Getting laid off is enough to make anyone want to crawl into a hole and hide. But Pat Flynn went the other direction. He took the opportunity to open himself up, and put his experience in the spotlight. And that very openness became the key to his success, as his Smart Passive Income Community has now reached millions of entrepreneurs.

It’s not every day that you have the chance to become an overnight sensation, but for Pat Flynn, the stars seemed to align perfectly for him on a gloomy day in 2008. After landing the job of his dreams and working passionately at it for many years, the mid-2008 recession hit him harder than he’d ever imagined. Being recently promoted at a large architecture firm, he was shocked when his boss announced that the company could no longer pay for his services and expertise.

Although he was clouded with the fear of unemployment during the first few weeks, this obstacle was the golden opportunity that would change his life forever.

Enter Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income

In this interview you will learn:

- How Pat has built a raving super engaged community so powerful that he often receives emails from community members asking for his amazon affiliate link as they want Pat to receive the affiliate commission from Amazon

- The power of building extremely deep relationships with your audience and how to build epic amounts of trust

- A throwdown on the Foundr Podcast and core action items on how to improve your podcast

- How Pat has built one of the top ranked business podcasts

- The power of transparency and how it has helped Pat grow his business exponentially

- What Pat believes it takes to build a successful online business these days

- & Much more!

Barbara Corcoran doesn’t look far past the family tree for inspiration. While many entrepreneurs seek seasoned businesspeople to learn from, Corcoran’s mentor was her mother, not because her mother managed a company—she didn’t—but because she managed a family.

“She ran our little, tiny two-bedroom flat like a corporation,” Corcoran recalls. Everything was organized, and everything had a system. Her mother did a phenomenal job motivating each of the children, helping them do what they did best. “If she had been in business, she would’ve been a tycoon,” Corcoran says. “I wouldn’t have wanted to compete with her.”

Common sense was one of her mother’s virtues, and it’s a trait that Corcoran says is vital in business. “I think you have to trust your natural instinct,” she says to aspiring entrepreneurs. Business is about street smarts. It’s not something you can learn in a classroom — you have to do it.

That’s exactly what she has done. Corcoran’s resume includes several businesses and millions of dollars, and she’s now a “shark” investor on ABC’s popular Shark Tank TV series.

She started young. “I had a flower-of-the-week club when I was in college that failed miserably,” she says. “It was good for a while and then it failed. How did I get that job? I just invented it.”

She later founded two real estate companies, including the Corcoran Group, which she started with a $1,000 loan and ultimately sold for $66 million. Corcoran has channeled her experience into her role as an investor on Shark Tank, a reality TV competition that pits entrepreneurs against each other in a contest to pitch their ideas and get big funding. The show’s run includes six seasons, and she’s been along for the whole ride.

In this interview you will learn:

- Barbara's story on how she rose to success

- The critical elements she believes it takes to become a successful entrepreneur

- A super productivity hack to get the most of your day

- Real estate investing tips

- What it takes to get your idea funded

- What Barbara looks for in an entrepreneur and the companies she invests in

- & Much more

Mattan Griffel wasn’t prepared for his first job. After he graduated college, a startup company asked him to be their marketer, but he didn’t know how to be a marketer. Mattan had studied philosophy and finance, but despite years of delving into the life of the mind and the management of money, he couldn’t snag a job in the financial sector. So he sat there, tasked with an entirely different field: marketing.

Griffel really wasn’t prepared, so he decided to fix that. He charged into the challenge, devouring books on marketing, consuming online classes, doing everything he could to eat up as much knowledge as possible. In just a year and a half, he says, he learned more about marketing than four years at university taught him about finance.

Learn voraciously. A passion for new skills can expand your opportunities and multiply your successes.

Griffel’s drive to be good at whatever he did gave him the ability to successfully manage a marketing budget of half a million dollars.

Now, that same drive has put Griffel at the helm of One Month, a Y Combinator-backed education startup aiming to provide what he calls a “no-BS first month of learning.” The company has created a contingent of lightweight courses that each teach the basics of a topic—ranging from Ruby on Rails to HTML to growth hacking and more—in 15 minutes per day for 30 days.

It was his endeavor to gain marketing skills that exposed Griffel to entrepreneurial education outside the brick walls and stone pillars of formal schooling. Having learned from platforms like Udemy and Skillshare, he eventually began teaching for them.  While instructing an in-person class on coding at General Assembly, Griffel met Chris Castiglione, with whom he would one day found One Month.

In this interview you will learn:

- Epic growth hacking strategies

- Key lessons from a Y-Combinator backed startup

- Mattan's experience at Y-Combinator

- Key Entrepreneurial lessons learned along the journey

- How to create powerful and valuable courses that sell

- & Much more!

Some people thought entrepreneur Justin Gold was nuts for trying to disrupt the peanut butter market. A decade later, he’s been recognized by Inc. and Ernst & Young as one of the food and beverage sector’s rising stars.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Gold is one of the Boulder, Colorado startup community’s big success stories, having moved to the mountain town after becoming disillusioned with his original career plan to become a lawyer. The keen outdoorsman made the most of the biking and skiing lifestyle while waiting tables to support himself, and found himself frequently chowing down on peanut and almond butter for the protein benefits.

Gold decided to start making his own at home, experimenting by adding everything from maple syrup to berries in his concoctions. They proved a big hit with his roommates, who ate everything he whipped up, so Gold started labeling the jars “Justin’s,” at first just to keep them away.

“At that point it changed from a kitchen experiment to a project,” he says. Being completely new to business, he had a million questions about how to start a company, from company structure through to labeling, packaging, and food regulations. Leaning on the Colorado University business library as a resource, Gold came up with a business plan. And since Boulder is home to a number of other companies in the natural foods space, from Celestial Seasonings to Rudi’s Organic Bakery, he started reaching out to their founders for advice.

Having raised about $30,000 from friends and family, Justin’s launched in 2004, selling to local stores, but a few years in, wasn’t growing as Gold had hoped. He knew overnight success was unlikely — his own mentor Steve Demos, the creator of milk alternative Silk, struggled for nearly 30 years selling tofu first. Being a “little naive and a little stubborn” kept him going, he says, with the idea that they would figure it out eventually.

In this interview you will learn:

- When, and how to know how much equity of your business you should give you

- The importanance of starting your business idea

- Why curiosity can be an amazing trait as an entrepreneur

- How Justin turned his idea peanut butter idea into a multi-million dollar empire

- Key leadership skills to build a solid team

- How to scale a business when you recieve rapid growth

- When, and how to know how much equity of your business you should give up

- A key concept to keep your employees super motivated