Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner and I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart and I got a returning guest here for you. Last time Timothy Sykes was on Mixergy, the most thumbs up comment under his interview came from a guy named Mort Goldman who said, this guy seems like such a prick. I feel like Mixergy got a little slimy just from doing this interview. There were a lot of comments like that, but Tim’s interview was the most listened to interview in all of 2013 on Mixergy, and he’s consistently popular even though people are pissed off.
I want to find out what he’s been doing since last interview, what he does to get people so worked up, and whether it converts into sales or is it just fun, and I want to just catch up with him. Tim is a penny stock trader, a blogger, an entrepreneur. You can see everything he does on timothysykes.com. Thanks to walkercorporatelaw.com, my sponsor, I’ll be asking him all of this and more including how much money he’s made over the last year. Tim, welcome back.
Tim: Thank you for having me.
Andrew: You said before we started I’m going tone it down a little bit this year. Why? Is it Mort? Did Mort turn you around?
Tim: Yes, Mort, I think about him day and night and no, before it was about getting exposure like, look at me, I’m making all this money, you can learn from me. There’s a lot of guys saying that, so I had to kind of distinguish myself. Now, in just the past few weeks, I have not one, but two millionaire students.
We’ve have gotten features on CNNMoney which got shared five thousand times, a feature on Fox with Cavuto and Fox & Friends, and we have a few more features lined up. The fact that my students are actually becoming millionaires, that’s enough. I don’t need to brag all the time. Now the press and my students are doing it for me.
Andrew: I see that you actually are getting some press for your students by bringing them on with you when you do interviews and from the one story that I saw, it seems like the Wolf of Wall Street is a good hook for you now.
Tim: Yeah, I mean, the Wolf of Wall Street is all about this guy who scammed and made a lot of money with penny stocks, but he ripped off his customers and I basically just say look, I’m actually showing you that I’m not ripping off my customers. Here’s my millionaire student who started with just $1500, less than three years ago. Tim Gretawny [SP], just a regular kid from the Midwest. My second millionaire student just had a baby so, or actually my first millionaire student was just kind of like my Jared with Subway.
Andrew: Yep.
Tim: The fact that I can create millionaires, it’s just the beginning.
Andrew: Do you make more money investing or more money selling courses and videos teaching other people how to invest?
Tim: Roughly 12 times the amount from teaching than I do from trading. Some people will look at that as a negative, I look at it as a positive because I am showing you how I make money from my craft and then I’m making money from showing people. I think that it goes hand in hand , but there’s a lot of purists out there that are like if you’re a trader, you shouldn’t tell anybody about your strategy.
You should focus on your own percent games. I was up 66 percent last year in 2013. The whole markets were up 20, 25 percent. Already, in the first three weeks of 2014, I’m up 30 percent on my trading, but I’ll always trade. It’s a question of how many people can I teach. I’m already rich. Me making another 66 percent or 30 percent or 100 percent, it doesn’t matter. It’s like you selling a few more greeting cards, once you’ve sold, how many greeting cards have you sold?
Andrew: Hey, it was all free greeting cards. You’re talking about the past business. We were giving it away and making money off of Lee Genton [SP] Speaking of making money, how much money did you make 2013? Every year around this time, you come back to Mixergy and we review your sales for last year. Where are you now?
Tim: So last year’s sales were $6.2 million. Up from I want to say from $3.5 or 4 the year before? You pull up.
Andrew: Yeah, let me see, I have it right here. It was 4 and where is that? I don’t have it. Oh, 20, here we go. 2011 it was $3.5, 2012 it was $4.4 is what you told me at the time. That sounds right?
Tim: Yeah, I mean I also include trading now because I made nearly $400 thousand last year in trading.
Andrew: So, we’re talking roughly $6 million from teaching people online how they can trade.
Tim: Correct, but more importantly, already in the first 3 weeks, so I had never had a million dollar month before this month. Halfway through the month, on January 15th, we hit a million. We’re already at $1.5 million in sales for January, so we’re on track to do $2 million so if you extrapolate that out, maybe 15, 10, 10, 15, 20, I don’t know how far it can go because now we have reached kind of like this important point where people realize it’s not just me in my Lamborghini and my mansion and my, you know, girls, and my lifestyle, and my trips, and my watches, my gold $36,000 Rolex. It’s not just about this stuff anymore, it’s about you guys.
Andrew: I want to understand how you’re selling to people. But, before we do, speaking of Lamborghini, last year around this time, I was checking out your Facebook profile, and it was nothing but you in a Lamborghini, and then women in the Lamborghini with you. I don’t see that anymore. Did it not work for you? Did it not convert?
Tim: No, I. . .
Andrew: Did you lose the Lamborghini?
Tim: No, I still have the Lamborghini.
Andrew: Okay.
Tim: No, it’s been. . . I’m probably the worst Lamborghini owner ever. I get nauseous when I take it out. I lent it to a friend, he knocked off the mirror. You know, there’s all sorts of issues with it, but hey, I still post every now and then. But again, it’s not just about my lifestyle anymore. Now, if you look at my pictures, you’ll see me bringing my top student on Fox the other day.
Andrew: I see that.
Tim: You’ll see me treating him to a suite at the Pierre. I got him a big [balthazar] of Veuve. It’s like 16 bottles. I tried to bring it into Jean- Georges in New York. They rejected us. I was going to pay them, like, you know, 16 bottles in corkage fee, which is like $1400. They wouldn’t do it. So again, it’s shifted.
Then, I also have a girlfriend, Bianca, who you just met briefly. She’s made me a better person, a nicer, more balanced person. So I have a lot of good things going on right now.
Andrew: So, what did you do in 2013 that allowed you to grow your sales by about 50 percent?
Tim: You know, again, I focused. I had the attention of people, you know, by being bold, by being aggressive, by being a prick. That gave me the spotlight, and then it was up to me to come through, and, you know, again, as I made 66 percent on my money, you know, I was right. I had dozens of huge winner stocks that doubled, tripled, quadrupled over the course of the year. You know, in the beginning of last year, I picked [OMVO] as my top pick. It was in the twos, it finished the year at ten plus.
So, you know, when you have these big winners, when you come through, I don’t need to just brag about my lifestyle anymore. I don’t want to offend people who now I have converted into customers and students. Before I didn’t have as many students, you know. Now I have over 3000 students. Last year, we only had, like, I want to say, like, 1500, or maybe 2000. But, the student base has grown, and now it’s about, OK, “What can you do? PUt up or shut up.” That’s what I’m doing. I’m focusing on webinars, seminars. My video lesson library is over 1400 videos now.
Andrew: Let’s break all that down. First, you said two things. It was the stock performance, and it was also your mouth that was bringing people to the site. Your mouth is the part that I’m most interested in. Where would you go to get people to come to the site?
Tim: That’s a weird phrase.
Andrew: What?
Tim: [??] yourselves. That’s just a weird phrase, the way you said it.
Andrew: Let it be. I’m Okay with that.
Tim: Okay.
Andrew: I’m comfortable with myself.
Tim: All right. All right, fair enough.
Andrew: Tell me. So, you couldn’t possibly do enough interviews like Mixergy, do enough blog posts to get traffic to your site. Was it also that you were buying ads and that was what was helping you?
Tim: No. I mean, we never really spent much on ads. It was more, I want people to find me, you know, organically. I don’t like the whole idea of advertising. I really like press. I’m a big convert of press now. All last year I didn’t go for any press, but now that I have a millionaire student, I think that I’ve earned that right.
Andrew: So then, what? Where did. . . Walk me through your funnel. People, you’re saying, it’s largely you opening your mouth and really drawing attention to yourself and getting people to your site. Where were you opening your mouth last year that got more students into the site?
Tim: Well, I mean, I showed a lot of my trips. You know, I still travel. My girlfriend and I went to Capri and Positano and Mykonos and Santorini for two weeks. I spent 50 grand, brought a camera crew, so we had to put those videos up. So first, it’s getting people inspired to want to learn.
As I said last year, the people who want the Lamborghinis, the people who want these material possessions are better students. So, it was about showing the material possessions, showing off the amazing life that I’m fortunate enough to live, getting. . .
Andrew: And where did you show it off? Was it. . . I saw it on Facebook. Was it anywhere else where you were showing it off and bringing. . .
Tim: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter. Instagram was the big new thing, where, you know, I don’t think I had Instagram last year, and now I love it, even though you can’t put notes, which is stupid, you know, you can share your photos and share these moments. That really inspires people, because most people, they have crappy lives. That really gets people going. And then, also, because I’ve been teaching now for a few years, some testimonials start seeping out, where people make 20,000, 50,000, 100,000. My affiliates are making, you know, $10,000, $20,000, $30,000.
Andrew: By promoting your stuff?
Tim: Yeah, by promoting my newsletters.
Andrew: Okay. Who do you use to get affiliates?
Tim: My students, you know, my students become my best affiliates. I haven’t, like, gone out to, like, affiliate conferences, or anything. That’s probably this year. It’s really all organic, from finding good students. Good students become good testimonials. Good testimonials are good affiliates. So we have our own affiliate program on Profit.ly.
Andrew: All right. Now, people come to the site, and one of the first things that they see is a request. Let me see, actually. Let me go to Timothy’s site. Let me really break this down. The first thing that I see whenever I go to your site is a request for my email address and name. That we have on Mixergy, it works real well, right?
Tim: Yes, having free video lessons.
Andrew: Okay.
Tim: So, you give us your contact information, we give you some basic videos. Some free videos that are sent to you just to give you some basics on what I’m about. Which I have to update, actually, now that so much has happened in the past year.
Andrew: All right. Where else are you getting people to start giving you their email address?
Tim: You know, we have a Facebook fan page, Instagram. Everything leads back to TimothySykes.com. That’s why when you said, “What website do you want me to talk about?” it’s all TimothySykes.com, that’s where people come because I have 8,000 plus blog posts. I have so many free videos. That’s where we want people to start. Then we can start saying, “Okay. What broker do you use? Apply for my millionaire challenge.” So there are different things you can do on TimothySykes.com, but it’s all me.
Andrew: I see, and then on the right side, I can give you my email address again for seven free lessons or I can apply to become a millionaire.
Tim: Yeah. You should apply. You should apply to become a millionaire right now.
Andrew: I’m going to apply to become a millionaire right now. If I become a millionaire with you, you will take me to Fox News next year?
Tim: Yes. We’ll go even to bigger…
Andrew: I can’t even pause it.
Tim: There’s no pause, once you start your journey, Andrew! You’re either in or you’re out. I want dedicated students.
Andrew: I hit the page and it started playing. I hit the pause button and it flashed pause, but it wasn’t pausing.
Tim: We want you to want in. We want the most dedicated people. Some people, they just don’t want it bad enough. You obviously built your company, you’ve interviewed a lot of people. You know how much work it takes to become a millionaire. Most people don’t know what it’s like and they’re not willing to do that. You know, they think, “Oh, I’ll study for 10 hours.” They’re lazy. And I don’t want lazy students.
Andrew: You know what, I did want it really badly at first. And I did anything, including pop-ups, pop-unders, pop in your face. I would’ve popped you in the mouth if I could just get your email address to join my greeting card mailing address and then sign up for a lead. Then with Mixergy, I said, I want to do it right. I want to have a better reputation. I want to take care of people.
Tim: That’s just because you were pitching crap before and now with Mixergy, you want…
Andrew: I think I was pitching good stuff before.
Tim: You were pitching free gift cards. Free little holiday…
Andrew: It was free greeting cards. You’re talking about the previous company and in the process of it, you can sign up for Time Magazine or something.
Tim: Okay. But I’m just saying that Mixergy, KhanAcademy, these are things where you’re selling wisdom. I’m selling wisdom. We’re all doing the world very good. So if I get you in the door, and I make this analogy where if you have a bum and you have a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bottle of green juice, the bum is going to take the Jack Daniels every time.
So it’s your duty to put the green juice inside the Jack Daniels and trick the stupid bum into actually drinking healthy. So I need to trick bums into my education. So I do that. And I’m not ashamed of it. I think that it’s needed, because if I don’t show off the Lamborghini, which I still show off, and I still show off the $30,000 plus Rolex. If I don’t show this stuff off, people lose interest very quickly. It’s very difficult to be a teacher. In our last interview, you said that I would fail at creating a millionaire.
Andrew: I don’t think I said that.
Tim: Oh, yes you did. I remember that. You were like, “What if you fail?” and I said, “I will not fail!”
Andrew: Yeah, I might have said, what if you fail. And I do remember you yelling at me that you will not fail.
Tim: Even having a shadow of doubt is too much, because I work my butt off every single day. I still do. I’ve gained like 45 pounds in the past year. I’m like Jonah Hill. But it’s a small price to pay not just for creating a millionaire, even though the pitch is to say, “Look, I want to create a millionaire.” a million dollars doesn’t buy you that much in real life any more. It’s about the fact that you can make a million dollars, like my top students starting off with 1,500. Or as some of my affiliates who are earning six figures a year.
There are many different ways to making a million. But by getting there and proving your self-sufficiency and being independent, Tim [??] who is my millionaire who was on Fox with me, over the course of 2013, I was in Japan filming for this upcoming TV show. I was asleep, I woke up because of the time zone difference.
I got an IM from one of my other challenge students who said, “Tim G. made 215 today.” I said, “$215? I don’t care. Why are you even wasting my time on that?” And he was like, “No. $215,000!” I was like, “Whoa, he made $215,000 while I slept!” He was totally self-sufficient but it was off patterns detailed in my DVDs. So if you Google how to make $200,000 in one day, you will see the pattern listed on my DVD and on a blog post two years before he used those exact patterns while I was sleeping, to make his own money. That’s beautiful.
Andrew: What about all those people who are signing up and don’t make money? If you’ve got two people out of 3,000 and, by your…
Tim: So far.
Andrew: So far, you’re saying?
Tim: Yeah. A lot of people are getting close to becoming millionaires. It’s not like just two millionaires and the rest are all losing. All I can do is focusing on providing all the tools. It’s working for some, it can work for all that my whole rational all here we have. We know, I think, three or four dozen peoples made over hundred thousand dollars last year.
I don’t teach this thing that like you could be billionaire. You know, I trade penny stocks. I trade these small stocks that every one in the world hates but they are very easy because everyone hates them. It is the gift in the curse. All the smartest people on Wall Street say no to penny stocks so we are trading against, you know, people who have been intelligence of like Forrest Gump.
You know, half the people in my chat-room are like boy, can you even talk. That’s basically what they are talking about so when you have this low competition level, it’s kind of like playing midgets in basketball. Sure. Not everyone is going to make money. Okay. Some people just won’t get it. The fact is 90 to 95% of traders lose money, but if I teach them rules, rules that have made me millions. And rules that have made now several of my students millions, I am doing good. That’s it.
Andrew: Even if they have use it. And it doesn’t work out for them and they end up losing money.
Tim: I mean, it’s kind of tough to lose a lot of money because my rule number one which are inundated with once you become one of my student is to cut losses quickly. So it you break the rules. I mean. people say stock market is scary trading. It’s scary. You know, driving is scary if you break the traffic laws. If you go through stop sign, if you go through the red light and you end up with your car upside down, you’re like, what happened.
Well, you ignored the rules. So if you ignore the rules of anything, it can be very scary. So it’s my job to teach these rules and anybody can learn this rules on their own 14 years of time, but I’ve refined these rules and learned them over 14 years. So I am just passing them down.
Andrew: Tell me more about what you do to get these customers to pay. I understand offering them the whiskey because that’s what they are going be more likely to be draw too.
Tim: The green juice and the whiskey. We give them whiskey.
Andrew: What else do you do. How much are you involved in the conversion on your site? Every time I am on your site I see something new. Now I see something called Bounce Exchange where I just left my mouse on the page long enough, and this big thing popped up on the screen that said seven free lessons absolutely free. Enter your email address now.That’s not new that’s them saying to you, Tim…
Tim: Who’s them?
Andrew: Bounce Exchange or some of consolidated workers for you [??]
Tim: It’s the software that we are use. We use lot of you little software and pieces of, you know.
Andrew: But is that you sitting their thinking what do we do, what are all the new tools we can put on the site or at this point are other people coming to you and pitching you products. And you’re saying, “I will try that to convert. I will…”
Tim: People pitch product but my partner, Zack, who you met last time for a second. He is very much in charge of just the website management. I write all the content still. I write the blog post, the tweets, the YouTube videos. They are all my ideas so I focused on content. My whole job is to make good content whether it’s a picture or a video of my Lamborghini or a 45 minute video lesson on a stock that I think is good right now,
I create content and then in that Zack’s job is to mish mash the content and write auto responders so that everything is flowing. My students whether you enter in your email to get the free video lessons or you’re an actually paying customer and then you have access to my 1400+ premium video lessons. They we also have webinars so there’s all sorts of different levels that you can do but my job is just to teach one what I know.
Andrew: Again going back to this pop up, there is no exit on it. I can’t exit off. I can’t click the background to make the pop up go away. There’s a link that says, “No thanks. I prefer not to build generational wealth.” That doesn’t work. I can’t click on that. But…
Tim: It should work. I mean, there are still software bugs we are not…
Andrew: That not an intentional thing is what you are saying. Okay.
Tim: No. No. We don’t want to track people.
Andrew: But the idea is you’re willing to be as aggressive as possible because you believe in what you are selling and you figure if people actually follow it their lives will be better. And if their lives aren’t better,at least, they are not going to lose lot of money.
Tim: God bless. You understand.
Andrew: That the idea.
Tim: When you are like teaching something so useful, so life changing, so many traders coming to me they’re just totally lost. If I open my mouth for 30 seconds I better their lives for years.
Andrew: How do you know what products to create for them? Every time I talk to you the store gets bigger and bigger.
Tim: It’s just seeing what works. The webinars work. My millionaire challenge program works and when you see what works then you can refine it. Like before I didn’t know that I had to do a live trading webinar last year. I don’t think I did any live trading webinars. I always did Q&A because people had questions.
So I did it after the market closed, but this year I was like, you know what? I doing live trades. Maybe you can learn in real time so we started doing that for my challenge students and people love I get three times as many people through the live trades because they say have questions. But they want to see it live. They want to see the chart and the stock on their own home computer and see my live play by play analysis.
Andrew: I am watching it happen and you come in here and you start talking to them about what’s going on.
Tim: Correct.
Andrew: I see.
Tim: So last week I did a two-hour webinar on the stock XXII in the morning and I was like, “Why I’m going to buy this, why I might buy it later.” And I was like, “Here’s what I might do later in the day.” Five hours later, it set up exactly the way that I said it would in the webinar, and I bought it, and it went perfectly! Just absolutely perfect. But my Challenge students were prepared five hours ahead of time, and they saw the stock, and it was a 20% winner. I made $30,000, and a lot of other people made $5,000, $10,000, $20,000.
Andrew: You called Zack, your partner. What’s your deal with him? He doesn’t own a piece of TimothySykes.com, right?
Tim: No, he doesn’t own a piece. He helps me manage this all, because I don’t know this whole internet world. He does.
Andrew: How do you pay him? Do you pay him a share of the results?
Tim: Yeah. Yeah.
Andrew: You do.
Tim: I mean, he doesn’t get a salary. It’s all based on results, but he saw what I have to teach and just knew that he had to manage it. And I didn’t know how to manage it beforehand. I was selling all these different DVDs. He created a nice little package, a curriculum and that’s what’s paying off.
Andrew: He takes all the courses and all the here, I’m actually in the store where it says, since our store’s, oh I see: “Since our store’s temporarily down so we’re offering specials and discounts with purchases of any of these DVDs.” But he took all of these programs that you created and he made it into a curriculum.
Tim: Yeah. Exactly. Well-
Andrew: Where you buy one, you go through it, and then you get the next.
Tim: -yeah. He didn’t do it, it wasn’t all his idea, but he helps me manage it. And my dad helps me manage it. My mom helps me manage it. We have 22 employees. My mom and dad are still my core employees. Good job, mom and dad. I just took down, we had court side seats with the Celtics-Heat game last night. It was pretty cool. If you looked at my Instagram, you’ll see some pictures.
Andrew: I thought I saw something going on there.
Tim: Yeah, it’s fun.
Andrew: Yeah, they were the first two employees, your parents?
Tim: Yeah! And they’re still great. We’re still getting crazy. Again, as I said we’re doing-
Andrew: Your dad’s a stepdad?
Tim: Yeah. We’re doing $50,000 a day in sales. Like, it’s getting insane right now.
Andrew: Is it inappropriate to ask about your real dad? Your real dad. Your biological dad?
Tim: Oh, it’s not inappropriate. It’s okay. I mean-
Andrew: Where is he? What’s that?
Tim: He died when I was young. My mom and dad got divorced, so I never really got to know him.
Andrew: How old were you when he passed away?
Tim: I think I was like 15, 16. But they had been divorced for awhile. But you know, my stepdad raised me, my best friend, it’s-
Andrew: Really?
Tim: He’s my business partner, so-
Andrew: But your dad you really didn’t know, were you pissed at him? Did you feel like, “I’ve got to show you that you were wrong?”
Tim: No, I mean my mom divorced him so it wasn’t like he left us. It was just they weren’t getting along. So, I never really had any “dad” issues. I don’t think I’ve ever suffered from confidence issues, as pretty much anybody will know, who knows me.
It’s more just knowing that what I have to teach is valuable to so many people, and more importantly that my chip on my shoulder is with finance, though, the whole industry who doesn’t let me talk about penny stocks. I was a big hit on CNBC, but they wanted me to talk about stocks like Starbucks and Google and I’m like “Well, there’s no edge there.” And that’s how they make their money. CNBC makes roughly $1 million a day-
Andrew: You weren’t pissed as a kid? You didn’t walk around feeling like “What the hell am I doing here in this school? They’re making me do all this stuff and I’ve got something so much more in me than what they’re allowing me to express?
Tim: I mean, I was a tennis player in high school. I played every day.
Andrew: And that’s where it came out?
Tim: Ten years. And so I wanted to win the state championship. I actually worked so hard I overworked my frail Jewish body so much that I got injured. Because I was lifting weights and playing tennis every single day because I lost in the third set of junior year of the state finals. So I wanted to win the state final, I over-trained, and that’s what led me to get into trading. So my stepdad calls it the “million dollar injury.”
Andrew: Okay. All right. I should go back to the site and what you’re doing to get sales there.
Tim: Yeah, sure.
Andrew: What other advice do you have for someone who’s trying to build a site like that? Who’s trying to sell education online and get people to not just buy $100,000, you know the whole six figure thing is too small for them, they’re thinking bigger like you, what do we need to do?
Tim: I think you need to try many different angles. Because every single industry is different. You know for me who, you know–you know Remimi [ph] too–you know, he thinks penny stocks are crackheads. Like he’s, like I can’t talk to anybody about penny stocks. And my people don’t care about his stuff at all. My people don’t care about options.
So every single sector is different, and you have to find what works in your sector. What I find is that when I make a video, with like a little thumbnail, with a little JPEG of a Lamborghini, and I say “45 minute video lesson. If you learn this pattern, you can buy a Lamborghini.” Or if I just have just a thumbnail of the stock turn and say “45 minute video lesson of a pattern you need to know.”
Well, the stupid thumbnail of the Lamborghini gets ten times as much page views as the other one. It’s the exact same video lesson! I beta tested this, I thought it was hilarious. And so, the Lamborghini works, so I’m going to do that just to get people to watch. I’m going to be abrasive, I’m going to be, “take one for the team,” so some people will call me a prick. I don’t care what the haters think. A lot of people say “Tim, if you’re nicer, you can get more subscribers.” But that’s not my goal, and it never has been.
My goal is to create the most number of millionaires. And just because you have a lot of subscribers doesn’t mean that you have a better chance of having millionaires. I mean, dedicated students. My dedicated students don’t care about the Lamborghini after they start learning the patterns. The Lamborghini is what gets them in the door.
So they’re bums at first, and then I dress them up. I give them a nice little [??]. They’re drinking kale juice by the end of it, and they’re good. You know, Tim Grattani [??], the media, was asking how does it feel to be a millionaire? Actually, I’ve cost a million dollars in training profits, but my taxes were only roughly $650,000. He’s so honest about it, and the media was like, just say you’re a millionaire. That’s an easier story, but I’m not.
So it’s he has learned the right way, and I’m so immensely proud of that. I just need to get more students like that and it’s not just about the biggest number of subscribers out there because the vast majority of subscribers out there aren’t dedicated, aren’t diligent. They aren’t going to go through what it actually takes, so they’re wasting my time. You think I want to make $50 or 100 off of somebody. No, I don’t care about that. That’s a nice little business, but the real driver of my business is creating millionaires. Right now I have two millionaires.
Andrew: Tim, the guy who made a million dollars trading after signing up for your program, how much money did he spend on TimothySykes.com and all of your Timothy Sykes’ products?
Tim: I mean, he’s going to [??] in for like two and a half years. I want to say like three or four thousand dollars. He has all the DVDs, all the videos. That’s it.
Andrew: Okay.
Tim: That’s pretty much it. You can’t spent more than a few thousand dollars with me. I don’t have like a $50,000 package. I don’t want to have that.
Andrew: When you say that you bring in – it was roughly $6 million, right?
Tim: Yeah.
Andrew: What kind of margins do you have on that?
Tim: Oh, roughly a 50% margin after we take out the employees and we’re trying a lot of different stuff online. So I split it. We also split with Zack and my stepdad. We just finishes my taxes for, I guess, last year. Yeah, I guess I made like $2.3 million after everything. So that’s pretty decent. It’s not great, but if you can create millionaires from scratch…
Andrew: How do you end up with $2.3 million. If it’s six million in sales…
Tim: Yeah.
Andrew: …and it’s 50% you get to keep, it sounds to me…
Tim: Because I’m giving some to Zack and my dad, too.
Andrew: But then you’re saying after that you have to pay taxes.
Tim: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, there are profits and then we have 22 employees now. It’s getting crazy.
Andrew: You paid over a million dollars in taxes.
Tim: I think I paid like $750, maybe, $800,000 last year.
Andrew: What do you do to protect yourself from paying more taxes? That’s pretty good.
Tim: I don’t know. We have an accountant, and he handles all of that. I don’t know the tax rules. I give him all the stuff, give him all the expenses. That’s what it comes down to.
Andrew: You taught one of the first Mixergy courses about how to be a profitable blogger.
Tim: Yeah.
Andrew: And you said, hey, you know what, Andrew? I’m going to throw up this web page. I’m going to teach this stuff and you mentioned it and I linked to it. The site is gone. What happened?
Tim: Yeah. [??] economics is still there in theory. It’s just we’ve gotten so overloaded, overwhelmed. We just hired three more people the other day just to keep up. Before I was getting 2,000 emails a day. Now it’s about 3,000. I went to Japan and we filmed all these blogging videos in like these Zen Gardens, and I was like, to be a blogger. It was great and we just haven’t had time. That’s what it comes down to.
So we’re literally a year, sometimes two years. I had [??] .com. That’s two years behind. I have a lot of things that I want to do. We have so many videos and movie spoofs. And I have a rap song that I filmed last year about my [??]
Andrew: Too Greedy is the one where you were going to show off everything that you bought so that your accountant can write it off as a business expense.
Tim: There’s a lot of stuff that we have ideas, but, you know, when it all comes down to it it’s me teaching stock trading at first. That’s the primary thing and I would love to do that. You met my cute puppy. I think that she’s cuter than Boo, so I might create a whole brand around her. I don’t think Boo was that cute. So there’s a lot of stuff that I want to do, but there’s only so much time that I have. That’s what it comes down to.
Andrew: Alright. Let me do a quick plus here for Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. I told you about – while he goes and gets his dog, I’ll tell you. I told you in the past that one of the things that I look for in a lawyer is not someone who can answer all my questions. Obviously no one can do that, but when he refers me to someone if he can answer a question I want that person to care, to be able to help out.
And when Scott makes an introduction people always respond, they’re always helpful, and it’s because of the reputation that he has with other lawyers and that’s why I like working with him. Many times I’ve talked about him and entrepreneurs have said that they’ve used him because of me. And I urge you to, at least, try WalkerCorporateLaw.com. Look at that puppy. WalkerCorporateLaw.com.
Tim: “Hi, Andrew. Hello!”
Andrew: Look at the little puppy that you have. I would have thought you’d have more of a killer.
Tim: I like you, Andrew. Mixergy rocks.
Andrew: There you go. A testimonial from a dog.
Tim: She’s so cute, right? Look at Andrew. Look at him. Look at the funny man. Look at his beard. Yeah, so I want to create a whole Facebook fan page and stuff for Miley too but-
Andrew: What about Profit.ly at Investimonials? How are they doing, those two sites that you created?
Tim:Fantastic. You know, that’s a big driver with a lot of the revenue growth because we started managing other traders. We have InvestorsLive and Superman. And Superman, you know, we’ve created his newsletter from scratch. He’s a stock trader that I knew. He used to write on TheLion.com for, you know, 10/15 years. And I was like, “Look, you’re giving your picks away for free. You should be charging this. You have a strategy.” I’ve seen him pick so many winners. Finally convinced him and now he has over a thousand subscribers making six figures a month.
Andrew: And that’s Profit.ly where people can follow traders and trade along with them.
Tim: Yeah. If you go to Profit.ly/guru you can see the different gurus and you can see our lifetime earning.
Andrew: I see. So Superman, for example, he is up $2,000,000 and if I follow him I get to trade along with him.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. And you see his watch list and video lessons, his rationale. He has a chat room. And he actually has a $600,000 plus winner that he still has to post. He hasn’t closed out the position yet. So he’s killing it.
Andrew: What percentage of your revenues are coming from that?
Tim: I’d say maybe 30%.
Andrew: 30%. That’s really strong.
Tim: Yeah, roughly. Yeah, I mean, it’s tough to differentiate because my newsletters are on the Profit.ly platform too. So it’s all kind of mixed, you know? We’re not big believers in being like, “Okay, this subsidiary has to do this. This has to do this.” It’s all to benefit. Like if you want to learn from me, that’s great. If you want to learn to trade penny stocks, if you want a more active chat room where there’s tons of picks and not just penny stocks but people are trading stocks like Facebook and Twitter then you go to InvestorsLive.
If you want Superman who holds stocks for days or weeks, then that’s his style. So, you know, as long as we have successful traders who actually make money and are right more than they’re wrong, you know, we get great testimonials and well, that’s the secret.
Andrew: I’m looking at the traffic for – where is that – for Investimonials. It’s pretty small. We’re talking under 50,000 a month, right?
Tim: Yeah, I mean Investimonials is all SEO-based so if you type in pretty much any broker or any newsletter and you type in the word review after it, you know, we have what, 30,000 reviews. We still have to work on that, you know. Some projects fall behind. Profit.ly has just introduced a whole new chat room, a new Facebook-like wall, and we have three or four thousand traders every single day logging in because we have 5,500 paying subscribers now on Profit.ly between all the different gurus. So I’m at like 3,300 and overall we’re at like 5,500.
Andrew: But Investimonials, the Yelp of the Securities industry, it’s not getting your attention.
Tim: I mean, it’s useful, it still gets traffic. But we haven’t really taken the time. You know the main thing is focused on teaching people through my educational offerings and the newsletters. I mean that’s a clearly defined business and it’s useful every single day. Leaving reviews, you know, there’s a lot of problems with review websites with fake reviews.
And obviously in finance if you lose money due to probably your own fault, you’re going to be more likely to blame the broker. And it’s not the broker’s fault, it’s just something that you probably did. So most reviews are just more negative than the real world. That’s just kind of a consequence.
Andrew: I remember seeing you, I guess it was maybe two years ago now, going down to Florida, was it, where you were going to talk to the guy who was working on Investimonials with you. Is he still with you on that?
Tim: Well that was Profit.ly so I was on my way to Profit.ly. I lived in Boca Raton in this crappy little town for three months while we built out the features of Profit.ly.
Andrew: Okay.
Tim: I highly encourage all entrepreneurs to do that, not to hire Indians or Croatians who can barely speak the language and you have like crazy time zones. Go like talk with your programmer in person or your team. It’s more time-consuming, it’s more expensive but you will, trust me, thank me like months and definitely years later.
Andrew: So far, actually, I can see that you’re tamer. Your girlfriend really must have – I was trying to bait you with the whole comment that I read at the top of the interview. I was trying to get you fired up.
Tim: I mean, it’s not just my girlfriend it’s also success. Like, you know, in our last interview you said, “What if you fail at creating a millionaire?” And I said, “I won’t.” And now I’ve proven that I won’t so, you know-
Andrew: Once you fail at creating 10 millionaires.
Tim: What?
Andrew: I don’t know. I’m kind of…
Tim: It’s probably like two years away. The fact is the path, the railroad, the tracks have been laid. Okay? Now, it’s just about duplicating the process. It’s not a question of if I write to try and do this, it’s a question of how much can I scale this. How many more millionaires can I create? And I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.
Andrew: How much money did you make off of the last interview that we did together, off my interviews?
Tim: I don’t know. I mean, people find me. They say that they were offended or that they love me.
Andrew: And then they go and they buy. I’ve seen people tell me, “He comes across, I don’t know what it is, as a jerk or whatever, but I like him.” Then they tell me they’ve gone and bought.
Tim: Yeah.
Andrew: What happens?
Tim: I mean we get customers that way. I don’t know, I also just like this, kind of, as I said in one of our interviews, I said, “I’m leaving breadcrumbs where you can track the status of my comp any year in, year out.” I like seeing you growing. The fact that we’re already at one and a half million for three-quarters of the way through January.
I mean, this could be my break out year. By the end of this year, maybe next January, 2015, you’ll ask me how much did I do. I’ll say 20 million because I created five millionaires this year. I don’t know where it goes. So, it’s kind of cool for me to look back. I’m glad that it was the most popular. I helped promote it, too.
Andrew: I saw that. You bought an ad on Facebook to help get more traffic to it.
Tim: Yeah, yeah, I like it because I share everything and this is what a lot of people on the internet don’t. You know they have testimonials and they’re not real people. And I’m like, “Look, you can talk to Tim Grittani.” He made a million dollars. More importantly, on Profit.ly you can see every single one of his trades.
So, it’s not just like, this program helped me make a few hundred thousand. It’s like every single trade and you can see it. You can smell the blood, sweat, and tears that it took to get there. And that’s the beautiful thing. The quest. It’s not just about these rinky dink testimonials that too many internet marketers use.
Andrew: I do see this whole path that we’ve been on. It was 2010 where you weren’t doing so well and you said, “You know what, I’m just doing this interview to leave a breadcrumb, so that people can come back years later and see when I wasn’t doing so well, and see that I’m not just full of it.
Tim: Yeah. I remember, you’re like, “Is [??] it [??] statistical as a bad day or something?” I don’t remember.
Andrew: Oh, there it is. It’s actually, you’re right, it wasn’t 2010. Maybe it was a different year. But, right, “Mr. Income [??] Pulls it Back.”
Tim: What was it called?
Andrew: I forget. I do come up with really good titles for your interviews.
Tim: Something like that, I don’t know. But, you know, you have down phases, you have up phases, but all along, I was chugging along with the idea that I can create millionaires. At first I just wanted to repeat my feat. I was like, “No one believes that I did it the first time. I’m going to do it again.” And I did some of that. I went from 12,000 to 230,000 in my brokerage account.
Then, I shifted gears and I was like, it’s not just about me. Let me actually create a millionaire. And now, we’re doing this. I was on “Fox and Friends” last weekend. So, we’re doing this right at the peak of my success, where we’re getting hundreds of people every few hours saying, “I want to learn.” So, everything that I’ve been saying…
Andrew: How many people are joining your mailing list, now?
Tim: On “Fox and Friends,” we had I want to say 8,500 people sign up during that hour that I was on.
Andrew: Really?
Tim: So, that was awesome. The CNN article has been shared 5,000 times, so I think we got like 20,000 people. These are new people. They know nothing about the market. They’re just looking at the free video lessons. Half of them think I’m full of it. So, the same process is going to repeat over and over. Some people will study, some people will doubt me, and then they’ll hear about the millionaires in maybe two or three years.
I don’t know, maybe by 2018 everyone will just be like, “All right, I give in. I want to learn.” I don’t know when that happens. What is that thing where you see something on the internet and it takes seven times before you choose to buy it?
Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Tim: I don’t know, I don’t know how many millionaires it takes, but I’ll tell you a lot of non-believers have been converted because Tim Grittani. You know, I’m not like responsible for all his gains. He has a mind of his own, but they’re based on my teachings. So, I’m like traffic school, and you got to go there.
Andrew: All right. I think that’s everything that I’ve got right now.
Tim: Cool.
Andrew: Good. Nice update for the year. You’ve got a P.R. person now for the next, what, eight days or so. If we can manage to get this interview up, you might to be able to promote it.
Tim: Yeah, well, actually I’ve hired her for another month now because she’s just done fantastic getting CNN and we have some more features. I’ve got to get the word out. I think a lot more entrepreneurs should do this, where it’s not just about SEO, it’s about getting your real story out there. Obviously creating a millionaire from scratch takes many years, and it is a newsworthy story. So, I’m not just saying get press like, “I cooked chicken because I blog and I sat here all day.” That’s not newsworthy.
If you have something news worthy, if you have something really that can hook a lot of customers, get that PR person, cut your SEO budget, increase your press budget, you know, I paid her five thousand a month and you know, she’s bought in probably a million or two worth of business in just the past few weeks so….
Andrew: Wow…
Tim: It’s pretty good ROI.
Andrew: Yeah. Five thousand a month is an incredible price to pay.
Tim: I mean I’ve known her for years so that’s like your friend discounts, so maybe her regular rate would be like eight thousand but still, if you can have some kind of amazing story, I mean, creating a millionaire from scratch is like basically like a testimonial. You know.
I have a testimonial now on CNNmoney.com with this kid who’s turned $1500 into a million using my teaching. So it doesn’t get better than that. You know, if you can get testimonials as crest, you’ve done something great.
Andrew: Alright. Actually that’s a really, that’s a good point right. Now your press is people who are talking about how well they did because of you. I saw that, that guy Tim on Fox I think he even interrupted the Neil Cavuto to say I learned it all from Tim.
Tim: Yeah, exactly. It’s not like I’m just like getting on Fox to be like, what’s your take on oil? That’s useless press. I know a lot of people say that because then you could put like as featured on Fox in a little corner and you can put the little logo in the credibility. That’s junk. Okay. Don’t even waste your time going to the studio putting makeup on and writing a press release that you’re going to do that. I
If you can get meaningful press something where, someone reads it and they’re like actually considering using your products. That’s fantastic because then that’s when things really gets fun just as I’ve learned over the past few weeks.
Andrew: Alright. Congratulations on doing so well. I hope this interview did well but I will not know until Mort Goldman weighs in in the comment. Mort I’ve seen you before…
Tim: Who is Mort? I don’t even know. I think I Googled one guy. One guy was like, you know, I don’t like you, you’ve Googled me, I’ve done all these sales and stuff and I Googled him and was like arrested as a scammer in Australia and I was like, oh you should be so proud, you’re the first scammer arrested in Australia.
Andrew: I didn’t see that.
Tim: Yeah that was the latest comment. I don’t know if it’s the newest or the top rated. It was just the latest and I Googled him and I was like, yeah, you should be so proud, you got arrested as a scammer.
Andrew: Yeah. Let me see the newest. Mort had the most popular comment. That’s why I read it. Let me see the next…
Tim: How many people liked it? How many people liked it? A hundred?
Andrew: Forty-six people liked it. You might have even hit the like button on that one.
Tim: Yeah, of course. I don’t necessarily condone my approach sometimes but I’m passionate and I say stuff that kind of hooks you. Go to the new. I don’t remember his name. But he’s….
Andrew: One of the newest ones is from Joseph Rodriguez. This definitely is my favorite interview on Mixergy and I’ve listening for years aside from being just pure entertainment, fun. It was also great to hear another guest be a hundred percent honest and upfront without fear also that he admits that the focus is on money. Not too many entrepreneurs are brave enough to admit that.
Tim: Australian Scammer was on your best interviews of 2000.
Andrew: Oh, gosh I got you, alright, yeah let’s take a look. Why am I going to that computer, let’s go to this computer. Ten, psychs, the best, mixergy.com, Let’s see.
Tim: This is funny. I really got a kick out of it. I’m glad we can bring this up.
Andrew: We’re still in the interview. I haven’t officially said goodbye. So I better keep talking while I do the search here. Where is that thing. I saw you also go into those comments by the way. I’m surprised that you have the patience to go in and respond to every single person. And in fact….
Tim: So my CNN article has 1600, 1700 comments. I’ve learned A: it’s good to respond to people so that you know, I’m not backing down from any of their, their BS and their lies. People do lie about me. But more importantly it’s also good for SEO, because it’s just more content on the page, as I learn from my SEO people. So…
Andrew: So it’s better to just keep adding more comments because…
Tim: Yeah, Yeah…
Andrew: I see.
Tim: It’s fantastic. But also, I, you know, I take things personally. This, this is my life goal. And, when people lie about me I just lose it. I can’t you know….
Andrew: Did you buy ads for that best of poster we did, because that had 726 shares. But I don’t you think you bought an ad on that.
Tim: No, no, I didn’t even know.
Andrew: And even without your buying the ad or your Facebook sponsorship or whatever for that past interview, It was still incredibly popular, because you were so aggressive. And I think frankly, to pat myself on the back, I gave it a good headline. The headline was, if you’re not a millionaire you’re poor, which is a direct quote from you.
Tim: Yeah, and it’s funny that, that you took that.
Andrew: I just happen to retweet it earlier, earlier in the month and I got like 526 hits just on that retweet.
Tim: Yeah, and it was good because again, my, my whole thing I was leaving bread crumbs knowing that I had this thing called the millionaire challenge, knowing that I would, you know, this isn’t like the student came out of nowhere, he was making money every single day, every single week and it was a matter of time before he hit a million. I didn’t even think that he would hit a million so quickly. So, I just was laying bread crumbs.
Andrew: I don’t know where this person is.
Tim: That’s okay.
Andrew: Greetings from Greece, I really enjoyed your interview with Alexis Neely so that one’s not about you. Where’s the one about you? Avid follower but I can’t reconcile the session by Tim Sykes with any of your previous well-stated intentions, just saying. I don’t see it.
Tim: I’m going to find it, hold on. Give me a second.
Andrew: Alright.
Tim: Keep it going. Let’s see, what was his name? Oh, here it is.
Andrew: Well, I also don’t even know that we should be accusing someone of doing something illegal. I don’t know that I can prove that.
Tim: Okay, allegedly Wayne Mansfield, right? He said “I’m a loyal follower”, right?
Andrew: He seems like a good guy. I don’t know that there’s anything that he did wrong.
Tim: Yeah. Okay. And I Google him and it says “Wayne Mansfield, of Perth, Australia, was the head of direct marketing business T3 Direct Marketing, operating under a series of two-dollar companies, and in 2005 became the first Australian to be prosecuted for email spamming”. You know, this is one of my haters and I said, do you want to respond to this? No response.
Andrew: For all I know, it could be someone else using his name. But if there’s someone in my audience who was arrested for spam like that, I would love to do an interview and find out about it.
Tim: You should interview Wayne Mansfield of Perth, Australia, because he was the first Australian to do that and apparently he doesn’t like that, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s not the other guy, maybe it’s just alleged, whatever it is you need. But I don’t take my haters seriously because I can back up every single trade, I can back up my students’ trades, and every single piece of hate just adds more credibility to me because I can disprove it.
So they allow me to brag about my accomplishments. I love my haters. I couldn’t brag in 800 comments on CNN without the 800 negative comments that inspire me. I’m just responding, I’m not actually going out there. Imagine getting a CNN article and having all 800 positive comments from yourself with no one responding. People would be like, what is this? But the fact that they’re saying, “No, this isn’t right” and I’m like, “Actually, here. You can prove it. Here’s this trade. Here’s this trade. Here’s this strategy.”
So haters can be good. This is one thing, it’s not just my immaturity, it’s not just SEO. They can really be good, because then people do look at the comments and I can poke holes in any single one of my haters’ arguments now.
So it’s made me a better teacher, it’s made me more popular, it’s made my students more convinced. It’s a sales tool, the haters. So use your haters. If your haters want to leave comments at the bottom of this interview, please . . .
I don’t know. They can touch my $30,000+ watch for a minute. They can kiss it, and then I’ll punch them.
Andrew: Here’s what I’ll do. I love your haters too.
Tim: Of course, you do because they’re page views.
Andrew: I got one, look. I got a Beacon speaker for the most creative hater of this interview in the comments. You okay with them ripping it any way they want?
Tim: Yeah, whatever they want to say.
Andrew: I will send this out to the most creative hater by upvote count. Done?
Tim: I don’t know about upvotes, they can manipulate that. There are a lot of creative Indians and Croatians out there. Not to rip on those two nationalities only, but I’m just saying upvotes . . .
Andrew: You are pretty harsh on those nationalities. No, I like it. Croatians are welcome to comment, everyone’s welcome. The most creative by votes.
Tim: Hate me, and I will make a promise to you. Well, not a promise. January 22nd, 2014, by our interview in 2015 I will have created several more millionaires.
Andrew: How many more?
Tim: I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s going to be two or three or five.
Andrew: But you’re saying at least two more by the time we do an interview in another year.
Tim: Correct. And I don’t like exact goals, but I know where my students are, I know where the market is, and as I create more and more millionaires, more and more people, even Wayne Mansfield, alleged email spammer, everyone will start realizing that what I have to offer is real.
It’s not this fountain of youth, get-rich-quick guaranteed thing. It’s just rules that I’ve learned in the stock market that benefit people. People that have been trading bitcoin have been telling me that my patterns have worked for them too. So even if they don’t trade penny stocks, it’s amazing.
Andrew: Is this Eric, the midget from the Howard Stern show who’s commenting on one of your interviews? It looks like it.
Tim: Oh, he’s using the picture. Yeah, I was laughing at that. That was funny. There’s some creative people out there, I like it.
Andrew: So, the most creative comment by votes will get this Beacon speaker that I got from a guest. He gave me one that I love and I have another one here that I’m going to give to someone in the comments.
Tim: You’re regifting?
Andrew: I’m regifting. This is such a good speaker that I can regift it, this person can regift it, and the next person can regift it and we’ll all love it.
Tim: Cool. That’s very kind of you.
Andrew: Okay. By upvotes, and frankly, I will decide. So if the top one has a lot of votes but I feel it’s a little suspicious, I’ll toss it out. It’s ultimately my decision, the audience can help me with the upvotes. Done?
Tim: Awesome.
Andrew: Go for it. timothysykes.com, check it out, and thank you all for being a part of this interview. Bye.
