Timestamps | Transcript
After years of helping billionaires like Richard Branson & Elon Musk check things off their bucket list, Steve Sims wrote his story in Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen. It’s helped him save entrepreneurs from themselves since, and I’m one of them 🙂
3 years ago this week Steve released the book, one he felt proud of but honestly didn’t think would be a hit – so much so he didn’t bother with a book tour or even a website. Boy did he get it wrong!!! It’s a worldwide best seller, translated into Thai, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Polish, and currently being translated for release in Russian. He’s spoken worldwide from events like Mortgage conferences in Vegas to bridal conventions in Spain, Entrepreneur masterminds in Thailand to Finance summits in New York – in fact, over 50 events over the globe and he’s just getting started.
Steve hosts his own events called “SimsSpeakeasy” and coaches clients who are ready to disrupt their industry. ALL OF THIS from releasing a book. I’ve been to 4 Speakeasies and he’s been my coach for 2 years. Steve has changed my life. Can’t wait to see what the next 3 years challenge us to disrupt!
Missed Bluefishing? See what you’ve missed: https://www.stevedsims.com/book/
TIMESTAMPS:
1:20 Steve’s company Bluefish was basically the wish fulfillment or the Make-a-Wish foundation for billionaires
2:59 the book deal to tell how the bricklayer from London could be working with Richard Branson & Elon Musk
4:33 the Bluefishing book launch party the publisher requested vs the book launch party Steve had
8:37 how writing a book makes you realize it’s not the big things but the little marbles that add up
11:00 Steve was trying to hack it, to talk with billionaires and ask them why they’re rich and he’s not
13:02 what he realized after dressing in suits & taking out his earrings to have lunch with businessmen
15:52 why Steve guarantees that the book Bluefishing will aggravate & annoy you
17:17 how an argument with his daughter accidentally led him to create his now-famous Speakeasy entrepreneur event
24:08 as a relatively new speaker, Steve knocks a keynote speaker down a peg
30:46 the publishing company’s very young marketer makes the mistake of telling Steve he needs to work on his credibility
Tweetable quotes:
“What you don’t realize is that it’s the little marbles that actually create the big movement.”
“If you can’t explain it on the back of a postcard I don’t want to hear it.”
“I never wanted to do this with the Pope and Elon Musk and Branson. I never went outta my way to do it. I wanted to speak to the guy that was going to pay for it.”
“So give people what they want. To me, it never made any sense to try and design the market.”
“She said “we need to work on your credibility.” At the time I had just had an 8-page article in Forbes with Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson.”
TRANSCRIPT:
LISA: I want to welcome y’all to a very special episode of my show tonight, special time, and special guest. The most interesting man in the world, I don’t care what the commercials say, Mr. Steve Sims. He is my mentor and the author of this wonderful, wonderful book, Bluefishing: The Art of Making Things Happen.
We are celebrating the third anniversary and I’m going to tell you right now, if you haven’t read the book yet you’ve been under a rock somewhere. I don’t know where you’ve been, under a rock, and you need to go read it or you’re probably going to go out of business. So I have Steve here just to chat and talk about everything, and about how wonderful it is.
How many languages is your book out in now?
STEVE: oh Jesus! I should actually post a picture of that. But we’ve got, um, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Mandarin Chinese, uh, Polish. Currently it’s being translated into Russian. It’s the best seller in all those other languages and the English one, obviously, gets everywhere else. So, yeah, it’s kind of amazing the different, different looks and covers.
LISA: tell everybody the background of the book, you know, that how such a surprise for you.
STEVE: so, yeah, so for many, many years I ran a very large experiential concierge firm that looked after billionaires. And we would do things like send them down to the Titanic, get them a drum lesson with Guns and Roses, get ‘em married in the Vatican by the Pope, uh, closed down a museum in Florence for a dinner party of six and get Andrea Bocelli to come in. We were basically the wish fulfillment or the Make-a-Wish foundation for people with really big checkbooks and I was always the guy in the black t-shirt that hovered in the corner.
In fact, I’ve been to events that I made happen for my clients. They brought guests and the guests have actually given me car keys thinking I was like either the head valet or security. And I’ve always been polite. No one ever knew who I was and I was very happy with that.
And then, um, they say you are the party you’re in, so you know I was always very fortunate to be in the rooms of, you know, quite powerful people. And I was in a party in New York and this girl I was introduced to was one of the heads of one of the largest publishing houses in the planet, called Simon Schuster. And someone had spoken to her about this weird bald guy drinking his, you know, um, old-fashioned and she came over and chatted with me and literally on the spot said, “we should do a book and you can name all the the most powerful and celebrity people you do.” And I said, “I can’t do that or I’d be dead by the time I ordered my next drink. And that was the end of the conversation. I thought that was dead, couldn’t even remember the conversation, and then a week later I got asked that, instead of doing the book about who I worked for, how could I, this bricklayer from London, suddenly be dealing with Richard Branson and Elon Musk, you know. “Would you be prepared to write that book?” and I thought to myself, yes.
I’m always aggravated how people give themselves too many excuses. I can’t do this because I don’t have a website. I can’t do this because I don’t have a CRM funnel, my my click funnel campaign’s no good. There’s always an excuse of why you’re useless, and so I thought to myself, I could do the book. So I had all this gutso and I was paid heavily to do the book, but the beautiful thing is, because I was paid so heavily, I didn’t care. And this sounds rude and I’m sorry, but I didn’t care if it sold. I wasn’t worrying about the commission sales because I already got paid. Which gave me the luxury of being able to write the book I wanted to write because I had no liability now.
So I just wrote a book that hopefully could get people to do things differently, give them an excuse to do rather than an excuse not. To get them to focus on their “I can” over their IQ, and really just kinda work that. And we didn’t think it would go anywhere. You know, I released a book it, well they released a book, three years from this Saturday and we didn’t have a website you know. We literally just had an Amazon link.
And they said to us, um, we need you to do a big launch party and I said, oh, what do you need me to do? And they said, um, here’s, and they and this was the dumb thing, they had been wiring me large chunks of money but they posted me this check which was really weird. They posted me a check for 2500 bucks. And they said there’s a Barnes and Noble in, and I live in Los Angeles and there’s an affluent thing called The Grove. And, uh, they said there’s a Barnes and Noble at The Grove. Rent the table, buy champagne, and sign copies on a Saturday afternoon. And I thought you’re wandering through Barnes and Noble with your kids, what possibly is going to come over you you’re going to go, hey, I’m gonna talk to that tattooed, pierced biker and find out
what he’s got to say. You’re not gonna do it.
So I literally went to a local whiskey bar that I frequented and, um, I signed the check over to him and I said, “look when the lights go off, or when the check runs out, turn the lights on and kick us out. And, and that was it. And they said to me, they said, “well, look, for there to be a book launch you have to put a display of books.” So I literally shoved a pile of books, no thought behind it, on the end of the bar. I invited a whole bunch of my friends and we just turned up, got drunk, and then we run out of money and we left, um, and that was it. So I never put any thought behind it. But uh, a beautiful couple called, um, Cole and Sonya Hatter who are the people behind the big Thrive event in Vegas. Um, she’s the lying little person that, she is, she had a camera and she wanted to get some footage for her husband’s sizzle reel. And she said can we use your party as the backdrop? And I went, I don’t care.
But what I didn’t realize she was doing was, they constructed a video where they interviewed people about Steve Sims. Yeah, that’s the video that’s on the Steve D Sims website. And so we put no thought behind it. We also put no care behind it because we didn’t know we were being videoed. So if you watch the beginning of the video everyone’s sober and they’re all kind of like, they’re all like, “Steve, this is an honor to be here and your first book.” And they’re always sensible, and then as the night gets on they’re all kind of like, “I didn’t know you could even spell,” you know, and “oh, my God, what’s this book about?” you know “is it about fishing? I don’t wanna fish.” And so it’s just a hilarious video.
LISA: I need to go re-watch that because it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.
STEVE: yeah! We just thought, “at least it’s me.” And you know my opinion of branding, I don’t. This is it, you know, love it, leave it, whatever. And so I thought to myself, because the publishing house was going, “you’ve got to do a website for the book.” So I thought to myself, I’m just going to stick that video up there and people are going to be able to make their own judgment on whether or not this is a man they want to find out about and whether or not they’re ready to get uncomfortable and make a change. So I posted the video up there and the rest is history. It did nothing, it did nothing for two months, and I was like oh, okay, well that was fun. And then it went bang! And that’s when all the international orders started, that’s when all the translations started. And it’s three years later, I look back and I’m like “how the hell?” If I had not been in that party and I had not spoken with that girl, if I had not made the joke about the book, you know we wouldn’t be here now doing all Speakeasies.
LISA: that’s the thing that people lose sight of. It’s all the little things in life that add up, that turn into the big things, the big picture. That video is basically the virtual chug test.
STEVE: yes, yeah, it totally is. And you’re writing a book so you know this. Well, you’ve written books before, but when you actually write books and I say that plural because obviously you have, or you are. But i haven’t, you know, so when writing this book it suddenly caused me to analyze what it is I did to get to xyz. And the funny thing is you sit there and you go, well I did this and I did this, and *then* I did this. And you think *this* is the big thing.
What you don’t realize is that it’s the little marbles that actually create the big movement. And it gives you the time to reflect and go, ahhhh. It’s the people that turn around, “I never would have thought of doing this.” Like, you say to someone “getting a couple married in the Vatican by the Pope and they go, “I could never do that.” But at the end of the day it’s a public place by a public servant doing a public event. If you break it down to just its, you know, bare parameters. Yeah, it’s got a lot more ego and gloss around it, but if you just tear it down and then just start chipping away again you, it’s amazing what you can do. But too many people look at the big picture and they look at the Himalayas and they go “oh!”
I remember being in Nepal and going to first camp and first camp is the first camp of of going up Everest. And it’s basically at the bottom. You’re not even in the snow. I was there and it wasn’t even snowing and I joked, I went, “my god, how the hell do you get up there?” and the guy just turned around and said, “it’s easy; you get there first” and pointed to the base camp. So, just get moving.
LISA: and go to the next one.
STEVE: yeah, there you go. So it was kind, it was kind of astonishing, revealing, and exciting and terrifying, and all of these things.
LISA: well, I have read the book so many times I can’t even count. As a matter of fact, I’m rereading it now since I’m writing my own book. But one of the things that I love is that you know, we talk a lot about how as entrepreneurs we’re too close to our own stuff and we need to surround ourselves with people. I love the fact that early on when you had a, were you even doing it as a business then or just as like favors when you were, uh, setting up trips and things for people when you were at the bar?
STEVE: so I was, um, I was trying to hack it. What I, I’m very primitive, you know that. You can tell people that. And it’s like, it’s not offensive, incredibly basic. If you can’t explain it on the back of a postcard I don’t want to hear it. And I knew that I was poor. I knew I was poor. You know, most of my friends were poor. I knew that I had to speak to people that were not.
You know there’s an old saying that, you know, you are the combination. I openly say that you are the party you’re in. So I needed to make sure I was in a room full of rich people. So when I started, and I was a doorman, so I started doing like after hours, you know drinking at the club, and I would only invite rich people, you know? I never wanted to be a concierge. I never wanted to do this with the Pope and Elon Musk and Branson. I never went outta my way to do it. I wanted to speak to the guy that was going to pay for it.
LISA: you wanted a job, right?
STEVE: well, I wanted an insight. I wanted to, the job actually came but my whole focus was, I wanted to speak to a billionaire and ask him why are you rich and I’m not?
LISA: yeah, when you talked about going to all those lunches every day and you would dress up in your suit every day and have lunch with these successful businessmen and finally one day Clare, who if, for y’all who aren’t familiar with Steve, she’s his lovely wife.
STEVE: yeah
LISA: Clare was like “why the hell are you doing this? You have this other thing. Why are you trying to get a job with these people?” and that’s when the light came on for you. And that shows, for all of us pretty much, we’re too close to our own stuff, you know.
STEVE: yeah, I was, I was throwing parties, I was throwing parties every night. Well, not every night but I was throwing parties like a couple of times a month. Yachts, mansions, and I was turning up in a black t-shirt and jeans like I always do, like you always know. But when I went and had lunch with them I would dress up and take my earrings out because I wanted to appeal to them. What I wasn’t realizing was, what was appealing to them was the people they they were meeting in the evenings and in the more relaxed mode.
I suddenly realized that, just like most people do, we try to become someone that we hope the other person is going to want to do business with and that’s a weird calculation. You never can hit it. And if you do hit it, then all that does is mean that you end up working with someone that you’re not really connected with because they don’t know you. So, it was Clare that really taught me that, you know, I was, I was licking the tree. That I couldn’t see the forest. So yeah, that’s uh, thanks to Clare.
LISA: then later you asked some of those guys “why did you never offer me a job” and they’re like “we never thought about it! Why would you have ever wanted a job? You had the life!” Right?
STEVE: yeah, it was, it was weird. I was, I was doing so much for these people. I’ve always made, I’ve always had this, uh, philosophy that, you know, you’ve got to get engagement, okay? Until the world where likes and followers can pay my mortgage at the end of the month, I really don’t care. I care about the engagement and when you want to get commitment and get someone to move, then they have to pay. And if they don’t pay, they don’t pay attention. We all know that one. So I was building up this network and I was making money from it, but I never realized what I was creating. And the trouble is, a lot of us don’t. We’re creating this movement and our eyeballs are over there without realizing that we’re actually going over here. So by the time that I was thinking oh, I better get a job, Clare’s like “but you’ve already got a client base; you’ve already got a reputation” and I was like “oh!” I had, to a point, already arrived at a position without realizing I was even on the journey.
LISA: yeah, that, I love that. It, you know, and that’s why I said there’s so many good stories in this book y’all, whichever way (as she’s holding the book up to the camera). You have to read it if you haven’t read it, and if you have read it you have to read it again. Because every time you read it there are new things. One of my favorite sayings is from your Dad and I’m sure I probably heard it elsewhere but I remember it all the time now. That people don’t drown from falling in the water, they drown from not getting out.
STEVE: yep, yep
LISA: it’s so true and we, as entrepreneurs, just get so stuck on our thing that we think this is it. And we’re all guilty of it and we don’t realize that all we have to do is move over a little bit and we won’t drown.
STEVE: yeah, I guarantee you anyone that gets the book, and this is a celebration of the three years. So if you, if you’re all out there thinking “well, why are they promoting the book so much?” Because we quite openly can’t believe how, what it’s done over these three years.
Um, but the book will annoy you. I guarantee you, the book will aggravate and annoy you because it will reveal stuff that for some reason you thought you were too smart to still do. But that works. The amount of people that I’ve actually had say to me, “this book pissed me off!” and I’ll be like “well, okay, why is that?” Then they said, “because I was doing that and then I stopped doing it and I started focusing on my click funnel campaigns and all these kind of things and I lost focus on where I was going.” And, you know, I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed but a hammer is still just as impactful. So you know, I got people to just reevaluate what they were doing. But more importantly, to understand where they’re going and you know, that’s how it happened. And it’s just surprised me how people have been able to look at it and go “why did I stop doing that? I’m going to start doing that again.” And of course then they contact me and we end up taking it further.
LISA: yeah, well and then, oh by the way y’all, my shirt The Speakeasy, tell them about how that, how only the misfits. So if you’re not a misfit you can’t come, but tell them how that got started. Another accidental thing that he started and we love it.
STEVE: yeah, I love, um I love being the architect for creative disruptors. Um, and I love, I often find that, funny enough, where you end up was not where you started to to go. And I had an argument with my daughter. You know, anyone out there that’s got teenage girls you know, you know exactly what I’m talking about. And it was coming up to my birthday and I didn’t want her to have to be disrespectful, I didn’t want her to have to lie to herself and walk up to me and go “happy birthday, Dad, I love you.” I didn’t want to put her on the spot.
So I literally, I turned around to my wife and I went, I’m not gonna be here. She said, “what do you mean?” I went, “look, I’m 40 – I don’t know what I was, you know, 49 or no, yeah, about 49. I said I don’t need to be here. You know, I’m 49 years old. I don’t need another birthday cake so I’m gonna go away. And she, “what are you gonna do?” And I went, “I don’t know.” And I went on Facebook and I literally said, “who wants to hang with me for two days? I’ll answer any questions.” Okay, and I got a bunch of people say yes.
And I went, “okay then I want commitment” because, again, there’s another saying that I have is that everyone’s interested until they have to pay. And so I went, okay, if you’re interested, I wanted to get the right kind of person, so I put a button: two thousand dollars. I’m going to hold it somewhere and that was it. And I didn’t have, I wasn’t sharing the information because I didn’t have the information. I just thought if 10 people say yes I’ll get a room that can hold 10, and if they have these problems then I’ll answer those problems.
So I was trying to get people to almost construct what they wanted rather than going to an event based on who there’s going to be and, you know, the little sandwiches you’re going to get at lunchtime. And so it took off. Um, we did really well but along the way there was a friend of mine, had a mansion. It wasn’t really a mansion, a very large house, and uh,had no furniture. And he said, “oh, you can use that.” So I said, “oh, I’m gonna get, uh, we’re gonna have to get some chairs or something, and the rental company had these colored bean bags.
Now I’m glad I didn’t get them because they would have been all hot and sweaty in California but I said, “oh, I’m gonna get all these bean bags and we’ll call it a beanbag mastermind. You know, that’s what we were gonna call it because we hadn’t come up with a name yet. One of the first attendees actually came up to me and, Neil Moore and Tim Larkin, who you’ve met. They were there at the first ever one.
LISA: oh, were they?
STEVE: yeah, and uh, I turned around and one of my attendees turned around and they said, “are you gonna tell us where it is?” And I said, “I can’t.” And then they said, “well, are you gonna tell us what time it starts?” I said, “yeah, it’s gonna start at nine o’clock.” “What are we gonna, what are we gonna do?” “I can’t tell you.” “Who are we gonna meet?” “I can’t tell you.” And he turned around, he said, “this is like a speakeasy, you know.” Yeah, he said, “you don’t know what’s going on but you know that’s where all the cool kids hang out.” And I was like, “that’s correct.” So literally before the event we had the name The Speakeasy and then that was it. We just, um, I think San Diego in January will be our 10th, um, and we now have simspeakeasy.com. And as you can testify, we never tell you anything.
LISA: it’s wonderful, and that’s the best. It’s just the excitement. It’s like Christmas. You don’t know, and not only before we get there do we not know, we don’t even know the whole time we’re there what we’re going to see next, who we’re going to, who is going to speak with us next, what we’re going to do next from shooting machine guns to throwing axes to, just such so much fun. I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this, when you did the first one were you already doing consulting and coaching or were, did you still just have Bluefish?
STEVE: oh, I know, so in the, um, in the latter years, probably the last five years of Bluefish I was doing so much, I had already done so many events, events were actually hiring me to focus on their marketing and branding. So I was actually consulting for some of the biggest companies in the planet. You know, Tiffany, Ferrari, Piaget, you know, some major brands, uh, Asprey. And, but I didn’t think that was going to be where I was going to go. And also, as we all know, corporates are very slow to move, very slow to change. And it wasn’t exciting me, um, so I couldn’t see it as a long time, long-term thing.
When the first speakeasy came out and a couple of people came up and they went, “hey can you help us with this event? Um, or help us with my company?” We, I think the first one I did was a product launch for a client of mine in Australia who, funny enough was a Bluefishing client but then got involved with me on this side of my world. And he said, “we want to do a product launch in New York.” And I said, “well let’s go over your tone, your voice, your message, the point, uh, what bruise you’re poking. And he went, “oh, so you consult on this?” And because I had already done it on the market I said yeah but then it kind of morphed into something else.
So I suppose the early stages we were trying to find out where it was necessary and what people needed. We had a few clients and now we’ve got, um, 18 full-on, uh, consulting clients we coach with and help them guide through, as you know, every month whatever’s coming up. And we noticed it was better to go shoulder-to-shoulder with the person you’re working with and going hey, what are we fighting here, what are we looking to win? Rather than trying to do a structured 12-step program. Let’s be serious, everybody, it doesn’t fit everybody and if it’s too structured it always cracks.
So but, yeah, we started to morph and people were saying to us about that they didn’t want to do coaching, they didn’t want to attend the events but they did want to kind of be able to look at us virtually and over the digital ecosystem. So we launched Sims Distillery. So we basically responded rather than preempted what was going on. So that’s the way I like to do business. You know, I’ll openly say to people, “hey, do you want sneakers?” And if 20 people go yes then ask those 20 people, “what color do you want them?” And if they say blue, then go and make blue sneakers. So give people what they want. To me, it never made any sense to try and design the market.
LISA: well, I love too, like you said do you, they said do you do consulting and you’re like yeah. But you probably had no clue like how much you would charge because it wasn’t what you’ve been doing. It was, like your first speaking gig where you’re, “I don’t know how much to, what am I?” You just pull the number out of your butt.
STEVE: yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that. My speaking was funny. I think the first gig, I think the first gig I did was three and a half grand and then the next one, um, I went up and I, I was pushing it each time. And, uh, I got to seven and a half and then this guy was backstage and he, he was chatting with us. And he was Mr Ego. He was the, the keynote speaker and I just thought to myself well I’m getting the sense that you’re a bit of a dick, but, but, but I must be wrong because you’re the keynote, you know? And, um, he went out on stage and he gave this this, um, this talk-to, and I call it a talk-to because he didn’t interact with the community. He didn’t answer any questions. He just yelled at them, you know? He was like, “and then you do this and you do this and I did that and you did…” And it was just it was horrible. And so when he came back up, um, when he came off the stage I realized he had helped nobody, you know? There was no impact. There was no lessons. And I said to him, “how much do you charge?” And he said, “seven and a half” and I said to him, and this is ballsy and probably a bit rude and I apologize, but I turned around and I went, “you know, I reckon I’m twice as good as you so from now on I’m 15 grand. And that was i. And the funny thing was, and you know this because I’ve talked to you about it during the Speakeasies, I’ve done lots of keynotes all over the world now. And I think it was about a year later down in San Diego that I did a keynote and he was one of the support speakers.
LISA: oh, funny
STEVE: and he reckoned that we’d never met. I went, “hey, how are you? I remember seeing you,” and he was like, “oh, yeah, I, I don’t recall that. I don’t recall.” And I was like, “all right mate, you want to play that, that’s fine.” It’s kind of weird.
LISA: that is ridiculous! Well, what is your favorite part of what you’re doing now and, whatever that favorite part is, was what you like, was that fulfilled in any way through Bluefish? I know you’re doing something totally different but the, what you really like the best now, and were you getting that fulfillment in any way through Bluefish?
STEVE: um, yes, yes to the no is a kind of a weird way to answer that. We are often very talented in doing something but what we actually do only is using part of it. Now, what I liked about Bluefish was constantly being challenged. What I loved about Bluefish was getting to understand the core, never listening to the problem, but understanding why the problem even existed. I used to like that element. I also used to like the marketing, the positioning, and I would listen to what the person said, ignore it, and then try to find out what we needed to do to overachieve it. That’s what I used to like.
Now, I used to do all of that within a travel concierge firm but when I got the chance now to actually do with individuals, hey, now it became exciting. Because when I’m spending a billionaire’s money to take over a museum, hey, that’s very exciting but at the end of the night or the following day, should we say, all we’ve done is spent a lot of money to give him an amazing cocktail story and we haven’t created any impact. We haven’t created any longevity. We haven’t created any substance or reason and there’s nothing behind it.
So all of a sudden when I started working with entrepreneurs and, like I spoke to, we’ve got a mutual friend, um, he contacted me today and we were doing one of our coaching updates today and he starts telling me about all the contracts that we’ve got coming, I say we, you know, I’ve been working with him so I class it as a royal we, but he’s getting the contracts now and he’s getting the money and he’s talking about the kids and how he’s going to help his kids and now his wife’s happier. So the relationship’s stronger. That’s an impact! And if you could do something once and you replicate it and it comes off twice and you try a little bit harder and you get four times return, now you’ve got a scalable model.
So all of that I’m finding far more exciting, challenging, and ultimately rewarding. And I will be honest with you, Bluefish would make me a lot of money. It ain’t cheap to get married by the Pope, okay? But it was draining. I guarantee you I would never do that again. I actually came back from from Italy where I was, I was living in the penthouse of the Hotel De’ Ricci, a four-star hotel in center of Rome, full expenses, flying first class, full expenses. I was there for around six and a half to seven months.
LISA: oh my gosh!
STEVE: I would never, forget the amount of money I made, I would never do that again. I couldn’t sustain, it was painful, you know. But now I’m getting the chance to actually work with people that we’re creating impact, we’re creating longevity, we’re creating a difference. I may not make as much money as getting you married by the pope but it’s sustainable, it’s longer, it’s reoccurring, and it’s far more exciting and the key word, rewarding.
LISA: yeah, well, and I was thinking earlier, going back to Clare, that if it weren’t for Clare, I mean, all the people I’ve met – aside from you – all the people that I’ve met, I’ve gotten to know through you, got to know through The Speakeasy, none of us would know each other if it weren’t for you taking the route you did all those years ago. And so I, the lesson to people for, for that, of that for people, in my opinion is first of all have supportive people around you who can see through your BS and be honest with you, but secondly keep your mind open and and take the journey and don’t be afraid of going off in different directions. Because I think most people, once they had Bluefish, it was so successful they would have been afraid to try to do anything else, they would have been afraid to take the risk of doing something like you’re doing now.
STEVE: I didn’t know it was going to be a risk, um, because quite simply we didn’t think it was going to be anything. When it suddenly started to present itself and I suddenly could, bear in mind. The funny thing was when the book came out I was called up to, um, I was called up to New York and they were going over this social thing. And she was very, very concerned about my social awareness and my social profile. And the marketing girl, who quite simply looked as though she was on a freaking school trip she looked so young and, um, she actually said to me, she said, “we need to work on your social and I said, “well, what do you mean?” And she said, “well, we need to work,” and this was the funny thing, “we need to work on your credibility.” Now at the time I had just had an eight-page article in Forbes with Elon Musk and Sir Elton John, okay? Not Elton John, Richard Branson. Um, so I said to her, I said, “I got this report, you know, I just had this article. That’s good credibility.” And she said, “that’s great, but no one reads Forbes. I looked at your Instagram. You only have 16 people following you.” And that’s what she focused it on. And I was like, are you kidding? And I swear probably 15 of those 16 were lost and you know followed me by mistake. But I didn’t expect, I didn’t know where this was going. I think, I don’t know what I’m on now, 54,000 or something stupid like that. But it just suddenly starts growing and you go “hang on a minute.”
LISA: exponentially
STEVE: yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t released a book, I’ve created a movement! And, and that’s why, and the movement… once something starts moving it consumes whatever’s in front of it. So the events, the course, a second book, you know, the t-shirt you’re wearing, all of these different things suddenly start coming forward and you go, “hey, let’s try it, let’s play.” And it’s, it’s just been, it’s a hell of a journey and I’m really enjoying it. And we’re not done yet by far.
LISA: what you have done is made so many people believe in themselves again. It’s important. The book is a gift and I’m just so thankful that I heard you on that podcast that day. And you know, came across it,
STEVE: so am I
LISA: like I said read the book, you know, everything along the way. I’m just so thankful that I did. And I have not announced this but you mentioned it so I’m gonna go ahead and say that, yes, I am writing a new book, Disrupt Your Now.
STEVE: sorry
LISA: no! I was just, I was trying to decide when I was going to announce it. So I’m going to do it now, I’m glad. Um, it’s going to be called Disrupt Your Now: The Successful Entrepreneur’s Guide to Reimagining Your Business & Life. And I’ll be talking, my cousin Charles Kipps who is a screenwriter and producer, he and I will be talking with a lot of successful entrepreneurs and putting together a book of advice from them about how you can reimagine your own life and get unstuck. Especially now, when everybody’s so afraid. Steve is going to be in the book and Jeffrey Madoff and I’m not going to tell who else yet but lots of cool people. And I’m really excited about it, and I really appreciate your support in that, Steve.
STEVE: well, I, we already know some of the people that are going to be in the book so I’m telling anyone that’s out there, be ready because these people are rock stars. And I would, I would guarantee you that, just on the name, and you’ve just mentioned one of them, name alone you’re probably, you probably don’t know most of the people or what they do if you just got the name
LISA: right
STEVE: and then if it was explained what they did, what they controlled, what they designed, what they built, what they franchise, you’d go whoa that guy! So, you know, it’s um yeah, it’s pretty special. That’s going to be a killer of a book.
LISA: The people behind the scenes that the famous people look to
STEVE: oh exactly, the people that really actually turn the dial
LISA: yeah, well I’m gonna let you go because I know you have lots more things lined up for the third anniversary celebration. But, once again, go buy the book Bluefishing. If you already have it, go read it again. It’s on his site stevedsims.com. It’s on amazon. It’s everywhere. And he’s got a free Facebook group
STEVE: um, yeah, An Entrepreneur’s Advantage
LISA: yep, but so you can go join his free group and follow him on social media and you can absorb all of his knowledge t
STEVE: thank you, Lisa. It’s been a pleasure to spend some time with you.
LISA: thanks. I appreciate it. I’ll talk to you later. Bye!
