World of Speakers E.25: Michael Dermer | Learn to leverage

Ryan Foland: Alright everybody, we are back for another episode.

This time we have Michael Dermer.

Michael, he may seem like a lonely entrepreneur, but he is not.

He has lots of friends and he helps lots of people learn how to cope with dealing with the fact that entrepreneurs are lonely at the end of the day.

I'm excited to hear more about how lonely entrepreneurs can become entrepreneurs, to become more successful, to get more friends and things like that? Is that right, Michael?

MD: It sounds great Ryan, thanks for having me.

RF: Why don't you tell us about your story to this stage?

How did it all start, where did you grow up?

How did the speaking element fit into the big picture for you and your journeys, both up and down?

MD: Sure.

I was a corporate lawyer in New York City where I'm from, doing mergers and acquisitions but I was really an entrepreneur at heart and wanted to start a business.

In the early 2000's, I started what got to be known as the first company to reward people for being healthy. It was a healthcare technology company in the early 2000's.

I left my cushy law firm job to do that, and bootstrapped it like a lot of entrepreneurs. I spent the better part of the 2000's evangelizing the concept to the healthcare community.

That certainly wasn't speaking in the traditional sense, Ryan, but as you can imagine, we were always out there speaking and talking and pitching and trying to get some of the most old-school companies in the country to think about health care differently.

We had built that company up to about 400 employees by 2008, venture capital backed.

After kind of "making it", my company almost got destroyed virtually overnight by the 2008 financial crisis.

We spent the next two years battling, and scrapping, and clawing, and we were fortunate enough after those two years to stabilize it.

At that time, in the United States here, there was a great interest in health care and changing behavior and we got an offer and we got bought.

It worked out wonderfully financially for investors, and I was literally just chilling out in New York City after a wild ride, and somebody said to me,

"Being an entrepreneur is really lonely".

There really isn't any kind of a go-to resource that “gets” what you've described before, just the struggle of being an entrepreneur and providing solutions.

So we launched that company about a year and a half ago. It started with the book that you're familiar with, "The Lonely Entrepreneur", and we launched an online learning platform.

We also spent a lot of time speaking, both domestically and internationally, to really try to connect with entrepreneurs that we share all of this journey with. But then, how do you actually provide solutions?

That's where a lot of our speaking efforts have occurred, but that's our long sorted story.

RF: Now, when you were a kid, were you the proverbial young entrepreneur that was out there slinging flamethrowers or hovercrafts?

MD: I was more the captain of the sports team.

I had played every single sport there was, I was on two national teams when I was a kid and played two sports in college.

It was more about being the captain of a team and watching a group of hodgepodge kids come together and actually build something. That was a little more of my context growing up.

Once I got in high school, that started to connect a little bit on businesses and certainly in college where we all have our kind of early state businesses that we started and things like that.

For me, it was about trying to lead a group of people in a team to try to do something cool together.

RF: What were your sports? What were the sports that you have either played or led on?

MD: If there was a ball involved, we pretty much played, so basketball, football, soccer, baseball; we swam a little bit, pretty much everything.

I played baseball at Bucknell University. I played a little bit of basketball until my 5'10'' frame ended my career pretty quickly, but I played all team sports.

You can imagine if you're a quarterback in football or point guard in basketball or center half in soccer, or shortstop in baseball— you're always thinking about the bigger picture in all those positions.

That really shaped my thinking about a lot of things.

RF: You say that you've got a system or a training course for entrepreneurs.

I know there's a lot of people that are trying to train entrepreneurs.

Was there a certain methodology or avenue or approach that you took to really help them understand what it's going to be like to be an entrepreneur?

MD: I think so.

What is interesting about this, Ryan, is I wasn't really looking even to start this business. I had worked hard, sold the company, and was kind of chewed out.

I noticed that there were two things that were missing out there.

One was, while there was no shortage of great entrepreneur resources, they were disorganized and all over the place.

We're asking an entrepreneur to really digest a lot of information in very disparate places.

And then secondly, the information not only had to be organized into a framework to solve that first problem, it had to be from somebody who "got it".

It had to be from somebody who had actually worn those shoes, who understands what it's like when somebody says, "Plop your first business plan down," or when you're investing your own money and you're feeling under pressure.

So to us, it was really to bring it all together in one place under a framework that's easily understood, but that also along the way, when you're talking about a financial statement, something very functional, you're also doing it with a bent of what does it actually feel like as an entrepreneur to wear those shoes with the struggles that we've all been through.

RF: In your path, you've got your crazy story of sort of the ups and the downs.

In the development of your business, how important was your ability to communicate your ideas, your products and using speaking as a platform within the growth of your company?

Because you grew it to, it sounds like, quite a bit, millions of dollars at a certain point in revenue, right?

MD: Yeah, we were priced $60 million when we were at our biggest.

If you can think about the concept of rewarding people for being healthy in the beginning, not only was that non-existent, it was offensive.

We were basically telling the healthcare industry that they were going to pay people and reward people for the ones that were doing the worst for their health care.

Imagine a pregnant woman that wasn't following her prenatal care or somebody that was not going to the gym, or a diabetic not caring for themselves.

The ability to communicate that clearly, often in the face of great resistance, and to do it with some of the most entrenched players in the healthcare industry that we've been doing the same things here in the U.S. for many, many years.

The ability to clearly communicate that, simply and consistently, was as important to us as anything because we really had to evangelize something that the first time we brought this concept to some of these players they were like:

"The only thing I can tell you is that we will never, ever reward people for being healthy".

And so, the ability to be simple and clear and also consistent over a period of time was absolutely critical to the success that we had.

RF: Now, in a market that hasn't really been explored like that, were there certain approaches that you found worked versus not working when you have this resistance?

I ask because there are a lot of people who are trying to communicate ideas that might be beyond the time right now, or just having people in these large industries that have been doing things in a certain way and they just don't get it.

Was there a certain general approach that you learned that worked better than others?

MD: Yeah, and what's interesting about the entrepreneurial journey is by definition we all believe we're doing something new.

And if we're doing something new, then it faces the circumstances you just mentioned, in that it hasn't been done before, and therefore, people are going to say,

"How do I know this works?"

For us, we learned pretty quickly that just because something made sense and just because something was clearly communicated didn't mean that it necessarily was going to move.

What we really learned was it was partly about being clear in communicating, but it was partly about influence and leverage.

This goes back to my studies, I happen to be fortunate enough to go to Northwestern Law School in Chicago and they're really strong in negotiation.

So, you realize that when you're the little player against the big guys and you're trying to convince someone something is of value, a lot of it comes down to,

"Can you create influence and leverage over the things that actually make them lose sleep at night?"

RF: I like this idea of leverage, it really ties into the concept of knowing your audience.

Because if you came in and you're presenting, or you're speaking, or even your sales pitch, you're really looking at what is going to keep them up at night, and that's what you're using as the real meat and potatoes of your message from a leverage standpoint.

MD: Yeah, especially for young entrepreneurs that are crafting their path in a market where you don't have all the capital you need, and you don't have the resources you need, and you really have to be able to create these leverage points that give you a little bit of momentum.

And then, once you have that, then we'll pay attention to why what you have is great, but you have to try to create it.

So, it's almost like a different form of communication, just around how you get a little bit of influence working in your direction.

RF: Do you go with a typical sort of not above board, but just more of a straightforward approach first and then based on that reaction, you're able to re-evaluate, sort of dig down, dig up and see where you can get that traction?

Or do you do the research and then you're able to re-evaluate, or do you have the more if you do the research and try to come out at first?

MD: I think you have to sprinkle both in.

As we all know, large companies take a long time to do things and you always have to have some compelling reason or burning platform for them to move.

Oftentimes, we are all fighting clutter more than anything.

To break through that clutter, think about why we respond to things when we buy things or respond to messages.

I think you always do it respectfully obviously, but I think you come out with a little bit of what is the value of our solution.

Secondly, what is the leverage point or competitive benefit, competitive risk, revenue benefit-risk if you don't take.

I think you try to do a little bit of both because obviously, those are the things that can move the needle in the end.

RF: I like that, it's a very audience-centric approach, but you're really getting to the core of why the audience would want to listen to you.

Let's talk about what advice you would have for those people, entrepreneurs, who are out there, cutting their teeth and they're using their communication skills to close deals. They're using their communication skills at a conference to try to earn credibility.

What would be your top tips from a presentation standpoint when it comes to speaking and selling?

MD: I think first and foremost is it's your job as an entrepreneur to bring your skill to not make things more detailed, but more simple.

Your job is to simplify and clarify, it's not to be able to spurt out the history of every element of your product or your service, which obviously, we've all lived through those.

We use this analogy at The Lonely Entrepreneur called "Your balloon is full."

And when your balloon is full, you're looking for places for that air to go. If somebody asks you questions and you spurt the history of everything associated with your company.

When you have the opportunity to be on stage, whether it's like you and I have done, Ryan, in front of thousands of people or five people at a trade show booth, your job is to be able to bring simplicity and clarity to why they care.

If you think about when you walk into a car dealership, imagine a salesperson coming up to you and handing you the car manual — you would immediately walk out the door.

RF: Nobody likes car manuals, I mean, they're fun to look at, but it is way too much information.

MD: They're great paperweights, right.

But, if somebody makes you think about that car and go in your own mind, "Ooh, that's interesting", you'll read the whole car manual.

Especially for entrepreneurs that have lived every single detail of how their product and service got there, your job is actually to make things simple and clear.

Not only in an audience, in a public form, where you might have potential customers and investors there, but even for your own employees, and even for your own advisers, you've got to be able to make it simple and concise and clear, and then the details will follow.

And the other thing too, is just to actually apply it to the situation that sits in front of you.

If you've ever been in like a demo day or shark tank type environment where an investor will go to ask a question and the entrepreneur literally can't even wait until the investor asks the question before they respond.

RF: Yeah, absolutely.

MD: We're so wrapped up in our own stuff.

If you have an audience of five people or an audience of 5000 people, really understanding why they care and how it's relative to them, and obviously being able to do that simply and clearly, becomes why they stay awake or pay attention.

RF: I think that this visual you have of an entrepreneur who is sort of "jumping the gun" on a question, I think that there's the space in between a question and an answer that's valuable even for the person asking the question, valuable for the audience who might want to sort of take it all in, and your brain has to actually process.

When you sort of "jump the gun", you talk over people — I know I'm guilty of this myself in my personal relationships where I think I know what someone's going to say, so I'll jump ahead and it ends up that I'm usually completely wrong in the first place.

So the importance of listening before you talk is key.

All right, so you've got the audience in mind and you're not "jumping the gun".

What advice do you wish you would have gotten from somebody early on that would have helped fast track where you are now?

MD: Specifically with respect to communication, I would say that “features” and “functionalities” are rarely what people actually pay attention to.

We live in a world of clutter, and it's very hard — even if you have the perfect mousetrap for that, to cut through.

It's the special sauce and the "know how" you develop along the way that can't just be copied with money.

It takes time and experience to learn what it actually takes to do a particular business

And I think that sets your brand and then the content of how you speak to an audience very differently than if you're talking about a product or a service or a solution.

RF: Are you referring to that as somewhat of like your expertise or your 10,000 hours concept?

Or is it the way in which you are communicating to really extract that information?

MD: You know Ryan, it's interesting— really, all of the above.

For example, I use my old incentive business, we used to say things like,

"If you didn't track these incentives right and you didn't give them away right all these bad things would happen, legal things and customer things."

And we would say things like, "You don't want to end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal for the wrong reasons."

And so a lot of it is, "What do you mean by that, how could that possibly happen?"

And you'd say, "Well, if you didn't have the right technology or business rules to manage this particular circumstance—".

And so it goes beyond just "experience" because if you and I launch a new company tomorrow, we'd have a line in there that said "experience".

It gets a lot closer to the 10,000 hours, because you're learning insights.

It's almost like when you drive to work the same way every day, when the traffic affects you, the weather affects you, and so you're bringing that to the table and trying to make people perceive your brand as one that brings that intelligence to life.

But it has to go beyond just general words of "knowledge" and "know-how" and "expertise" and start to approach the types of things you get when you do have 10,000 hours and you know where all the bodies are buried.

RF: And is a way to communicate that through storytelling, through communicating your experiences, through what's happened both good and bad?

MD: Absolutely.

In fact, I'm glad you said that, because I think it's actually the best way.

In the old incentive world we used to have one particular situation that served us well which was that people would have incentives that they earned for a prior year.

And then, in the next year they would still be doing activities that were supposed to be credited to the year before, because of data lags and things like that and the years used to cross over and because of that, everybody's incentives got screwed up.

And we screwed it up one year. We were a young company. Eventually we built business rules and learned to deal with that and we used to tell that story all the time.

Again, it goes back to clutter. A big part of the theme I think Ryan against everything we're talking about is themes and stories.

Themes and stories are things that people remember and then they'll find the details, like our car example.

We had two or three or four "stories" like that.

There was a Blue Cross Blue Shield health plan that didn't have good tracking, and people would fill out cards that said they ran three marathons in a month to earn rewards. So we would tell that story.

You don't have to tell anything about the technology or about the service or anything when you tell that story because a health plan just goes, "I don't want to do that." Storytelling is absolutely critical to it.

RF: Being an entrepreneur and helping entrepreneurs — let's talk really quickly about the proverbial business pitch, the elevator pitch.

What are your thoughts on the elevator pitch, the rehearsed 30-seconds or less to get your ideas out there?

From a conceptual viewpoint, is it as crucial as everyone says it is?

MD: Whether it's 10-seconds or a minute, I think it's the ability to make sure that you're always aligning your messaging and your solution to something that is or could be a burning issue for your customer.

RF: I like that idea, because one of the problems I have with the elevator pitch is that it's just so rehearsed and it does not cater to the audience.

If you step in an elevator and you have this like, "Oh my gosh! Here's my—" and you just spout it out, there's no real tweaking to the person that you're talking with.

I'm a fan of your ability to communicate in a short amount of time, but the idea of a rehearsed elevator pitch for me, I guess is a bit outdated.

MD: I think if you were talking for example to a pharmaceutical company versus a health plan versus a hospital system, right, your elevator pitch would be slightly different.

It's your ability to go back to those two things, one is the burning platform that you're going to solve or prevent and how does what you do enable that.

Then you can package it up in 5 seconds or 50 seconds.

I know for us, Ryan in the early stages of our company, I used to sit down at the end of the day every day and leave people voicemail messages.

I didn't want to call them in the middle of the day, I wanted them to get it first thing in the morning and we were calling big Fortune 1000 companies and we had a callback rate of almost six in 10.

It wasn't an elevator pitch, it was basically 30 seconds of "This is why this is really bad or good for you."

It's more I think to your point those components being well communicated than it is whether it's 10 seconds or 30 seconds.

RF: I like this idea of a voice message.

Let's take this elevator pitch out for a minute, from a technical standpoint — if you had a chance to leave a voice message for someone and you only had 30 seconds, I think that actually changes the dynamics of it, right?

MD: Yes, especially because people have so much clutter and our whole idea was could we get it so if we left it at seven o'clock or eight o'clock at night, most people wouldn't get it until the next day.

It might be one of the first things they listen to.

I mean listen, if you don't have a compelling message, it doesn't matter the medium, I think these days a face to face meeting and a handshake can mean a lot because nobody does it anymore.

I think that leaving a voice message that's thoughtful and clear and obviously compelling to their potential burning platform, I think actually can be quite effective.

RF: I dig it. I think it's a voicemail challenge, so your challenge is to call somebody up that's compelling enough for them to basically call you back.

If they call you back and you've got a 6:10 ratio, then that's a huge indication that what you're saying and how you're saying it could work.

And this goes back to your original concept of leverage.

The ability to leverage the situation — it's not about what you're doing, it's about the problem that you're solving for the person that you're trying to engage with.

MD: One of my former heads of sales used to say,

"If Cigna sign could beat Aetna, and we gave them a banana to do it, they would buy a banana."

And they would pay attention to whether they're buying a banana or a coconut or a grapefruit because you've made it in some way clear to them how your particular banana can make a difference.

I think some of the rehearsal part of it makes us not thoughtful.

If you were to draw a pie chart and you say:

How much is it about you and your product and your thing, (especially when our things or what we've invested a lot of time and effort and passion into)...

Versus what piece of the pie chart is about not just their issues, but compelling issues, things that people lose jobs for and get big bonuses for, that kind of stuff.

That pie chart should be 90 percent about them in a very deep way that causes pleasure or pain. And then we'll forget what's in the car manual.

RF: Right. I like this banana idea.

You can sell a banana as long as that banana is solving the problem that that person has, no matter what it is, right?

MD: Yeah, totally.

RF: Very cool.

Let's transition into the tips and a piece of advice that you have that have gotten you on a stage, that you've leveraged, that helped you be able to bill millions of dollars in revenue.

From a tactical standpoint, everybody has a little bit of a different sales process to get the gigs that they get.

What would your advice be, what has worked for you to turn the key so that now you are monetizing this message?

Whether it's monetizing it in the entrepreneurial sense or whether it's just getting on stage and how those two worlds combine?

MD: We've been very fortunate to be able to monetize this as it's only a part of our business, but we've been doing it not only in the U.S., but in Mexico, Croatia, Dubai a couple other places.

Here's what I would say: obviously built into what we do and I think everybody can take a lesson from this as a genuine experience.

The way I described that up and down, Ryan, is kind of off the cuff and now it's a funny story and it was pretty crazy at the time.

The fact that it came from a genuine place and that genuine place is what actually spurred me to do what I do now which is have the honor to help people as entrepreneurs try to realize their visions — you being genuine about it — I don't know about your experience, but people, especially in this day and age with all the clutter that's coming through social media, people smell things that aren't genuine really, really quickly.

Even when they're packaged up a certain way.

Secondly, what's gone hand in hand with us is that I think that we, like others, know what it's like to wear the entrepreneurs' shoes.

In our case, I think what we say is, I don't want to say super controversial, but a little bit against the grain.

We say things like passion, grit and a good idea aren't enough, you've heard me probably say that before. You have to improve your skills as an entrepreneur each and every day.

I think for us, it's the ability to have a genuine background and people really understand that we've been in their shoes.

But then also, we are taking an approach that might be a little bit different than what they've seen out there, not just,

"I have passion and I've run into a wall over and over again but I have to develop these individual skills to be able to do it".

I hope anyway that our, not only passion for entrepreneurs, but our genuineness of our mission to be able to say,

"If somebody in the audience walked away and that person went back and managed their day better or closed another sale or saved a little bit of money, I hope anyway that that genuineness comes through."

And I think those are the things that have led to a little bit of success for us and I think can lead to success for others.

RF: Yeah, that authentic story really is something that you're selling, because the concept is people buy your story not necessarily your product or service, and you combine that with leveraging the type of banana that's going to plug the hole that these people have. I can see that making sense.

For you, as an entrepreneur leveraging public speaking — which came first, the chicken or the egg?

How would you see this working, is it the entrepreneur that becomes successful and then speaks, or is it that the person speaks, has a platform and then becomes a successful entrepreneur?

Or both?

MD: I think it's the second.

I think it goes back to the whole idea of this notion of intelligence.

People might have asked me to speak in my old business in rewards and healthcare because we had developed a whole base of experience, and we would talk about that experience.

I think there's no question that you could set out and say, "I'm going to be a speaker," and I guess if you were compelling enough and funny enough and dynamic enough, you could pull that off.

But I really think that it's the ability to bring to life your experience, especially for entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs are very quick to see when things aren't really right.

When somebody comes, for example, from a purely corporate environment and plops something on their desk, they can smell it.

I think going through your particular level of domain expertise, if you're a chief that's had successes and failures and you're talking about that as part of building your business, there are people that will say to you,

"Hey, you've got a lot of experience, it would be interesting for you to share that with others."

And then, hopefully, you bring some entrepreneurism to it in terms how you package it and sell it and have people perceive you as a speaker.

RF: Do you have a certain sales process that you follow in order to try to get at large conferences or to use the stage for you to better your business?

Is there a certain approach that you have that might either be unique or something that someone else can take and mirror to find their ability to get booked more?

MD: Our approach has gotten easier because now we just refer people to other people that had us come speaking and have had, hopefully, good experiences, but obviously it is not that way for all of us at the beginning.

For us, we all share the struggle and I think our sales process was putting people in normal stuff pipeline and building up the base of people that would be potential folks that would hire us to speak.

We are very consistent in that message, we're bringing hopefully a different tone to this and a different perspective to this.

But I think it's normal pipeline building and I think you try to really understand, you've got some that are kind of bigger ones that you think that would be valuable for you, and sometimes you make the sacrifice to say to them,

"We'd be happy to do something at no charge year one but we'd like to be the keynote in year two, and here's what we charge."

And then you kind of mix that up with smaller ones.

Certainly, when our book came out, we did a good amount of book tours and workshops throughout the country at workspaces and other places to try to get a little bit of momentum.

But I wouldn't say there's a magic process, I think as long as you're genuine about what you're doing; hopefully that message comes through.

RF: And how was that book experience for you?

Because I know a lot of people try to do that, or they do do it and have hindsight as a 20-20 concept.

From your experience going through that book and how it relates to your ability to expand your speaking career and your business, how did that all work out?

Is there anything you’d do differently?

MD: What was interesting about when we published the book was probably two things.

Number one, it was incredibly easy to write.

We had lived through this crazy experience and when you're living through that experience, some of those stories that you tell in the book are torture, right.

In our case, this whole market was collapsing around us, but when I wrote the book, it was cathartic to write and laugh and see it as an opportunity to work with others and help others think like that.

So that part was actually much easier than I had thought.

I think we also made the decision to self-publish our book, we were very much focused on having the rights to do things internationally, and so we didn't want to necessarily be tied down to a publisher.

I would say that, with respect to the process that we went through, I think that we had written a first draft of the book without an editor and then we brought an editor in later.

I think I probably would have brought the editor in earlier, just to help shape things a little better.

One of the things that actually came out of the book was given my whole sports background, I had a very boy-centric and sport-centric set of anecdotes and things like that, we ended up balancing a little bit more, but I would say probably more so than anything bringing in an editor earlier.

I'm a big fan of self-publishing, of owning your content and being able to have license rights and other rights to be able to do that, certainly publishers can add a lot of value, but I don't think I would have done that differently at all, and it is certainly serving us well internationally now.

RF: Do you have another book that's coming out on the horizon?

MD: Probably not in the not too distant future.

We've been publishing the book, we just published it in Spanish and it's going to get released in the Middle East and some other places.

I think what we do have coming is I think I mentioned we build this learning community in our learning platform.

What we're going to do is expand that to The Lonely Entrepreneur on fashion and The Lonely Entrepreneur on healthcare and The Lonely Entrepreneur on restaurants, so that's the next foray for our content if you will.

But we've had lots of interest in writing different books for different market segments and different industry segments, so I would say that it will definitely happen in the future, but probably not for a year or two.

RF: You seem to leverage social media quite a bit, that is how we initially met on Twitter.

How important is the social footprint for upcoming speakers and how is that tied into developing or increasing your ability to book gigs and be seen, and get the credibility and all that?

MD: It's a little bit of a double-edged sword, I think that everybody has the ability to give themselves a presence, right, wrong or otherwise.

Somebody that has an incredible background (this happens a lot in nutrition) you have these people that have multiple degrees in nutrition, and then, out of nowhere, they become a food blogger that take a picture of a couple of dishes on their table and all of a sudden they get a huge presence.

I think that social media has just to be looked at as one of the multiple techniques of your overall marketing strategy.

I think the most important part of that is the fact that there has to be a strategy that sits at the center of your wheel and all of these different things like social media become different spokes to the wheel that serve up that message.

If that message is not genuine and clear and consistent and compelling, the medium becomes somewhat irrelevant because there's just so much clutter out there.

Entrepreneurs are out there with their passion and it's hard, and so they're actively engaged on social media to try to commiserate, find support, get solutions.

And so I think for our type of business, it's probably a little bit more important and relevant, both for our mission of helping them and obviously for things like getting more exposure for speaking and things like that.

I think it depends on the nature of the business, but there's no question that it's a significant portion, I just think social media is not a strategy, it's a set of tactics that should implement a strategy.

RF: Yeah, I like that concept, that in itself it is not a strategy.

I want to know how it works out for an entrepreneur, they are lonely, but is there a certain point, is there a point where they're not lonely anymore?

And are you bringing people in that are at that point that want to surround themselves with the community and it's at that point that they graduate to an unlonely life?

MD: I don't know if entrepreneurs ever really transition to an unlonely life, I think they can transition to a more fulfilling and fun life.

Here's what I would say — what is really interesting, Ryan, about like when we've done speaking gigs and smaller venues, bigger venues, it is just as likely for us to see a 15-year old as a 65-year old.

While there's obviously a little bit of the middle of the bell curve.

I think it's so prevalent here in the United States, the enthusiasm around entrepreneurism, we just think that at every step of your entrepreneurial journey, whether you're in corporate America and you're thinking about leaving to do something, or you are somebody right out of college, all the other people; we think that every step of the journey is about incrementally improving skills.

Think about what we've been talking about here just about communications and speaking, these are skills that make a meaningful difference in your ability to attract investors, attract employees, close sales faster...

And so, at stage one, you might be, "How do I set up a company," but six months later, you might be talking about raising money, and a year later you might be talking about, "Man, I've got to manage 20 people and figure that out."

So for us, I think the lonely feeling hopefully gets replaced by progress, and progress is not an amorphous progress, or even just passion, if you increment, if you hire better, you make a better decision hiring, you bring in that first employee and that works, versus not hiring well and you just don't develop that skill, that has a meaningful impact on your business.

And that is what I think starts to tip it from feeling overwhelmed and frustrated all the time to some of the amazing benefits that come when you're ultimately able to bring to life a business that's viable and making money and growing and stuff like that.

RF: I love it, I love the concept that it's really the skills that you have, which helps to improve everything else and it just gets down to the bare bones basics.

MD: Yes. And you have to improve every day.

I always ask people who were mothers for example, "When you had your first child did you wake up the next day and say I'm awesome at this?"

You have to improve on this, and for some reason for a long, long time, and we thought a lot about this, being called an entrepreneur meant you just had to deal with what came, you just figured it out and there was chaos and you had passion and you just didn't think of it as something you just got to get better and better at, and I think that's changed.

But this whole notion that's kind of just all thrown in there in a stew and you figure it out, it's about,

"Hey, if I know I'm under pressure and I'll hire anybody, because I need help, how do I actually do that better, what techniques do I use to maybe bring in somebody like Ryan."

"Hey Ryan, will you interview this person because you're not working 24 hours a day and you have no bias, so tell me about this employee."

And they'll be like, "You need this employee to know nuclear physics and they don't know anything about nuclear physics, so why would you hire them?"

Just little things, little skills along the way, to me that's what creates momentum and that's when you feel like you're going in the right direction, that feeling of loneliness or just the struggle feels like it's on a pathway to success as opposed to sometimes feeling like we're in quicksand.

RF: Very cool.

If somebody wanted to check out and they are a lonely entrepreneur and they want to join this community and they want to get their skill-sets better every single day, what is the best place to point them?

MD: First of all, thank you again for having me Ryan.

Lonely Entrepreneur.com is the website, there's a free, what we call "prospective of the day", so every day you can sign up and get a free tip from us.

And then our learning community, which we call the Lonely Entrepreneur Community, there's a big button on there which is our big learning platform that they can learn about there.

Then obviously, our social media channels on Twitter it's @thelonleye and Facebook, The Lonely Entrepreneur and you can find us on Instagram as well.

RF: Very cool.

I really appreciate the New York, no-frills, down to the basics, get some leverage in there, back to the skills.

And I see that sports leadership resonating throughout because in sports, you practice, you get better.

In business, in entrepreneurship and speaking, what I'm hearing is that you practice, you get better and to tie it all — you've got to have a good coach and you've got to be there with people who have actually already won to learn what that winning success looks like in a formula format.

So, thank you Michael, it was a pleasure, hopefully we can share the stage sometime soon and we'll see you on Twitter, tweet, tweet all that good stuff.

MD: Terrific, thank you so much for having me Ryan.

RF: Alright buddy, we'll talk to you soon.

A bit about World of Speakers

World of Speakers is a weekly podcast that helps people find their own voice, and teaches them how to use their voice to develop a speaking business.

We cover topics like: what works versus what doesn't, ideas on how to give memorable presentations, speaking tips, and ideas on how to build a speaking business.

Connect with Michael Dermer:

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