The Transcript

The Upside of Setting Outrageous Goals

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to? and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

All righty. Hey there, everybody. Welcome back to The Digital Entrepreneur. I am your host, Jerod Morris, the VP of marketing for Rainmaker Digital, and you are listening to episode No. 27.

On this week’s episode, I am joined by a man who says that hard work and helping people was instilled in his DNA. Sounds like our kind of guy. This man started two businesses at the age of 21 and two more after that, and currently, he is a digital marketing consultant for purposeful companies and the host of the podcast, Sell More, a show for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, marketers, and aspiring entrepreneurs who want to sell more online.

And get this, he says that his goal for the next five years is to help five billion people — that’s billion with a B — with their efforts to grow a business. Whoa, right? Clearly, this is not someone who needs help setting bold goals.

Who is this man helping people by the billions? He is Brandon Lewin, and he is a digital entrepreneur and our guest on this week’s episode.

Get the Inside Scoop on RainMail — The Rainmaker Platform s Integrated Email

Jerod Morris: Now, real quick before I bring you my discussion with Brandon, I want to let you know about a webinar that I hosted recently with Brian Clark and Chris Garrett. It was about the Rainmaker Platform. Specifically, it was about RainMail, the new email marketing feature built right into the Rainmaker Platform.

You’ve heard us talk on the show before about how much having email marketing baked right into the Rainmaker Platform would be a game changer. Now it’s here — with plenty of updates and new RainMail features on the way, too.

I actually just switched my site, AssemblyCall.com, over to RainMail, and I’ve already seen a big difference in the growth of both my email subscribers and my site members, as well as their engagement once they subscribe or sign up, which is really the goal, right? I’ve gotten this increased engagement by having my email marketing, my landing pages, my content pages, my marketing automation all able to work together in a fully integrated way.

We took some time a few weeks back with Rainmaker Platform customers to answer some frequently asked questions and provide some use-case examples of the difference that RainMail can make. The live event, when we held it, was just for customers because we really wanted to hone in on the questions that customers had who had used RainMail, get some of their experience so that we could talk about it.

But we’re happy to share the replay with you so that you can learn more about what RainMail is, what it could do, and why it takes the Rainmaker Platform to the next level as a true all-in-one solution for digital marketing and sales. In other words, the perfect solution built by digital entrepreneurs for digital entrepreneurs.

If you want to watch the webinar replay, totally free. You don’t have to sign up for anything. Just go to Rainmaker.FM/RainMail, and you’ll be redirected to the replay page. I just posted it a little while ago on the Rainmaker Platform blog, but go to Rainmaker.FM/RainMail. That URL will redirect you there. If you have questions, just know, as I hope you do already, that you can always reach me on Twitter at @JerodMorris. I will be happy to answer. Once again, that URL is Rainmaker.FM/RainMail.

Jerod Morris: All righty. Now let’s get to this week’s discussion with the man who won’t stop working until he’s impacted five billion people, Brandon Lewin. Here it is right now on The Digital Entrepreneur.

All righty, Mr. Lewin, welcome to The Digital Entrepreneur. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Brandon Lewin: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. I’m super excited. I can’t wait to share a little bit about my story and see if we can help some people, inspire them, and do all that good stuff as entrepreneurs as we do.

Jerod Morris: If only we were in person sharing a Community Mosaic right now. That would make this even better.

Brandon Lewin: Especially at 10:00 in the morning.

Jerod Morris: Exactly.

Brandon Lewin: Nothing better than a good cold brew at 10:00 in the morning.

Jerod Morris: That’s right.

Brandon Lewin: It makes for a sane rest of the day, let me tell you.

Jerod Morris: Brandon, I’ve got to start off by asking you this because I found this quote on your LinkedIn profile, and it kind of blew my hair back. Here’s the quote. You say, “My goal for the next five years is to help five billion people with their efforts to grow a business.” That is one heck of a goal.

Brandon Lewin: Yes.

Jerod Morris: How are you going to do that?

Why Brandon Finds It Imperative to ‘Give Away’ All the Information He Possibly Can

Brandon Lewin: How am I going to do that? That’s a very good question. I haven’t quite figured that out. No, I’m just joking. There’s a lot of things that I’m doing in a concerted effort to do that. One is, just for the last year, I have been doing as much as I possibly can from sharing content.

When I say five billion, it doesn’t mean I’m necessarily getting paid by five billion people to help them out, but it’s just about sharing content. I think that comes down to some of this you can actually track some of the numbers. Some of it is not trackable. Really simply, what I do is I share as much content as I possibly can. I’ve always been a big believer of just giving away the farm. There are some people who share that mentality. A lot of people do, but there’s still a lot of people that want to keep stuff close to their chest and want to make people pay for it.

My thing is just really, first and foremost, sharing as much content as I possibly can, getting on platforms that have large audiences to be able to share that. I track those numbers. Not everything is trackable, but I track as much as I possibly can.

In the last year, I have hit over 10,000 plus people. I don’t have the specific numbers, but we’re moving in that direction. Obviously, those numbers need to jump if I’m really going to five billion, but it’s sharing content, doing it through podcasts, videos, anything I possibly can. Then I also am doing online training programs. I’m speaking in various cities. Like I said, I’m trying to hit the numbers as much as I possibly can. Yeah, and just the services that I provide.

That’s right now the efforts. I do have bigger plans as far as creating services and products that are going to hit the millions. That’s where it comes down to even getting into other aspects of service-based businesses. I shouldn’t say service-based business because that’s what I’m doing right now. It’s SaaS businesses because that number can really jump once you start providing those type of services. Those are all in the works, but from the basic stuff right now, it’s just sharing content, man.

Jerod Morris: Yeah, I love it. I love the big, bold goal. It’s one of those, even if you don’t reach the five billion, say you reach one billion or two, that’s still pretty impressive.

Brandon Lewin: Absolutely. I don’t know if you read the book Bold, but that’s where it came from. It said if you can help one billion — and I hear this all the time now — but if you can reach one billion people, you’re going to be very, very wealthy in a lot of different fronts. I want to be wealthy.

That’s always been a huge goal of mine, not just so much about having materialistic-type things, but as you get a little bit older and wiser and you start having kids and a family and all that stuff, you start to realize how much wealth and money really can affect the world.

It’s always been something that’s been close to me, giving back to charity, but I’ve been getting more and more involved in it as of recently. There are just so many people that want to really, and are currently really doing big things in the world. By me being able to hit that billion, five billion people, and create a wealth of money, but also just connections and everything that comes with that, I can do so much more for the world. That’s always been a huge goal of mine.

Jerod Morris: Well, being able to reach a lot of people, being able to chart your own course, those are all really great benefits of digital entrepreneurship. I’ve always felt that the number one benefit of digital entrepreneurship is freedom — the freedom to choose your projects, the freedom to chart your course, and ultimately, the freedom to change your life and your family’s life for the better. Besides freedom, what benefit of digital entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?

The Biggest Benefit Brandon Derives From Being a Digital Entrepreneur

Brandon Lewin: Freedom comes down to everything really. My big thing is teaching people, giving away stuff. Besides the freedom, just having the flexibility to give away and do what I want to do. I guess that still comes back to freedom. I have a hard time thinking of anything outside of that, but it’s the flexibility. What really sparked me to go back on my own … my story goes up and down. There are a lot of different twists and turns, but I started off as an entrepreneur in college. Then I ventured off and was doing my own businesses.

Then I actually started my family and went to work for some people. I quickly learned that working for somebody else doesn’t work well when you’re an entrepreneur at heart. When I went back on my own, it was really about … something that I learned working for other people, and it was still in the agency world of doing digital marketing, was that those people didn’t see the value in giving away information.

Like I said, there’s still a lot of people that carry that kind of philosophy of not giving away and want to hold stuff close. To me, it’s never worked. I always give things away. My philosophy is, you give things away, and if people are going to take it, they’re going to run with it, and they’re not going to pay you for your services, that’s fine — because they never were in the first place.

Then being able to just give it away and having that flexibility and saying, “I can wake up today, and if I feel like I want to give away my secrets to how to do this, I can do that.” I guess that really does come back down to freedom. That’s really, to me, what’s sparked getting back in the world of digital entrepreneurship.

Jerod Morris: On that thought — you kind of started to do this — but take me back to before you became a digital entrepreneur. Tell us what you were doing and what was missing that led you to want to make a change.

Brandon’s Story on How He Got the Taste for Entrepreneurship at a Young Age

Brandon Lewin: Do you want to go all the way back? Do we have enough time with all that?

Jerod Morris: Yeah, go all the way back. You can shorten it if you need to, but go all the way back.

Brandon Lewin: All right. I’ll try to keep it as abbreviated as possible because it can get kind of lengthy. In college, I went to school in DePaul in Chicago, and it was at that time that I really just always had an entrepreneurial mind. When I was younger, my dad made me it was the first taste I got as an entrepreneur. He told that if I wanted a toy — I forgot what it was, I think it was like a Transformer or something like that — he was like, “Yeah, right, you’re 10 years old. If you want this, you need to earn it.”

I went out. It was the dead of winter in Chicago. I got a buddy of mine. We got a shovel. We went around the houses. We charged people $5 for a driveway and sidewalk, and we started shoveling driveways. I think in the first couple days we made about $200 apiece.

Jerod Morris: Wow.

Brandon Lewin: That’s really where I got the taste for entrepreneurship. It was great because I liked just helping people. That’s something that I got right away, that sense. My dad’s an entrepreneur. My mom’s an entrepreneur. It’s just something that runs in our blood line.

Then I went off to college. My dad always told me this. He said, “All right. If you’re not playing sports and you’re not in school, you’re going to be working.” Actually, there was a summer when I was 13 years old, and at the time, legally, you weren’t supposed to work. You couldn’t get your permit until you were 14. He got me to work for one of his clients in a warehouse. I did that, and I had to travel about an hour each way just to get there.

At that moment on, every time I wasn’t playing a sport, I had a job. I worked my way through high...