JEFF MILLS, INC.
INVERNESS, FLORIDA

I knew I was about to interview a different sort of financial mind when my interview with Jeff Mills started out like this: “Back in 1977, I understood the concept of leverage for the first time when I was sitting in a tree house about thirty feet up in the air in my front yard.” He wasn’t talking about the pulley system/dumbwaiter, either. Mills and his neighborhood buddies used to get together in the tree house every week and do MadLibs and other kid-type things, then trek over to Mr. Toy to buy candy. In Junior High, while growing up in Huntington Beach, California, Jeff bought Jolly Ranchers, Laffy Taffy squares for .05 each and sold them for .10 each or 3 for .25 at school. Business on the playground and black top was booming. Then came the cinnamon toothpick craze of the early 80’s and Jeff was in his kitchen cooking cinnamon toothpicks in cinnamon oil and selling baggies for $1 for 10 sticks (while other kids were selling “other mind altering stuff in other baggies). He experienced his first “slap” when the principle called him into the office and told him no more selling stuff on school grounds. School was for book learning, not selling stuff. Instead, in 1999 he was working as a youth pastor in Minneapolis, Minnesota, earning about $32,000 a year with not much hope of ever earning any more. Debt weighed heavily on him from seminary and Bible College tuition, and from making some unwise choices with his credit cards. Mills resigned himself to never again being debt-free unless he won the lottery or ”figured out some super-Jedi investment technique.” He’d heard his friends and parishioners talking about the Internet, and people who were making money online, and thought it was at least worth a shot. Not knowing much about it, Mills signed up for the first thing that sounded promising, a program called AllAdvantage. The premise was simple: sign up for free, and AllAdvantage would put banners on your website. Every time you clicked on that banner, they paid you ten cents, seven cents, three cents, or a percentage of a penny. The first day Mills sat at the computer for sixteen hours, clicking the banner every chance he could. He made $1.87. Clearly that was not the way to pay off his debts. But it was the humble beginnings that lead him to produce $25 million dollars selling products online to date. Mills grew up with a Commodore 64, and he enjoyed being on the computer, so he didn’t let himself get discouraged. He just dug deeper. Like many Internet Marketers, he quickly discovered the idea of selling other people’s products as an affiliate marketer. And, like many others, he had no list of his own. Being incredibly shy, Mills spent a lot of time hunkered down in his hotel room, thinking that all the others there knew each other and were practiced pros. He did meet and spend some time talking with others though, and years later was able to call many of those members sitting along side of him business partners and friends and he shed his shyness and learned the skill of networking and speaking from the stage. Mills made a few moves that year that figured heavily in his success. At the “BigSeminar,” he bought a copywriting course and learned how to write pretty good copy—good enough that he could get the job done. Earlier that year he also signed up for a mentoring program that cost him $500 called Mentors in Motion, and joined on as a reseller and began earning $400 for every person he signed up to take classes helping people grow their MLM and Network marketing business. That was when he caught onto the fact that it takes just as much work to sell a ten-dollar product as it does to sell a hundred-dollar product. At first he was skeptical that anyone would buy “high-ticket products online, site-unseen,” especially from him as an unknown, considering that even he had debated for days about whether or not to do spend $500 to begin this mentoring program. But he did buy it, and by the next day he had five people introduced to Mentors in Motion; four of them ended up buying, and he made $1,200 in one day. That’s almost fourteen times what he made as a pastor in the same amount of time. Over the course of a year, he earned $80,000 just on that product alone. That let him devote more quality time—and less quantity—to his youth ministry. His exact thoughts were “Ok, the Lord is giving me the vehicle I need to step out of paid of ministry now, come home to unite my family, do this and work from home lifestyle design thing.” That was in 2003. Mills believed 100 percent in the Val Smyth’s Mentors in Motion product, which taught him the foundations of marketing. He even added a little spin to create his own online system, and did very well with it, called “Who is Marketing”. Who is Marketing was the early foundations of what many now call the "Law of Attraction" and found people would want to know WHO they were joining a business with before shelling out the money, and as they got to know, like and trust their future mentor, it made it easier for them to buy into the programs they were selling. And that's when Jeff realized that if he could sell a $500 product, he could probably sell a $1,000 product. Then he sold a $2,500 product. He’s gone on today to selling $10,000 products and $12,000 to $40,000 personal coaching masterminds. Mills found his niche: big-ticket products. One variation on the big-ticket niche is live events. In October 2006, Mills hosted his first seminar, held in Minneapolis called the Midwest Super Conference. Attending multiple “BigSeminars” and taking Armand Morin’s seminar coaching program gave him the background to set up a live event, as did meeting John Chillders, who teaches people public speaking and “platinum selling from the stage,” which is selling through talking ,teaching and story telling. Part of his reason for hosting an event was that it gave him an opportunity to bring together many of the greatest speakers available; unbelievably, everyone he invited said yes, even though he knew only a few of them personally. The attendance was only a quarter of what Mills expected, but those who did attend apparently found a lot to like: one attendee began generating so much business—over a thousand phone calls per month to his office—that his employees couldn’t handle the volume.