Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle w/ Curt Mercadante
Curt helps entrepreneurs and wannapreneurs design, manifest, and grow their freedom businesses. For 25 years, he has counseled small businesses, entrepreneurs, as well as some of the largest corporations and associations in the country. He’s built three profitable businesses, including a 7-figure PR and ad agency.
In this episode, Curt talks about his book, Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle, and how he walked the walk by shutting down his business, selling his home, and traveling around the US and the world. If you’re an overworked entrepreneur trying to escape the comfort zone of misery, give it a listen.
Curt's Links:
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Josh Steimle: Today, my guest is Curt Mercadante. Curt helps entrepreneurs and wantrapreneurs design, manifest and grow their freedom businesses. For 25 years, he's counseled small businesses, entrepreneurs, as well as some of the largest corporations and associations in the country. He's built three profitable businesses, including a seven-figure PR and ad agency. He's a Gallup-Certified Strengths Trainer, a certified human behavior consultant, and author of the best-selling book, Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle.
Curt, welcome to the show.
Curt Mercadante: Thanks Josh. It's been a pleasure. We've known each other online for a little while now, so it's great to actually “sorta” meet in person.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. I've been following you for years. I don't know how it started. I think we're just kind of part of the same group of people that are into marketing and conferences or something. But I know I've seen you around for a long time. We're finally getting to really chat here in person, “sort of”. But give us some of your background for those out there, who haven't heard of you before, where do you come from? What's your entrepreneurial background?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah. Well first of all, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. And yeah, I think we first “met” on LinkedIn and then I've been had a love affair on and off with Twitter and I had a bunch of followers. I ditched Twitter.
I came back and I left and I came back and next thing I know Josh has a blue check mark. It's like amazing, but…
Josh Steimle: Well they're handing them out to anybody these days.
Curt Mercadante: And taking them away.
We're almost at the four-year anniversary, where I woke up on a Tuesday morning, it was Thanksgiving weekend, and I had had built a seven-figure PR and ad agency and scaled it. But I had about eight or nine years of denial and anxiety attacks and poor health and not being the best husband, the best father. And I woke up on that Tuesday morning and I asked myself a question. I said, “There's that God awful meeting next week that we had this eight hour planning session,” I said, “If my plane goes down, to or from that meeting, is it worth it?” And I said, “No.”
And so I told my wife that I'm shutting it down. She said, “It's about time.” Because she knew, just mentally, physically, spiritually, I was just crushing myself, traveling all the time. And I fired all my clients on that day, shut it down, brought my revenue down to zero and started my current company, which is a speaking training coaching company.
Along with that other agency, I had built another very successful digital media publishing company, as well and started over. And, I'm not that smart of a guy, but I seem to be able to create businesses that make money and sell. And now I'm doing one that gives me freedom and fulfillment. And I use the examples I learned over the 14 years of that agency, of what's really important. The trial and error of how you define success based on what you think it's supposed to be, which may just be dollars and cents, which, “Hey, I'm a free market capitalist, right?” But when you attach your meaning to that, sometimes you spend your life playing defense to defend what you have and hoard what you have and you spend your life waiting. Waiting until you're 59 and a half, and you can touch your SEP or your IRA or your 401k or waiting till 65 for work-life balance and the life part to balance out.
And so I used all those lessons to write my book Five Pillars of the Freedom Lifestyle. And there's five simple lessons in there of what you can bring to bear, to manifest, to build freedom.
The first one is unleash your superpowers.
Two is clearly define a vision for your life, so you have a guiding star.
Three is alignment, not balance, but what does alignment look like for you when your work, your family, and yourself are in alignment?
The next one is outcomes. So you take that life you design and then you reverse engineer it so that every year, every month, every week, every day, you know the key outcomes you need to achieve to get where you want to go. So you're not just throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks.
And then the fifth one is do it in a state of flow. So you get in a state of flow instead of a state of grind and all those I've found and worked with my clients to find the same thing. Gets you in a way where you can be successful.
Yeah, you can have the money, but you're doing it where you can be a good father or mother. You can be a good parent. You can be a good spouse or partner and you can enjoy life and spend your life living instead of waiting. I think over the last few years, there's a lot of people who've woken up to the fact that living isn't just about the hour and a half commute and the water cooler chat and getting yelled at by a boss. And quite honestly, that's what I think, whatever four or 5 million people have resigned because they're like, I'd rather have some enjoyment in my life, rather than wait until 65.
Josh Steimle: And this isn't just lip service for you. You're living this, right?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah. In addition to that four years ago, it's been a big journey since then. We've traveled to Europe several times. We were going to travel more and then the recent unpleasantness occurred over the last two years. But in the middle of it, we were living in Charleston, South Carolina for seven years. And, generally speaking, we don't like being told what to do, but they closed down the parks and the beaches and we weren't allowed to do stuff.
And then, our kid was in an acting class and they wouldn't let him do that. And then we had some other unpleasantness, all this stuff that happened last summer in Charleston. Outside people came and tried to literally burn down the city and I'm like, “You know what? Let's just get up and go.” So we sold our house. At one point that was going to be our forever home. We said, no. We sold our house. And we sold/donated, basically everything we own that didn't fit into our minivan or a five foot storage container and took our four kids. So we have our daughter, who is 15 and then our sons are 13, 10, and 7.
And we've been traveling the country since September of 2020. We've been in the mountains, the beaches, back to the beaches again. We've been in the desert. And we came into Sedona, Arizona, loved it. The energy here is incredible. We found a state of flow here that we've never found anywhere else. So now we're going to hang out here for awhile.
Josh Steimle: So when you wrote the book, obviously you had a mission in mind, you wanted to get this message out there. Was that also something that was factoring into your business and your speaking that you needed for those reasons as well?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, absolutely. I'm very pragmatic and outcomes what I want to do.
I wasn't like going to the book, I'm going to get rich off writing a book. I was very intentional of thought leadership, build the brand, use it to get speaking gigs and clients.
So the book was published in 2019. I have a bootcamp called the Freedom Business Blueprint Bootcamp in which we take the pillars and use them for people who are either entrepreneurs who built a prison instead of a business, or wantrepreneurs, who've been hanging out with their side hustle for four years and are like, I don't know what to do next.
So we designed it from the ground up using the principles in the book.
Josh Steimle: So now, you had some experience with writing and producing content, before you wrote the book, did you feel pretty confident going into it, or how challenging was it going through the process of writing this book?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, you know, I was pretty consistent with content. I haven't missed a day of at least two posts a day on LinkedIn for four years. Which is why I'm worn out on Twitter. I can't do the 12, 13 a day. What I did was I actually started, I don't know the exact timeline, but I decided sometime before I'm going to write some LinkedIn articles. But kind of write my book through LinkedIn articles, at least the principles, et cetera.
And so I started doing that maybe in the summer or the fall.
And then, I think around December, January, I'm like, “Okay, by March, I want the manuscript.” And so what I started doing was looking back at my past writings, taking a lot of those, organizing them into something that made sense. Really came up with the five pillars. Organizing that into a kind of process that could be packaged and easily understood. And then, what I did was I'm very good at time-blocking, so Monday and Friday, I'm no longer taking any calls or working with any clients. It's writing day.
Now, I wouldn't write all day, but what I wouldn't do is cheat with, I'm going to take a call here and there. I’d do meditation in the morning. I'd work out in the morning. I do that. And then I would write, and then after that, my reward was family time, go do whatever I want. But I take about two hours on a Friday, two hours on a Monday. Some of it was organizing content I had, some of it was writing from scratch.
And just that systematic approach. It was like, boom, I had a book. And then I had met an editor at a conference. She's up in New England. Did the process. And next thing it was done. I got a state of flow and writing it versus, “Oh my gosh, I got a deadline and I’ve got to write a thousand words today, or 3000 tomorrow.” It was just Monday, Friday. And you know what, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I just didn't even worry about it. I didn't even think about it. And if I had an idea, I'd throw it in a folder for the book, but I only focused Monday, Friday on writing that book.
And before you knew it, it was like, it’s done.
Josh Steimle: It’s always interesting to hear the different systems people set up to get their book done. So you mentioned writing on LinkedIn and doing LinkedIn articles. Did you write your entire book in LinkedIn articles or was that just at the beginning or parts of it?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, no, it wasn't the entire piece.
Actually another big piece, kind of the first part of the book was a combo of some LinkedIn articles. And, you know, the LinkedIn articles would get out my thoughts, but it was only 500 words. So then I would expand on that and maybe turn that into a chapter. I also I had a podcast at the time called Freedom Mindset radio, and I was interviewing a number of people and they told stories that weaved into thematically what I want to explain with the book.
So I had that whole bank of interviews and as I would expand on the topics and get into these topics, I would go back and say, “Oh wow. I interviewed so-and-so about that. This would make a great story for the book. So then I use their stories and I had the transcripts from the podcast to use there.”
And it was like, I had done the interviews, but it was like, I had interviewed them for the book. And so I put that in there. So I had this ready-made content for it. And I think a lot of people probably do that. And I do a bootcamp, that's really about branding and sales and one of the things and the biggest challenges I hear is, “You've posted twice a day for four years. Like where do you find your conent?” And I go back to Gary V, half the stuff I can take, half the stuff I can't take from Gary V. But one of the things he says that's true is, “Document, don't create.” Like we have conversations each day. We have life experiences. We have conversations with potential clients. We have conversations on podcasts. We have conversations with existing clients.
I tell people like, if an existing client is having a challenge or a problem. Like extrapolate that out. There might be another 10,000 of your ideal clients who are having the same problem. So document it and use it as a post. You don't have to use their name.
It's the same with a book. Things are going on where you just got to bring them in. Put them on paper, before you know it, you realize, “Wow, thematically, I've got a book here.” Thematically, I have content for two months to put on social media to build my brand. So you don't have to be a creative genius, just document what's going on in your life.
Josh Steimle: When you were writing your book, who are you thinking of reading the book, who is the target audience?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, at the time it really was, and I coached some women, but it really was men 45 to 55 who were in what I like to call a comfort zone of misery. Actually, that's the the subtitle of the book is How to Escape Your Comfort Zone of Misery. And, Henry David Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And I call it a comfort zone of misery, right? Because the quiet desperation can be more dangerous than loud desperation because when it's loud.
There's been a study of POW's during the Korean conflict, Korean war, whatever. And there were more deaths amongst POW's, but less physical torture. So the Chief Army Medical Officer went in there and looked. And it wasn't that they were physically harming them because what the Koreans knew and they found out, that if you punch a POW, they get energy from it and it gives them something to live for, “When I get out of here, I'm coming back and I'm going to kill you.”
If you just ignore them and take away all hope. It's quiet, they just wither away. So quiet desperation is more dangerous because you can live in that comfort zone, even if it's miserable for years. And it's just comfortable enough to put up with the misery. And it's just a life of blah.
And, I didn't know this at the time, but those were the people who were coming in as clients at the time. Now, I've changed business models a little bit. And so now, I have a more diverse array of people coming in. But at the time, I looked at it after I published the book and Pre-COVID, 7 out of 10 suicides in America are white males, 45 to 54. And I tell people that and they're shocked. I said, “I'm not saying this because I want you to feel sorry for white middle-aged men.” But, people are shocked because of a) Who gets the news? and b) Well, wait, aren't they the privileged people? So why are they…? Others people's expectations that they've been living since they were 15, I'm living the life the dad wanted me to live when I was 10 or my boss or society. And they get to that area. And it's that comfort zone of misery. Those words speak to them because they're like, “Yeah, that's me.”
But when it gets loud, like it did for me, I woke up and I quit my job. I wish I had done it for eight or nine years. I had lived in that comfort zone for eight or nine years. So that was really in my head and in my mind, when I was writing the book.
Josh Steimle: How many people, I guess probably the majority, but how many people are in that comfort zone of misery, but they think that they're happy? Not just that they're like putting up with it, but they actually think this is good. I'm in a good place. And then they wake up and say, “Wait a second, no, I'm not happy.”
Curt Mercadante: Yeah. I call them pain unaware, solution unaware. And then sometimes they'll see a video from me and they'll be like, “Oh wait, that's not normal.” And I had a recent bootcamp and a guy dropped out. And, you know, there's a difference between being content and settling. And sometimes people don't know the difference. And they’ll be like, “Listen, I only have to try and make it another 15, 20 years. I'm not happy, but hey, I'm making good money.” And they just define their life by their paycheck. But they put on a hundred pounds. Physically their energy isn't there. The spark in their marriage has gone out. They're not the best father or mother, whatever that they're supposed to be. And yeah, they think, well, I'm happy though, because I'm living the American dream as it was portrayed to me for the last 50 years,
Josh Steimle: I've got a house in that flex, What more could you want?
Curt Mercadante: I had a guy, we had met on LinkedIn and chatted in the fall. Nice guy. He lives up in the Pacific Northwest. And he was like, “Yeah, things are going great here.” He's an attorney. Everything's great. And I hear that a lot. Everything's great. And I talked to him. He pinged me, I was watching college football, this was about three or four weeks ago and I had switched cell phones, so I get this thing, “Hey, how are you doing?”
I'm like, “I'm doing great. By the way, who is this?”
And he says, “Hey, it's me.”
“Oh great!” I said, “How are you doing?”
He's like, “Better than ever!”
I said, “Oh really? What happened?”
He said, “I had the Widowmaker in April, almost died. Massive heart attack. And it's the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Unfortunately, sometimes, and in my book I write about it, is called an infrastructure rattling event, for us to realize, “I'm not happy. What the hell is going on in my life?”
My dad died in 2012. That was my infrastructure rattling event. My dad worked on the space program. I joke around that he was a real life Tony Stark. He worked on the space program, designed all the switches on the Boeing 777, has a patent for that. My brother told me he designed one of the first shoulder fire missiles. Did all this cool stuff. And then also the first world's first digital sewing machine. You know, all this stuff.
At his funeral, I'm sitting there and all these grown men are crying. No one mentioned my dad's career. It was, he was the president of the local Notre Dame club. He read to the blind. He read audio books. He would go and read like a couple times a week, audio books to the blind. He was president of the Parish Council, all these things. And it was, to me, it was a wake up call of, “Who the hell is going to show up at my funeral?”
But that was in 2012, it still took another five years. So even once I realized I wasn't happy, it still was like the money is good, but I'm dying, but the money's good, so I got to go with that. Until it just, it hit. And people are like, “What's the catalyst to change for you?” And I said, “Pain.”
Some people, often, many people are more motivated less by the pursuit of happiness, than the avoidance of pain. Until the pain gets so bad on your comfort zone, that then you're like, “Okay, I got to jump off the cliff. Otherwise this fire is coming at me.”
But to your point, there's a lot of people. I don't know the numbers. I already mentioned one statistic that shows all those people who think they're happy and next thing it's, I thought Joe was happy and he took his own life. It's an unfortunate statistic and I'm sure there's ones beyond that. Whether it's divorce, depression, a number of factors that probably portray what you're talking about.
Josh Steimle: So how long did it take you to go from conception to publishing your book?
Curt Mercadante: I had it in the back of my head for awhile. So I think from officially, “Okay, here's what it is.” I think it was probably really November, December when we started. And while we published it in September, it was ready to go in July, but I didn't want to do anything in July. Like I didn't want to, July and August, dog days of summer, let's wait until September. We were going on vacation. So it would have been ready in July. I was done writing it in March. So then, the design and the editing and all that good stuff. So probably December to July ish and then another two months of just waiting.
Josh Steimle: And so what have you been doing since to promote the book and get the word out there? Get it into the hands of the people who need it?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, I think, the biggest way is social media posting. LinkedIn has probably been the biggest way. I'll do podcasts like these and talk about it. Especially at the beginning, I did a lot of podcasts over a six month period after the release. With the podcasts, it's hard to look at the Amazon numbers to see exactly when it goes up.
Now, a couple of times a month, I'll do a Freedom Friday and post it and I can tell the sales go up. But also, I did a training in April in Texas. And they bought 50 books as part of that. I'll go into a speech and they'll buy a hundred books as part of my fee. And so that's great when you can do that and sell it in bulk like that. That's just money in the bank and you don't have to do any promotion of it. But really podcasts. LinkedIn is my bread and butter for conversion on anything. Quite honestly. At the time I had a robust Facebook group, too, a lot of people would buy it in that Facebook group. But I deleted Facebook and now I came back on Facebook. So I killed off some of that stuff. So yeah.
Josh Steimle: I'm curious. Earlier today I was interviewing a guy, James Carbary.
He has a book called the Content-Based Networking, and it's about involving people in your content as a form of connecting to people that you want to connect with. So you want to talk to somebody, you launch a podcast and then you invite them to be a guest on your podcast. And that's how you get to talk to them.
Did you do anything like that with your book, with the research that you were doing in terms of involving your community or involving people in your content? And did you see benefits from the content before the book even came out, that way?
Curt Mercadante: Yeah, what I mentioned about my podcast and having guests that were featured in the book. I didn't tell them that they were going to be in the book. But what I did was I sent them early copies of the book with notes or a note bookmarking the area where they were mentioned, and they were extremely flattered by it. Some of them actually showed up and bought a bunch of books to give away as gifts or whatever. But then they also were the ones who helped promote it and went out there and promoted it for me.
And I'm working on my next book or two, I go back and forth on which one I'm going to do, but I had a branding podcast for about a year and I had some just star superstars on there and I'm like, “Okay. I want to put them in my next book.” And these are folks who might sell thousands of books for me. Cause they have big networks, influential networks. So that's how I did it. I probably didn't do it as best, or maybe I didn't even do that intentionally, but I could certainly do a better job.
Josh Steimle: Yeah. I was just curious. So have you seen results now since the book's been published, what's coming back in terms of feedback?
Curt Mercadante: It's really interesting how I'll promote it and I'll put it up there and people will buy it and all that. Starting late last year, I started getting more and it trickles in here and there. But then now it's even more, where people will view my profile on LinkedIn, and everyone who views my profile who's within generally my target market, I'll reach out to and say, “Thanks for viewing my profile. Let's connect.”
And they'll connect. And I’ll say, “Hey, anything that peaked your interest to visit?”
And probably once a week, I’ll hear, “I just finished your book. I connected with you.”
“Oh, where'd you find my book?” And they just found it on Amazon.
I think over the last two years, that word: freedom, while it has become a triggering mechanism for some, other people want more freedom. They realized they didn't feel free. Whatever that means to them. And so they're searching for it, finding the book. And it's funny that didn't happen when I first released it, but as last year went on, I think more people, to me at least, this is anecdotally, were searching for the content in the book. And it's been really amazing when those people come in and I’m like, “How did you find my book?” And they made a positive change from it. And it leads you to believe there are probably a lot more other people out there that did the same, but didn't view my LinkedIn profile or didn't come forward.
Josh Steimle: Perfect. Well Curt, thanks so much for sharing your journey here today with us on the Published Author Podcast.
Curt Mercadante: Josh, it was my pleasure and thank you so much for the opportunity to come on.
