Today’s guest is JV Crum. He’s the author of The Conscious Millionaire. He’s going to talk with us about what it takes to run a business that is conscious and successful…..and hopefully will become sustainable. He’s the host of the Conscious Millionaire Podcast as well as The Conscious Millionaire Health Reality Show.
JV has been incredibly successful in his own businesses and he’s taken what he’s learned and helped other business owners adopt what he’s learned in their businesses. Listening today will help you find out what you can do to not only make your business but be conscious while you’re doing it.
You’ll learn some of the following:
- What a conscious business is and why you should care.
- Why money isn’t the only thing that drives you in your business.
- What some of the opportunities are for family businesses to use different forms of management for success.
- Why you need to be positive about what you want for your business.
I invite you to get a copy of JV’s book The Conscious Millionaire at Amazon.
Transcript:
Narrator: Welcome to The Sustainable Business Radio Show podcast where you’ll learn not only how to create a sustainable business but you’ll also learn the secrets of creating extraordinary value within your business and your life. In The Sustainable Business, we focus on what it’s going to take for you to take your successful business and make it economically and personally successful.
Your host, Josh Patrick, is going to help us through finding great thought leaders as well as providing insights he’s learned through his 40 years of owning, running, planning and thinking about what it takes to make a successful business sustainable.
Josh: Hey, how are you today?
Today, you are really lucky. We have JV Crum with us who helps entrepreneurs grow 6- and 7-figure conscious businesses. I’m sure we’re going to get into talking with him about what a conscious business is and how to make high profits and at the same time having a positive impact.
He is a speaker. He’s a coach. He works for the Huffington Post. He is the best-selling author of Conscious Millionaire: Grow Your Business by Making a Difference. He also is a host of the top-ranking Conscious Millionaire podcast. I was lucky enough to be a guest on it several weeks ago and I’m looking forward to seeing the episode go live. And he’s the founder of the consciousmillionaire.com which is a coaching and wealth product business. He has an awful lot of degrees. He holds an MBA, a J.D., and Masters in Psychology. He has come out of the family business world, built and sold a successful company which—there just aren’t that many people that do that well. So I am really looking forward to him.
Let’s bring JV in.
Hey JV, how are you today?
JV: I’m fabulous. Josh, thank you so much for having me on your show. I love what you’re doing and it’s an honor to be here.
Josh: Oh, it’s my pleasure.
So let’s start off with—my first question is what does conscious millionaire mean?
JV: It’s a great question. What’s so interesting is just the evolution of when I really became inspired with this phrase “conscious millionaire”. In the early stages, I actually went to a mastermind. I paid $15,000 for this mastermind to be with a lot of information marketers and only about three or four of them got it. Most of the people spent their entire time, in good intention, trying to convince me that this was an unsalable concept and that I need to get rid of the conscious part.
I spent the whole time saying, “Well, the conscious part is kind of what makes a conscious millionaire, you know, without that, it’s like everybody else’s program and it’s really not what I’m inspired to do. So, the conscious part is really about being aware of who you are, who others are, what’s going on in society and what inside of you do you feel inspired to do with your life, and how can you bring that into your business? How can you build the business where literally you and others in society are all winning together, all your stakeholders are winning together. And guess what, when everybody’s winning, the new model of business actually makes you more money. It’s actually more profitable when you really are concerned about everybody else, and all the synergies, and the collaboration that can occur.
So the conscious part is being aware that there’s something bigger than the money part of the business that’s actually driving you because you really want to do something that’s important – that matters for your customers, that you’ve really got their best interest at heart. And then the millionaire part is, “How do you make profits doing something that you really believe makes a difference?” How do you bring those two together and create a positive impact that’s putting money in the bank.
Josh: That’s very cool. So, this sounds very familiar to me, in that, this is what John Mackey calls “conscious capitalism”. Would you say it’s a similar sort of thing?
JV: Yeah. I’ve read his book a couple of times. I’ve met him. I’ve been at summits with him. I’m in a movie that’s coming out with him this summer called Rise Up and you can go to RiseUpmovie and learn more about that with Arianna Huffington and Dalai Lama so I’m really honored to be with all those people.
Josh: Wow, impressive.
JV: But I think that what’s going on today is that a lot of people are moving into a more conscious approach to business. So, conscious capitalism kind of has its own formula. Conscious millionaire has its own formula. BCorps has that own formula. But I think what we all have in common is saying there’s something bigger than just the money that’s driving us all and we really want to bring all the pieces together and do good in the world by the way we’re making our money. I think that’s what we’re all saying, just with some different words.
Josh: You know, what I really like about this is this talks to the core of what private business has been, at least for the 40 years I’ve been involved in private businesses, is that the smaller businesses in this country have always done what I’ll call “triple bottom line” because it’s their community. It’s their people. It’s what it is. And folks like you are really validating what’s been done for years. Does that make sense?
JV: Yeah, I think so. I mean, sometimes when I’m talking about it, I go, “Look folks, this is common sense that if you have everybody’s best interest at heart” – and I think that is much more true in the small business world.” I think it’s always been much more true in the small business world. I think what’s happening is that a lot of the small businesses are also growing up and becoming bigger businesses but they’ve got a heart. They want to–
You know, you think about Zappos, right? And about being happy. And if you don’t like the shoes, send them back. You know, you think about Toms – both of them happened to be in the movie as well. You think about Toms and, you know, buy a pair of shoes and we’re going to give a pair of shoes to someone who doesn’t have one, right? It’s that I think that this is becoming a bigger movement.
And I think it’s always been there because my background’s being in family business but I think what has changed is that we’re no longer just—a lot of family businesses still—even though they were doing good, honest business, I don’t think, until more recently, more of them have come on line with this whole idea of “there’s a higher consciousness to all of this.” There’s something bigger than all of us that we want to create a society.
When I look out and I look at the world, you know, I’ve got my nonprofit consciousworld.org. I work with 18 to 25 year olds all over the world who are doing projects to uplift the world and make this a more positive place for everyone. And we look at what’s going on in the world.
I think what’s different now is that we’re saying “business can be the solution – commerce can be the solution” to how we shift this world we’re all living in because I think–not to get overly political because it’s really not who I am, I think that we’ve all pretty much seen that the top-down version of life is not solving the problems. And I think what’s great about small business and entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants is that we’re in a position from the bottom up to create our own versions of movements to really go out there and impact the world by how we’re doing business. And that the way we do business is actually changing society in a positive way. And I think at the core of that is really the question, “Are you selling products and services that have intrinsic value that really have true value inside of them?” Or are you just using a marketing platform designed purely to convince people they need this color widget today and tomorrow is going to get thrown in a dump. And I think that’s kind of at the core of this whole conscious movement. Let’s do something that really matters.
Josh: You said something really interesting which is, you were talking about coaches and consultants. You’re probably aware of this but I’m going to bet our listeners are not, is that there’s 28 million businesses in the United States, only 6 million of them have any employees at all. So that means there’s 22 million businesses which I know is your sweet spot where, with a little bit of work, they could become the major drivers of employment in this country.
JV: Absolutely. And already, the majority – over 50% of employees are in small businesses. I define small business–you know, because I’m a numbers guy, I’m trained in tax laws, I’m always thinking numbers. If it’s a privately held company, under $10 million, I think that’s a good definition of small business because that really covers most of the small business territory.
Josh: You know, by the way, that’s all small businesses – all businesses in the United States except for the biggest 150,000.
JV: Yeah, because it’s very interesting. Once you go to a public-owned company, you think about $1 billion and under as small business, you know. Or a 100 million a microbusiness [inaudible 00:08:30] folks, if we have $5 million, we’re making a seven-figure profit for an individual or a family – that’s a great income.
Josh: Yeah, it’s great. It’s a wonderful thing. So, you talk about three steps at creating a level of wealth. What would those three steps be?
JV: When I looked back and I was writing my book—
By the way, if you’ve never written a book, in a way, I highly recommend it, but be prepared. If you think it’s a lot of work, you’re right. I spent seven years redoing mine and getting it the way I wanted and I had to look back and go, “How did I go from 23 and being flat broke to having a four-storey luxury home, and a Mercedes, and my first million at 25? How did happen?” Because when you’re doing it, most of the time when you somehow stumble on to what you’re actually good at, you actually don’t know what you’re doing. By not knowing what you’re doing, you’re not conscious of what you’re doing. You’re doing it really well.
But I had to go back and I go, “What was I doing that I could create change that fast?” And I realized I was doing three steps over, and over, and over, and over again. And they’re conscious, focused action. And the conscious part, each one of them has three aspects to it. The conscious part is really getting crystal clear about what you want to achieve – that number one result that is highly defined. It’s very specific. It’s measurable.
And then looking at, “Well, do I need some other resources? And what are my options for how to get there?” So this is kind of a planning stage. But you can do that on what you want to accomplish today. You could do that in a half hour or an hour. It’s not very long – a lot of times. And then, focusing – not just your mind but I say you’ve got your whole heart in it. You are fully committed. Nothing’s going to stop you and your body is ready to take action.
And then you get to the action part. Well, here’s the problem. I’ve coached so many small business owners – I think I really understand most of the patterns that occur that get in the way because over 90% of small businesses that are started never have $100,000 in revenue. And therefore, they’re never in a position to scale up to a million. And ultimately, a lot of them go out of business.
So, what you’ve really got to do is get rid of all those actions that are not putting money in the bank and accomplishing the number one priority you have at any time. So you’ve got to list out what are all the actions you take, then put them in the right order and you’ll find, usually, that you left some out and there might be inside of you but you just kind of assumed them. And then say, “Well, does something have to happen before each of these actions occur?” And then just do the actions designed to get you to that number one outcome.
Now, if you only did that, you’re going to move your company forward so much faster because it will eliminate you going in 10 to 15 different directions. It’s not unusual for me. This week, I’ve done a couple of coaching sessions with small business owners that had, in one case – four, in another case –five target niches but not $100,000 in revenue. And the first thing I did is I said, “Okay, we’re going to prune. You’re going to make a decision. You’re making it today. Which one of these four or five do you want to work with? And by the way, you’re going to be working with them the next three years because you only need one niche to get to a million.” And really kind of forced the hand and say “Okay, go inside. Figure out which one is like and now you’re going to go out and you’re going to research them and be sure that they’ve got the problems you really want to be working with because let’s face it, as entrepreneurs, as coaches, as consultants, as marketers, what we’re doing is we’re taking the top three problems – the big problems that our market has and we’re going to be providing solutions to those problems for the next three years because that’s about what it’s going to take you to get to that million if you’re really building your company right.
You better love those problems. You better like wake up in the morning excited, “Oh my gosh, I get to solve this problem again.” But if you wake up in the morning and go, “God, I cannot stand these problems,” you’re in the wrong niche. You need to find something that’s going to speak to you because you’re not going to have the passion to make it through.
Josh: So that’s a really important point. So let’s spend a little bit of mind in that. How do you go about finding something that really speaks to you?
JV: Well, that’s an internal question. In my book, I talk about it as your true north and I break it down into three parts. The first one is “What are you just naturally passionate about?” I love to journal so if you’re listening to this, this is one of those things to journal about. You might want to spend a few days just kind of let yourself work through this one because it’s a big important question.
I’ve so many people ask me, “I don’t know what I’m passionate about.”Well, here’s how you discover it. First of all, there are activities that you do that you love, that you find so much enjoyment from that when you do them, the first characteristic is you got lost in time. You think a half hour passed and four hours passed and there’s nothing wrong with that if you didn’t tell your partner that you were going to meet him in a half hour, then you might be up the creek, so you might need to want to watch the clock on that. But you get lost in time.
The second part of finding your deeper passions is that you feel a sense of joy. And that really is the best word. And in fact, people may have looked at you when you were doing those kind of activities or you’ve been involved with them for a few hours and they go, “you look different”. You know what, you are different. Your blood’s flowing different. Your musculature to your face is different. You look and feel all throughout in a state of joy.
And here’s the third clue. You love doing this activity so much that you’ve probably done it many times for free to help other people because you just love helping people this way. Because I go, the real joke of the whole thing is you’re going to get paid well for doing this. That’s how you discover the passion.
Then the next part is, “What difference do you want to make?“ And that’s really the purpose piece. So just allow yourself to journal and go, “Well, what is that change that I’d like to help other people or organizations or it could be animals, it could be the planet.
You know, other people will pay you rather than the animals but there are a lot of people with animals. I live in a building where there are 162 units and I think 50% of the people who live here have a dog, and a lot of them big dogs. They love their dogs. And they have dog walkers that come in during the week while they’re at work. They take them for special grooming. So, you may have just a passion for animals and that’s great. Get clear about what individual organization or group that you really want to make a difference for and that you’d be excited to do that every day of your life. You’ll be so excited.
The third part is what really makes it so unique for you is that I think everyone of us has one, two or three natural gifts. For me, I’m just good at systems. I think systems and process all the time. It’s what I do. It’s how I run businesses. And guess what, it’s one of the top things I help business owners, coaches, consultants, marketers get the right systems in place. That’s a lot of mindset and execution but those are things that I’m just naturally good at. I love to coach. I just knew how to coach, I think, when I came out of the womb. I love helping other people.
So, you need to identify that for yourself. What’s your 1, 2, 3 natural gifts that—you know, it sounds like something you’ve probably heard because it’s true. You could do them in your sleep. In fact, you probably do. You probably go to bed at night, kind of working on problems and you wake up the next morning you have solutions for. And you used your natural gifts all night long.
Josh: That certainly has been true for me, in my life.
So, one of the things in your book that you recommend is that life partners both write their vision for what their life should be and then work together to figure out how to make that reality. How does that translate into making a better business?
JV: Here’s how it translates. Let’s say that partner A owns the business and partner B isn’t an entrepreneur, that a lot of times that happens. And if you don’t both sit down independently – you don’t want to share this at first. You want to do this independently and look at where do you want to be in three years? What is your ideal life like? What’s your ideal day like? What’s your weekend like? Right, because these are all things that impact what your life’s going to be like as an entrepreneur. And then, get them set up together.
Now, you’re going to a similar future and you, as the entrepreneur, have the freedom to come back and say, “Yes, my partner and I, this is really important to me too. I want both of us to be happy, that’s why I have a partner after all.” You want to take a journey together. And then you can design your business around what’s going to work for you and your partner, and you look at how you put the business together. And that may have everything to do with what you delegate, how you spend your time, whether you design a business that can be completely mobile. That’s very popular today. I mean, so many of us. I could be doing this interview from any place in the world.
And on any given day that I’m doing interviews for my podcast and radio shows, I’m interviewing people in Bangkok and Australia and New Zealand, you know, Europe. I’ve interviewed people in Africa. You know, I can be interviewing all over the world and I could live any place I want. I could spend any month, any place that I wanted and run my business because it is run – even though I have a staff that work with me, we all work virtually. We don’t work in person. It works just as well. We get on Zoom. We get on Skype. We talk with each other. It’s just like we’re in the room together anyway.
Josh: Yeah, that’s absolutely true.
So it sound to me like you’re sort of helping people design a lifetime of work and not just a job for 20, or 30, or 40 years which you’re going to sell and then ride off into the sunset. You’re really helping people figure out what their passion is and how to live a great life. Would that be an accurate statement?
JV: Yeah. That’s absolutely a piece of what I’m doing and I’ve done it for my own life. I know where I want to be in 20 years. I know where I want to be in 30 years. I know what I want to accomplish with my global nonprofit. I know what I want to accomplish with the Conscious Millionaire. I know that there are going to be tons of opportunities I don’t even know about but I know the directions I want to go. I know that I want to be highly mobile, that I want to live in other countries. In the next three years, I want to start living around the world because I think that’d be very exciting.
So, I’ve designed a business and a future that relate to how I want to show up, and what I want out of life, and what I want to give. And I do that with entrepreneurs because if you don’t do that then there’s no way that you’re actually going to get the life you wanted. And when everything is said and done, isn’t that the kind of a deal? You know, those of us who want to really help the world. I’m not doing it—it’s not altruistic for me – not at all. This is what gives me my joy. I’m actually getting what I need from helping other people because that’s where I get my biggest joy.
Josh: That’s very cool.
So, JV, we’re out of time unfortunately and I know that you have a gift that you’d like to offer our listeners. And I’m also going to bet that some of our listeners may want to contact you, so could you tell us about both please?
JV: Sure, absolutely.
Well, we’ve got masterminds. We’ve got the Business Academy. I do a small amount of individual coaching. I love doing individual coaching but I can only do that three days out of the month so I have to schedule who I’m going to be working with for that.
What I have for everybody – and it’s a great way to really get to know Conscious Millionaire because it’s going to give you a great deal of value and it’s going to give you some ideas as to what you want to be doing and give you ways that you might want to work with us. And that is, I want to give you my book. It was number one on all of Amazon 34 categories at one time, over 50,000 downloads. So I want to give you my book Conscious Millionaire: Grow Your Business by Making a Difference. All we ask is that you just tell us a little bit about you and your business. And along with that, I have a $97.00 fast track program that’s got over 16 videos, audios, pdf’s. It’s got a companion journal for the book that’s got over – there’s over a hundred coaching exercises in the book, so it has them all in one place for you. You get a link to get that absolutely free as well and all you have to do is go to consciousmillionaire.com/mybook. That’s a special page where you can go and get your free copy of my book which I’d love for you to have and also get the fast track training to help you build and grow your business, your coaching, your consulting, your marketing practices and get your voice out there. Make your difference. Make a positive impact and put more money in the bank.
Josh: Cool.
Hey, JV, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. This was a really interesting episode.
And for those who are listening, go to the website and get the book. Read it. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Thanks so much and we’ll see you back at The Sustainable Business real soon, I hope.
Narrator: You’ve been listening to The Sustainable Business podcast where we ask the question, “What would it take for your business to still be around 100 years from now?” If you like what you’ve heard and want more information, please contact Josh Patrick at 802‑846‑1264 ext 2, or visit us on our website at www.askjoshpatrick.com, or you can send Josh an e-mail at jpatrick@askjoshpatrick.com.
Thanks for listening. We hope to see you at The Sustainable Business in the near future.
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