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James Wedmore was born and raised in sunny Laguna Beach, California, and now lives and runs his business in the beautiful Red Rocks country of Sedona, Arizona. For the past 15 years James has leveraged his expertise to help teach digital CEOs how to build and scale their online businesses through courses and training, such as his signature program, Business By Design. Other programs in James's abundant course library include Sales Page By Design and Nail Your Niche.

Celebrated in the online space for his unrivalled online courses and content, James also facilitates Next Level, a strategic, group-coaching experience, and the high-level mastermind The Inner Circle.

When he isn't working, James can be found hiking, flipping homes for Airbnb, or off-roading through the rocky terrain of Sedona. His motto is simple: ‘Work hard, play harder!’

We had the following conversation in September 2020.

Can you give me your origin story?

Well, I have like 20 origin stories.

The one I know is you went into video then pivoted into online courses.

I call it the leapfrog effect. I think everything you're going through now is just preparing you for the next thing. So there's an origin story for every next thing. But the story of how I stumbled across this idea of selling teaching information, coaching on the internet, started when I was bartending at a restaurant, on the day shift during the week, which is kind of depressing, while on the weekends I was running a mobile bartending business where people hired me to come to their parties. I wasn't passionate at all about bartending. I don't even drink more than a glass of wine once a week. But I was passionate about business. So within a year I had this mobile bartending business with 15 staff members and we were servicing parties north of LA all the way down to San Diego, so a big chunk of Southern California. We were booked solid every week, while I was consuming book after book and program after program on how to understand running a business and marketing. And I noticed a pattern. Everyone I was learning from was selling their system on marketing and business — that was in November of 2007, so you can see how long ago it was — and I had the idea that I could do the same. It kind of started as a game for me. I thought, I bet I can make more money teaching people how to tend bar than actually doing it. That night I came up with the domain name Bartend For Profit, and my idea for an online bartending school was born.

I moved back in with my parents and buried myself in my room. I put all my marbles into this jar of creating an online bartending website and business. It was April 2008. Several months later I had a finished book (220 pages) and a CD-ROM with video training and all that stuff. And, bada bing, bada boom, I had my very first sale. That was, you know, one of the greatest moments of my life. A complete stranger from San Antonio, Texas, paid me $200 plus $19.95 shipping and handling to send this entire at-home and online package — I did both, so you got a print version and a digital version of my bartending thing. I knew even back then I wasn't going to stay with bartending, I wasn't going to be the bartending guru, but that one day this would turn into something bigger and better.

Do you think your initial success was partly because you started with what you knew at the time?

Yeah, I had to start with what I knew. I also had to have a vision of where I could go, and, you know, that's the thing that people don't get, and I'm just very lucky that I did get this. But if your heart isn't in it, you're not going to be successful. It's very easy for people to see what I do today and see the money I make, the lifestyle and, you know, the fame, the huge following, and they want all those things. But they don't understand that that's a by-product of the work. They fixate on the by-product and not the work. What happened was I fell in love with marketing, I fell in love with technology, copywriting and selling. I fell in love with teaching too. If people fall in love with money and freedom and significance and influence, they're chasing the wrong thing. I hear people all the time say, ‘I just don't like marketing’ or ‘I don't like writing’ or ‘I don't like the internet’. And it's, like, then what are you doing? My secret is I love what I do. I love all of it.

From bartending, how did you then get into the video program? Because the video program was really what took off for you, wasn't it?

Someone who saw what I was doing connected with me and asked, ‘Will you partner with me in my business?’ He was a dating and relationships coach. This was maybe the end of 2009. He just wanted to be the relationship coach. I said, great, let me do everything else. At the time he had a $37 ebook that was making like a sale a week. So he was making 150 bucks a month. I said, move over and let me do it. And I went to work. We completely reinvented his marketing strategy. Within the first month, we were already on track to build a six-figure business. There were no ads at the time, none of this stuff we have today.

So practically overnight he went from $2000-plus a year to a six-figure business, and growing. Every month was bigger and bigger. One of the big things I did was I took a YouTube channel of his from zero to two million views in about two months. That's how we built the business. Then one day he calls me up. I was getting a percentage. He said, ‘Well, looks like the business is working now’. And I said, ‘Yeah, sure is’. He said, ‘So I don't need you anymore’. And he let me go.

I was really green at the time. I thought we were partners. I thought this was ours, that I had a 30 per cent stake. But no, I was just an employee. Because he didn't have money then, he was just going to pay with the revenue. But we didn't have any contract in place, so he just fires me one day, and it's back to square one. I'd dropped everything else and for the last year had focused 100 per cent on that business. And there I was just, you know, dumped, and no more money coming in.

By the relationship coach!

Yes, by the relationship coach. I know, there's the subtle humour. He dumped me and I was upset, angry. I was even scared … for two steps. I walk or pace while I talk, so I took two steps, then on the third I told myself, I'm going to decide that this is the best thing that ever happened to me. This is a true story, exactly how it happened, I could take you to the spot in the middle of the street in my neighbourhood where I made that decision.

I got off that call and made my decision. Life is a choice, so everything that happens is about the decisions we make. What am I going to make out of this? Two weeks later, a friend came and crashed on my couch for a week. Lewis Howes was kind of my peer and became a really close friend. We'd been learning and struggling together. And he started telling me how frustrated he was by people who were letting him down, being dishonest and doing shady things. I'm going through exactly the same experience so I say, ‘I know what you mean’. And he tells me, ‘From now on, I only want to do business with my friends’. I'm sitting there and I say, ‘Yeah, me too’. He looks at me and he goes, ‘We should do something’. And I say, ‘Yeah, we should’. And he goes, ‘Let's create an online course’. And I say, ‘Yeah, that sounds great’. And he goes, ‘What do you want it to be about?’ And I say, ‘Well, I just helped this guy get millions of views on YouTube. How about YouTube?’

I had a film background too, so I knew how to make videos, but I was really into how to use YouTube. This was in January 2010. Right after this guy had dumped me. And he said, ‘Okay, let's make a product on YouTube’. So I created it, and we launched it in September 2011 and made a good $400 000 in sales in 30 days at a $97 price point. Overnight I became the YouTube guy. That product went on to do a couple of million dollars in sales. And it spawned an entire business.

How did you even do that? Facebook, which you used to promote your products, had just started then.

Yeah, the way we did it was with a very simple model that you don't see a lot of people use today. My superpower, especially at the time, was teaching. I was just really good at teaching and making things simple and fun and easy to do. Lewis didn't really like teaching, but he was a super connector, which at the time I wasn't at all. He had all these powerful, influential friends and himself had a big audience. So he put me in front of his audience and then he started attracting these people as affiliates.

So you came right out of the gate with your first course with affiliates and the whole shebang.

Yeah. We used affiliates and joint-venture webinars and stuff like that. And we were doing three a day, I was finishing one and jumping straight onto the next. We used GoToWebinar and sent people to a checkout page. And that was it. It was still really simple. And it was amazing. Then I built several other products and coaching programs.

Was that week as exciting as when that guy in San Antonio bought the first bartending product?

That's a great question. They were just very different. The first one told me, this really is possible and you can do this. This one told me, you can live an extraordinary life and reach the top doing this. One was I can do this, the other showed me what was really possible when I did. So both were very exciting. But I think it's still more exciting to discover it's possible, because it wasn't always about the money. Money was one driver, but only to the extent that I didn't want to have to worry about getting a job.

Now you make millions, is the same level of excitement there?

You can see yourself getting desensitised. I think you can choose to hold on to as much gratitude and appreciation as possible. One of the things I talk about with my students and help my students with is what we call Launch Freefall. You've put all this time and effort into creating this program and everything around it, then you put it out there and it doesn't go the way you expected. The only expectation you should have is that it won't go the way you expected — that I can guarantee! So I'm desensitised to the ups and downs of the Launch Freefall. Everything is just always okay.

We do big launches today, $6 million launches with 150 affiliates and a team of 12. We're doing long days and 50 000 people are going through the launch. Things happen. Today I'm cool as a cucumber. It's just whatever, you know, it is what it is. I think that's just a beautiful place to find yourself — never being reactive or freaking out and emotionally all over the place. Because the way I look at a launch is it's like a Broadway stage performance. If you're too much in your head, or you're freaking out, you're affecting the performance and if you're affecting the performance, you're affecting sales. So every time I go into a launch I simply ask myself, what does my audience need from me today?

When you keep creating new goals, there's that excitement at every launch. Once you get past a place of is this possible? and can I do it? the only thing that really lasts, that will drive you over the long term, that isn't like a drug where the high wears off, is to find yourself in a place where the core motivator is service and impact. I know that sounds like a cliché. But when someone comes to you and says, I was on food stamps and now I just bought a home and my spouse has retired, because of what I've learned from you … well, that's a high that never wears off. It's something you can never get sick of. And that's all we do today, because I'm all about the long term. You'll always notice that about me — I don't follow trends, I don't get into what's hot and current, because trends come and go. To be in this industry as long as I have is rare and becoming rarer. Long-term people have a different strategy. That's kind of one of my secrets.

If you want to do something long term, then it has to be something that pulls you long term. Money won't do that. In fact, studies show that money is one of the weakest motivators. Once people have enough, then it doesn't drive them the same way. That's how it has been for me. We took our company from $3 million to $9.4 million in one year. I told people I was going to do that, and they laughed at me. And it was easy, it was so easy to do that. But I'll tell you this: nothing changed for me in terms of my lifestyle, my quality of life, my emotional state. Nothing at all changed there. It doesn't get any better.

As your skills grow, so will your rewards. One year I quadrupled my own revenue on my own — without any partnerships, and not working with Lewis — and took the business from about $280 000 to $1.2 million in revenue. That's a quantum leap in growth. People generally expect like 10 per cent a year, a little step. This is a rite of passage if you're a personal brand, influencer or course creator. People ask me, what was my secret? What did you do to quadruple your revenue in one year? Was it a new launch strategy? Was it more Facebook ads? It was one thing: I finally let go of the need to be liked.

So many people come into this industry and see everything through the lens of I hope they'll like me, I hope I say the right things, I hope I get engagement, I hope they give me compliments. People have no idea how little I care about others’ opinions of me. Even when someone says something nasty or bad, it's oil and water. It has zero effect on me.

How did you get to that level? I find that's what holds so many people back — when they go to launch and they're so worried about people's perceptions.

Well, for starters, you have to realise it requires a deep inquiry into your own life — you know, how much your life is being dimmed and dulled because of your need for other people's approval and good opinion. The reality is when you're born you're born alone. Even if you're a twin, or a quintuplet, you're born alone, it's down to you and your life. And when you die, you die alone. This is your life. No one else is experiencing your life but you. You are alive for only a very short time as it is, so really, day by day, you have a choice. Who or what am I living for? And when you realise that everyone is full of judgements and opinions, you recognise that the people who might be judging you today are just as afraid of being judged themselves. If you are afraid of being judged, or of what people will say or think, remember that they are just as afraid as you. And when you can come to that place on your own, you'll find it's a very, very powerful and dangerous place to be.

What did that shift in your thinking allow you to do with your marketing?

Everything I was — all of my messaging and content — had been filtered through the lens of Is this going to get them to like me? I would hesitate and water it down and double second-guess it. I was putting what I call a governor on it. A governor is a term used by auto mechanics for a device that throttles back the carburettor so it doesn't open full bore and burn out the engine. I was holding myself back from going pedal to the metal in my messaging and even my self-promotion. Oh, I don't want to come across as pushy, because then they won't like me. So I don't say anything. When none of that matters you open the floodgates and you're just unapologetically you.

Here's my thing. I don't care if you don't like it. If you like it, great — here's what to do. If you don't, that's great too. What that does is it encourages you to amplify your message, which becomes more powerful and reaches far more people.

So what shifted in the business? This is where people get all screwed up. And this is why I teach goal setting today, which is really fun because I have a whole different approach on goal setting. The goal should be to fulfil your purpose or dharma every day. Mine is to transform and empower change makers and entrepreneurs to be the best versions of themselves so they can reach more people. That's the goal, and I pursue it every day in some capacity, whether it's through a new podcast episode or a coaching call with my clients. Every single day someone says this helped me, thank you. So I focus on the goal every day, but the game is in the way I'm going to do that.

My goal hasn't changed for years, but the game changes all the time. That's a big, big distinction that most people don't get. They focus on money as the goal, and when they don't hit the money, they get upset. Look at me, I'm a failure — self-pity, self-pity. The reality is that goal you created is outside of your control, because you don't have control over the thoughts, habits, actions and behaviour of complete strangers on the internet. You can influence them but not control them. You've said, I'm going to make my identity, my beliefs about myself and my emotional state completely dependent on an external variable I have no control over. How is that working out for you? Instead, my goal is to do something I do have control over, which is to be of service or to put something out there that's going to help at least one other person. I can say and do that every day. And if I'm doing that, then I'm already winning.

For people looking to get their gifts out into the world, do you think it's harder now because the space is more crowded?

Well, it depends on what you mean by ‘harder’. The simple answer is yes, but let me make a key distinction. When there are more people doing what you do, you may complain that the market is overcrowded or oversaturated. This is a belief that is rooted in lack, and lack is an illusion. That's a hard idea for people to take in. I operate from a context that lack is an illusion. There's no such thing as lack. You don't believe me? Go look in nature. My home borders on national forests. Thousands and thousands of trees, and thousands of leaves on each one. How many grains of dirt and sand cover this beautiful desert of Sedona? Abundance is everywhere. You make a choice when you see lack rather than abundance. So I don't look at market saturation; I look at market sophistication. It's not that there are too many people; it's that the market becomes more sophisticated, and you need to become more sophisticated than the market.

So it's hard only in the sense that your skills as a communicator, an influencer, a marketer and a copywriter need to match the sophistication of the current market. If you're trailing the market, you're losing. It's not until you get ahead and lead the market that you win. Today, with what I know and what I've done, that's very easy for me to do. But for someone without the necessary marketing skills, yeah, it's going to be hard for them. Because it's like trying to be the best architect when you didn't go to architecture school, right?

How do you view social media marketing with your personal brand?

The first thing I would say is when I'm creating content about my life, it's never from a place of what do I want to share? or what will persuade people to like me? but rather, what about my life will provide value for somebody else? That's the difference. You know, I think there are chronic over-sharers. And they're doing so out of a need for significance and attention, a need to be liked, which we've already talked about. None of that matters to me. Why do I need attention? Okay, that's just completely irrelevant to me. What I want is to help people, and if this helps them, then I want it in front of them so it can help them, and if it can help more people, I want to get it out in front of more people. So everything I do passes through that simple lens. To me, it's as simple as that.

How did your habits change from when you reached that first million?

My answer to this might be a little different from most people's. When I hit that $400 000, I fell into a deep depression, and I'm normally a pretty happy, easygoing dude. I just started drinking and smoking pot and couldn't get off the couch. The reason for that, as I found in hindsight — because hindsight is 2020 — is that I had tied my sense of self-worth to some elusive dollar amount in the bank account. If I make a certain amount of money, then I will be good enough, I will be worthy enough, girls will want to date me, friends will want to like me, people will want to love me. And when all that money came in, I didn't feel any different. I was the same insecure loser I saw myself as. And that was very scary, very confronting. What got me out of it really was that I went down a path of spirituality. I developed a spiritual context in my life, and it changed everything. This is why I talk about this so much, because it changed my life and I want to give back. If what I have, and what I've done, resonates with you and you'd like to learn a little more, here's what I discovered in my own life.

The first thing that had to go was this strategy that most of us have, which is that in some way we've equated our work ethic and our effort with our deservedness. If I work enough, if I work harder, then I will be deserving of success. I decided I never ever wanted that to be the case. So what I tell my students today is, you should never work hard to be deserving of what you want. Work hard, because your clients deserve the best. They deserve the best of you. But it has nothing to do with your being more deserving.

And I can say that, conceptually, everyone is going to have to go on their own journey to work through that. Because the scariest thing is to spend years of your life working harder and longer only to wake up and realise you still tell yourself that story. I'm not worthy enough, and no amount of work will ever change that. Trust me. When you can be at peace with who you are, with the idea that you are worthy, that you are deserving; then you're not working from a place of fear or compensation, you know, trying to compensate for a lack. Everything you do is because you put your heart into it. So I want the people who come into my world to experience my best stuff. Because they deserve it. That's it. I pour my heart into everything I do because I love it and it doesn't feel like work.

How much do you work now in terms of effort? Do you quantify work now?

I hesitate to answer because the way the business runs is in cycles. It ebbs and flows. This year especially is very different, because last year there were 21 events. I had two masterminds with three events each. So there's six events right there. Then I had a program called Business By Design, then Next Level, and that came with two events. So now we're at eight. Then we ran two BBD lives a year. So there's 10. And I ran an affiliate mastermind for people who had won one of our big competitions.

What is the first thing you think someone should do when they're starting in the online course world?

The first thing they should do is sell it. People waste too much time in their comfort zone. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the pudding is the profit. You don't have a business until someone gives you money. So why not be in business? Now, instead of spending a year working for free trying to build something, the reality is, you don't need all that stuff.

You get started, you can just sit there and say, I want to help people do this. And if you'd like me to teach you, here's how to sign up. We've had people do their beta launch or founding members launch with just two people. Better two than none. The problem is, it's as simple as this. Ours is a unique type of business. I mean, I've seen people who have been in other businesses come into this industry and get their butts kicked. And part of it is because their identity is wrapped up in the product, you know, and all they get to deal with is these confronting issues around themselves.

The other part of it is, well, kind of tied up in that. It's the Pareto principle on steroids — 5 per cent of the activities you do are directly responsible for 95 per cent of the results you want. The problem is, that 5 per cent is often far outside people's comfort zone. They can stay busy and distracted for a long, long time. What I like to say is business is very seductive and it will trap you all the time. Oh, I've got to do this first. But I need to do that first. I need to do my photo shoot and my business card and my website. I need to podcast, to get the Instagram, to produce six months of content. Now I need to do that. And a year goes by and they're like, ‘I don't get it. I've been working my arse off and have nothing to show for it’. That's because the only things that will drive the business forward exist way outside your comfort zone. And what is that at its core? It's making an offer, asking people for money, selling. Maybe I can do this without selling. But you can't. You have to sell. You have to ask for money. And if you don't ask for money, no one's gonna give it to you.

Anything you would like to add for course creators?

There's a lot happening on the planet. I stand in a place where it's all good. And I think it will just bring more awareness and enlightenment and beautiful things to us. It's just like all the personal growth I've had to do in my life. I had to go through some crap to do it. And that's what anyone who's done any type of internal work will tell you. It's tough because you've got to face the parts of you that you don't want to look at, and you've got to deal with them. Then, on the other side, it's beautiful. And I believe we're doing this collectively, whether we want to or not, and that's beautiful.