Ian Sells, 38, has been a serial entrepreneur since childhood when he'd rescue, repair and resell items tossed by others. Since 2004, Ian has been growing and scaling businesses through fiscally sound leverage and proven internet marketing strategies. After selling his first Amazon brand, he launched four more product lines while also opening an Amazon consulting business, managing over $30 million in sales. He is the CEO and founder of MillionDollarSellers.com (MDS) an elite, mastermind Amazon group with nearly 400 sellers representing over $4 billion in 2019 Amazon sales. In his continued mission to empower emerging brands, Ian is the co-founder and CEO of RebateKey.com a rapidly-growing, online cash-back rebate and coupon marketplace.
- CEO Hack: Calendly for scheduling meetings (ii) ClickUp to organize our processes (iii) Slack for communication
- CEO Nugget: Look for advisors and communities, you don't have to figure everything out yourself
- CEO Defined: Leading a team while inspiring them to perform their best
Website: http://www.rebatekey.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebatekey
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Transcription
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00:23 – Intro
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:51 – Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ian Sales of RebateKey. Ian, it's great to have you on the show.
01:00 – Ian Sells
Hey. Thanks for having me too.
01:03 – Gresham Harkless
Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Ian so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Ian has been a serial entrepreneur since childhood when he'd rescue, repair, and resell items tossed by others. And since two thousand four, Ian has been growing and scaling businesses through fiscally sound leverage and proven Internet marketing strategies. After selling his first Amazon brand, he launched four more product lines while also opening an Amazon consulting business managing over thirty million dollars in sales.
He is the CEO and founder of million-dollar sales sellers, MDS, an elite mastermind Amazon group with nearly four hundred sellers representing four billion dollars in twenty nineteen Amazon sales and his continued mission to empower leveraging brands. Ian is the co-founder and CEO of RebateKey, a rapidly growing online cashback rebate and coupon marketplace. Ian, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
[restrict paid=”true”]
01:55 – Ian Sells
Absolutely.
01:56 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on it a little bit, but I wanna hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:10 – Ian Sells
Yeah. Well essentially, out of college, I started my own real estate company buying houses up in the college area and renting them out to college kids. So we quickly grew that business in a few years to managing and buying over a hundred houses, in San Diego. And that's how I came out of college, swinging hard. And that transition as things progressed from two thousand four to two thousand twelve when I started to look into other businesses to invest in and, was investing in a friend's business from a college that was selling products on Amazon in twenty twelve. And, we gave him, five grand, and he bought some Xbox hard drives, and we sold them online. And, within a week or two, they just all sold out. We're like, wow. This is amazing.
02:54 – Gresham Harkless
Nice.
02:54 – Ian Sells
And so we kept going with it. And, eventually, we took on some other products and created our brands. We had Bluetooth speakers and things like that. And within about a year and a half of that business, we were quickly doing over a million dollars in revenue, in the early days of Amazon really, and sold that business off. So that's when I decided to put more time into it stop doing so much real estate and focus on Amazon. And so I started another brand by myself after we sold out with some of the profits. Within a year, I was doing over a million dollars with that brand too. So I realized how fast you could grow on Amazon and knew all the marketing methods. And because of my background in real estate, I was able to take advantage of knowing how to invest money wisely into a business that scales and has ROI.
03:43 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you sharing that story and then how everything has evolved into what you're doing now. And I think so many times we hear stories, we don't realize, like, each of the pieces of your story, all the parts of your background kind of play in parts. So that's what oh, I appreciate you talking about that fiscally responsibility responsible, way you're able to approach your business.
04:01 – Ian Sells
Yeah. And that's how a million-dollar sellers, group ended up coming about was I needed a group of people. I was looking for resources on how to sell on Amazon and it's like the new frontier. No. There's no guidebook on how to do this. So we're on Facebook chatting in different groups, and I was scaling faster than a lot of people. I would see people, hey. Is this a good product to sell or whatnot? And I was like, okay. Well, I'm already doing, twenty-five thousand dollars a month in sales. How do I get to fifty thousand? How do I get to a hundred thousand? How do I go beyond that?
And so I created a little community called, the fifty k and up group. So, if you're doing fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue, you can join this group, and we would bring in people, to the group over, you know, on a daily or weekly basis, whatever, and grew just really slowly, but, like, found people online kind of on the same path as me, able to grow and scale faster and wanna run this as a real business. So the side gig. So, the quickly became the 100k group, and then eventually it became the million-dollar group. So you had to do a million dollars trailing twelve. And so over three or four years, we've grown from 10-20, thirty members to now we have over four hundred and seventy members, and it's it's like the most prestigious and highly respected paid mastermind for Amazon sellers if you do that revenue over a million dollars.
05:17 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I appreciate that. And so many times, as you said, that, like, being able to find that new frontier as you said so well or be like a first mover and start to lay that groundwork and have success. It provides, it sounds so many other opportunities that people want to know how to replicate and understand exactly how to do what you're doing.
05:34 – Ian Sells
Exactly. Yeah. And and the the story doesn't stop there. Right? It continues to rebate the key. So rebate key was just an idea that I had, and, it was, like, basically back in the day when I would work at Circuit City selling printers, at seventeen years old. People would buy these printers, and they'd mail in the UPC and, get a check in the mail, sixty days later from the manufacturer, like, a manufacturer rebate. So came up with that idea, but posted it in the group, and all of a sudden, everyone's like, that's a great idea. Let's do it. And so a guy in the group, I wasn't connected with that closely. He's like, hey. Let's do this together. Twenty-four hours later, we put up a web page, and we raised a hundred thousand dollars in twenty-four hours for this idea of rebate key.
06:19 – Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. The most beautiful thing is I use I am too an alumnus of Circuit City. Some people might not know what that is, but I also I was on the CD side, and I did a little bit of TV sales as well. So it was great to hear how that ID I did have those seats planted there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, cool. Well, so I know you touched on rebate keys. So I wanted to drill down a little bit. I know I know you touched on a little bit about that, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about what we can find there. How does it work, and what service does it provide for people?
06:49 – Ian Sells
Yeah. So rebate key serves the need of, e-commerce merchants that need to promote their products on different marketplaces, whether it be Amazon, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, or whatever. RebateKey is like an independent site that uses the order ID that the merchant gives you. So Amazon has an order ID. Walmart has an order ID. Everybody has order IDs. We use that to track the purchase of a consumer. So consumers come to our site to find great deals, and sellers come to our site to post deals that they wanna promote. So they might offer their newest, latest, greatest product at fifty percent rebate or seventy-five percent rebate if they wanna drive a lot of sales. And so the difference here is that we can't just stand at a store at a Vons or Costco and hand out samples and get people excited, right, for free.
So online, you have to incentivize people to buy your products and try them out, and get word-of-mouth marketing. So rebates are a great way to do that, and a lot of platforms don't have coupons or other ways to drive sales. So RebateKey can work on any platform because buyers will actually find the deals, discover them on RebateKey that that are posted by sellers, and then they'll go buy them on, let's say, Amazon, and then take the order ID and put it on rebate key. That's where the seller can verify that that person bought the product, and then we wait thirty-five days before we transfer the money from the seller to the buyer's account as a cashback rebate online.
08:11 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be for yourself individually or the other businesses and the empire you've been able to build. But what do you feel sets either you apart or your business as a part that makes it unique?
08:25 – Ian Sells
That's a great question. I've been an entrepreneur. You know, just everything always moves forward with me, so I don't get stuck in the details. It's like the eighty-twenty. I just get out there and do it. And so I'll try everything once and then and give it a shot. And who cares if I fail? And I always tell people what's the worst I can have when you fail? So what? Right? You just move on down the road. So I think my secret sauce is that, and also I like to find different resources to tap into to to grow or scale businesses.
So I'm always looking for new service providers that could potentially help my business out. If I have two service providers, I'm not sure if I'll hire both of them, see which one does better, different ways of actually, like, operating your business versus trying to avenue yourself and conserve money. I'm willing to leverage money and and and and and buy time from experts, essentially.
09:16 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. Especially, because that's the most valuable resource that we all have is time. And to be able to understand that, and as you said learning that especially from your real estate background, knowing, like, what that value is and how to make sound investments into yourself, but also your businesses, it sounds like too.
09:34 – Ian Sells
That's right.
09:34 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And I appreciate you for being able to understand each of those pieces because I think a lot of times people don't realize or understand all of that. So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
09:56 – Ian Sells
Good question. A lot of it has to do with, using apps to save time. So I love, Calendly for scheduling all of my meetings. Like, everybody's like, hey. What times can you meet? And I'm just like, hey. Would you do me a favor? Just book it on this link right here, and it's done. I don't have to go back and forth ten times. So I love that app a ton. I use ClickUp in my businesses to organize all of our processes. I think, the best project management tool out there. And it just does so much more than that, and it hosts documents, and it allows everybody to have a different view, and you can see things in different ways.
And so it's a very good place to centralize all your look your information. And then just like communication on a virtual team, we use Slack a lot, which helps cut down on the emails and allows everybody to get together on a topic or sort something out quickly where before our weekly meeting, let's say. So I think those are two to ask. And then, I wish I had a perfect morning. I've got young kids right now, so I can't get that. It's getting up early enough to do some stretching, go to the gym, and get back and have some coffee. And I don't even eat till noon or 01:00. So I have a lot of energy throughout the morning, and that makes my day. And I try to focus on getting back there, except when my kids are waking me up all night.
11:19 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
11:34 – Ian Sells
I had success early on, with the real estate business, growing so fast at the right time. And we didn't back then, I didn't utilize networks or advisors. We had people that were like, wow. You guys are just crushing it. Let me invest with you. Adults, people with kids in college, things like that we were just doing so well. And, I wish that I had taken advantage of more, resources at that time and had more, like, a mentor. Maybe I found somebody else that was, a seasoned real estate investor who was our our mentor.
That was something that helped us guide because we made a lot of mistakes. It's easy to hide the mistakes when there's a lot of success, but it's hard to hide the mistakes when the market is changing and things like that. So, yeah, I think the golden nugget is to look for community, look for advisors. Don't think that you need to reinvent the wheel. And that's what I learned from my real estate days. And so that's why I created the Million Dollar Salary because I wanted to be in a mind share of people who are just like me doing the same thing as me, so I didn't have to figure everything out myself.
12:42 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. And, I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're open to different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Ian, what does being a CEO mean to you?
12:53 – Ian Sells
Well, for me, I'm the visionary type of CEO, so I'm the guy with the big ideas. And I can see the future essentially a lot of times better than other people or kinda understand, like, where are we going? I don't think about, like, the past or the day-to-day. I kinda, like, think about my future. And so as a CEO, we have to lead the team and inspire them, to perform their best to hit goals and also understand where is the company going. So I've learned a lot about running your business where everybody on the same team to the lowest level understands what the goals are of the company.
A lot of times you're like, you hire somebody for a role and you don't share, like, oh, we wanna do two million dollars in revenue or whatnot. Like, they should know that, and it helps them go, okay. Wow. We're at one point five. If I just make five more calls today, I'm gonna help the company hit its goals. And so I think, like, bringing the whole team together and having a little bit more transparency, and leading the vision and the core values of the company is really what the CEO has to do.
13:53 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that.
13:55 – Ian Sells
And sometimes you don't realize, like, if I do make those five more calls, how that's going to impact the overall goal. But when I think you can paint that picture as a leader, it allows you to make sure everybody understands that and has an idea of what they're doing. But I imagine too that it's probably helped out as far as you knowing, where your strengths lie, how you can bring people on the team, and how they can complement everything you're doing from your businesses, but also from the mastermind as well. I mean, well, across the four different businesses I run, and everyone's a different team.
It's really important to, you know, let them know that, like, I'm there to support the vision, but not working on their processes with them. Right? And I need people that I can hire to trust, and they're gonna accomplish the goal of the company, which supports them and their livelihood. And when people can see a clear path of how their impacts affect the company, I think that's where, like, you start to see a lot of wins.
14:54 – Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. When everybody can be in their zone of genius and they do the thing that they do best, that's when, as you said, you start seeing those wins happen regularly. So, Ian, truly appreciate that definition, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things that you're working on.
15:18 – Ian Sells
Yeah. I mean, you can always reach me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best business place. Send a mail or a message. You can go, email me at Iansales@rebatekey.com. If you're a brand owner and you are looking to grow your sales online on any marketplace, check out RebateKey. It's free to sign up and launch a campaign. It's a pay per for performance, marketplace. So you only pay as rebates are given out. So it doesn't hurt to get more exposure for your brand and add sales. And if you are an Amazon seller or a direct consumer seller on Shopify or whatnot, check out Milliondollarsellers.com. That's where we have this online community. It's now much more than a Facebook group. We throw events all around the country. We have annual summits, and you will be around like-minded people who are proven and driven, and you will feel at home as a million-dollar seller or more.
16:08 – Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ian, for taking some time out today, of course, for being a trailblazer as well too, and finding that path and then helping so many other people, you know, be successful as well. So we will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can connect with you and follow up with you. But thank you so much, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:27 – Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
00:23 - Intro
Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.
00:51 - Gresham Harkless
Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Ian Sales of RebateKey. Ian, it's great to have you on the show.
01:00 - Ian Sells
Hey. Thanks for having me too.
01:03 - Gresham Harkless
Super excited to have you on. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Ian so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Ian has been a serial entrepreneur since childhood when he'd rescue, repair, and resell items tossed by others. And since two thousand four, Ian has been growing and scaling businesses through fiscally sound leverage and proven Internet marketing strategies. After selling his first Amazon brand, he launched four more product lines while also opening an Amazon consulting business managing over thirty million dollars in sales.
He is the CEO and founder of million-dollar sales sellers, MDS, an elite mastermind Amazon group with nearly four hundred sellers representing four billion dollars in twenty nineteen Amazon sales and his continued mission to empower leveraging brands. Ian is the co-founder and CEO of RebateKey, a rapidly growing online cashback rebate and coupon marketplace. Ian, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?
01:55 - Ian Sells
Absolutely.
01:56 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So to kinda kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit. I know I touched on it a little bit, but I wanna hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.
02:10 - Ian Sells
Yeah. Well essentially, out of college, I started my own real estate company buying houses up in the college area and renting them out to college kids. So we quickly grew that business in a few years to managing and buying over a hundred houses, in San Diego. And that's how I came out of college, swinging hard. And that transition as things progressed from two thousand four to two thousand twelve when I started to look into other businesses to invest in and, was investing in a friend's business from a college that was selling products on Amazon in twenty twelve. And, we gave him, five grand, and he bought some Xbox hard drives, and we sold them online. And, within a week or two, they just all sold out. We're like, wow. This is amazing.
02:54 - Gresham Harkless
Nice.
02:54 - Ian Sells
And so we kept going with it. And, eventually, we took on some other products and created our brands. We had Bluetooth speakers and things like that. And within about a year and a half of that business, we were quickly doing over a million dollars in revenue, in the early days of Amazon really, and sold that business off. So that's when I decided to put more time into it stop doing so much real estate and focus on Amazon. And so I started another brand by myself after we sold out with some of the profits. Within a year, I was doing over a million dollars with that brand too. So I realized how fast you could grow on Amazon and knew all the marketing methods. And because of my background in real estate, I was able to take advantage of knowing how to invest money wisely into a business that scales and has ROI.
03:43 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I appreciate you sharing that story and then how everything has evolved into what you're doing now. And I think so many times we hear stories, we don't realize, like, each of the pieces of your story, all the parts of your background kind of play in parts. So that's what oh, I appreciate you talking about that fiscally responsibility responsible, way you're able to approach your business.
04:01 - Ian Sells
Yeah. And that's how a million-dollar sellers, group ended up coming about was I needed a group of people. I was looking for resources on how to sell on Amazon and it's like the new frontier. No. There's no guidebook on how to do this. So we're on Facebook chatting in different groups, and I was scaling faster than a lot of people. I would see people, hey. Is this a good product to sell or whatnot? And I was like, okay. Well, I'm already doing, twenty-five thousand dollars a month in sales. How do I get to fifty thousand? How do I get to a hundred thousand? How do I go beyond that?
And so I created a little community called, the fifty k and up group. So, if you're doing fifty thousand dollars a month in revenue, you can join this group, and we would bring in people, to the group over, you know, on a daily or weekly basis, whatever, and grew just really slowly, but, like, found people online kind of on the same path as me, able to grow and scale faster and wanna run this as a real business. So the side gig. So, the quickly became the 100k group, and then eventually it became the million-dollar group. So you had to do a million dollars trailing twelve. And so over three or four years, we've grown from 10-20, thirty members to now we have over four hundred and seventy members, and it's it's like the most prestigious and highly respected paid mastermind for Amazon sellers if you do that revenue over a million dollars.
05:17 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. Well, I appreciate that. And so many times, as you said, that, like, being able to find that new frontier as you said so well or be like a first mover and start to lay that groundwork and have success. It provides, it sounds so many other opportunities that people want to know how to replicate and understand exactly how to do what you're doing.
05:34 - Ian Sells
Exactly. Yeah. And and the the story doesn't stop there. Right? It continues to rebate the key. So rebate key was just an idea that I had, and, it was, like, basically back in the day when I would work at Circuit City selling printers, at seventeen years old. People would buy these printers, and they'd mail in the UPC and, get a check in the mail, sixty days later from the manufacturer, like, a manufacturer rebate. So came up with that idea, but posted it in the group, and all of a sudden, everyone's like, that's a great idea. Let's do it. And so a guy in the group, I wasn't connected with that closely. He's like, hey. Let's do this together. Twenty-four hours later, we put up a web page, and we raised a hundred thousand dollars in twenty-four hours for this idea of rebate key.
06:19 - Gresham Harkless
Nice. I love that. The most beautiful thing is I use I am too an alumnus of Circuit City. Some people might not know what that is, but I also I was on the CD side, and I did a little bit of TV sales as well. So it was great to hear how that ID I did have those seats planted there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, cool. Well, so I know you touched on rebate keys. So I wanted to drill down a little bit. I know I know you touched on a little bit about that, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about what we can find there. How does it work, and what service does it provide for people?
06:49 - Ian Sells
Yeah. So rebate key serves the need of, e-commerce merchants that need to promote their products on different marketplaces, whether it be Amazon, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, or whatever. RebateKey is like an independent site that uses the order ID that the merchant gives you. So Amazon has an order ID. Walmart has an order ID. Everybody has order IDs. We use that to track the purchase of a consumer. So consumers come to our site to find great deals, and sellers come to our site to post deals that they wanna promote. So they might offer their newest, latest, greatest product at fifty percent rebate or seventy-five percent rebate if they wanna drive a lot of sales. And so the difference here is that we can't just stand at a store at a Vons or Costco and hand out samples and get people excited, right, for free.
So online, you have to incentivize people to buy your products and try them out, and get word-of-mouth marketing. So rebates are a great way to do that, and a lot of platforms don't have coupons or other ways to drive sales. So RebateKey can work on any platform because buyers will actually find the deals, discover them on RebateKey that that are posted by sellers, and then they'll go buy them on, let's say, Amazon, and then take the order ID and put it on rebate key. That's where the seller can verify that that person bought the product, and then we wait thirty-five days before we transfer the money from the seller to the buyer's account as a cashback rebate online.
08:11 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce. And this could be for yourself individually or the other businesses and the empire you've been able to build. But what do you feel sets either you apart or your business as a part that makes it unique?
08:25 - Ian Sells
That's a great question. I've been an entrepreneur. You know, just everything kinda always moves forward with me, so I don't get stuck in the details. It's like the eighty-twenty. I just get out there and do it. And so I'll try everything once and then and give it a shot. And who cares if I fail? And I always tell people what's the worst I can have when you fail? So what? Right? You just move on down the road. So I think my secret sauce is that, and also I like to find different resources to tap into to to grow or scale businesses.
So I'm always looking for new service providers that could potentially help my business out. If I have two service providers, I'm not sure if I'll hire both of them, see which one does better, different ways of actually, like, operating your business versus trying to avenue yourself and conserve money. I'm willing to leverage money and and and and and buy time from experts, essentially.
09:16 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. Especially, because that's the most valuable resource that we all have is time. And to be able to understand that, and as you said learning that especially from your real estate background, knowing, like, what that value is and how to make sound investments into yourself, but also your businesses, it sounds like too.
09:34 - Ian Sells
That's right.
09:34 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And I appreciate you for being able to understand each of those pieces because I think a lot of times people don't realize or understand all of that. So, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?
09:56 - Ian Sells
Good question. A lot of it has to do with, using apps to save time. So I love, Calendly for scheduling all of my meetings. Like, everybody's like, hey. What times can you meet? And I'm just like, hey. Would you do me a favor? Just book it on this link right here, and it's done. I don't have to go back and forth ten times. So I love that app a ton. I use ClickUp in my businesses to organize all of our processes. I think, the best project management tool out there. And it just does so much more than that, and it hosts documents, and it allows everybody to have a different view, and you can see things in different ways.
And so it's a very good place to centralize all your look your information. And then just like communication on a virtual team, we use Slack a lot, which helps cut down on the emails and allows everybody to get together on a topic or sort something out quickly where before our weekly meeting, let's say. So I think those are two to ask. And then, I wish I had a perfect morning. I've got young kids right now, so I can't get that. It's getting up early enough to do some stretching, go to the gym, and get back and have some coffee. And I don't even eat till noon or 01:00. So I have a lot of energy throughout the morning, and that makes my day. And I try to focus on getting back there, except when my kids are waking me up all night.
11:19 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. And so I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.
11:34 - Ian Sells
I had success early on, with the real estate business, growing so fast at the right time. And we didn't back then, I didn't utilize networks or advisors. We had people that were like, wow. You guys are just crushing it. Let me invest with you. Adults, people with kids in college, things like that we were just doing so well. And, I wish that I had taken advantage of more, resources at that time and had more, like, a mentor. Maybe I found somebody else that was, a seasoned real estate investor who was our our mentor.
That was something that helped us guide because we made a lot of mistakes. It's easy to hide the mistakes when there's a lot of success, but it's hard to hide the mistakes when the market is changing and things like that. So, yeah, I think the golden nugget is to look for community, look for advisors. Don't think that you need to reinvent the wheel. And that's what I learned from my real estate days. And so that's why I created the Million Dollar Salary because I wanted to be in a mind share of people who are just like me doing the same thing as me, so I didn't have to figure everything out myself.
12:42 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. And, I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're open to different quotes-unquote CEOs on this show. So, Ian, what does being a CEO mean to you?
12:53 - Ian Sells
Well, for me, I'm the visionary type of CEO, so I'm the guy with the big ideas. And I can see the future essentially a lot of times better than other people or kinda understand, like, where are we going? I don't think about, like, the past or the day-to-day. I kinda, like, think about my future. And so as a CEO, we have to lead the team and inspire them, to perform their best to hit goals and also understand where is the company going. So I've learned a lot about running your business where everybody on the same team to the lowest level understands what the goals are of the company.
A lot of times you're like, you hire somebody for a role and you don't share, like, oh, we wanna do two million dollars in revenue or whatnot. Like, they should know that, and it helps them go, okay. Wow. We're at one point five. If I just make five more calls today, I'm gonna help the company hit its goals. And so I think, like, bringing the whole team together and having a little bit more transparency, and leading the vision and the core values of the company is really what the CEO has to do.
13:53 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. And I appreciate you sharing that.
13:55 - Ian Sells
And sometimes you don't realize, like, if I do make those five more calls, how that's going to impact the overall goal. But when I think you can paint that picture as a leader, it allows you to make sure everybody understands that and has an idea of what they're doing. But I imagine too that it's probably helped out as far as you knowing, where your strengths lie, how you can bring people on the team, and how they can complement everything you're doing from your businesses, but also from the mastermind as well. I mean, well, across the four different businesses I run, and everyone's a different team.
It's really important to, you know, let them know that, like, I'm there to support the vision, but not working on their processes with them. Right? And I need people that I can hire to trust, and they're gonna accomplish the goal of the company, which supports them and their livelihood. And when people can see a clear path of how their impacts affect the company, I think that's where, like, you start to see a lot of wins.
14:54 - Gresham Harkless
Yeah. Absolutely. When everybody can be in their zone of genius and they do the thing that they do best, that's when, as you said, you start seeing those wins happen regularly. So, Ian, truly appreciate that definition, and I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things that you're working on.
15:18 - Ian Sells
Yeah. I mean, you can always reach me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best business place. Send a mail or a message. You can go, email me at Iansales@rebatekey.com. If you're a brand owner and you are looking to grow your sales online on any marketplace, check out RebateKey. It's free to sign up and launch a campaign. It's a pay per for performance, marketplace. So you only pay as rebates are given out. So it doesn't hurt to get more exposure for your brand and add sales. And if you are an Amazon seller or a direct consumer seller on Shopify or whatnot, check out Milliondollarsellers.com. That's where we have this online community. It's now much more than a Facebook group. We throw events all around the country. We have annual summits, and you will be around like-minded people who are proven and driven, and you will feel at home as a million-dollar seller or more.
16:08 - Gresham Harkless
Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ian, for taking some time out today, of course, for being a trailblazer as well too, and finding that path and then helping so many other people, you know, be successful as well. So we will have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that everybody can connect with you and follow up with you. But thank you so much, my friend, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.
16:27 - Outro
Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.
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