Paying Off Huge IRS Debt With Online Marketing With Winter Valko

Hi, I’m Igor Kheifets. And this is the List Building Lifestyle. The podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the List Building Lifestyle Confessions of an Email Millionaire at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus a $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints, visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now it’s time to claim your list building lifestyle.

0:52  

So,  how do you even get into a $1.5 million debt with the IRS? Not easily, right? Because you first got to earn one point more than the 1.5 rather than to even get there. It’s a bit of a story man, I’m a high school dropout turned into a network engineer. So I’ve always been a nerd. Someone taught me less billing in oh seven. And like most I kind of kicked it around for a year or two.

1:22  

And then I finally hit it off. At the time that I bid it off. My mom got sick with ALS. We live with Oregon, which at the time was the only state that allowed for death with dignity. That was the most courageous thing I’ve ever seen someone do.

1:41  

So anyways, my mom passed away. My list building business was growing up my mom passing away, my father passed away a year later

1:52  

I started printing money I guess the way we could put it right it just started like I went from maybe earning at the year you know time before I was earning 50, 60 grand, 70 grand a year to earning millions. My dad passed away as I mentioned a year later, my dad was my CPA. So in between my mom and my dad passing I had multimillion many multi million dollar launches and that huge growing business and my parents were my best friends. You know, that compounded with my dad being my CPA,

2:24  

and his passing I wasn’t like let me go file my taxes. Right at his passing. I was like, shoot, I just lost the two most important people in my life. And I didn’t choose the best way to deal with it. This was back in my late 20s, I’m 43 now so I didn’t pay my taxes for years and I became the elephant on the back like I got anxiety every time I went to check my mailbox because we know that there’s going to be a letter coming I don’t just forget that it wasn’t some small amount of earnings or something right um and it finally came and all said and done I owed the IRS 1.3 and the state of Oregon about 250-300 grand so I had lost both my parents.

3:14  

I had this massive debt and I also wasn’t although I had success in my business man I wasn’t feeling fulfilled you know and I had really experienced that pinnacle of money does not bring happiness you know, I mean because I spent a lot of money, a lot of time during those tax dodging years trying to fix myself and all the rest of horse race so long story short that’s what got me there man losing my two bests.

3:47  

And having the Father as a CPA, you know, kind of being like I always did every year, since I started earning money. I was like a child when it came to taxes. This is you know, I’ve never been like that. I’ve been very much aware of the tax situation, even when I wasn’t making anything I still went to file them and to really get to understand the system. But

4:14  

I’ve also thankfully never had to go through what you went through but I can certainly relate to checking out right, to basically distancing yourself from any big issue that might be showing up in your life and just not wanting to deal with it because you were hurting so much.

4:36  

Of course, what’s really cool is that, you know, you did have that business, right? So you started building your list, launching products. And what’s really interesting is that even though you knew you owed a lot of money, you still managed to owe a lot of money but traveled a lot. And I mean you kind of lived your life as if you didn’t really owe a lot of money to the coop

5:00  

Completely lived an awesome existence, then on the outwardly and inwardly I’m broken from losing them, you know, that taxes, you know, once that letter came, you know, had to hire attorneys because at that level, you don’t just try to figure it out yourself. And that was a five year process in resolving that debt with the IRS.

5:28  

But I had an awesome business that was producing money. I’ve said this before, over the years that I am less building my internet business than saving my life. I don’t, I probably would have ended up

5:44  

totally broken, homeless or something, right? Because I was so broken by my list building that business allowed me to work less than most people would work and be profitable is what I’m trying to say right I was broken but could still get that 20% there. And at the time that 20% was enough to make a lot more money than I had been making offline. Yeah, what I find is once you’ve got it off the ground, because that’s the most difficult part is to get to a critical mass when you’re making a certain amount of money, and then you’ve built momentum. And then you know, once you have a list, once you have some products out there, or even if you have a list, but it’s mostly promoting other people’s products, because you’re big on Clickbank you are at a time. At that time, you were probably one of the bigger guys in the self help Clickbank marketplace. So like, you don’t really need to push very hard at like, there’s a point that comes when you’ve sort of hit that critical mass, and then you just need to keep like, almost like pushing with your finger as opposed to like really going full force. And then you can either sustain it, or you can even increase it.

6:54  

And I’m assuming at the time, the game was fairly simple. You just had to mail a lot and launch a lot, that was it precisely right, it was the the JV launch game, which partially led him to my own personal happiness just because I would find myself.

7:15  

One, my business relied on those relationships staying strong, right, and isn’t something that I had more control over than relationship building, which we mostly do. But relationships can go bad if they happen.

7:28  

But to have to also promote products I wouldn’t promote had there not been a partner that I owe the reciprocal to right and maybe at times promoting stuff that I didn’t even necessarily agree with or didn’t make my eighth house, but I owed them in this business agreement. Right. And so those things led me to not really focusing on a lot of it.

7:51  

And I was in a bit of despair, you know, I had this massive amount of debt. I wasn’t, although yes, I was financially able to produce some decent amount of my income, I really experienced that, like, money is great, but, energetically working towards something that you enjoy doing. And building a business that you enjoy every day far outweighs even millions of dollars, in my opinion, you know, if you’re unhappy with what you’re doing every day, but hey, you’re making $2 million a year. Well, anyone that’s watching this, that thinks that they would be happy with 2 million year regardless, I guarantee you try it out, you’re not you know, money doesn’t bring happiness, we all have always been told that, you know, I’m sometimes shocked and surprised even to this day, to find out the sorts of businesses that you can run that align with your passion and hobby and, and the things that, you know, satisfy you like and still make a million dollars a year. Like I see people, you know, produce 10 $20 million a year still running businesses they enjoy. And it contradicts this idea that I grew up with which is like, if you want to make a lot of money, you gotta work really hard.

9:08  

I think that’s just not true. Even if only because when you do something you love. You don’t feel like it’s work. Like I can’t lose myself in writing emails, I can lose myself in you know, trying to develop an idea or something or maybe even outlining a training about email marketing, for example, like I can really lose myself in it to a point where I’ll forget about other commitments that I have. I’ll jump out of bed night and I’ll get to work completely ignoring the fact that you know, that I need to be somewhere whatever, like it can just consume me to a point where it’s not work because work doesn’t doesn’t feel like that work is something you make

10:00  

yourself to work is something that you feel like you’re obligated to do, as opposed to kind of just being obsessed. And I was watching an interview yesterday with Neil deGrasse Tyson. I started taking an interest in his work after seeing him speak live here in Toronto. And he was saying how people tell him, you know, when you’re going on vacation, or, you know, don’t you want to go on vacation, he tells them that, you know, even if I go on the beach, I’m thinking about like the universe. He says, like, I don’t want to go on vacation, because I love what I do. And I completely and fully resonate with that, because you can be making a million dollars, you know, doing what you love. 

And it’s now primarily possible because of the internet, because of all these niches and pockets, where people go like on the internet, you can be a superstar of your own little tribe. Right. So like, we’ve seen that people went from living in tribes to living in cities, villages, first, and cities, etc. And all of a sudden, you get lost in the city. But then the internet developed and all of a sudden, we’re back to being tribal again. And you can build your fortune around the tribal interest that you have 100% I’ve said many times myself or to some folks, right, we’re so fortunate to be alive in this age of the internet.

11:36  

My grandfather built a 20, $30 million valuation company back in the 70s. Housing, providing roofing, right, and at one point, they roofed all the Denny’s in America, some of the Denny’s still have that metal roof, that was my grandfather’s roof, what I’m getting at is the amount of work that he had to put in.

11:58  

So different from the amount of work we have to put in these days with the internet, it’ll mean similar size levels of business and similar size potential, right.

12:07  

I think it’s probably so much easier, I can’t believe the amount of jobs that he must have had show back then to build that out, right, he built it from nothing. And the internet like really unlocks that enables us to build, like you said, there’s tribes

12:24  

on a more micro level, you know, than what was required before. I like the analogy of moving out of the cities my whole life. I’ve lived in a city, because it has fast internet. And I haven’t taken the new advantage with Musk’s Starlink to move back out to the country, but I am looking forward to and I plan to,

12:47  

You know, I’ve been online since I was 708. Like I said, I’ve needed fast internet for most of those times. So that’s kept me City Bound, right. And so I love prefer living out in the country and, and more off the land, so to speak. So

13:03  

definitely something about being connected to the internet, that makes me feel almost safer and more in my comfort zone. Like I have this ridiculous fear of flying, or at least I had it because in the last, I don’t know, 12 months or so I must have traveled at least once a month. And it always involves flying somewhere, usually back and forth. So it’s two flights a month. And it’s been pretty solid.

13:30  

But like I’ve always had fear of flying in and one time was flying from New York to Orlando, or vice versa. And it was the first time that we had Wi-Fi on the plane. And when I paid the 20 bucks or whatever and connected the moment is the first ding on my laptop, you know, for when the notification kind of popped. I noticed this comforting sense of safety and security. You know, all of a sudden was like, Oh, yes, I am not in a steel tube. 10,000 feet above ground. I am in my comfort zone connected to the internet.

14:13  

Completely. With the pandemic and post pandemic. My relation to that is that it changed us as a whole my family.

These days, I don’t leave the house much right. I pick the kids up, drop them off from school, but our lives have changed a lot. And I think I’m okay with that one. I’ve been online for a long, stinking time. 

14:35  

But also, these are my interactions and the internet’s enabling that let’s say the internet site here, I’d probably go crazy. It’s just me and my wife, my two sons and it’s all I see. That’s all I engage with on a daily basis, maybe once a week somewhere else, you know, I mean, I’d probably go absolutely bonkers. Yeah, but I put myself in this room. I sit in front of seven screens and man I’m connected all the time.

15:00  

The only time that it ever has its downfall for me is are we ever true be disconnected, I think I’ve only done that once in my 1617 years online, really got truly disconnected for a week, that was back when it was just my email marketing list building business doing cross promotions. And I, you know, scheduled out a week worth of emails and went in the mountains.

15:19  

Nowadays, you can even go into the mountains and Starlink is connected everywhere. So it’s such a powerful tool. Yeah, I love reading emails from like, some weird spot, you know, like, the cottage or the mountains or the skiers, or, like, we got a trip coming up in March to go skiing, like, I don’t look forward to the, to the scheme, or I’m not really big into that. But I know that kids would love it. But you know, I can already see it like I can, I can envision it, there’s a vision in my head. And it’s me in a cafe cozy warm with a cup of hot cocoa, you know, writing an email or something, you know, it’s not me on the slopes going.

16:01  

It’s me going.

And I’m perfectly fine with that, because otherwise, if I’ll be on a slope, I’ll be thinking about how to translate what I’m seeing into an email or something. I guess at this point, it’s almost like a mental condition when everything that happens to me has to become an email. But I’m fine with that. Because every time I send an email, it makes me money.

16:31  

So that reminds me of one launch several years ago, I was traveling the world with my girlfriend at the time, and she got sick with salmonella, and we’re about to go live. And needless to say, I launched from a hospital in Bangkok. I was in Bangkok at the hospital with my girlfriend at the time for 12 days in the hospital. So all my JV updates are about the Bangkok Hospital, which led to good, interesting JV updates.

16:57  

But literally like sleeping in the hospital room, you know, on this little pullout thing and running lodge in Bangkok, the internet wouldn’t have allowed my grandfather to do that. You know, I mean, it’s awesome.

17:10  

Yeah, the other thing about this, the business of email is how you like. I’m sure your grandfather had to travel a lot. Like I’m sure if there was a Denny’s in Iowa, then he would actually have to get on a plane or in a car and just go to Iowa.

17:29  

Now we traveled because we can. Now we traveled because I mean, obviously we can go to masterminds and events. And that’s something we should do. We go to see clients, sure, you know, if you’re going to consulting day or whatever you can fly out or they can fly to you. But you can also just decide that come this weekend. You’re going to Vegas, you’re going to Orlando, come this summer, or come this winter, you’re taking your kids to Disney World, you’re taking them to Lego with you taking them whatever. And it’s because it’s a preference, rather than saying that oh yeah, like I was I was chatting with somebody the other day, and they were telling me how they’ve built. So they’re involved in sports. And they are pretty successful at what they do.

18:19  

And last year, they traveled for, I think 200 days like so they were forced to be on the road for 200 days because of their work. Like, I don’t like that.

18:36  

like a couple of years ago, I had this. I had coffee with my best friend. And he says, Would you take on a $10 million job. So it’s guaranteed 10 million a year like and you don’t have to take on all the headaches of running a business. You’re just literally just a dream job. It’s a dream job. You’re writing emails where you’re doing some kind of copywriting thing or you know, building a live whatever. Like it’s whatever you love to do. And it pays 10 million a year.

19:07  

But you have to commute to work. You have to get in the car and drive downtown, do it there, come back, get in the car, drive downtown, come back. And I said no. I said I’ll take an income, a fraction of that. I don’t even care if it’s like 10% of that.

19:28  

I’m sorry, even if it’s 1% of that. No wait 10% of 10 mil is the mil and one one would be 100%. Yeah, so I’ll take 100 grand, but I want to like work where I want to work and I don’t want to commute because I had to commute. I did the commute. And I have done it since I was about 14 years old. I would wake up at 5:30am and I would get on an inter city bus. I would go to a different city to the Israeli Air Force Academy. I would spend the whole day in the car.

20:00  

And I would take the bus back home, it would take me another hour, hour and a half to get home every single day, five days a week, sometimes six days a week. And then after that there was the army service. After that there were my, you know, started jobs that also required a 30 minute bus ride each way. And I was like, I am not doing the commute. I don’t really care. If I’m staying home and earning 80 grand a year. I just don’t want to. I just didn’t want to commute. The freedom far, far outweighs the rest. Like you said, like, it isn’t possible to have, hey, it’s Thursday afternoon. We don’t have anything going on this weekend. Let’s leave town for four days. Right. And most people don’t have that, that freedom at all.

20:47  

Or that commute? I don’t know, with commuting like my son’s going to a Montessori school. And there’s two choices of schools. One was 30% more than the other. The other quality schools are the same, one school five minutes away, the other school appointments way.

21:02  

Which one did I pick? Right? Same thing, I don’t want to drive 20 minutes that way twice a day? No, I’d rather spend 30% More, and it’s five minutes away. And then even if I leave three minutes before I still get there on time, you know.

21:16  

No, the whole school run thing. I mean, as a parent, sometimes I don’t really feel like a parent, I feel like a shift. Uber driver, you know, like a personal assistant, to organize your schedule. But it’s, oftentimes it’s, you know, in there, but not a parent, you can be all these things. And people, I think people who don’t have kids really underestimate the amount of effort, time, energy planning, and thinking that goes into managing a child or to the two kids, I mean, your sons are pretty close in age. So I’m assuming they’re doing all the same stuff. Like they go to some presently present extracurricular, they’re going together. I mean, my kids are six years apart. And they’re a boy and a girl, which means, you know, she doesn’t want to do soccer, he wants to do soccer. You know, he doesn’t want to play the piano, she wasn’t the piano. And it’s like different places around town, different times of day, different days a week. And the only thing that we managed to pull off is to get both of them in the same school, they actually used to go to different schools. So we would have to do like two drives. So it’s like four, four trips, if you will, yeah. And they would finish at different times as well. So you have to plan it out. So you set out like at 3: 30, to pick, you know, my son, and then you know, 5pm, you pick up my daughter. And it was like a nightmare. And thank god, I’m an entrepreneur, because as an entrepreneur, you kind of you kind of rebel against whatever box they put you in, oh, you learn that you can break the system, and you can build your own system, you learned that whatever the the status quo is, you can question it, and you can build your own. So I mean, within just a year, we quickly learned that we did not like this. And we kind of shifted things, found a different school, found a different set of curriculum. Now, we even have it in a way where some of the extracurricular stuff that they do is in school, which means we don’t have to pick them up and drive them somewhere else. I mean, the amount of time that saves is insane.

23:30  

And I don’t know if this is true for you or not. But I noticed that there’s some activities that drain me more than others, meaning that I’m automatically more productive. If I can protect myself from having to do these activities. For example, a phone call in the morning completely derails my day.

23:49  

I don’t know why it is like that, it can be an absolutely friendly phone call with a friend, it could be a work related phone call, but a phone call will absolutely kill my productivity or having to drive somewhere. Like if I actually have to, like 10am, I have to go drive somewhere and come back. That exercise just leaves me incapable of doing any, any work. I’m just kind of gonna sit there and stare at a wall literally. So by not having to have like by eliminating the extra five drives a week. It’s like I’m putting money in my piggy bank because of all the energy that I’m saying for sure. For sure. And like the cumulative

24:32  

hours, even like in your instance, for trips to different schools, just in a week or two or a month. I hear you there. I hear you there and I’m the same way with calls or you know, this Friday, I have a doctor’s appointment at 9: 30. I intentionally booked a business lunch with a friend afterwards. Because I know that if I’m going to a doctor’s office, I get back into the office by 1111. I’m not going to get much done. You know what I mean? That already took the

25:00  

A creative gauntlet out of me or so to speak or whatnot, you know, I can do the maintenance stuff, right? When I’m checking with the team, make sure they’re doing it, do their stand up, so on and so forth. But if it’s something where I’m putting creativity of thought and building into what I’m working on, I don’t have to be in the flow state for that. I also find love for myself.

25:23  

Presently, right, recently, I’ve been building this big building from my wife’s sewing room, it has a Murphy bed and cabinetry and drawers and all this stuff, right? I like woodworking.

25:33  

And I’ve been working on it for about six weeks, and all my creative energy is going there and not into my business. I don’t know if you experienced that as well. But I, as I go hog, you know, always jump off very deep with everything I’m working on. So the wood, the wood stuff, I’m building her like, I’m thinking about what I’m working on even if I’m working, maybe I’m googling something about that, because I’m just teaching myself as I go along with it, right?

25:57  

Shift to four months ago, something within an event where I put in like 500 hours of quality focus time in like six weeks, right? Sounds like I’m exaggerating, but it was like, dark to dark, seven days a week, because I was in I was I was focused, I was in bed thinking about the next steps, so on and so forth. So you know, I mean, I have yet to manage how to manage multiples at the same time. I’m not very good at it. About you. Yeah, yeah, no, I think I think that’s a very cool observation. Because this is the reason why, for me, it’s very hard to be a good investor, for example. Like there was a brief moment during COVID, when, just before COVID, I took interest in crypto, and then during COVID, I took interest in the stock market. And what I found is exactly what you’re describing is during work hours, I would like to get distracted, go Google stuff about the market, and try to watch the charts, try to learn to read the charts and all that. And I realized that I couldn’t do both. Like I couldn’t possibly go watch the market and try to, you know, react to the news and whatever. Elon Musk tweeted today and whatever, and did and did my business. Well, even though I don’t, I don’t really work that much in terms of net hours. I work maybe for maybe six hours a day, five days a week, which on paper leaves a lot of time to do other things. But for some reason, maybe it’s just like you said, we go so deep into our work that by the time we’re done, we’re just we can do maintenance. We can’t really, there’s not the battery, the juice in the battery runs out and we can go learn a new thing or a new hobby.

27:45  

So yeah, I completely agree with you. But that’s also a testament to the fact that you’re probably doing something that you love. And I think the ability to put deep focus into what you do is one of the secrets of success. What I don’t like for example, I’m trying to figure out I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’m trying to figure out how to get my daughter off of social media, like off Tik Tok and all that it’s really hard to do because all of her friends are there. So I can’t isolate her and I don’t want to be a tyrant. I wanted to feel like she took part in that decision, you know? Because she’s 11. Well, now I have to count her opinion, you know, and really listen and everything so I can just say no, and because she doesn’t comply.

28:37  

So I’m trying to figure out how to get her Tik Tok? Because of all the social media that it does, it fragments our attention, even like video games. If you’re a systems engineer by trade, I’m assuming you played video games growing up because that was like the time to win when all the cool games were developing.

28:58  

Remember, when we used to play games we used to really play games. We used to like to pick a game and play that game all day long every day. Like we would go deep into the game, try to figure out all the intricacies, try to game the system and try to master all the moves, right? Like we really put in the time and the effort the way kids play games now I don’t know about your sons but I look at my son the way he plays the game. He’ll play something for like three minutes and then an ad would pop up for a different game because the game is a free game and you know the so he taps on that downloads and your game plays a new game for five minutes, which is a different game or when he’s playing a game and he’s like stuck and he can’t really pass the level he just quits and goes to different

29:47  

This is so annoying because that means that he’s not going to put in the uninterrupted focus into achieving this outcome and I I believe video games are great for kids. I believe video games really make you think that

30:00  

They make you strategize. They make you, you know, really just advance and improve. But I really want to see more depth. Because I believe that that is very important for success and like you study successful people, then you see that they were always obsessed with one thing, whatever that thing was. And that’s a clue. That’s just not a coincidence. Yeah, my, my, my five year old, almost six does the exact same thing with the games.

30:28  

Or it’s like, hey, come help me. We have a switch, we got him a switch for Christmas. So he and his mom play a switch. I’ll play with him. So um, but if he’s playing on his own, he gets stuck. He comes in to ask for help. I’m like, dude, so that works. You gotta figure it out. Right? Because I’m the same belief. And yeah, as a kid, you know, we played tons of, the first PlayStation games or first Nintendo games or whatnot. 99 I sold all my toys to buy a Nintendo the first year they came out, right. So I always enjoyed video games, when I think that’s helped lead to the way my brain works now with engineering. You know, for me, whether I’m list building marketing, building something online, or I’m building like this woodworking project, for me, it’s the same connection, I feel the same

31:13  

excitement right in the head. You know, and that’s why like this, this weird thing, like I’m researching this, and I’m having to pull myself into the office to work, when early I’m like, wanting to be out in the woodshop playing, playing with the new saw and making something cool. Um, but I think that is because it provides me with the same, same thing. You know, it’s the same type of enjoyment

31:37  

of being able to create stuff and learn how stuff works. I dropped out of high school. So everything I know, I am a backwards engineer, right. That’s why I call myself a backwards engineer, learning how it breaks by taking it apart.

31:48  

Which as an adult has led me to my has led to my wife to say, it’s great when you have a husband that can fix anything, but you never get anything new. Right. And she said, that’s a Russian saying, so I don’t know if you recognize that saying, that’s great when they can fix anything, but you never get anything new. It’s true. Like, you know, the dryer breaks, I take it apart and replace whatever needs to be replaced in ABS, air conditioning, whatever.

32:11  

You know, I’m like the complete opposite. Although, in the academy, I studied for junior engineering. So like, I get how your mind works and,

32:21  

but I’ve never had the passion to, to take things apart. Like, I don’t know why, like, I’ve never had the passion to, to figure things out and to fix things with my hands. Maybe because my dad was never like that. But I do have a very similar passion to other things that interest me where I will go super deep, I will pull them apart, I will break them down into concepts and try to restructure them. And yeah, I’m like, the complete opposite. Like if a dryer breaks, we’re getting like, that’s what’s gonna happen. 

32:59  

I’m not gonna, you know, the other month, I think we had so. So there’s like a problem, I’ll really wait like in the house, I really wait until it gets really bad before I pay attention. So upstairs, we had pretty much the whole floor, right? We had all the spotlights on in the room.

33:22  

No more like, it was like, you switch on the light. And there’s like a very distant, glowing somewhere in that part of the you know, hallway, but there’s like no light. And at that point, I was like, fine. So I got the light bulbs. I got the ladder I climbed tonight. And so what’s really cool is that when I was doing that, because it’s so unusual for me to do it, my wife was looking at me like I just cured cancer. He was like, I was like replacing this spotlight. And then when it was all done, he was like, Oh, you’re my hero, you’re my Savior. I was like

34:01  

I find for myself and I struggle with this as an entrepreneur in my journey, like something like that or something with work all find myself procrastinating on as well. And then I have to ask myself internally, like why am I, why am I procrastinating because for me, it’s just something else in the back of your memory here that needs to be done. So every time you turn on that light switch,

34:21  

and then it’s just like bogging down wait right so maybe sometimes in business instances I’ll have like a group of emails I need to deal with or this that or the other and for some reason I’ll push it off 2448 72 hours, but it’s actually occupying so much of my mind space to always be like I got to do this I gotta do this and then it becomes like I push it off and it’s just some I don’t understand why we work that way. Like I don’t get it you know, it’s something that could take three minutes but I’ll spend five days thinking about how I need to do that three minute task, right or the light bulb right? slightly different but you experience it all the time. Why why not? Personally not handyman I get it but

35:00  

You know what I mean? Like the cognitive load. So for myself in this journey of this life now, I’ve really tried to break down internally and figure out why I do that, what the issues are, what is it, you know, is it what internalized for that to occur, you know, and why I can’t do these little tasks. As I move through life, you know, maybe there’s even just like picking up the mess that you made. It’s easier to spend two minutes picking up the mess you made, then leaving it in, cognitively seeing it and feeling the weight from it every time you walk by, right? I’m trying to refine myself, that’s my present stage of working through procrastination.

35:37  

Yeah, what I find is, it usually happens to me because I make it mean something, or I make, or I’m kind of future basing an outcome, that doesn’t feel good.

35:50  

Almost every time it triggers back to some kind of childhood event, of course, you know, for not being good enough or whatever. But, you know, it does play out in the most trivial stuff with, Okay, I gotta move this pencil from this side of the table to that side of the table, but it’s literally gonna be here for the next 17 days, because, and it’s gonna, I’m gonna think about it too. Every time I think about it, I’m gonna get a sense of like, fresher stomach, and, you know, it’s like, this, this kind of this sort of stuff is like, pure.

36:21  

It’s pure in between your years kind of deal, right? It’s that meaning that we assign to things. And what I find is, this is a very destructive thing to productivity, that, you know, if you can eliminate makes you 10 times more productive way more than any, you know, tool, or, you know, any, like project management software and shit. But what it also does is, this is a symptom of the sort of behavior that that shows up in our day to day life, in our relationships with our health, and what I find is that the moment I can figure out, what is that thing that’s causing me to really procrastinate about doing this, you know, one activity usually plays out really well in my personal life, and to my relationships, because apparently, I I’m bringing, like the same exact approach to, to things like, you know, saying something that I’m afraid to say, or doing something for myself that I’ve been putting off and not doing or, you know, even like, switching directions, you know, there was one time when I had to switch directions, kind of like yourself, like when you decided to walk away from from launches. You know, I procrastinated about that for three years, until the moment when it clicked and all of a sudden, within just two weeks, I think I made the whole transition to build like a whole other business.

37:53  

These things are very subtle, very subtle, and very individualistic. Extremely. For me, the one thing that was extremely helpful, the one thing that literally solves this, like and these issues don’t come up anymore, is working with our mutual friend Wesley.

38:12  

He’s like, he’s got the techniques, you know, he’s got the toolkit for that. And it’s been incredible. I’ve now been working with him for over a year. And there’s some there’s some changes in my life that are absolutely I mean, if if you were to if you were to go back in time find an Igor from five years ago and tell him look in five years this will it’s kind of what your life’s gonna look like this how you’re going to behave in a situation like this and like that. I would tell you that

38:43  

no way Get out of here, or are you just I don’t believe you. And I would have never believed I would have never believed but this is incredible. Like, these are the clues right? So whenever an issue like that comes up this is almost like a road sign for you. You’re like, Okay, we’re gonna move in this direction now.

39:02  

And it’s, it’s such a liberating experience when you clear some of this stuff up. Awesome. I do have a call set up to connect with him next week.

39:14  

Looking forward, alright, so you were in debt, massive debt, and you paid it off with your list building your email marketing, but now you’re not in that game. Now you’re in the game of helping people run webinars. So I mean, we don’t have too much time left. But I’d love to know what made you make the transition and how did you make that trip? Yeah. So 2015 2016 had this IRS debt.

39:45  

Not loving a launch game, not loving what I was doing. I put together my first high ticket webinar. I had never gotten a high ticket. I’ve always done low entry. First high ticket webinar. I’m doing a live show using GoToWebinar. We’ve done it maybe 1020 times

40:00  

Scott got our control, right? I want to automate it because it’s hard to do a live webinar wants to three times a week. So I want to automate it with every webinar at the time my conversions when the half, right so I told my business part of the time, we got to keep doing this live let me figure this out, I took on a challenge from a friend of mine and he challenged me it’s like you cannot automate GoToWebinar so that was my first goal was just to automate GoToWebinar just recreate that like, live environment of that live environment for the viewers but not have to deliver live right. Um, I accomplished that. That was my my proof of concept. Then I you know, 2016 17, I’ve been online for already 10 years I see email, although email still, by far to through to today is king, I noticed that it wasn’t what it once was in like 2007. Right to that time, it’s still the you got mail phase. So what I’m getting at is I wanted to send text messages. Now every webinar or the other solution at the time, you could send a tax, you could send 110 minutes into it, or templates into 10 minutes before right? It was one solution, right. As a marketer, I’m like, I’m not going to ask for a phone field to be able to send one text, right, I want to utilize that information. We know adding every form field lowers conversion, right. So I wanted to send picture messages, 10 minutes into it invoking FOMO, right. I wanted to be an animated GIF, I want to send voicemail and broadcast this and the other. So I gradually built what became the proof of concept of AMP. And today for my info business. Right? It wasn’t until maybe late 1718, where I’m like, You know what I’m liking what I’m doing. I’m enjoying it more than information marketing. And other seven and eight, nine figure businesses are asking me Hey, can you set this up for me? Right, like, and at that point, I’m like, No, I don’t, I’m not. That’s not possible. But let me think on this, right. And that’s kind of where an event was born out of the needs for my info business.

41:53  

Today, we fully automate, go to webinars, of course, and zoom. We have our own, like Live platform, Aveo YouTube Live, we tie together 60 different channels of communication to create more of a good omnichannel experience. So maybe you’re using Zoom, and maybe you’re doing it live, but we can add all this automation before, during and after to help improve the results. Right. So a lot of folks that use the platform, are maybe doing those weekly live zooms, and they’re downloading the attendance data afterwards and going in hand tagging them somewhere. Maybe they’re using Zapier to do such, or a team member. That’s all the stuff that an event really focuses on is the omni channel behavioral based 2024. If you’re using webinars, and you’re sending like the same attendee sequence, whether they’re on for one minute, or they saw your call to action, and they visit the checkout page, you’re sending them the same replay,

42:46  

you’re leaving money on the vine, right? So a lot of a event focuses on really pinpointing and speaking precisely to where that leads at what they did see didn’t see what actions they took, and maybe sending them you know, a targeted like, like Carter, Brian Mercer testimonial screenshot right or couple of success stories and send them back to an on the fence page and stuff. A lot of what an event does, isn’t strictly to do with an event, right? This is what I talked about with webinars, right? Anyone, any platform you’re using these days, generally supports some type of segmentation, but get more intelligent with the webinars and whatnot. So that’s what we focus on today. We are not the best tool of anything we like, we helped bring together all the best tools at 16. Like nothing would work with my tools and it drove me crazy. Right so it’s a very typical entrepreneurial stories like I had this problem I solve this problem for myself and all of a sudden I realize this can be a business

43:39  

but add in the Add in the IRS debt you know, like once I got through that, I mean logically meaning that while building this it was like an extra sword in the in the thigh at the time, right but it probably added to to resiliency, um, to this day, and I’ve never taken any funding or or anything I look at some companies how they fail 20 3050 100 million dollars in funding and they couldn’t pull it off. It’s like, how Yeah, I couldn’t ever really get that how do you run like a software as a service company and you burn through so much money so quickly? When even most software companies don’t even do marketing like paid marketing, they kind of just let the users do the marketing for them and will list them on Product Hunt.

44:24  

But at the same time, there’s also millions and millions of people starting software businesses that never take off. Good. Have you heard of better marketing? I think you’re in a very good position to be a marketer and a software guy. That’s I think that’s the best of both worlds because you understand like going in you already understood the market. The already understood the unique selling proposition you already had proof of concept as yourself and what when you go into a new market by the way, one of the best positioning plays is

45:00  

You know, let’s say you’re going to be selling to barbers. And you’ve got some sort of a barber marketing system, whatever, like, you start the conversation with, Hey, my name is John, and I’m a barber. And you know, at one point, I struggled to fill my barber shop with clients. But now, my my barber shop is, you know,

45:19  

crammed with clients in the lineup around the block. And I use this marketing system. So it’s like, it’s like one of the oldest approaches to marketing, but it works so well, because you are your own proof of concept. And you’re like part of the tribe. And so you came out of the launch game. You’re a list builder, you’re an email marketer, you’re an info marketer. You’re an affiliate marketer. 

45:45  

In fact, I didn’t tell this early on in the interview, but I remember actually promoting your products.

45:50  

Back in 2010 or so I think you had a product that was a make money product and other stuff. Like that one point. Yeah. And I think you were partnering with somebody for that.

46:05  

I just don’t remember. Yeah, I want to say, maybe with that product, too. We had a solo ad directory. And I want to say that we had you listed in that too. I think you were doing so, yes. No worries. Yeah, that was a little bit late. Okay. That was later this morning. For I became like the solo ad guy. I know you’re lunching with a partner. I just don’t, but I remember making money with it. So like, that’s why your name sticks out. Because back in the day, I tried promoting everyone’s products. And oftentimes, I would fall flat on my face. But yours did resonate with my list. And I was mailing them all the time. But my point being is that

46:44  

The transition you made is very smart. Like it might feel accidental or whatever, but I don’t think it was. I think it was very good, strategic, you know, preparation meets opportunity, sort of transition. And timing was perfect, because it was just before COVID And then COVID hits and everybody wants to do webinars. And now there’s zoom, everyone knows what Zoom is. And so I think it’s an incredible, incredible story and hopefully a much bigger success story in a few years. Thank you, man, whether or not you just to do an exit or because like anytime I go to any seminar, like I’ve just been to webinar comm where we met,

47:26  

like everyone’s raving about Avon. Thank you. And I also participated in the launch a couple of weeks ago. And you were also involved, I think I was talking to the vendor and I was like, hey, about the webinar this and that this and that all of a sudden, what they do is like, Oh, wait, hang on, hang on a second, then all of a sudden, bam, add you to the group’s like, just talk just Dr. Winter. I was like what, what does he have to do with it? Well, we gotta we gotta you know we’re gonna run like 200 webinars all at the same time. You know, obviously he’s gonna manage that. So you kind of became like the go to

48:03  

like a live webinar guy. You know, honestly, man, I never did a proof of concept or market fit like any of the normal SAS tracks. The whole time is a passion feeling, gut feel, intuition, maybe beyond times that are beyond reason or make sense, right? Maybe some folks are like, you had a multimillion dollar a year business and just walked away from it. But a lot of it was you know, I’ve said this many many times, like the Field of Dreams, right? If you remember the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, if you build it, they will come just like that strong gut feeling like, Hey, I’m enjoying this, I’m liking it more than what I’ve been doing. And I believe in the long term, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s been that and you know, back to like, focusing on one thing over

48:50  

this went from idea to to what it is today, over what eight years, many opportunities to get back involved in information marketing, or hey, let’s go do a launch whether we can generate a couple million Yeah. Yeah. Like hard. No, it’s just always been a hard No, just because I know myself and I, if I go back in there, and I and I, and it’s a different type of business model. You know, launching is like, you can print a couple million dollars in a couple of weeks. Great, cool, but it’s a very, very different business model. But I know myself, I’m like, No, I’m, I gotta stay on this train. You know, if I drink that juice again, perhaps I won’t come back here because that’s just how I work. So just just that one minded one one track than not losing focus, I think, like you said, like it, it does.

49:37  

Usually pan out in the long run, right? For those that are able to really focus on one thing and go through the hard times. I don’t know if our kids will have that same, you know, back to the video games and quitting, right? Like, dude, I didn’t quit because I didn’t really like that. Like I grew up for and hungry and you

50:00  

You know, fighting for survival, right? I don’t really see that as my favorite, they have everything. And they might I mean, I grew up in Eastern Europe than Israel, my kids are growing up in Canada, very secure, cushy, you know, but I don’t know, man, I’m concerned about like, I’ll be honest, I’m concerned that I won’t, that I won’t be able to figure out a way to make them stand on the shoulders of giants, so to speak.

50:27  

Because for that there needs to be hunger and curiosity, and this drive and passion to succeed. And that usually comes as a result of like, a lot of negative shit that happens to you when you grow. I have the same, the same, same concern and also just, you know, the boys in our five and a half and three,

50:48  

spoiled, like, you know, like, No, we can’t buy them a toy, they got three toys this week, they don’t need, you know, like back for me as a kid, like we were medium low or medium income, right? We were food on the table, whatnot. But like, I mean, I get a treat or a toy, you know, during my birthday or something, you know what I mean? Were these ways it’s like, oh, you had a bad boy, you know. And so I personally tried to limit that. We all have our wives which do their own things too.

51:18  

So, go figure. Yeah, my wife resisted, like my son would walk up to her and be like, I love you, mom. And you can see the resistance melt away. Like he knows the perfect line. He knows the headline, you know, too. And it’s like, what do you want? You know, can I have some candy? Can I have a new toy? That’s like, that’s, I mean, that’s it. That’s all he has to do. Incidentally, though, to be fair, my daughter can do the same with me. You know, she can come up to me. I’ll Give me kiss and say that. I love you that’s what it was like, I love you too. It’s interesting. Like, we’re, we have two boys. Just as of two weeks, three weeks ago, we’re pregnant with a third. So I do wonder if that’ll happen. For me if we have a girl. Because right now with the boys, I’m the authority. 10 right. I’m the like, I’m, I’m the boss, mom will just whatever, right? But if we have a girl, I’m curious.

52:11  

It will happen. It’s a special bond with the girl. You know, with the boys. It’s kind of like that when I take my son to the playground, like when we arrive and I sit down and sit down at the bench. And it’s like, Hey, Chris, just don’t die. Okay, just go. Just let him go. When I go there with Erica. It’s almost like, alright, you know, here’s, you want to climb. You want to climb things like okay.

52:42  

Yes, go. Yeah. Okay, well, here’s a sandwich. Here. There’s some tea, you know, whatever. So like almost like being so overprotective to a point where it’s an almost redundant issue with the older one. Yeah, she’s older now. She’s 11. Yeah, so now she doesn’t even need me anymore. Now she’s like, that leaves me alone on stage. Which is okay, because I have a little bit more time to spend with my son who likes to get in trouble. He likes to fight, he likes to you know, we can wrestle, we can play video games together.

53:17  

So it’s a little bit there’s a little bit more bonding happening with him now. It’s a good fun age. You know, when they’re five? Yeah, it moves so quickly. Man. There’s one thing I’ve noticed as I age, they always say time speeds up. But now once having kids it’s like, just flashes by? It does. Yeah. And the older you get, obviously, but with the third one. I mean, we only have two but there’s been talks of the third but I’ve been holding the line.

53:47  

You know? Because as far as I’m concerned, a boy and a girl. Right? Well, you guys already have a massive split in Angel as it is right? And then you’ll have that other 11 to zero like we’re only you know, he’s five and a half six. For we’re not I kind of Yeah, yeah. For us it was either time or not and then it just happened. So here you go.

54:13  

Well, good. Look, every every seed carries an equal what’s the same every adversity carries an equal seed of opportunity, whatever. So I’m sure maybe it’s a product idea, maybe it’s like how to raise healthy children in the works.

54:33  

Look, we were out of time, right she passed time. So guys, if you’re doing webinars, you should check out anevent.com. It’s a software that turns your live webinar into a live webinar for the audience, but you don’t have to do with live yourself, which means you can be running a live webinar every hour of the day without your audience knowing the difference and it can

55:00  

increase your income, increase your freedom and allow you to just not have to do not have to exhaust yourself with live presentations every day, because there’s still people out there who get on like live calls every single day, that’s where they go, especially if you do it for lead generation.

55:17  

I think it’s a tremendous advantage, not to mention the automations, the before and after tools that you can use to increase your response. And, you know, in my experience, a webinar campaign is only as successful as the before and after. Because yeah, you could have a great presentation, but at least half your sales will come after the webinar, and your attendance will be heavily determined by all the pre webinar efforts. So you check out an event. I know dozens and dozens of six and seven and eight figure marketers who use an event, they prey on an event you know, they put up goats and sacrifice them to an event at the altar. So it’s a really cool tool. Reliable one proven, you know, just something you should look into. Winter. Thank you for spending this time with me getting real. I appreciate thank you for before we wrap up.

56:17  

If you could go back in time and spend 60 seconds with 60 minutes with someone you know, from history like alive or dead. Someone famous who would it be? Who would it be? Gosh. You know, maybe Mr. Ford did some really drastic big things.

56:45  

60 seconds with Mr. Musk today, I think, would feel awkward by looking at what he’s been able to achieve. But that’s partially technology. Right? So that’s why I say Mr. Ford is the thing that was cheap back then. Massive, right? Like looking at what the big ones in our 100 last 100 years have achieved.

57:04  

Plus the tools that they have right Musk is just crazy. But the tool set said he has is not like what Mr. Ford had. So for me to be Mr. Ford. Yeah, Henry Ford is, have you read his biography? I haven’t.

57:18  

It was. I mean, I didn’t finish it. It was very difficult to read. But I watched all the documentaries about him. He actually had this issue where he was never happy with his sons.

57:29  

And it’s like, his number one regret. And I think his younger son had cancer too. Like it was, it was very difficult. Like as much as he was successful in business. I think he didn’t figure out how to be successful and live with his family. The most satisfying thing for him I think was going to the country and riding his tractor or something. So yeah, there was a trade off to being a badass, you know, a badass entrepreneur and, and men changing the game and Ken I think he just brought the same exact mentality home to his personal life. Yeah, to his detriment. All right, well, thank you for sharing that. I appreciate it. Thank you for spending this time with me and until next time, chat, have a good

58:22  

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, remember to clean your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch. Plus, I’ll give you $3,000 worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email, swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.