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My Mentors & Business Heroes – The Key Experts Who Have Inspired Me

You may have seen that I am a business nerd and especially a marketing nerd, as shown by the vast number of marketing books I’ve read and reviewed.

This list doesn’t cover the many business growth and marketing courses I’ve worked through and there are a lot of those. I thought it would be nice to:

  1. Pay tribute to the main people who have inspired me and my thoughts about small businesses and marketing.
  2. To let you know the source of ideas I draw upon in my coaching and business advice.

This could develop into a long list of names but I want to keep it short so you can see who have been my main influences.

Jay Abraham

What I like about his ideas is the way he can find opportunities for more sales and profit in unconventional ways. He very much creates a profit opportunity seeking mindset in the people who study his methods as he looks inside and out, up, down and around. I like that because there are often hidden assets which can be turned into more revenue and profit.

Jay is the man who really emphasises the title of his well known book, Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got. This book is in my Top 12 Books for business owners and entrepreneurs to read.

Much of my knowledge of the Abraham techniques comes from expensive courses I’ve collected over the years.

The one I particularly recommend if you can find it is How To Get From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be. It’s quite old now (pre-Internet) and it has been given away as a bonus for various promotions. It’s exceptional in the way it teaches the Abraham way of thinking.

See my articles and posts about Jay Abraham.

Scott Hallman

The first name will appear on many lists like this, the second probably wouldn’t because Scott is nothing like as well known.

Scott is a former high-flying entrepreneur who turned his attention to helping other entrepreneurs. Heavily influenced by Jay Abraham, what Scott has done is take the biggest ideas and explain in step by step terms, how to implement them in any business.

If I was only able to keep one training course, it would be the recordings I acquired from his now defunct Small Business Growth Club. It really is that good and the core of those recordings are from his Power of One course.

See my articles and posts about Scott Hallman.

Rich Schefren

Neither Jay or Scott would pretend to be experts in Internet marketing, but this is the forte of Rich Schefren. He became known as the “guru to the Internet marketing gurus” because he launched a revolutionary coaching program, known as the Business Growth System.

I love the Business Growth System and also really appreciate the thinking within his Founders Club and Guided Profit System as well.

Rich stepped away from working with small business owners and developing training products for a few years. In recent months, he’s been working with Agora and he’s back giving tips. Almost certainly this is building up to some kind of launch.

See my articles and posts about Rich Schefren.

Ryan Deiss

Before my health problems overwhelmed me, I’d established a good reputation as an affiliate for the Internet marketers like Rich Schefren, Jeff Walker etc. I was approached about promoting someone I’d never heard of… Ryan Deiss and given free access to his membership website called the Total Access Club.

I thought it was excellent and Ryan didn’t remain unknown for very long with launch after launch.

What made Ryan different from the majority of the other Internet gurus was that he was active in a wide variety of different niche markets on the Internet, away from the “make money online” crowd. He was able to share was really working and he did so in a lot of detail. Fascinating stuff.

The Total Access Club has been replaced by Digital Marketer Lab – a must-have resource if you’re active in an Internet marketing business or if you advise small Internet businesses. Access is available at different levels depending on your commitment.

See my articles and posts about Ryan Deiss.

Mitch Axelrod

Mitch is a former Jay Abraham protégé and was asked to give sales training to the other proteges to help them to market the Abraham style marketing techniques.

Since then, he’s developed his own business ideas which have been captured in a training program called The New Game of Selling. Mitch has become my favourite sales trainer because his ideas fit in with my beliefs.

There is a short book of the same name which is a brief introduction to the ideas, but I’d have liked him to bring more of his ideas into the mainstream.

He’s the source of the second opinion idea I used in my free introduction session called the Business SOS.

See my articles and posts about Mitch Axelrod.

Peter Thomson

Peter is a UK based business and personal growth expert. He is a superb speaker in front of a live audience.

He developed a large training program called the Accelerated Business Growth System which he sold labelling rights to an accountants’ network where it was called Probiz Edge. He also sold an exceptional program through Nightingale Conant called The Best Kept Secrets of the Word’s Great Achievers.

In recent years, Peter has become more focused on helping knowledge experts to create their own information products.

See my articles and posts about Peter Thomson.

Jay Conrad Levinson

Back in the early 1980s, Jay Conrad Levinson had left the high powered life as a senior advertising executive and was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. His students asked him to recommend a book about marketing for small businesses.

An extensive search found nothing so he decided to write one and the brand Guerrilla Marketing was launched. Jay died in 2013 but he’s left a fine legacy of many books and the brand continues to produce small business marketing training.

More than ten years ago, I trained as a Certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach.

See my articles and posts about Jay Conrad Levinson / Guerrilla Marketing.

Mark Joyner

One of the first Internet marketing “gurus”, Mark stepped away as his interests took him in other directions.

He is the founder of Simpleology, the productivity system for helping you to achieve more with your life.

Mark has the great habit of taking complex ideas and stripping away the levels of complexity to let you see the core essentials. I hadn’t realised just how much I’d fallen back on the simplified thinking in two of his books, The Irresistible Offer and The Great Formula when I wrote my free report, The Six Step Profit System.

Mark is also the person who gave me my interest in marketing psychology and buyer psychology. There are two sides of the same coin, but the interests are different. It strikes me as strange how much marketing and sales training tries to manipulate the buyer rather than to work with what the buyer wants to achieve.

Click to learn more about the Simpleology productivity system.

See my articles and posts about Mark Joyner.

Eliyahu Goldratt

This physicist turned his attention to using logical systems thinking to business improvement and created the Theory of Constraints. This is a wide body of work that started in production planning to recognise capacity constraints and spread out into finance and performance measurement, the systematic thinking processes, project management, distribution issues, business strategy and sales and marketing.

See my articles about Eliyahu Goldratt and the Theory of Constraints.

Richard Koch

As well as providing important insights into business strategy, Richard Koch is best known for highlighting the importance of the 80/20 rule and how it can drive business success and personal success and happiness.

See my articles and posts about Richard Koch.

David Garfinkel

My involvement with everyone above dates back to before I was ill, but my last main entry to this list is a recent discovery. David Garfinkel is a copywriter and copywriting coach.

His copywriting podcast is outstanding, simply called the Copywriters Podcast. I liked it so much I was tempted to buy his training course, Fast Effective Copy. It is excellent.

See my articles and posts about David Garfinkel.

Other Influences

This list could be extremely long since it’s likely to include every author who has written a book I’ve rated at 4 stars or better plus other experts who I’ve spent sometimes £000s with on their training courses.

It includes:

  • Dan Kennedy (on the blog)
  • Michael Gerber (on the blog)
  • Brian Tracy (on the blog)
  • Michael Port (on the blog)
  • Jeff Walker (on the blog)
  • Paul Lemberg (on the blog)
  • Sean D’Souza (on the blog)
  • John Carlton (on the blog)
  • Gary Halbert (on the blog)
  • Chet Holmes (on the blog)
  • John Jantsch / Duct Tape Marketing (on the blog)
  • Joe Polish (on the blog)
  • Karl Bryan and Adrian Ulsh (on the blog)
  • Drayton Bird (on the blog)
  • Glenn Livingston (on the blog)
  • Perry Marshall (on the blog)
  • David Sandler (on the blog)
  • Roy Furr (on the blog)

I’ve probably missed out someone really important, but this will do for now. I have an insatiable thirst.

All in all, it’s a unique combination which helps me to think the way I do, to approach problems and find solutions the way I do.

If I had my time again, I probably wouldn’t have kept widening my search for new and better business building information. There is such a thing as too much.

There’s a lot to be said for finding hard-core of experts and reading their books and working your way through their best training courses time after time. The more you become familiar, the more you learn and retain unconsciously.

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