Business Coach : Find Your Motivation
-So are you motivated to become successful, or are you motivated to help kids? Or both?
-Both. I mean, I think I’m successful when I help out the kids. That’s what my success is.
-Let’s look at this here. Helen Keller, the famous deaf, blind, and mute author– let’s not jump over that real quick. Deaf, blind, and mute– that’s a lot of adversity. And she defined the path to true happiness- “True happiness is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose,” like a commitment to a worthy purpose. These are the type of life lessons you can learn from a business coach.
Remmi, it’d be a lot easier if you just went out and got a typical teenage job. Say you went and worked at a Sonic restaurant or Burger King. I know my first job was at the Norseman in Cokato, Minnesota. And I remember not wanting to work there washing dishes. Why don’t you just go out and do something normal?
-I mean, I’m not a normal kid by now. I don’t think I can go back from all the work and effort and everything I’ve put into my business– I can’t really turn my back on it. This is the mindset a business coach wants you to have.
-I heard it said like this one time. The platform that you ultimately build or get to stand out as an entrepreneur, you have to build it with hours and hours of free labor. If you’re standing today on this platform as Chef Remmi, you’ve had to build that platform up. If you’re standing on this, imagine you were filling this up with hours of free, unpaid labor.
How many hours of unpaid work have you put into building your brand before you received a dime? Hundreds?
-Probably. At least a hundred.
-Before you got paid anything. And that’s typical. I just want to make sure everybody sees that. I want to give an example. One of my friends from college, his name is Ryan Tedder. He’s the front man for One Republic. And Ryan worked for almost a decade without being really paid as a musician. I think he was working at a retail job and then interning for free. He took every dime he had, put it into his career and moved out to Nashville. Then he moved to LA– just working every hour of the day he could, other side jobs, to afford studio time and gear. And then he became an overnight success after nearly a decade.
-How many years have you been building your brand?
-I’d say about five years.
-You’ve been building for five years. Now, when did you get into whole foods? When did that happen?
-I’d like to say 2011?
-So really about three years before you were able to get into whole foods. You worked for two or three years before you got into whole foods. And I don’t want to get caught up on the specific dates as much as the point– you worked a lot, put a lot of effort into it, before you were paid anything. So it’s not because you’re lucky. It’s because you’re working hard there.
Now, Brian Tracy, one of the world’s most successful self-help authors, has repeatedly said over the years that “all successful people, men and women”– and young ladies– “are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day towards that distant vision, that goal or purpose.”
-Remmi, what is your dream for kids and adults alike as relates to their eating habits and their access to food?
-I want people to have an economical source of healthy food. And I want it to be something that they can easily access. I just want them to do it and be able to have the resources they need to live a healthy lifestyle.
-Well, you know, Martin Luther King Jr, he once famously wrote “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.” He’s a famous civil rights leader. I speak a lot at schools, but you’ll ask a 12-year-old– “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And the kid will say– I would be an astronaut. I want to be a ninja. I want to be a chef– I mean a firefighter. I want to run my own business. With the help of a business coach.
And then when you interview the same group of people 20 years later, now they’re 32. What do you want to do?
I just hope to retire someday.
And I feel that they lose that desire to do something big. And what Martin Luther King was saying here is once we become silent about things that matter, once we stop putting our dreams out there, do you feel that for you, living with your goals out front is exciting? Or is it kind of scary? Having a business coach will make it less scary.
-I think it’s a little bit of both. I mean, I put it up there, and I know what I want to do. So I have to work towards it to get to what I want to be. I’m probably a quarter of the way there. I still have a lot of work to do, and I have so much to look forward to. It’s a bit scary, because you always have that little voice in your head that’s like– you won’t get there. That kind of thing.
But then you always have to have the other voice, like the little devil and the little angel on your shoulder, that says– you can do it. Now keep going.
-Little devil on the shoulder, little angel on the shoulder. And you have to, in your head, battle that out.