Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Scott Oldford, Mentor & Advisor to Entrepreneurs

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Scott Oldford has helped over 200 businesses scale past seven-figures. Today, he spends the majority of his time as a mentor, advisor and investor. In addition, he is the CEO of The Wisdom Group and helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses while remaining in harmony and balance.When Scott was 8 years old, he made his first $20,000 selling eggs from the chickens on his parents’ acreage. By the age of 16, he had a seven-figure web and marketing agency. However, at the age of 21, he lost it all and went $1 million in debt. Since then, he has bounced back and, in total, has built nine of his own seven-plus-figure businesses while becoming one of the top business advisors and strategy coaches to entrepreneurs and online businesses looking to surpass $10M/year.Scott has been featured in nearly every publication and podcast, and his methods and frameworks have been viewed by millions of people, with hundreds of thousands regularly watching his business strategy videos and reading his emails, each of who are impacted directly (and indirectly) by the 100+ entrepreneurs he has helped scale past seven figures.At heart, Scott is a scientist. He’s known in his community for converging groundbreaking ideas and future-oriented thoughts, and make them easy for others to understand and implement, and can typically be found researching, watching documentaries, or in a deep rabbit hole about something that most people haven’t even heard of.Learn more: http://scottoldford.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-scott-oldford-mentor-advisor-to-entrepreneurs

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. Influential Entrepreneurs is sponsored by Marketing Huddle, where we build an authority positioning portfolio for entrepreneurs using podcast and TV interviews and guaranteed press coverage. For more information, go to Mike Saunders 360.com. Today we have with us Scott Olford, who is a mentor and advisor to entrepreneurs.

Scott, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Mike, I appreciate being here. Yeah, I'm looking forward to talking with you because I've followed your work from afar, and I know that you've got quite the resume, even from selling eggs on the farm when you were little, so I want to dive into all of those cool lessons that you've learned. But get it started with a little bit of your story and background, and then how did you get into the realm of working with the entrepreneurs?

Yeah, absolutely. So when I was eight, as you said, I had some chickens, and that grew a bit, and then I had hundreds of chickens, and I was selling their eggs on this little tiny and, you know, 10 or 11 acres land in Newfoundland, Canada, and then that turned into me learning how to program and then me selling that to other people and starting a programming agency,

having a million dollar business by the time I was 16 years old. By the time I was 21, I lost everything when I'm over a million dollars in debt, which was a great experience. It was way more effective than the university. And then in around 2015, someone one day was like, hey, can you teach me, you know, can you teach all the stuff you understand, you know about online marketing, of course, at marketing agencies and did marketing from, you know, pretty massive $9 billion companies even.

and so I said, you know, not really. I don't want to do that. And then I thought about it for a couple more months. And then I finally did it in May of 2015, so almost 10 years ago from the time we're recording right now. And I did half a million dollars in six months doing that the next six or seven months. And three million dollars the next year. And I was like, wow, number one, I must know something about this. And number two, this is really cool.

and so I let go of everything else. And then, you know, I started in that marketing and sales. But, I mean, I've been an entrepreneur. I mean, I'm 33 right now. I've been an entrepreneur, really made my first 100 grand when I was in a year when I was probably 10 or 11. So, you know, I've been over 20 years, how most people do. They might only have five or seven years experience by the time of the 33.

Yeah. So that's, so then the marketing sales then transition into, well, hey, you know, So most businesses, I love the quote, most businesses don't fail, a bit larger businesses don't fail because of starvation. They fail because of indigestion. And so then I got a lot more into helping entrepreneurs on their mindset and finances and operations and delivery and really building a really great foundational business. And to give context, I really only help online businesses.

So if you got a brick and mortar pizza shop, I don't know anything. You probably know more than me. But when it comes to online education, online media, software companies, that's what I really have helped and I've helped, you know, hundreds of businesses scale past multiple set figures at this point. You know, I'm glad you mentioned mindset because in order to take those shots to the gut like you described, it takes mindset. You know, it takes perseverance and all of that. It takes being willing to humble yourself to learn, all of those things. but boy, it really is a mindset because otherwise you would have gone like, wow, this isn't for me. I'm such a looser.

Let me go punch the clock. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's really, I've had a couple. I mean, I've had some pretty massive failures. I mean, the one when I was 2021 is probably smaller than some of the other ones. You know, 2019, I had a eight-figure company and, you know, just was like, this isn't going to work. Like, the math doesn't work. Like, this business, I've grown. business and I've created a prison of influence and abundance and these things, but like, my God,

there's just no way that this is ever going to work. And I remember being on my, you know, bathroom floor and I don't know, in March of 2019 being like, this sucks more than it did when I was a million dollars in debt. And, you know, yes, I was on a ton in debt, but it sucked nonetheless. And so you, in order to be an entrepreneur, one of the most effective mindsets, I believe that you have to have. And I have this like naturally, I think because I have ADHD and I have terrible memory, short-term and long-term memory. You're going to wake up each day and have complete amnesia, sorry, of the day before. Yeah. You just got to forget. And that doesn't matter if you had a good day or a bad day. You had a good day. Awesome. Sweet.

Let's just keep on moving. Because, you know, success is, success. does not attract success. Success attracts generally being entitled. And entitlement will make you fail faster than even anchoring yourself to failure and failure mindset. And so one of the things I really believe in, you wake up every single day, you ask God, the universe, whatever you believe in, what am I supposed to do today, who am I

supposed to serve today, how am I supposed to be in the world today? And then you listen to the whisper, you listen to the thing that you write down, and you listen to whatever it is, and you go do that. And then you wake up the next morning, you forget about what you did yesterday, and you just keep doing that. At 10 years later, you look behind and be like, well, you know what? That worked. And that's as simple.

So I agree with that concept. And then I'll put a little disclaimer and say, but how do you handle this? Because I know that we should be learning from the past, looking to the future, but remaining in the present. So with that thought in mind, you can't totally forget what you did yesterday in the sense of, hey, if I did something wrong, what was the lesson so I don't want to do it again? If I did something right, what did I do so that I can keep doing it? So how do you document those things and then wipe the slate as clean as possible so that you're moving forward the right way?

Because you do want to continue doing what's been working. You don't want to do it. Yeah, no, of course you don't want to. I think that's part of closing the energetic loop each day has been. Like, what we're each day, each week, each month, each year, each quarter, whatever the time span is, each season that you're in, is, is, you know, you look at, okay, cool, that works this way or it didn't work. Here's what my expectation was, here's what happened. And then being like, okay, I wonder why that happened. And it'll be like, okay, sleep.

That's what happened. And now I'm going to move forward. I'm going to use that as a little, you know, a little note. And then, of course, you know, now with AI, it's a lot easier to actually record. these things and to be able to utilize them. Now, now I don't have to use my memory. I used to write a lot of these things down. Yeah. And now I just, I just talk about my day or my week or my month to my own personal AI. And then it comes back and tells me six months from now, hey, you know, you look at this pattern, right? And it doesn't have to be AI. Could be, you know, coach, could mentor,

a therapist, whoever it might be at the end of the day. But yeah, I'm definitely all about, you got to think you got to learn from your mistakes. But, but, but, and this is the other part, which is you fail forward for 20 years, you eventually figure out what doesn't work for you. And then there's only success left. It's really what comes down to. It's like eventually, there's only so many ways to do something, and you're going to find the ways that you can do it,

but you don't like it. You can do it and it failed. And the ways that you did it, it worked, and it worked for your life, and it allows you to have inner harmony and happiness and fulfillment. And that doesn't always necessarily be the option it makes the most money. But it's going to be the option that gives you the most fulfillment. And that's worth far more money, far more than just money. Yep.

So you mentioned AI, and I know we can go down a big rabbit hole on that, but let's just talk a little bit from a 90,000 foot view. What are your views on the current landscape of scaling, whether it's marketing or increasing sales, given the tools and technology that we see and how fast they are changing at a moment's notice, it seems like. I think, for the last probably seven or eight years, most of my revenue has been generated between $10,000 and $50,000 a year for someone coming and working with me. And then, you know, my hire, I probably generated a million to $2.5 million a year

with people paying me over $100 grand. And just for context, my mentorship business, on the lowest end was $3 million in 2020, sorry, 2016. The highest it's ever been, it was $14 million, and it's been in between there, you know, for the last nine years. And I looked at this as we're coming into AI. And I've had a lot of failures in that. I mean, you know, we do this.

You know what? That didn't work as well as I thought it was or the delivery is not going to be the same way or, you know, this or there's limitations on this and that. So I actually eliminated almost everything in the middle. and I've built AI, and this is not what I came there to talk about at all. I mean, I didn't have any particular intention, but I'm just, it's very interesting. So I've trained AI, 34 different AI, I'm calling them experiences, for the different things that I've built frameworks on and that people come to me for.

Using your methodology. Using my methodology, using the transcripts. I've kept every transcript of every conversation. since 2015, because I knew that this is going to happen. Yeah. And so it is, you know, my seven-figure mindset is trained on, I think it's 6,000 hours of my mindset advice over the past seven years. And so when I, when, I mean, when someone talks to it, it's, it gives better advice

than I can't. And the reason it can get better advice. Yeah, because it's got perfect recall. And your memory is imperfect because we're human. Exactly. And so, and so, you know, one of my businesses, I own a percentage of close to 50 businesses, but one of my businesses, I decided not to hire a CEO in that business. And I was like, you know what?

I'm going to make it so AI is the CEO. So we feed all the data to the AI. That business is on track to do about $7 million this year with no CEO. and arguably the best ran business in all the businesses that I currently own. Huh. And there's lots of reasons why, but the truth of the matter is to get back to the question. In my experience, Peter Diamandis has a great quote. In 2030, there's going to be two types of businesses, ones that use AI and ones that aren't a business anymore.

And so, but it might build you a different moat, right? We're always talking about moats in business. What makes it so that somebody doesn't go away from you? The moat is today, somebody can get a strategy from me for scaling their business that used to take a minimum $10,000 and generally about seven hours of my time. Today they can do it. And it takes me about four minutes to approve the strategy. And now I can charge $1,000. And now I can, and then I can go on my day and do the things I actually want to do.

It gives me infinite scale while still giving someone a result. that's actually better than if they just worked with me. And so now what do, you know, people hire me one-on-one now. It's for being in person with me. It's for my mindset and energetic work. It's for things that I love talking about because after doing this for such a long time, I don't want to talk about. I don't want to plan out another marketing funnel.

I'd rather I do that. Yeah. So that you can take the condensed output, sit down with that person one-on-one, and go, okay, now let's get creative about this. in implementing it. Correct. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's a massive time save. The things that used to take 50 hours for someone to do in my world when they come in and pay me money takes three or four hours. And now it's 10 times better than it was. And we're talking three years ago. We're not talking a significant amount of time. And so I think there's going to be a lot of disruption. There already is a lot of disruption.

But I think the next three years you're going to see a massive amount of disruption because there really isn't any way around this. When somebody can come and get a lot of disruption. a 10 times better product for a 10 times lower cost, it doesn't matter how great your brand is. It simply doesn't. Brand only has so much power. Somebody,

because people, they still want to save their own personal time and money. So your brand might be like, oh, wow, I'm following XYZ brand and they're amazing, but if they were given the choice, they'd much rather invest one hour of their personal time with that brand.

and one tenth of the money with that personal brand. They still respect the brand, but if the brand isn't recognizing what's going on in the market, you're missing out because people will move on. Yeah, people will move. And I think, you know, there's, I mean, personal brand, I mean, I've been building my personal brand for 10 years. I've spent, you know, well over eight figures on my personal brand,

building it. I believe it's one of the best assets you could have, you know. Would I rather have $10 million in real estate or my personal brand? I'll take my personal brand all day long. And so the truth is, you've got to, in my opinion, you're going to have, there's a transitionary time right now. And I don't think if you're not in the know in this transitionary time, it doesn't matter how great your brand is.

This is one of the rare times that it's almost like if you didn't start using the internet in 2000. Yeah. And you're like, you know what? No, I don't want to use the internet. Well, that's what happened to Blockbuster. Yep. Yep. So definitely without getting into the weeds of AI, here's a question that is like, again, 30,000 foot view, 60,000 foot view.

I feel like when people hear AI and all of that, they go, oh, cool, I can set it and forget it. And now it's going to just run everything like, you know, a machine. And I don't need to have any input. That's incorrect. So what are some mindsets that people. need to keep in mind when deciding on the first step, second, step, third step in addressing and integrating AI into their business because definitely it doesn't remove the human element. It just saves time.

It is, it's almost like a co-pilot. It's like, you know, you're there and you have the CEO or you have a CFO, you have somebody. I think there's definitely tasks and things that you can, will be able to automate it. completely, but not fit. I think that's going to be rare. I think it's going to be rare for a while. I think there's a co-creation because business is a art and science, not just a science, right? Yeah.

There's more to it at the end of the day. Yeah, 100%. There's more to it. So let's talk about this. Let's say that you have polished up your personal brain, your business brand, you're scaling, you're using AI properly. but why do you say making millions means nothing if your burnout? At the end of the day, you got to know why you actually want to make money. That's a big part.

After like a half a million dollars a year personally, I live on more than that, but like for the most part, like, you know, after a half a million dollars a year, like to you personally. your happiness doesn't really go up based on how much money you make. The only reason your happiness is going to be based upon it is probably some like internal wounding or the desire for significance or these different types of things. So you got to realize that money is, it's both an amplifier as well as a pacifier. Here's what I mean by that, which is money amplifies you and who you're around. but money a lot of times is used to not deal with the things that you haven't healed in you. So if you are, if you have a fear of abandonment, when you see someone with a really high fear of abandonment, you'll generally see someone that makes a lot of money because money makes us to that people don't abandon you.

Yep. Right. if you look at somebody and they want to be influential, and this is me too, by the way, earlier on, not so much anymore. I wanted a personal brand because I wanted to be cool because I was the fat kid in school that everyone picked on. Right? So I didn't want it because of money.

I didn't want it because of success. I didn't want it because I want to spread my message or impact or any of those things that might be a righteous move or the move for somebody else. And so once you really get us, you'd be like, all right, why do I really do? why do I really want money? What am I pacifying? And then, and most of the time, it is something. And as long as you're okay with whatever it is, I don't care what it is, I don't

care what it is. I think everyone should have the ability to make whatever amount of money they want. But know why you're doing it, because what will happen is that if you make money with no reason you will burn out, because money is energy. And my belief is that it goes, in our universe, it goes to the places in which are the most aligned and are the most confident on who is going to be the steward of that money and how that money is going to flow to make our planet better. Well, plus if you ask someone, why are you making money? And then you do like the, you know, whatever you want to call it,

but the laddering, you know, well, why is that important? Why is that important? You do get to the real, real, real reason. But most of the time, it's going to come down to, I want to have time and freedom and flexibility to do what I want, when I want. And if you, if you don't set your business up the right way with the right operations and all that your time is gone and so then at that time it doesn't matter and most of the time you need a lot less money than you actually think you need and you can go and live your life the way that you actually you know um want to without ever having to do any of the shit that you think you're going to need to do yeah right like it's it's it's it's you know when my son was born i mean i'm in a great place in my life i've made a lot of money i've made

you know, a lot of money over the last 10 years. And I've had a lot of success and I've had a lot of good times. I guess I had some down times. But I've had more up times than I've had down times. And, you know, my son was born about three years ago. And I was like, oh, my God, I want to like retire so I could spend all this time with them. And I went and I, you know, I started investing a little too aggressively. And I, you know, made some decisions that were out of fair, not out of abundance, out of, oh, my God, I want, you know, this.

And in reality, it's like, really, I could. have retired three years ago and just taken on 10 or 15 clients a year. And I could do that for the rest of my life. I didn't have to do anything else if I really want it to. And instead, you know, that devil in your ear says more. And you got to be really careful when the devil in your ear says more. And you got to the God on your ear has to say, why. And if you don't have a good answer for why, then you probably, it's probably your ego. It's probably something, you know, some part of your past that's trying to get pacified with money. Yeah.

It reminds me of the old movie you probably saw trading places with Eddie Murphy and, you know, the relative wanted to spend some in unbelievable amount of money in a short time frame, mainly just to get them to the point of going, I don't need all that money. I hate it. It's a bother. But the point is at some point, enough is enough. And what is the most important thing? when you can come to that realization, then you probably can go back to the business side of the equation and go,

okay, well, how do I structure my business around my life? And now you've got that synergy. Yeah. And it's an aligned business versus a lot of people make a lot of money and it's not aligned. And if it's not aligned, it's not going to feel good. You're going to burn out. You're going to be depressed. You're going to be all these things.

The last thing you want to do is be the guy with the Lamaradini. the Bentley in the big house that has built himself a prison. And you get home at the end of the day and you hear the proverbial, you know, cricket chirping because it's like, wow, now I'm alone. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Scott, this has been super enlightening. If someone is listening to this, go on, help me, guide me in my online digital marketing endeavors.

What's the best way that they can start engaging with your brand, learning what you do and reaching out and connecting with you? If you go to scuttleblower.com, you should be able to take it from there, lots of different resources, things that you can get to help you to scale. And obviously, if you're scaling past multiple seven figures,

you need some help with that. Always happy to help. Excellent. Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure talking with you. Yeah, likewise, Mike. Appreciate it.

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