Who: JV Crum III is the author and host of the Conscious Millionaire. His mission in life is to help people make their first million. He has an incredibly diverse background, has earned a JD, MBA, MS in Psychology, and has sold multiple businesses in excess of eight figures. He achieved his dreams at the age of 25 and has since revectored his life so that he could live a more fulfilling one. He specializes in coaching, specifically through Neuro-Linguistic Programming, otherwise known as N.L.P.

Traction: JV considers traction to be the level of progress that you make towards doing the thing that fulfills you most – your conscious niche. He spent years making money by building and selling businesses, but ultimately realized that it wasn’t what brought him happiness. He spends his time these days coaching entrepreneurs to help them make their first million, but has three recommendations on how to achieve traction towards becoming a conscious millionaire:

1. Intrinsic motivation: the path that you set out on must be something that motivates you internally. What you set out to build must be something that you would be happy doing up to three years later, without changing a thing. The easiest way to know if the task that you’re thinking of is something that motivates you intrinsically is testing whether that activity puts you into the state of flow, where you lose sense of time, it changes your state where you feel and act differently, and it’s something that you would do for free. The state of flow is a state of being where you lose all sense of time, where action and thought merge, and where you can accomplish anything. This was first identified by the researcher mihail chicksentmihail 

2. Core purpose: What’s the difference you want to make? Who benefits? Why does that matter to you? If you could only do one thing for the rest of your life, what would you do? Those things are going to be the business that will lead to success in traction. 

3. Action: have a solution for the thing that you’re most passionate about. 

Growth: The difference between seven and eight figure companies, according to JV, is that one offers a variety of services while the other offers one core product to a specific set of customers. Which describes the eight figure companies? The ones that provide a niche solution to a very particular set of customers. In order grow and become a market leader, niche focus is absolutely essential. How can you reverse engineer this to grow within your niche category, while also aligning with your traction steps? If you know that your solution works and is profitable, ask yourself of the audience that you serve, who would you most like to work with. If you’re serving business people, farmers, and college students, which group within that audience would you feel most fulfilled by working with? You can further scope down the niche of your offering and become hyper specialized to scale up your operations for that demographic.

Income: JV has a fascinating take on income. It’s a simple one but makes incredible sense. Let’s start with an example first. What’s the last car you bought? When you were researching cars and settled on that one car, as you were searching for the car you ended up buying, did that car start to appear nearly every place that you looked? The cars were most certainly there before you noticed them, but now you see them all the time. That’s because you had never set a filter for that car in the past. Now let’s take that example and transfer it to JVs recommendation of how to make your first million. Like the example with the car, JV recommends that you only filter for opportunities to make your target income. What does that mean? Instead of jumping at the first chance to land a new client, take the time to think about the conditions that must be met in order for you to hit your target income. Those conditions then become the minimum standards that you set for yourself in business. If you only look for those opportunities, that will be all you see, which in turn becomes your income. 

Traction action step: Ask yourself what you would do for free because you’re so passionate about it and ask 3 people if they would pay you for it.

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