I always like to hear about innovative business models, and todays interview is with the CEO of a company that teaches men and women how to get more dates and attract the opposite sex!

Nick is President and CEO of Mystery Method Corporation and is the author of Magic Bullets, the “bible” of dating science and social dynamics. He loves adventure and a challenge. After college, he traveled the world for several years, managing international businesses in Europe, the Middle East, and South Africa. He started by gambling at backgammon for food and travel money across Turkey and finished by helping raise financing in Slovakia for Europe’s most promising low-cost airline http://www.skyeurope.com/. He has an MBA from Wharton and an Honors Degree in History from McGill University in Montreal. He has also consulted to several Fortune 500 companies around the world on business strategy.

1. Did you always know that you wanted to start companies and work for yourself, or was there a specific moment that made you realize it? How did you get started?

I was always attracted to the idea of being an entrepreneur, but always had a good excuse not to take the plunge. Usually this was because of other great job opportunities. I had a taste of the entrepreneurial bug running a clothing franchise when I was doing my MBA, and then did a stint with an entrepreneurial company in Europe (a new low-cost airline), and that whetted my appetite. About a year or so out of business school, I realized that I was in the wrong job, and in the midst of looking for something new, the little voice in my head told me that it was time to take the plunge. Ironically, this came right as I’d finally landed my “dream job” with a company I’d been dying to work with for years. But I figured that the company wasn’t going to disappear in a year and everyone would still remember me, so I gave myself a 12-month horizon to test my entrepreneurial dreams and see what happened.

2. What was the most important thing you learned in your time abroad?

There are so many different ways I could answer that question, but most of them would seem like platitudes or self-indulgence when reduced to a paragraph of text. In terms of “news I can use”, probably the most important business learning I’ve benefited from is the concept of business timing. In the U.S. business culture, things work according to deadlines, agendas, and project plans. If you need someone to sign off on a project by Thursday, you damn well better meet with them before then and you’d better get them to sign off. In some other cultures, especially the Middle East where I worked for a while, people are much more sensitive to the emotional temperature of a room before pushing their agenda. If you sense that the person you need something from is stressed, or for whatever reason not in the mood to engage your issue, you put it off. It can be frustrating in that culture because it appears that some things take forever to get done and it’s not always obvious to an outsider why this is; however, coming to the United States I also get surprised when someone is trying to get me to do something when it’s obvious that I’m not predisposed at that moment to engage their issue. To generalize, US business culture is based on time, whereas Arab business culture is based on timing. The ability to combine both approaches is important.

3. Did you have any mentors or role models that pushed you to see self-employment as a good option? Bad option? How can aspiring entrepreneurs meet good mentors?

For sure. When I was at SkyEurope, a startup airline in Central Europe, I learned a lot from the energy and excitement and spirit of the two co-founders there. They couldn’t understand why someone of my age, skills, and background WOULDN’T be an entrepreneur. It’s easy to talk yourself out of taking risks, but it’s a lot harder to explain this to someone else. You sometimes realize how silly your arguments are when you have to verbalize and justify them.

I’m not sure I had any great entrepreneurial mentors. I never really sought them out, and this is something I’ve been trying to fix the last few months. I’ve made a ton of mistakes, like anyone, and many of these could have been avoided with the type of experience and perspective that a mentor could provide. And I can’t even begin to estimate the value of the lost opportunities that quality mentors could have helped me see. Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur would be well-served to connect with successful people who have come before them. And make sure to be respectful of their time and offer them value in return. I’m in the process of setting up an advisory board, and there will definitely be compensation involved (that’s not to say that compensation is the only form of value that can be returned).

4. Based on friends or clients you’ve worked with, how can being in the wrong job or being unhappy in your job affect other areas of your life?

Most people spend about half of their waking hours working, preparing for work, commuting to work, buying clothes for work, thinking about work, and so on. That’s half of your life. First of all, whatever purpose you have on this earth, don’t spend half of it doing something that makes you unhappy. Second, no matter how stoic you are, there is no way that what happens in half of your life doesn’t affect the other half. When people are unhappy at work, you can tell. They don’t have that energy and excitement that people do when they are happy. They are more irritable, more negative, they drink and eat too much, and eventually adopt a sort of fatalistic attitude. It’s sad. Timothy Ferriss did a much better analysis of this in The 4-Hour Workweek, and while I don’t agree with everything in the book, he hits the nail on the head on this (and some other) issues.

5. You’ve probably heard the old saying that “the only way to get what you want is to help others get what they want”. How important is this idea of “helping others” in the founding of Mystery Method or any company?

The whole basis behind dating coaching is about helping others. We help men succeed with women. So for Love Systems or The Mystery Method, we don’t succeed if our clients don’t succeed. We don’t have millions to spend on advertising and we guarantee everything we sell with a full refund if clients aren’t satisfied. If we don’t genuinely help others, we die. That might sound scary, but it’s not; it’s highly motivating. It’s really fun to be in a business where our interests are directly aligned with those of our clients. Now we’re also helping women succeed with men and it’s the same principle at play.

6. Can you tell us about a company or project you’ve started that failed, and what you learned from it? How do you deal with “failure” or risk of failure as an entrepreneur?

Test and learn isn’t just a direct marketing philosophy, it’s how we run the whole business. The important thing to keep in mind when trying something new is to set your failure conditions beforehand. If I’m going to put one month, or X dollars, or whatever resource into a project or opportunity, I want to have a sense before I get started and emotionally committed to it, what would constitute a failure. It’s like investing in a stock. If I buy at $60, I may decide to sell it if it drops to $50. It’s all too easy to hold on and hope for a rebound. After all, if it was a good investment at $60, isn’t it a better investment at $50? But you can go broke, or waste years of your life, if you let little losses pile up. Yeah, $49 isn’t that different from $50. And $48 isn’t that different from $49. But eventually the stock is trading at $10, and at some point you have to realize you got it wrong. Same thing with startups. When Mystery Method Corporation was formed, I gave it a year. I knew that in a year if it didn’t work out, I’d still have my contacts and be marketable. Fortunately, it succeeded. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have let it drag on into year 5. There’s nothing magic about one year, of course, some businesses need a greater or lesser time horizon. But the important thing is to set your failure conditions before you start.

7. What’s the one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?

Most jobs are not like school. You don’t disappear from the professor’s view, write great paper, hand it in, and have it graded objectively. In my first job, I ignored many opportunities to socialize or build relationships in my company in order to spend more “work time” producing better work. And I did produce better work, and my career went fine. But it could have gone so much better with 90% of the efficiency and more time spent managing relationships and being part of the team. Work isn’t fair. It’s not meant to be fair.

8. Do you ever see yourself going back to a “real job” working for someone else? What does the future have in store?

Some people say they couldn’t do that after being an entrepreneur. I don’t know if that holds true for me. I think as long as I was working with great people and had appropriate incentives and the autonomy and tools to achieve them, I could do just as well in the corporate world. The fun of doing what I’m doing now doesn’t come from being “the boss”. I defer to other members of the management team a lot, usually when they are closer to a specific issue or feel strongly about it. I focus on a couple areas of responsibility and have overall accountability, but in a way it would also be nice not to be the person ultimately accountable for every single issue. That being said, I love what I’m doing now and wouldn’t change it.

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