Episode 123: Moonshot to Moneymaker with Lewis Schiff

Lewis Schiff (00:00):

I realized I had done it all wrong. I hadn’t really been a great entrepreneur. I had been looking for, you know, pops. I’d been very opportunistic in the worst kind of way. Like just people are doing this. I’ll do anything to get the downloads. I’ll do anything to get the eyeballs. What I wasn’t building was sustainable, thoughtful, strategic, culturally driven businesses that would stand the test of time.

Speaker 2 (00:22):

Welcome to Learning Life. And the thing that I’ve realized from the CEO to the NFL football player, to the janitor, we’re our toughest critics. And we’re hardest on ourselves. But you have to be willing to say and point out the things that need to be said. The only way to grab somebody’s attention is with a story.

Jon Tota (00:44):

Welcome to another episode of Learning Life with Jon Tota. My guest today is Lewis Schiff. Lewis is an old friend and mentor of mine, a prolific author, serial entrepreneur, and advisor to hundreds of very successful business owners over the years. You’ve probably seen or read at least one of Lewis’s many successful books, a list that includes The Armchair Millionaire, The Middle-Class Millionaire, Business Brilliant, and The First Habit: The One Technique That Will Change Your Life. Beyond his own entrepreneurial success, Lewis has spent the second part of his career creating organizations and education programs to support entrepreneurs through the various stages as they grow their businesses to new heights. I met Lewis almost a decade ago when I was part of his business owners council. Since then, he’s gone on to chair The Birthing of Giants fellowship program, and most recently launched Moonshots and Moneymakers, a week long workshop in collaboration with Ryder University and Oxford University.

Jon Tota (01:33):

I’ve learned a ton from Lewis over the years, and he was actually the first person I sought out for advice when starting up this show. So I’m very happy to have him with us today. Lewis Schiff, welcome to Learning Life.

Lewis Schiff (01:43):

Thank you, Jon Tota.

Jon Tota (01:45):

I asked you for advice when I was getting started with an interview show like this, and I always thought of you as this master interviewer. I’ve been part of your programs. I’ve seen you on stage all the time interviewing people; you interview people in your books. What is it that that is kind of that core ingredient to what you’ve done in your career? Because you’ve had this huge career over the last 20 plus years. Has that curiosity been part of it in just growing your career in this direction?

Lewis Schiff (02:17):

It starts with a love of this person called an entrepreneur. I mean, I just loved this person. And I say that because not everybody loves entrepreneurs, you know, they can be, there’s a word that we use, which is either arrogant or bold. If you’re wrong, it’s arrogrant; if you’re right, it’s bold. Entrepreneurs, I find, I have such empathy for, even from the beginning, how hard their lives are. And so when I sit down to talk to them, I start by loving them. I do, I love every single entrepreneur I’ve ever met with. I would bleed for them. They’re not all the nicest people, but they’re, they’re all such brave explorers. And I just love that about them. So I kind of walk into every interview, fascinated with them. Remember Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live? And he used to do these interviews where he was such a fan boy of everyone he interviewed. He never let them talk and just spent the whole time telling them how much he loved them. I could do that with these people. I could just tell them how much I love them, but then I think about the audience. So if you’re doing a live interview or even if you’re doing it in writing, I just am obsessed with the idea that these people have wisdom to share. And, you know, by the grace of God, I’ve been put in between the wisdom and the audience. And so I’ve got to dig it out. And I would say the last thing, which is going to sound in conflict with the starting that I loved entrepreneurs is I also don’t really care about the entrepreneur at that point, because if the audience can benefit from the wisdom that this individual who’s talking to me on stage has, I’ve got to get it to them. Like I must, I have such an urgency to get it to them. And so if it makes my interviewee uncomfortable, I don’t care. I’ve got to get the wisdom from that person to everybody in the audience.

Jon Tota (03:50):

Yeah. And I, I remember you gave me that advice too. It always sticks in my head also, you know, don’t be a fan boy, you’re trying to get the best interview possible for your audience. And it’s an admirable concept because it’s when you’re interviewing people all the time, it’s not easy to keep digging deeper and get to that uncomfortable spot. So if I, if I am able to achieve that today and make you uncomfortable, you know, you’re the one who led me here.

Lewis Schiff (04:16):

We can start that tomorrow.

Jon Tota (04:17):

We’ll do that on the next one.

Speaker 2 (04:20):

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Jon Tota (05:25):

Obviously you have- and I think it’s really fascinating- The first part of your career was really your entrepreneurial journey before you started advising entrepreneurs and business owners. So tell us a little bit about that, cause I know you built up an early business and sold it to iVillage back in the early dotcom days, and then did some other interesting things. Just give us kind of the quick overview on those experiences.

Lewis Schiff (05:47):

Sure. Well, I have been, you know, that sort of kid entrepreneur, you know, even in my teenage years, I was always getting myself into something where I was buying something and selling something. But when the dotcom boom came around and I’m talking about the first one in the mid nineties, I was all about it. I mean, I had already been kind of an entrepreneur in training that whole time. So I did what people did back then, which is I raised money. I started these little websites and I happened to be lucky enough to sell one of them to a company called iVillage, which happened to go public in sort of a roaring nineties of like, you know, these companies after day one being more valuable than GM. You know, they were just, these kind of weird situations were happening. And I had a great run with them and I happened to sell my company to them in stock.

Lewis Schiff (06:29):

So I got a lot of stock options and, you know, could have gone wrong, but it went really well. So my first brush with successful entrepreneurship, which I define is starting something and selling something in that kind of traditional sense of entrepreneurship. I, I did that from the year 1996 to the year 2000, had that first very successful effort. And I was in my early thirties by the time like completed that run. And so I did what you do when you had one successful run, which is you do it again and again and again. So from 2000 to 2010, I started a few things and I learned the other side of entrepreneurship, which is of course not everything works out. But I then ended up around 2008 with my second exit, so I started something. Also with iVillage what I started with, had to do with personal finance and educating regular people on their money.

Lewis Schiff (07:17):

That site was called Armchair Millionaire. It was backed not just by iVillage, it was backed by Intuit, the makers of Quicken, and then eventually by Kleiner Perkins, the VC firm, and then even more importantly, Charles Schwab, the brokerage firm. And so I built this financial site that was pretty popular. Then I built another financial site called Main Street.com, which I sold to The Street.com, which was Jim Cramer’s website. And all this is to say that between 1995 and the year 2009, I built a lot of things that were web related and personal finance education related, but I only had two successful exits during that time. And I’m pretty proud of that. That’s kind of a decent ratio, but I also learned that 15, roughly for 15 year span how to succeed and also how to fail and how to pick yourself up and how to keep going.

Lewis Schiff (08:04):

That’s the classic entrepreneurial story, right? It’s sort of, you take your punches and then you hurt from those punches, but then you have to pick yourself up and keep going. Then I had this very amazing moment where I had written a book, which I’m sure we’ll talk about the book part of my life, which is running parallel to these companies that I started. But I’d written a book and I got a chance to present it to the folks at INC magazine. And I have to tell you that even though I was in the New York media world, which called a lot of magazines and a lot of websites, I never really looked at Inc magazine, but my friend had become the CEO. And he brought me in and said, tell me what this book is about, that you wrote and had a lot to do with, um, I was a personal finance guy, so I had a lot to do with how Americans manage their money, but it really had a second story that I had discovered, which is that people who built businesses were often the most successful people in America.

Lewis Schiff (08:52):

So he wanted me to come in and talk about that. And I just had giant epiphany. I had, I had never really looked at Inc magazine. I never really even thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I just thought of myself as like a guy who built businesses; and I’m very grateful to the Inc magazine brand and that community for teaching me about a whole other side of entrepreneurship that I didn’t understand at all. And this is a long way of me saying that those first 15 years, where I built a couple of businesses that I sold for a lot of money, I realized I had done it all wrong. I hadn’t really been a great entrepreneur. I had been flipping, I had been looking for, you know, pops. I’d been very opportunistic in the worst kind of way. Like just people are doing this, I’ll do anything to get the downloads. I’ll do anything to get the eyeballs and then it’ll be valuable and I’ll sell it to somebody. But what I wasn’t building was sustainable, thoughtful, strategic, culturally driven businesses that would stand the test of time. And I only learned that after I had sold two businesses.

Jon Tota (09:50):

You kind of lived in this early world of the dotcom boom. And, and you, you had a lot of successes or those two really great successes doing that, where it was all about downloads and eyeballs and traffic, not necessarily is this a good business that’s going to generate meaningful profits. So are you seeing that again today? Have you seen the business world evolve in a new direction where people are really focused on building sustainable profitable businesses that solve a problem versus just following the latest tech trend and trying to profit from it?

Lewis Schiff (10:26):

Right. So during those 15 years, I was pretty deeply embedded with the VC world, the venture capital world. And I was doing what you do, which is they would tell you what they wanted to invest in, and then you would build it. I have almost nothing to do with the VC world anymore. And that includes the angel world. I just, I find it to be kind of a rabbit hole, kind of like you just described. It’s just, there are not many leaders in that world. They’re mostly followers. I don’t even understand why people are in venture capital to be honest, but there’s a whole other side of capital. It’s sometimes called private equity or family office. It’s a different level of wealth. It’s a more mature wealth. And I find that they’re looking for the most part, they’re looking to build sustainable businesses that sort of are strategically sound that, you know, really solve problems.

Lewis Schiff (11:08):

So if there’s two worlds, one where there’s so much noise, okay. The whole venture capital world, the whole startup world, the whole unicorn world, I mean, there’s tremendous noise. The other world are, are people who start companies at their kitchen table, almost always with whatever money they have and what I mean by that is whatever they put into it. They’ve got to get it back really quickly. So when we start businesses, we say, Hey, I can afford to put $10,000 into this, but I gotta get it back in like 90 days. Cause I don’t really have that kind of money to play around with. And I don’t have anything here that VC or private equity firms can be interested in. So I’ve got to build something with my own money and the whole world that I’m in now are people like yourself, Jon. Cause we met when you were in, when you ran your own business that have built something you through sweat and through creativity and through hustle, but it has grown well past the sort of infancy stage.

Lewis Schiff (12:00):

And now they’ve got these thriving somewhere between toddler and adolescent businesses and where I come in with a whole group of incredible entrepreneurs, it’s called the Birthing of Giants program is we help take those adolescent companies and turn them into kind of mature adults. And if we can get them from adolescent to mature, there’s a ton of great money, like a private equity fund money that is dying for companies like that. And so we’re still part of a value chain of taking it from point A to point B. But my world is no longer, you know, a kid with an idea, sitting at a Starbucks, writing a pitch deck, it’s a person who’s built a pretty good business, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million, a 100 million dollars revenue has customers, has contracts, has assets, has a reputation. And we’re taking them from that to, let’s say a billion where there’s going to be a ton of people who want to buy into that business.

Jon Tota (12:47):

Yeah, I think that’s true. And I, I remember from our time together when I was, when I was part of your business owners council, and, and today I’ve seen some of the people involved with Birthing of Giants and same kind of thing. They’re big businesses and these, these people have built them up as you know, their own business in their model, but they’ve really scaled very well. So I think you’ve always attract that kind of a, I guess, more of a practical entrepreneur. I know you’ve been writing books all along. And when you look at the list of all your books that you’ve written, it’s almost every several years you release another book. Is that part of what attracts that type of entrepreneur to you, that the style of your writing? And how important are these books to your business model and who you are out there in the community?

Lewis Schiff (13:41):

I produce a book about every five years. I’m working on another one now I’m happy to talk about it, but the five year steps, those five-year increments reflect my own kind of education as an entrepreneur. And so I have done three books that depend on something called primary research, which is I interviewed- And I say, I mean, I hire a team of usually a PhD candidates to interview hundreds. Sometimes thousands of people, the most I ever interviewed was about 5,000 people. And that is hard to do. I mean, that’s a ton of money and a ton of time. And you know, once you have that, not only do you have a material for your own book, but there’s a ton of other writers who use primary research to develop their secondary research, meaning you’ve read it probably if you picked up the newspaper or looked at the newspaper on your screen today, a reporter said, according to a study, blankety blank, blank blank.

Lewis Schiff (14:35):

So I’m that study in my books. I write these books about the studies I do. And therefore a lot of other people quote my work because it’s original research. And I have found that while that’s very, very difficult, you know, process I have found that’s what makes my books valuable. And I would sort of as a cautionary tale to anyone, your books have to be based on other people, more than yourself, not withstanding an autobiography. But you know, most people who have a story, they want to tell they, they have to have the rigor to go get other people who want to tell that story and then be a vessel- just like we started talking about the beginning, but as an interviewer – and be a vessel for that story. I have a pretty big turnoff to businesses, to books, especially business books, where someone just tells me about, you know, how they think the future is going to be X or they think the future’s going to be Y without talking to anyone else but themselves. I think you have to do that. And so my books have done that. And as a result, like I said, I’ve been quoted a lot and the books have been really wonderful brochures for the work I do as a, as an educator and an owner of an education enterprise.

Jon Tota (15:42):

And so books in this primary research category, it, as you said, it’s a lot of, lot of work. It’s a big undertaking and you’ve just got to conduct so much research and so many interviews. How are you balancing that with your other ventures at the same time? Because I know a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs and business leaders out there who want to write a book. I selfishly want to understand how you do this as well, but how are you balancing it? Do you go into a certain mode once every five years where you shut everything else off and just focus on the research and the book, or you kind of doing it both simultaneously?

Lewis Schiff (16:19):

Books have a crescendo, right? I mean, you start off, it starts off very early on where you have an idea for a book and you just kind of crank out the equivalent of a term paper. It’s called the book proposal, but it looks like a term paper back in school and, um, you know, 20, 25 pages, but it takes a couple of months to write it. And that’s that you just do that. You burn the midnight oil because you don’t even know if anyone’s going to buy the book, but then there’s this wonderful moment where a publisher buys your book and then either there’s a deadline, right? So let’s say within nine months or 18 months, you have to return something to them. So, you know, the crescendo in terms of hours and energy, it looks like what you think it does. It’s the first day, it starts off with very little work.

Lewis Schiff (17:00):

And then by the 18th month, it’s like, you have to put everything else aside to work on it. But I would say it’s a pretty ugly process. I mean, it’s really kind of ugly. So for primary research, for example, and broad primary research can fall to two categories, one is where you interview a thousand people. And the other is just interviewing 10 people in depth. I mean, you don’t have to do like phone survey interviews if you don’t want to. There’s other ways to do primary research. But the hard part about primary research are the dead ends. So you have to interview people. And then after one hours of interview, you say, ah, this wasn’t the right person. Like there’s a lot of heartache with all the dead ends that you go through, but that’s, that’s just plodding along and you start to get excited about the next person you’re going to interview and hope that they’re the right person.

Lewis Schiff (17:42):

At the end of that process, when you feel like you’ve done all that interviewing and you’re in book composition mode and that’s sort of a slog, but it’s not, at least you’re mostly done talking to the outside world. I mean, there are definitely times when you have to go back to the interviewee or interviewees and find somebody to fill a hole. But so it’s two steps. I think there’s a heartache step, which is the interview process, lots of dead ends. And then there’s the writing and editing step, which is just, just discipline, pure 100% discipline. And you know, I think it’s just like they say with an elephant, you know, you gotta, you start with, you start with small bites, but I also want to say that I hire people to help me. So I hire people to coach me during that, I hire people to do research for me during that. I don’t take it all on myself. That would be too much for me.

Jon Tota (18:27):

And so if you had to pick an obviously I think Armchair Millionaire was probably a really meaningful book for you because of all the things that it created as a result. But if our listeners are listening and there’s one book that you say right now is the most relevant, interesting book that they should read or your personal favorite, which of your books would you choose?

Lewis Schiff (18:48):

I’ll tell you, I’m going to say this answer because I think it’s the most helpful to your audience is I wrote a book. So if you know the publishing world, a contract will say something like you have to deliver 75,000 words or something like that because 75,000 words translates into what you think of as a book- it’s like 250 pages. Go to the bookstore, buy a book, put down your 20 bucks. You want to walk out with, you know, a pound of book, but that’s not really, not every story needs a pound of books. So I wrote a book called The First Habit where I really managed to get through it in 50 pages. And I knew that no publisher would be interested because no publisher would ever publish a 50 page book. And so I put it on my website for free.

Lewis Schiff (19:25):

I also self published it, but I put it on my website for free so that people could have access to it. It, it did the job and it only took 50 pages. I suppose my favorite book that I’ve ever written that I really liked still is Business Brilliant. It came out in 2013. It’s a great story. It uses original research. It talks about how, you know, the most successful people in America are not brilliant in any traditional sense. They may not have gone to the best schools. They may not have attained the highest degrees, but their business brilliant. And I think that people should understand what business brilliance looks like because you know, we’re at a tough time. I mean, people are going to college now and the colleges have become, you know, tuitions are so high and they’re walking out of these degrees and with debt.

Lewis Schiff (20:13):

And so I am a huge fan of traditional education, liberal arts education- you know, every edition for every edition’s sake; Worldliness, um, you know, perspective, uh, the ability to, to research something, the ability to organize your research around something. Those are all, uh, things we learned at school. But you know, what’s happening now. People are leaving school and they’re not necessarily well equipped for the working world. And so business brilliant is a book about what really takes place at the highest levels of business and what success looks like. And the first habit, the free book I put on my website is a very small slice of all of that. It says, you know, in the end business brilliant was about seven qualities that I found when I looked at all these really smart business people. And then I wrote this little book that was about one of the qualities and it just needed a little bit of time to work through it all in terms of a workbook and things you can do to understand your own journey.

Lewis Schiff (21:07):

That’s the most important research I’ve done. I will say that the Armchair Millionaire, my first book was, it’s actually such a funny book now because it’s got references to stuff that is so ancient. I recommend VHS tapes that you can doubt that you could buy, you know, even just like mentioned the internet as a thing, like there’s also the internet where you can go for research, really talked about it, almost embarrassed about it, but the core information of the Armchair Millionaire for anyone who wants to learn how to invest their money, you know, I still 30 years later invest my money in exactly the same way.

Jon Tota (21:40):

That’s awesome. And, and, and I think your book topics have evolved with, with your career. And so the early books were very much geared towards personal finance and then business building. And I know if I’m doing my math, right. I think the last book, The First Habit was 2016. So every five years, you’re just about due for another book, right?

Lewis Schiff (22:03):

Yes, sir. Yes.

Jon Tota (22:04):

Are you, can you tell what it’s going to be? Is that public knowledge?

Lewis Schiff (22:09):

Yeah, no, it’s, uh, I mean, cause we’re gonna talk about it. So, uh, it’s, it’s this concept called Moonshots and Moneymakers. And so really I have been chronicling how people manage their money and how people grow wealth differently over the, over 25 years. And I was in the middle of something huge. Um, I’m going to say this as a, I was in the right place at the right time, but I also made the wrong decision. I was at the right place at the right time when this thing called index funds. And talked about a boring subject index funds, but I was right there when they were being conceived. And the, the whole conceit of index funds was you don’t need brilliant people to run your money. You just need to own every stock everywhere because stocks as an asset class tend to go up and that’s, as I said, I still invest my money that way. I own every stock everywhere. I don’t make any individual stock choices. And so, you know, out of that came the company called Vanguard and Charles Schwab and they became behemoths. And really the largest pool of money in the world is now in index funds or index ETFs. And I was in there at the very beginning of that. And I was building these little websites that I sold for, you know, millions of dollars, but not, but people around me became billionaires with that stuff. And I didn’t have the consciousness to stick with it. I was sort of flitting to the next thing cause I thought of myself as a media guy, as personal finance guy. So anyway, fast forward to now I’m onto something very big, very significant seismic shift, which totally reminds me of where I was when I was in index funds.

Lewis Schiff (23:34):

And it has to do with the maturation of how these entrepreneurs, that I am crazy about. These people who start businesses at their kitchen table with their credit cards and how they go onto to battle test the quality of their business and the quality of their business acumen and the strategy behind their business; the market they serve, the fundamental economics of it. Those are businesses that I called moneymakers today. And then how some of them, not all of them are going to pivot and they’re going to pivot because their customers evolving and because the technology in their industry is changing. And they’re going to pivot from being really smart, often services based businesses into software or technology based platforms. And my long story short is there’s all these VCs and all these kids at Starbucks writing pitch decks right now. And they’re just chasing craziness, but there’s a whole bunch of seasoned business owners out there, money makers who are the perfect people to pivot into the moonshot territory that we often think of when we think of the venture capital world.

Lewis Schiff (24:37):

They just don’t know how to do it. And so moonshot to moneymakers is what we do for one week at Oxford. As we show these individuals how to take these really great businesses they built – and maybe they’re worth $10 million, or maybe they’re worth $50 million and that’s a lot of money – and we showed them that they could be worth a billion dollars. They just have to pivot and take it and sort of evolve their strategy in a way that makes them much more scalable. And that’s, that’s the thing I’m excited about. And that’s what the book is going to be about.

Jon Tota (25:03):

Fascinating. And it, and it’s very true to form with you because you’ve always focused on, like you said, those practical moneymaker business owners, the people who have built a business model that works, and it’s just, I guess, leveraging the market around you and the technology to figure out that, how do you go from being a $10 or $20 million business to a billion dollar company. And yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s super interesting. So that’s the new book and I know it coincides with the workshop that you just recently launched, which I think is awesome. And so my last question for you, because I think this kind of aligns with that is that there’s obviously some trait that you see in a successful entrepreneur because not every entrepreneur, even though they might have built a very successful business is the right fit for this moonshot concept that they might be very happy just being a successful money-making business. What is the trait? If I’m an entrepreneur listening and I’m running a successful business, what have you seen in all the research and all the people you’ve worked with that is that one thing that kind of stands out with all of these entrepreneurs that they might have that secret ingredient to get to that, that ultra successful level?

Lewis Schiff (26:14):

Well, listen, I’ll tell you, it’s not that they can’t it’s that they may not want to. So a lot of businesses can pivot into this moonshot territory, but what you have to do is it’s called the hero’s journey and you know, you’re a storyteller. So the hero’s journey is the, is that the only way you get to the next level of success is by betting, betting it all, betting it all on what you’ve already built. Now there’s a lot of tricks where you don’t have to truly bet at all, but I always, you know, we all tell the story of Star Wars where Luke Skywalker does an amazing thing by saving princess Leia in the first, you know, 30 minutes of the movie, maybe 45 minutes. He goes from being totally unknown to being the hero of the rebels for saving princess Leia. And I think of that is as entrepreneurs that build a $10 million business, like they rose from obscurity to build something really valuable.

Lewis Schiff (27:01):

Maybe they have a hundred employees whose lives and families depend on them and they felt something important. But remember what Luke Skywalker did he, after having saved princess Leia, got a fancy ribbon and he was a hero. Then the empire was threatening the rebels and they had this thing called the death star. And there’s a one in a million chance that he was going to be able to blow up the death star and he offered to try and do it. And in the end he did do it. And so what you have to do to become a moonshot is you have to take the success you’ve already created. And in some sense, bet it all on a Deathstar imploding, you know, moonshot that makes you the hero of all time. You have to bet the big thing and the great thing you’ve built on becoming huge and massive and changing your industry. And the way we call it, the tagline for birthing of giants is every business needs a giant. So you have to become the giant that your business needs you to be.

Jon Tota (27:54):

I love that. And it doesn’t seem too, too much of an obstacle when you compare it to the taking down the death star.

Lewis Schiff (28:03):

Right, right.

Jon Tota (28:03):

So I think it’s awesome. I know you’ve always said this to me too- and I think it’s very true to form – that it really does depend on what you want as an entrepreneur. Do you want just that business that makes a lot of money for you and provides a good living and lifestyle, or do you want to change an industry, disrupt the market and be the leader like that? So I, I think it’s a, I think it’s super cool, really excited to see obviously the book and hear more about moonshots and moneymakers the workshop. So for all of our listeners, if they’re interested in learning more about your books, the programs and workshops that you offer, and just following all your writing, cause you, you, you put writing out all over the place. Where’s the best place to, to keep up with you,

Lewis Schiff (28:48):

Birthing of giants.com. So birthingofgiants.com, your listeners can, um, they can get a free copy of the first habit. They can check out this really cool video interview training video training that we did during the last six months or so we created this video training called the Perfect Business Model. We didn’t even talk about that, but we, I worked with a person. His name is Chris Roth, who came up with the perfect business model. And as he did it, I mean, and I’ve been around thousands of entrepreneurs and this one guy came up with the perfect business model. So I interviewed him about it and I put him up there. Um, so there’s the first habit is free. The perfect business model is like a 45 minute video. Then you can see about moonshots and moneymakers at birthingofgiants.com. And then you can read about our flagship program, which I’m super proud of.

Lewis Schiff (29:33):

We didn’t talk much about, but it’s the thing I’m proudest of in a way it’s called Birthing of Giants fellowship week. And that’s where entrepreneurs, uh, some of the best entrepreneurs in the country get together and we advance our own knowledge base. And the way I always liken it is, you know, if you’re Tiger Woods or if you’re Lewis Hamilton in Formula1, or if you’re, um, you know, LeBron James, you’re the best at what you do, but you probably have the best coaches too. And so birthing of giants fellowship week is the best entrepreneurs getting together with the best coaches and really killing it.

Jon Tota (30:04):

Oh, that’s awesome. So birthingofgiants.com has just a ton of content. I think I attended that video session that you did with Chris Roth live. It’s that same video?

Lewis Schiff (30:16):

No, no. The video is more of an educational one, but yeah, we did talk about it.

Jon Tota (30:20):

Yeah. Super interesting. So for everybody listening, definitely check out birthing of giants.com. Uh, Lewis has a ton of interesting information there and valuable free resources. So thank you. Thank you for offering that. And Lewis, thank you for being here.

Lewis Schiff (30:35):

Yeah. Jon, thank you so much. I’m thrilled about the success you’re having. One day, we will have to pivot and change our chairs. And I want to hear about what got you to live what is clearly your best life?

Jon Tota (30:45):

Yes. Well, I have to see if I have the courage to be interviewed by you, and I know how uncomfortable you want to make me or your interviewee, but well, thank you. And to all of our listeners, thanks for being here every week. As you know, we have a new episode that comes out every Tuesday, so wherever you’re listening, be sure to subscribe, leave us comments. We love to hear from you guys and until our next episode, happy learning.

Jon Tota (31:13):

Hey everyone, Jon Tota here. I want to thank you for tuning into the show each week. We love our learning life community and are so grateful for your support. We’d appreciate it if you would take a minute to rate us and write a review for Learning Life, wherever you’re listening right now, your ratings and comments, help new people find the show so we can keep growing our community and bring great interviews on the topics you care most about.