes that touch your heart, please check out our affordable program, Wealth with Purpose. To my listeners. Thank you for tuning in. You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform and please rate, review and subscribe. Until next week. be prosperous. Bye bye for now.