Founder & CEO Of Success Champions Network: Donnie Boivin AKA The Champion Network Boss – S2E59 (#87)

S2E59 Donnie Boivin.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

All right. Your microphone is sound good. Your video is clear. All right, three, two, one. Welcome back to Boston Uncaged podcast on Today’s show. I’m going to give you guys a little tidbit. This show is probably going to be funny, super informative. It’s going to be a little bit on Niranche and Wild side, but I guarantee you you’re going to get some hell of actionable items by the time this guest is done with you, I’ve deemed him the Champion network boss without further Ado. Donnie my brother man, how are you doing today.

Dude Shannol. I’m telling you, man, I am stoked to hang out with you. I’ve been checking out your show for a little bit. Now your content spot on you ask brilliant questions, and you’re not a bad dude. So it’s a pretty wicked combination. So I’m looking forward to this, brother.

Cool. So let’s jump into it. You have a laundry list of things that you have done and different marketing, different strategies. So let’s just jump into, like, who the hell are you first off?

Yeah. So Donnie Bovine, CEO and founder of Success Champions. There are five companies under that brand. I spent 20 years as a straight commissioned sales guy, making everybody else wealthy and rich and got tired of living everybody else’s dreams. Launched Success Champions in 2017 and didn’t realize I spent my life being an employee of others. So when I launched my business, I had no flipping clue how to be a damn business owner. So I promptly ran my business straight into the fucking ground. Found podcasting in 2018, turned the company around. Podcasting taught me business. I ended up having one of the top podcasts in the world. I’ve got some cool screenshots of my show sitting right next to like Jocko Tim Ferris and all the guys. And then from there, we’ve launched all the business. So it’s been crazy. I spoke, I should say, all over the world on podcasting, sales, business development. And now we’re continuing to run and gun and change lives and help people get out of their own way and build that fucking freedom they sent out when they started to run a business.

Nice. This takes little pieces of those puzzles, right. So as a sales guy, and I think that was the hook. That when you were telling me that you wanted to kind of be a guest on the show. And it was like, how does a sales guy become an entrepreneur? And most people will think, well, sales guys are into business and they’re selling. But to your point, they’re kind of like slaves to a system and they’re earning and they’re killing what they’re keeping. But you realize that and then kind of converted that into a business structure. What does that journey look like for you?

Well, it’s fascinating for me is when being a sales guy, right. And I’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. But as a sales guy. I sold. That was my job. My job wasn’t accounting operations, delivery structure, processes. My job was to go get the deal done. So when I launched the business, I did that, I went and sold. But in my head, I had to be a CEO, right? So a CEO is a guy back behind the scenes doing operational things and all this stuff. So I got into this weird series of okay, let’s go sell something. Now. I got to fucking deliver it. Oh, crap. Now I got to build this thing. Here comes the operational side of things. Process, structure of crap. I’ve been back here on the back side of the business. I haven’t sold shit right now. I have to go back out and try and sell things. And this wicked cycle came along. So what happened was somewhere around January of 2018, I stood on the back porch of my farm, looked at my wife and said, We’re about to fucking lose everything we have. I blew through my nest egg because I was trying to throw money out of business versus learning how to be a business owner. And she looked at me and she finally said the key phrase that got me to start pulling my head out of my ass. And she said, look, you’ve got to get off your ass and go sell something. You’re not meant to be behind your business. You need to be out front. So I started selling and building that business up again. But the biggest shift I had to literally make is to stop being an employee. Because when I built my business, I built a damn good job for myself and not a company. So I had to flip the script. And one trick your audience may enjoy is this is how I figured out what I was doing to be an employee versus a business owner. I wrote down everything that I was doing in my company, fucking everything. Every task, job role, everything else doing in the business. On the left side of a sheet of paper, I drew a line straight down the center of this damn thing. Top right column over that I wrote, Would Steve Jobs do this task? And then I went through every freaking item, and I was just doing a lot of stupid shit that I shouldn’t be doing. And that’s when I finally got the podcasting and it flipped the script and taught me about outsourcing operations, process systems, and what it was like to really be a business owner. So I had to go from just sell it. Then somebody else takes care of it to okay, what’s the process of sales? What’s the process of business? What’s the systems and everything behind it. It was a massive leap.

That’s definitely serious insight. So let’s talk about your business. Use a little bit. I mean, you’re a published, successful author. On one hand, you have a coaching program, a networking program. You have magazines just list out your business structures. And what does that look like?

Yeah. So five companies altogether. So we have Success Champions as a consulting company where we go in and we consult Fortune Five hundreds and Fortune One thousands on how to use podcasting as a business development tool. Nice. Underneath that consulting umbrella, we also teach small up and coming business owners how to launch a podcast and monetize it. And then we have another consulting arm underneath there where we bring small business owners in through Masterminds and help them scale and grow their business. That’s all under consulting. We then have the Success Champions Podcast, which we generate well over six figures a year with that through various different entities, some sponsorships and the like. We have Success Champions Magazine with almost 10,000 subscribers in. It’s a digital magazine where we have a Facebook group where we feature people inside of our Facebook group, and they provide all the articles and content. So it’s written by small business owners for small business owners. Nice. Then we have the Badass Business Summit, which is something we launched in 2020, where we bring speakers and small business owners from around the world talk specifically about the business development side and scaling and grow their business. And then we launched Success Champion Networking in 2020 as a competitor to a BNI or Rotary Chamber type thing. We launched that in 2020 and now grown that to 30 States across the US. We’re getting ready to open up Canada, London and Baja Mexico. Nice.

So with all of that, if you had to define yourself in three to five words, which at this point, I think even for me to think of three to five words to describe you as difficult. But I’m going to ask you to do it right. Define yourself in three to five words?

The guy that’s teaching others. And what I mean by that is when I launched a business, everybody was out there saying how easy it was, right. You need to be an entrepreneur. You need to do this, right. And even Gary Vee and I love a lot of shit. Gary Vee says, I don’t love everything. But Gary is out there like, there’s no reason to work for somebody. You should be an entrepreneur. It doesn’t say it exactly that way. But there was a lot of people, and all of a sudden, being an entrepreneur became like the new MLM. You be an entrepreneur. You’re a millionaire overnight, right? And so I think part of me got caught up in that hype, caught up in that journey. And when I launched the business, I think a lot of my struggle was nobody was teaching how to be a business owner. They were teaching different various tactics and strategies. But nobody was teaching how to be a business owner. So for me, I literally decided early on that I was going to teach what I was learning. I think a lot of success that I found is I’ve shared the fuck ups. I’ve shared the failures. I’ve shared the screw ups, and I’ve put everything out there for other people to hopefully have some sort of roadmap of how to do the things I’ve done. And I just teach from my own experiences. And we have a mantra in my company is go break some shit, because if you’re not fucking things up, then you’re not learning. You’re not growing. You’re not trying to get to that next level. And so I mean, shit. I’ll sit on a Zoom call with almost anybody to help them figure their shit out. And I want somebody when they’re done talking to me, to be able to run through a fucking brick wall because they’re ready to fucking light the world on fire.

Nice, So i mean I think I saw one of your videos. I think it was on Instagram, and you were talking about if you don’t have any haters, then you’re not being loud enough. And the reason why I’m bringing this up because dealing with clients, they always think like, okay, prime example emails. Send one email a month, send one email a week. And I must like, you got to send emails like, Damn it, or twice a day to even get through the bullshit to kind of get in front of people. So why don’t you kind of talk about that a little bit more about if you’re not yelling loud enough, nobody’s going to hear anything you have to say.

My latest book came out on Amazon, and it was Endless Stream Referrals, and I got a one star review on this book. Now, this book, I’ve sold almost 16,000 copies and it continues to blow up and have a lot of fun on there. And I got a one star review. Dude, I took a screenshot of that one star review, did a video, put that star up behind me, and I have no idea who gave it to me, right? But I thanked them so much in this video and the reason I thanked them for the one star review is because that means somebody Besides my fucking mom and dad were reading this book finally.

Yeah.

Right? Because mom and dad, your family friends, they love you. They’re always going to tell you the good shit, man, when the haters show up, celebrate that stuff because it means that you’ve got outside your circle. You got outside the people that are going to be nice and fluffy and talk to you, and then I’m empathetic, I cuss like a fool. That’s part of my contents who I am, and that book literally starts off with. All right, let’s get the bullshit out of the way. The reason you’re not getting referrals because you’re not fucking asking for them. And I’m almost 99% sure that that’s the reason I got a one star review. I don’t think they read the rest of the book all the way through it. On one hand, you don’t put out content to get hate. You put out content because it’s your truth, and you feel like the world should hear it, right. But when the haters show up, man, when they start getting on your ass and they’re talking smack, whatever you want to say, every time somebody does that, another ten to 50 people are fixing to see that piece of content, and that’s the beauty behind it. Right? That’s the joint. But you know there are, what, 7 billion people in this freaking world?

Yeah seven. It changed now.

You’re not going to connect with everyone, and you don’t need everyone. You need your people. What I mean by your people is you need the people that geek out on the same ship that you geek out on. It’s so much easier to do business when you got a natural connection with somebody and can hang out with them. Go ahead. .

No I think you’re going to dive into tribes a little bit. Got you before we dive into tribes a little bit. I want people to really understand because you went from sales to business. So you understand business structures. So, like, how was your business? You got multiple, different business, multiple, different assets. So are you more like S-Corp a C-Corp. Combination of multiples. And how is that set up?

Yeah. Combination of multiple. So we’re an LLC with an S-Corp back, and then we have a ton of DBA sitting underneath that. All under a success Champions umbrella overall. But we split them into different entities for different revenue lines, so we could track how well a particular business was doing underneath the overall umbrella for a lot of reasons. More than that, too. But I’m really big on looking at what’s working and what’s not working. And if everything was smashed under basically one line item, we wouldn’t be able to see the individual structure of each one of the businesses. In that token, I have people who run those divisions underneath everything. So their job is to hold the line on all of those and keep everything running and getting and flowing as we move through. But to give people an idea, we’re launching a new podcast right now called Growth Mode. That podcast has a twelve person team on it, producing that podcast. It’s a pretty wicked structure and scale. And I’ll be honest some days, it’s a lot of shit to keep going in your head because, like anybody who knows who’s run a business, it’s a lot of work. It gets complicated when you bring a lot of people to the table.

So that kind of goes back to the original thing we’re talking about with tribes. Right. So you have essentially two separate tribes. You have your internal tribe that’s essentially running your business. You have your external tribe that you’re talking to and communicating with. Right. So what systems do you have in place to manage? Because it’s two separate tribes.

It’s almost one tribe. And here’s what I mean. So one of the greatest things I did for my podcast was launched a Facebook group. And having that Facebook group gave a place where the Champions, the people who listen to the show could come to hang the fuck out. And I launched the Facebook group. Same reason I launched the podcast. I wanted to get around other entrepreneurs and business owners because I had no entrepreneurs or business owners in my life. So I kind of really felt like an island and out there on my own because when I talk to family and friends, I’m like, hey, this is fucking up in a business. And their advice was, go get a job early on. Anybody who’s trying to run a business and entrepreneurs heard that. So I created all this so I could get around other people that were doing the things. So what’s fascinating about having that Facebook group was everybody who works for me. Take it back. There’s two people that don’t out of everybody who works for me. They’ve come from that Facebook group. So they’ve come from the tribe. So as that Facebook group grew, I was doing Zoom calls with people getting to know people and understanding what they were, the strengths and weaknesses. So the cool thing about that is the people that work with us, they already geeked out on the brand, the message they were already into what we were doing, and we just allowed them to continue to geek out in whatever their company business line is. They just do it for success Champions. So it’s almost one tribe, first and foremost for sure. We got the Facebook group to bring everybody in. And then we got a ton of programs from there between Asana entrepreneurs and then team meetings and processes and systems. And I am not a processing system guy. That’s why I got Kevin Snow, who’s my director of operations, because he loves that shit and big ideas vision out front. Kevin, make sure everything goes.

And I think it helps that he has kind of like a porn star name like Kevin Snow is like a cool-ass bad-ass name.

dude I can’t wait to tell him that.

Obviously you’ve been on this journey for this shit didn’t happen overnight. You didn’t just wake up on a random Tuesday and say, hey, I’m going to go out there and create this multi, six, seven figure business. We always hear about the 20 years it takes someone to become successful, and when somebody meets them for the first time, they’re perceived to be an overnight success, right? How long have you been on your journey?

So I launched in September of 2017. We’re about three and a half years in now, but I can tell you it was 18 months into that journey before I felt like a real business owner. It was probably two years into. I really started to see momentum and things to start shifting, but I got a long way to grow. I got a long way to continue building, so I still don’t feel like we’ve made it, and I don’t know when I’ll ever feel like we’ve made it, but we do have some cool things working. And for us, let’s go break some shit and then keep pushing forward and learning all the way through. Patience is a bitch. Being patient to find success is one of the toughest things. And I really think for someone to find success, they got to be dumb enough to hold on where most people will throw in the fucking tile because no same person is going to put themselves through this shit. No same person is going to almost go broke be up the next day going, oh, my God, this is going to work. The next day going, oh, my God, I’m going to lose everything the next day. Get up. No sane person is going to do that. You got to be a little fucking crazy to want to do this. And I think really the people who have the grit and tenacity to hold on and realize that if they start learning through the process, they start applying those learnings that they’re going to find some sort of second gear that’s going to push them forward. So, man, when it gets tough, put your head down and could dive right the fuck back into it.

That’s definitely a solid philosophy, because I always kind of reference that in the sense of a visual, right? I think everybody has probably seen this meme before. Where there’s two tunnels, two guys with pitchforks and one is digging away and one turns around and gives up. And the one that turns around and gives up is an inch away from the damn diamonds. And the other one is a mile away from the diamonds. But he would eventually get to the goal and get to the diamonds because he’s persistent. And that’s what you’re just going to be saying. It’s being constantly persistent. So in your persistence, right. If you can go back and change anything, one thing, what would that one thing be and why?

Oh systems early on. Absolutely. Systems early on. Well, if I want to go back any further, I wish I would have started a business 20 years ago. Anybody says they don’t have regrets, they’re fucking lying. I think people have all kinds of regrets all the way through each of their own. But I wish I could start a business 20 years ago. Nobody tells you when you start a business that you’re going to finally meet yourself because, look, working for somebody else, you got excuses for days as a sales guy. If my numbers were down, it was like the economy sucks. The leads aren’t coming in, too much competition in the marketplace, and you can make up all these bullshit excuses while your numbers weren’t down, but still be successful, right? Still hitting your quotas and everything. So it was no big deal. When you get out and run a business, there’s no one left to fucking blame. But you right. So you’re out there. If your shit’s not hitting you’re not getting the numbers you need to be getting. You’re not accomplishing the things you need to be getting that’s on you. So I always tell everybody success. That’s your fault. Failure. That’s your fault. Everything happens. I’m not saying you have a fault. I’m saying you’re fucking up or you’re fucking up, right? And getting it. And once you take kind of the jockey willing ownership of it all, then life gets really simple. But when you get down to a spot in life, when you realize that you dug this fucking hole like I did when I had to look at my wife and say, I was going to lose everything, you realize that for your world to change, you’re going to have to change. And, dude, when I finally started figuring me out, I didn’t like that, motherfucker. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t a dude that totally got after life. I didn’t like that. I was a dude that did good enough was good enough. I didn’t like being just okay. So I had to start figuring out, okay. What the fuck am I good at? What things really get me off, get me ticking, get me fucking rocking, and then go do those fucking things. And the more I did, the things that just got me fucking stoked and going, the more people showed up in life that started doing the things that I fucking sucked at. So that’s the biggest thing, man, is start a business a lot earlier and fail a hell of a lot faster than I currently did.

That’s crazy man. In that moment, I’m sitting here and I’m on a football field and I’m like, yes, coach. Yes, coach. Get it in the game Coach, put me in the field coach.

right?

Definitely. So you got the hustle, right? You got the tenacity, right? You got balls of steel. Are you from an entrepreneur or family? Like, where is that?

God, I fucking love this question. No, I’m not the kid who had the fucking lemonade stand. I didn’t sell Boy Scout cookies. I didn’t have shit. Nobody in my family has ever run a business. My dad worked for as a technician. Wow. Mom worked the front desk receptionist of an eye doctor for fucking years growing up, his kids, dad was a truck driver and mom worked in factories. I did four years in Marine Corps. My brother did 24 years in the Marine Corps. My other brother was a fucking sales guy. All of my family were employees and banks and real estate and everything else. Nobody in all of my generation ran a business. I’m the first one as far as I can fucking know. And trust me, sitting around my family. When I said I’m walking away from almost a seven figure income, partnership and everything else to launch my business. Everybody looked at me like I had two fucking heads, and it was wild. But that goes back to why I had to surround myself with people that were doing this, too, because my family, my friends. I remember the day that I told one of my best friends that I was walking away from all this and launching a business. The dude looked right at me and goes, oh, my God, how are you going to pay your bills? What are you going to do? Where’s the income coming from? And I had to look right back at him and said, I have no fucking clue. I’m going to figure all that shit out. And he was white. I mean, like, scared shitless white for me because it was like, no way in hell he could do this. And for me, that was all the indicators that this was the right damn direction to go. So every bit of this shit I’ve had to learn along the way, and it’s been a painful journey, learning a lot of this stuff. It’s been really tough. So fucking thank you for that question. I really appreciate that.

Yeah, definitely. It’s a cool question in the sense, because most people by default think that if you are an entrepreneur, if you’re a business owner, that it comes from some genetic genome somewhere in reality, most of the successful people in the world are kind of like they woke up on it one day and made a decision. They made a decision like you said earlier, to change, to change their outcome, to change their legacy, to change everything they’re going to do moving forward in that change you brought up earlier about your wife, right? So how do you juggle your work? Because obviously you’re juggling a lot of different things. And from what I can tell, like, you’re engaged 100%. So how do you juggle your work life with your family life?

So let me bust a myth really quick. For most people, there’s no such fucking thing as work life balance. It is an absolute fucking myth. And people need to quit beating themselves up. Here’s what? I mean, there’s one caveat to this. If you’re an employee for somebody else work life balance all day long, eight to five, go home, be with the family. Blah, blah. If you run a fucking business, you’re never going to fucking stop thinking about the business ever. It’s a 24/7, seven days a week fucking endeavor. My buddy Mike Michalowicz, who wrote the book Profit First, fix this next pumpkin plan. Good dude. He put it this way. Being married to an entrepreneur is like being in the passenger seat of a car that’s doing 100 miles an hour going down the freeway. And there’s no fucking steering wheel. Because. Being around people that are crazy enough to do this business ownership thing, to be an entrepreneur, whatever. Fuck you want to call it is absolute pure insanity, especially early on when you don’t not sure where money is going to come from and you’re trying to figure it out. And your spouse, your loved ones, whatever. They’ve never done this either. So they’re having to adjust and learn along the side. So I’m not saying don’t be with your family. I’m not saying you don’t go out to dinner. I’m not saying you don’t go on trips. What I’m saying is when you do those things, you’re going to be thinking about the business and that’s okay, right? It’s okay to be thinking about what you’re working on. It’s not okay to be stressing about what you’re working on, because that’ll fuck a lot more things up, but it’s okay to be thinking that. So it’s not a matter of trying to balance it all. It’s a matter of being you and allowing your spouse and family to be a part of the game. On that journey. My wife is one of the most wisest people in the face of the Earth, and she’s constantly if my head is up my ass thinking about something and I say it out loud, she’ll put me in my place without even blinking twice and give me a different perspective. But she was also in the same sentence. She’ll tell people I have no fucking clue what my husband does for a living, right? But that’s kept some sanity in there. So there is a little separation of Church and state, if you will, that she doesn’t need to know all the inner workings of the business so we can talk about other shit and have a fun conversation. But she knows that I’m always going to be working on the business and that’s part of the game. So don’t beat yourself up over work life balance.

Got you so going into, like, just your general day to day. What’s your morning habits, your morning routines?

This is where your people are going to think I’m fucking nuts. So in addition to these five businesses, I run a full working farm. So right now I’m on my farm just out of Fort Worth, Texas. We’ve got goats, chickens, Ducks, geese, sugar gliders, bearded Dragons, turkeys. You name it. We’ve got it all over the damn farm. So I’m up at 04:00 every morning and 04:00. I get up, I read a Journal, I work out, and then I go take care of the farm, taking care of the farm animals. About an hour endeavor between getting all the stalls ready, getting the babies, milk and everything all the way through about 07:00. I’ll sit right here in this chair. So it’s about a three hour morning trick to get all set. At 07:00. I’ll sit right here and I will be in almost back to back Zoom calls till five or six in the evening. And some days I have to remind myself to run downstairs and go get fucking lunch. But if I’m not on a Zoom call. I don’t feel like my business is moving forward, so I’m either talking with a teammate figuring out what’s going on the section. I’m talking with a client, or I’m talking with a prospect to come into one of our programs, and then I’ll finish the day either with a kickboxing class or some extra reading. I don’t read a whole lot in the afternoon, but then I’m going to Cook dinner. It’s going to be ready most times before my wife walks through the door, and then we’re going to sit down. We’re going to watch a couple hours of TV together because that’s our time to unwind and everything else. I’m going to pour myself a stiff glass of room and sit on some Captain Morgan put my feet up, and then we’re in bed by 10:00 so I can do it all again. The only thing that changes up is on the weekends. I don’t do the sitting here on Zoom. I do more farm work, and Thursday afternoons we shut down the whole company at 02:00. The whole company shuts down at two, and you go spend time wherever you want, doing whatever you want. So we called our farm day. So we’re doing a lot of projects around the farm just to break it up a little bit in the middle of the week to confirm your statement.

Yes, I think I just think you’re bat shit crazy for running a full blown farm, and I’m sitting here thinking, I’m like, okay, well, he’s in Dallas and I’m in Atlanta, right? And the thing is, you book this pocket at 8:30 in the morning. So you guys are about 2 hours behind us.

No. 1 hour, 7:30.

7:;30 So I’m just like, okay, it’s 7:30. And I usually do that early for people in Australia to kind of make sure. And I’m like, Why the hell? Okay, now it makes perfect sense. I’m like, Well, this dude is up pretty damn early to get on the podcast, so jumping into books a little bit every time I interview somebody on this podcast, I always have opportunity to grow like my book club. So what books are you reading? What books got you to where you are? What books do you want to recommend?

So books that got me where I’m at probably the book that made me make the leap to being an entrepreneur. Was “You’re a badass of Making Money” by Jensen Sincero. That book was just right timing, right. Read along that journey. And I can remember sitting on the back of my tractor listening to the audio version of that laughing my ass off and she’s talking about the goat breaking in the house and shit. If you haven’t read that book or listen to it, you need to a phenomenal read. So absolutely amazing book business wise. The book that helped me get the finances in order for sure is “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz. Freaking brilliant. Read personal Finance, then would be “Automatic Millionaire” by David Bach. Absolutely amazing. Read the book that I’m completely devouring right now is “Atomic Habits”, which is part of our success Champions Networking groups. We do a training every Thursday at 10:00 if you’re a member of the networking and all the chapters from around the US come together, and I do a training. We’re actually doing a book club for this month. So every Thursday at ten we’re reviewing. So right now we’re going through Atomic Habits, which is a phenomenal read Prison of Your Own by Sean Kane. I’m just getting ready to drop his podcast interview on my podcast. Brilliant, brilliant read about how he spent five years in prison and turned his life around. So good stuff. Oh, God, there’s a ton more, but those are the ones off the top of my head right now.

Got you. Yeah, I definitely appreciate it. Flows out like water once you start really thinking about it. And to your point, I think Atomic Habits, if you have not read Deep Work by Cal Newport, no, I would say definitely. They go together, hand in hand synergy between those two books, you read one, you read the other one vice versa. And to your point, The Badass Series is a great series, and anybody has not read The Badass series, I would definitely advise them, like you said to read it, because when I first read her first series and she was like, I’m going to go in there, I’m going to buy this car and I’m going to figure out how to pay for this shit. I’m just going to buy the car. And I was just kind of like, that’s crazy. And she was like, yeah, I am crazy. And she just did it. And then she figured out how to pay for it. So it’s kind of like you have to put yourself in a state of awareness to be on to stay ahead at all damn times. So what do you see yourself in 20 years from now?

I think in five, we’re going to change the world. So I think right now our fastest growing brand is Success Champions networking. And I truly believe we are going to change how the world networks. We’re launching the Growth Mode podcast to help promote that. We’re in an interesting time as a whole. So with Cryptocurrency coming in and I don’t know enough about it to be dangerous. But you have these new things called NFPs coming to the marketplace, and I’m learning about them, and they’re fucking fascinating. So it’s going to be a unique role. On one hand, I’m trying to keep up with tech currencies and those, like, on the other hand, it’s how do you stay in touch with your tribe and your people in 20 years is such a far reach for me to look at and go. This is what I’m going to be doing. I’m not a goal setter guy never have been, I think goals demotivate people and things shift too fast to worry about setting goals. So set a freaking quick target. Let’s get to that target and hit the next one. But for sure, in five, we’re going to be changing the world and we’re already doing it. We’re just going to be doing a lot bigger and fucking louder.

Got you. Let’s talk about it. I’ve been part of Power Corps and other networking groups before. So what’s the unique factor to your networking group? How is it structured? How does it work? Is it kind of like a weekly meet up? You meet for an hour. What’s your stage on that?

So first and foremost, it’s built for virtual. Always. We’ll always be virtual. I hate commutes. Don’t put me in my truck and go anywhere. I lose half a fucking day. So it’s built for virtual. And then it’s built on. Let’s bring real business people together. So there’s no multi level marketing, direct sales or anything like that in there. And then it’s heavily focused on education and training. So what most networking, I think lacks is the ability to actually learn how to grow and scale not only yourself but your business. So we run four different types of meeting styles during the meetings. There’s some similarities to a lot of other networking. One seat per industry. It’s an hour long meeting. We have leadership teams and the like. But the meetings is where we start, really separating from everybody else. So one meeting is going to be a mastermind. We’re going to bring people in, put them in small groups, mastermind the hell out of things. Second meeting, we’re going to come in and, look, we don’t do the whole 62nd commercial where you spend an hour, the fucking meeting going around, trying to learn what everybody does. It’s boring and nobody gives a shit once. I know you’re a realtor once I know you’re a consultant coach. I don’t need to fucking know every week, I need to know who I need to get you to. So the philosophy behind everything is I should get to know you so damn well that I can introduce you to my mom. Or, better yet, my best client. That’s how networking should be. It’s not meant to be a place where you go in and just get referrals. Because if you only get referrals, that thing is going to fall apart and crumble. Your job is to give more referrals than you receive and watch how big your business grows. So meaning number two, we’ll do a little portion at the beginning, and then we’ll split everybody off in what we call virtual coffee. So virtual one on one for 40 minutes to dive into. How can two people collaborate together? Another meeting will bring in one of the members, and they got to come in and they got to teach. They got to teach something unrelated to their business that other people can use. And apply and put in place for their business. And then the last meeting is we got approved speakers that go around all of our chapters and teach things that are not portion of the business. Like a guy named Dan goes around. He teaches LinkedIn, but it’s not the stupid shit, like, get your profile right and do all the stuff he’s teaching. How do you actually use LinkedIn to go get business and some cool strategies? And he runs a tax firm out of New York, and he’s teaching LinkedIn shit. So we really divide it up and then the most badass things. A lot of these organizations are like, BNI is a great organization, nothing against it. The one thing that I always hated about being I is, if you were part of a BNI chapter, you couldn’t be a part of anything else. They didn’t want you to go network anywhere else. I’m like, fucking dude, you need to be on board. You need to be a part of Rotaries. I don’t give a shit if you’re part of BNI, but if you’re not in the community networking, then you’re not opening doors for others. So to really harp on that at every Thursday at 10:00 A.m. Central, we do a live training where all the chapters from around the US and soon to be around the world come together. And I’m teaching business development, sales, everything that I’ve learned and done how to scale and grow. And that goes back to right now for the month of March. Each week, we’re talking about atomic habits. So all the members from all the chapters are coming together, and we’re doing a massive ass book club as part of it. So it’s really about bringing your tribe of people together so you can have other people out there representing your business and helping you grow.

Yeah, that’s definitely awesome. I’m just listening to you speaking. I’m just like, are you guys recording those coffee meetings? Are you recording any of it? Because that’s a lot of damn content that you can kind of broadcast on the television station, right? You can kind of get your own Roku station and just take that content and deliver it. You only need 24 hours by default, so that you get 24 hours in a week.

Mainly because I wanted to stay as a benefit of being a member of the groups. I mean, look, to be a member of one of our chapters is only $47 a month, right? I’m not here to try and break the bank, and there’s no commitment. So it’s not like you’ve got to be there for a fucking year. If the shit’s working, stay. If it’s not working, get the fuck out. If we’re not showing up and doing what we need to be doing, then get out of it. So I want a lot of this stuff to stay behind the scenes. So people get it as part of a benefit of the organization, because I go pretty fucking loud and crazy myself with the podcast, interviews, YouTube and everything. I’ve got a pretty good team now behind me, helping me put out a massive amount of content. We’re just going to see if we can. I don’t think I can ever put out as much content as somebody like Gary Vee does, but we’re going to put out shit on a condo. That ridiculous amount of content.

Well, he’s been compounding it like stock for like, 10,15 years.

And he’s got a team of 27 people behind him helping produce that much content.

Yeah, I knew Gary was on another level when he was interviewing himself. I was like, wait a minute. Did he interview himself from 20 years before? Like, how the hell do you? Okay, that’s real shit, right?

And Gary looks like shit back in the day, you know what i mean?

You’re talking about all these different systems and tools, what software that you are using right now that you would not be able to do what you’re doing without?

First and foremost is “Entrepot”. That’s why I can put it as MailChimp and HubSpot on steroids. I think you can get into it, like, for 100 and $5160 a month. So it’s not MailChimp cheap, but it’s not HubSpot Salesforce expensive, right? But that’s why I have Kevin. Kevin is an absolute genius when it comes to entrepreneur, knows how it works inside and out. But our entire company works because of that program. So if you get an email, if you’re getting some sort of automation, you’re getting anything that’s coming through that program. Nobody writes us a check, all of our payments that people pay us. It’s all automated. I don’t have to do collections. It’s all automated. Everything in our company is 100% automated. That’s why I’m fascinated by digital currency coming up, mainly because it’ll fit right into our system as it continues to become more mainstream. The second program is Asana, and my team will tell you, I hate systems and processes. They’re constantly reminding me, hey, we have a process for that fuck, because I’m the one that’s always going to fuck it up in step by step. But Asana allows us to coordinate all of our team. So we’ve got team members all over the world, and it’s really cool, especially if you’re doing any sort of project management, because you can just put it in stages all the way through. And people know when step before theirs is done, it gets moved to a new section. You can see it right then and there and keep on rocking out with it. So those are the two biggest programs we’re looking proactively for a competitor of Facebook, because Unfortunately, Facebook would be my third one. We use a lot of their messenger chats, and I don’t want to use Slack. There’s just too many complications with slack, so we’re using a lot of their private Facebook groups and stuff. So if anybody listening knows any great competitor to Facebook hit me up. I’m absolutely interested in how we get all of our people, not off of Facebook, but to a platform we can control.

Interesting. Obviously, Facebook is kind of like the elephant in the room, and they’re also the big brother and everything else on the sun. And they have, like, maybe 3 billion active users at this point. So asking you the question because we’re both marketers. Right. So understanding that Facebook makes it very easy to target use is very easy to say, hey, I’m looking for John a dad that makes six figures that lives in Texas. Why would you want to move off of Facebook when you can do that on Facebook naturally, right now?

Well, it’s not the marketing that I want to move on Facebook. It’s the communication for our networking groups. We got a private Facebook group for all the groups, and we have private chats and everything else for the Champions that are just into the podcast, the magazine, everything we do, we have a Facebook group for that. We do all the communications. My fear is at some point, Facebook is going to ship and decide, OK, groups are no longer a cool thing. So we’re now going to kill groups. And if they do that, we lose a huge communication space. So what I’m looking to do is recreate what we’ve done. The problem. We’ve tried a couple of programs and in trying to get off Facebook, there’s no reason for somebody to grab another program. Facebook, they’re already there, right? They’re communicating on a regular basis or having great conversations. So to pull them off of Facebook monster networks, there’s convene. There’s a bunch of programs out there, and we’ve tried a lot of them. But if there’s no reason for somebody to go there on a regular basis, like, they’re already going to Facebook to see what Mum and dad are doing or see what their kids are doing or whatever else they’re already there. I need to find a way for the company as a whole. How do we maintain that high level communication where people are engaging contacting, having a conversation? But it’s just off the Facebook platform. And that’s what we haven’t found is every time we try, it’s like, I forget that programs over there because I’m not on it already because that makes sense.

Yeah, it definitely does. And I think we’ve covered some conversation. We covered different elements. I think the one element we haven’t really Dove into is, like, the magazine side of things, right? It’s funny because I think the owner of podcast magazine, Steve, was like, if you have a podcast, you should have a magazine. They go together hand in hand. And I have, like, my wife in the background always talking to me about, dude, you got to start a magazine. You got to start a digital magazine. I’m like, I got so many different. I just started the directory, a book club. Eventually, I get to the magazine. So I just want to kind of get your take on it and kind of like, how did you stage that? And how is that running for you?

Well, I think Steve’s wrong just for the record, because I think the way Steve did the magazine was very smart because Steve doesn’t do shit with the magazine. He literally found other podcasters in particular genres and said, okay, you own that genre. Go get me content. Fucking smart. Move on his part. Oh, yeah. A magazine is a shit ton of work. I’m just going to tell you right now, we’ve got a six person team that takes care of the magazine for us when my team came to me because what happened was we were in the Facebook group. We had a ton of people that were like, hey, we need more content from you. And a lot of people were like, hey, we just need more and more and more. I’m like, Fuck, how do we continue to produce more? And somebody on the team said, hey, let’s start a magazine. I’m like, Dude, I spent seven years in the commercial printing game. I am not about to spend the capital to print a magazine, and they’re like, no, you can do it online. I’m like, what do you mean, you can do it online? And I had no idea that online magazines were a thing. So they found a couple of programs, and we got into it. The first episode, the first issue, it was fairly easy, straightforward put together. We figured it out where it gets complicated is the consecutive issue. So we put out a new issue every other month. And there’s a lot to think about in a lot of moving parts. You got to figure out what’s the cover, who’s the cover, what’s the story of it, what’s the theme of that particular issue? And then you’ve got to figure out what’s all the content that’s going to go with that. And so there’s a lot of people that want to contribute to a magazine. So it’s okay who’s going to edit all that stuff and then turn around and you’ve got to put page layouts and everything all together. And we generate a significant amount of money off of the magazine as a whole. But there’s often times where I’m like, Fuck, why are we still doing this? Because it really is a lot of work with it all. But I would 100% disagree that if you have a podcast, you need a magazine. I think that’s probably some affiliate play on his end. But because the average person is not going to produce enough content to be able to fill out a magazine because you’re talking six to 14 articles, written 750 to 1000 words. You got to go find those people to write those articles, and then you got to have those edited. You got to get pictures and graphics that are license free to go along with each one of those articles. You got page layouts. Then you got to deal with advertisers and figure out which ad can go with, which copy. And there’s some legal things behind the scenes to cover your ass, too, all the way through it. So I’m not trying to discourage anybody from doing it. I’m just saying that unless you’re going into that magazine already with a revenue source created, and, you know, there’s going to be a revenue play out the gate. Then I would look at a lot of other things before I started a magazine.

In the monetization of it. Obviously, you have subscriptions, right? You have advertising spots, maybe you have affiliate deals and affiliate offers in there. Are there any other monetization options for magazine?

We’ve had people come to us and pay to write articles because they were launching a new book or everything out there. So instead of doing the affiliate pay elite and there’s people that have paid to put advertising in there and then pay to write an article in most of our articles are not paid for. But if they want to do an Advertisement and then do kind of a write up for their Advertisement, then they’re going to pay for the ad and then in there. So that’s the additional in there. But it’s also a massive lead magnet to all of our other stuff. So we’ll put our own ads in there for our podcast workshops, our own ads in there for our podcast. We’ll put our own ads in there for success, Champions networking. So it’s a great place to advertise our own stuff. And then we can track it all so we can see what’s come from the magazine and watch the flow of it all.

Got you.

We got a couple of affiliates

Affiliates programs. Definitely some insightful information, and it kind of drills down to hold a little bit more about magazines. So just talk about final words of wisdom. Let’s say I’m an up and coming entrepreneur. Maybe I was a sales director. Maybe I was starting out in sales, and I’m like, Fuck this. I’m tired of working for the man. I want an opportunity to run my own show. They hear this podcast and they’re like, Donny, is the truth. What words of wisdom would you give to that person to continue them on their journey?

One don’t do it the way I did it. Create a side hustle and get that side hustle to a level that replaces your current income. Then jump. I think if I would have done that early on, I wouldn’t have been as mentally exhausted as I was out the gate trying to build this thing. So that would be first and foremost. Second thing is, don’t pigeonhole yourself into one business because oftentimes the business people start is not the business they finish up doing. So go try fucking everything. And if it’s fun, keep doing it. If it sucks, don’t do it. It’s like, somebody who wants to start a podcast. Don’t start a podcast. That’s about your business. Nobody gives a shit. Start a podcast on something you completely geek the fuck out on. So you could still be wanting to talk about five years down the road all the way through. Because if you do something like, I had a Gal who ran a tax firm say, hey, I want to start a tax podcast. I’m like, no, you don’t. Who the fuck wants to listen to a tax podcast goes, Well, I think my business is. Well, I think it would be a great lead generation tool. I’m like, how much do you enjoy talking about taxes? She’s like, I fucking hate it. I’m like, right? So why would you start something you fucking hate? I said, what do you geek out on? She goes, Dude, I love wine. I’m like, all right, tell me more. And she’s like, I love that different wine tastes different and different glasses and different brands. And she starts going into it. And she’s like, in this ten minute freaking diatribe of stuff Unwine. I’m like, Go start a wine podcast. You obviously geek out. She goes, but how does that fill my tax practice? And my answer is always simply this, what is Gary Vee’s business? And people were always like, Well, he’s a motivational speaker. No, he is not a motivational. He runs a 1.3 or $130,000,000 ad agency. He’s got Vanners Ford. He’s got, like, five or six businesses behind him, and then I’ll flip it. I’m like, What’s Tony Robbins business, and they’re like, oh, he’s a motivational speaker. No, Tony has, like, 31 businesses a tune of, like, $5 billion. Motivational speaking. What he does on stage is his lead magnet to get to every fucking thing else. Start a wine podcast is the same damn thing. Don’t turn your passion into business. Go find something very fun, and then do that and watch how much more shows up for you.

Nice. I mean, to your point, Gary started off with liquor as well.

You’re right, he did. Maybe that’s the answer. Everybody should just start some sort of liquor thing.

Definitely. How do people find you online? You have a lot of different handles, a lot of different profiles. So which ones do you want to broadcast?

So pretty much. If you go almost anywhere, you can just type in Donny Bovine, and you’re going to get there. So last name is B-O-I-V-I-N. And it’s Donnie with an I. E. The proper way to spell it. No, y in this shit. I got the same problem as you guys Shannol is nobody can get my fucking name right. I keep threatening. I’m going to do a Gary Vee episode where he’s like, Vaynerchuk. I’m going to be like, Bovine, because that’s how you pronounce a fucking thing. Nobody ever gets it right. If they want to get to me fast and directly, they can send the words “I am a success champion” to 81-7318 630, and that’ll get them to me very quickly and I’ll respond and everything else. So yeah, I’m everywhere.

Yeah, I’m definitely with the whole name thing. I usually have to say it’s like, Shannon, when you change the last letter to an L Shannon, you got to do a depiction for them to get it. So going into the bonus round, right. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be?

right now I’m fascinated with Richard Branson and Elon Musk, and I don’t think I could sit long with Jeff Bezos, but I think we’re in a very cool time in history, and I’m not picking these guys because of their wealth. I’m more fascinated what they’re trying to do when you got three of the richest men in the world all competing to get their asses in space, that fascinates the hell out of me because I’m looking okay. These guys have built some of the largest companies on the planet, so they’ve got this driven drive, whatever the fuck behind them. And now they’re putting that behind going to space. I really wanted to sit in and be a part of those conversations just to be around guys that think that big. I mean, Steve Jobs says the only people that can change the world are the ones crazy enough to believe they can. And those guys are absolutely proving that right now with what they’re doing. So I’m fascinated by that. But out of three, it would be Richard Branson. And the reason I picked Richard Branson is they’re growing up for me, business, CEOs presence and all that. We’re fucking assholes, right? You had to be a cold hearted, white dude. That was just a prick. And I love the fact that Richard Branson my perception of him, right? I’ve never met the guy, but my perception of him is he is a kind, gentle soul that has run his business that way. And I hope I can always emulate that because I think it’s truly a beautiful thing to watch how he treats his people, how he always seems to put them first and still has made a shit ton of money, but maintain that level of pleasantry. I know Gary Vee puts that shit out there all the time, but Gary Vee still strikes me as one of those guys to be an absolute Dick to work for nothing against the guy. I think at the end of the day, his hustle and grind is going to beat the shit out of some people. But Richard Branson always just struck me. That dude that was just genuine down there, and I could be completely wrong. But that’s my perception of him.

I think Sir Branson is one of those people that you just kind of look at like this dude with the whole Virgin. He went to so many different tentacles and to your point now he’s kind of venturing into space. It kind of only makes sense for him to be in that market and to be kind of like a nice guy because he’s been doing it forever. He’s been doing it longer than I mean, he’s older than everybody as well.

Yes he is. If you haven’t read the book, Losing My Virginity, which is kind of his life story up until he did Virgin Airlines, which I’m so disappointed. Virgin Airlines and not in the US anymore. You want to talk about the best plane to ever fly on if you can ever fly Virgin, it’s amazing. But just a phenomenal story of basically how a hippie kid is. The way I look at it, built this Empire, it’s pretty fucking cool.

Nice. So if money wasn’t a factor, would you still be doing exactly what you’re doing right now?

Yes. And money is always going to be a factor of everything you do. But I’m really enjoying this. The biggest thing that I’m looking forward to, and one of the things that’s on my wife and I agenda as we continue to grow is we’ll create an entire wildlife refuge for all the critters. She really wants to create an old dogs home. So when dogs get sent to the shelters, nobody will do. She can go in and rescue them all business, wife, life wise. Hell, yes, I’d still be doing all this. But I’ll also put this caveat on there is why the fuck would anybody do anything if they can’t make a lot of money and it really impact the world? Money impacts and changes a lot of things, right? The more money you make, the more money you can fucking impact and change for others. Lives, advocacy and all that stuff is a beautiful thing. But it takes money to move mountains. I’m looking forward to the day that we can continue to create and do some just amazing things to continue to impact and change the world as a whole and just do some good shit.

Got you. So just based on what you said, I think my daughter would probably want to move from our house and move into your farm because she collects animals like their baseball cards. If you need someone, like, maybe a summer hand, right?

We’ll put her to work, man. I’ll give her a weekend muck and stalls, and she may change her mind.

I don’t know, man. She’s pretty engaged.

I love it. Encourage that because we need more people out there that maybe aren’t in that world and realm wanting to get into it because it takes people from the outside that aren’t doing it to really make great change, because oftentimes we’re in the weeds of doing whatever we’re doing an outside perspective of somebody who hasn’t necessarily done it. He goes, Why do we do it that way is a fucking beautiful thing to encourage the shit out of that man.

Got you? Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, going into closing. I mean, obviously we had a hell of a conversation, a lot of ways, a lot of ups and downs. And I think we definitely delivered on our promise in the beginning, this was going to be an interesting conversation, a lot of insightful details on how to structure businesses and just give insight to who you are. So on this journey, did you have any questions that may have rise that you want to ask me?

Oh, dude, that is a fucking first on all my interviews. Yeah, actually. So this boss Uncaged, what is it? So if I’m just walking down the fucking street and I see Boss Uncaged, what is it?

So you’re talking about, what is it from the business side or what is it not yours? To me, my representation of Boss Uncaged is too full. On one hand, it’s an opportunity to target people that see the word boss, and they’re intrigued by the definition of what they think boss really is. And essentially, it’s helping them on their journeys to become entrepreneurs, whether they’re small business owners, whether they’re startup companies like you’re. A great example of why I wanted you on this show because you’re going to give content and deliver information to that viewing audience. On the other hand, it’s especially my legacy. It gives me opportunity to look at my Rolodex and expand my Rolodex into people like you to then give to my grandkids and my kids and other family members down the road to listen to this. 20 years from now, 15 years from now, I’d be like, everything that they’re talking about. Essentially, one is evergreen and two 20 years from now, someone’s going to be able to listen to this and be like, Holy shit, I can take what they’re saying and apply action to it and 100 years down the road do the same thing.

I fucking love that. One more then for you.

Yeah go for it.

What are the four arrows?

Oh The four arrows, essentially, is the components of like just business structure. So it’s essentially a person, right? It’s all about the inner you, but it essentially symbolizes multiple revenue streams. It symbolizes multiple facets of business. It symbolizes intelligence, intellect, the grind. It’s like anything that you want. I would say it’s kind of like triangulation, right? You have to kind of figure out your ins and your outs whether you’re going to be an entrepreneur. If you’re going to talk to podcasters, if you’re going to establish something down here, if you’re going to talk about revenue, what are your four main components and those four main components shouldn’t be revenue streams. And then you compound and compound and compound out.

Love that, love that. Last question.

Yeah. Go for it.

How are you taking your brand big and fucking loud?

I mean, every day I’m pushing it and promoting it. But to your point, I think that I’m going to get bigger and louder as I continue to interview people like you continue to get out there and interview more and more people and get more and more people on the show. And I think that’s going to be my compounding to get louder and louder and louder and amplify it.

Fucking love it, dude. Keep doing, man. Seriously, I love the research you did behind the scenes and the show good shit and I love the dialogue, man. Well done.

I appreciate it.

Let me do one solid for you. So, guys, if you listen to this episode and you got any tactic, tips, tricks, something that was of value for you, do me a favor and teach somebody else how to subscribe to this fucking show. Being a podcaster. I can tell you reviews are beautiful and we love them, but subscriptions mean fucking everything and there’s still a lot of people out there have no clue how to listen to podcasts. Watch YouTube whatever. Freaking go teach somebody else how to dial into this shit. So his message, his word, his brand can touch more lives, and so he can impact and change more lives. It’ll mean fucking everything.

I definitely appreciate that, man. And it goes to show that not only are you a good dude, you’re a hell of a marketer, a hell of a brander, and you understand the philosophy of business behind the scenes and how to network. So I definitely appreciate you taking time out your busy schedule to be on the show. You gave hell of Nuggets and jewels on this episode, and I hope that my audience will take heed and take action on what you’ve taught them today.

I appreciate you brother.

Definitely, man. S.A Grant over and out.