Natalie: Hello everyone. My name is Natalie Ledwell and this is the Inspiration Show. Today on

the show I have a friend of mine by the name of Damian Reid. Damian is a Canadian coming to us

from, I’m not quite sure which city, but we’re going to be talking about how his mission is

showing up in the world and how he is doing his purpose. Because as you know, a lot of you have

heard me say it before, I really believe that we all have the same purpose and that is the best

version of ourselves that we can be and to make a contribution but our mission on how that

shows up is different for all of us. And I know with Damian he specifically working with small

business owners and he’s doing that in a very big way. So please welcome my guest Mr. Damian

Reid. How are you Damian?

Damian: I’m doing well Natalie. Thanks for having me on the show.

N: Pleasure to have you here. So, why don’t we start a little bit about your background and

your story and how you got into working with small business owners.

D: Absolutely. So I started my first business when I was thirteen years old. And I probably

shouldn’t be doing what I was doing, you know, here I was at 13, underage and I actually

started dj-ing out of my mom’s basement. And very quickly found out that I had an

entrepreneurial flair and started hiring my friends to work for me. And after a couple of

years, before I knew it, I was competing at that time would have been the top radio station and

tv stations in Toronto, where I’m from. We were doing live shows competing against them and we

were winning. Ever since then, I’ve been a serial entrepreneur with different businesses. I’ve

consulted with small businesses over the time before starting the current company which is

amorvita. I also spent some time in the corporate world in telecommunications. So, it’s been a

process or a pathway that’s been perfect and lead me to exactly where I am.

N: Cool. So, amorvita, tell me a bit about this new company that you have.

D: I’d love to. So, amorvita was created back in the middle of 2013. And the company stands for

having entrepreneurs specifically small businesses and self-employed professionals do more of

what they love to do, love what they’re actually doing and achieving the results that they

dream of and may actually think impossible and so we do that by providing business services,

business coaching and personal coaching with the team that’s in five countries around the

world. Our team right now is at 16 and we’ve got about another 30 specialists and consultant

that work in consultation with the core team to provide different kinds of services. It’s

amazing. Given where we are from when we started, it’s actually been great to be a part of

creating that.

N: So, you’re creating a space for support for them or you’re educating them or like, what main

things are you doing to support business owners?

D: Primarily education and support. Actually, it’s supposed to be education and support. One of

the things I got really clear about before I started the company and it was a bit of a

disappointing discovery for me as I transitioned out of my previous career, I spent 7 years as

a transformational coach for a major international company and I was leading leadership

programs there, leading seminars and so forth. And when I came out and decided I’m going to

create amorvita, one of the things that I discovered that was upsetting for me was that the

education for small businesses and self-employed professionals really doesn’t exist. A lot of

them have to learn it by trial and error, which is how I did it when I was 13. I had a business

fail when I was in my early twenties and declared bankcruptcy out of that but it was trial and

error. How do I run this business, will I do this and it works, if I do this it doesn’t work,

stop doing the stuff that doesn’t work and I’ll do this. And when I really looked at the

educational system, I was upset with it because the educational system is designed for people

to go to school and come out to be doctors, lawyers, major business owners, there’s not a real

structure to train small business owners and the self-employed professionals on how to start

running your own business. So I really saw that as a missing and said, I’m going to create

something that’s going to address that. So that other people who are passionate about their

beliefs and I believe that a real entrepreneur has two things, one is that they have a passion

about something and the second is they have the courage to pursue an idea, and both are really,

really important but I wanted to create a place where they could actually get access to those

resources and be successful and accomplish their careers.

N: Yeah, because you bring up a very important point, that a lot of people do go into small

business because number one they want freedom, they want to be able to leverage their time,

they want to create a massive income and they have a passion and the courage to follow that

passion and those things are awesome. But when it comes to running the business there are

certain things that you need to know and I too am a serial entrepreneur, was a serial

entrepreneur, and what I also discovered is that when it comes to running a business, there are

certain business skills that you need to be able to make sure that that passion does see the

light of day. You’re not just buying yourself a job where you get paid less, work more hours

than if you were working for somebody else. So, what are some of the common pitfalls that you

find in a lot of small business owners fall into.

D: Well, probably, the biggest pitfall that small business owners fall into is a lack of

planning. I see that across the board and that’s even with people who coach other small

businesses. I’m amazed at the number of times I asked simple questions like do you have a

business plan? And the answer is no. It doesn’t have to be a complicated business plan that’s

ready to go to the bank to get financing, it could be a one-page business plan. And that would

be great. We’re a 5-page business plan but a plan to get from where you are and where you want

to go. Nothing in this world had any kind of significance or impact has really been

accomplished without some kind of a plan. That’s probably the biggest thing that I can see and

it’s never too late for small businesses to actually start planning. I really don’t care where

you are in your year or where you are in your planning process, I would set aside time every

week to actually look at what you’re creating and planning and then have that roll out to your

quarterly planning and annual. That’s the biggest area I see.

N: Yeah, because you know, anyone who’s watching this and in our community knows that you can

write out a plan, you don’t necessarily have to follow it to the letter and more often than not

especially if you’re doing your visualizations, you have this bigger picture or visualization

in your mind the only way you get to that result is not necessarily the way that you think is

going to be. But I know that you’ve got to have some kind of general direction in which you’re

travelling rather than just getting up and getting to work and see what’s happening in that

day. You’ve got to have some picture of the future of that business and the direction that you

want to go and how many people you want to reach and all those somethings. So, we actually got

to meet because you have created this small business summit, so tell us a little bit about that.

D: Yeah. So the small business global summit, just as you were saying about having a plan of

where you want to go was something interesting that I just thought with the small business

global summit, the small business global summit was in my plan a year or two from now. The way

that I wrote it down but I was clear with the direction that I was going and have the

commitment just to start to be able to create in advance for small businesses and self-employed

professionals to go and get the education, go and get the information that we were talking

about earlier. And go and do it with no strings attached. Often I see that our small business

owners out in the world, who are competing against each other, service providing, we make the

water a little bit more muddy, because we say this to someone, okay we’re going to give you

this information but you need to join our list first or you need to do something first and when

they get the information, it’s not the information that they thought they were getting. So, I

really wanted to create an event where small business owners to come, they could get the

information and the training that they actually need. And so we created that. We’re going to be

doing it on September 16th to 18th, this event is going to be a virtual event. We plan to do a

number of virtual events every year and we also plan to do it at least one possibly two live

events a year. And our first live event is going to be on the spring of 2015. We’re going to be

starting it here in our home city Toronto, but this event is going to be over the 3 days we

have 3 tracks, so we have a hot topics track which you’re going to be speaking on which I’m

really happy to have you. And hot topics are really about the things that are small business

owners and the self-employed professionals are dealing with now that are sort of top of line.

So a lot of hot topics around marketing, hot topic – we got a speaker that’s the CEO of

Mars/Venus coaching. So if you don’t know who mars/venus is that’s the john grays organization

that wrote man are from mars, women are from venus. He’s going to be talking about the general

importance. I’ve got on a call talking to him about getting ready for the summit and he was

sharing with me something really interesting and I thought, wow, isn’t that amazing people

don’t think that way and he said, if I asked you to do men and women buy differently, what

would your answer be? Of course they buy differently, I know that. I shop very differently from

the way my fiancé shops. He said, now, in your business development process, do you train your

people to approach men and women differently? And I said no. Well, most businesses don’t do

that. So he’s going to be talking about things like that which are really important. Our second

track is called our must-have track. And our must-have’s track deals with information that

small business owners have to have, like it’s if you don’t do this then you really shouldn’t be

operating and expecting your business to succeed. And one of our amorvita associates is going

to be reading a conversation called turning your business cards into a hundred dollar bills and

I said to her on the phone the other day, if you told me that every business card that I got

will turn into a hundred dollar bill I would get a lot more business cards. So, I got some

topics like that. And Natalie, the last track is what we call the love of your life track. And

we as entrepreneurs know that, we, our life and our business is inseparable, really. And we

know that having a happy rest of our life has us have a much more productive and successful

business life and vice versa. So the love of your life track takes on all of the other topics

that are not business focused. So we’ve got sextologist, a renowned sextologist talking about

how to have a better sex life. We’ve got a relationship coach. We’ve got a finance coach.

Actually, working with people on how to actually have their finances working. And so, having

all those other areas of your life work, that’s what the third track is all about.

N: Yeah, I know, it’s very exciting. And that’s the thing, when it comes to anything that we do

whether you’re a small business owner, whether you’re male of female it doesn’t matter. One of

the keys to our success was that we joined a mastermind group and we surrendered ourselves to

people that we knew that could support us, because we can’t do it alone. Like in small

businesses, sometimes you feel so alone. There are so many challenges that you can face and

sometimes you think you are the only one doing it and you’re not quite sure how to get through.

But when you can get on something like a summit like this and join a community like this, you

get to meet other people that can help and support you and not just give you lip service and

go, you got this, you could do it, actually give you sound advice that can actually take your

business to the next level. Because remember our business is not (12:55), our business is a

complementary, it’s a part of our life that helps us to build a (13:03) lifestyle – that we

have this amazing marriage, we have this happiness, we get to travel, spend time with our

family – that’s what our business is supposed to be. It’s not supposed to be a heavy chain

around our neck. That’s actually more of a stress to us more than anything else. And so getting

involved like this summit can actually get you, not just any kind of information but connected

with other people that could really help you with your business as well.

D: Yeah, absolutely. And Natalie, earlier you asked about what are the big things I see people

making a mistake with in their businesses? The second most important thing that I see here is

that they don’t connect themselves with those communities. They don’t create an accountability

structure when they actually do establish where they want to go. It’s so easy for us as small

business owners, many people working in home offices or abridge versions of that or part-home,

part-office that type of thing, it’s easy for people to do what I call going under the duvet

and doing their favorite not working with a team, which for me, I must admit, when I go of in

that direction, it’s Netflix. It’s really easy to go from taking a lunch break and watching one

episode to I’m just going to go over like this (gestures) and have it, it just keeps running

episodes, if you’re not interrupted. So it’s important to create that accountability structure

and that’s one of the things that the small business global summit outcomes is really to create

those structures, those tools, those systems that actually have you take your business from

wherever it is to wherever you want it to go. I’m really excited about the event and the folks

that we get to partner with. We’ve got some of the top speakers in north America. They’re

partnering with us and I’m excited and thrilled for us to be (14:59)

N: Yeah, it’s an amazing line-up and I’m honored to be part of it. So where can we send people

if they want to find out about the summit and communicate with you?

D: They can go to smallbusinessglobalsummit.com and they’ll find all the information on the

website – all the speakers, all the different sessions. They can go that site’s got everything

they need to register and get started (15:25).

N: Perfect. And guys, don’t forget if you click on the banner to the side, there you’ll go

straight through Damian’s website from there. So thanks again Damian for joining me today and

congratulations on the summit and thank you for all the work that you’re doing to support small

business owners.

D: Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.

N: No worries. Guys please share this video and get the word out. You can do that by clicking

the Facebook and the Twitter share buttons on this page. Also download the app if you haven’t

done so already so you can watch the shows on the go. And make sure that you leave your email

on the box on this page. So I can send you the manifesting with the masters video e-course.

It’s actually valued at $87 and I would love to send it to you for free. So until next time,

remember to live large, choose courageously and love without limits. We’ll see you soon.