Founding History of BusinessMentor.com

Hey, it’s Aleksander Vitkin,

Back in 2014, I set a goal to spend ten years or so building one big beautiful business. I wanted to make an impact, though nobody knew who I was. I had no skills like “buying traffic” or “speaking on camera”. Furthermore, I didn’t know what business I wanted to create, or how to build it.

Well, fortunately, I’d just spent two-point-five years working with a seven figure self development company, in which time they doubled their revenue, thanks to marketing strategies I devised. I spent a lot of time working directly with the CEO, and also travelled to a few countries with him, and met some very successful people, some of whom were making over one hundred million dollars per year in revenue. So during those two-point-five years I learned quite a lot about business.

Also, I had 6 years of business experience at this point, which included freelancing and running agencies.

So I began to create daily YouTube videos teaching what I’d learned during that time. To my surprise, people LOVED them, and I gained a small following online. During a discussion with a mentor, I told him about what I was doing, and he suggested that I sell something to my audience.

I decided to heed his advice and turn my little project into a business, and literally thirty minutes after my decision I had my first sales call. I sold a one-hundred-dollar one-hour consultation session about business advice.

What happened next surprised me to say the least. My entire schedule filled to the brim with these consultation calls. I noticed I was repeating myself a lot, so I wanted to make the business more scalable, and require less of my time. So I added everyone to a facebook group and organized group coaching sessions.

Now back in those days, most people teaching business were only selling ebooks and video courses, about, imagine this: how to sell ebooks and video courses. I wanted to be the first person to ever address this issue, so I dropped all my other clients and focused full time teaching business.

Some of my earliest students are now millionaires. They figured out that instead of doing YouTube videos like I was, they could cold-call businesses and sell services. So that became the primary business model that I taught. People would join my education program, and me and other experienced students would teach how to cold-call and sell expensive services.

Imagine Wolf of Wall Street, but online and with phone calls. I was staying up until four a.m. every day and working fourteen hour days. It was a brutal method to learn and teach business, so I asked my most successful students to do some of the coaching. Some were scientists, pharmacists and one of them was a former university professor.

We called the community the “Daily Business Hustle”, and it was transforming people’s lives. Nineteen year old kids were calling one hundred and fifty businesses per day and selling them four thousand dollar websites.

Then two thousand fifteen came. I set a new goal. The new mission of the Daily Business Hustle was to help one hundred people reach seven figures. I began to do big launches on social media to attract new members. I would do all the sales calls, and about one third of the group coaching sessions, with the most successful students doing the rest of the coaching.

The purpose of the calls was to teach students skills they’d be able to use to build any successful business they wanted. There was one problem. Students were very reluctant to do cold calls. Which was understandable, because it’s a scary thing, and most members were very young and very inexperienced. 

But one of my friends, a weightlifting and diet coach, had figured out how to improve sales call close rates. He had taken the sales process that I had invented in two thousand and fourteen and made it better. There were five steps and it was superior to the original. That five step sales process turned into a seven step sales process, and it has now been used to close millions of dollars in sales.

At a certain point, I noticed that students were really struggling to get good results within 3 months or less, which conflicted with my initial reasoning to start the business, which was to focus on student results.

So I decided to help students build inbound sales funnels so that they could get results faster. We tried and mostly failed for three to four months, but success would come later that year. For my own funnel, I tried doing webinars and cheap front end info video courses, which were moderately successful.

At the same time, my team of seven people helped me grow our free facebook community to over eight thousand members, which was one of the most popular business groups on facebook. I kept making my content better, making more content, and doing more sales calls. I worked so many hours one time, I ended up in hospital.

Meanwhile, I travelled the world. In two thousand fifteen alone I travelled to eight countries - Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Finland, Iceland and Canada.

At a certain point, I figured out a new funnel for students to use, and suddenly success rates grew beyond eighty percent, so I finally stopped doing all the sales calls myself and hired people to do sales calls for me.

So, two thousand fifteen closed with a thriving, growing community and many new instructors and success stories. The business’s revenue was more than double that of the previous year.

In two thousand sixteen, my audience grew to a tremendous size and I truly became fanatical about business. Anywhere I went, all I could do was talk about the Daily Business Hustle mastermind, and business in general.

The free Facebook group grew to over eighteen thousand people and I was being recognized at random events. I was also being invited to speak and help organize various events. We did some all over Europe. The purpose was to really get to know people in person and promote my personal brand. I also focused on my health that year. I was in the best shape of my life, which is great because my health had to be on track seeing as my goal was to build a big beautiful business. I also did many live streams with members of the mastermind on Facebook and YouTube.

However, in two thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen, I totally changed the way I view and operate a business. I went from wanting to surround myself with entrepreneurs and having this amazing business where we’re all building a business together... to understanding that I’m the primary driving force in my own business.

It’s my skill, my effort and my vision that determine where the business goes. Others have their opinions and they are based on what they want and their vision, but the primary decision maker in my business is me. Furthermore, I decided that the best person to make decisions in my business is me, based on my best reasoning, feedback from peers, and objective facts. I also figured out that to make me successful at business, I need to make sure that I’m happy with where it’s going and how it contributes to the world.

Something strange that started to happen was… my social media presence actually began to decline. I was starting to wonder how come social media engagement was going down, but sales kept creeping up. I had doubts about spending any time on social media at all. At the same time, I had an overwhelming anxiety about the whole thing. What if it was all a fluke. What if I don’t deserve this success.

Yet sales kept going up. In fact, the mastermind began to grow faster than ever before. We had amazing success stories, and every single week there’d be another guy who closed a one hundred thousand sale or had his first forty thousand dollar month.

I realized that instead of clinging on to subscribers and followers, the key is to communicate with the perfect buyer and work closely with great performers in the business education program I had built over the years.

Towards the end of two thousand eighteen, I changed the way I run business. Before, I was talking to dozens of people and trying to keep an eye on everything. What I ended up doing was talk to only two or three people and focus on working on my business, not on babysitting every little detail. We replaced complicated communication with automation. Everything related to money in the business was automated with tools and automated processes which didn’t involve humans.

Daily Business Hustle was rebranded into BusinessMentor.com and Business Mentor Insiders (program). This was the best decision ever. The community is more focused on business and less focused on lifestyle.

We truly started to innovate in business as we turned our unique education methods into processes and formulas.

The way the company currently runs is:

We home-grow world-class talent, often from scratch. 

Members grow their own business and then mentor newer members and contribute in other ways to the community.

We use a crowd sourced business model, not a top down, centrally controlled business model.

But that’s a topic for a different time, when I’ll explain the methodology of Business Mentor Insiders.