About Richard

The CEO Training Show is changing the landscape of business owner training

Richard created the CEO Training.com Show to provide concise, practical, and valuable advice to business owners.   Each CEO Training Show produced lasts less than 15 minutes and aims to provide north of $1,000 worth of business building advice.

Richard Wilson is the founder and managing director of programs at CEOTraining.com, BusinessTraining.com, and the Global Training & Certification Institute also known as the G.T.C. Institute.

Due to the realization that most professionals receive very little if any practical training from their employer or school within their specific area of work, Richard helped create the G.T.C. Institute. The mission of the G.T.C. Institute is to provide practical online training and certification programs for niche professions and industries so that teams or individual professionals may learn only what is relevant and practical instead of traditional and generic.

Speaking: Richard is a frequent speaker at conferences and he presents within his own full day live training workshops every year within cities such as New York, Singapore, London, Brussels, San Francisco, Moscow, Chicago, Tokyo, Boca Raton, and Hong Kong.  He often presents on capital raising, marketing, speed of implementation, influence and persuasion, and business building.

To book Richard for a conference, keynote speech, or workshop please email him at Richard@RichardCWilson.com

Writing: Richard is the author of six books and he has written and published over 5,000 articles that have been read by over 20,000,000 professionals in the business and finance industries.  His latest books have been on Speed of Implementation and The Marketer’s Bible.

Richard has a Bachelors in Business Administration from Oregon State University, an M.B.A. in Marketing from the University of Portland, and he has completed master”s level research and coursework on the psychology of influence at Harvard University within their ALM department.

My Story

Failed Business Experiments: My life started in 1982 in Chicago, IL but I grew up in Portland, Oregon.   Often times I was paid a penny a page to read a book or pick up pine cones in the yard, I was often also told to “go figure it out” whenever I complained about not knowing how to do something.

Growing up I was always trying out new business ventures which included an advertising business involving car magnets, an e-commerce website, a lawn care business, and a long distance networking marketing opportunity.  My dad ran his own business for 15 years so he made me create 2-5 page business plans for each idea and think through how I would attract clients.  The lawn care business actually made some money, the rest of the ideas were a bit too creative I guess would be one way to put it.

After my e-commerce idea flopped I decided to get a real job and through cold calling everyone with the word computer or software in their name in the yellow pages I got hired by a one man webmaster and software trainer in town, who taught me how to build websites.  I was in sports and the boy scouts growing up, and just like my father and his father before him became an Eagle Scout when I was 17. 

1 For 2 in College: In college at Oregon State University I started a consulting firm that attracted a  first client which decided to pay my $9,000 in consulting fees with bounced checks (ended that gig), and I also started an online textbook business which grew profitably for a few years before I sold (mostly gifted) it to some other students.  My best job during college was cold calling alumni to ask for donations to the university; we would call 100+ alumni a night and it was great training in sales and cold calling

From Portland To Boston: After college I set out to find a job, so I met with every CEO I could in Portland to try and prove myself as someone they should add to their team.  Eventually I connected with a fast growing consulting firm, who gave me 2x the salary I was expecting and it paid for my M.B.A. from the University of Portland.  I soon moved to Boston to take some masters level psychology of influence courses from Harvard and I ended up working in consulting, reading marketing and sales books, and raising capital for hedge fund managers for about 7 years.

What is a blog? One day I realized that there was something out there called a blog and I literally did not know what it was.  I used to create websites for a job,  so I figured I better at least know what this word means…I Googled the word blog and found Blogger.com.  I started a blog for free and started writing about living in Boston, taking courses through the Harvard ALM Program and working in the hedge fund industry.

I wrote for fun just once a week, but after just 5-6 weeks I noticed that my website visitors only wanted to read about my experience in the hedge fund industry.  I started writing once a week only on hedge funds and studying search engine optimization and my traffic grew from 100 hits a week to over 1,000 hits a day.  I then re-invested more time and started writing one short blog post each day on hedge funds.

The Tipping Point:  Eventually my blog got over 10,000 hits per day and I would get over 300 emails coming in per day from blog readers, and about $800/month in advertising income.  My boss at the capital raising firm found out about my blog because a newspaper called him to interview me about a topic I had mentioned on my blog.  My boss told me to delete my blog (300 posts at the time) or quit my job, so I did what any son of an entrepreneur would do and quit my job.

I started working on my blog 12-14 hours every single day, writing articles, optimizing my site, doing press interviews and trying to attract new $100/month or $200/month advertisers.  Within six months of starting my business, I was asked to speak at the European Business Summit where the President of Coca-Cola Europe and the Prime Minister of Czech Republic were also speaking, all because of the expertise I shared on my blog.

Oh yeah, and that same month that my writing led me to  speaking in Brussels I was having a Harvard teachers assistant who was actually from the Czech Republic (Czech was her first language) review the final draft of an essay for class and she asked me if English was my first language because my writing was so bad.  I guess good grammar isn’t required for good content that can establish you as an authority in your field.

I Made it: Eventually I built up a steady $3,000/month in income and I realized I was going to survive.  It was like the moment in the movie,  The Pursuit of Happyness when Will Smith walks onto the street and looks up and can’t believe he made it. I had always wanted to start my own business that was actually a success so this was a dream come true for me.

Momentum: Next, I realized that many of the 300+ emails I was getting every day were the same…lots of people were asking me the same questions over and over again. I used this to come up with new blog post ideas, write my first e-book, do some consulting, and most importantly come up with product and service ideas.  From my customer feedback I was able to come up with a line of products and services that were in demand by a market I understood.

Shifting Gears: That was like shifting from 1st gear into 2nd gear, and within three months of realizing this source of new product ideas I doubled my revenues and started to actually run a profitable business.   Since that point everything we have done has been based on the market demand that we research or sense through our existing websites and relationships.

Even  more importantly is that I learned how to take a business to the “next level” by improving myself, our business systems that we operated on, and the types of markets we played in.  Lots of people say to themselves “I know that” instead of “how good am I at that” and while I heard that years ago from people like Gitomer I didn’t realize how central that is to business success.

The most successful people that I can think of are constantly training themselves, paying $35,000 to join high-end mastermind groups, $25,000 for a day of coaching, or $10,000 for an hour of access to some of the top minds in business and marketing.  Many people expect heat before throwing wood in the fire, but the most successful people I know shovel wood into the fire nonstop and they can’t do it fast enough…and they all started from nothing.

Current Day: I currently run a business with four divisions, I have spoken over 50 times,written 10 books, and earned well over $1M in revenue with the support of our 20+ part and full time professionals on our team.  I write this here not to brag (well maybe a little) but really to show that I failed at my 7 of my first 8 business ventures, and have such bad writing skills that I was asked if English was my first language…yet I still have been able to become somewhat successful in business through pure hard work.

The message here is not look at my inherit talent (assuming any exists), really it is the opposite: hard work creates luck…or as Gary-V would put it – “Work Your Face Off” if you want to be successful.  One of my favorite quotes is “If you live life the easy way life is hard, if you live life the hard way life is easy.” Now that I have my business I, like many others see far too many opportunities and too little time to capitalize on them.  There are far more good business ideas and niches to be served than there are focused entrepreneurs, so don’t listen to anyone who discourages you or tells you differently.

Thank You: I have studied Jeffrey Gitomer, Eben Pagan, Brian Tracy, and Jack Canfield and I while I’m sure none of you will ever read this I am thankful for the advice you all openly share. I believe that if you give away genuinely valuable pieces of advice every day, you will be paid back many fold through the relationships you build and it is in that spirit that I’m recording these videos here on CEOTraining.com.

Thanks for visiting my website and watching my videos, please keep in touch as we continue to release more free business building videos!

 

P.S.  Below I will start posting some pictures of me with some of my favorite mentors and trainers that I have learned so much from.

1) Richard with Eben Pagan: Here is a picture of me with my brother Charlie at Eben Pagan’s Guru Mastermind Event in 2010.  I have learned a ton from Eben and hope that I can complete an expert audio interview with him shortly. If you are friends with him put in a good word for me please!