Take Advantage of Others and Their Money

A lever is a simple machine designed to move a great amount of mass with the least amount of effort.

What does it mean to intellectually or financially “leverage” your business? It means to take advantage of someone else's experience or money to get closer, with less effort, to the objectives you pursue.

Leveraging your company is like deciding to use the highway instead of the regular road, since you know exactly where you want to go and have great confidence in yourself. 

Intellectual Capital 

In 2012, I went to a networking breakfast where I met a person who attended on behalf of a business coach who was supposedly very well known throughout Latin America and Spain. During that time, I was testing a business strategy where I was looking for alliances with consultants and coaches to promote our workshops so that I could leverage their client portfolio and they could leverage my product. I made an appointment with him.

I know that immediately he and his team saw me as a good source of money, and as soon as he spoke, he began with his commercial speech: he wanted a new customer and I wanted a new distributor, so … let the Hunger Games begin between two fierce salesmen!

I agreed to begin a relationship with this famous “coach,” Alberto Velázquez.

The coach did not arrive on time for our first appointment. While I was waiting for him, my phone rang. It was Alberto. My eyes rolled to the ceiling, as I was in despair with his lack of punctuality, but I took the call. Little did I know that this call would change my life.

We engaged in a conversation that lasted eight years, until Alberto passed away in 2018. He was the first person who made me realize how my beliefs based on scarcity, fear and ignorance to do business were the cause of the lifestyle that at that time was afflicting me (please note the victimized tone). Without question, I can recognize that Alberto helped me to take the first step on the path of personal development that I follow to this day. I will always be very grateful to him and his team.

For the first time I understood the value of leveraging other people's intellectual capital. My Entrepreneurs' Organization forum, my masterminds, my mentor, José Luis Basurto, and hundreds of honest and deep conversations (with other colleagues who are now my friends and advisers), helped me get to this understanding and joined me in this belief.

I would love to acknowledge individually each person who has added value to my belief system, but that would distract from the purpose of this article.

As a result of opening myself to knowledge, collaboration and the proper construction of myself, my results have multiplied. Tranquility and clarity grew to the point where in 2013, at the time my second child was born, I decided to sell my software factory and shift my career to the world of productive financing. For the first time in my life I had neither proof nor doubt that it would work well, and all this thanks to Alberto Martinez and his naive belief and certainty in me. 

How to Leverage Other People's Intellectual Capital

I invite you to first generate an important distinction between different people who will offer you their knowledge and experience:

• Consultants

• Advisers

• Coaches

• Mentors

There are different definitions of these four characters dedicated to supporting business, professional and personal growth. I will now share with you how I believe they differ and complement each other.

Consultants have tactical knowledge on specialized topics and do not hesitate to roll up their sleeves to work hard for your benefit. This is very useful when you have your problem well identified and do not have the time or desire to learn any other discipline.

Advisers help your company and you as the director, that’s all. They don’t care much (in most cases) about the company-family-person life balance as long as you are meeting the goals that you previously set for yourself.

From my perspective, the coach is the one you rely on for decision-making and accountability. In other words, it's the person you hire when you want to “buy” a boss. Entrepreneurship is a solitary activity even though we are always surrounded by people. The coach accompanies you, demands and implements beliefs so that you can achieve your goals.

The mentor is the person who lives the lifestyle you aspire to have. He will try to ask you questions that incite you to reflect, share personal experiences that contribute to your personal challenge and mainly seek to update your beliefs to push them to the limit, or even break them. His focus is 80% on a personal level and he wants this to be enough to impact your business, your family, your community, and yourself.

The payment terms for each of these individuals vary in amount and scheme. There are individuals who are here by profession and others who are here by vocation, so it is easy to find those who are willing to help you for free. It is always good to have a compensation scheme for integrity, to ensure a simple balance in the investment of time, experience and care for yourself. 

How to Leverage the Intellectual Capital of a Group of People at the Same Time

While it's good to leverage one person, it may be even better to leverage many, especially if it's at the same time. This will allow discussion to truly become gold dust in your hands, giving you the opportunity to achieve your wildest ambition. I will share with you some strategies to bring people together for their benefit and for yours.

Form and Hold Recurring Meetings With Your Advisory Board

The advisory board is the result of bringing together a group of directors, and not wanting to give them legal responsibility as a board of directors requires.

The challenges you’ll face in order to have an advisory board will be:

• Find your advisers. Challenge yourself to call upon and inspire only people you admire for their results, methods and background. Don't waste your time looking for people who you know will only applaud you, but won’t give value back.

• Compensate your advisers. The time they will be giving you should be well compensated based on your own results. The amount of money you must pay your advisers should be high enough to “hurt you” and motivate you to get the most out of them. I have seen many schemes of payment that range from cash to coin/medals, to ghost options, where your advisers earn based on net profits without owning any stock.

• Discern between good and not so good advice. The areas of work and expertise of your advisers should be as varied as the people on the board, so opinions on various issues will be completely divergent. It is your responsibility to be discerning and have clarity about which strategies you receive support your objectives and which do not. You should always be grateful for their intention to help you, even though at the time you may not appreciate what they are saying.

Create Your Mastermind and Live It

If the advisory board exists to help the manager take his company to the next level, the mastermind exists to take the manager, as a person, to the next level. The first reference to the mastermind I could find is by Dale Carnegie, in the first half of the 20th century. I define this practice as the coming together of four to seven colleagues who are in a similar life situation and are willing to invest time in others, just as others will invest time in themselves. The excuse for meeting should be that together they will be able to transcend their limitations and refresh their beliefs.

The mastermind structure that I have been practicing since 2012, thanks to the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, is simple to understand but challenging to execute. Each person has a limited time of no more than seven minutes to update the group on their current personal, family, and business situation. Afterward, each person has about three minutes to unveil blind spots, pose thought-provoking questions or share personal experiences that contribute to their situation. We can say this is a personal mentoring council.

I believe that the mastermind is the most powerful and easy-to-integrate tool for any entrepreneur, as they will be able to see that many others are going through the same challenges and can leverage the experience of others.

Update Your Circle of Geniuses

You are the result of the five people you hang out with the most. In fact, let me be more specific:

Your financial and personal net worth is the average of the net worth of the five people with whom you collaborate, converse, build, and discuss with the most.

If there is one thing that I want to leave you with today through this article is the following. Look around you and ask yourself this question: “Today, how many people have I met and conversed with in depth, whose lifestyle I aspire to have?” If the answer is zero, pick up the phone and ask for a 30-minute appointment with the individual you most admire. My friend and colleague René Salgado shared with me that in 2016 he set himself a challenge: to talk to the five most influential people in business in Mexico. This task caught my attention, and I immediately asked him:

• “How did you do it and how did it go?”

His answer was as simple as the method:

• “I opened my internet browser, searched for the company's site, made a phone call, and browsed (on the network and among associates in the organization) until I got to the person closest to my influential person. Emails, calls, and LinkedIn messages were enough to get appointments, some eight months apart of course, but they were all with the people I was looking for.”

I have no doubt that some of those conversations still resonate in his head today and helped him to update beliefs in the areas he was looking to elaborate.

Conventions and Congresses 

Conventions and congresses can easily become the most “expensive” way to learn, since the public has positioned these events as an ideal way to connect with other people, get updated, break the routine and travel. I have always thought that networking is the most valuable activity in an event like this. In my case, I value a congress because it allows me to focus completely. By removing myself from my natural habitat, I find myself free of distractions and immersed in the given topic, which means plenty of hours talking about the same thing, in a context of openness and inspiration generated by conferences, integration events and nightlife.

Online Training Service 

I can imagine the conversation of two “millennials” in 2040:

• Do you remember when universities existed, and we had to commute to take classes?

• Yes! And they gave you a professional degree that many companies considered important to determine how much you knew about something or not.

• And not only that, the cost of studying was high! Knowledge in this modality was only available to people who could afford it.

We are living in an incredible era because there is a new way of learning. Today, we have a practically infinite collection of online courses, delivered in different modalities: by email, through shared and low-cost training platforms, an infinite number of offers with a lot of content and pedagogical structure.

During the 10 years that I collaborated with Innox and the five with Arrenda+, I traveled north to south and south to north on an avenue in Guadalajara called Lopez Mateos, also called Choques Mateos, or similar nicknames. It is a very busy avenue, too busy in my opinion, and this is a daily occurrence. Was I angry that I could lose more than an hour and a half because of the traffic every morning or afternoon? Many will answer yes. But I was not. Lopez Mateos gave me the opportunity to listen to audiobooks, podcasts and other material while sitting in my car. I even thought of asking for an honorary doctorate from Lopez Mateos University for the number of hours I spent in their facilities studying hundreds of valuable subjects.

I think we can easily conclude that access to first- or second-hand knowledge is possible if we find sufficient value in the effort it takes to access it. Giving up knowledge of the world for my own gain is as wise as trying to navigate the internet with a typewriter (analogy generated by ChatGPT) or how to live today but in the Middle Ages (analogy generated by Gemini). Feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss this further.