October 17, 2025 • 33 mins
Jeff Lerner went from a jazz musician to generating over $100 million in online sales. After multiple failed ventures and $500,000 in debt, he discovered digital business, paid off his debt in 18 months, and built multiple 8-figure companies, twice landing on the Inc. 5000. His journey inspired him to educate others, leading to the creation of ENTRE Institute, one of the fastest-growing entrepreneurial education platforms with over 250,000 students, and Entresoft, a top small business software suite.
Jeff is the author of Unlock Your Potential (Penguin Random House, 2022), a Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly bestseller, and the host of Unlock Your Potential, a top 1.5% global podcast featuring leading entrepreneurs, authors, and thought leaders. His message revolves around the "3 Ps of Success"—Physical, Personal, and Professional—helping people reshape their lives through entrepreneurship.
A sought-after speaker and content creator, Jeff continues to expand his reach through speaking engagements, media appearances, and digital content. He is a devoted husband and father of four, crediting much of his success to his marriage. Despite his busy schedule, he still plays the piano for an hour daily.
During the show we discussed:
- From jazz musician to 8-figure entrepreneur
- Overcoming $500K in debt and rebuilding success
- Myths and misconceptions about making money online
- The creation of the “Life Design” philosophy
- Why ENTRE Institute achieves 63X higher success rates
- The “3 Ps of Success” framework for a balanced life
- Breaking self-limiting beliefs to unlock potential
Resources:
https://designyourlife.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@lifedesignwithjefflerner
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
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And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
(00:22):
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
Today, we are going to give you the
actual blueprint for entrepreneurship and for personal growth
(00:43):
from somebody that's built multiple eight figures and
can really lay out the exact roadmap for
you to successfully be able to do the
same thing.
So with us today is Jeff Lerner.
Now, he's actually went from a jazz musician
to generating over $100 million in online sales.
So after multiple failed ventures and a half
a million dollars in debt, he actually discovered
that digital businesses could actually be successful.
(01:05):
And he used those to be able to
pay off his debt in 18 months and
built multiple eight-figure companies, twice landing on
the Inc 5000.
His journey actually inspired him to educate others,
leading to the creation of Entry Institute, one
of the fastest growing entrepreneur education platforms with
over 250,000 students, and Intrasoft, a top
(01:25):
small business software suite as well.
Jeff's actually the author of Unlock Your Potential
from Penguin Random House in 2022 was released.
And he's a Wall Street Journal and Publishers
Weekly bestseller and the host of Unlock Your
Potential, a top 1.5% global podcast
featuring leading entrepreneurs, authors, and thought leaders.
(01:46):
His message revolves around the three P's of
success, physical, personal, and professional, helping people reshape
their lives through entrepreneurship.
Now, he's also a sought after speaker and
content creator as well.
And he continues to expand his reach through
speaking engagements, media appearances, and digital content.
He's also a devoted husband and father of
(02:06):
four, crediting much of his success to his
marriage.
Despite his busy schedule, he still plays the
piano for an hour daily.
I hope he doesn't see this piano behind
me because he will realize I'm a horrible
piano player and he's phenomenal.
Jeff, what's up, man?
Thanks for joining us today.
Oh, I'm grateful to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you've done some really cool stuff.
I mean, I gotta start at the beginning.
How do you get from jazz musician to
(02:28):
where you are now to building multiple eight
figure businesses?
Well, I mean, a really good incentive to
go out and do things that make money
is to be as broke as you can
get being a jazz pianist.
I'll put it that way.
Pick a profession that's gonna put you in
a financial ditch and it becomes great fuel
to get out of the financial ditch.
But no, in all seriousness, I'll say this
(02:51):
to kind of sum up the answer to
multiple questions in that one.
My big thing from an early age was,
I actually, I was born to very well
-to-do parents, very successful, hardworking parents.
My dad was a money manager who managed
money for high net worth individuals and institutions.
(03:12):
And my mom was an attorney.
She was a partner at a big five
law firm or became one during my childhood.
So they were like, and they were self
-made.
They weren't born into any wealth or opportunity.
My mom worked two jobs to put herself
through business school and law school and undergrad.
They just were like American dream, go-getter
people that did awesome.
(03:32):
And that was my motto.
And I was an only child.
So I was like surrounded by what's possible
in America growing up.
And we weren't like, I mean, they didn't
own an island or anything, but like we
had enough money that I, and I went
to a private school where I was around
people that had a lot of money, like
even way more than us.
And so I just, I grew up without
that financial stress that I think almost is
(03:56):
definitional to a lot of people's life experience.
And I didn't have that in childhood.
And so paradoxically, I came to understand how
deeply, all the different ways you can be
deeply unhappy, even if money's not a concern.
Cause I was like a really moody kid
and had like, I mean, they like, I
got called in the counselor's office a bunch
(04:17):
as a teenager.
They were like worried about me.
Like, is he going to make it?
I was just like, money doesn't make you
happy.
And that was my early childhood experience.
And so I think a lot of people
come through high school and it's all about
what job am I going to get?
What student loans am I going to get?
And what's my sort of finance roadmap of
my life going to be?
How am I going to make something of
myself?
How am I going to make my parents
(04:37):
proud?
What am I going to do?
And dah, dah, dah.
And I was just like, how do I
live a life that I can actually wake
up and look forward to every day?
That was my question.
And none of the conventional playbook appealed to
me at all.
Like I had two summer jobs when I
was 16 years old, both of which simply
(04:58):
taught me that I'm profoundly psychologically unemployable and
unsuited to work for anyone.
And especially someone that I don't esteem as
someone that ought to be presiding over me.
You know, I was kind of a cocky
kid maybe.
And like, you're not smart enough to be
my boss or whatever.
And so for me at 16, I dropped
out of high school and I told my
(05:19):
parents, I'm hearing myself say this and it's
like, wow, this sounds really spoiled.
I dropped out of high school and I
was like, I'm not going to college.
I'm not getting a job.
I'm going to be a musician.
And they were like, okay, well, we're not
going to support you after you turn 18.
That was the deal.
You know that you're kind of on your
own.
We'll help you go to college if you
want, but sounds like you're out on that
(05:41):
deal.
So if you're going to drop out of
high school and be a musician, like let
me tell you about the bed you're making
that you're going to end up sleeping in
for the rest of your life.
And they said, but if you decide that's
what you want to do, well, we're not
going to drive you to school every day
and sit there and make sure you go
in.
So I dropped out of high school, started,
I actually learned to play piano out of
a book.
(06:02):
I bought a book called the Jazz Piano
Book.
And I just sat at home all day,
every day, teaching myself chords and music theory.
And it was all, and I had this
sort of like viewpoint of like, and to
be honest, I was kind of depressed.
And this is probably gonna get me in
hot water for saying this.
There's a certain luxury in being depressed where
(06:24):
like you're not attaching a lot of value
to a lot of things that other people
do.
You're kind of like, yeah, what's the point
of any of it?
And so then, you know, taken to its
extreme, depression is just the experience of not,
of feeling like you have nothing to lose.
So I was kind of a depressed teen
and I'm like, well, I don't want any
of this crap anyways.
So I'm just gonna try to find a
life I can be happy in.
And a life that I can be happy
in came to mean a life that I
(06:46):
can truly be myself.
I wanna discover who I am and I
wanna do something in the world that's as
unique as my fingerprints.
Because honestly, otherwise, what's the point?
And Camus, the great existential philosopher actually did
say that the only serious philosophical question is
suicide.
Because if you're gonna choose to be here,
(07:07):
then you surrender to the absurdity of the
place where you choose to be, or you
can opt out.
But there's no logic in surrendering to the
absurdity of the place where you choose to
be because you forego your choice to opt
out, but then spending all your time complaining
that it's absurd.
You knew that the day you decided to
stay here, right?
And if you didn't know that, wait, go
(07:28):
outside.
You'll be reminded, like this is a ridiculous
place that we inhabit.
So if you're gonna be here, stop complaining.
Or if you're gonna complain, go away.
And that's a harsh way to counsel someone,
but that was Camus' viewpoint.
And that made a lot of sense to
me as a teenager.
I was like, well, I wanna be here,
so I'm just gonna play the game to
(07:49):
try to figure out what happiness and fulfillment
look like.
Because I wasn't gonna be a slave to
money because I had grown up with it
and I already knew that it wasn't the
point.
And so that's the setup of how I
became a jazz musician.
It's also the setup of how I got
my ass kicked as a jazz musician and
realized that, okay, even if money's not the
point, it's still a pretty significant piece of
the equation.
(08:10):
And that's why I went into entrepreneurship is
because I just wanted a life that I
was never gonna be able to afford as
a musician.
And I'll stop there.
There's so much more to the story, but
hopefully I answered your question.
Yeah, I love that.
And along that path, you accumulated a lot
of debt, paid it off in a very
short period of time.
So how did you make that happen?
I mean, a lot of people, as you
know, try to succeed online.
(08:30):
And they never accomplished even a fraction of
what you did.
So how did you go from really knowing
nothing about online entrepreneurship to then building multiple
eight figures, to accumulating the knowledge you needed
to build multiple eight figures in that space?
Yeah, so I was very fortunate that in
2008, I was 29.
(08:51):
As you said, I was $495,000 in
debt.
I had tried opening a couple of franchise
restaurants.
And if anybody's wondering how the heck did
a derelict jazz musician even get the capital
to open franchise restaurants?
And it's like, I actually think it was
an achievement to get half a million dollars
in debt when I'd never made more than
like 50 or $60,000 a year.
(09:12):
And it was because it was 2007.
The banks were insane.
They would loan any money to anybody with
a pulse and a one-sheet business plan,
right?
That was the bubble that led to the
Great Recession in 2007, 2008, the big collapse.
So I just, wrong place, right time, so
to speak, was able to convince a bank
to give me two SBA loans to open
(09:34):
franchise restaurants back in 2006, 2007, even though
I had no real business experience.
And that's how I ended up in all
that debt.
And again, I would say debt and depression,
two things that set you free to take
risks you never would otherwise.
And so with half a million dollars in
debt as a piano player, going out to
play one extra gig and make an extra
(09:56):
100 or $200 wasn't gonna do anything for
my life when you have half a million
dollars in debt and you're hiding from creditors.
And I had real estate investment trusts.
My landlords at the two restaurants were both
REITs.
So I'm like, I'm getting hounded by big
corporate lawyers and defaulting on SBA guaranteed loans.
And when you default on an SBA loan,
it's not the bank you have to worry
(10:16):
about.
The bank just cashes in their insurance policy
with the government.
It's the U.S. Treasury actually becomes your
creditor.
And so I'm getting hounded by the treasury
and I'm getting hounded by a bunch of
corporate lawyers for the defaulted leases.
And I just went into hiding.
I literally, I started operating under a modified
dispelling of my last name and was like,
if I'm gonna make a life, if I'm
(10:37):
gonna dig out of this, I'm gonna have
to kind of go extreme.
And so I moved in with my estranged
wife's parents.
She was in the process of separating and
divorcing me, but they still, her parents still
took pity and let me live there.
And I just went totally balls to the
wall.
I bought $395 course on affiliate marketing.
(11:00):
And it was sold by a platform, a
company called Carbon Copy Pro that was built
by this professional affiliate marketer who would kind
of give you everything that he did and
you could carbon copy it, hence Carbon Copy
Pro.
And it was good training.
And the reality in 2008, it was kind
of like the wild west.
You could find a niche, you could strike
(11:20):
gold and you could get some traction really
fast.
But I'm not gonna say, oh, it was
easy.
I mean, there were 40,000 members of
that affiliate platform and they had a leaderboard
where people publish their earnings, their affiliate commissions.
And after about six months, I was number
three out of 40,000.
So I was working really, really hard and
(11:43):
I was a quick study.
Now, if somebody said a quick study at
what?
Like what did I do different maybe than
39,997 other people to be number three?
I would say, first of all, in addition
to being a musician, I'd been an actor.
I studied theater in college.
And so I've always been pretty good on
(12:04):
camera.
Like I went to Best Buy, I bought
a little video.
This was before phones had cameras, but I
bought a camera.
And I started setting up in my soon
to be ex-wife's parents backyard during the
day when they were at work.
And I started shooting a ton of videos,
just like videos about what I was learning
and sharing.
And I got really excited about the digital
(12:24):
economy and this new emerging entrepreneurial space that
a lot of what I would say is,
I accumulated $495,000 in debt as an
undercapitalized brick and mortar entrepreneur.
Now, let me tell you about this thing
called internet entrepreneurship, where there's no such thing
as being undercapitalized.
(12:45):
There's no such thing as ending up a
half a million dollars in debt, because it's
the internet and it has leverage and it
has frictionless scaling and it has automation and
it has all these, a lot of the
things you'd say about AI, you were sort
of saying an early version about the internet
at the time.
And I was like, I was on fire,
because I found a way that I could
continue trying to be an entrepreneur, even though
my financial situation prevented me from doing anything
(13:07):
out there in the physical world.
And so I would say, I got really
good at sort of, or really, not good,
I got really excited about personal branding and
cultivating a unique message and becoming a really
refined, powerful deliverer of that message.
At the end of the day, people respond
to people.
And when you come across someone that has
(13:27):
something to say and says it well, that's
a skill that never goes out of date.
And so that's one thing I did.
I also got really obsessed with the science
of direct response marketing and direct response copywriting.
And I studied the greats.
I learned a lot from Dan Kennedy.
I went back and studied Gary Halbert.
(13:49):
And who's the guy that wrote Breakthrough Advertising?
Eugene, I keep wanting to say Eugene O
'Neill, but that's the Iceman Cometh, different Eugene.
Eugene Schwartz, I think.
But anyway, I got real into copywriting and
behavioral psychology and the art of persuasion and
essentially how to get people to do stuff
through words and design.
And I mean, I guess to sum it
(14:10):
all up, it's affiliate marketing.
So the thing about affiliate marketing is you're
promoting the same products as 1,000 other
people or 10,000 other people.
There's nothing unique.
There's nothing differentiating in the product you're promoting.
It's all in the marketing.
And I got really good at messaging and
I got really good at persuasion.
And then I guess the final piece was
I did something, and this is probably the
(14:32):
biggest takeaway of the whole story.
I did something at the time that nobody
else was doing or even when I told
them about it, they weren't willing to do
it.
And the standard formula at the time and
the materials I was given to carbon copy
were name and email opt-ins.
Like a typical opt-in for me, I
have a name and an email address.
I put phone number on the form and
everybody said, don't ask for phone numbers.
(14:54):
You'll either get a bunch of fake numbers
and or your conversions will go down because
people just don't wanna give up their phone
numbers.
So I put on my offer, on my
funnel, on the very first page, I put
VIP access phone number.
So I didn't even define what that meant,
but I got a certain percentage of people
that would put their phone number in the
opt-in to see what VIP access meant.
(15:15):
And as soon as they did, I'd call
them up.
And whatever I was promoting on the back
end of the funnels, I got really, really
good at having discovery conversations.
And basically my conversions were probably two to
three times better than anybody else in the
whole program because I was capturing as many
phone numbers as I could.
And I was actually willing to get on
(15:36):
the phones and talk to people.
Imagine that, right?
Yeah.
I love the story and what you've done
and how you've kind of got to where
you got to that point.
Fast forward to where you are today.
So you've got this thing that I think
is interesting called life design.
And it really has to do with like
personal growth and then entrepreneurship.
So can you tell me a little bit
more about that philosophy?
(15:56):
Yeah, so remember I grew up with money
and that gives me, I think a really
unique vantage point because here's the thing, most
people that grow up with money, they go
into the industries that they grew up around.
They become lawyers.
They become investment bankers.
Most of my high school buddies had summer
internships at Maryland or Goldman Sachs or whatever
(16:17):
law firm they were gonna go try to
get into after law school.
And so you end up, there's not a
lot of information exchange in the world of
like, let's say wealthy people speaking truth about,
and maybe it's different now because the internet,
everybody's talking about everything.
But like this, my vantage point was like,
I know what it's like to have money
and I know what it's like to not
(16:37):
have money because I was also a poor
jazz musician all through my 20s.
So I have this unique life experience to
kind of juxtapose not just having money versus
not having money, but being around the culture
of wealthy people versus being around the culture
of very non-wealthy people such as jazz
musicians.
And how do they think differently about money
(16:59):
and life and being a consumer and all
this stuff.
And also.
And now a quick break to hear from
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(17:19):
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Like I had a pretty good grounding in
how money works.
And so I think I was just probably
a little earlier than most on understanding where
the world was headed and certainly where we
(17:41):
are now, which is that I'll say some
things that depending where people are in terms
of eyes open to the zeitgeist, they may
or may not dispute.
But like, I think now there's an emerging
understanding that actually being an entrepreneur is less
risky than being an employee because in the
modern world, there's 160 million employees in this
(18:02):
country.
Only roughly 6 million of them will ever
achieve a million dollar net worth through their
employment.
So what's that 4%?
96%, 24 out of every 25 employees will
never achieve a million dollar net worth through
their job or their pension or their 401k
or their whatever.
And so then go Google, how much do
you need to retire in any city in
(18:23):
the United States?
And it's ranked.
If you go to the bottom quartile of
cities in the US, cities like Huntsville, Alabama
and Jackson, Mississippi, South low cost of living
cities, you still need a million dollar net
worth to retire comfortably and have $40,000
a year in passive income for the rest
of your life.
Well, if you need a million dollar net
(18:43):
worth to retire in Huntsville, Alabama or Jackson,
Mississippi, and 96% of employees will never
achieve a million dollar net worth, how is
employment secure?
How is employment a logical strategy for 24
out of 25 people?
They're never gonna be able to retire.
And that's the whole reason you get a
damn job in the first place is because
supposedly there's a system that's engineered to a
(19:04):
happy ending called retirement.
And I figured out in like 20 plus
years ago, I already knew the math wasn't
mathing for people.
And I don't know why, I just did.
And so I was never enticed.
I never saw the appeal of like, give
my whole life away for a paycheck that
isn't gonna get me where they're trying to
convince me that it will.
And so, gosh, I guess in terms of
(19:26):
what we do now, I've been evangelizing since
2019 when we started Entra.
So in 2018, I sold my last business
and I was essentially done.
I was comfortable, I didn't need to sweat
it.
And I remember I had this moment where
I was like, okay, 10 years ago, I
was injured jazz musician.
I couldn't even play a gig if I
(19:47):
wanted to.
I was in half a million dollars in
debt.
I was facing my second divorce.
I would have been homeless if my in
-laws hadn't taken pity on me.
And here I am, that was 2008.
And here it was 2018, 10 years later,
I sold my business.
It wasn't my first successful business, but it
was my first exit.
I'm comfortably retired ironically at that time I
(20:09):
was 39 years old.
And I did everything you're not supposed to
do.
I'm a high school dropout who became a
jazz musician.
But entrepreneurship changed the ending for me.
And so I just was like, we live
in a world where millions of people are
doing a thing that they were told was
the safe bet.
But I'm living proof that there's a different
(20:29):
bet you could place that if you rise
to the calling, anybody can win.
And I just started sharing that message.
And that in the digitally empowered world, and
this was pre AI, AI has changed it
a whole nother order of magnitude in terms
of what a solopreneur with not a lot
of capital can get going.
But even back then I was like, this
(20:50):
ain't your grandpa's entrepreneurship.
You don't have to go get a ground
lease and put up a building and stock
shelves and hire employees anymore.
Why isn't everybody got at least starting some
sort of digital side hustle in their life
so that within maybe a decade, rather than
40 or 50 years, they can actually get
to retirement rather than being disappointed when they
(21:11):
discover too late that it was never gonna
get there.
Like it just seemed like a better paradigm
for living.
And I started sharing it and it caught
on and crazy enough, some of the data
in your bio is a little aged.
And we've had over 300,000 people buy
some sort of training from us.
We've helped over 25,000 people launch businesses.
And I don't know, there's some other big
(21:32):
numbers I could throw at you, but the
bottom line is people are resonating.
And so, and then so let me fill
out one more part of your question.
Life design, which is the combination of personal
development.
And I would say it's sort of like
transformational psychology slash life hacking, just like how
to live a better life paired with entrepreneurship
is trying to address what I see as
(21:53):
an artificial schism in the market where you
have this whole category of industries that are
like lose weight, build muscle, get better sleep,
heal, improve your marriage, become a better parent,
conscious parenting, improve your communication, get or maybe
work on your sales skills, reskill for a
better job.
Let's call it the whole category of self
(22:14):
-improvement.
And then you have a whole category of
business opportunities and entrepreneurship programs.
But the fact is, if you wanna be
good at entrepreneurship, you just have to probably
be a much better version of yourself than
what's required to at least hang on and
(22:34):
have a job.
And that's, I'm not trying to call anybody
out, but I mean, you can be a
fairly mediocre person and employment still has a
place for you.
And as long as you show up on
time, they're actually legally obliged to pay you
for something, for your time.
Entrepreneurship is like 97% of people have
like nothing to show for it, regardless of
(22:56):
how much time they put into it.
And then some smaller percent have an asymmetrical
upside that is like me, you can be
retired before 40.
And what's the difference?
How good a version of yourself are you?
It's just a much higher standard.
And by the way, high standards are really
good for life.
So why shouldn't we fuse the two and
say, hey, let's start working on ourselves holistically.
(23:17):
Let's get in better shape so we have
more energy, so we can put in the
extra hours that entrepreneurship requires.
Let's put different fuel in our body.
So let's, so literally, so that when we
show up on camera, we have more vibrant
dynamic energy exuding from our face and we
don't look haggard because we live off of
fast food.
And by the way, let's learn to polish
our communication skills and fuse it with an
(23:39):
understanding of human psychology because not only might
that help me be a persuasive sales guy
on the internet, but it might also help
me be a better husband to my wife
and understand that everything is just human beings
trying to get their needs met and understanding
what those needs are and how to meet
them is not just gonna help me sell
stuff.
It's also gonna help me parent.
It's gonna help me be a spouse.
And it's gonna help me be a kid,
(23:59):
a child to my aging parents, right?
Like it all goes together.
How you do one thing is how you
do everything.
So if you wanna make more money, become
a version of self that's actually worth more
such that the market will naturally compensate you
better.
I've never understood how people think they're gonna
do one without the other or the other
without the one.
We just fused it together and call it
life design.
And you're killing it.
(24:20):
Like if we look at Entre, I think
I saw stat was like crazy.
Like you guys have like 63 times more
success than any other program or similar programs
have to do with increasing income.
And it seems like you've got this three
Ps to success strategy.
So can you tell us a little bit
more about that?
Because that philosophy seems to be really driving
a lot of people to success.
(24:41):
Yeah, so the metric that you're referencing and
this is based on surveys that we did
with our members is that the average member
of Entre who goes through the full life
design process, which is not every one of
our customers, right?
You can buy a course from us and
never even log in or log in and
never talk to us and never do any
of our other stuff.
But if you go through our full life
design methodology, which we can unpack some other
(25:04):
time, it's a robust thing.
It's kind of like a combination of going
to like a trade school to learn a
business and also going through like Tony Robbins
complete set of events, but also with some
different nuances that we do and no one
else does.
But anyways, if you go through it, 63
% of the people who go through it
report earning a meaningfully higher level of income
(25:26):
after 12 months in their life.
The industry average for the home-based business
or online business industry category, they like to
say that it's 1%.
I think it's actually much worse than that.
I think it's like one basis point.
I mean, it's bad.
And so when we say we're 63 times
better, we're referring to the fact that 63
% of our people that do our full
(25:46):
program have more money to show after 12
months versus 1%.
But even that, I mean, we might be
6,300 times better if I'm right, that
it's really much worse than 1%.
But in any case, that's the stat.
And what it really, I think there's two
reasons for it.
One is that the version of self that
people become through our process is a version
(26:06):
of self that is naturally gonna be better
compensated in the market, whether it's through a
business or their job.
And by the way, some of those people
are not statistics of people that build a
business and bring in new income.
Some of them are people who just start
working on themselves and people at work start
to notice and they either start closing more
deals or they get a promotion or a
(26:27):
raise or a new job opens up.
Like it's just progress in life, even though
it started as entrepreneurship.
But so there's the transformational piece of like,
I'm becoming a version of self who's naturally
gonna command a higher value in the market.
There's also just the stickiness and the discipline
and consistency that comes from getting results.
(26:51):
And in entrepreneurship, and I'm sure you know
this and many of your listeners would know
this, profit is like the last thing to
happen in entrepreneurship.
Like it's the lagging indicator that you've done
a whole bunch of other things right before
suddenly you're like, oh, I made a bunch
of money, right?
I mean, it might be two years before
you see a bunch of profit come in.
It doesn't mean that you weren't doing all
the right things.
It's just, that's like the last piece of
(27:14):
the startup mode.
And now you're in, you can scale and
grow and all that stuff, right?
And so, and I have a lot of
experience now of six years and hundreds of
thousands of people that I've gotten to oversee
coming through an ecosystem saying, I wanna change
my life.
I'm willing to do new things.
Tell me what to do.
And then I get to see whether or
not they actually follow through or not, right?
(27:34):
And so what I'll say is, when you
get people improving themselves holistically, the money may
still be a year or two out, but
hey, you know what?
I just lost 10 pounds and I'm feeling
pretty good.
And I noticed the last time I put
the moves on my wife, she was a
little more receptive to me.
I think I'm gonna stick with this program.
(27:54):
We just help a lot more people stick
with it because you get holistic results long
before in most cases you see profit.
And so we help people lose weight.
We help people quit smoking.
We help people keep their commitment to do
date night every week with their wife when
maybe they had let it go for the
last five years.
We just, you know, cause again, it's all
who you become and it's all how you
(28:15):
do everything.
Jeff, I love that.
I love what you guys are doing.
And I actually spent a lot of time
looking at like your frameworks and what you're
doing and you help so many people with
so many different problems and accomplish such phenomenal
results.
And there's so many things I'd like to
dive into more about your strategies, your philosophies,
your frameworks to help you accomplish this.
But as we get near the end, let
(28:36):
me ask you this.
Where can everybody go that wants more information
to be able to learn more and maybe
participate in your program so they can start
sharing in some of that success that so
many of your students are getting right now?
Yeah, I appreciate the question, obviously.
So I just started a new YouTube channel
and the channel is called Life Design with
Jeff Lerner.
And if somebody just goes and searches Life
(28:58):
Design Jeff Lerner on YouTube, it'll come up.
That's actually the handle is Life Design with
Jeff Lerner.
So you can find it.
I don't even think it links anywhere right
now.
It has like a hundred subscribers.
I just started it like several weeks ago.
And somebody might wonder, cause I have another
YouTube channel that's got almost a hundred thousand
subscribers.
Why did I start a new YouTube channel?
And also why am I giving that link,
not the other one to your audience?
(29:20):
The reason is because basically what I've decided,
somebody that I look up to a lot
said something as a business philosophy that I
thought was really profound.
He said, as the world, everybody knows like
information is essentially becoming a commodity, right?
Everybody can access any piece of information in
the world thanks to ChatGPT or YouTube or
(29:41):
whatever.
So stop trying to charge for information.
Information should be free.
Transformation is what people should pay for.
If you're as a business, right?
Like don't charge people for a white paper
on what to do.
Give them the white paper.
And then if you wanna sell a program,
have it be a.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome to the Business Credit and Financing Show.
Each week, we talk about the growth strategies
that matter most to entrepreneurs.
Listen in as we discuss the secrets to
getting credit and money to start and grow
your business.
And enjoy as we talk with seasoned business
owners, coaches, and industry leaders on a variety
(00:22):
of topics from advertising and marketing to the
nuts and bolts of running a highly successful
business.
And now, to introduce the host of our
show, financial expert and award-winning author, Ty
Crandall.
Hello, and thanks for joining us today.
Today, we are going to give you the
actual blueprint for entrepreneurship and for personal growth
(00:43):
from somebody that's built multiple eight figures and
can really lay out the exact roadmap for
you to successfully be able to do the
same thing.
So with us today is Jeff Lerner.
Now, he's actually went from a jazz musician
to generating over $100 million in online sales.
So after multiple failed ventures and a half
a million dollars in debt, he actually discovered
that digital businesses could actually be successful.
(01:05):
And he used those to be able to
pay off his debt in 18 months and
built multiple eight-figure companies, twice landing on
the Inc 5000.
His journey actually inspired him to educate others,
leading to the creation of Entry Institute, one
of the fastest growing entrepreneur education platforms with
over 250,000 students, and Intrasoft, a top
(01:25):
small business software suite as well.
Jeff's actually the author of Unlock Your Potential
from Penguin Random House in 2022 was released.
And he's a Wall Street Journal and Publishers
Weekly bestseller and the host of Unlock Your
Potential, a top 1.5% global podcast
featuring leading entrepreneurs, authors, and thought leaders.
(01:46):
His message revolves around the three P's of
success, physical, personal, and professional, helping people reshape
their lives through entrepreneurship.
Now, he's also a sought after speaker and
content creator as well.
And he continues to expand his reach through
speaking engagements, media appearances, and digital content.
He's also a devoted husband and father of
(02:06):
four, crediting much of his success to his
marriage.
Despite his busy schedule, he still plays the
piano for an hour daily.
I hope he doesn't see this piano behind
me because he will realize I'm a horrible
piano player and he's phenomenal.
Jeff, what's up, man?
Thanks for joining us today.
Oh, I'm grateful to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you've done some really cool stuff.
I mean, I gotta start at the beginning.
How do you get from jazz musician to
(02:28):
where you are now to building multiple eight
figure businesses?
Well, I mean, a really good incentive to
go out and do things that make money
is to be as broke as you can
get being a jazz pianist.
I'll put it that way.
Pick a profession that's gonna put you in
a financial ditch and it becomes great fuel
to get out of the financial ditch.
But no, in all seriousness, I'll say this
(02:51):
to kind of sum up the answer to
multiple questions in that one.
My big thing from an early age was,
I actually, I was born to very well
-to-do parents, very successful, hardworking parents.
My dad was a money manager who managed
money for high net worth individuals and institutions.
(03:12):
And my mom was an attorney.
She was a partner at a big five
law firm or became one during my childhood.
So they were like, and they were self
-made.
They weren't born into any wealth or opportunity.
My mom worked two jobs to put herself
through business school and law school and undergrad.
They just were like American dream, go-getter
people that did awesome.
(03:32):
And that was my motto.
And I was an only child.
So I was like surrounded by what's possible
in America growing up.
And we weren't like, I mean, they didn't
own an island or anything, but like we
had enough money that I, and I went
to a private school where I was around
people that had a lot of money, like
even way more than us.
And so I just, I grew up without
that financial stress that I think almost is
(03:56):
definitional to a lot of people's life experience.
And I didn't have that in childhood.
And so paradoxically, I came to understand how
deeply, all the different ways you can be
deeply unhappy, even if money's not a concern.
Cause I was like a really moody kid
and had like, I mean, they like, I
got called in the counselor's office a bunch
(04:17):
as a teenager.
They were like worried about me.
Like, is he going to make it?
I was just like, money doesn't make you
happy.
And that was my early childhood experience.
And so I think a lot of people
come through high school and it's all about
what job am I going to get?
What student loans am I going to get?
And what's my sort of finance roadmap of
my life going to be?
How am I going to make something of
myself?
How am I going to make my parents
(04:37):
proud?
What am I going to do?
And dah, dah, dah.
And I was just like, how do I
live a life that I can actually wake
up and look forward to every day?
That was my question.
And none of the conventional playbook appealed to
me at all.
Like I had two summer jobs when I
was 16 years old, both of which simply
(04:58):
taught me that I'm profoundly psychologically unemployable and
unsuited to work for anyone.
And especially someone that I don't esteem as
someone that ought to be presiding over me.
You know, I was kind of a cocky
kid maybe.
And like, you're not smart enough to be
my boss or whatever.
And so for me at 16, I dropped
out of high school and I told my
(05:19):
parents, I'm hearing myself say this and it's
like, wow, this sounds really spoiled.
I dropped out of high school and I
was like, I'm not going to college.
I'm not getting a job.
I'm going to be a musician.
And they were like, okay, well, we're not
going to support you after you turn 18.
That was the deal.
You know that you're kind of on your
own.
We'll help you go to college if you
want, but sounds like you're out on that
(05:41):
deal.
So if you're going to drop out of
high school and be a musician, like let
me tell you about the bed you're making
that you're going to end up sleeping in
for the rest of your life.
And they said, but if you decide that's
what you want to do, well, we're not
going to drive you to school every day
and sit there and make sure you go
in.
So I dropped out of high school, started,
I actually learned to play piano out of
a book.
(06:02):
I bought a book called the Jazz Piano
Book.
And I just sat at home all day,
every day, teaching myself chords and music theory.
And it was all, and I had this
sort of like viewpoint of like, and to
be honest, I was kind of depressed.
And this is probably gonna get me in
hot water for saying this.
There's a certain luxury in being depressed where
(06:24):
like you're not attaching a lot of value
to a lot of things that other people
do.
You're kind of like, yeah, what's the point
of any of it?
And so then, you know, taken to its
extreme, depression is just the experience of not,
of feeling like you have nothing to lose.
So I was kind of a depressed teen
and I'm like, well, I don't want any
of this crap anyways.
So I'm just gonna try to find a
life I can be happy in.
And a life that I can be happy
in came to mean a life that I
(06:46):
can truly be myself.
I wanna discover who I am and I
wanna do something in the world that's as
unique as my fingerprints.
Because honestly, otherwise, what's the point?
And Camus, the great existential philosopher actually did
say that the only serious philosophical question is
suicide.
Because if you're gonna choose to be here,
(07:07):
then you surrender to the absurdity of the
place where you choose to be, or you
can opt out.
But there's no logic in surrendering to the
absurdity of the place where you choose to
be because you forego your choice to opt
out, but then spending all your time complaining
that it's absurd.
You knew that the day you decided to
stay here, right?
And if you didn't know that, wait, go
(07:28):
outside.
You'll be reminded, like this is a ridiculous
place that we inhabit.
So if you're gonna be here, stop complaining.
Or if you're gonna complain, go away.
And that's a harsh way to counsel someone,
but that was Camus' viewpoint.
And that made a lot of sense to
me as a teenager.
I was like, well, I wanna be here,
so I'm just gonna play the game to
(07:49):
try to figure out what happiness and fulfillment
look like.
Because I wasn't gonna be a slave to
money because I had grown up with it
and I already knew that it wasn't the
point.
And so that's the setup of how I
became a jazz musician.
It's also the setup of how I got
my ass kicked as a jazz musician and
realized that, okay, even if money's not the
point, it's still a pretty significant piece of
the equation.
(08:10):
And that's why I went into entrepreneurship is
because I just wanted a life that I
was never gonna be able to afford as
a musician.
And I'll stop there.
There's so much more to the story, but
hopefully I answered your question.
Yeah, I love that.
And along that path, you accumulated a lot
of debt, paid it off in a very
short period of time.
So how did you make that happen?
I mean, a lot of people, as you
know, try to succeed online.
(08:30):
And they never accomplished even a fraction of
what you did.
So how did you go from really knowing
nothing about online entrepreneurship to then building multiple
eight figures, to accumulating the knowledge you needed
to build multiple eight figures in that space?
Yeah, so I was very fortunate that in
2008, I was 29.
(08:51):
As you said, I was $495,000 in
debt.
I had tried opening a couple of franchise
restaurants.
And if anybody's wondering how the heck did
a derelict jazz musician even get the capital
to open franchise restaurants?
And it's like, I actually think it was
an achievement to get half a million dollars
in debt when I'd never made more than
like 50 or $60,000 a year.
(09:12):
And it was because it was 2007.
The banks were insane.
They would loan any money to anybody with
a pulse and a one-sheet business plan,
right?
That was the bubble that led to the
Great Recession in 2007, 2008, the big collapse.
So I just, wrong place, right time, so
to speak, was able to convince a bank
to give me two SBA loans to open
(09:34):
franchise restaurants back in 2006, 2007, even though
I had no real business experience.
And that's how I ended up in all
that debt.
And again, I would say debt and depression,
two things that set you free to take
risks you never would otherwise.
And so with half a million dollars in
debt as a piano player, going out to
play one extra gig and make an extra
(09:56):
100 or $200 wasn't gonna do anything for
my life when you have half a million
dollars in debt and you're hiding from creditors.
And I had real estate investment trusts.
My landlords at the two restaurants were both
REITs.
So I'm like, I'm getting hounded by big
corporate lawyers and defaulting on SBA guaranteed loans.
And when you default on an SBA loan,
it's not the bank you have to worry
(10:16):
about.
The bank just cashes in their insurance policy
with the government.
It's the U.S. Treasury actually becomes your
creditor.
And so I'm getting hounded by the treasury
and I'm getting hounded by a bunch of
corporate lawyers for the defaulted leases.
And I just went into hiding.
I literally, I started operating under a modified
dispelling of my last name and was like,
if I'm gonna make a life, if I'm
(10:37):
gonna dig out of this, I'm gonna have
to kind of go extreme.
And so I moved in with my estranged
wife's parents.
She was in the process of separating and
divorcing me, but they still, her parents still
took pity and let me live there.
And I just went totally balls to the
wall.
I bought $395 course on affiliate marketing.
(11:00):
And it was sold by a platform, a
company called Carbon Copy Pro that was built
by this professional affiliate marketer who would kind
of give you everything that he did and
you could carbon copy it, hence Carbon Copy
Pro.
And it was good training.
And the reality in 2008, it was kind
of like the wild west.
You could find a niche, you could strike
(11:20):
gold and you could get some traction really
fast.
But I'm not gonna say, oh, it was
easy.
I mean, there were 40,000 members of
that affiliate platform and they had a leaderboard
where people publish their earnings, their affiliate commissions.
And after about six months, I was number
three out of 40,000.
So I was working really, really hard and
(11:43):
I was a quick study.
Now, if somebody said a quick study at
what?
Like what did I do different maybe than
39,997 other people to be number three?
I would say, first of all, in addition
to being a musician, I'd been an actor.
I studied theater in college.
And so I've always been pretty good on
(12:04):
camera.
Like I went to Best Buy, I bought
a little video.
This was before phones had cameras, but I
bought a camera.
And I started setting up in my soon
to be ex-wife's parents backyard during the
day when they were at work.
And I started shooting a ton of videos,
just like videos about what I was learning
and sharing.
And I got really excited about the digital
(12:24):
economy and this new emerging entrepreneurial space that
a lot of what I would say is,
I accumulated $495,000 in debt as an
undercapitalized brick and mortar entrepreneur.
Now, let me tell you about this thing
called internet entrepreneurship, where there's no such thing
as being undercapitalized.
(12:45):
There's no such thing as ending up a
half a million dollars in debt, because it's
the internet and it has leverage and it
has frictionless scaling and it has automation and
it has all these, a lot of the
things you'd say about AI, you were sort
of saying an early version about the internet
at the time.
And I was like, I was on fire,
because I found a way that I could
continue trying to be an entrepreneur, even though
my financial situation prevented me from doing anything
(13:07):
out there in the physical world.
And so I would say, I got really
good at sort of, or really, not good,
I got really excited about personal branding and
cultivating a unique message and becoming a really
refined, powerful deliverer of that message.
At the end of the day, people respond
to people.
And when you come across someone that has
(13:27):
something to say and says it well, that's
a skill that never goes out of date.
And so that's one thing I did.
I also got really obsessed with the science
of direct response marketing and direct response copywriting.
And I studied the greats.
I learned a lot from Dan Kennedy.
I went back and studied Gary Halbert.
(13:49):
And who's the guy that wrote Breakthrough Advertising?
Eugene, I keep wanting to say Eugene O
'Neill, but that's the Iceman Cometh, different Eugene.
Eugene Schwartz, I think.
But anyway, I got real into copywriting and
behavioral psychology and the art of persuasion and
essentially how to get people to do stuff
through words and design.
And I mean, I guess to sum it
(14:10):
all up, it's affiliate marketing.
So the thing about affiliate marketing is you're
promoting the same products as 1,000 other
people or 10,000 other people.
There's nothing unique.
There's nothing differentiating in the product you're promoting.
It's all in the marketing.
And I got really good at messaging and
I got really good at persuasion.
And then I guess the final piece was
I did something, and this is probably the
(14:32):
biggest takeaway of the whole story.
I did something at the time that nobody
else was doing or even when I told
them about it, they weren't willing to do
it.
And the standard formula at the time and
the materials I was given to carbon copy
were name and email opt-ins.
Like a typical opt-in for me, I
have a name and an email address.
I put phone number on the form and
everybody said, don't ask for phone numbers.
(14:54):
You'll either get a bunch of fake numbers
and or your conversions will go down because
people just don't wanna give up their phone
numbers.
So I put on my offer, on my
funnel, on the very first page, I put
VIP access phone number.
So I didn't even define what that meant,
but I got a certain percentage of people
that would put their phone number in the
opt-in to see what VIP access meant.
(15:15):
And as soon as they did, I'd call
them up.
And whatever I was promoting on the back
end of the funnels, I got really, really
good at having discovery conversations.
And basically my conversions were probably two to
three times better than anybody else in the
whole program because I was capturing as many
phone numbers as I could.
And I was actually willing to get on
(15:36):
the phones and talk to people.
Imagine that, right?
Yeah.
I love the story and what you've done
and how you've kind of got to where
you got to that point.
Fast forward to where you are today.
So you've got this thing that I think
is interesting called life design.
And it really has to do with like
personal growth and then entrepreneurship.
So can you tell me a little bit
more about that philosophy?
(15:56):
Yeah, so remember I grew up with money
and that gives me, I think a really
unique vantage point because here's the thing, most
people that grow up with money, they go
into the industries that they grew up around.
They become lawyers.
They become investment bankers.
Most of my high school buddies had summer
internships at Maryland or Goldman Sachs or whatever
(16:17):
law firm they were gonna go try to
get into after law school.
And so you end up, there's not a
lot of information exchange in the world of
like, let's say wealthy people speaking truth about,
and maybe it's different now because the internet,
everybody's talking about everything.
But like this, my vantage point was like,
I know what it's like to have money
and I know what it's like to not
(16:37):
have money because I was also a poor
jazz musician all through my 20s.
So I have this unique life experience to
kind of juxtapose not just having money versus
not having money, but being around the culture
of wealthy people versus being around the culture
of very non-wealthy people such as jazz
musicians.
And how do they think differently about money
(16:59):
and life and being a consumer and all
this stuff.
And also.
And now a quick break to hear from
our sponsor.
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(17:19):
can definitely help you.
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Like I had a pretty good grounding in
how money works.
And so I think I was just probably
a little earlier than most on understanding where
the world was headed and certainly where we
(17:41):
are now, which is that I'll say some
things that depending where people are in terms
of eyes open to the zeitgeist, they may
or may not dispute.
But like, I think now there's an emerging
understanding that actually being an entrepreneur is less
risky than being an employee because in the
modern world, there's 160 million employees in this
(18:02):
country.
Only roughly 6 million of them will ever
achieve a million dollar net worth through their
employment.
So what's that 4%?
96%, 24 out of every 25 employees will
never achieve a million dollar net worth through
their job or their pension or their 401k
or their whatever.
And so then go Google, how much do
you need to retire in any city in
(18:23):
the United States?
And it's ranked.
If you go to the bottom quartile of
cities in the US, cities like Huntsville, Alabama
and Jackson, Mississippi, South low cost of living
cities, you still need a million dollar net
worth to retire comfortably and have $40,000
a year in passive income for the rest
of your life.
Well, if you need a million dollar net
(18:43):
worth to retire in Huntsville, Alabama or Jackson,
Mississippi, and 96% of employees will never
achieve a million dollar net worth, how is
employment secure?
How is employment a logical strategy for 24
out of 25 people?
They're never gonna be able to retire.
And that's the whole reason you get a
damn job in the first place is because
supposedly there's a system that's engineered to a
(19:04):
happy ending called retirement.
And I figured out in like 20 plus
years ago, I already knew the math wasn't
mathing for people.
And I don't know why, I just did.
And so I was never enticed.
I never saw the appeal of like, give
my whole life away for a paycheck that
isn't gonna get me where they're trying to
convince me that it will.
And so, gosh, I guess in terms of
(19:26):
what we do now, I've been evangelizing since
2019 when we started Entra.
So in 2018, I sold my last business
and I was essentially done.
I was comfortable, I didn't need to sweat
it.
And I remember I had this moment where
I was like, okay, 10 years ago, I
was injured jazz musician.
I couldn't even play a gig if I
(19:47):
wanted to.
I was in half a million dollars in
debt.
I was facing my second divorce.
I would have been homeless if my in
-laws hadn't taken pity on me.
And here I am, that was 2008.
And here it was 2018, 10 years later,
I sold my business.
It wasn't my first successful business, but it
was my first exit.
I'm comfortably retired ironically at that time I
(20:09):
was 39 years old.
And I did everything you're not supposed to
do.
I'm a high school dropout who became a
jazz musician.
But entrepreneurship changed the ending for me.
And so I just was like, we live
in a world where millions of people are
doing a thing that they were told was
the safe bet.
But I'm living proof that there's a different
(20:29):
bet you could place that if you rise
to the calling, anybody can win.
And I just started sharing that message.
And that in the digitally empowered world, and
this was pre AI, AI has changed it
a whole nother order of magnitude in terms
of what a solopreneur with not a lot
of capital can get going.
But even back then I was like, this
(20:50):
ain't your grandpa's entrepreneurship.
You don't have to go get a ground
lease and put up a building and stock
shelves and hire employees anymore.
Why isn't everybody got at least starting some
sort of digital side hustle in their life
so that within maybe a decade, rather than
40 or 50 years, they can actually get
to retirement rather than being disappointed when they
(21:11):
discover too late that it was never gonna
get there.
Like it just seemed like a better paradigm
for living.
And I started sharing it and it caught
on and crazy enough, some of the data
in your bio is a little aged.
And we've had over 300,000 people buy
some sort of training from us.
We've helped over 25,000 people launch businesses.
And I don't know, there's some other big
(21:32):
numbers I could throw at you, but the
bottom line is people are resonating.
And so, and then so let me fill
out one more part of your question.
Life design, which is the combination of personal
development.
And I would say it's sort of like
transformational psychology slash life hacking, just like how
to live a better life paired with entrepreneurship
is trying to address what I see as
(21:53):
an artificial schism in the market where you
have this whole category of industries that are
like lose weight, build muscle, get better sleep,
heal, improve your marriage, become a better parent,
conscious parenting, improve your communication, get or maybe
work on your sales skills, reskill for a
better job.
Let's call it the whole category of self
(22:14):
-improvement.
And then you have a whole category of
business opportunities and entrepreneurship programs.
But the fact is, if you wanna be
good at entrepreneurship, you just have to probably
be a much better version of yourself than
what's required to at least hang on and
(22:34):
have a job.
And that's, I'm not trying to call anybody
out, but I mean, you can be a
fairly mediocre person and employment still has a
place for you.
And as long as you show up on
time, they're actually legally obliged to pay you
for something, for your time.
Entrepreneurship is like 97% of people have
like nothing to show for it, regardless of
(22:56):
how much time they put into it.
And then some smaller percent have an asymmetrical
upside that is like me, you can be
retired before 40.
And what's the difference?
How good a version of yourself are you?
It's just a much higher standard.
And by the way, high standards are really
good for life.
So why shouldn't we fuse the two and
say, hey, let's start working on ourselves holistically.
(23:17):
Let's get in better shape so we have
more energy, so we can put in the
extra hours that entrepreneurship requires.
Let's put different fuel in our body.
So let's, so literally, so that when we
show up on camera, we have more vibrant
dynamic energy exuding from our face and we
don't look haggard because we live off of
fast food.
And by the way, let's learn to polish
our communication skills and fuse it with an
(23:39):
understanding of human psychology because not only might
that help me be a persuasive sales guy
on the internet, but it might also help
me be a better husband to my wife
and understand that everything is just human beings
trying to get their needs met and understanding
what those needs are and how to meet
them is not just gonna help me sell
stuff.
It's also gonna help me parent.
It's gonna help me be a spouse.
And it's gonna help me be a kid,
(23:59):
a child to my aging parents, right?
Like it all goes together.
How you do one thing is how you
do everything.
So if you wanna make more money, become
a version of self that's actually worth more
such that the market will naturally compensate you
better.
I've never understood how people think they're gonna
do one without the other or the other
without the one.
We just fused it together and call it
life design.
And you're killing it.
(24:20):
Like if we look at Entre, I think
I saw stat was like crazy.
Like you guys have like 63 times more
success than any other program or similar programs
have to do with increasing income.
And it seems like you've got this three
Ps to success strategy.
So can you tell us a little bit
more about that?
Because that philosophy seems to be really driving
a lot of people to success.
(24:41):
Yeah, so the metric that you're referencing and
this is based on surveys that we did
with our members is that the average member
of Entre who goes through the full life
design process, which is not every one of
our customers, right?
You can buy a course from us and
never even log in or log in and
never talk to us and never do any
of our other stuff.
But if you go through our full life
design methodology, which we can unpack some other
(25:04):
time, it's a robust thing.
It's kind of like a combination of going
to like a trade school to learn a
business and also going through like Tony Robbins
complete set of events, but also with some
different nuances that we do and no one
else does.
But anyways, if you go through it, 63
% of the people who go through it
report earning a meaningfully higher level of income
(25:26):
after 12 months in their life.
The industry average for the home-based business
or online business industry category, they like to
say that it's 1%.
I think it's actually much worse than that.
I think it's like one basis point.
I mean, it's bad.
And so when we say we're 63 times
better, we're referring to the fact that 63
% of our people that do our full
(25:46):
program have more money to show after 12
months versus 1%.
But even that, I mean, we might be
6,300 times better if I'm right, that
it's really much worse than 1%.
But in any case, that's the stat.
And what it really, I think there's two
reasons for it.
One is that the version of self that
people become through our process is a version
(26:06):
of self that is naturally gonna be better
compensated in the market, whether it's through a
business or their job.
And by the way, some of those people
are not statistics of people that build a
business and bring in new income.
Some of them are people who just start
working on themselves and people at work start
to notice and they either start closing more
deals or they get a promotion or a
(26:27):
raise or a new job opens up.
Like it's just progress in life, even though
it started as entrepreneurship.
But so there's the transformational piece of like,
I'm becoming a version of self who's naturally
gonna command a higher value in the market.
There's also just the stickiness and the discipline
and consistency that comes from getting results.
(26:51):
And in entrepreneurship, and I'm sure you know
this and many of your listeners would know
this, profit is like the last thing to
happen in entrepreneurship.
Like it's the lagging indicator that you've done
a whole bunch of other things right before
suddenly you're like, oh, I made a bunch
of money, right?
I mean, it might be two years before
you see a bunch of profit come in.
It doesn't mean that you weren't doing all
the right things.
It's just, that's like the last piece of
(27:14):
the startup mode.
And now you're in, you can scale and
grow and all that stuff, right?
And so, and I have a lot of
experience now of six years and hundreds of
thousands of people that I've gotten to oversee
coming through an ecosystem saying, I wanna change
my life.
I'm willing to do new things.
Tell me what to do.
And then I get to see whether or
not they actually follow through or not, right?
(27:34):
And so what I'll say is, when you
get people improving themselves holistically, the money may
still be a year or two out, but
hey, you know what?
I just lost 10 pounds and I'm feeling
pretty good.
And I noticed the last time I put
the moves on my wife, she was a
little more receptive to me.
I think I'm gonna stick with this program.
(27:54):
We just help a lot more people stick
with it because you get holistic results long
before in most cases you see profit.
And so we help people lose weight.
We help people quit smoking.
We help people keep their commitment to do
date night every week with their wife when
maybe they had let it go for the
last five years.
We just, you know, cause again, it's all
who you become and it's all how you
(28:15):
do everything.
Jeff, I love that.
I love what you guys are doing.
And I actually spent a lot of time
looking at like your frameworks and what you're
doing and you help so many people with
so many different problems and accomplish such phenomenal
results.
And there's so many things I'd like to
dive into more about your strategies, your philosophies,
your frameworks to help you accomplish this.
But as we get near the end, let
(28:36):
me ask you this.
Where can everybody go that wants more information
to be able to learn more and maybe
participate in your program so they can start
sharing in some of that success that so
many of your students are getting right now?
Yeah, I appreciate the question, obviously.
So I just started a new YouTube channel
and the channel is called Life Design with
Jeff Lerner.
And if somebody just goes and searches Life
(28:58):
Design Jeff Lerner on YouTube, it'll come up.
That's actually the handle is Life Design with
Jeff Lerner.
So you can find it.
I don't even think it links anywhere right
now.
It has like a hundred subscribers.
I just started it like several weeks ago.
And somebody might wonder, cause I have another
YouTube channel that's got almost a hundred thousand
subscribers.
Why did I start a new YouTube channel?
And also why am I giving that link,
not the other one to your audience?
(29:20):
The reason is because basically what I've decided,
somebody that I look up to a lot
said something as a business philosophy that I
thought was really profound.
He said, as the world, everybody knows like
information is essentially becoming a commodity, right?
Everybody can access any piece of information in
the world thanks to ChatGPT or YouTube or
(29:41):
whatever.
So stop trying to charge for information.
Information should be free.
Transformation is what people should pay for.
If you're as a business, right?
Like don't charge people for a white paper
on what to do.
Give them the white paper.
And then if you wanna sell a program,
have it be a.
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