John Lee Dumas is the Founder and Host of EntrepreneurOnFire, a business podcast that interviews today’s most inspiring and successful Entrepreneurs 5-days a week. EntrepreneurOnFire is a top-10 business podcast generating over 450,000 unique downloads a month in over 140 countries, and his lineup includes Barbara Corcoran, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Guy Kawasaki, and hundreds more.

EOFire was nominated for BEST BUSINESS PODCAST by @Stitcher! Will you help us beat Ramsey by voting daily? http://t.co/SLEhaGl0a3

— John Lee Dumas (@johnleedumas) January 6, 2014

Maddox flies solo for the interview and Ledge swings in later to do the show notes.

This episode covers a ton of great topics including:

• leading with value,
• the importance of getting a mentor,
• listening to your audience, and
• how to profit now AND save for later.

Can’t wait and just want to dive right in? Check out these nuggets of wisdom culled straight from the interview.

What’s your best business advice?

“Just start. You will never be ready to launch in your mind. Get it out there with an MVP into the hands of your ideal customer. Get your feedback, pivot and approve.”

What’s your most important success habit?

“My alarm clock goes off at 5AM. I do a power-walk around the [San Diego] Bay, then I shower and sit down with coffee and crank away starting at 5:30AM. I get an incredible amount done before 9AM. I get to 9AM having already accomplished a ton of work, having set the plate for tackling what I have coming up. Because I have already had a longer work day by 9AM than most people have all day it allows me to develop my audience and my income.”

What would you have done differently if you had the chance?

“One thing I would do is I would break myself away from the mindset of being herded into a certain path. Going into college, the Army, law school, corporate America…You are the author of your own biography. As soon as I came to that realization that’s when amazing things started to happen to me. I wish I had come to that mindset shift at an earlier time.”

John cites “creating profit” as the key for his business success and he’s very transparent about how he does it. In fact, he shares all of his income reports each month on his website so other entrepreneurs can learn from his successes and failures.

We ask John where all the money is going.

“Most of it is going straight into our bank account.” John says he’s happy to invest money back into his company at the right time and on the right things. He’s a big believer, however, in living “below your means” so you can “use your savings as a runway for 6-12 months in order to focus on the quality of the service.” John says he’s ready to “weather the downturns and invest when the time comes.”

We loved his closing comments about entrepreneurship and how he manages his business.

“The entrepreneurial journey is a roller coaster. There are ups and downs. We’re preparing to be agile when the time comes that we need to be flexible. We make mistakes and we learn from them. We share that in our monthly reports. Our mistakes and failures are right there in print. A lot of people find that valuable. We project transparency. Other companies are doing the same things. Transparency connects you to your clients right away in a meaningful way. Share it all and people will feel like they are growing with you: an intimate connection that you can’t achieve in any other way. If you can’t create a connection with your clients you are setting yourself up for failure.”

Listen to the full episode!

John Dumas, who we interviewed in our first episode, took up this cause right away with his business, focusing on leading with value first and monetizing second.

In fact, he determined to provide as much value to his audience as possible without considering how to monetize that audience until six months after his launch. He believes focusing on value first allowed him to enjoy income that looked more like a “waterfall instead of a drip” when he did start to monetize (something you can see forthright in his transparent income reports).

John tells entrepreneurs to “go pull the trigger” and “let things go where they go.” While being “a person of action,” he’s also adamant that each of us invest in ourselves in terms of education and in the belief that our goals are possible. Given the chance to take a shot, John believes we should take it even if we’re scared.

How scared? John has an answer for that, too, when he tells us about the value of mentoring.

Listen to the full episode.

John’s podcast and its offshoot businesses leverage his listener base to create revenue and profit. John tells us that his listeners were asking him “how to create products and services.”

His answer is simple: “Listen to your audience and [they] will tell you the services and products they need.”

John cites his recently launched Mastermind group, Fire Nation Elite, which is a closed Mastermind group with 100 members. The mastermind group generates $13,500 each month. It’s a major revenue source for EOF with expenses under $5K month. He started it because listeners were telling them wanted to interact with other elite entrepreneurs. So he opened the group and capped it at 100 members — and sold out in less than a week!

In another example of listening to his audience, John tells about how people were seeing the EOF success and asking how to create their own podcast. They’d ask him, “How do I rank better? What are the tech specifics?” So John started Podcasters’ Paradise, a community where you can create, grow and monetize your podcast as a member. Providing tips, tools and tactics for podcasters in a tight community has grossed more than $115K since October 2013. It’s already a 6-figure product and more people are joining every day.

Key take-away: “Listen to the pains of the listeners and followers and then create something to solve it for them.” The same can be said for lean startup founders creating an MVP. Don’t overbuild and listen to the users who will ultimately spend the money you need to stay in business and profit. They might have the same needs and wants as you, but they also might now. Be attentive and listen carefully. Most of all engage!

Listen to the full episode!

In our Episode 1, John talks about “impostor syndrome,” which he personally learned about from Seth Godin. It’s a well-documented feeling that manifests as negative self-talk in men and women. You can read more about it in Valerie Young’s book, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It.

John tells us in the interview, “What held me back was the impostor syndrome: The little voice on my shoulder that said I couldn’t do it.” His negative thoughts and emotion kept making him push back his launch date, all the way from August 15th to October 1st. He tells us it was “all out of fear.”

How did he break through this fear? John tells us, “Breaking through goes back to the most powerful thing is any entrepreneur can do — get a mentor: someone you can talk to about your business and your fears.”

John formed a mentor relationship with Jaime Tardy, author of The Eventual Millionaire. As John relays her dealing with his delays, she said, “You will launch today or I will fire you.” He says that’s what allowed him to get over the impostor syndrome and launch. Delaying his launch ended up having one major impact. “All that did was delay my success by the same number of days. That six figure month [that happened in October 2013] would have come a full month earlier. I put myself back by waiting.”

Key Advice: Get a mentor, invest in yourself and embrace the impostor syndrome. Drive forward and listen to the advice of the people who have come before you.

Listen to the full episode!