Bill Wilson

Full transcript: Bill Wilson on London Real

0:00 I am here with Bill Wilson, our recent graduate from the Business Accelerator. Bill, tell us about you. Who are you, sir? Well, I am 54 years of age. I grew up in Germany, I live in Canada right now. One of my big passions, which is why I’m here, is to talk about my passion for being a vegan. And being vegan is not easy, but certainly the biggest focus that I want to do with my online business is to encourage people to become more vegan, or consider the path, the journey of becoming more vegan, because truly there’s a lot of benefits to becoming a vegan.

0:48 My focus is really to encourage people to look at the health benefits. We can talk about the animal cruelty and the impacts on the environment, but I really feel that’s so negative that people just tend to shut down, and they stop even wanting to consider the path of becoming a vegan when they look at the negative stuff.

1:12 Okay, have you always been vegan-ish, or what’s the last 10 years of your life been? Well, it’s interesting, because to me it was a journey. Five years ago, about six years ago now, I was in Costa Rica and I had a boat accident. The raft capsized in the whitewater rapids, and I almost drowned, and I survived. I was lucky. But when I came back to Canada I got very sick, and I never get sick. I work out, I take good care of myself, I’ve been eating very clean, mainly white meats, and no dairy, very little dairy.

1:50 But I got really, really sick, and I thought to myself at the time, maybe at my age, to consider changing some diet and health things to improve myself. And coincidentally I went to the health food store, and I was offered a free DVD on being a vegan. It’s like, whoa, this is not me. However, I considered it, and from there the journey just continued.

2:21 I tried to do a cleanse. I ended up just getting rid of all meat and dairy at that point. I progressed, and actually went to the Hippocrates Health Institute, which is a resort down in West Palm Beach, Florida, where they offer the ability for people that are very sick… I wasn’t that sick. I’m talking about stage four cancer and people that are almost terminally ill. They encourage people to adopt a vegan raw food with intermittent fasting, which means only two meals a day, lots of green juicing, lots of wheatgrass.

3:01 And the whole idea of different health modalities, like infrared saunas and things like that, to help your immune system reboot, reboot your health, your immune system, because it really is your immune system that makes a difference between whether you die or live in any state. Okay, and when did you decide, I’m going to go ahead and build a business around this, and go ahead and say, okay, I’m going to build the face of this? I mean, was that a difficult decision to make?

3:32 I’ve been thinking about this for a number of years, and a good friend of mine has been pushing me really hard to do this, and I just needed the extra kick in the butt. And I stumbled upon your London Real videos about half a year ago, and Dorian Yates was the person that I had googled, and I saw your interview, and I was pretty floored, because I’d never seen that approach to interviewing bodybuilders. Bodybuilders usually talk about the diet, they talk about training, they talk all the boring stuff, definitely.

4:17 But for you, you really got into his mind, you really got into who the person really was, and that to me was so appealing. And from there I started watching other videos, and then I heard about the Business Accelerator course and I decided to do it. Didn’t take me long, just a few days. I was running late, I was towards the end of the registration period, and I thought I might have missed the boat, but I was very fortunate to be part of it.

4:42 And what made you decide to trust us? We’re going to go down an eight-week course, it was a big investment. What made you think, okay, I’m going to trust these guys to help me with my business? Well, I put a lot of my trust in you, that’s one thing. I really wanted to learn from you, because I really could relate to you, and to me it was an easy, easy decision, because I had been struggling for the previous few years trying to do something on my own. I was very unsuccessful, trying to do courses with the help of my friend. She was guiding me, but I just couldn’t do it alone.

5:24 I needed a pack, a team pack, almost like the class that did it with me, this accelerator. So we had a team of 80 or 90 people, and together we all stumbled and struggled and really worked, and we had our ups and downs, and together we achieved the goal of getting through this eight to ten week course.

5:49 What was that first two or three weeks like for you? You know, you’re in this private Facebook group of 90 people, you’re uploading videos. What was the thing you remember about that? Well, the first thing was, aside from LinkedIn, which I used for my project management profession, I’ve never used any of the other social medias. So for me, putting up a Facebook page was a struggle, and Twitter and Instagram and all the rest, that was quite new to me.

6:16 That was the first, or the second struggle was the ten vlogs in ten days. To me, it’s like, I feel comfortable in my skin, but I’m not comfortable in front of camera, especially at that point. So that was really good, because it really showed that there really was nothing to worry about. Do it, be yourself, and even you can give your message.

6:50 And what was the community like, the community of people in the class? Oh, the community, yeah. The class was dynamic. It was 80, 90 people from all over the world, which is amazing, to think that we are interacting. We had our own Facebook page, we were constantly helping each other through our struggles, which to me was worth almost more than the actual content of the course, because getting that support was so essential, and without the support the course means nothing.

7:22 And you met a bunch of them last night. What was it like to see the people in person, if you’ve been interacting with them virtually? And by virtually, twice a week we had our video conference calls, and it was great to see 90 little faces on those video sessions. Seeing them in person was great. It was wonderful to finally see people in the flesh.

7:48 What was your biggest challenge on the course? What was the hardest thing that you struggled with? I think it’s overall the amount of time that was needed to learn the different tools. It was very challenging. I mean, with a full-time job and then taking this course on, I thought it would be a few hours a week, and to do it properly was many times more than a few hours a week.

8:24 But then of course, if you want to do it right, want to really learn, just immerse yourself. Have to accept the fact that it’s going to be hard, but the benefits are there, so let’s just do it. And everybody else is doing it, so you get a lot of encouragement. So it’s just a matter of just plugging away, putting aside as much time as you can every day, every day of the week, and catching up on the weekend.

8:51 We had a great accountability sheet that you provided us, where we could not only keep ourselves accountable but also look at other people and see how they were doing, compare ourselves, and that was really helpful, that accountability sheet. It would help to push us all.

9:06 What do you think are going to be two key takeaways from the course that are going to help you in the next year? What are the elements that you’re going to be like, okay, that’s what I’m going to use to help me go forward with my business? Well, I’m still struggling with the whole social media, because it’s overwhelming, really, it truly is. I mean, if you want to do it right, it seems like you almost want to do every social media, but you really can’t.

9:38 So as the course had suggested, we need to focus on one or two of the social medias that make sense to us. And for me, YouTube, hard to believe, that video blogging is key for me. But I think going forward, to give my message of the vegan lifestyle, I’m going to continue with YouTube. And I think secondly it’s going to be probably Facebook. Facebook is the connections that you have with your friends, and just relationships with people that you get to know.

10:11 And what are your plans for the vegan lifestyle the next year? What are the kind of things you want to do? Well, right now I’m doing it very much part-time, and I would like this year to work into doing it full-time. So it’s that migration of replacing my current salary, or some of my salary, with this new venture. But for me the biggest thing is I don’t want to start too fast, because I want to make sure I’m getting a good solid foundation of value for the people that have seen my videos and joined my website and joined my team, my tribe of people that want to improve their health through better focus on the vegan lifestyle.

10:58 So once again, I’m not in any way trying to force anybody to become a vegan. That scares people off. Instead, what I’m saying is, zero means you’re eating all meat, hundred percent you’re a total vegan. Everybody’s in that range. Even for me, on a very rare occasion I might have something, so I consider myself 99% vegan, or whatever. You know, never say never. So hundred percent is excellence; it’s hard to achieve that.

11:28 So you might be comfortable eating meat twice a week; that’s so much better. For example, I’ll give you an example: a friend of mine I had lunch with, he mentioned that he used to eat meat twice a day, and now he’s down to eating meat five times a week. So he used to have it 14 times a week, now it’s down to five times, so he’s reduced it by two thirds, which is amazing. They feel so much better, and he knows all the health benefits, so he’s doing the right thing and he’s on the right path. And is that good enough for him? Probably is.

12:00 And you know what, not only is he helping his own health, but he’s also helping out with the reduction of animal cruelty and the environment and other stuff that I mentioned I wasn’t going to focus on, but we all understand that that does exist.

12:18 And if you hadn’t joined us on the accelerator, what do you think you’d be now when it came to spreading your message? I’d be where I was the last few years, which is nowhere. I needed a real good kick in the butt to get going, and I needed a lot of support, and I think I got that through you, Brian, and also the team that supports you, and also my class. So I think together we really achieved stuff.

12:52 And for people that are thinking about taking the course with us, what would you tell them as far as whether they should do it or not, what to expect? I would say find something that you’re really passionate about, because for me I was pivoting a few times and considering other angles of other passions I have that are not quite as strong as this vegan one, and I sort of lost some of my momentum.

13:16 So if you have something that you’re really passionate about that you want to voice, and I think we all do, everybody has something, it’s just that we are not comfortable necessarily announcing it to everybody. But find something that you’re really passionate about, and if you really want to spread the word, and if you really want to live your passion rather than living a job, then it makes sense to take this course and really jump in, go whole hog for achieving all the different objectives and different tasks that need to be done, and you’ll benefit tremendously from it.

13:54 What’s the community like, all those 90 people, all those calls? What did you learn most about all those different types of people? Well, we all struggle through a lot of the same things. We all have some self-doubt, we all have different fears, we all have resistance to change, and I think together we can overcome it a lot easier than by ourselves.

14:18 I’ve been going forward, even for my online business, and I think for most of my classmates, I think that part of our success will be to collaborate and to form partnerships and things like that. There’s no reason why we need to do everything by ourselves. I mean, that’s a struggle. Why not have a partner and together focus on something, and just, you know, really have that synergy? Excellent. Bill, it’s been awesome having you on the course. Your energy, you know, it’s really palpable in those calls. So thank you for being a part of the class and continuing to take this journey with us. All right.