Business Excellence and the Power of Mentorship

0:00 My guest today is Robert Indries. Thanks, Robert, for coming back to Tools of the Podcast Trade. Thank you so much for having me again. Yes, absolutely. I'm happy to have you. All right, before we get on with it, and I know you've been on here before, but could you tell us who is Robert and what have you been up to since our last chat? Well, I believe if we are to stay true to our nature, Robert is a constantly evolving creature and human being.

0:41 As I said in the previous episode, I was born in a developing country in Romania. I've been enjoying engineering, technology, and business for almost two decades now. It's been a very amazing ride in which we've in total had 11 companies in our portfolio. We already sold three of them for a total of a little under $20 million in exits, and we still have eight companies in our portfolio. The most recent of which that launched after we had our podcast last year is a company called Alvenda.

1:22 It's a business process management system. So basically anyone that has or wants to systematize and procedure their business can now very easily do so within Alvenda. So even small companies that maybe just hire freelancers and VAs can very easily go there, define the procedure of what those people need to do, and then basically when they assign a task, they can attach a procedure to that task. And they can make that task recurring, so every single time those people need to follow process whenever they do their work. And it has a bunch of things like automated time tracking, and it has automatic escalations, So if someone's late, you never need to follow up with people anymore.

2:11 Because if they're late, by default, tasks escalate. And you set the escalation timer for every type of procedure. So we launched, so we had the beta at the end of last year, beginning of this year. It was around six months of beta. We got 126 points of feedback during the beta, and we implemented all of that. people were very happy to see the end result and then a couple months ago we launched and we had over 150 businesses sign up in about you know one and a half months however much that was the launch period and then since then more and more businesses are just signing up that was very exciting and on the other side i or me and my co-author we just launched a book called unshackled the seven levels of business excellence which basically is a summary of or not a summary because everything's very clearly written it's like a It's like a magnet for all of the thoughts, all of the business thoughts and all of the questions we've ever been asked on how to run a business, right?

3:32 My co-author has been in business for, I believe, 40 years now or a little bit longer. So he's my senior in both age and experience. An amazing person. I really hold him very dear. And we started working together a few years ago and we just said, hey, let's write a book on business. combined him and i together we've generated more than a billion dollars uh for our clients over the past few decades so it's uh something that we take a lot of pride in and um every single lesson like the foundational lessons right obviously the we don't go into specifics like for example if You want to do SEO?

4:23 What's the exact way of doing SEO? No, there are books on SEO and there are cool podcast episodes like you have, right? Like you've had a few months ago, an episode on SEO. So all of those things you can look into, but the foundations of business itself, all of them are in the book. Yeah. Oh, wow. I mean, it takes a lot to write a book. It takes even more to write a book on business. But then if I remember our last conversation correctly, you've been in business a while and you've not just... started a business and been in that business for decades, you are in a lot of different enterprises, different business, right?

5:07 So you're well familiar with how businesses run and their systems. I must say, I am still surprised that you achieve as much as you do because you look like a young man, you know? But I want to ask you, you mentioned your partner, your business partner, who is also being a great help to you. And I'm a big believer in mentorship. How important has that been to your success?

5:47 Well, I would say that mentorship in general helps you Do things faster. I believe that someone that has determination, you know, and drive and, you know, passion for something, they will figure it out sooner or later. Because, you know, people are way dumber than we are figured it out, right? So sooner or later you will figure it out yourself. The difference is that when you take coaching and mentorship and you look to your peers that have been there and done that, right? And then you literally get almost like a shortcut to where you want to go.

6:29 Instead of bashing your head into the wall for three years, you can get the same result in six months. Because now you know what to do. So... I am a very big believer that we should always be seeking. We should always remain humble because we don't have all of the answers and we should always be seeking better ways of doing things, better perspectives on whatever it is that we're working on, right? Better contacts that we can have in our network, right? That make us introductions that we need or that... Like for example, even in simple things, like recently we had a renovation.

7:12 We have a house in the city center and it needed some renovating. And even outside of the house. And the reality is that we had no idea. you know, what to do, who to work with, and so on. What we did, we just called our network, right? We called people that we knew renovated their house and did it well, and we loved the end result. So we called them and we asked, hey, who did you work with? What was the price? Like, what should we expect? That's a form of mentorship, right? Mm-hmm. That's a very simple metaphor for business, right? And we ended up working with those people and we saved thousands of dollars and I don't know how many headaches because we got a shortcut.

7:52 Instead of paying more money, like losing money, losing time and getting stressed because we're working with people that... let's say, might not be the best for exactly what we need, we went to our network, we found mentorship there, and then we implemented what they suggested. Just like that in business, I've always had mentors. From the very beginning, even in my teens, I used to have mentors. Because when I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. Even as an engineer, I always had mentors. I remember the first time one of my mentors put me in front of a Linux computer.

8:36 And it was a black screen and a little cursor, right? Like a text cursor. And he's like, okay, go. I'm like, what do you mean? I don't, what do I do? What do I click on? There's no buttons. Like what buttons? You don't have buttons here. Like, what do you mean? Where's the interface? Like, how do I know what do I need to do? And then he showed me a book, like as thick as the Bible. He's like, read this and then you'll figure it out. Right. And I started reading the book and I started learning command prompts, right? Like CD, exchange directory and so on and so forth. And you have so many different things.

9:19 And I literally started seeing that could be like imagining what's in the computer without an interface, just being able to work with it. And so always, always should do that. And in business, I would get mentorship in sales, which I had many times. I got mentorship in marketing. I got mentorship in HR recruitment. I got mentorship in technology, like how we should implement certain things. We now are getting mentorship, for example, from AWS. We are AWS partners and we resell their things. What else? We...

10:00 And so the way, like let me tell you this, the way I've met my co-author is that I haven't had a mentor, this was a while ago, I haven't had a mentor in business for like two years. And the main reason for that was because I kept having mentor after mentor after mentor and I kept exceeding them. So I was making five figures. I found a mentor that was making six figures. And I talked to them. I asked them what they do and so on. I executed on their strategies. I got to six figures. Then I found a mentor that was in the millions, right? They're at seven figures. I talked to them. implemented everything that they taught me, like in the mentorship program or consulting or coaching or whatever.

10:45 And then I became a millionaire by the time I was 25. And then I found multimillionaires and I was talking to them. I actually got as far as billionaires. Like I literally have billionaires in my network that I could just speak to. And it's very cool because they're just normal people. It's so strange because, oh my God, the billionaire, they have more money than they could ever spend. Though that's true, we have a saying in this part of Europe, no one can eat with two mouths. You eat the same meat or the same vegan food or the same whatever. It's not like if you pay $200 extra in a restaurant, it's going to be, oh my God, the difference.

11:30 No, it's not. You can get the same thing for $10 and nutritionally speaking, it's literally almost identical. So it doesn't really matter. In terms of workouts and health and so on, everything that's available to you are the same things that's available to them. The only difference is they can maybe do cryogen, they can do whatever fancy things, but those are not necessary for optimal health. Those are like the maybe 5% to 10% differences. But up until then, 95% of health you can attain without being a billionaire or millionaire or whatever. So all of these things, basically, the guy, for example, many times when we speak, he's on the treadmill.

12:11 Literally, a treadmill costs a few hundred dollars, right? He's on the treadmill, you know? Yeah. That's it. And that's what he uses for cardio. And basically... At one point, I couldn't find other mentors that I resonated with. Not because I couldn't find people that were richer than I am, but because all of those people have had some form of imbalances in their life, which I didn't agree with. For example, many of them were divorced. Some of them were divorced multiple times over. Right. Many of them were very much overweight or obese.

12:52 Right. I'm like, I don't want to give career success, you know, and sacrifice health or sacrifice my amazing relationship with my beautiful wife or time with my children or all of that. Right. And you can see many, many millionaires and billionaires say, you know, I spend no time with my children. I don't want that. So I'm not going to listen to people that that's what they've done. Because if I go, that's what they know. So that's the path they would guide me on. So I don't want that. So it was very hard for me to find. And I did try for like two years. I didn't have a mentor. I was just basically, you know, just me and God, you know, just having conversations.

13:33 And I mean, you could argue I still had the best mentor, you know. Yes, a good mentor, yeah. I could always pray and have good conversations and get revelation. So that would still happen for those two years. At the same time, you still feel that clinging desire to have someone that's, you know, 10 or 100 steps ahead of you and talk to you. So then I met with my co-author, Aaron. at the conference of all places in London. You said you went to London this year, right? So we met in London quite a few years ago and he was a main stage speaker. We talked. I liked his speech. Then we talked for a little bit. I asked him a hundred stupid questions, you know, and just bombarded him with questions.

14:17 Every single answer was incredibly pertinent. I'm like, how did I not think of that? That's crazy good. And so then I realized this guy isn't a theoretical teacher. This guy has been in the trenches just like I have. The difference is that I've been in the trenches for 15 years. He has been in the trenches for 35 years. So this is very big, more than double my experience in business and in life and so on. What I bring to the table in the book is everything that has to do with technology, with new perspectives, with how you should run business today remotely and how you should find people, how you should hire them and so on, which are slightly different than what Aaron used to do.

15:07 Because he is now far removed from his businesses. He just does networking and so on and so forth. He is what we call a level 10 in terms of the book. Like we have seven levels total. We have level zero, then levels one through five, and then level 10, right? Because you make a huge leap between five to 10. So basically you have all of these... overarching concepts of this is how business should be run and then also the nitty-gritty of this is exactly how you hold an interview this is exactly you know how you write the job description this is exactly you know how you create the procedure this is exactly how you hold weekly meetings with your team etc like every single thing thing is there and it's like half half half of it is his brain half of it is my brain and then you know everything comes together nicely in the book Okay.

16:05 All right. Thank you. And speaking of the book, but before we get into that, I appreciate you explaining that because I think sometimes we kind of, oh, mentorship, I get a mentor, and we only think of jobs, right? We don't think of business owners and successful business owners having mentors. But no matter what level in life we are, we need, we always need that extra step. You know, Tony Robbins likes to say that two millimeter gap, we usually need that bridging, right? And Jim Rowan says we're the average of the five people we spend the most time with.

16:49 So you are a typical example of the person who is always searching, always looking for ways to improve and better themselves. So I appreciate you sharing that with us. Yeah. Okay. So being as our show is for aspiring podcasters, new podcasters, can you entice them to buy your book? by giving them one or two tips that they could use in podcasting and show them how they need to get more by going to see what you have in this book.

17:31 Of course. So within the podcast, we go very deep into multiple aspects that help you build a business that both thrives right now today and also lasts for the future because many people that go into either entrepreneurship or a side hustle like a podcast or things like that because some people might have it as their main business like hey i do podcasting for others it might be a marketing channel that they use right or or uh right like hey this is what we do we're like for example i know one guy that i really admire he's a very competent cto he's a technical guy and he has i think it's called the cto show or something like that where he interviews other ctos and he they talk you know very technical things and how you know their decisions impact the business and so on and so forth so i really like it it's it's great i recommend it for anyone that's technical then basically it can also be a side thing that you do like maybe you have a job or whatever and then you also want to do podcasting you know uh sort of like if i think about it i think joe rogan started this as a hobby because he was in mma before that and so on and so forth like i think right it was a hobby and i remember made for many people it was a hobby uh and then they made a project out of it and then that grew you know like crazy so

19:01 The book helps you put structure, order. We call it going from chaos to order, right? It helps you put order in every single thing you do. It takes the guesswork out of this. If you want to do podcasting just for the fun of it, so not like a business, not like a project that you actually care about, then the book doesn't help you. Because it's like getting a business book and you want to just paint as an artist. The book isn't really going to help you unless you want to sell your paintings, right? Unless you want to build a brand around, hey, this is the style of painting I'm going for, right?

19:42 And this will be my brand within the industry of painters, right? And so on and so forth, or artwork. Just like that, with podcasting, if you want to make it... into something that grows beyond yourself, like literally leaves an impact on the community of listeners that you will eventually have, then that's why you should get order. Whether you get our book or something else, you don't really see progress without order. It has to be ordered, otherwise you don't have progress. Like for example, you would think that A tree just randomly grows.

20:23 But that's false. A tree has divine order built into every cell. It knows exactly what to do, in what direction to grow, where to have a leaf, where to have a fruit, and so on and so forth. For example, the vast majority, 99.9% of people don't know this. Cherry trees have a very specific thing that they do. I don't know if you know, but cherries come in pairs. Like there's one little thing at the top and then you have two cherries, right? And so cherries always come in pairs. So what the cherry tree does is if it rains a lot that year, all of the cherries are fine and you just get to pick all of them and so on and so forth.

21:08 The cherry tree just had enough water. However, if there's drought, the cherry tree will literally sacrifice one of the cherries from each one of those because it doesn't have enough water to sustain both. Imagine. So that's what the cherry tree does. And it takes that decision. It knows it's like this year, we're not gonna have enough water. I need to start sacrificing some of these cherries so that the ones that are left have the highest chances of making other cherry trees, right? And so it's divine. It's very good. If you look into, you know, anything that has to do with trees and nature and so on.

21:51 And so you'll see it's complete order. There's no chaos there. Everything's perfectly planned out. So just like that, if you want success in business, you should have things structured. And that's what the book gives you. we literally have endorsements from the former president of Warner Brothers International, from the founder of Uggs Boots, which is again another billion dollar company, from one of the original sharks on Shark Tank, right? And so on. Like these are people that have all made billions and they're telling us, that this book has everything you need to build an amazing business. You literally have all of their testimonials and endorsements and so on.

22:35 These are people within our network, right? So we mingle with the right type of people when it comes to business. And talking of podcasting, one of the biggest podcasts on the planet, Entrepreneur on Fire, he left us a testimonial. He also praises the book and says that basically if you want to build a business, you should definitely get the book, right? Things of that nature, hopefully that was enticing enough. The most important thing is to be a seeker, to be a humble seeker. That's what we call it. And whether you get our book or any other book that you resonate with, Get that and keep growing, keep growing.

23:20 And if you can afford a mentor, go for it. Get a mentor. Get mentorship. Because mentorship literally helps you cut months, if not years, off of the time frame of what it would otherwise take you to figure it out. And not because of your intelligence. Simply because of your time. Because let's say you have a question. Yes. should I use this setup or this setup, right? Or whatever, should I do this or that? Whatever it is in podcasting, right? And so you can spend an hour of your time doing that, figuring that out or maybe more, or obviously now you can ask ChatGPT, but again, you can't really trust it. It's AI, it just comes up with stuff that it finds on the internet.

24:04 You can trust it to the extent that you would trust the washing machine to know how to wash your clothes. That's about it. But it's not an expert in podcasting, right? It's an expert in clothes washing, which is to, in that case, to regurgitate information that's already live online, right? It doesn't have a filter of quality. That's my point. It doesn't know if what it's saying... is what it should be saying. It just thinks that that's what it should be saying. And so a mentor is different because a mentor has real AI, not artificial, but real intelligence that can actually comprehend and say, well, I've tried these three things and I can tell you this third one is the best one.

24:46 Yes. whatever so what I do when I go to coaching calls and mentoring calls and so on and so forth I I'm prepared with like a dozen questions or two or three dozen questions I have so many questions I remember Aaron was shocked because I also bought coaching from him I paid a very significant amount of money to be coached by him and I would come to the calls with so many questions. He said, Robert, I don't think I've ever met anyone that had so many questions like you. Because I'm actually implementing everything. Everything you say, the next day I'm putting it to practice.

25:26 And so when we meet a week from now, because we had weekly coaching calls, when we meet a week from now, I'm going to have so many questions because this worked, this didn't work, this I tried to do. And for some reason, I didn't know. I got to stop. I have a bottleneck here or whatever. Or this is the result. And I don't know what to think about the result. Is it good? Is it bad? You don't even know because you're doing something new. And it's something that... I do myself and I really enjoy when people that get mentorship from me come prepared. They come to the call and they're like, tell me. I'm like, what?

26:08 Tell you what? Well, how do I do this? This one. It's not useful conversation. They already lost three minutes of their time and consulting with us or at least with me is $1,000 an hour, right? So they just lost basically $30 or whatever the value of that was, right? So come prepared with questions, right? And then those questions will lead to follow up questions and to other things. And so that's typically how I like to run those. But to answer your question, we always take mentorship ourselves. And I literally just had a call with our chief of marketing against someone that has been in marketing for over a decade and has generated hundreds of millions of dollars, right, for our clients, they said, Robert, I feel I need some coaching and I feel I need to take some courses on this and this and this subject.

27:04 I'm like, perfect. I love that you want to do that. Go for it. We'll cover the expense. No problem. Right. And so that's what you believe internally. And hopefully that answers your question. It does. Thank you. Can you, do you have a copy of the book you could hold up? Oh, they're literally being sent right now, but I can give you the link to the book, and then people in the show notes can check it out. It's very easy. It's called theunshackledlife.com, right? Because the book is called Unshackled, right? And we teach people how to live the unshackled life. In my case, for example, again, we have eight businesses in our portfolio right now.

27:48 Most people have a struggle managing one or overseeing one, right? We have eight and they're in different industries, different sectors all over the planet. We operate in 19 different sectors in 18 different countries or 17 countries, something like that. So it's a lot of work to do. and to manage everything and to oversee everything. However, at the same time, I spend so many hours with my wife every single day and every week. I spend time with my child. I have a girl. And we want, hopefully, to have more children in the future. I go to the gym every day or every other day, very often, at least five times.

28:29 We go for walks and so on. So I spend time with my mom and with my parents and with her parents. So we're not sacrificing anything, right? We're literally living an unshackled life. We're saying, if this takes time from me, spend from me, bonding with my baby girl i am not going to do it so i need to figure out a way to get this done without sacrificing time with my girl right with my daughter so that's uh that's basically how we think and we explain all of that in uh the book which you can find at the unshackledlife.com okay all right and um sorry we can we'll put the links in the show notes and system structure and mentorship i'm getting those three words terms from you and if we learn nothing i hope we can follow you know your message using those three words yeah thank you yes okay that's a good summary yeah thank you so what is robert grateful for today Robert today is incredibly grateful for everything that has to do with his family.

29:47 Um, I'm very grateful. We have supportive mothers and, uh, relatives and everyone comes together, you know, to help us with, you know, our, our, um, child. I, I remember in the second day or not, so it was the first day when we came home with Olivia, My mom came because she wanted to help and make sure, you know, we have all of the information that we need. Again, a form of mentorship, right? She would literally teach us, this is how you bathe her, this is what you do, this is how you change her. We've never done this before, right? It doesn't matter that I made $10 million in business.

30:29 I was new at raising a child and I was taking mentorship from someone that raised multiple children and also helped with at least $100 children because my mom's a nurse, right? or she used to be, she's retired now, but literally everything we needed. And she literally stayed with us that night until the next morning. And so we got to rest. It was fine, especially for my beloved wife. And this is just a point of gratefulness for us every week. My wife and I cry at least once a week at how grateful we are for our families, for, you know, everyone coming together whenever we need them if we need them to you know do something and it's an emergency everyone just jumps up it's like a rally and I we know many people don't have that in their lives many people don't have that family support and we're just very blessed and grateful we do awesome thank you thank you for sharing that and congratulations on Olivia So I am just, you know, grateful that you were able to come and share so much value with us.

31:49 And as John Lee Dumas would say, so much fire. And so, um, I appreciate you coming and, um, we put some links in the show notes and if you would, I follow up and see when that, when your book Unshackled will be published so we can, um, At least mention it when we're promoting this episode. Yeah, of course. Okay. All right. So any parting shots? Well, I think that anyone listening should know that whether they engage in podcasting or whether they have a podcast on business or on marketing or on artwork or whatever, they should always do what they enjoy doing.

32:33 If I do have a secret, like in quotes, it's that I do things with people I really like, like I like the people I work with, And I only work on projects I believe in. Even if it's a simple thing, you know, because we have simple things that we're working on. It doesn't need to be world changing. But I believe in the value that that thing adds to society. business, that service, that product, and so on. And so it gets me excited to know that, well, another 500 people got value from this last month, and another 600 people got value from this this month, and so on and so forth, right? So do things you enjoy, and your entire life will be joyous.

33:19 All right. Thank you. Thank you, Robert and Darius, for coming and talking to us today. I really appreciate you. Likewise. Thank you so much again.