Nathan: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me Marie and come down to the office, meet in person…

Marie: Yeah, thank you for having me. Absolutely

Nathan: Welcome. So we spoke like a couple of years ago now. And it was an incredible conversation and it’s funny, I was thinking back when I was looking through the book this, Everything Is Figureoutable message, this has been with you for a while because we talked about it a couple of years ago. So the first question I ask everyone that comes on is how did they get their job? So how did you get your job, tell us?

Marie: Yeah. Deploying the Everything Is Figureoutable philosophy, but the details are when I graduated from school, my very first gig was on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and I was so excited for this job. I’m a person who naturally has a lot of energy. There are literally no seats on the floor. Like there’s these little pop down seats that maybe you can sit at for a second. But especially when you’re an assistant, which is what I was, you don’t get to sit all day. So I was really excited because first of all, it’s a legendary place. Second of all, the opportunity to create great kind of financial freedom is there, you’re kind of in the centre of everything. And so I was really jazzed. However, about six months into my job, I started hearing these little voices in my head, like the still small voice that was saying, “Marie, this is not what you’re meant to do. This is not who you’re meant to be.”

And this was a panic point for me because again, I had just graduated. I’m the first in my family to go to college. I was in debt, like many of us are afterschool and I didn’t have a backup plan. So hearing this voice saying you got to get out of here didn’t really make sense, especially when the voice wasn’t telling me what else I should be doing. Well, that voice just continued to get louder and louder and I was trying to figure it out and I realised a couple things. One, being on the floor of the exchange, getting to know my coworkers. Many of them didn’t seem that satisfied. They were making millions and millions of dollars. That was more money than I had ever been around in my life. But they didn’t seem content or fulfilled. And they would pine for those kind of two weeks out of the year that they could get to take vacation.

And I couldn’t see myself making a career there. And there was one day when I was trying to ignore the voices and just do my job when I started to have what I can only describe as like a panic attack. Where I started feeling dizzy and getting hot and feeling a little bit nauseous and I told my boss, “Hey, I just need to go run out and get a coffee.” And because I had just graduated from a Catholic university, I was kind of trained at that point in a crisis to kind of ask God for help. So I didn’t go for coffee. I made a beeline to the nearest church and I’m like sitting in the church and I was bawling because I just felt so horrible. I wanted to quit this job but I didn’t know what else to do and I just felt like I was quite broken. So the first signal I got was to call my dad, and this is back in the day when there was still like flip phones.

So I took out my flip phone and I was just doing the ugly cries, snots coming out because I just felt so like I was going to be a disappointment to him after he worked so hard to put me through school. And I said, “Dad, I can’t explain it. I feel like I need to quit, but I don’t want to be a disappointment. I don’t want you to feel disrespected. I know how hard you work to put me through school.” And kind of when I took a break from just blubbering on, he’s like broken and he’s like, “Ray, you’ve been working since you were nine years old. I’m so not worried about you keeping a roof over your head or putting food on the table. You’ll take care of that.” He said, “But you’re going to work for the next 40 to 50 years of your life. And the whole secret when it comes to work is you have to find something you love because if you don’t, the rest of your life is going to be miserable.

So if you need to quit this job, go ahead and quit and don’t stop searching until you find something you love.” And Nathan, that moment, it was like part of me just felt such relief and I knew that he was right even though the logical part of my mind was just like, how do I find something I love if you didn’t give me any direction on that? It was just like, no, just get your butt out there and go figure it out. So I quit my job about probably two weeks later and I tried to really find how to figure out what my next move was going to be. And so the only direction I had was to go in my past. As a kid, I was really creative. I thought I was either going to be an animator for Disney or a fashion designer or do something in the arts. But I also really loved business and I loved marketing and I love small business. My dad was a small business owner.

I loved going to work with him on the weekends and anytime I could. And so the thing that my mind came up with was the world of magazine publishing. Because I was like, okay, there’s the commerce side, there’s the ads, right? All that bit. And then there’s the editorial side and okay, this is going to be the industry for me. And so I hustled and I went to a temp agency and I finally got in as an ad sales assistant for Gourmet magazine, which was part of like the storied Condé Nast Publishing, huge publishing house. So I was really proud of myself, super excited to go to work, whole new fresh environment. My boss, this woman named Sandy, she was incredibly kind. The publisher of the magazine, another woman, she was just awesome. And I was like, this is going to be great. I’m going to learn so much. And a fun fact, my little desk was near the test kitchen of Gourmet.

And of course that’s a food magazine. So all of the editors would bring me snacks all day long. And I’m like, “How can it get better than this? This is wonderful.” But then about six months into that job, the same thing started to happen. I heard those voices again of like, this isn’t who you’re meant to be. This isn’t what you’re supposed to do. And I could feel that sense of dread and misery starting to rise up. And then I was starting to again feel like, what is wrong with me? I really love to work. I didn’t want to just sit around eating Bonbons all day, but I couldn’t deny the fact that I didn’t want to be there. So then when I kind of stepped back and try to get a fresh perspective, I was like, “Okay, let me try and figure this out.” So I don’t want to necessarily become an account executive, which was my boss.

And when I looked down the career path, I don’t necessarily want to be the publisher, which was the big boss. And I was like, “Okay, if I don’t want to climb this ladder, what am I doing wasting their time and mine?” So then I was like, “Well, maybe I’m still too much in the business side of things.” Like it’s all numbers. It’s about money. It’s making the deadlines, all those things. What if I’ve just under nourished my creativity? Maybe I picked the wrong side of the publishing business. Why don’t I go over and be on the editorial side? Maybe that’s where I belong because it’s so much more creative. Went to the HR department, finagle my way into getting on the editorial side of a fashion magazine called Mademoiselle. So I’m in the fashion department, got this new job. I’m like, “This has got to be it.”

Going to fashion shows, working with all these new designers, working on photo layouts. I’m like, this is going to be awesome. What do you think happened? Six months in that voice started coming back again and this is where I really started to feel like something was cognitively wrong with me. None of this made sense. I was like, “Okay. I graduated as a valedictorian of my class. So I know I have some degree of intelligence yet, I cannot figure out how to find a job that I really want.” And so there was one day when I was on the internet, probably when I shouldn’t have been, this is back in 1999 and I stumbled across this article about a new profession at the time and it was called coaching.

So when I read this article, Nathan, I swear to you, it was like internally it felt like the clouds parted and little cherubs came out and they were like shooting some beans into my chest and it was like one of those awe moments. But the logical part of my brain was like, “You’re 23 years old, who the hell in their right mind is going to hire a 23 year old life coach? You haven’t even lived life yet. Plus you keep quitting your job. You’re in debt, you have nothing to offer anyone. This is like the cheesiest.” Like who, the term life coach in and of itself, I was rolling my eyes. I’m like, “This is terrible. This all sounds so wrong.” But at the same time, I couldn’t deny how right it felt. So I remember that night, I actually signed up for a three year coach training programme and it was all done remotely, which was very new and novel at that time.

Nathan: Three years?

Marie: Yeah. Because it was part time too. And I continued my work at Mademoiselle during the day. Right. I needed to pay the bills. About six months later, I got a call from the HR department at Condé Nast. They had a promotion for me and it was at Vogue. It was more money, it was more prestige, all those things. So that was my proverbial fork in the road. Do I stay on this safe path and have the steady paycheck, have the health benefits, have a respectable job that people actually understand or do I quit and do this weird ass thing called life coaching, right? That you have no idea how to do, no idea how to start or run a business and you’re so young, you don’t even take yourself seriously. So of course I chose that. So I quit my job at the magazine and I started bartending and waiting tables again to keep a roof over my head and to pay my bills. And that was the beginning of what’s now been a 20 year career.

Nathan: Can we fast forward now to like all the incredible things that you do and the amount of people you impact and help them.

Marie: Yes, yes, yes. So, okay. So after 20 years here we are with this incredible blessing of a company. I mean I think our YouTube show, Marie TV, we have over, what is it, 48, 49 million views at this point. We have an audience in 195 countries. One of our signature programme is B-School. We’ve had over 55,000 graduates through that programme over the past decade. Helping entrepreneurs start and grow businesses from hundreds of different industries, 171 different countries. So we could go on and on. But that’s some of like the fun stuff that we do is just really helping people create a business and life they love.

Nathan: Yeah. Amazing. And you’ve got your famous show-

Marie: Yes, Marie TV.

Nathan: Yeah. You always have these incredible sets. We tried to match it, it takes an awesome job.

Marie: Yeah, exactly.

Nathan: And you’ve just recently just about to, when this goes live, people will be able to get a copy of your new book, Everything Is Figureoutable. So what compelled you to write this book?

Marie: So this is probably the single greatest driving force of my entire life, this little three word phrase. And what I’ve seen now over the decades is that it can help anyone achieve their dreams or solve some of their most pressing problems. If you want, we can talk about where this phrase came from.

Nathan: Yeah. Let’s do it.

Marie: Yeah. Okay. Awesome. So my mom is this really interesting character. So she’s like 5’3, she looks like June Cleaver, like this tiny little character. She’s probably one of the most industrious people you’d ever meet. And she curses like a truck driver. So there’s all these contradictions. So my mom grew up in the projects of Newark, New Jersey. She had two alcoholic parents and she learned by necessity how to stretch a dollar bill around the block like five times. And one of my favourite memories growing up in New Jersey with my mom is sitting around the kitchen table with her as we would cut out coupons. She loved teaching me all the ways that our family could save money. And the other thing she loved to do was teach me that brands would actually send you really cool things for free if you saved up what were known as proofs of purchase.

I don’t know if you remember that or if you guys have that where you’re from too. So you could get a free cookbook or utensils or whatever. And one of my mom’s favourite prize possessions was this little transistor radio that was shaped like an orange. It had a red and white straw sticking out of the side that was the antenna and it was from Tropicana orange juice. And she got this thing for free. So she would always be somewhere around the house listening to this little Tropicana orange. And it was like one of her favourite things in the planet. So my mom was one of those humans where she’s always busy. And always doing something. And the way that I knew how to find her when I came home as a kid was listening for the sound of that radio.

So one day I was walking home from school and I was walking towards our house and I heard the radio off in the distance and as I got closer I realised the sound was coming from above, which was strange. And I look up and I see my mom on the roof of our two story house, like perched very precarious. And I looked up, I was like, “Mom, what are you doing? Like what the hell are you doing on the roof of the house? Are you okay?” And she and her very kind of gruff manner was like, “I’m Ray, the roof had a leak. I called the roofer, he said it was going to be at least 500 bucks. I said, screw that. I saw some extra asphalt in the garage and I’m fixing it.” And I was just kind of stunned. Another time I came home to the house and I heard the radio in the back.

I followed the sound and it was coming from the bathroom and I pushed open the door and Nathan, the entire room was filled with like dust and particles and like pipes sticking out of the wall. It looked like a bomb went off in the bathroom. And I was like, “Mom, are you okay? Are you hurt? Like what’s going on?” She’s like, “I’m fine. The tiles had some cracks in it and I didn’t want the bathroom to get mouldy. So I’m re-tiling the bathroom.” And you have to get, this is the 80s. This is pre-internet, pre YouTube, pre-Google, my mom only has a high school education. There was one day when I was walking home from school and it was in the fall and it was getting dark out. So it was kind of creepy. And as I approached my house, everything was silent and the house was dark. I went inside and I could feel that something was wrong.

It was like, in an Italian American home, it’s rarely quite and it’s rarely dark. So I’m walking around the house and I started to get nervous. Like, where’s my mom? Where is the sound of this radio? And then all of a sudden I heard these little clicks and clacks coming from the kitchen and I walk in the kitchen and hunched over the table was my mom. It looked like an operating table. She had a screwdriver, an electrical tape and then in like 20 little pieces was her Tropicana orange. And I felt so bad. I was like, “Mom, are you okay? What happened to your radio? It’s like your favourite thing.” And she’s like, “Ray I’m fine. The antenna was a little off and the dial was broken. So I’m fixing it.” And this was the first time I finally had enough smarts to ask a question I had always wanted to ask.

And I said, “Mom, how do you know how to do so many different things that you’ve never done before and nobody’s showing you how to do it?” She put down her screwdriver and she looked at me and she’s like, “Nothing is that complicated, Ray. You can do anything you set your mind to. If you just roll up your sleeves, you get in there and you do it. Everything is figureoutable.” And it was a moment where that phrase just reverberated so deeply in my soul and I was like, “Everything is figureoutable.” And it was this light bulb moment that has driven every single thing in my life of getting out of an abusive relationship when I was in high school. Getting into every class that I really wanted to get into in college.

Every single side job or gig I’ve ever gotten, every single piece of growing this business from the ground up with no investors, no knowledge, no clue, no help and everything that I do to this day. So that’s why I wanted to write this book because it’s so universally applicable and I’ve been sharing it now over my career. And the stories that have come in that it’s not just about building a business, it’s not just about reaching a particular personal dream. I mean people have used this idea to overcome addiction, to face really hard truths, like a diagnosis, like loss of a loved one, grief. And so I felt like I would be doing the world a disservice if I didn’t share this idea and get it out there.

Nathan: Incredible story. So can you talk me through the framework, like what is the framework? How does it work? Like even Elon Musk is working through some sort of framework to work us to get through the Mars.

Marie: Absolutely. And before we go through that, I just want to set some context. When I was writing the book, I was having brunch with a friend who has an eight year old son and he asked me about the book and what it was called. And when I told him the title, he’s like, “No, it’s not. No, everything’s not figureoutable.” And I was like, “Awesome, tell me more. Why don’t you think everything is figureoutable?” And he said, “Well, I can’t grow working human wings out of my back.” And I was like, “Well, that’s really kind of true.” I said, “But we humans can fly.”

And he was like, “Yeah, that’s right.” He’s like, “Well, I can’t bring my dog back from the dead, the one that died when I was two and I really miss him.” And I was like, “Well, that’s true right now.” I said, “But you know, scientists are working on cryogenics and there are people that have cloned their dogs.” And he was like, “Yeah.” But that conversation with an eight year old really inspired me to create a framework that helps us. There are three rules that really help us use this idea to solve our most painful problems and to reach our biggest dreams and those are this. Rule number one, all problems or dreams are figureoutable.

Rule number two, if a problem isn’t figureoutable, it’s not a problem. It’s a fact of life, I.e gravity, laws of nature, death. Rule number three, you may not care enough to solve this particular problem or reach this particular dream, and that’s okay. Find something you do really care about and go back to rule number one. And what that mental framework does is kind of keep us from going off in these fantastical directions and just kind of arguing, “Well, no, this isn’t figureoutable or that’s not figureoutable.” It just keeps us focused on how we can use this idea and this philosophy to make real in our lives and the lives of others.

Nathan: Yeah. With rule number three, that kind of strikes me to something that I’m sure that you would experience a lot, especially with your community and I see today is entrepreneurship is the new cool, right? Like everybody wants to start a business. Everyone wants to do something on the side. Everyone wants to make more money. Everybody wants to get ahead. And everyone has these crazy dreams, but quite often more than not, most people don’t want it bad enough. And I think when you think about the concept of everything is figureoutable, what would you say to people that, I guess they’re stuck, they’re frustrated, they’ve been trying to get a business off the ground or they’re kind of, things just aren’t working. I’d love to hear what your thoughts are on take.

Marie: Yeah. well I think it could, it’s hard to answer in the abstract, but we’ll try and poke into it from a few different points of view. So to your point, somebody who doesn’t want it bad enough, I think many times that can be true. So if we take your premise that entrepreneurship is kind of like the new cool thing to do and everybody wants to do it, I think sometimes it’s over glammed and folks think it might be easier or the successful come faster than perhaps they think it should. And so they get very discouraged. One of the ideas that we talk about in the book is this idea of progress not perfection. And we talk about the fact that anything that’s worth figuring out could be a business, could be your health, could be a relationship, anything.

It’s about the long term, not the short term. So that’s one piece of it. But I think in terms of feeling stuck, I think we all really can feel stuck in our lives from time to time. But if you do embed this belief, everything really is figureoutable. It gives you this energy to get up and go again and get up and go again. And the initial idea that you had perhaps for the business or the product or whatever it is that you want to sell, that might not work. But if you keep going in that direction and you keep challenging yourself to be creative and innovative, take feedback on, look at things from a new point of view, you might wind up pivoting and going someplace else. So for example, in my own life, the business I started 20 years ago is not the business that I run today. And I think to survive as an entrepreneur, you have to be incredibly nimble and flexible and to keep evolving yourself.

Otherwise you get left in the dust. So I don’t know if that helps put a frame on or give an answer to your question. But I think that I would say to someone, whatever it is that you want to figure out, you have got to be willing to devote the lion’s share of your time, energy and effort to this thing for the foreseeable future. It’s a long game. It’s a really long game. And if you’re not willing to, I think that’s a red flag that this may not be the thing for you. Everything worthwhile that I’ve figured out. I’ve been willing to say, “You know what? No matter how long this takes, I’m into it. I may have to do it just a little bit every day. I might not be able based on my other obligations or responsibilities. I might not be able to devote 10, 15 hours a day to this, but I’m going to chip away and chip away and chip away until I conquer it.”

Nathan: Yeah. When you were describing kind of how like the framework, one thing that I was thinking about just then was more than anything, it’s a mindset. That mindset shift that empowers you to any roadblock that you face. You can overcome it. And when I think about my own journey and the things that we’ve faced at Foundr because we’re doing new things and we’re trying to build a business model that quite frankly not many people have built. I always think to myself, “Okay, well if we broke it up into this one part, it’s not about what, it’s about who.” Who has, there must be somebody that has solves this problem. And I tried really, really hard to find someone, put a call out because it’s going to speed up that learning cycle to solve that problem.

Marie: Absolutely. There’s, we have a whole kind of series, there’s a chapter in the book about the power of defining your dream. Whatever the thing is that you want to devote all this energy and mind share and timeshare to, and it’s really a series of criteria to get real with yourself. To ask yourself, “Is this a thing I really want to focus on?” And so, one of the things that we walk people through is the difficulty scale, right? Has anyone in history ever accomplished anything either this thing exactly or anything analogous to it? If so, that’s awesome and if not, that shouldn’t necessarily deter you, but that should help you prepare mentally and emotionally for the tough terrain ahead. So I think it’s just about being real with ourselves.

And I also think that we, just as humans, underestimate the value of writing things out and writing things down. We know when it comes to feeling stuck, when it comes to feeling fear, which can stop many of us, we allow it to stay a morphous and kind of shapeless and like a boogeyman in our head rather than being concrete and specific about it on the page. And so what I’ve seen in my work for myself and working with tens of thousands of other people is that when you start to write things down and get some distance from it, you have a little perspective. You are so much more capable at cracking into, solving some of those problems and seeing how achievable something really is.

Nathan: Yeah. There’s something very magical I’ve found around writing down your goals. Even putting pen to paper versus typing. I’m not like into spirituality or anything, but I do believe that you give yourself a greater chance of success if you write it down and move away from it or separate yourself from it and look at it. I think that’s really powerful.

Marie: I mean there’s some research behind it too. You’re actually, if you write down your goals, you are 42% more likely to achieve them. Dr. Gail Matthews, who did an incredible study about this, we talk about it in the book. And she had folks in her study from all walks of life, young and old, all different kinds of professions and that held true. And it’s like who wouldn’t give yourself a 42% chance of more success by simply writing something down.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s crazy. So I love to switch gears and talk more around yourself and your success as an entrepreneur. In this industry in space like, in online world, you’ve had incredible success and you’re really, really strong in marketing and like everything you put out, like the design, the content, it’s really incredible. You have a very, very large community and that’s very aspirational to people. A lot of people want to really develop their personal brand now and you’ve been doing this for a very, very long time. I’d love to hear like there’s a lot of people that they say that you should always be focusing on building your personal brand. And you’ve done an exceptional job at this. Like, you’ve interviewed Richard Branson, you’ve been on Oprah, like you’ve done some, you’ve interviewed Oprah, you’ve done some incredible-

Marie: She interviewed me.

Nathan: She interviewed you?

Marie: Yeah. She was amazing. I haven’t interviewed here yet but let’s keep everything crossed.

Nathan: You’ve done some incredible things. I’d love to just unpack that a little more. Like what does it take to build like to such a large personal brand and impact so many people?

Marie: Well, I think tremendous patience. Tremendous, tremendous patience. So sometimes people are like, “Marie, what was like your breakthrough moment or what was the moment when everything changed?” I was like, “There wasn’t one.” I’m very much a worker bee. I’m very much the person who keeps my head down and just focuses on the work itself, the quality of the work. And virtually every opportunity. And this probably goes against what a lot of other folks would tell you or maybe their experience. So I’m just going to speak truth into what has been mine. Where I have always just kept my attention on how can I make the highest quality work. And when I say that, it’s not about like looking perfect, although we do have a static standards.

And I like things to feel a particular way because I think it speaks to emotion and heart and that’s important to me. But more importantly, it’s about helping people create results with the content and creating structures and making sure that things are actionable and that they’re clear. And that if someone actually took on our advice or used one of our products or our programmes and they did it with good faith, that their results would just be so off the charts, their life would greatly transform. So I’ve never had a PR person. I still don’t. We’ve never done any type of a campaign to like get me on Oprah or anything like that. It has all been a result in my own belief system of that folks have noticed the quality of, does that make sense?

Nathan: Yeah. And I think you’re extremely consistent.

Marie: Yes. Like I’ve been doing free weekly content for 20 years. The name of my first email newsletter, this is so cheesy but it was super fun. It was called magical moments, because I just want it to have a name for it. And again, you have to get, this was like 2001. And I just, I would send out a little piece of content, email only. I didn’t have anyone on my team. This is when email marketing was like, again, super, super brand new. But that has been consistent. And then Marie TV didn’t start as a show. It started, I got my puppy who’s now nine and I was having trouble finding time writing blog posts because I was, this was my first time having a new animal that you actually have to care for. And I was like, “I really like just talking into the camera.” Because I also had my simultaneous career in health and fitness and dance.

And I was like, “Let me just answer some reader questions like into my MacBook webcam.” So there was no lighting, there was no editing, it was me putting it up and iMovie and then going like, “I can stick this on the blog.” That’s how Marie TV started. So it wasn’t like a grand I am going to have a show. I never even dreamed that. But I realised I was having so much fun doing the videos. So to your point, being consistent and creating that every week. And then I had more creative ideas about how I could better communicate my messages. I was like, “Well, I have this idea for a skit that I think could illustrate this concept much better than I can merely do with words to a screen.” And then I’d be like, “Well what if we did X, Y, and Z and there were some comedy in it.” So it kept evolving organically. And then the place where it’s at today. I never thought we could get here. It just kind of built.

Nathan: I see. And have there been any kind of, in that 20 year span, like anything that you’ve done or any strategic decisions that you and your team have made that have really allowed for like incremental growth that you could share perhaps?

Marie: Yeah. I mean like decisions we made that when we watched, when we made this decision, we watched everything. Yeah, for sure. Doing less. So one of the most powerful lessons that we strive to adhere to even today is this notion simplify to amplify, simplify to amplify. So concrete example, there was a moment probably back in 2012-2013 where I had a high end kind of coaching and mentorship programme because I love working with people with one on one. I also had a programme that was called B-School, but it was very, very new. And I was doing several other things, speaking engagements and there was just all these other parts of the business.

And there was Marie TV, which was starting to kind of take shape and get traction. And I was starting to feel burnt out and felt really overwhelmed. And when I step back and I ask myself like what’s really important to me? It’s really important to me to impact as many lives as I possibly can while I’m on the planet. Because in 100 years I’m going to be powder, I’m not going to be here forever. So I’m very clear on my own mortality. Two, I want to do so in a way that is leveraged and scaled. Three, I want my business to be extremely profitable, not just for me, because I really don’t care that much about material things. I like giving back. I like taking care of my team.

I like having that fluidity to use money as a tool for good. We were also doing a conference at the time, by the way. So there was like all of these different revenue streams and I took a step back and I said, “I can’t keep going like this because I don’t feel like I’m giving the quality that I want to give to all of these different revenue streams. And I feel like it’s somehow holding us back.” So we did a little analysis and I realised transforming like 300 people’s lives at a conference and then 25 people’s lives in the mentorship programme, all the time and energy and bandwidth that was taking was preventing me from doing even more with the show.

And even more from a programme like B-School where I was like, “If we really dial this thing up, rather than having a couple of 100 people taking the course, I can have thousands and thousands of people and transform the lives of thousands, tens of thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world who don’t have to jump on a plane to come see me. And it’s way more affordable than the private coaching.” Like everything just started to make sense. So I probably killed over $1 million of revenue like that, just took it off the table. It was like done, not doing it anymore. And that one decision we saw not only our revenue and our profits skyrocket, but from a creative standpoint for me and from a lifestyle standpoint of having more space and not feeling so crunched, it was everything.

And that was all the proof we needed to say, “Less is more always.” I mean, you can even see it now. Some people will be like, “My God, why aren’t you doing like X, Y, and Z on Instagram? You could be doing so much more.” I was like, “That’s great for you, but I actually have a life and I love my business.” And I’m not out there to chase things. I’m not going after vanity metrics. I give no shits about any of that. The metrics that matter to me are the lives I can impact, the profitability of the company, the difference I can make through our philanthropic endeavours and am I actually enjoying my life? Do I really, really love it? Not to say that there’s not hard times, but the broad strokes of can I wake up every day, look in the mirror and go, “This is awesome.” Like two thumbs up. And if it’s not, something needs to change.

Nathan: Yeah. That’s really interesting. This concept of less is more, we see it like it’s crazy. Like, yeah, you can just focus in, hone in on the things that work. But I’m curious like over time you have added things. Like I saw you guys do a podcast now.

Marie: Yep.

Nathan: How do you know when to add and still with that philosophy of do less.

Marie: Yeah. So it’s dance. It’s always a dance. It’s nothing that’s static, right? Because nothing in our lives is static. So we kind of have some criteria internally whenever we’re looking at a new opportunity. One of the things which and this is not, this might sound woo woo, but it’s really not, we always check in how does this feel? So we’ll talk about some of the concrete bits in terms of having resourcing, staff, people to handle things. But how does this feel to us? What’s the why that we’re doing this? So for example, the fact that we have a podcast now, one of the major reasons that we do is because we, first of all, we’re constantly talking with our audience. We’re constantly listening. Our biggest department in the company is customer happiness because we respond to every single email that comes in and we have conversations with folks.

And what we heard consistently was that people were taking their phone, watching Marie TV, putting it on their passenger car seat so that they could listen while they were driving and we were eating up all of their bandwidth. Do you know what I mean? On their data plans. And they were like, “Can you please, we just love to listen to.” We were like, “Yes.” So we started creating the version as a podcast. So while we sometimes do audio only podcasts, a lot of times it’s the same exact content that, absolutely. And people so appreciate it because they get it, but they don’t have to eat up their data. So that was one of the criteria is like, “People really want this. What’s the why? It’s going to help serve them in a really big level.” And then when we checked in bandwidth wise with the company, someone on our team was like, “I will own this. I love this. I know exactly how I can do it.

It’s not going to take me off track.” So then we did it. There’s other times where an opportunity comes up and it’s like, yeah, we could do that, but is it going to take us off track from these other things that we really enjoy? Even if we can make more money. I get so many folks, not as much anymore, but I would say maybe like five or six years ago, do you know how much money you’re leaving on the table? I’m like, “I don’t care.” Because having a really successful, thriving business is not just about the money. It’s about how does your team operate? How do they feel showing up to work everyday? How do you as the founder feel? Are you so stressed out that you want to run away and hate that you even started this thing? Like have you created a monster that you can’t keep up with? If the answer is yes, again, I’m all about teaching people how to create a business and life they love and that is not the way to do it.

Nathan: I love it. So talk to me around the hard times, because you’ve been doing this for a long time. Hasn’t been easy like you said. Tell us some of the hard times that you’ve faced, maybe some interesting stories around building the business where you’ve used the framework.

Marie: Yes. So I remember one, it was in the early days when I didn’t have much of a team and I was really excited about having a membership community, this is years and years and years ago. And I was pumped about it. I was psyched about it. I actually had this whole sales page, a bunch of people had signed up. We had hundreds of people who were excited to get into this and I wasn’t necessarily satisfied with the features of things that were kind of on the market at that time. Other plug and play platforms. I wanted something custom because of the experience that I wanted to give. So I’d invested thousands of dollars building this new custom platform and I was so pumped and I was kind of a little smug about it, getting all these people into the programme, Nathan. And as soon as everyone was loading in, the whole thing crashed. I’m talking like total mess tech nightmare. Nothing moved. And it was like one of those feelings, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this where everything just goes wrong and it’s not just internal-

Nathan: Comes…

Marie: Right. It’s not just an internal thing where there’s like, Oh my goodness, it involves real paying customers. Where people that you really want to serve and they really want to take care of, you’ve disappointed. So that was the position I was in and I felt horrible. Not only that, the money I’d invested in building this custom platform at that time, my business didn’t have that thick of margin. So that was a whole lot of money to just kind of flush down the drain. And I just remember feeling to myself like, you know what, the everything is figureoutable idea, right? I realise the power of positive quitting. Here’s what I mean by that.

That tech site crashed. What I did instantly told people exactly what happened, how it went down, got them onto a host of platform and over-delivered on what I promised, so that part was fine. But rather than dump more money into like rebuilding a custom platform, it taught me a great lesson that I have no business building a custom platform when I have no level of tech support underneath me. And that investing that amount of money when I don’t have the knowledge about tech to be able to be in there every second of every day is not a wise use of my time or energy. So it was a really valuable lesson in that and that I could quit that part of the project so I could keep figuring out how to grow the business. Does that make sense?

Nathan: Yeah. It does.

Marie: So I don’t feel like, I think that there’s a big distinction between giving up and moving on, right? So giving up is where you really still and you’re like, “I can’t do it. It’s not going to work.” But moving on it’s like, “I hit a wall, I crashed. I learned something valuable and I’m going to keep moving.”

Nathan: I love it. So talk to me about mentors, like who do you learn from? How do you stay on top of your game?

Marie: Yeah. So I’m at an interesting place in my career. I don’t have a particular mentor, but what I am surrounded with is incredible dynamic support. And here’s what I mean by that. I’ve developed such close friendships over the years with people who are also at the top of their game. Who, some of them are in similar businesses, some of them are just people that I’ve had the opportunity to meet who have very specific areas of expertise. Some people are experts when it comes to like the body and energy. And some people are experts when it comes to nutrition and some people are experts in like these different areas. But we’ve developed friendships where it’s not necessarily like a mentor mentee thing.

It’s like more of a pure like relationship. But there’s such a deep level of trust that they are folks I can go to and I’m like, “Hey, this feels thorny to me. What do you think?” But there’s this reciprocal relationship, if that makes any kind of sense. So I feel like I’ve cultivated this support system of people that help me find my truth. They don’t come in dogmatically with like, “This is what you should do next.” They know me well enough at this point to kind of present options and to help me find my path ahead. Because what I’ve seen over time is I’m not really good at following rules and I’m very unconventional. So I’m not going to do well following someone else’s plan. But the people around me really help me continue to stay on my own path with my own truth.

Nathan: And is that where you draw inspiration from? From your peers or?

Marie: My goodness. Everywhere. So I actually really love, I love film, television, music, the arts. Like I try and draw inspiration from outside of the industry, if that makes sense. Because I feel like you just get so much like different perspectives and different point of views. And I find that for me it can get a little insular and things start to look and feel the same. So that’s why we’re always kind of doing things that are just outside. Like I love going to amusement parks. I’ll take my entire, we’ve done this, take the entire team to amusement park for a whole day and we go on rides and we did this whole experience in Disneyland for my birthday one year and we got all these tours and we learned so much history about Disney and how he crafted things. So there was so much inspiration that came that has nothing to do with what we do, yet everything to do with what we do.

Nathan: Okay. Interesting. And with your team are you guys like remote?

Marie: Yeah. So we are a fully distributed team. I think there’s over 30 of us now, continuing to grow. But we do shoot in New York city in terms of our show. So we are in person together like the video team and the folks that help kind of create our content. But 99% of the time everyone is dispersed.

Nathan: Wow! How do you manage that?

Marie: Well, here’s what it comes down to. There’s a couple things. One, we have extremely strong connections on our team. My director of operations, she’s a wizard, she’s amazing. We all get along really, really well. And part of it though to, is that we hire people that are self motivated. Like who don’t need to be prodded, who kind of shared the DNA that I have, which is you are naturally motivated to do great work in the world. And so it’s just about having communication aligned, project plans aligned, timelines aligned.

And as long as people are a good communicator, one of the things that we find in our company is that folks are so happy because there’s so much freedom. They don’t have to like get up and go to a particular office every single day. They don’t have to battle commuting. We can get on video chats and still hang out. We get together in person. Some of our team, they actually take vacations together or they’ll get together when the company’s closed down, they go to see each other in real life. And I think that stems from the depth of the connection which comes from trust and the fact that people actually just do their jobs.

Nathan: Yeah. That’s cool. So how often do you guys catch up? Do you catch up every week? Every fortnight?

Marie: We talk constantly.

Nathan: Whole team?

Marie: Whole team, twice a week. Twice a week we have two set times where we all jump on the phone and that’s like usually 99% of us are there. And then we split off. And it’s always like different calls and different teams depending on who’s working on what.

Nathan: And what is the agenda of those two calls usually? Those 30 people.

Marie: My goodness. It is the priorities of the week. We go right down like what are the big things happening in the company that everyone needs to be aware of? Especially now, in Bookworld there’s lots of things that are happening that are a little unusual from our day to day. But then also really big milestones or projects that everyone needs to be aware of. So for example, if we’re in B-School season, and let’s say module two is opening up today, okay great. We’re all going to keep an eye on that. We’re going to have awareness of it. So if we catch anything in the email inboxes or someone alerts us, there’s an issue. Everyone kind of understands the customers come first. This what takes priority. So it’s going down our project list. It’s making sure that everyone’s on the same page and that if there’s any challenge in any project happening that we can kind of voice it. And then offline go readjust. Absolutely.

Nathan: That sounds like a really good cadence.

Marie: Yeah.

Nathan: Okay. And I’m curious as well, like when it comes to courses, every person’s doing courses now. Even like we’re creating so many now with all these different instructors and I notice a lot of companies now are as well, like Shopify have their own Academy. Fiver have their own Academy. And you’ve been doing this for a long time. So I think I’d be foolish not to draw on your experience there. If you don’t mind sharing and you’ve got, as you said, 55,000 graduates. Like you know how to get people incredible results. I’d love to know like over time, how has that changed and what are some things that people can be thinking about if they do want to produce an online course to really make sure people get results? What are some things that you’ve noticed?

Marie: Absolutely. So in terms of what’s changed, I think the sheer volume of options out there, right? So there’s a lot more available for people. And I think that’s a good thing because education is one of the most powerful tools that we have to transform our lives and our business. So that’s awesome. I think the downside of that though is perhaps quality control, right? And so if you’re not really a fan or a lifelong student of learning itself and being really interested in understanding how another human being when you don’t have the benefit of in person interaction. When perhaps you don’t have the benefit of like a one-on-one dialogue, how do you kind of scale to ensure that people get what they need and that you’re giving them the tools they need to actually get results.

And so I think that one of the things that folks need to do is just really get really clear on the outcomes that they’re hoping their students will walk away with, like concrete outcomes. What will they know how to do? What will they understand? What will they be able to create or accomplish as a result of going through your particular course? And being hyper focused on that. And I also think it comes back to what we talked about before. Less is more. I think one of the places I see folks having difficulty is they’re trying to stuff too much into a particular course and people get overwhelmed and they can’t finish. And then I also think it’s about what is the interaction level? Like one of the things that we have in B-School, we have an incredible ever-growing team of B-School mentor coaches.

So those are business owners who run successful businesses, meaning, so they are a successful entrepreneur. They’re taking care of themselves, they’re in business for a certain amount of time and they’re also B-School grads. So they get the philosophy and they’re there to support our new class of students, right? So that people going through the programme for the first time have all of these layers of support. I’m there with them, their fellow students, the grads come back, the official mentor coaches, team Forleo. So you really have to be committed to not getting it. Do you know what I mean? As long as you’re willing, right. The person’s willingness is big. So I know you asked me about what’s changed and I think in terms of what people should really keep in mind, I think less is more. Be hyper specific and concrete about the outcomes. What is the promise of your course?

And then here’s the thing, I think people have no patience. Like the first time I came out of the gate with B-School, which by the way, some folks are going to be like, they would probably want to shake me for this, but we had like 200 students. Which is not nearly as big as we are now, right? We’re 55,000 plus. But I would’ve never gotten to 55,000 plus if I was like, “It’s just 200 people and that’s it. And this must not have worked. Let me go create another course and let me go create another course and let me go create another course.” The B-School that first came out is not the B-School there’s today. The feedback, the iteration, the constantly making it better is how you get to something that’s legendary. And I think don’t have the patience or the ability to focus over time and the desire to make something extraordinary. And that’s why we have a lot of mediocre.

Nathan: And do you think because there is more and more noise and there is more ability of choice, it is more difficult to get your message found or it’s harder to get… Really?

Marie: No, I think it’s the opposite. Here’s why. In a sea of sameness, where people are not really trying that hard, all you have to do is like put 20 to 25% extra in. In terms of the care, in terms of how you want something to be, in terms of the customer experience. And you stand so far above the massive mediocrity, right? So I actually think you can see it as a positive and I think that’s true in almost every area of life because people are so I just want passive income. And whenever anyone tells me they want passive income, I’m like, “I got a bridge to sell you.” Nothing is truly passive. Nothing. Even investments.

If we’re looking in the financial world, if you don’t keep an eye on your portfolio, you’re going to cry at some point. So I don’t think anything is truly passive. I don’t think that’s the position or the posture that we want to take in life. We don’t want to sit around eating Bonbons. We’d be bored out of our fricking brains. So why not be actively involved and have leveraged income? Why not think about how to create, and it’s such an extraordinary experience for your customers that they can’t wait to tell other people about it. So I think there’s some different positioning that can happen. But I think that the amount of courses shouldn’t be a deterrent. It should be an inspiration to be extraordinary.

Nathan: And as over time, because you’ve been running B-School like you said, almost nine years.

Marie: Over. This is going to be my 11th.

Nathan: Wow! How have launches changed? Do you find that email is still effective and all that sort of stuff?

Marie: Yes. So here’s the deal with email. People still are like, “Email’s dead.” Like some folks show up and they’re just like, “My God, I’m running my whole business on Instagram.” Just am like, “Please no. For the love of all things Holy. No.” First of all, running your entire business off social. You are making yourself so vulnerable. You don’t own the connection with your customers, the platform does. And the moment they want to change their algorithm, they change their terms of service, you and your business are screwed. In my opinion, and there’s some solid data to back this up, you can just research on it. Email is still one of the most effective forms of marketing, but here’s the kicker. If you do it right, if you’re just phoning in your email and writing super shitty subject lines, of course it’s not going to getting opened.

And if you’re not really putting any care into the body of the message, if you’re not delivering value, if you haven’t created trust, if you’re not creating these relationships where someone actually wants to hear from you, of course your email marketing is not going to perform because it’s not good. But when you do email marketing right and when you actually care about your customers and your artful with your subject lines. And I’m not talking about being manipulative, I’m just talking being creative and making things fun and delightful and interesting and value driven. People actually want to open your emails and they want to hear from you. So I don’t think the problem is necessarily that email marketing doesn’t work or that launches have changed.

I just think people are so spread thin because they’re trying to be everywhere at once. They’re trying to be, we were talking about this off camera before we started rolling. If we just take Instagram for example, as a platform in and of itself and you want to be amazing at your grid posts. Then you want to be amazing on stories, then let’s be amazing on IG TV too. That’s just within the platform of Instagram. By the way, let’s be amazing over on Facebook. And then all the things that you can do on Facebook. And what about YouTube? And all the different things you can do on YouTube and Twitter and whoever else knows and then email you cannot be excellent at everything. So again, it comes back to simplify to amplify. Choose a few places to be and be dangerously good at it. And then your launches will work.

Nathan: Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed is like, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you guys do like Facebook ads. Do you do much of that kind of stuff?

Marie: We do. But we’re really, really strategic about it. So and that of course is always a moving target. So it’s hard to get into the nitty gritty and to be really, really honest, I’m involved in the creative and the high level decisions, but the team now is so sophisticated and because so many of those, the more kind of technical aspects change in a minute. They’re the experts, not me. We do do it. But again, it’s always like simplify to amplify. It’s like what matters and why are we doing this and what are we hoping to accomplish? And what it comes back to is never vanity metrics. It’s about changing lives, getting someone either into a paid programme or a free offering where we can create a result and then create a fan for life.

Nathan: Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Well look, we have to work towards wrapping. How are we doing for time? Jeez, we’ve gone for a while.

Marie: Wow! I’m sorry. I can just keep talking and talking and talking. Sorry guys.

Nathan: It’s all good now. This a great conversation. So look, I can talk to you all day, Marie. Just look at the time, we have to go towards wrapping up. Where’s the best place people can find out more about your new book? When does it come out? Depending on when people are watching this and where can people get a copy and where can they find out more about yourself and your work?

Marie: Absolutely. So Everything Is Figureoutable is available on September 10th. It’s available both in the hardcover form and audible. So if people like listening to audio books instead, you can go to everythingisfigureoutable.com or wherever you get your favourite books and audio books from. And then in terms of our work, we have hundreds and hundreds of free episodes of Marie TV, 100s of free tools at marieforleo.com. And then the place, in terms of social, the place I have the most fun is Instagram and that’s just at Marie Forleo.

Nathan: Awesome. Well look, thanks so much for taking the time, Marie. Always a pleasure to speak with you. Second time now. Great to make it in person and yeah, thanks so much.

Marie: Thank you for having me.