JAY SEABROOK — I Created a Multi-Million Dollar Company for Financial Dummies Like Me

I was too dumb to go to college. I smoked way too much weed in high school. So, I was a minimum wage employee until I was 24.

I was also an idiot when it came to managing money. Growing up in Canada, the school systems had absolutely no education on personal finance. My business partner, Kevin, was even worse.

Kevin got a credit card with a $20,000 limit when he was 19. Not knowing any better, he went to a car dealership and bought a brand new car with that card.

Both Kevin and I separately ended up in the same place. I had little options with my lack of education, but I’d started learning sales skills by reading a lot of books on it.
Kevin, a high-school dropout, was pretty good at talking to people. He’d called about 60 realtors from the Yellow Pages, offering to work for them for free if they’d teach him everything they knew. He spoke to this guy who was starting a sales training company for realtors — Richard Robbins International. And that’s how we met.

We bonded over how we both saw this void in the financial industry:
No one was teaching Canadians what to do with their money except for the banks.

So, while we worked our sales roles, we’d each spend about five hours per week creating a financial training program — enRICHed Academy.
Using our sales skills, we convinced teachers across our province to let us come talk to their students about money.

In those first few years, we did over 250 free high school presentations.

But we knew that we actually needed a product to sell. We’d pay attention to what topics made students go to sleep and what excited them — and we used our own money to film our first DVD training videos.

We started by selling them to students’ parents and kept looking for other speaking opportunities. I think the first day we had our DVDs, we sold like $20,000 worth to a group of mortgage brokers we spoke in front of — who bought them as gifts to give to their clients.

Today, we’re the top Canadian financial advice company that teaches students and employees everything they need to know about earning, saving, and investing your income.

Step-by-Step Strategy

1. Learn sales skills through books, audiobooks, and podcasts.

2. Look for an opportunity in a field you’re passionate about.

3. Figure out the common problems people face in that field.

4. Create a product or service that solves this problem for them.

5. Plan how you’ll get your solution in front of those people.

6. Get revenue coming in, so you can keep improving it.

7. Find more people looking for your product, and the easiest way to put it in front of a lot of them at once.

A lot of people have tried to figure out how to make money from financial education. The reason it’s so difficult is because you’ve got one big competitor: banks.
Sure, you can get financial advice from a bank — but you’ll get steered toward their products.

And it’s not cheap to do your money business with a bank. Canada is one of the most expensive countries in the world for financial advice.

What makes us different is that we’re not selling you anything. We’re unbiased.

On top of that, we’ve put A LOT of energy into making this not utterly devastating to learn. Because, let’s be honest, most financial education is horrifying to listen to.

Building a business isn’t just about selling something to people — it’s about figuring out how to make it as easy as possible for you to help as many people as possible.

We realized that selling these DVDs directly to people wasn’t the smartest way. So, we started building relationships with schools to get them to teach the Enriched Academy program to their students.
From there, we then started approaching large corporations to do the same thing with their employees.

Isn’t Everyone + Their Mom Selling Ideas Online Today?

An idea is not enough — revenue is the key piece. We couldn’t just take an “idea” on Dragon’s Den. We had to show the money-making potential first.

You need to figure out how your idea is going to make money as soon as possible.

And, in order to make YOU money, it needs to be valuable for other people.

If you’re selling an educational product, get clear on:

• Who will benefit the most from this product?

• What problem would this solve for them?

• Where can I find these people and get it in front of as many of them as possible?

Once you get that down, turn your focus to making it better and better!
We went from putting students to sleep (once they realized this wasn’t going to be on a test) to having them be SO excited about what we were saying.

I’ll never forget this one day, early on, this dad called me and said,

“My daughter came home from your presentation today and said she wants us to take her Christmas presents back so she can invest that money. Do you have some training or something I can show my other kids?”

How to Price Yourself

1. Don’t give your product away for free. Even if you start by charging a lower amount than you think it’s worth — it doesn’t become real until you get someone to pay for it.
The sooner you figure out how to get people to pay for it, the sooner you can start ramping things up and making it better.

2. Figure out how you can turn it into recurring revenue. Is this a training someone could keep a subscription to? Could you partner with other professionals who could benefit from sharing it with their people?
We went from selling $600 courses to selling to 350,000+ people on a monthly basis — and at a much cheaper rate for them, too!

Tools + Costs to Run the Biz

When we started out, it was literally just me and Kevin putting hours in. Once we determined that we were going to make the DVD training, we put in around $200,000 of our own money to fund making them.

In 2012, we hired my mom to do our administrative work. She would keep track of our income and expenses, handle appointments, etc.

In the beginning, be prepared to do a lot of things yourself to keep your costs low until you get that revenue coming in.
Then you can start to figure out which tasks you can pay someone else to do, so you can focus on the bigger goals.

Plus, once you’ve done a task yourself, it’ll become a lot easier to hire for it. I’d recommend you outsource anything other than sales — because no one will be able to promote your company as effectively as its creators.

How to Get Clients

Pick up the phone and call. Don’t just email or LinkedIn message people.

You’re more nervous calling someone because there’s a chance of error. What if you stutter or mess up your words? What if you get shot down? I get that.

But that just means you need to keep doing it and get better at it.

A huge advantage in ANY business is learning how to get people’s attention.

I get 5-10 emails a day from people who want to offer me something. But if someone actually takes the time to call me, or even leaves me a compelling voicemail, and they’re persistent — I am going to give them my time.

We had this 17-year-old kid reach out to us, saying how much he loved our training videos. Then he proceeded to spend 10 minutes telling us how he thought he could have been better. I immediately offered that kid a job.

Don’t be afraid to show someone how passionate you are.

Daily Hack For Productivity

I time block everything.

I have a goal list for my life, and I break that into a goal list for the year. That helps me figure out what action steps I can take this year to move me toward that goal.
Then, I break down that year goal list into weekly goals. By looking at my big goals and breaking them down into smaller steps, I’m way more clear on what I need to do.

We’ve actually now added a 1.5-hour training on how to be productive and kick ass in your career using this strategy.

Example: I have certain times of the day where I’ll take meetings, and certain times where I’m in deep focus mode. Sometimes people will need something from me, and I’m like “Thanks, I’ll get add that into my next week’s list — I’m all booked up this week.”

Create time blocks in your schedule for certain tasks, and commit to them. Otherwise, all the noise of life comes in and steals your time away from the goals you’re really trying to work on.

One Weird Wealth Habit

Truly — never stop seeing yourself as a student.

If you want to know a topic — you are five books away from being way smarter than 95% of the world on it.

I am still always reading books or listening to audiobooks or podcasts about business, sales, and money.

Think about how amazing it is that you can get 30 years of someone’s wisdom in a five-hour book!

For Aspiring Entrepreneurs

1. Learn sales. People are so afraid to do sales, but it is literally the most valuable skill you can learn if you’re trying to do ANY kind of business. I convinced those first 30 teachers to let us present to their students because I’d learned how to get people enticed enough to invite us.

2. Small steps every day. I dedicated five hours per week to this project before I even knew exactly what to work on. Keep taking small actions toward your goal, keep that momentum going, and you will figure all the details out as you progress.

3. Do you want life-changing, or do you want quick? We spent 14 years developing Enriched Academy before we turned it into a full-time career for ourselves. Now, it’s grown into something that’ll make millions of people millionaires. Commit to the dream!

After one month of publishing these newsletters, we’ve found that the people we interview often have overlapping advice.

Find Jay’s BONUS advice in our end-of-month issue, where we’ll compare it to two others to give YOU the top takeaways!