118: Focus Until You Succeed: Perseverance, Forward Motion, Relationships, and The Invisible Organization with Mitch Russo

Robert Plank: Mitch Russo has worked with Chet Holmes. He worked with Tony Robbins. He has a new book called The Invisible Organization. Mitch, welcome to the show today.

Mitch Russo: Thank you, Robert. Great to be here.

Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you. Could you tell us about yourself and what it is that you do?

Mitch Russo: Sure. I'll give you a little bit of background first so you know who I am. I was born in Brooklyn, New York. I had a rock band up until the age of 17, and I probably learned more about business in my rock band than any other single thing as a kid. We booked gigs all over New York City. We probably were the highest paid bands under 18 years old in the entire state for a little while. Back in 1977, we were getting $500 a gig, which, in today's dollars, is actually ridiculous.

Robert Plank: Especially for an 18-year-old, yeah.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. We were so young, we weren't even able to drive our own van. We had to hire somebody to help us get to a gig because we were too young to drive, but I learned so much about marketing, about sales, about positioning, even about quality. It was really an incredible experience. Then I went on to... I moved to Massachusetts to take a job with a computer company, and I ended up in sales. I did a lot of cool stuff when I got to Massachusetts, but probably one of the most memorable things I did was I started a software company. I started it. Literally, as they say, it was a garage operation. I started it, literally, above my garage in the one room that nobody knew what to do with in my house.

My neighbor and I got together and we built a company out of an idea that I had, and that grew to 100 people, and we had moved the company 5 times over the course of the 9 years, until we eventually sold it for 8 figures to Sage Plc in the UK. Man, what an incredible experience that was. Again, there's no better way to learn than to make all of the mistakes that we made and have to fix them or die. It's correct your mistakes or die, so you've just got to step up and make it happen. There were nights that we would be looking at the payroll and thinking... My partner and I would look at each other and go, "You know, we don't have enough money in the account to cover payroll." The two of us go into our wallet, and we started making the rounds at cash machines and taking money off of our credit cards to make payroll. I mean, it was that bad at one point, but later, everything went right and we were able to finally make things happen.

You know the story of The Hero's Journey, Robert?

Robert Plank: Joseph Campbell.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. There were so many points in time when we were on the brink of failure, and we didn't quite know what to do, and then we just persevered. We just kept going, and then boom. It just happened, and it worked. That was a great experience, and I finished up with that. After I sold the company, I then went and worked for the people who bought us, Sage, and I ended up running the entire U.S. division for Sage, and I was actually completely done, at the age of 44, with millions of dollars in my pocket and theoretically able to retire if I wanted to, but I couldn't. I absolutely would be bored out of my mind, so I started investing in other people's startups. I started working with the venture capital community, and I started building a portfolio of companies that I invested in and friends that I made throughout the entire process.

That went on until I got a call from a buddy of mine, Chet Holmes. Now, Chet and I had been friends since my Timeslips days, and he said to me, "Mitch, I need some help. It's time for you to get back into the business game," and I said, "Hmm, okay. What do you need?" Next thing I know, I'm building a sales force for him, and over the course of 6 weeks, I tripled the sales force, and we were now doubling revenue. After about 3 months, he said, "Look, I've got to have you as my president," and so I said, "Okay," and I joined the company. Within 90 days of becoming president of Chet's company, we began negotiation with Tony Robbins.

This was an ongoing process. We were on a late-night phone call every week for 4 or 5 months planning what the company was going to look like, planning how we were going to roll out into the marketplace, planning exactly what we were going to sell, and then going through a legal agreement and negotiating all the points of a legal agreement, until, finally, everything came to a head in Las Vegas in November of 2008. That was the Ultimate Business Mastery Success Event, The UBMS, and that's where we recorded over 50 hours of content, packaged it up, and that single event ended up generating over $20 million in revenue by selling the packaged videos with workbooks and coaching.

That was quite an experience, and we were growing at quite a pace. I mean, we had started at a relatively... just about as a startup, but we were generating over $25 million a year at the point when Chet, my partner in the business, got sick. Unfortunately, he passed away several months later. When Chet died, the family, of course, didn't know what to do. They thought maybe they should just sell the company. Really, I didn't fit there any longer. I mean, my friend was gone. I asked Tony what he thought, and Tony told me to do what I needed to do, which is what I would have expected of Tony, and so I decided to leave. The first thing I did when I left the company is I called a couple of friends and said, "Hey. I just want to let you know I'm going to be leaving BBI, and I'm going to be on my own. I just want you to know where I am. If you have anything interesting you want to talk to me about or want to show me or get me involved in, let me know."

I called Jay Abraham, and Jay and I had known each other for many years. We worked together on several projects together. I said to Jay, I said, "Jay, I just want to let you know I'm out of here," and he said to me, "Mitch, you cannot let what you know go to waste. You have to find a way to take what you know, and you've got to teach it to others." Tony used to say the same thing to me all the time. I said, "Okay. All right, Jay, I'm going to do something. I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but I'm going to do something," and that became the beginning of me writing my book, The Invisible Organization.

Robert Plank: Cool. I mean, lots of stuff to get from where you were to where you are now, and I'm hearing a lot of repeat lessons. There was the perseverance part of it, like when you and your business partner went to all of the ATM machines just to get to that point, get to the breakthrough point. There is the forward motion, where you could have quit, and you kept going. Then what I'm hearing a lot of, too, were all these relationships you built, like Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes and Jay Abraham, where it started a long time ago, but then, after a while, kind of paid off. With all of that, is there a big secret to all this? Do you have a big secret from having all these successes? Is there something, aside from those 3 things, that's just been responsible for getting you where you are?

Mitch Russo: You know, I wish I had something super profound to tell you, but it's very simple. You never actually fail until you stop doing what you're doing. Until you give up, you never actually fail. In my life, the lesson that I've learned is that it's best to focus on something until you succeed, and I generally don't stop until I do. Does that help?

Robert Plank: Yeah, and it's like... What is that quote? There's something, words like, "If it's not working, change your methods, not the goal," or something like that.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. Yeah, we ended up pivoting time after time, but we never lost sight of what the end goal was, and we never stopped pursing it. No matter what, I never do, because there's just... I mean, unless the world changes in such a dramatic way, and it never does. Business is business. People still have the same motivation everyday, and that's why your products are always out there doing so well, because people want to be in business.

Now, when I work with private clients, I see that in their eyes. I see that when I work with them. I hear it in their voice. They're discouraged, and they want to stop, and I don't let that happen with my clients. We push through, and we make it so that they end up getting what they want, because success comes not in a flash and not by luck. It comes from a lot of hard work, and you know this from your own experience. It takes a long time to be successful, but it looks easy. You can look at me now and go, "Oh, wow. Look at all the stuff he did," but it's taken me a long time to get here, and you know that.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It only takes 20 years to become an overnight success. Is there a trick or is there a secret to knowing the difference between, like you said, having to push forward versus an idea that just won't work? If a company invented cell phones at the wrong period in time, it just wouldn't work, no matter how good of an idea. If someone had invented tablets at the wrong time, no matter what, it wouldn't have worked. How do you know the difference between you're just kind of hitting your head against the wall and this thing that's never going to happen versus you just need to get through the rough patch? How do you know the difference?

Mitch Russo: Okay. I have a story about an entrepreneur who went through this. I have a friend who, at a young age, achieved notoriety because he invented a cable drive mechanism for bicycles, and he was featured on news programs all over the country. This cable system was quite innovative. It didn't require gears and sprockets. All he did was use friction and a special shape of a hub, and he was able to create this very simple power transport system using cables. He went to try and market it to bicycle companies, and nobody wanted it. The bicycle companies, at first, thought it was a cool idea, but they realized that it would really make no impact to the end product. Sure, it might be cable-driven instead of gear-driven, but it didn't seem to change the end result of riding a bike.

Continued to do this, and he didn't stop. Finally, he said, "Well, they don't want it. Maybe I'll just start my own company, and maybe I'll just build a bicycle company," so he went and he spent all of his life savings and poured it into building this company. He built a manufacturing plant, and he sold like 60 bicycles total and shut the company down. He never recovered from that. Here's the way I look at it, I think, at some point, when the market tells you distinctly, "No. This is not good," then you don't necessarily have to give up, but you do have to at least pivot. You do have to find another way.

Here's a pivot he could have tried. He could have tried to figure out where else his patented cable drive system could have an application in another industry, but he never did this. He just accepted the fact, then he just persevered to death, if you will. It's hard to know, but you've got to get feedback from the market, and you've got to keep trying things, and that's when you finally know, "Hey. If it's not going to work, you just keep trying it and trying something else."

Robert Plank: I like that way of thinking, and especially how there was a little piece in there, near the beginning of that story, how it didn't catch on because, even though it was a really cool invention, it didn't actually help anyone, right? If only that invention had made it where you could ride the bike twice as fast, or it cost way less, or something like that, that would have been an improvement in someone's experience of using a bike, but it seems like it was on the right track, but not quite there, I guess, right?

Mitch Russo: Yeah, it was a solution looking for a problem. It was cool, and it was innovative and clever, but to build a life around a solution without solving a problem is just going to lead you down that path. By the way, lots of people start that way and ended up that way, but they don't get to the point of realizing, "Hey. You know something? I've created something of which there is no need for in the marketplace." There are some people who create stuff that's too advanced for the current marketplace. If you would have invented the internet in 1985, no one would have gotten it. There wasn't the systems in place to support it. Yeah, it might have been a great idea, but the time of it was completely wrong.

Robert Plank: I like that. I like that way of thinking. Yeah, the things going through my head when you mention that are stuff like Twitter, where it's super goofy, took a while to catch on, and so we pushed through a while and saw people were using it. I think Twitter, in fact, only kind of caught on because they started hooking it up with all the mobile apps and stuff like that. If cell phones had taken a little longer to develop, maybe Twitter wouldn't have caught on. On the other hand, you had to push through those tough years to actually give it a chance and see if people were using it, but if 5 more years had gone on, if 10 more years had gone on, and it was just not picking up, then I guess that's time to quit then.

Mitch Russo: Sure. Let's talk about Twitter just for a second because I think it's educational, at least, to take a look and... Now, Twitter is considered kind of a failure, when it comes to the market, because it doesn't really have... I mean, it's not Facebook, so anything that's not Facebook is kind of a failure. The problem with Twitter is that it just hasn't been adding a lot of new users. It hasn't been getting a lot more usage. What is the problem with Twitter? Well, the problem with Twitter is that they haven't found their pivot yet. They will. They're not giving up. I mean, they might be sold before they can, but they need to find their pivot.

Now, I wrote the CEO of Twitter and I said, "Here is what I think you should do. I think you should stream live events, and I think because people love to interact with each other during live events, why don't you stream concerts? Why don't you let people tweet throughout the entire process of watching that concert streaming through your network, and let them pay $1 for that, or something?" Of course, I never got a response from my suggestion, but that's the kind of pivots that you've got to keep thinking about when things are failing.

Robert Plank: Even recently, they've kind of tied into Periscope. They're definitely trying new things and seeing what will catch on.

Mitch Russo: Right, exactly.

Robert Plank: Even like you mentioned to me, I put out a WordPress plugin, and that's the same kind of thought process. I'll put out a backup plugin and membership plugin, stuff like that, and I'll put it out as, first of all, a thing that I need and a thing that other people need, but mostly just something that I need that does not exist. That way, even if it's a failure, I still get something out of it, but then also, I'll see these projects through the number of years they have to go through, but I'm not just putting all my eggs in one basket. I have this plugin and that plugin because I know that there's things I need, and people might end up picking them up, and they'll get traction, and then I can go back later and connect the dots and say, "Okay. Now I can combine all these things, and now you get this plugin. You're going to want these other plugins, or you get them all in a package together."

I think there's just something to that. When we're mentioning all these examples, there's something to just having these experiments, I guess is what we're talking about, these experiments, and just see what people use, how people use them, and then, like you said, get to the point where maybe you pivot, and then there's the real money from there.

Mitch Russo: Well, exactly. The other thing that you're doing is you're building a portfolio of products. One product... and I'm just going to use just make-believe numbers. If one product generates $10,000 or $20,000 a year and you say, "Well, that's fine. I mean, it was worth doing it, even if it's not a retirement fortune. We can generate another one, and then another one," and before you know it, you have 6 products generating $20K a year, and then maybe the seventh one will be a bit hit, you see? You never stop because something isn't working, but you find a way to pivot within that, and that simply means if that doesn't work, something like it will work. What was the brilliance of that first idea? What problem were you trying to solve that you found the solution to? Who else has that problem?

When we first created Timeslips, it was a popup time-tracking tool that we thought, "Oh, everybody's going to need this. Everybody needs to keep track of time." Like idiots, we advertised in PC Magazine and spent an entire... All of our savings for marketing went into 2 ads in PC Magazine, and we got 6 orders for $100 an order. I mean, clearly, not everybody needed it, but here was the cool thing about that. I was able to take the 500 bingo leads... which I don't know if you've ever heard that term before.

Robert Plank: No.

Mitch Russo: You know the cards that used to sit inside of magazines where you could circle the number of the ads that you were interested in? Have you ever seen those before?

Robert Plank: I think a long time ago, but yeah.

Mitch Russo: Right. What they would do is people would read the magazine, and instead of sending away for information from everyone, they would take it, and they would just circle the number of the ad. Most of those leads were worthless, but I got 500 of those leads, and I called every single one on the phone. I said, "Why did you circle that ad? What interested you about the product?" I found out that a third of the people who had circled my ad were lawyers. I said, "Hmm, lawyers seem to be attracted to this. Maybe I should market directly to lawyers."

That's how my product eventually took off. I found my market. I didn't know what it was at first. I thought it was everybody, which, clearly, I was inexperienced, but that's what I thought, but then I finally honed in on what would eventually become my true target market. Over the course of 18 months, I went from being completely unknown to being the number 1 selling product for lawyers, when it came to keeping track of their time.

Robert Plank: That's really cool. In that case, it was almost like the market found you.

Mitch Russo: Well, you might say that, but we uncovered a need. We had a cool solution to a problem, but we didn't quite know who needed the solution. We knew it was a problem that people had. We didn't know exactly who needed it. Even though I say it was a mistake to have run that ad in PC Magazine, if I hadn't have done it, I would have never found my true calling, my true market. Sometimes you do need... Screwing up is what gets you to learn how you get onto the right path.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. It's almost like if you're too lucky or if everything you do works out right away, it's almost a bad thing because the one time that something goes wrong, you're not going to know how to react. It's almost like, as entrepreneurs, we kind of have to get toughened up or something.

Mitch Russo: That's right. Since we're on this topic, I want to lead this into what I'm doing now, because I think it's important.

Robert Plank: Okay.

Mitch Russo: One of the things that happened to me at Timeslips Corporation is that we sold a lot of software, and we used to give away 30 days of free support with every copy of the software we sold. What ended up happening is that when we first got into the retail stores, our products sold like crazy. Now, our phone lines for support were getting overwhelmed, and I was struggling to keep up, in terms of hiring enough tech support people, of building the internal systems to make sure that those calls can get answered. With all of that, now I had customers, clients, who were asking for individual attention where we had to visit their office. I mean, when you deal with lawyers, sometimes you've got to go overboard in support because, you know, you don't want to get sued, and they're certainly litigious, as you know.

In this one situation, I had a woman who was the vice president of the technology division of the California Bar Association, and she was having a problem with my software. I said, "Geez, I've got to get out there somehow," so I did something unexpected. I called another client who happened to live in the area and I said, "Would you do me a favor and run over to this office and see if you could help this woman? She's having some difficulty," and she said, "Oh, yeah, sure. I'd love to," and I knew she was an expert at our software. I said, "Well, whatever it is, don't worry. I'll take care of you," and she goes, "Oh, no, no. For you, Mitch, it's a favor. I'd be happy to."

She goes over there, and I'm like on pins and needles now. I don't know if I did the right thing. Maybe that could explode in my face, but about 4 hours later, she called me back and she said, "Oh, yeah. She's all set, and I've got to tell you, something super happened to me." I said, "What was it?" She said, "She gave me a $100 bill." All of a sudden, the light bulb went off in my head, and then she said to me, "By the way, if anybody else you know needs help, let me know, because I'm happy to help them." Then I realized, "Well, maybe I could build a network of people that I could send to other people's offices as consultants and get them to help my clients. Maybe these people calling themselves certified consultants would be interested in even building a profession around supporting my software." That's how I designed and built the Timeslips Certified Consultant Network.

Now, the reason I disconnected to our earlier conversation is because I totally screwed it up. I did it simply by selling a test, and if you pass the test, you were certified, but at that point, I had about 60 of these people running around wreaking havoc with my clients. I had to actually call every client that had a problem with one of my certified consultants and figure out how to make them happy while literally shutting down the entire program and then reengineering it from scratch to make sure that the mistakes I uncovered would never happen again. When I did that, and it took me like 5 or 6 months to do it, and I relaunched the program, it was an incredible success, and it grew to 350 people paying us every year to be our third largest sales channel, to support all of our customers. My tech support dropped by 20%. My sales went up by $1 million, and the program generated another $1 million for me that same year.

That's-

Robert Plank: Freaking amazing.

Mitch Russo: Isn't that amazing? By the way, and the reason I say it is that's what I do now for clients. I build what I call power tribes for my clients, which are mobilizing their best clients as certified coaches, or certified consultants, and with that, we were able to generate 6 and 7 figures almost out of thin air.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and let's talk about that. Let's talk about what it is that you're doing now and this whole new idea you have about The Invisible Organization.

Mitch Russo: Sure. Well, like I said, it started from having solved the problem on my own. I wrote about it on my blog post, and someone came to me and said, "Would you do this for me?" I said, "Sure. I'd be happy to," and I didn't even really remember... I mean, I remembered having done it, of course, and I remembered all the stuff that went wrong and all the mistakes I made, but we didn't have the internet back then, so I literally was flying blind on this, but we did it together, my client and I. Amazingly, it worked perfectly. I mean, they were blown away. We launched that program from absolutely nothing. 10 weeks later, we launched that program, and it immediately generated 6 figures on their first launch. Now we're redoing the launch every quarter, and it's going to be generating between $300,000 and $500,000 per launch, and we're going to be now doing this ad infinitum every single quarter.

The way I do this is it's very much a "done with you/done for you" program. It's like I'm a business consultant, and I work with my clients side-by-side, and together we craft all the tools required to get people certified. I have a lot of the tools that I give my clients in advance. One of the things I do, and this is the most fun of the whole process, is we design a new business model around their company as to how they will use these multiple streams of income and generate them from their certified consultants, and more importantly, how the certified consultants will generate income from the services that we provide.

Unlike standard certification where you buy a certificate... like a digital marketer's program. Are you familiar with them?

Robert Plank: Yeah, a little bit.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. What happens is if you qualify, you can buy a program to become certified in one of their disciplines. The only thing you need to qualify is a credit card. I mean, anybody can become, quote-unquote, certified. Well, with my clients, we don't do that. We only work with people we already know have an intimate working knowledge of the fields, of the fields of business, and their product. At that point, we do very intensive training. We bring them to 100% competency through the guidance of building these courses that I had learned how to do.

I built Tony Robbins' virtual training environment with Tony. He taught me so much about what it takes to build a virtual training environment. We build those now for our clients, and these are amazing, because once someone goes through the program, they totally know what they're doing, and then we put them into an apprenticeship to make sure that they can totally do what they just learned, and then we work out a way so that they can make money right out of the gate. When they're making money, they will renew next year, they will attend our programs, and that's how we build multiple reoccurring streams of revenue.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and I think what I've been hearing a lot from you, Mitch, as far as the stories that you're telling, is that there's a lot of the little details and little bit of course correction, right? As opposed to just saying, like you said... Some people offer their certification, and it's like when you send in to buy a doctorate for like $500 or something.

Mitch Russo: Yeah.

Robert Plank: It's like, "Okay. Here's the money." "Thanks, you're certified," and that would be great for just a little one-off sale, but then that's not a real long-term business. It sounds like, with everything you do, you make sure that you understand... When someone buys from you, there's a clear reason why they're buying from you, what they're going to get from you, and then what that will lead to afterwards, so now they get certified, go through the apprenticeship to make sure that they're 100% there, but then now they have their own kind of business. I think that's pretty cool.

Mitch Russo: Yeah. If you think of everything as a progression... and by the way, you do a great job of this. I really love the way you guys do this, but you've got to think of business as, "Okay. Well, you could sell somebody something, and you can make some money, but what will they need next, and where should they go next, if they're successful with the last thing you sold them?" As long as you keep that in mind as you begin this path of product creation and of leading people through how to create something of value that you know how to do, then you're going to be successful, and you can have a sustained income from helping others all the time. That's how I see it.

Robert Plank: What will they need next? That's pretty good advice, just in general.

Mitch Russo: Exactly, exactly. In my case, when I enter a business contract with a client, I don't just sell them some consulting services, "Pay me some money, and I'll talk to you or work with you for 3 months until your program launches." When you sign a contract with me, we are together for a minimum of 3 years, and the reason I want it to be long-term is because there is going to be a series of changes as your tribe grows and develops. There will be problems and questions that come up that I know I can answer for you, that if I left you alone, you might choose the wrong path and destroy what we've just spent so much time and money to build.

My goal is to guide my clients to the point so that this isn't just a little itty-bitty 7-figure program at the end of 3 years. It's generating $3 to $5 million consistently year after year, and it does, so-

My end goal here is not to build a one-shot sale. It's to build lifetime relationships with everyone I come in contact with.

Robert Plank: Cool. Along those lines of what you were just mentioning about how some of these companies, they're at a certain point, and then as they mature or their size changes, they have a different set of needs. I understand that you have a book called The Invisible Organization, which is all about getting companies to go virtual. Is that right?

Mitch Russo: Yes. Yes, and the book that I wrote is really... At the time I wrote it, I poured everything that I learned about building Tony Robbins' and Chet Holmes' business breakthroughs. As a virtual company, we had 300 people attached to the company, and I ran the whole thing from my spare bedroom, and I traveled all over the world. I'm an award winning photographer as well, so I would sneak away, and I'd be in Iceland or Jordan or Morocco or any of the places that I do travel to all over the world, and I could still run the company from a laptop, which is just so thrilling to me, but not just a little solo company. I'm talking about a full-blown $25 million in sales a year company with 300 people.

Robert Plank: Crazy. How is it done from just you in your spare bedroom?

Mitch Russo: Well, first of all, like anything else, it takes some planning. I work with my maps. I love my mapping, and so I tend to do a bit of overplanning every single thing that I do. When I work with a client, the first thing I do is I start building mind maps of the entire business model and process that shows every step of the way, what's supposed to happen, and what should happen if what we expect doesn't happen. We're prepared with contingency plans across the board.

When you start with good plans and great thinking, the next thing you need are good people to execute. I surround myself with the best people that I can, and that's one of the great secrets of building a virtual organization, because I know other really smart people who want the same lifestyle as I do, who want great money, who want to be able to work from home or from wherever they tend to be. My VP of sales spent 2 months a year in Hawaii and ran the entire sales division and didn't miss a beat, because we were a virtual organization. She showed up for her sales meetings everyday, did her training everyday. Nothing was lost by the process.

In fact, Stanford University did a study, a landmark study, called Does Working from Home Work, and in that study, it showed that 13% productivity increases across the board were possible for people who would be working from home. If you interview these people, whether they're low-end telephone sales people or high-end executives, what we really find out is that they're even more productive working from home than working at a company. They save hours driving a car, burning gasoline, and wearing out an automobile, and they save frustration, that like-sucking commute that most people hate. You don't have that commute. I certainly don't. Why should half the world have to get into a car every morning and battle traffic in rain and sleet and snow and have accidents and spend money on gas and eat out for lunches that are unhealthy when you could have a life building a virtual company? That's what the book is about.

Robert Plank: That's cool. Yeah, in this day and age, with the Wi-Fi and the internet being so fast, there's no reason for anyone to deal with that commute. My mother used to wake up at 4:00 in the morning everyday just to get on the road by 5:00 or 6:00, just to drive 2 sometimes 3, 4 hours in traffic just to start the day at 8:00 or 9:00, once she got to work. I mean, ridiculous. Yeah, just to save that amount of time everyday, that's the dream, and especially that particular person that you mentioned, living in Hawaii. I mean, that's the life right there, right? You have your passion. You do what you love. You do the work stuff. You earn the money, but you're also living on the beach everyday. It's pretty cool.

Mitch Russo: Exactly. By the way, without disclosing names or numbers, that person made over $500,000 that particular year that they were in Hawaii. Their productivity actually went up. They were happier people, and they did a better job. Let's take it down to the base level. Next time you get on the phone to make an airline reservation, I know that you don't get on the phone a lot, you do it over the web, but if you ever call Southwest Airlines or JetBlue, ask the person on the other end of the phone how they like working from home, because their entire call center is home-based.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Mitch Russo: Thousands and thousands of people that could have been dragged into the city to sit in a miserable call center everyday are now working from home where they could eat the food that they like, walk the dog when they will like. One woman I interviewed got rid of a second car. They didn't need it anymore, and now she's there to make dinner for her husband, and then after dinner, she goes back into the den and gets on the phone with customers and helps them with reservations. She loved it.

Robert Plank: That's cool. It sounds like all these people who are working virtually, they don't have to give up anything. If anything, they're gaining something, and that's always the thing you always think, "Oh, if they're working from home, they must not be motivated," or, "They must be getting paid less," but it seems like why would you pay someone less? If you're a company and you're paying someone to work from home, why would you pay them less if you're saving money on their office space, on their parking spot, on all that stuff? It sounds like it's win-win for everybody.

This book is for people who want to transform their company into a virtual company, or who is this for exactly?

Mitch Russo: That is exactly who it's for. If you go to InvisibleOrganization.com, it's the book site, and it will say exactly who it's for. It's for CEOs who are running companies and who understand that saving money on things like real estate insurance, heat, air conditioning, telephone lines, internet service contracts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If you're a CEO and you want to save that money, buy this book and see exactly how it's done.

Robert Plank: Cool. Well, I like the idea for that book. I think that's a pretty good message. Are there any other websites where people should go, other than InvisibleOrganization.com, to find out more about you, Mitch?

Mitch Russo: Yeah. Actually, the main website for me is simply mitchrusso.com. All my stuff is there. All my other training programs and business stuff is there.

Robert Plank: MitchRusso.com and InvisibleOrganization.com. Man, we talked about all kinds of cool stuff. It was such a pleasure having you on. Thanks for being here.

Mitch Russo: My pleasure, Robert.