127 ISAAC TOLPIN – Lessons From Failure

Shelley Rogers:                 You're listening to another episode of Inspiring Greatness where we share the stories of remarkable entrepreneurs. Welcome, my name is Shelley Rogers, your host. Join me each week as we share experiences from amazing entrepreneurs who have success and failure. Listen to their stories, recommended books, technology tools and business tips. If you're an entrepreneur at startup stage or if you have a business experiencing high growth, welcome. This podcast is for you. Listen and learn from the entrepreneurs' best and worst moments and hear what inspires them. Now, let's begin.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Be careful who you take advice from and I think everybody can relate to that, but you really do have to be very, very careful who you take advice from because everybody is willing to give advice these days and it's so hard to find the kind of advice where they're not just feeding you things based on their bad experiences.

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Shelley Rogers:                 Welcome to Episode 127. You just heard a snippet from Isaac Tolpin. Now, Isaac shares openly the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur starting his first business at age nine creating and selling arts and crafts. In this episode today, you will discover how seven children and his wife keep Isaac in check as he refuses to waste time achieving the world's definition of success, but instead does what matters through the projects he's involved with. Isaac shares his worst entrepreneurial moment which was losing his business, a once very successful digital agency and how failure helped him come back even stronger.

                                                While he talked about the importance of having clear roles between business partners and why being aligned is crucial to success, Isaac also shares great technology tools that have never been mentioned on this podcast before so you're not going to want to miss it. We also have links on our show notes page so you can access those very conveniently. Lastly, we talked about ... Well, Isaac about taking two hours a day or sometimes even a full day each Friday to journal and focus on clear thinking. When he started doing this, it allowed his team to grow from $5 million to $11 million in a very short time.

                                                Also, Isaac has shared some amazing free resources for you. He has provided a free 11-day course called Build More Than a Business and it's a challenge, and also, Five Steps to Corporate Content Licensing. So, without further ado, let's dive into the episode.

                                                Entrepreneurs near and far, it's Shelley Rogers here and thanks for joining me today and listening to this episode where we share remarkable stories from amazing entrepreneurs to inspire you. I'm very excited to introduce our guest today, Isaac Tolpin. Are you ready to share your story to inspire our listeners?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Absolutely, great to be here, Shelley. I'm excited to talk with you.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, thank you very much. Now, Isaac is one of the founders of ConveYour.com. It's the number one microlearning platform for influencers and companies. Now, he is a tech entrepreneur and a futurist at heart on a mission enabling brands to authentically connect and inform at scale with over $105 million in combined revenues from the companies he's helped build so far.

                                                I'm really excited to dive into your entrepreneurial journey, but before we begin, okay, I have to ask this question right off the bat. You have seven children. How on earth do you deal with that? Can you share a little bit about your personal life?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Oh, thank you, yeah. It's interesting. We didn't set out to have seven children. I came from small family, so do my wife but we had a couple of kids and we decided I want more and then we kept wrestled with it back and forth and we're like, "What greater way to impact the world than to train our own children in our home and have many of those children that we can send it out to have impact?" It was more of a legacy mindset than a personal comfort mindset. But it's definitely made both of us stronger people and they're incredible kids, so it's been great.

Shelley Rogers:                 What are their ages?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Ages 2 to 17. We have one getting ready to go off to college in about eight months or so, and then all in between, five boys, two girls.

Shelley Rogers:                 Oh, my gosh. Your wife also has a website. Maybe just tells us a little bit about the reason for her website.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, Courageousmom.com and yeah, it started as a blog and now, she's got a couple of books and she's got courses and T-shirts. And it's really to encourage and inspire moms and to help them raise their kids in an uncertain world and from all kinds of things. She just ... You can check it out. You may or may not disagree. It's faith-based but she's got some great wisdom.

Shelley Rogers:                 Oh, that's fantastic and congratulations. That's a big commitment in today's society to live a legacy with seven children. That's amazing.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Thank you.

Shelley Rogers:                 Okay, so, let's dive into your entrepreneurial journey. Tell us how you got started, how long have you been in business, ConveYour.com, the reason maybe behind the name. I'd love to hear that as well.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, it's interesting. I got started very young and I think my parents maybe didn't want to give me allowance or something but at age 9, I built crafts at a very small town called Port Townsend in the US. It's a Victorian town, beautiful if you're ever in the US and want to check it out. But I built crafts and I sold them at the farmer's market kind of thing, had a little table. I was an introverted shy kid, so it was a big step for me to do that. I learned a ton from that. I remember my best day was $100 profit in one day which is huge back then in being nine.

                                                And that taught me a lot. There's nothing better, and many people can relate to this, there's nothing better than creating something that originated in your mind and then watching people purchase it and then enjoy it. That just really triggered this whole entrepreneurial journey. I had a couple of jobs and I realized really quickly that I'm not really the employable type of person. I'm more of an entrepreneur and so I got into entrepreneurship at a younger age. It never stopped. I'm 40 now.

Shelley Rogers:                 When did ConveYour.com, is that your first company that you started, or have you had others previous to this?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, I've had other things and I failed before, some big failures, some big wins as well. And ConveYour is a tech company I've been involved with. My co-founder was Stephen Rhyne, just an incredible business partner, brilliant guy. We started it eight years ago and really launched ConveYour a year and a half ago and it's the biggest thing that we've ever done with this company.

                                                Prior to that though, yeah, I was in direct sales for a long time, and leadership, I had thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people in my organization with physical office locations. That was really exciting and interesting and then I left that at the top. We did unbelievable things. We're doing $10 million a year in revenue and I decided to move on.

                                                I went to build a digital learning agency, grew it to 43 employees and it ended up failing. I ended up putting, at the time, all of my money into that. When that failed and I had ... This is not that long ago. We just had our seventh kid, so a couple of years ago. It was pretty challenging to be faced with no income and no resources and seven kids and you're an entrepreneur.

                                                I'm thankful though that I was business partners in this tech company that ... Stephen had really been keeping going and doing a great job and then we were building ConveYour. I just jumped [inaudible 00:09:08] in a role in that company that I co-founded eight years ago.

Shelley Rogers:                 The digital agency, the one that you were stating as your failure, was that your sole company or were you partnership with Stephen in that one?

Isaac Tolpin:                       That's a super good question. I wasn't business partners with Stephen. I had a different business partner. It's really, if I could give some wisdom on that. If you're going to have a business partner, it is very, very important that there's amazing alignment there and you understand your roles really well and you guys are going in the same direction.

                                                There are some challenges with that business model. I think the challenge is in the partnership, although he's a great guy as well. It just didn't work out and I learned just a ton of lessons from that. It was a really humbling experience and I'm sure entrepreneurs that are listening in, you've had your humbling experiences. This was like going from having everything dialed in, money in the bank to serious debt that is following you from the company failure. My other company that I co-founded can only pay me very little right at first. It was a bit of a challenge.

Shelley Rogers:                 Isaac, I can relate. I have shared my failures. In fact, I just wrote an article on Five Tips for Failing Forward that hit Inc. Magazine, and I'm sure there's lots of listeners out there going, "Yeah." But I think what happens is we learn from our mistakes. You mentioned making sure that you have a partner that is aligned and that you understand your roles. Would you be able to just maybe go to that story on that final day where you pulled the plug on the company and just share that story and the lessons learned?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, absolutely. The first thing, the couple of days before, maybe a week before, some really good friends of mine demanded a meeting with me, and they said, "You cannot keep doing this. It's not going to work." If you are like me, you persevere and you never stop, and you make things happen, and you have a history of making things happen. I have experienced that where all odds are against me and we overcome.

                                                It's hard for me to stop after you put so much in. It's like when do you stop. It's like when you get lost and you're driving in the car. And if you're like me, you just keep going because you feel like you're going to figure it out. But in wisdom, you have to understand that if you are on the wrong track, every mile you go is another mile you have to backtrack.

                                                It's just important to remember, sometimes, we do need to stop. Sometimes, we need to know that lesson and it's important to have incredibly good friends around you that are not going to give you advice based on their experiences, based on just their knowledge, but they're going to give objective advice looking in and seeing your blind spots and helping you out. I think that was crucial.

                                                That final day, it was like, "Okay, I have to have absolute faith about this," because in my own abilities, this looks very daunting situation even though I'm very talented. I've done great things but in that moment, you're really challenged to look in where to go, who am I, what did I do wrong, and how do I take the right steps forwards?

                                                Most importantly for me, it was how do we take the right steps forward that my kids could learn from on how to respond to challenge because they're all watching. And I wanted them to see this is how you respond when something really, really challenging happens to you. That was in the back of my mind the whole time.

Shelley Rogers:                 That's a really good check, being authentic and just being honest and "Are my kids going to be proud of me at the end of this and lesson for them." That's golden. Thank you for sharing that.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah.

Shelley Rogers:                 You went from having this setback. How long did it take you ... You're already in partnerships with Stephen for ConveYour.com. Did you dive right into that, or did you take a little break and dust yourself off?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, there was no time for a break financially. I dove right in, and that was hustling to ramp up customers using ConveYour to launch it, to get feedback on how we can make the software even better. Stephen as well, we're working together on all these things. I was just full-time diving right in because there was no time to spare.

                                                It's interesting. I was used to a lifestyle where we made plenty, did very, very well. It's interesting when you're humbled and you have to breathe, figure out how to live with less. I would say that was one of the best experiences actually for my whole family because it's really respecting the dollar and really respecting success and the challenges. It really brought my family closer together.

                                                I immediately dove into build ConveYour with Stephen. We ramped up and it's like you had this great thing and you went to build something else out of your ego. That's what I did. I went to build something else out of my ego. This would be bigger, faster, better, but when I always had these thing with Stephen, that was the best.

                                                Sometimes, you can't see what's best because we're just totally blinded by your ego. An advice for people is if you're a go-getter, you're ambitious, where is your ego driving you and preventing you from seeing blind spots and preventing you from seeing the very best opportunities? Because I'll tell you, ConveYour is the biggest thing I've ever been a part of, and it's absolutely huge.

Shelley Rogers:                 You went from the partnership that wasn't ideal or you weren't aligned. What's different between you and Stephen and ConveYour?

Isaac Tolpin:                       I think with Stephen and I, we both have very different strengths and weaknesses. I think that's important in a business partnership, is to align with people that where you're weak, they're strong. Where you're strong, maybe they're weaker because then, you're not competing at strengths. I think that there's something to that.

                                                I think that although in my previous business partnership, we're both good people. I think we were competing in some strengths, and although we did have some areas where we're stronger than each other but I think it's recognizing that. And Stephen and I, we understand that. We know where we're stronger and weaker, and we complement each other really well and we communicate well and we talk about expectations and we have weekly calls. I would say we're really aligned in all aspects of things and that's super important.

Shelley Rogers:                 One of the things that I highlight for my clients is when they're looking at a partnership is to ensure that the core values are aligned. I always have them do a core value exercise as well as a shareholder's agreement and exit strategy. Those are the top three things that I think are so important to make sure, "Okay, if it doesn't work, what does it going to look like? How is it all going to unfold and what's the exit strategy so that we can leave this learning some lessons but also still remaining friends."

Isaac Tolpin:                       I think that's super smart, Shelley. That's right on. Yeah, you got to have the same vision for how that exits do. It's super cool. Then, you ask me the name of ConveYour. I wanted to make sure I answered that. It's convey your message with one Y. It's like convey your. Now, we got a dot-com, so it's hard to get dot-coms nowadays. We felt like we're building technology for companies to convey their message to their employees and for influencers/trainers to convey their message to their people in a more leveraged way.

Shelley Rogers:                 Perfect. Tell our audience exactly what you guys do.

Isaac Tolpin:                       We're in LMS system if we cut right through it. Companies and influencers/trainers use LMS systems. In the influencer side, it might be Teachable, Kajabi, Next, Thinkific. Those are some of our competitors potentially. On the company side, there's all kinds of LMS systems. Both sides are flawed because when you really look at it, the learners are not engaged. The retention of people in a digital environment is unbelievably low.

                                                I'll just give you a couple of examples. Higher education, they get about 20%, 25% completion of their academic courses in online even though people pay full price for them. There's a large MOOC who they put a hundred million dollars in to create it, and they lose 93% of the people after the third lesson.

                                                You won't see these things advertised, but there's a fundamental problem happening. We built software that completely disrupts the industry because instead of going to HR first of what they need or what the trainer really wants first, we went to the learner and we said, "What?" This is good entrepreneurial advice, right? Ask what the end user experience was and build from there.

                                                We did that, and I don't think anybody else has done that effectively, and we looked at where human behavior is today and make sure that there's a digital experience that matches that. For example, mobile text message notifications, gamification, two-way communication, collaboration, ability to be going through something with others, monetization abilities, ability to put entrance to the course on any brand or any website. Just a lot of things that are really important to make this work.

                                                We're really winning and it's been exciting and we're getting feedback like, "Wow, entire management teams are going through this training program and 95% of them complete the 30-day challenge with 30 videos when we make it optional." You never hear those kinds of things anywhere else, so it's really, really exciting.

Shelley Rogers:                 That is very high stats, so congratulations. What do you do that's different that makes people complete these courses or want to go through, and you said they're voluntarily doing this as well?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Everybody listening can think of this: Would you rather consume video on your computer or your mobile device? Mobile. Would you rather consume a long video or a short video? Short. It's pretty basic when you think about it. Do you want to just have videos talking at you, or do you want to be able to engage with that content? Engage. We made sure there's engagement formats where it's easy to do that.

                                                Would you rather get an email or a text message? Now, you might answer one way or another on that, but the reality is 93% of people open a text message within three minutes. If you want to make sure you're notifying people, there's a new lesson or there's something else, and you use email or any digital content, you've already lost because email is difficult.

                                                Then, you've got to have ... There's got to be achievement currency. People, you got to hit their achievement drive and there's got to be a record of them participating and experience of seeing how other people are participating and are ranking on a leaderboard. It just gamifies it. It makes it fun to get more currency to get further along and make sure my name is associated with greatness on the leaderboard. There's all these psychological aspects that make what we built work.

                                                I guess probably the most important one is none of that, actually. It's actually that we made it easy to take content and bring it to life without lots of production because I really believe one of the premises we're building this on is that polish isn't as important anymore. The breadth and relevancy trumps polish. If polish is really important, if you're doing videos for whatever reason, you highly edit those videos. Except for a marketing video, I agree. Marketing video, you might want to highly edit, but in a training video, the more you edit that video, the more likely you'll never update it when it comes to relevance.

Shelley Rogers:                 Is it because it's just more costly, more time consuming and you just go, "Oh, no. It's still good enough," or ...?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Exactly-

Shelley Rogers:                 Yeah, versus just jumping in there, doing it and tweaking it because you didn't have to spend a lot of time.

Isaac Tolpin:                       I imagine a world where it's so easy to produce that you can literally, from a laptop, the screen plays. That video loads right in our software and into a lesson, and you can put gamification with it and then boom, you can send it up to people because I don't think people expect a really polished videos anymore. They want short and to the point. Look at it, it's a YouTube world. They go get the big content everywhere. If we subscribe to what people are appreciating, then they much rather have their content be relevant than have a whole bunch of images on them.

Shelley Rogers:                 Perfect. Perfect video, so that's not relevant. I totally agree with that. You mentioned gamification. Can you just briefly touch a little bit more on that?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, gamification is on LinkedIn. It's your profile. You're a rock star because you have it so complete. That's gamification. All the social media engines do it, but getting likes, why do people go back to their Facebook post? I think they want to see who liked their posts. It's not even they care how much on who, so it's like, "Did I get more likes?" It's the game, and when we're hooked on games. That's what so addictive.

                                                You want to hook people on your learning world. Well, how do you do that? Well, you make it competitive. You give points for people participating. You make it short. You create a leaderboard. You create progress bars. You let them rate themselves one to ten on something and let them do a poll and then immediately see results with other people's answers anonymously like right then. There's no way to ...

                                                We're in a reality show world that's hooked on gamification. Most people creating digital training are still on the high production, slow as a snail's pace, high dollars output and it's a user experience nobody wants. What a perfect industry to disrupt.

Shelley Rogers:                 That's perfect. If I had some content and I came to you, I know it probably depends on how much content. But approximately how long would it take for us to get a course online?

Isaac Tolpin:                       A trainer, somebody a trainer working by themselves, they get a course up in a matter of ... Around their other stuff in a matter of five to seven days. Not working the whole time, just around their ... I'm assuming they're working more than full-time already at their own thing, right in the evenings and around it and things like that. I built a course. I obviously know our software really well, but I built a course in two days with 11 videos just to prove it and I did it. This is a funny thing, I have good camera equipment stuff, but I chose to use my iPhone 6 because I wanted to prove that anybody could build something in a couple of days. I had over 200 business owners go through that and love it.

Shelley Rogers:                 Can our listeners see that video on your website?

Isaac Tolpin:                       That course-

Shelley Rogers:                 Yeah.

Isaac Tolpin:                       The one that I built? Yeah, after the fact, I could get you a link to see that one that I built two days for sure, and I'll give it to everybody.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, thank you. And you also have free resource for our listeners. It's Five Steps to Corporate Content Licensing maybe just to give our listeners a little bit of a sneak peek on what they can get from that as well.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, if you're a business owner, you'll be looking at that for a reason of you're interested in seeing how what I'm talking about makes a difference in creating your own digital training for your employees. The content might not be as relevant as seeing the interaction and how this plays out on your own, [inaudible 00:25:42].

                                                For people that are trainers or speakers, you'll love this because one of the biggest opportunities people are missing is when they go give a speech, they're not, one, capturing 80% more of their audience that has opted in cellphone and email, but they're also not leaving something with them that not only impacts us people and helps them reinforce with their building, but also plants a seed with those corporate clients that you're great in digital too.

                                                What this is five lessons, five videos in a blueprint on exactly how to create something to up your training or speech that reinforces the concepts you taught live so you get more participation and implementation which the companies will rehire you back to speak because of that. But it also opts in everybody to your database and it also plants a seed. We had a consultant do this and in Capital One and it's like, "We've never seen our employees this engaged in digital training. We have to use that for other things internally." You start to peak their interest about you in a whole different way.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, thank you for sharing that. We'll have that on our show notes page and I think that will be a fantastic resource for our listeners. I said I'm dying to ask you what's the best advice someone has given you.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, you know, I'm going to give you a couple of things. One of them is to marry well. I'm assuming a lot of married people are listening but that's important. Another thing on a business side is be careful who you take advice from, and I think everybody can relate to that but you really do have to be very, very careful who you take advice from because everybody is willing to give advice these days and it's so hard to find the kind of advice where they're not just feeding you things based on their bad experiences, or good experiences. And I think really it's hard to find that objective loving advice where there's no competitive agenda, that they don't even know about themselves, where they're really truly giving you good advice. I think that's huge.

Shelley Rogers:                 It was funny. I just interviewed Ken Fowler and he said right before the global financial crisis in 2008, his accountant gave him advice to buyout his partner and he paid an extraordinary amount to pay out his partner and buyout his partner and then crashed. So, he said the same thing. Be careful, like why would I take advice from my accountant. He has never had a business kind of thing. Yes, very good.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah.

Shelley Rogers:                 Isaac, do you have any personal habits or key mindsets that contribute to your success?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Absolutely. One of the things and I teach my kids, everyone I can this as well, is we all have an identity within ourselves and though one of the things that is important is let your word be as good as gold to yourself. We all think that's important to others and that is, but what's most important is ask yourself a question, "Is my word as good as gold to myself?" Because when you decide to do something, when you say internally, I'm going to do something, do you have this thing where inside you ... This has helped me tremendously, I swear, like I totally don't feel like doing that right now but I know if I don't follow through developing a poor identity of how I view myself, which is going to lead to me not doing things I tell myself I'm going to do even more in the future if I don't do this thing right now.

                                                It gets me to do the mundane thing I committed to now for a bigger purpose of I don't want to develop a poor identity with myself that when I say I'm going to do things that I don't always do now.

Shelley Rogers:                 What keeps you motivated, keeps you pushing forward when you just don't want to do certain things or try to procrastinate.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Oh, yeah, it's like, "All right. I'm going to run every day. Oh, it's 11:00 p.m. and I'm watching Netflix and I forgot to run." In that very moment when it's raining out, you get up and go run in the rain.

Shelley Rogers:                 I love that. Let your word be as good as gold to yourself.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yes.

Shelley Rogers:                 Wonderful. You're in the online digital marketing and I'm curious what technology tips that you find helpful whether it's in business or personal life that would be useful for other entrepreneurs.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, everybody has heard of Slack, but I do use Slack. I thought I'd just mention that. It's good. Obviously, our software ConveYour use it all the time. Drift is a new one. If anybody has company websites or anything like that, I highly recommend Drift because now you can create a real-time conversation on one of your website but they also have what, the bot where it answers questions for people and routes them to different paths whether it's support or sales or whatever. There's some kind of psychological thing now where everybody loves messaging. Instead of a forum, they're [killing 00:30:38] the forums in the front of your website. You can have real-time messaging. That's really cool.

                                                For shooting videos, by the way, your phone, I love the app Teleprompter. It's just called Teleprompter. I'm afraid there might be other ones very similar names but it's like $20 app. It's incredible, like the words just scroll right over your iPhone screen so you don't look right in your camera and literally read word for word the script that you need to. That's amazing.

                                                Evernote, I signed up for Evernote when they were newer company and I never used it until about a year ago. Then, I finally started using my account, I'm just like, "Wow, I should have been using this all the time." That thing is incredible.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, Slack was one of the ... I kind of summarized in the month of December all of the interviews and definitely Slack was by the far the number one recommended app for my listeners or for my guests, but I never heard of Drift before. What kind of price tag is that or is it free?

Isaac Tolpin:                       It's got a price tag. It's for company websites and so, you're going to pay a couple of hundred bucks set at minimum to more, but you should look at it if you want to be more relevant in capturing people heading your website.

Shelley Rogers:                 Yeah, I hate filling out forms so I think that's great. I'll take a peak at that. We'll have all those recommended tech tips on our show notes page and thank you for sharing Teleprompter. I haven't heard of that one before either.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah.

Shelley Rogers:                 You did share your worst entrepreneurial moment and talked about your failures and what you've learned but I'd love to hear the other side, what would you be your aha moment, if you could share that specific story and what made it so special.

Isaac Tolpin:                       I would say one of my bests is back in 2008 and I was doing $5 million a year in my organization. We're top in the company or top a couple of spots out of 40 organizations. And I thought, I don't know if you've experienced this where you're agitated no matter ... Even though you're really successful with what you're doing, and I thought, "Well, maybe it's time for me to leave." And then I wrestled with that and I've decided, "No, it's time for me to stay but to do this how I really believe it should be done with who I am."

                                                That was a profound change and it didn't always make people around me happy, but what I did do is lead to greater success for all the people around me that were in my organization and we went from $5 million to $11 million when the economy was crashing in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. A lot of lessons came out of that which were really, really valuable for everything moving forward.

Shelley Rogers:                 How did you go from being to agitated like what changes did you make in order to go from $5 million to $11 million.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, it's interesting. The previous year, I read 30 purposeful books. I was on a big personal growth stint and I thought for sure that would help me grow the previous year and I didn't. I was super agitated and I realized that, "Okay, I have to have no fear of people at all," even owners of the company, whatever, no fear of people. I have to totally be myself and act without worry at all. And these are things I already acted out to get to that level for success but it was like just really taking these things to heart and to really frankly, glorify God in every success.

                                                I really feel like I got a spiritual wisdom at that moment and it was really interesting. After that, all these new concepts started coming to my mind. I started to exercise something called ... I would call it clear thinking where I will schedule a couple of hours a week where I did nothing but think. There was nothing in front of me and I would try to suspend my experience for a couple of hours because your experience is always trying to get in and do things based on how you've done them before, that's called condition thinking.

                                                Instead of condition thinking, I was trying to get to clear thinking to suspend all that and let my mind think of anything and everything. I started journaling a lot and I do this on Fridays for at least a couple of hours. Sometimes I would take a whole day doing interesting things and all these new solutions came to mind at how this business should be ran. Every time one came about, I would act on them and I would empower other leaders from our organizations to act on them, and they became so right, it was crazy. Everything worked.

                                                It was a little disruptive at that time because there was people in the company that didn't quite understand what was happening and maybe it was just a little bit too early than people are ready for, some of those things that were going on. But so many of those things now are mainstays in that company that they adopted. It was kind of the innovator's dilemma but if you want to become innovative to come up with new ideas, you've got to suspend your experience long enough to get your problem solving and you got to be willing to do things that are maybe even the antithesis of how things have been done before to find new solutions and new ways of doing things.

                                                It was really eye-opening and everybody on here listening, I just challenge you. You probably might be challenging me right now in you're thinking but I would say you probably have a lot of condition thinking and if you want to grow your business, you need to suspend that long enough to get to clear thinking. In fact, there's a book called Think Better, I think it's called. There's one part in it that makes this book really good. It talks about Kaizen, which is constant, never-ending improvement, I think. It's a Japanese term I'm sure [inaudible 00:36:23].

                                                He talked about in ... If there were a word in Japanese called Tenkaizen, it would mean good revolution. And good revolution means the opposite of Kaizen. Kaizen is incremental improvement. Think of Steve Jobs for a second. Before Steve Jobs created the iPhone, the phone looked a certain way. If he would have incrementally improve the way the phone existed, we'd still have buttons on our phone potentially too. But because he participated in what I would call from his book, Tenkaizen, a good revolution, which is thinking anew. Suspending what we know long enough to think completely anew and from that, you're seeing in our business today whole new channels, whole new industries, Uber, things like that. It's incredible because there's leaders out there thinking anew and that's how you get yourself to do that in a short sound bite.

Shelley Rogers:                 I can't agree more. I totally agree. I do a lot of coaching and training for the entrepreneurs, organization. And right now, we're doing a strategy model for the accelerated program and same thing, it's get out of the business to work on the business, not in the business. It's all about taking those two, three hours a week just to sit there and strategize and think, "What can I do? How can I be better than my competitors? What's going to set me apart? What's going to make my customers want to buy from me?"

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yes, absolutely.

Shelley Rogers:                 Speaking of books, I didn't ask you your favorite book.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Well, my favorite book you might have guess is the Bible. It's incredible. The ancient wisdom is incredible. However, I can give you another one. I'll give you another one, Good to Great. I'm sure a lot of you have read it, but my questions to you from Jim Collins, my question to you is have you actually implemented that stuff. If you have employees, have you actually done the [inaudible 00:38:21] and things like that.

                                                When I first read that book, I loved it and I didn't implement it. Then, I went back to it and I journaled it and I studied it and then I actually implemented it and it was transformation what that did in my organization.

Shelley Rogers:                 Yeah, it was interesting when you said you were on the personal development that one year and you did 30 different courses or books, it's so true. We could go to all these seminars. We can learn all these but if we don't implement it, then it's pointless.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yes, yes.

Shelley Rogers:                 It's about implementing and continuously improving. Just because you implement it, it doesn't mean that it's good to go. You got to keep going back, tweaking, making it better.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah. Next time someone asked you a good book, ask them back. If they tell you a good book, go, "Hey, tell me the one thing you've implemented from that book." And then I'll go read it.

Shelley Rogers:                 Yeah. Perfect. I'm curious to see or hear what you will be doing this time next year, Isaac.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Next year's going to be an exciting year. We're going to be scaling up ConveYour further, better market share and branding and letting the world know more about us. Another thing I'll be doing is taking a couple of month RV trip in the summer with my whole family. We have a 39-foot class C RV. We're going to take that around the country and I'll still be working remotely while we're travelling but that's another thing that we will be out the next year.

Shelley Rogers:                 Lovely. And what inspires you right now?

Isaac Tolpin:                       What inspires ... Being the best dad I possibly I can be. There's no time to spare for fathers, and mothers out there. It's just I have a 17-year-old now and I'm sure people can relate, it's like once you have that 17-year-old, it's like, "Okay, I've got to make count and I've got keep making a count with all the rest of the kids," and you start to see some of your shortfallings too once your kids get a little older. It's okay, you just got to move forward with where the shortcomings are but you got to be aggressive about fixing them. That really does inspire me.

                                                On the business side, transforming digital training, I mean killing boring companies that are feeding people this horrible stuff and enabling influencers to fully express their IP in a way that's humanized and people love in a digital environment because then they feel more comfortable creating leverage and that happened to be a reward than making money.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, that is very inspiring and this concludes our Inspiring Greatness interview with Isaac Tolpin but before I go, would you like to share a quote that inspires you?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, just a thought. How about a thought? Which is let's really question how we define success and let's not waste our lives pursuing a poorly defined definition of what success looks like. Let's really create a definition that aligns with our values and where we're called, what we're called to do and where we're called to go. And let's make sure we're not letting the pressures of the world define that word success for us. Let's get on it.

Shelley Rogers:                 Perfect. What is the best way our listeners can reach you?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yeah, find me at any social media, Isaac Tolpin. You can email me, Isaac@conveyour.com. You can also message me on front of our website at conveyour.com too and you'd probably get to me.

Shelley Rogers:                 Perfect. That's Conveyour.com?

Isaac Tolpin:                       Yes.

Shelley Rogers:                 Well, thank you so much for being a guest on Inspiring Greatness. It was wonderful to hear your story and share it with our listeners, Isaac.

Isaac Tolpin:                       Oh, it's so great to be here, Shelley. It was a lot of fun.

Shelley Rogers:                 Thank you for listening and spreading the word of Inspiring Greatness. We have some incredible guests coming up each week. Stay tuned for what's coming up by liking us on Facebook, searching there Inspiring Greatness podcast or subscribing on our webpage at inspiring-greatness.com.au. It's that time to commit to change, time to implement ideas. It's time to maximize every day and make decisions as if you only have a limited time to be great. Learn from the experiences our guests share. It's time to go out there and inspire greatness around you.