Mentor Yourself With Entrepreneur, Evan Carmichael

Evan Carmichael: Your Invisible Mentor – Interview

Interviewee Name: Evan Carmichael, Entrepreneur
Company Name: EvanCarmichael.com
Website: http://www.evancarmichael.com 

Avil Beckford: Tell me a little bit about yourself.

Evan Carmichael:  I’m the founder of a website called EvanCarmichael.com and we’re an online resource for entrepreneurs. We have 14 million people who check out the website, and we try to give them motivations to keep going in their business and also some strategies to help them grow their companies. Before that I had a biotech software company, built it up, sold it then hooked up with a venture capital company and was raising venture capital for entrepreneurs and the started my website.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you?

Evan Carmichael: I’ve done a lot with time management and try to chunk the tasks I try to do every day. I do most of my work between Monday and Thursday. Usually on a typical day I get in around 1 o’clock, go through all my emails – I’ll spend an hour-and-a-half on that. I’ll spend 90 minutes every day doing CEO tasks, and those are important tasks to build and grow my business. And the rest of the day I could be doing emails or other projects that we happen to have on the go.

Avil Beckford: How do you motivate yourself and stay motivated?

Evan Carmichael:  A lot of entrepreneurs have challenges with this, especially if they are solo-entrepreneurs or working from home, it can be hard to keep it up and keep the energy going. For me, I really started my website around the famous entrepreneur profiles. If you go to the home page you’ll see stories about Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump and other highly successful entrepreneurs and if you look at their stories and how they got started it wasn’t easy for them. They had a lot of hardships to overcome and they often doubted themselves. They didn’t know if they would be successful or not. And you think, “Wow that’s crazy, these guys were scared just like I am now.” They are human, they had all these challenges, and it makes it easier for me to keep going.

I also enjoy getting feedback from my readers and viewers. Every time I send out a newsletter or create a new video, I’ll get comments back from people saying, “This really changed my life, thank you so much. It’s a great resource.” And when you hear those types of things it makes you want to keep going and keep providing more information and ideas to help people out.

Avil Beckford: If you had to start over from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you do differently?

Evan Carmichael:  I don’t regret any of the decisions that I’ve made because they helped to get me where I am now. But knowing what I know now, when I first started my business, it wasn’t even a business at all. The website was called EvanCarmichael.com just off my name because it was more of a personal site. It grew organically. There wasn’t a plan behind it from the very beginning. So I would have started sooner on that front. I probably would have gotten into communicating with a audience a little bit better, so doing a newsletter sooner, doing social media sooner, getting my Twitter account and Facebook page and YouTube Channel all set up sooner. I’m really happy with how things are going now , but if I’d started that years ago, I’d be a lot further ahead now.

Avil Beckford: What's the most important business or other discovery you've made in the past year?

Evan Carmichael: First I would encourage people to try to be genuine and try to help people. It might sound like obvious advice but a lot of people start off in business with the goal of making money and not necessarily following their passion and not really helping people out. So really try to help people as much as you can. Give advice, be the expert on whatever area you’re in and try to help them out as much as you can.

Tell your story. People like dealing with people. When I fist stated my site, I didn’t have my picture anywhere and people said, “It’s called EvanCarmichael.com, but I cannot see who you are.” So I started doing a lot more with my story and people wanted to find out a lot more about me, and people are interested in your story. As an entrepreneur you want to be properly telling that, and then try to reach more people.

And that’s what I have done more of in the past year. I’ve done a pretty good job of people who have come to me and needed help, they wanted me to help them with their business, or do an interview, or whatever it is. I try to keep my door open to entrepreneurs as much as I can. In the past year I have done it in a more open and public forum. So if people ask me questions, I may write an email back but I may create a YouTube video so many people can benefit from it and not just that single entrepreneur. And that has paid off in a lot of different ways, so that’s an important discovery I have made in the past year.

Avil Beckford: What are three threats to your business, your success, and how are you handling them?

Evan Carmichael:

1. We are dependent on people finding us through search engines. We are an online business so if people aren’t searching for our type of information online we wouldn’t have people coming to the site or if we got penalized for whatever reason we wouldn’t have a lot of traffic to the site. We try to do all the right things like link building, social media, and trying to provide relevant, ongoing valuable content that people would want to search for and not have spammy content.
2. We are dependent on advertising revenue, that’s how so we make most of our money. If advertisers had a hard time so they cut down their budgets and weren’t interested in going after small business owners then that would hurt our business as well. We try to diversify our sources so we are not dependent on one single source of advertising. If a really bad economy hit all advertisers then that would impact us, but if any one company didn’t do well we’d be okay.
3. We have a great core team and if for whatever reason they thought that I was a bad boss, or it wasn’t fun here anymore then that would really hurt my business as well. I try to provide a workplace for them that they enjoy what they are doing and feeling that they are being challenged. I also try to be a nice person – a lot of people don’t like their bosses and think they aren’t great people, and so to try and understand what they are going through really helps out a lot.

Avil Beckford: What’s unique about the service that you provide?

Evan Carmichael: The thing that started to differentiate us is the famous entrepreneur profiles so we have a lot of content for entrepreneurs. What we got known for are profiles of famous entrepreneurs like Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, and Bill Gates and looked at how they got started. So how Bill Gates makes $1 million now doesn’t interest me. How did he go from zero with that idea to making his first million and what can I learn from that as an entrepreneur, I find that really interesting. So we have the largest collections of those famous entrepreneur profiles and stories online. And that’s how we started our niche going after those entrepreneur profiles and then other people wanted to contribute to our website and we’ve grown to have 6,000 people who contribute to the website. But it all started by creating this niche that we’re good at and that gave us awareness that attracted people who wanted to contribute.

Avil Beckford: Describe a major business or other challenge you had and how you resolved it. What kind of lessons did you learn in the process?

Evan Carmichael: It’s a challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs go through, and that’s managing my life – my off-work time – with my working time and trying to create a happy work-life balance. I think that’s something everybody can relate to. I have a wife and I recently had a child, two years old now. That’s a great part of your life but limits what you can do in your business life. I’d often be pulled in both directions trying to figure out, “Well how do I manage this? How do I have a happy family and also a grow business?”

I sat down with my wife and figured out what times we wanted to spend together and how we can break this out during the days, and how can I make time at work more effective and more efficient. So most days in the morning I’m doing something with my family, and my wife has her own business teaching salsa classes, so she is usually tied up in the evenings. So we don’t get to spend evenings together so we try to spend the mornings together and do something. We’ll have lunch together, and then I’ll come into work at 1 o‘clock.

And then I start chunking out my time. I’m usually working from 1 o-clock to 6 o’clock and pick three main projects that I’m working on. One will be my email for the day, one will be my CEO task and another will be a project that I’m working on at the time. And I found that creating that schedule really helped me feel happy that I have a lot of time to work on my business and I still had a lot of time to spend with my family.

The lesson I learned is that communication is important, and that’s important if you are married or if you have a team. Instead of getting stressed out or feeling there wasn’t an answer, the best solution came from just being able to talk to my wife, sit down and come up with a plan. Also talking to my staff, we have a lot of remote working hours, it used to be that everybody came into the office and we all met here, but now people know what they are doing so we don’t need to see each other that much. So people can work at home if they want, they can come into the office if they want, so communicating that and making sure that everyone was on the same page was an important lesson that we learned.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave you.

Evan Carmichael: For this business, how I started building my website after I sold my software company, I was being asked to speak at a lot of events – young entrepreneur success story. I just used my website to say, “Here is where I’m going to be speaking.” Then when I connected with a venture capital company I started writing content around how to raise capital and use my website for that as well as some famous entrepreneur profiles.

I didn’t have a big moment, but I think what really helped was as I built up content for my site, we started to get people who wanted to contribute as well, and at the time I didn’t have a revenue model behind it. It was just marketing consultants, business coaches writing to say, “Hey you have a great site, I’d love to add an article about business planning,” or whatever it was and I’d say, “Sure, “I’ll put it up.”

I thought it would be great for my readers even if there was no clear way that I was going to benefit from it. I thought it was useful and helpful information for my readers. Then we discovered that we could make money through advertising and we did a couple of tests using Google’s Adsense program and discovered that this could actually be a potential business where before I hadn’t thought of it that way. It was more about providing useful information and potentially generating some leads for the venture capital business.

I guess the big break came when we realized that this could actually be a business in itself making money through advertising and then I slowly transitioned my business to focus on that path.

Avil Beckford: Describe one of your biggest failures. What lessons did you learn, and how did it contribute to a greater success?

Evan Carmichael:  With my biotech software company we realized that we wanted to sell the business. The market was certainly heating up, and we thought if we didn’t sell now we’d have to wait another five, ten years before we got another opportunity again. The mistake we made was trying to identify companies that would be a good fit for us, who would buy us and what would be their incentive to buy us. We identified a couple of players and we spent most of our energy on the number one player, and it turned out that they were not interested in us.

One of their competition, the number four player in the market was the one that ended up doing a lot of acquisitions and bought our biggest competitor and it was between us and them at the end of the day. We did our presentations and that other company got bought out for $40 million in cash, which was a great deal. Maybe if we had done a better job of preparing, and not gone after the number one player, we would have looked at some of the other companies that were starting to kick up some noise. We might have had a better chance of getting that deal.

So what I learned from that was a lot of times the number one player is lethargic and not as interested in growing. The smaller companies, two, three, six down the line are usually more aggressive and willing to take risks to try to grow because they want to be the number one company. So they’re more motivated, ambitious, so if you’re looking to form partnerships, and you’re looking to grow your business and get some credibility you might have a better chance going after the companies that aren’t number one, but want to get there and see you as the vehicle to help them get there.

Avil Beckford: What’s one of the toughest decisions you’ve had to make and how did it impact your life?

Evan Carmichael:  I think the decision to sell the business was a tough one. We had a good business going and there were three partners in the business and we had a good lifestyle and really enjoyed what we were doing. We went back and forth should we sell it, should we not sell it. A lot of the reason came from my partners wanting to move to the US and selling the business would help them get there, where for me I was happy where I was. I am based in Toronto, Canada. That weighed on my mind and at the end of the day we decided that the market opportunity was right, and if we didn’t do it now it would have to be much further down the line. If we waited too long the hotness would go away, it wouldn’t be as sexy a deal anymore, and it would be harder to sell for a good price.

That was one decision that we struggled a lot over, but eventually we made one that everyone was happy with. Starting a business is like raising a baby and you put so much into it that to sell it off can be a big challenge sometimes for people.

Avil Beckford: What are three events that helped to shape your life?

Evan Carmichael:

1. When we sold the business I started to get a lot of invitations to speak and a lot of media, and before then, I was just running the business. I was helping the customers but I was providing information to help entrepreneurs. Selling the business and being asked to make all these appearances got me thinking that I could try to help other entrepreneurs.  They can learn through my story and that helped shape where I am right now and the type of business that I do.
2. A great discovery we made with my first business was to think that we weren’t the first people to do what we were doing. We were a software company and when we started, I was 19 years old, still in university, didn’t know about what I was doing. And one day I said, “Hey we’re not the first company to try to sell software so why can’t we model success and see what other companies have done,” and then try to use their strategies that have worked out for them. So we looked at companies like Microsoft, Intuit, McAfee and looked at how they got started – from zero to a million in revenue, how can we get started. How can we copy some of their successes? And that’s been a strategy that I’ve continued to use, and that’s why I put on my website famous entrepreneur profiles. There are a lot of lessons there that you can take.
3. Getting married and having a child is another event that shaped my life. It definitely changes how you do your business and you have to restructure your life around it. It’s not just you, you have to plan for other people, and maybe you cannot spend as much time doing the things you were doing. You have to make sure you are working smarter, and you may have to change your schedule.

Avil Beckford: What’s an accomplishment that you are proudest of?

Evan Carmichael:  One that came up which I’m really proud of is we created a program to support entrepreneurs in Africa through Kiva – a micro-lending program – and we’ve helped over 1,800 entrepreneurs get their businesses started, which I’m really happy with. Their businesses are really small, it could be for $1,000 so they can buy some chickens and build a fence and start a business, and that’s what they do. And then they can grow the business and hire a couple of people. It gets them to learn how to be entrepreneurial but also support themselves, and not depend on anybody else for their livelihood. To be able to help that many people get their business set up is great, it’s a feeling that you’re making a difference. When people tell you that you have made a difference in their lives it makes you feel good.

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Evan Carmichael:  We’ve had a lot of mentors. A lot of my mentors come from people who I have never met. So when we were selling the business, we had a number of people who helped us and gave us advice on what to do because they had gone through the process, and it was brand new for us. We leaned on them a lot for advice on how to structure it and who to talk to, and what terms to ask for. But I think a lot of the mentors from the business side have come from people I don’t know so it could be from books that I have read, famous entrepreneur profiles and you read stories about how they have accomplished success and it gives you ideas. And I found a lot of success from doing that.

On the personal side, my parents have been great mentors, teaching me how to deal with people and to try to do what’s right. So the combination of both of those two things has had a big impact on my life.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Evan Carmichael: From the personal side it would be to try to do the right thing. My parents always taught me if I am not sure what to do I should always strive to do the right thing wherever possible, and sometimes it’s hard to do the right thing. I may not be the best at doing that, but I always try to heed that advice.

From the business side of things, I think following your passion is definitely something that comes up a lot. It would be great for any entrepreneur to think about. Most entrepreneurs will start up a business because they think it’s going to make them a lot of money and they don’t really care about what they are doing. Those are the businesses that don’t succeed whereas if you look at the businesses that have really done well, it started with an entrepreneur that was really passionate about what they were doing.

You have to care about money, but it’s more about changing the way people do work, run their lives or whatever it is. They have a strong passion for making their companies successful, and that passion will help you to get through the dark days. Every entrepreneur has dark days when they aren’t sure if they are going to make it or not, and they get down on themselves. But if you’re really excited about what you’re doing – imagine what work you’d be doing if you weren’t paid to do it, things you love so much that you have to do it for free – then turn it into a business you have a good chance of being successful.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn things from by observing them from afar, in the capacity of an Invisible Mentor, what is one piece of advice that you would give to readers?

Evan Carmichael:  Follow your passion, that’s definitely where you want to start. From there I would look at how you can be as helpful as possible. That may sound super basic, but how can you help as many people as you can and be significant, so you want to make sure that you have a significant impact on their lives in whatever industry you are in. If you sell flooring, or you’re a personal coach, you want to try to have a significant, positive impact in the lives of the people you’re touching. And if you can do that, if you can have a significant impact then you can build a good business from it even if it’s a small market. If you are really making a difference and being super helpful, that can build you a little business. You can make that business go from a small business to a highly successful one by helping more people. So still being significant, still being super helpful, but trying to reach a wider audience, so go beyond your initial niche and try to meet more people.

So for our site, we started with the famous entrepreneur profiles. That’s what we got known for, and we attracted a lot of people from that, and we’ve since expanded to cover a wider range of topics that entrepreneurs are interested in to help more people and still be significant in their lives.

How can you use this information? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Liked this post? Share it and subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!

Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that's why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people.

Book links are affiliate links.