Sharkpreneur: JV Crum III

What is conscious millionaire? JV Crum III of ConsciousMillionaire.com says there are several ways to define it but it really is all about building a business that has a bigger purpose than just the money. Being a conscious millionaire, you got to have a driving desire to make a difference in people’s lives. Intentionally making a positive impact as the focus of your business is the smartest thing you could ever do because impact leads to profits. JV talks about what inspired him to start Conscious Millionaire and why it took seven years to complete his book.

Listen to the podcast here:

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Sharkpreneur: JV Crum III

I have the good fortune to be with JV Crum III of ConsciousMillionare.com. JV is the Founder of ConsciousMillionare.com. Conscious Millionaire: Grow Your Business by Making a Difference is a number one book on Amazon. The Conscious Millionaire Podcast is top thirteen business podcasts of last year according to Inc. Magazine. He also writes for Huffington Post and many other places in his spare time, which he doesn’t have any of. JV, thank you so much for joining us.

Seth, I’m so excited. I want to give a shout-out to Authority Bootcamp because that’s where we met, and it was incredible experience and such a great group of people.

I am very glad I was able to speak at that event and got to meet you. Let’s go back in time a little bit. What is Conscious Millionaire?

There are several ways to approach what conscious means. I have three different definitions in my book, but let’s take what I think is the most fundamental. It’s building a business that has a bigger purpose than just the money. I think that’s good business, because it’s something that comes out of the entrepreneur, it’s something that is a driving desire of theirs to make this kind of a difference with their life. Then they go, “How can I connect with a group of people who want that difference?”A lot of magic can happen because the truth is, no one’s going to pay you money unless you’re making an impact in their life. Intentionally making a positive impact as the focus of your business, to me, is the smartest thing you could ever do.

I would agree 100%, however, I am biased. What inspired you to start Conscious Millionaire?

I was skiing for the winter over Lake Tahoe and I went over to San Francisco for the weekend, so it’s about three-and-a-half-hour drive. Literally I’m walking along the streets and I see this brochure, like you’d have those big stacked-up brochures, and it’s for the Green Festival, which I knew nothing about at that moment. I said, “It’s interesting.” I picked it up, put it in my SUV, and when I got to the place that I was renting, I got in the hot tub and I’m going through it and I see the word ‘conscious’. My intuition comes visually, and I saw the phrase in my forehead, Conscious Millionaire. I got a little tingling in my spine.

For about two or three years I’d been doing a lot of things, sweat lodges, going camping for two or three weeks at a time, I’d sold companies and I said, “I got all these talents, but what can I do with them that makes the world better?” The moment Conscious Millionaire came into my mind, I said, “That’s exactly what it is. This is the thing that I’ve been waiting for.”Knowing the metaphysical side of this, how the universe works, I stayed in the hot tub for another 40 minutes and I said, “You’ve been looking for this for two or three years. Why don’t you have a good time and wait?” The URL will be there, and it was. Being a good attorney, I filed my trademarks. I have over 90 trademarks around the world on Conscious Millionaire.

I saw that was it. That was a way that I could bring what I wanted to do, and it worked for me because I made my first money and had my first million at 25. I turned around a family company that was a regional trucking line that had no internal passion for me. I got excited about learning about the systems and how to build a business, how to turn it around, how to get the cash flows, but I wasn’t fulfilled. I ultimately sold it because I said, “There’s got to be something more to my life than just running a company that puts money in the bank but doesn’t fulfill my soul.” I was out looking for a soul fulfillment journey. I said, “I want to help other people be highly successful financially, but I want them to do it in a way that’s going to fulfill their soul and will seem meaningful and purposeful. At the end of the day, they’ll feel like they did something that matters.” I knew how horrible it was to, at the end of the day, feel like I hadn’t done anything that mattered. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life that way. Naturally, what’s happening is I attract people who want to live this way of feeling fulfilled, like they’re doing something that matters, and they want to be highly financially successful.

Conscious Millionaire: Intentionally making a positive impact as the focus of your business, to me, is the smartest thing you could ever do.

Which came first, the book or the podcast?

I rewrote the book seven times over seven years. It’s a long story. I had mono. My dad died. I almost died. Every time one of these events would happen, the book would be finished and then I rip it apart and start all over because if you lay in bed for three or four months at a time, you will review every page of your book. Then you don’t like it at all. Interestingly, it took seven years for it to come out. The book and the podcast almost came out simultaneously. The soft launch of the book was in October of 2014 and the podcast launched September 16th of 2014. They were launching together. It wasn’t planned. It’s just the way it happened.

You’ve had an amazing track record with the podcast. How many listeners, downloads, and subscribers are you up to now and how did you grow it?

I have over twelve million worldwide in 194 countries. We now have four podcasts. One of them is seven days a week. How did I grow it? I’m a numbers guy. I’m trained as a tax attorney. Numbers come into everything. I’m not in any way exaggerating that for at least the first year, I’d get up every hour during the night and look at my Libsyn numbers, I’d look at everything I was doing probably fifteen times a day. I studied patterns, I studied how to write tweets, and I studied everything that we did and what worked and what didn’t work. I would frequently make major changes in marketing after a week. It took about a year and then I figured out what was working. I’m about to go through all that oil all over again. There’s so many new avenues.

I realized it was about distribution and part of it was that we went old school. I’m about to get on a whole lot more radio stations and we got on radio stations. We would have different outlets where we’d have streaming downloads from those outlets. I realized that the game is a distribution game and that podcasting is one piece of it, but there are many ways you can repurpose that. We do a blog on all of our major podcast. We put them on LinkedIn. I had a heart attack weeks ago. I was about to do a bunch of videos and I’m about to catch up and be able to do those and put them on YouTube and promote all the things that we’re doing. It’s looking at all the different ways that we can get it out there and touch people and make a difference.

Even though I’m extremely numbers driven, why I started the podcast is I wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. My motivation is totally different than I just want people to know who I am or it’s only about attracting clients. It’s about those things, but that’s not the biggest drive. The biggest drive is that I want to touch people’s lives and make a difference.

Now, you’ve gotten the podcast to some incredible numbers. How did you get Inc. to name you one of the top thirteen top business podcasts?

The magic is I didn’t. All of a sudden, I got a link that said, “Here’s the article and your name is one of the top thirteen.” There was John Lee Dumas and a few other people like that. It was ninth on the list and I’m going, “That’s interesting.” Nobody’s ever asked me about this, but at first, I was going like, “Is this a joke?” That’s what I said to myself. Then I realized it wasn’t. I went, “We should tell people that I was in Inc. Magazine.”

There are many business podcasts. There’s many consciousness and spirituality podcasts. There’s even a handful of conscious business podcasts, but your numbers not only blow away most of the spirituality ones that are hosted by Joel Osteen of the world, but you also blow away most of the business podcasts numbers too, and yet you can still walk down the street and go to Starbucks and there aren’t any teenage girls chasing you.

It is nice when you go to conferences and people know who you are. I knew that I was going to become a public person and we’re just at the tip of the iceberg, and I knew that was part of what was going to be part of my life. I wasn’t very happy about that. You have the sense that this is what’s going to happen in your life so that you can fulfill your mission because to me, that’s what it’s all about. I value my privacy, so I’ve had to learn how are you going to manage all this the bigger it becomes and how are you accessible and where do you draw boundaries. I’ve thought about a lot of those things. What’s nice is that I’m known in a niche but I’m not Tom Cruise. That’s nice because I would hate that completely. I like to be able to walk down the street and meet new people and say hi to people and it’s just a person saying hi.

[Tweet “It’s about impact, because impact leads to profits.”]

You have additional resources available to help folks become conscious millionaires. Who is your ideal clients or listener or reader?

That’s all the same for the most part. There are two groups. I work with coaches and consultants who’ve had success, so they might have $50,000 to $100,000 or more in revenue because coaches don’t tend to make the same revenue as a big business. I want to help them get to their next milestone. For some, that might be a quarter of a million or half a million. For some, it’s a million. It depends on where they want to go. The entrepreneurs I work with tend to be both seven and eight-figure entrepreneurs and they want to make some substantial increase. Here’s what they all have in common. They want to perform at a high level and I’m a high-performance coach, so they want to go someplace they’ve never been and usually, it involves them taking a deeper look at why they’re here and how they can specifically channel that. Channel that, I mean this in the sense of what you want to do with your business.

How can they channel that into a specific message that’s going to resonate with people and make a difference and attract people? The thing that I teach over and over again is that it’s about impact, because impact leads to profits, and so many people have that backwards. They wake up in the morning and they go, “How can I make more money?” The real question should be, “How can I make a bigger impact that’s relevant to the people I want to help?” I assure you, that is the only reason they will consistently give you any money.

The folks who you are helping, those speakers, those coaches, those consultants, however we’re defining them, what are some of the biggest mistakes you find they’re making when they come to you?

It’s pretty consistent. I work a lot on the mindset. In general terms, they’re not thinking precisely and they’re not thinking as big about what’s possible for them. In terms of their action, it’s usually very scattered over too many items. I’m a very lean design person. My formula for creating wealth is conscious, focused action. I don’t want anyone to have more than three outcomes that we’re attempting to achieve in any 30 to 90 -day out outcome because I want you to choose what’s important and you need to know what order they’re in.

Here’s an interesting thing. People pay me this money to coach with me and I don’t allow people to have any goals. You’re going to go, “If people are hiring you as a high-performance coach, you assume they wanted to achieve something. They have them.” I go, “Yes, and I want them to. I only allow them to have commitments.” I tell everybody exactly the same thing. If you make commitments between now and the next session and you start showing up and you don’t do your commitments, I won’t work with you. It’s your job to keep your commitments. If you’re not keeping them, that’s what we need to work on because that’s going to make the difference between you getting out there and shining at a high level and just staying where you are. Nobody who comes to me wants to stay where they are.

You’re doing so much. You’re talking about conscious focus. How do you stay focused?

I have a heart attack.

Conscious Millionaire: My formula for creating wealth is conscious, focused action.

Let’s say we don’t want to do that.

If you don’t want to have a heart attack, you can do what I’ve had to do because I did have a heart attack. I’ve cut back 40% of my hours. Whatever your hours are, if you cut back to 40% of your hours and they were all full to begin with, I guarantee you this is going to cause a huge hiccup. It’s more than a hiccup. Every day I’m still having to redefine my priorities for the day, this is what’s most important in what order, and learn to hone out everything that is an important. It’s the same thing that I teach, it’s the same thing I’ve been doing, but I’m having to do it on a grand scale but in a granular way because I don’t have an option. At 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM, I’m simply going to be tired and I needed to rest. I have to make those decisions, but I’m going, “This could be one of the best things that ever happen.”

I’ve already scheduled out my schedule for two, three months where I’m starting at 10:00 AM and ending at 5:00 PM, which is completely new for me. I need to do exercise and rehab in the morning, spiritual practices and Qigong and all this stuff that’s very useful for my heart. I’m going, “This is a better way of life because come this weekend, I’m taking personal time.” Tomorrow night, the next night, I’m going to performances and I’m going, “This is what you’re doing.” Life looks different for me, but it’s getting that laser focus wherever you are. Either you can have a heart attack and you don’t have a choice or you could just make a decision and not have a choice. Burn the bridges. It’s making me a better entrepreneur because number one, it’s creating an impact that makes sales. I go, “You’ve got stuff that’s getting in the way of that. You need to stop doing that other stuff and just do this.”

Talk a little bit about some of the resources you have available to help folks who want to learn to become a more conscious millionaire.

Let me give you a couple of resources. You decide what you want. First of all, my book was number one on Amazon in 34 categories, number one at the same time and moved about 50,000 books in three days, which was interesting. If you’d like a copy of my book for free, you can go to ConsciousMillionaire.com/FreeBook. If you’re a coach or consultant and you want to know what are the specific steps that you need to take, I’ve outlined them in an infographic that’s one page. You can go to a ConsciousMillionaire.com/SevenFigureFormula. That’s my seven-figure formula. A lot of people were asking me, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which steps to take. I don’t know what I should be doing now.” They had them muddled, so they were going in multiple directions, but it wasn’t going to get them where they wanted to go. I want to know what kinds of things you need to be focused on at each stage of building and getting to new milestones.

[Tweet “The greatest tragedy that can happen in anyone’s life is that they don’t fulfill that mission.”]

If you’re a coach or consultant or anybody who wants to get to your first million, I divided it into four milestones. $1,000, $250,000, $500,000 and $1 million. I find that a lot of times, one of the biggest mistakes people do is they try to do all of that in twelve months. Can you? Yes. Will most people? No, but if you were to say, “I want to do that in three to four years,” can you? Yes. Most people who choose to do that and they’re going to do the work, I think you will. You have to take things in steps. Then I work with seven and eight-figure entrepreneurs. You want to talk to me about how it can help me with my high-performance coaching to get wherever you want to go faster and to get clear about what’s most important. I’m going to give you my phone number. It’s 303-641-0401. That’s my private cell. All I do is ask you to respect that if that’s what you want to talk to me about, leave me a message, so I know that. I will get back to you.

That is absolutely incredible and very few guests on our hundreds of episodes have ever given out their phone number before that is there direct cell. We appreciate that. We appreciate your time. We know how valuable it is. Any last words of wisdom you want to share with our audience?

I want to tell you that if you’re in the audience today, you’re supposed to be part of this. I frequently say this on my podcast. I don’t think there are any accidents. You are on the planet to do something magnificent with your life. The greatest tragedy that can happen in anyone’s life is that they don’t fulfill that mission. I want to encourage you to ask yourself, “What is it that I can step up and do that I haven’t done before that would jazz me and make a difference to somebody else?”That’s the path that will fulfill you and it’s the path that’s going to make you the riches, if that’s what you want, the fastest and the most fulfilling way.

We greatly appreciate it. JV Crum of ConsciousMillionare.com, thanks again so much for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Seth.

Thanks so much for listening to this special productivity series of the direct response marketing podcast. I’ve interviewed hundreds of the most successful entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and CEO’s all over the world and I want to share with you one of the biggest ways I’ve discovered to triple your productivity that I’ve learned from these amazing people. Even better, I’ll pay you $500 to test-drive it. Just go to Takethe500Challenge.com to learn more. Thanks so much.

Links mentioned:

• ConsciousMillionare.com
• Conscious Millionaire: Grow Your Business by Making a Difference
• Conscious Millionaire Podcast
• Huffington Post
• ConsciousMillionaire.com/FreeBook
• ConsciousMillionaire.com/SevenFigureFormula
• Takethe500Challenge.com

About JV Crum III

J V Crum III is known for his LIVE On-Camera Trainings where he creates a Breakthrough for business coaches and consultants by helping them find $50,000 or more in hidden revenues and develop steps to put it in their bank account. Named by Inc Magazine as one of the Top 13 Business Shows to listen to in 2017, JV is host of the syndicated radio show and podcast, Conscious Millionaire, and the best-selling author of “Conscious Millionaire: Grow Your Business by Making a Difference.” JV holds multiple certifications in NLP and has graduate degrees in three areas: law, business and psychology (JD, MBA, MS).