Mark Fisher, Super Human Unicorn, joins the show today to talk about all things life and business, including marketing, sales, learning, processing information, and time management.
Mark Fisher is an in-demand international speaker, consultant, and entrepreneur.
His core expertise is helping business owners achieve financial success and personal freedom through community building, leadership development, and creating healthy organizational cultures. He’s also excellent at playing with puppies.
Mark and his “non-sexual life partner” Michael created Business for Unicorns in 2016 and have since worked with clients like Sony Music, Sylvan Learning, Novus Surgical, and the ACLU, as well as many of the leading fitness studios across the US and UK. They are also proud alumni speakers of TEDx Broadway.
In addition to their consulting and teaching through Business for Unicorns, Mark and Michael also co-founded Mark Fisher Fitness, one of the most successful gyms in the history of the fitness industry. MFF has two physical locations in Manhattan and was recognized as #312 on the 2015 Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in America, as well as one of Men’s Health’s “Top 20 Gyms in America.”
We kick things off talking about finding your niche and identifying the people you ultimately want to help. Many people mistakenly try to cast a wide net and never end up helping the people they originally intended. Mark believes his target audience came about organically, but he certainly attributes the large amount of reading he has done to finding his way. Specifically, the “conscious capitalist” business model drove Mark to believe he can run a business, help people, and still honor his personal values.
We then move on to discuss the consumption and application of information, focusing on reading. While a brute force, quantity oriented approach to reading is certainly effective, it’s important to strategize about your pursuit. There comes a time when it’s appropriate to just sit and read, but there’s also a time that it’s important to pause, reflect, and strategize about how you will put this information into action. Mark splits these categories into books that teach him to think better, and books that are oriented at a specific upcoming task. These strategies certainly vary from person to person and are context-specific.
Next, we jam on time management and specifically Mark’s Time Ninja Course that is available at Business for Unicorns. Time management has a big influence on his MFF clients and contains 2 functions: the planning function, and the execution function. These can be broken down into smaller skills, but when it comes down to it we all have the same amount of hours in one day.
Mark then discusses the two categories of issues that he sees in his coaching business. Clients are most commonly lacking in marketing or their product just isn’t that good. However, we discuss the fact that if you absolutely kill it in marketing, you can get away with a bad product and vice versa. For most of those listening to this podcast, we discuss the uneasy truth that your training knowledge is probably what matters the least. We want to focus on big rocks, and at some point your training is “good enough” and other things will require your attention.
This leads us into a discussion on what makes a person successful, and most importantly defining success on your own terms. We want to focus on the things that ultimately matter to us, and success is going to vary widely from person to person. If you live your entire life trying to fulfill someone else’s definition of success, you’ll never be successful (or happy for that matter).
Lastly, we hit on selling. This is a sticking point for a lot of people and Mark shares his approach to this issue. If you don’t believe what your selling is worth the price, you’re going to have a hard time selling it. The most natural way to kill it in sales is to genuinely believe in your product and practice, practice, practice.
Enjoy and hit that subscribe button if you learned a thing or two.
Episode Highlights:
3:15 – Mark’s Background
10:45 – Finding your niche and putting your personality into your business
17:00 – Consumption and Application of Information
33:00 – Time Management
41:00 – The two big rocks for a fitness business
47:00 – Running a business and finding the right path for ou
52:00 – The important variables in success
58:15 – Successful sales
1:04:00 – Mark’s recommended resources
Links and stuff:
- All Things Mark Fisher: https://www.markfisherhumanbeing.com/
- Business for Unicorns: https://www.businessforunicorns.com/
- Mark Fisher Fitness: https://markfisherfitness.com/
- Mark Fisher Instagram: @markfisherhumanbeing
- James Cerbie: @jamescerbie
- TRAIN: https://train.jamescerbie.com
- Silverback: https://www.silverbacktrainingproject.com
- Become a Learning Machine: https://www.businessforunicorns.com/personal-productivity/become-a-learning-machine/
- Change Maker: https://amzn.to/2S3OMeT
- The E Myth: https://amzn.to/2U9L8Ty
- Zingerman’s Deli: https://www.zingermansdeli.com/
- Charlie Munger Books (end of this blog post): https://bit.ly/2uOenQY
- How To Get Rich, Naval Ravikant: https://apple.co/37JjMrd
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