Exclusive Q&A with Kane and Alessia Minkus on Their Entrepreneurial Journey

Unlike the popular belief, married couples can build winning business partnerships. One great example would be Kane and Alessia Minkus.

Both Kane and Alessia met at a Business Growth event in Rimini, Italy. At that time, Kane was presenting, and Alessia was in the audience. They fell in love and got married. As both are passionate about launching and growing business, they embark on an entrepreneurial journey. They founded M&M Global Consulting, and together they launched over 40 companies.

The big question is: How did they do that? We have a great opportunity to interview both Alessia and Kane on their entrepreneurial journey. Here’s the Q&A:

Hi, Kane and Alessia – please kindly introduce yourself to our readers on who you are and what you do.

We are a husband and wife team who are serial entrepreneurs and investors. We invest in people, then in ideas. We have launched over 40 of our own companies and created over $220 million in revenue and trained over 400K entrepreneurs and business owners to launch and grow their businesses with our proprietary systems for growth hacking.

Together, you’ve started 40+ businesses – what’s your story? What’s your tipping point that kickstarts everything from starting one, two, three, and so on.

Our stories are different actually, so we can elaborate on both…

Kane:

I started as a musician and creative type as a young child, and then went broke trying to figure out how to become a successful musician. I became a Record Producer for Sony Music, but still ended up broke on a friend’s couch in San Francisco when I was 20.

I ended up deciding I would start my own music company which did nothing for 6 months, until I ended up at a business seminar and met a guy who would become a close friend and an important coach in my life. It turns out he and his parents were top coaches in America, and he agreed to help me with my music business, even though I had no money to pay him. He invested in it, and asked for 15% of the business. Over the next 4 years, he helped us create the 5th largest media business in the world called SomaTone which still continues on today (over a decade later).

He went on to coach me on almost 24 other companies (not all were a success), but by the time I was 29 years old, I was retired and worth tens of millions.

Alessia:

I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My parents had started a tourism company in Rome, Italy. It was doing well, but my father worked 24/7 building it and was not living a very healthy lifestyle. When I was 19, he had a heart attack, and I was forced into taking over the business. I thought, “How hard can it be? He already did all the hard work getting it set up!”

I figured I would run it for 6 months and hand it back over to just help out while he was recovering. However, I learned quickly it was harder than I thought and it started going into the ground.

I simply wanted to run, but I couldn’t because there was no one else to run it. So I had to work it out and start to learn how to make each part of the company work.

I remember sales was the worst for me – I hated selling things to people. So, in the absence of any option, I hired a coach to help me. And that turned out to be a massively important decision. That coach helped me not only turned it around, but also increased the business from 15M Euro to 20M Euro a year within a few years.

I had another set back when I was show jumping horses, as I was a competitive show jumper. When I was 24 years old, everything was going great, and I was performing at a competition. I went to take a jump, and the horse threw me over. I landed on a cement block, breaking my spine. I ended up spending 6 months in bed, not able to move. Doctors didn’t know if I would be able to walk again.

At that point, the business again started falling apart. Although I had learned to run it, I made myself the key person in it.

While I was in bed, I had to learn how to build leaders and have the team run the business. Luckily my spine healed. Furthermore, I had created a machine that was scalable and independent of me personally. So the company grew itself (with some supervision of course) to about 30M Euro a year in revenue over the next few years.

While I was bored, having little to do at a company that I had really systematised, I started 6 other companies over those years, in everything from travel, tourism, coaching and training, language education and entertainment.

You travel the world, coaching business owners – what are the common problems faced by the business owners you’ve coached, and how to deal with those problems?

There are five common problems all business owners face:

1. Clarity
2. Structure
3. Visibility
4. Community
5. Influence.

Each of these are critical business issues that must be overcome if the business is expected to thrive.

What are you guys working on these days?

We have a bunch of stuff in the hopper, but mostly we are investing in our students’ businesses these days. We train and mentor students through our training programs and then once they reach a certain level of proficiency and revenue we help them, through an investment in either time, resources or both, achieve superstar status.

Our audience is mainly business owners and entrepreneurs; please share your tips on how to start a business – and thrive.

Well, that’s a big question! But if we had to boil it down to three things, there are three key things that always help a business thrive. As it turns out a good idea is not one of them :) There is nothing wrong with a good idea, but that’s not why businesses are successful or fail. It’s much more around the execution.

To execute well, you need three things:

1. Best Practices to make good choices
2. Experience, and Experienced Mentor who can guide you
3. A Network, filled with the resources you need.

These three things together help one become inevitably successful.

I want to follow your footsteps; I want to travel and coach business people around the world. If you were me, what’s my first step?

Buy a plane ticket ;) Just kidding.

The first step is to get clear about who you want to coach, what their problem is, and what unique ability you have to solve that. From there, it becomes a game of talking to people and finding those who have a problem; those who are actively looking for a solution.

Once you declare these three things – you become a real business possibility, once you get your first ‘paying’ client, then you become a real business owner. People over complicate this process, it’s actually really very simple. Someone has a problem, they need solved, you have a unique skill or product that can do that, and you solve it for them. Out of gratitude, they give you money. It’s pretty straight forward. :)

Many thanks for your time, Kane and Alessia!