In this influential episode, Robert Indries, Chairman of the Board of Robert Indries Holdings, shares how he built an empire of 8 businesses generating 7-figures yearly.
You will discover:
– Why you shouldn’t believe the client is always right and what you can do instead
– The distinct advantage entrepreneurs gain from their parents
– The power of love to overcome your biggest business challenges.
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach and I am here with an unbelievably high demand coach and that is the one the only Robert Indries now. He was born into a modest family in a tiny town in Transylvania, Romania. And he spent the first part of his life on farms caring for livestock and working in the land. Traveling allowed him to observe common mistakes and successes in businesses all over the world. He’d visited 17 countries and spoke in front of 1000s of people in three different languages. Now, throughout the years, he’s also generated over 500 million, I had to count all the zeros here 500 million in business value first clients delivered over 200 projects for clients at 19 sectors, and consulted with over 1000 professionals to achieve two to 10 times higher levels of effectiveness. He’s here with us today. Robert, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. Before we dive into some of the really cool work that you’re doing with your clients, I’d love to just hear a little bit more about this story. So you grew up on a farm in Romania, well walk us through, you know, how that led you to where you are today?
Robert Indries
Well, growing up in Romania isn’t all that special. What is special in our specific area of Transylvania is that there is a very high number of Hungarians there. And I was one of them, or I am one of them, right? So when the Austro Hungarian empire even lost the Second World War, this part at that point in time, this part was part of Hungary. And then they had to give this part back to Romania. Well, so you can imagine the conflict, the tensions, the the mini battles that people were fighting here, you know, day in day out. Pay this is Romania. And Hungarians were like, No, this is Hungary, you know, so it, it wasn’t easy, and you end up building quite a bit of character from that, right? Because what ends up happening is that you are put in front of situations where people either bully you or they don’t respect you, or they didn’t consider you. And so in a realm like that, you can either choose to soften up, and you know, just allow yourself to be pushed around, or let’s say strengthen up, or however you want to call it, you know. And so I was very lucky to live in a loving family. So I was born with both of my parents alive in there. And, you know, they were both educating me and, you know, helping me. And so I feel that’s one of the biggest, let’s say, blessings of my life, that I was born into a loving family. Because no matter how dangerous, the world seeing outside, I knew I could come home, and it would be safe and peaceful, and so on. So that gave me strength and courage to go out every day, right, and, you know, do what they have to do. I remember when I was very young, my mother was called into school very often, because I would always get in fights, because I wouldn’t be pushed around by Romanians, and I just fight back. So you really do end up building character. And from that, it, it’s you, you have this inner urge of, Okay, what else is there? You know, like, what more can I do? This can’t be, you know, everything that that life has to give, you know. And so, what I really enjoyed doing, and this is, you know, thanks to my father and my mother as well, but my father was very big influence in this sector sector. I would read books and, you know, browse through books and so on, because that’s the only thing that they would give me money for. Now. They everything else was, you know, off limits, but books I could buy. So I told this story a few times, but at one point, I came across the evolution of technology, huge book, beautiful images, and that really got me hooked into engineering. And so I was about 10 years old, and I really started loving engineering. I started learning programming. I started disassembling everything that had the motherboard I started learning in, I got my bachelor’s in science, and I got my master’s in science, so I really love the stuff and it made me pursue more so I left my home My childhood home when I was 14, went to a much, much larger city. I stayed there for four or five years, then I left again to various other countries to learn more to do all types of cool projects. I went to Italy, I went to Siberia, I went to Mexico, I went anywhere, there were cool projects and cool things to do. I would just go. And obviously, every time I will do that, my parents will get a mini heart attack, you know, because I will be, you know, who knows where on the planet? You know, I was it remember the youngest? I was, I think it was at one point, I was 15. And I hitchhike like 900 kilometers or something like that I just hitchhike because I wanted to get somewhere for a conference. And I didn’t want to tell them because I knew that they are not going to let me do it. And so I just left at one point with, you know, my rucksack. And today, it took me two days to get there. So I had to sleep where I could, but once I was there, I called him like, Hey, I’m here. It’s like, what do you mean, you’re there out? When do you get there? Like I got here a few minutes ago, but I didn’t want to tell you. So yeah, it was it was fun for me, and very exciting, very adventurous. But I think it was horrifying for my parents. I hope my children don’t do that to me, or at least if they do it, the air remains safe, you know. So, in, in the way I am, you know, very adventurous and you know, very, let’s say, determined to put in the work because when you were young, no one asked you if you want to work, you would just work like I can’t remember, any parts of my life when I wasn’t working. Like the youngest memory I have was when I was like five years old, and I was already habitually working by five, right, I was doing anything that needed to be done on the farm. So from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, there’s some form of work to be done. And so I just took that into my teens and adulthood and you know, progressed from there.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Well, so when did the when did the entrepreneurial bug bite? When did you really get into launching? And what was your first real successful business endeavor?
Robert Indries
So I never wanted to be an entrepreneur, I always wanted to be an engineer. Since I was 10 years old, I always wanted to be an engineer, and I started getting all types of jobs. And I had the wrong, I didn’t want to exaggerate, but maybe five, six jobs and in different countries, different industries, different roles, right. And I realized that in none of those jobs, did the company actually care about me? And that was strange, because that felt opposite to how a company’s culture should be. And so I was constantly shocked at how mistreated people are in companies. And I didn’t understand why Why does going on. Now I understand. Because now I have dealt with employees, and I know what the pain they can be, right? So it’s incredibly hard to find one that’s actually loyal, that’s, you know, actually there and boots into artwork, and so on. I mean, you might need to hire 10 people, and nine of them lied on this on the interview, their CVs puffed up, you know, and so on. And one of them may be that a player that you were looking for, you know, and where you might lose $50,000 Searching for that, or more, you know, who knows, the cost of a bad hire is enormous, especially at bigger companies. So basically, I couldn’t find my place in employment. And so at one point, I said, Look, excuse my French, but Screw this, I’m going to start my own company, and, you know, hire people and treat them the way companies should treat people, right, like care about them, put them first so on. So in our companies, the client isn’t always right. If the client calls us and says, Hey, this and this and this isn’t okay. First thing we do is we do an analysis, we ask everyone that was involved, what actually happened, what’s going on? Right? And we have a very objective, unbiased approach. And then we have a conversation with the client that say, no, look, this actually happened. And this was an internal communication issue in your company. So solve that first. And then probably this won’t happen again. Right? So we’ve had conversations like that so many times because we protect our employees as much as we can. And again, we don’t protect them. Like, in a biased way, we always try to find the objective reality of what actually happened, what should have happened, and then what led to it not going the way everyone wanted it to right Right. So that analysis we do, and we don’t consider the client always right. So that’s one thing. And we do various other things like we have unlimited vacation days. So whenever someone wants to, you know, take off, if it’s Wednesday, and they’re not feeling good, they can just take off, right, they just need to tell their manager and make sure whatever password they had anything urgent that someone else helps them tackle that. But otherwise, it’s very, very forgiving, let’s say, from that perspective, and so on, and so forth. So that was my first company. And that was, I believe, 11 years ago, little bit more. And that’s companies still alive and thriving. today. It’s making millions a year, right, that has been making millions for for five years now or more, I don’t even know, like half a decade, it’s been making millions. And since then, I’ve added 10 Other companies to my portfolio, and a few of them we’ve already sold.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. So you know, managing a business is hard enough. As I checked those, do some research, I think you’ve got around eight, something like that. And the the fact that it might be higher might be lower, it’s just indicative of how much work that actually is. So like, how, how do you manage all these different organizations and continue to lead them to success?
Robert Indries
So I have, as I mentioned, in engineering background, so everything in the world, for me is ones and zeros. Everything like there’s the numbering starts at zero. So up until 10, you have 11 numbers, right? Any I can explain it to anyone. But it’s everything is zero and one, there is no chicken and egg situation. There is no gray area. Anyone that wants any form of clarity, I can tell them first was the egg. And then was the chicken because there were no chicken, there were just lizards, and lizards has made eggs and at 1.1 of those eggs made a chicken. That’s it. End of story. Right? So there is no gray area, right? Either you’re, you’re telling the truth, or you’re lying. I’m not saying you’re intentionally lying, I’m just saying it can’t be a half truth. It’s either the truth, or it’s a lie. So it’s, if you have let’s say, someone calls it the half truth, because half of what they said is true. In mathematics that doesn’t exist. It’s either one or it’s zero. So if half of it is false, that means the entire thing is false. Because if part of something is false, the entire thing means the entire thing is false. So if someone, for example, forgets to do something in a business, right, like they forget to follow up with someone, then what that means is that the system that reminds that person that they need to follow up. And then if they actually do not follow up and mark it as complete, automatically escalates that to their manager, that system isn’t working. Right. And so it doesn’t matter what you tell me in terms of you know why you didn’t follow up? The truth is that you haven’t, what comes after you haven’t? Doesn’t matter in terms of changing reality reality. You should have followed up you have it. I’m not here to blame. I’m not here to point fingers. I’m not here to judge. What I am here to do is to seek excellence. And excellence works in zeros and ones. It’s either excellent, or it’s not. Right. There’s no middle area. Right. So if you didn’t follow up, let’s look into it. I’m not, I’m not yelling at you. I’m not scolding you. I’m just asking, Okay, why didn’t you follow? I forgot. Okay, but this system reminds you to, to follow up? How did you miss that? Well, the truth is, I was off because this and this and this. Okay, so you weren’t at your office. That’s what really happened. And so we need to put a system in place that if you’re not at the office, we should know, right? And then you build a policy that says, hey, if you’re off, let someone know you’re off. So that if anything is urgent, the manager knows to take care of it when you’re not there. Right? Etc, etc. I’m not here to seek blame. I’m here to seek excellence. Right? And so it’s not easy to work with us because this is what how our culture functions. We don’t tolerate mediocrity, we tolerate excellence. So if someone joins our company, they might be mediocre when they join, but if they stay with us, they’ll definitely leave a professional. They’ll leave someone that’s outstanding in whatever role they chose for themselves, right? And so and you can ask anyone that we’ve worked with for years, they will tell you the same thing they join us as juniors or mid level they leave as seniors You know, veterans in their field, if they leave, because we have people that have been with us for six, seven years, I don’t even I’m losing count how much people stay with us. So it’s it’s that form of mentality. And so what we do, because you also told me, you know, in private before to call that, we should talk a little bit about how we use what we have to help the world as well is that whenever someone comes to us and says, Hey, I have two businesses, or I have one business, I have this, I have that whatever. And I’d like it to go better, I’d like it to grow, I’d like it to, you know, not be so dependent on me, whatever the challenge is, we look at it as ones and zeros. What’s reality, we show them the factual reality, we do an analysis and one to two months of everything in the business, we show them this the factual reality, whether you decide to accept it or not, that’s secondary, right. And if you accept reality, you know, then we can help you, if you don’t accept that this is what’s real, then maybe we can help you because your blind spots, or your ego, one or the other, or both, right, are a very big bottleneck in the growth of the company, and you are the owner, at the end of the day, I can’t grow beyond you, you need to grow with us, right? Like you as the owner. So the owner has to understand what we’re saying, and do his own analysis if he wants to, and come back with his data and prove to us that we’re not right or whatever, we accept that. And we’ve been wrong 1000s of times, right. It’s not like we have all of the answers. And so when we get to common consensus, we say, okay, year one, these are the things we’re gonna change. And then all of a sudden, I kept telling you countless stories of someone coming to us, for example, saying, Robert, I have a $20 million business. And we’re working on it for the past 20 years, right. But I feel I want to go to the next level, I feel I want to burrow better, I feel like I don’t want the business, so dependent on me. And so, guess what, that one specific case study I’m thinking about, it took them 20 years to get to 20 million. And then in three years, we took them to 50 million, right? Literally, it exploded because everything was already there, we just needed to remove the owner, and then you know, put everything in place so that it just grows, you know, like crazy. So we do that over and over and over again, for companies we work with make half a million a year, right? That’s fine. We don’t judge everyone somewhere on their path. Others are at 5 million others are at the 100 million, right. And we just take the companies wherever they are, and then to help them, you know, to be a higher impact all the time. The only one thing that we don’t do is we do not help in industries that we believe in are have negative effects on the world, right? I mean, everything is easy, and Yang everything has good and bad, don’t get me wrong. However, there are some industries that literally just do damage to the world. You know, like I can say tobacco or you know, whatever alcohol, it, there’s no quantity of alcohol, that’s good for you. I don’t know, if anyone listening, you know, likes to drink. I don’t judge you, I really want to make that clear. Just, I don’t want to help a company that helps you drink more than you already. That’s it. It’s just simple as that, right? Where I don’t want to help a company that helps you smoke more than you already do. Right? Again, I’m not judging you for doing anything. I have my own vices. And there’s this. There’s this interesting saying that I really love. Don’t judge me just because I sin differently than you do. Because we all sin is just we sinned differently each one of us so I’m not gonna judge you for your sins. And you know, hopefully I get the same in return.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, so you’ve got this whole breadth of experience. You’re working in so many different industries, so many different challenges that you guys have overcome so many success stories. If you want to boil all that down, what would you say is the biggest secret you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening or watching today knew?
Robert Indries
Oh, on the top thought I was going to be prepared for these questions, but I’m not. I feel if I think about it. That the one thing that people missed in their careers in their life, so on and so forth, is that on very many occasions. They forget that love is the answer. It’s always love. Right? If, if you have a client that’s been problematic, you go to that call, not with fear, not with anger, not with anything else other than love. And you asked them, Mr. Client, what’s wrong? Lovingly, kindly, no patronizing, no sarcasm, no anything pure love, pure understanding, pure desire to do good to help them to, you know, find an ethical path forward, and so on and so forth. And the same if someone in your life does or says something that you consider that they shouldn’t have done or said, you go to them with love you say, my dear, why would you say that? Right? And they’re like, Well, I’m very angry. And I’m sorry to hear that you’re angry. Why are you angry? Well, because you said this. Okay, do you believe that? What I said was uncalled for? No, it’s the way you said it. Okay, I’m sorry, if that felt harmful, I will try to do better next time. What do you think about the message itself about the contents of the message do you believe is true? Do you believe it’s false? What what do you feel? And then you can continue having a loving conversation with your, you know, clients, with your colleagues, with your family with anyone? And love is the answer with you as well with yourself, right? If you do something you feel that you shouldn’t have done or said, or you’ve fallen short with anything. Criticism, self criticism, self loathing, all of those things do not help. What helps is to say, Oh, dear, you you’ve eaten cake again, you promise yourself you wouldn’t? What happened? What’s wrong? Well, I was at the party, and everyone was eating cake. Okay, but did we tell everyone at the party that we don’t eat cake? Well, yes, we have when we were there, but everyone was, you know, insisting, okay, well, what if we call everyone, especially the hosts of the party, and we tell them that we really feel bad for eating cake the other day, and we really wish on their next party, that if they wouldn’t insist that we eat cake again, right, and we have a very firm and honest and loving conversation with them. And guess what, there’s only so many times you need to do this before everyone in your network knows that you don’t eat cake. And then it will be much easier for you next time, right. And you will notice that once you set this expectation a few times, I will give you one example. I don’t drink alcohol, or I if I drink, I drink maybe twice a year, three times a year, whatever. And so when I go to specific parts of the family, there’s this uncle that always is like, hey, come the end and you want to drink. I know, I already told you 100 times and I’m going to drink right? The first time you told him loving the second time you told him lovingly, by the third time, even you get upset, right? So now all of a sudden, this habit that you don’t want to keep, Whenever someone asks you to indulge in it. Now you get upset, because you now feel attacked by someone, you know, wanting to go against what you want for yourself. And now you don’t attack them again, you love is the answer. But you’re more firm. And you say I’ve already told you three times that I do not want to drink there. Well, yeah, but I just want you to feel well. I feel well, when I am accepted. And I do not feel accepted. If you do not accept me as a non drinker. Do you understand that? Yeah, you don’t need to take it so seriously. But I’m not taking anything more or less than it really is. The reality is that you’ve asked me four times, if I want to drink and each and every single time I told you no, I do not drink. So there is a message somewhere in there. I would really love for you to find it. Right? So you can have these conversations with anyone. But again with love with love, not anger, not fear, not any if you’re fearful. That means something can go wrong. Listen to that fear and create a plan. So you avoid whatever can go wrong. But create the plan lovingly execute on it lovingly talk with everyone lovingly, and so on and so.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Yeah, so good. I love that idea of Yeah, listen to the fear because it’s not always wrong, but it’s not always right either. Right. So that idea of making a plan being loving in the way is just golden that thank you for sharing. Now we’re gonna have we shift gears a little bit and have you take off your advisor hat for a moment put on your CEO hat. That is what’s the next stage of growth look like for you as a leader and what challenge we have to overcome to get there?
Robert Indries
Well, so far I have had the privilege and blessing to pass a million dollars by the time I was 25. And I passed 10 million by the time I was 31. So now my next goal is to pass 100 million that’s in my career, the next let’s say goalpost. And I will do that via a new company that I am starting this year, that I am now looking for investment for. And so if anyone on the call is an investor, or you know, know, someone, they can obviously introduce us, and they can share with them what they have. However, they need to have significant capital, they can just come come, you know, with 50, grand or whatever, because I have passed that game A while ago, I don’t want to be disrespectful to anyone. However, I don’t want to make millions anymore, I don’t even want to make 10s of millions, I want to make hundreds of millions, right. And so it’s a different game, I need quite a bit of capital to allocate to make it happen. And so I’m looking for investors right now, hopefully I can find investment and this first half of the year, and then start a company. And then we’ll see where it takes us by my calculation. I should hopefully pass 100 million by the time I’m 40. But you don’t know. Time will tell.
Scott Ritzheimer
Exciting times I love it. How can folks find more out about you, your company and how they might be able to partner together with you in the future?
Robert Indries
So if they want to learn anything about me, they just need to Google my name. And you know, the first I don’t know how many pages should be all about me. I do have websites, my full name.com. So it’s robertindries.com. And if anyone wants to speak with me directly, they just need to email [email protected] and mention either your names called or the podcast name, and I promise to reply personally.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, Robert, just an honor having you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. For everyone listening we’ll drop those in the show notes so you can just click on it right there. You don’t have to track it all down. And for everyone watching and listening you know that your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Robert Indries
Robert Indries was born into a modest family in a tiny town in Transylvania, Romania. He spent the first part of his life on farms, caring for livestock and working the land. Traveling allowed him to observe common mistakes and successes in businesses worldwide. He visited 17 countries and spoke in front of thousands of people in 3 languages. Throughout these years, he has also Generated over $500,000,000 in business value for his clients, delivered over 200 projects for clients in 19 different sectors, and consulted over 1,000 professionals to achieve two to ten times higher levels of effectiveness.
Want to learn more about Robert Indries’ work at COMPANY? Check out his website at https://robertindries.com/
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