Steve Cunningham

Host: Tim Martin
Guest: Steve Cunningham
Episode 18: Readitfor.me Founder and President – Steve Cunningham Interview
June 20, 2014

 Download pdf Transcript HERE
Welcome to Success is Voluntary, a podcast devoted to helping you become the salesperson you were always meant to be, where it’s all about helping you learn the techniques and tools that will enable you to win in the increasingly competitive world of voluntary benefits. Welcome your host, a guy who has hired and trained over 2,000 voluntary benefit salespeople in his career, Tim Martin. Success is Voluntary, selling voluntary benefits.

Tim Martin: Yes, my name is Tim Martin, and you are listening to episode number 18 of Success is Voluntary. Today, I’m joined by Steve Cunningham all the way from Toronto, Canada, through the magic of Skype. Steve is the founder of an unbelievable learning system called Readitfor.me. For those of you who know me, you know that I’m an avid reader and lifelong learner. In fact, I read about a book a week.

Over the years, I’ve also subscribed to a couple of different traditional executive book summary services. When I came across Readitfor.me, I immediately subscribed, and I am completely hooked on it. I’ll let Steve tell you most of the details of how it works and all the features of their services that are available, but suffice it to say this: I am a raving a fan and would encourage you to consider jumping on and subscribing today.

Stick around until the end of the podcast because as a listener to the Success is Voluntary podcast, Steve is going to give you an offer code that’s going to drop the cost a full 75 percent off their list price. Honestly, if you don’t subscribe at this price, I’m worried about you. Readitfor.me’s product is amazing, and the price is ridiculously discounted. How could you possibly say no to that? All right, enough hype. Let’s jump into the interview with Steve. Hey Steve, how’s it going?

Steven Cunningham: Good. Good, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim: Man, I am so excited about you being on here and your product and services that you guys have at Readitfor.me. I mentioned in the introduction that I’m a lifelong learner, and it sounds like you are too, the little bit we’ve already had a chance to talk, and I just love talking to people who are likeminded. I think my listeners will really, really enjoy this.

I have a couple of questions for you. Then, of course, we can talk about anything you want to talk about, but before we get into that, I always let the guests kind of introduce themselves and tell us a little bit about their journey, so tell me a little bit about how you got to this point.

Steve: Well, it’s a pretty interesting story. I have a pretty interesting background. Growing up, I wanted to be a hockey player (professional hockey player). My dad always wanted me to be a professional, like a lawyer, accountant, something like that. About midway through my college hockey career, I sustained a lot of concussions, which I think my wife will tell you explains a lot about who I am today.

Essentially, I decided that was going to be the end of my hockey career, and I should start focusing on other pursuits, so I decided to go to law school and do something I was really passionate about and interested in and something my father would be proud of. About midway through law school, what you do up here in Canada is you get a job as a summer student.

My job was essentially to follow the senior partner of the firm around, carry his bags, get his coffee, do all that fun stuff, but I was able to see what a senior partner at a law firm does for a living. I realized, at the end of that summer, that wasn’t going to be for me. I loved law school, I loved learning, but the business and the day-to-day reality of being a senior partner at a law firm just didn’t excite me, and I couldn’t see myself working for 15 or 20 years to have that as my prize.

Growing up, my father had always been an entrepreneur himself. I had called him up one day, and I said, “You know what, Dad? This just isn’t for me. I don’t think I’m going to become a lawyer. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I would love to join the family business,” so we cut a deal. He said, “If you still want to be in the family business after you graduate from law school and after you get called to the bar, I’m glad to have you.”

I essentially made that deal. I finished up law school. I did what’s called articling up here in Canada, which is essentially the first year before you become a lawyer, essentially like an apprenticeship, and finished that up and got called to the bar. The funny part of that story is that essentially the firm asked me to stick around for an extra week to close up some files that I was working on, and so I get to tell the story now for the rest of my life that I was a practicing lawyer for exactly one week. That’s its own story. I think it’s a record. I’m not sure, but it has to be close.

I joined the family business, and lo and behold, unbeknownst to me, a few months into my journey there, my father decided to make me the president. Remember I came out of law school, not business school, and so I didn’t have a lot of practical experience other than just hanging around my father for most of my life. I would work with him during the summers, but I had no education on how to run a business.

What I did was I went out, and I did the only thing that I knew how to do, which was to go out and buy as many books as I could and learn as quickly as I could, because the alternative was to do nothing, so I did that. I read a bunch of books, and I think we’re going to talk a little bit about how much I read and all that stuff later.

Around the same time, within this business, I decided that I wanted to create a marketing agency, and around that time, a lot of people were starting to talk about social media. This was back when everybody was really interested in it, but nobody really wanted to cut a check to have somebody work on it, which is a problem when you’re a small business owner.

I would go into these offices of VPs and presidents, because everybody was very interested to talk because they wanted to get their free consulting, but I noticed that on their bookshelves there were always these business books, the ones that I had been reading, and so you know the old trick. You try to create some rapport with the people who you’re talking to. I would ask them, “What did you think about that idea from Good to Great because I see you have Good to Great on your shelf?”

Invariably, I would get like a blank stare back at me, and eventually, they would sheepishly admit that they had read none of the books on their shelf, which was, I think, a more common experience than most people would like to admit. They have too much work to do. They have an inbox that’s overflowing. They have soccer practice at night, all sorts of really great reasons why they didn’t have the time to read the books.

While I was reading those books, I kind of fell back on something that I learned in law school, which was to take notes, and take notes in such a way that I could go back to them later and really get the key concepts because this was a really important thing in law school when you’re reading a 150-page case study and you need to only know 2 or 3 sentences from the case.

I decided, at that point, we needed to create our own social media case study so that we can go back to them and say, “Hey, this is how we did it. Here are the steps you need to take in order to use social media to grow your company.” What happened was I decided, “We need to create some content here.” I had all these notes from these books that I was reading, so I said, “What if we just turn these into 12-minute videos?” which is roughly the length of what my notes ended up being.

We knew that there were other summary services that had done things by PDF and all that kind of stuff in the past, but our hypothesis was if we can create something that’s a little bit more engaging and more suited for kind of what was going on in the world at the time, that we could get that to be shared socially and go viral and all that good stuff.

We sent an email out to 10 people. I mean, we did that on purpose so we could track this and show people what happens if you create something that people want to share. Of course, we had no idea if this was going to work or not, so I had sent off the email to 10. That was forwarded to 20, and that was forwarded to 50, then to 100, until, eventually, thousands of people, very quickly, were coming to our site and watching these videos. It did exactly what we thought it would do, which was to bring in a lot of people to visit our website and maybe get lots of calls, and we eventually closed some business.

Along the way, we also started to get calls from venture capitalists, wondering, “What’s your business model for this new thing? What are you going to do with it?” Remember I was in law school in Canada, and I had no idea what a venture capitalist was, so I said to them, “I don’t even know who you are, but we don’t have a business model for this thing because this is social media, man. We’re just sharing it for free.”

Long story short, we stopped getting calls from venture capitalists, but people started asking us, “We don’t want this to go away. When are you going to start charging for it?” and all that kind of good stuff. Eventually, we decided that we would start to charge for it, and one thing led to another. Originally, it was just me working on this. Then I pulled in some part-time staff from our agency, and now we have people working on this full time every day. That’s how we got here.

Tim: Wow. I said in my opening that you basically started this business by accident because I knew a little bit of the story, but that is just fascinating that other people saw the potential in the business before you did even. That’s fascinating to me, and it also answers the question of how you got so interested in personal development.

It was really a survival skill. Here you are, president of a company, and I’ve talked to your dad. Your dad is awesome. I really enjoyed the time I spent on the phone with him, a neat guy, but here you are, kind of thrust into a role that you’re ill prepared for. You have to go figure it out, and it fell back on what you knew, which was obviously research and reading, which you had just been doing a ton of in law school.

You’re absolutely right, by the way. I’ve seen statistics that say that 90 percent of salespeople have never even read one book on sales, so it doesn’t shock me that you would see a president or somebody in the C-suite who has a bunch of books that somebody gave him that they haven’t read either. It’s tragic in my opinion.

Why do you think that it’s so critical to continue to develop, especially for my audience, which really, they’re all entrepreneurs? They happen to be in the insurance industry (most of them). I have people from other industries who listen as well, but for the vast majority of them, they’re entrepreneurs. They’re running their small…maybe it’s just a one-person practice, or maybe they have a team of people who they’re leading, but why is it so critical to continue to grow and to learn as an entrepreneur?

Steve: Well, from reading all those books, you kind of start to see some patterns. There are a few things that I’m good at it, but one of them is putting patterns together, and I kind of came up with this saying that, “Your success is really going to depend on what you put in your mind, what you put in your mouth, and the people who you surround yourself with.” There are so many quotes you can go out and find from other great speakers and other great authors who will say pretty much the same thing. What you put in your mind is so important.

Almost none of the people who I know… I’m certainly in this camp, and probably a lot of your listeners are in this camp. We don’t get a lot of formal training on how to run a small business. There’s lots of training on how to join an enormous business and fulfill a very small role within that organization, like learn a lot about finance or learn a lot about marketing, but as a small business owner and entrepreneur, you have to know all of that.

There is a great interview with… I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Steve Blank, who does a lot of work in Silicon Valley, mostly around customer development, which is growing small startups into viable businesses, and he had a great point. Most people treat small businesses as a smaller version of a large business when, in fact, it’s a completely different animal altogether.

It was interesting because even a lot of the books that I started reading when I first realized that I was way out my depth becoming the president of a company so young was that a lot of the stuff I was reading had no applicability to the situation I was in, which was running a small business. I think, as an entrepreneur, in order to be successful, you have to go out, and you have to learn because in order to get to where you want to go, there’s no other way because you’re not going to come equipped to do this right out of the box.

I think, lastly, what I would say around this is that in some sense, being in business, especially as an entrepreneur, it’s almost like a competition. I’m kind of prone to sports metaphors because I grew up playing sports, but the more you learn and the more you apply, the better chance you have of winning and succeeding, and if other people are out there doing the same thing, well, you have to do it all the much more.

I think that’s why personal development, specifically for an entrepreneur, is so important…because I just don’t think you can become successful without continuously learning and improving.

Tim: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and in fact, I think you have to really work to obviously learn your niche and learn your industry and all that, but you really have to be pretty well rounded as an entrepreneur because you never know where your next client is going to take you and what kind of environment that will be. You don’t want to look silly in front of them. You want to be able to speak to certain things.

You don’t have to know everything about everything, but you better be pretty well rounded, especially in our industry, the insurance industry. We’re dealing with all sorts of different kinds of companies. Very few agents just really narrow in on one industry that they sell into. They’re typically dealing with everything from the little, small machine shop to more corporate type of places, and they’d better be able to speak the language all throughout their entire block of business, not just one little niche.

Some of the themes, you mentioned there are some common themes that you noticed, some common areas that a lot of the authors spoke on success and on personal development. What are a couple of things that you think are just absolute universal truths that you see over and over and over again as you continue to read? Some great authors and some not-so-great authors, I assume.

Steve: Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff being published, and not all of it is great. I think I can boil this question down, maybe, into two parts because I there’s a distinction between what makes a great business and personal development book and what makes people successful, which is what they talk about in these books. I think the best authors and thought leaders are able to package up their information in a way that’s memorable and that it’s easy to understand.

I think a great example of this is when Chip and Dan Heath wrote the book Made to Stick. They have an acronym called SUCCES, without the last S, and it stands for simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories. I haven’t forgotten that one since the day that I read it. It’s almost like whenever you’re in a situation that requires you to apply an idea, you’re just going to apply the first thing that comes to your mind, and SUCCES, if I’m thinking about how to make a story that sticks, is the first thing that pops into my mind.

I think what we do here at Readitfor.me is we try to do that for books that don’t do that themselves. We try to make things memorable for people so that they can take this idea and stick it in their tool belt, and it’s available for them whenever they need to use it, but I think the best authors do that intuitively, like Chip and Dan Heath do.

Jonah Berger just wrote a book recently called Contagious, which is a fantastic book about how ideas spread, and he has an acronym in it. I think what they’re able to do really well is take something that’s complex, but they’re able to organize it in a way that somehow makes it easier to understand.

I think the last thing that’s really important in these books and making the ideas really resonate with people and so they’ll remember them is they’re very good storytellers. I think anybody who’s read a Malcolm Gladwell book will know that he’s a very good storyteller, and so I think those are the things that kind of stick in your mind after reading them, because there are very, very few of those books…just for me.

Maybe your audience has a different experience with this. So few of them actually stick in your mind. I have to work really hard in order to remember much of what I’ve learned.

Tim: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. I’m just kind of, as you’re talking about that, I’m thinking through some of the authors that really have popped for me. Obviously, Michael Gerber and The E-Myth, he tells that whole book through stories, and because of that, the lessons really stick.

Daniel Pink does a lot of that too, tells great stories in his book, and really ties the book together through the stories. You may not remember the acronym like SUCCES, like the Heaths, but you do remember the lesson, and that’s really, I think, important. Especially since, you said, not everything that’s getting written is great. I found a lot of business books that go on for 300 pages could easily be about 120.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of what our service does is try to weed those out, and it’s funny because a lot of people use your products and services in ways that you could never imagine, and a lot of people will actually use our service to determine which books they actually want to spend 6 or 10 hours diving into. Not all of it is great, but sometimes it just takes a little bit of repackaging to make an idea stick and to make it memorable. Yeah, there is a lot of stuff being published for sure.

Tim: You bet. I have subscribed in the past. I told the listeners in the open that I am a subscriber to your service, and I think it’s phenomenal. I have subscribed to some more traditional executive book summary services in the past, and you’re right. That’s what I did with that service. If I really enjoyed the white paper that came out on it, then I ended up buying the book and really digging into it because it really drove that kind of learning for me, and I wanted to find out more.

That’s funny that other people are doing that. It doesn’t shock me, but it didn’t dawn on me that would be… It probably didn’t dawn on you either that’s what they would do with it when you started Readitfor.me, so that’s funny.

Kind of talk about the progression of your business model so far and kind of where you think you’re headed with it. I mean obviously we know a little bit about how it got started, but it looks different today than it did when you launched, so tell my listeners kind of what you’ve added to it already, and what you kind of see happening as you move forward.

Steve: Sure. You know the progression has been, like we talked about earlier, it was really designed as a social media content strategy in the beginning. After I got over my embarrassment of turning away VCs who potentially wanted to give me money, what we did was we threw up a PayPal Wallet, and we started charging access for it.

You kind of jump into these things, and if you remember back then, I was still a lawyer who didn’t know very much about running a business, so I had to kind of learn on the fly. People started signing up, and we learned a heck of a lot about running an online subscription-based business, and like I said, now we have full-time people working on this every single week, and they’re doing a fantastic job.

Our business model is pretty simple. We charge a subscription to access the site, and we have monthly and yearly plans, so if people want to subscribe monthly, we allow them to do that. If they want to save a little bit of money and buy a year all at once, we also let them do that. In terms of whom we serve, we serve two very distinct markets. The first one is the large corporate market, and the second one is the entrepreneurial market.

It really requires two very different approaches and mindsets, so we’ve almost had to learn how to run two separate businesses within the business in order to serve both of those markets, so that’s been a great learning experience for us. We’ve had to try a lot of things and see what works and keep what does work and get rid of what doesn’t, and we’re constantly learning about how to do that better. That’s really, in essence, the business model itself. It’s a fairly simply business model.

In terms of where we’re heading with it, there’s a quote by Evan Williams. It’s a little long, but I would like to read because it really describes how we’re thinking about this and maybe how some of your listeners might be able to think about their business. He was giving a speech, and someone asked him about, “What’s the key to running an Internet business?” or “What’s the Internet done for society?” He had some really broad questions.

He said, “The Internet is a giant machine designed to give people what they want. It’s not a utopia. It’s not magical. It’s simply an engine of convenience. Those who can tune that engine well, who solve basic human problems with greater speed and simplicity than those who came before, will profit immensely. Those who lose sight of basic human needs, who want to give people the next great idea, will have problems.”

There’s a little bit more, which I’ll talk about in a second, but we fell into that trap so many times of trying to give people more and more and to give them the next great idea, when the real focus needs be on…What do people want, and how do we make it easier for them to do what they already want? One of the issues for us has been…What’s possible with Readitfor.me?

We have lots of case studies from our customers about the amazing things that they’ve done and the businesses they’ve been building just based on the ideas that they get from our service, but for most people, for a lot of people, what they just really want to get out of this thing is the ability to understand these concepts quickly.

Really, at the core of our service, that’s what it is, and we continuously have to remind ourselves to come back to the core of what we’re doing and take our progressions from there and listen to our customers because most of this has been on accident, and it has been driven mostly by listening to what our customers have been saying.

Then he goes on to say this, which is really something that has been sticking in my head lately. He says, “Here’s the formula if you want to build a billion-dollar Internet company. Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time. Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.” That’s kind of the model that we’ve been thinking about, which is access what people are already looking for, and take out the steps in order to get there.

So for most people who need to read one of these books to get the knowledge out of them, they have to go on Amazon, buy and download the book, or even back in the olden days, four or five years ago, drive to the local bookstore and pick up the book. Then they have to spend 10 hours reading it, so really what we’re doing is taking out steps, which is just play the video for 12 minutes, and you’re going to get the concepts.

Tim: Even one-step further that you’ve taken out for them, and that’s having to determine which book to read next. I mean it’s almost forced learning for them because you know you’re getting another lesson coming up. Obviously, they have a whole library of things they can go look at once they access your site, but I think that it’s really kind of a cool thing that sometimes you’re going to take them on a journey that they might not have taken on their own.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. It’s hard for me to put myself back in the shoes of people who don’t read a lot of those kind of books, but back when I started just reading, you know what I would do is I would just go down to the bookstore. Up here in Canada, the main bookstore is called Chapters. It’s kind of like Borders down in the U.S.

I would just go to the business book section and kind of look at whatever would suit my fancy that day and buy the book. It’s an aimless journey kind of, so I think you’re right that a lot of what we do is to curate for people and have the next one ready to go when they finish the last one.

Just to kind of finish the thought of where we’re going and the progression, what we’re really interested in doing is helping people apply the 80-20 rule to their personal development. We’re really trying to help people to get most of the value from their personal development in a fraction of the time. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Body.

Tim: Yeah. You bet. The minimum effective dosage, in other words, I think is where you’re headed. Yeah.

Steve: Absolutely, and so that’s a concept that I think is very powerful because when you’re thinking about, “What do most people want to get out of learning?” they just want to get the main points, especially when you’re talking about an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is very busy, like you are, like I am. We really just want to get down to the essence of it to see if there’s something worth applying to my current situation.

The minimum effective dose for that is not to spend 10 hours reading a book. It’s probably watching a 12-minute video. But if your minimum effective dose is you’re trying to master this idea, and you’re trying to really just wrestle this thing, and it’s the most important thing you’re dealing with today, well, then, yeah, probably reading the book is the thing you want to do.

Maybe you want to even hire the person who wrote the book to come and help you with your business. That’s the way we’re looking at…How do we provide value to people? It’s through the idea of…What’s the minimum effective dose to get them what they already want?

We started with business book summaries. Recently, we’ve moved into creating workshop experiences that would usually take an entire morning or an entire day and condensing it down into about an hour so that you could do it over lunchtime, for instance. Then what we’re doing some beta testing on right now is moving into the concept of mastermind groups.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with groups like Vistage or YPO, but it’s really a group that gets together, I think, every month or every week and works together through their business challenges and kind of applies some of the latest thinking to what they’re wrestling with. We’re looking at the same thing, taking steps out of that process, like for instance, being able to do it from your desk over a lunch hour rather than having to carve out an entire day.

We’re just looking at what things, in terms of personal and professional development, people are already doing, what they’re actually trying to achieve, and trying to make it easier for them to do. We’re not sure exactly where that’s going to lead us, but so far, those three ideas, which are the book summaries, the workshops, and the mastermind groups, have been the things that have resonated most well with our customers.

Tim: Well, again, I am a raving fan of yours and what you guys are providing. I just participated in the first little webinar. I say “little” because it is only an hour, and it was phenomenal. The book summary is awesome, but then you actually made us, the attendees, go through a process and actually apply some of those steps right while we were on the phone and on the Internet.

I think I told you earlier, when we talked the other day, that was bold because you basically gave them 15 minutes of dead air. I’m a former radio guy. I did radio, and 15 seconds of dead air starts making me sweat, so to go 15 minutes of kind of dead air as you made us go through the process… You came on every five minutes or so and pushed on to the next thing, but it really did, it forced me to apply it.

I’ve been talking about the concepts from that book for the last two weeks since I was on it, so it is a very effective format. I’m really excited about it, and I’m interested to find out more as you guys start moving into the masterminds. I belong to one mastermind group already for my business, and I really have got a ton out of that, so I’m a big believer in masterminds, as well. It’s exciting. It’s exciting.

Like I said, I’m a raving fan. I’m a subscriber. If we’re going to subscribe to your service, how do we maximize the membership? What are some of the tips that people are using? How are they using it to really get the most out of their investment?

Steve: I think number one is to get very clear on what you want to be learning. There’s a lot of content in our service, and you could easily meander around things. You kind of act like I did back when we first started, which was to just kind of walk in the bookstore, meander around, and click on the first thing that sticks out at you.

I think if you’re very clear about what you’re trying to achieve (and I think most entrepreneurs would understand that this is an important thing to do), you can find the content that you want to apply to your business a lot quicker, and you can get a ton more out of our service. That small initial step is going to save you so much time and generate so much more results for you if you do it, so that’s the first thing that I would say.

We have a team of people here who if you tell them, “Here’s what I’m wrestling with. Can you help me find some of the content?” they’re very good at pointing out the selections in our library that will help you. We have people who will take even an entire half an hour working through this with you for free.

The second thing I would say, and this is really just boiling down to making personal development a habit, because we all get really busy. We all have to put out fires every single day, and the thing that I found to be the most effective for me and for everybody who uses our service is to get out your calendar and mark off an hour or an hour and a half every single month, where this is when you’re going to be working on Readitfor.me, and nothing else gets in the way.

What we like to encourage people to do is to carve out just 1 percent of their working hours every single month for this, and that ends up being about just over an hour and a half if you’re working 40 hours a week, which I know none of your audience is working 40 hours a week. They’re probably working much more, but if you can work that into your schedule, carve it off so it doesn’t get taken over by other priorities. You’re going to be successful with this. You’re going to use the system, and it’s going to add a ton of value to your life.

What we’ve developed along with that will be called a 1% Personal Development Pledge, where even if you just sign up for a free account with Readitfor.me to kind of come in and check it out and see if it’s something that you might be interested in, if you commit to spending that 1 percent of your working hours every single month on your personal professional development, we’ll create a $1,000 scholarship to Readitfor.me for a grade- or high-school student somewhere in the world.

So you can come in, take the pledge, which there are no strings attached. All you have to do is say that you’ll do it, whether you spend that 1 percent of your time working with Readitfor.me, reading a book, or going to a seminar, whatever it is. What we really want to get people in the habit of is making personal and professional development a habit, because that’s the only way you’re going to get it incorporated into your life, so I would say those are the two things.

One is you have to be really clear on what you want to accomplish, and secondly, pull out your calendar, carve off that 1 percent of your time, and make sure that nothing gets in your way from getting that done.

Tim: I could not agree more about that. That’s such a huge tip for anybody. I’m a huge believer that if it doesn’t get calendared, it doesn’t get done, and so if it’s going to happen, it’s going to have to get into your calendar. You can’t have just the intention of getting it done. You have to get it into your calendar.

I really appreciate the fact that you guys are reaching out to the students and offering them scholarships into your service because, man, I can’t imagine if I… Well, first of all, I was a goofy kid. I probably wouldn’t have paid attention anyway, back then, but I can’t imagine, if I had, where I could be right now because I didn’t start my personal development journey, really, until I was in my early 30s. It’s been a huge change in my life since I started that.

My guest next week (you wouldn’t recognize him, I know, but my listeners will) is a gentleman by the name of Les Heinsen, and Les is one of my heroes in the insurance industry, literally. Literally, a hero of mine. I don’t use that word lightly. He says, “All growth begins with personal growth.” If you’re going to be a better father, a better entrepreneur, a better church member, or a better Ping-Pong player, it really doesn’t matter. The only way you’re going to get better at what that role is is just to get better yourself, and so that’s why I appreciate services like yours.

I think you guys literally just have the best product out there, the best platform out there, and like I said, I’m a huge, raving fan. You have been gracious. You’ve offered to give our listeners an incredible discount, and so why don’t you tell them a little bit about that and what they actually get with that discount because, quite honestly, it’s amazing. It blows my mind what you’re willing to give them.

Steve: Yeah, so we want as many people to be using our service as possible, and to entice people to get in the door, we’d like to give your listeners a nice discount on our service. Our most popular plan is what we call our Workshop Plan which typically will go for $999 a year or $99 a month.

What we’re going to offer to your listeners is if you buy a monthly plan, we’re going to give you 50 percent off that price, so you’ll be paying $50 a month. If you want to save, you want to cut your price in half again, you can buy the annual plan, and that’s going to cost you only $250, so down from about $1,000 to $250 for the entire year. You’ll get access to all of our workshops in our system.

You’re able to attend our workshops that Tim was talking about earlier, live, with other Readitfor.me community members. If we launch the Readitfor.me mastermind groups this year, that’s also going to be included in your subscription, so that’s what we would like to offer your audience. We hope we’ll see you on the inside, and you’ll start devoting 1 percent of your working hours every single month to your personal and professional development. We would be honored if we could be a part of that plan for you.

Tim: Well, I really appreciate that. That’s a phenomenal deal. Just your regular service without the workshop and mastermind retails at $299. I know you have a ton of subscribers at $299, so to give them the workshop and everything for $250, that’s an unbelievably great price, and I really appreciate that. The coupon code for that is going to be SIV, as in Success is Voluntary, so they just need to go…where

Steve: They need to go to www.readitfor.me/pricing, and just making sure you’re checking out on the Workshop Plan, which will be on the right side of your screen, and type in that discount code, which is SIV. You should see that discount applied on the screen. If for any reason that’s not working for you, you can email me personally at steve@readitfor.me, and I’ll be happy to have our team get that sorted out for you.

Tim: Again, I sound like a fanboy (and I guess I kind of am), but I have dealt with your team on a couple of different things, and you are a very blessed man. You have great staff. They’re very responsive, get right back to you, and help you tremendously, so I really appreciate what you guys have going on. I’ve always joked about Canada, but now I’m starting to really like you guys. I don’t know what the deal is.

Steve: We’re, as we like to say, sneaky good.

Tim: Sneaky good.

Steve: We sneak up on you. Before you realize it, we’re going to take you over one day. Just don’t tell anybody.

Tim: Oh, man, and by the way, that $250 is in Canadian, and I checked it out. The exchange rate the other day, yesterday, was 92 cents on the dollar, so it’s not even $250. If you’re paying in U.S. dollars, it’s going to be slightly less than that $250 because it’s $250 Canadian, so that’s amazing.

Steve: I know. We’re going to have to switch it back into U.S. dollars. For a while there, we were making money off the U.S. exchange, and now we’re losing it, so I don’t know, but we’ll honor the Canadian pricing for your listeners for sure.

Tim: Awesome. I appreciate that. All right. Well, Steve, I appreciate you coming on. Good luck. I don’t think you need my well wishes. It sounds like you guys are just doing great things up there. I really appreciate your passion for learning and really appreciate you coming on.

Steve: Tim, it was great. Thanks so much for having me, and thanks so much for everything that you’re doing. It’s fantastic.

Tim: All right. Thanks so much. Bye.

Remember everything is voluntary, including success. Take it in your hands now. Head over to www.successisvoluntary.com/iTunes/, and stay up to date with all the latest tips, news, and techniques in the world of selling voluntary benefits.

Tim: Wow. How fun was that? I just love talking to people who are dedicated to growth and to moving forward in life. Steve certainly is one of those people. I can’t believe the discount he is giving you guys. It’s quite a bit less than I’m paying for the service, quite frankly. I’m a little jealous. Remember when you go to www.readitfor.me/pricing, you’re just going to put in the coupon code SIV before you check out. It’ll give you the entire $999 package for $250 or $25 a month. I mean seriously, one book, one business book costs $25. You can’t go wrong.

All the show notes and everything that we talked about can be found at www.successisvoluntary.com/018/, as in episode 18, so go on there. There’s a link to Steve’s LinkedIn there. There’s a link to his website, including the link to purchase the product.

My definition of sales for what we do is we get people to do what they should do anyway but wouldn’t do if we didn’t come along. Hey, listen. You don’t have to subscribe. That’s voluntary, but you know what? Everything is voluntary, including success.

I can’t wait to have you here next week. Thank you so much for being a listener. Next week, we’re bringing Mr. Les Heinsen. Les is one of my heroes in this business, and I can’t wait to share him with you. Thanks a lot. I hope you have a great week.