The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [40]
If that story of how I met an amazing mentor—who has taught me way more free of charge than any college professor ever did for tens of thousands of dollars—sounds like a long and twisty road, that’s because such stories in real life almost always are. There’s no quick-shot formula for connecting with powerful mentors. Elliott did it through inviting leaders to ski trips. I did it via Burning Man and a relationship workshop. These may be extreme lengths, but one good mentor can literally change the direction of your entire life. It’s worth the effort.
Here’s a story about how I met a second great mentor in my life, Bryan Franklin, whom I introduced you to in the Introduction.
I had kept hearing about this guy Bryan (http://www.bryanfranklin.com) through friends of friends. He was supposed to be one of the most successful executive coaches in the country. He was only thirty-eight, but he had been earning $1 million a year for the past ten years coaching executives at some of Silicon Valley’s hottest firms, including Google, Apple, LinkedIn, and Cisco, on sales and leadership. He ran a yearlong sales, marketing, and leadership training program that cost $18,000; a client of Jena’s had taken the program, and Jena said she was amazed by the business results she saw this client getting from the program.
It all seemed kind of preposterous to me when I first heard about this. I mean, c’mon. A thirty-eight-year-old earning a million bucks a year coaching fifty-year-old executives at multibillion-dollar companies on sales and leadership, and doing so since his twenties? What the hell did he have to teach them on sales and leadership that they didn’t know for themselves? And eighteen grand for a single year of training with him?
Nonetheless, I was intrigued. Who was this dude?
Jena had met him once, and when Bryan found out she lived in New York, he mentioned he was interested in starting one of his yearlong programs there. I didn’t know much about him beyond what I had heard above, but I wanted to know more. I got in touch with him and said, “I know a lot of people in New York, and I could probably get you in front of a roomful of people who might be interested in hearing about you.” He said he’d be in New York in a few months, and he’d take me up on my offer.
Jena and I put the word out through our community. The pitch was basically, “We don’t know much about this guy, but what we’ve been hearing is amazing, so come join us in a free lecture he’s giving, which we’re organizing, and we’ll all learn from him together.” Enough people trusted our judgment, and then invited their friends, that the room was packed with over seventy-five people, for a lecture called “How to Take Your Business to the Next Level.”
The lecture was worth it (you’ll be hearing a lot of the content, and more from Bryan, later in the book) and I knew I wanted to be a student of this man. Jena and I eventually packed three more rooms over several months. From this, he put together his first New York yearlong sales, marketing, and leadership training program, in which Jena and I participated.
Jena and I hosted him and his fiancée Jennifer every time they came to town. We promoted him in every way we knew how, introducing him to business partners and even clients. (I introduced him to Eben, and they’ve since become good friends and Bryan has even spoken at one of Eben’s live events.) Jena and I always asked ourselves, How can we give more to him? How can we contribute more? How can we be of service more? How can we help him get what he wants more?
(We even started coaching him on his nutrition and eating habits! He would always come to our house eating junk food, and had a gut to show for it. We pestered him about this, saying, “You talk so much about personal growth—well, this is one area you haven’t mastered yourself. It’s time to shape up!” He finally started listening to us.) We figured, if all this help could win us the opportunity