Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Adam Schafer: Mind Pump Co-Founder on The Mindset That Separates Entrepreneurs Who Win | Part 1 | Entrepreneurship | E337
Mon, 17 Feb 2025
Adam Schafer’s childhood was marked by poverty, the tragic loss of his father, and the presence of an abusive stepfather. At just 15 years old, he became an entrepreneur, mowing lawns to afford the life he wanted. By 21, he was already leading a team of fitness trainers despite having less experience. Years later, he co-founded Mind Pump Media, transforming it from a side project into a multi-million-dollar business. In this episode, Adam shares how childhood adversity built his growth mindset and how rejecting a victim mentality fueled Mind Pump’s organic growth and unstoppable success. In this episode, Hala and Adam will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (03:53) From Teen Entrepreneur to Team Leader (09:46) Turning Adversity into Fuel for Success (18:02) How Sports Shaped His Growth Mindset (21:55) Why Vulnerability Drives Business Growth (27:34) The #1 Sales Strategy: Value Selling (31:40) The Key to Monetizing Social Media (35:54) Launching Mind Pump with Total Strangers (42:52) Scaling Mind Pump with Free Content (48:20) The Secret to Lasting Business Partnerships (52:51) Managing Conflict with Partners (57:40) Building Partnerships on Trust and Time Adam Schafer is the co-founder of Mind Pump Media, a multi-million-dollar fitness brand and podcast. Growing up with childhood trauma, including the loss of his biological father to suicide, Adam developed resilience and leadership skills early on. Starting with a lawn-mowing business and later working as a fitness trainer, he co-founded Mind Pump, growing it into one of the top fitness podcasts and companies from the ground up. Sponsored By: Shopify - youngandprofiting.co/shopify Airbnb - airbnb.com/host Rocket Money - rocketmoney.com/profiting Indeed - indeed.com/profiting RobinHood - robinhood.com/gold Factor - factormeals.com/profiting50off Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Resources Mentioned: The Mind Pump Podcast: mindpumppodcast.com Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Career, Productivity, Careers, Startup, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Opportunities, Professionals, Workplace, Career Podcast.
Chapter 1: What inspired Adam Schafer to become an entrepreneur?
Yeah, fam, what does it take to turn personal adversity into a thriving career in business and media? Today, I'm excited to welcome Adam Schafer, co-founder of Mind Pump Media and one of the co-hosts of the popular Mind Pump podcast. Now, Adam Schafer is an extraordinary entrepreneur. I ended up speaking with him for over an hour and 40 minutes.
And I do this with anyone who I feel like just has so much information that I need to extract from my listeners. Adam definitely did not disappoint. He gave so much amazing information. And in part one of this episode, we're really focusing on his challenging childhood. He had so much adversity. His dad committed suicide when he was younger. His mom was in an abusive relationship.
And he had a really traumatic childhood, but he didn't stay the victim. So he discusses how he stopped playing victim and drove towards success. We also discuss how he first started MindPump, which is just such an amazing organic story. In part two, we talk about the business of MindPump. How do they make their money? How do they deal having four business partners? How do they all work together?
How do they think about social versus email versus podcasts? How do they acquire audiences? What is their marketing messaging like? And we even talk about sponsorships. So this is literally a masterclass for all my creator entrepreneurs out there, for all my content creators and entrepreneurs, which is basically all of us. I'm so excited for this conversation.
I think you guys are going to get so much value from it. Here is part one of my conversation with Adam Schafer. Adam, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
I'm so excited for this conversation. I can't wait to pick your brain about fitness, about business. And when I was studying for this interview, I found out that you've been an entrepreneur for a really long time. You started a lawn mowing business before you could even drive. And so I want to know, where did this entrepreneurial spirit come from? And why have you always been young and profiting?
I don't think it's a very sexy story because it was more out of necessity. I grew up in a home, I'm the oldest of five. My parents weren't very financially successful. We struggled. We moved around a lot. I lived in nine different homes growing up. And that was because many times we couldn't afford to live in that house or we're being evicted.
And so if I wanted something as a kid, I had to go get it. It wasn't like I grew up with like this fire to, oh, I want to build a business when I get older. It was like, hey, if I want those new sneakers that all my friends have or the new starter jacket, dating myself a bit there, that was really cool. I better go find a way to make money and do that.
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Chapter 2: How did childhood adversity shape Adam's mindset?
For my age and what I was doing, it was perfect. I worked the weekends. It gave me enough money in my pocket to keep up with my friends that had wealthier parents and that could buy the sneakers and the stuff. And so that's really how it started for me. The next like venture or job that I did was working in a dairy.
So I was a bovine mammary extraction technician, which is a fancy term for I milked cows. But I got to work for a couple that had built this business from the ground up and really got to peer into what I think is like a lot of real entrepreneurship and not the sexy side, the side that is hard work and no vacations and seven days a week, twice a day, you have to milk cows.
And I got to know the family really well after four years of working there. And I actually was turned off by entrepreneurship once I found how little they made and how difficult it was for them to have success. They were considered successful because they built their livelihood. They had a home and a family and fed their family, but they struggled and they worked really, really hard.
And so that kind of turned me off a little bit about entrepreneurship. Man, this is going to be really easy and it's not. one of those things where you just start a business and you make a lot of money. And that's actually kind of how I was going to school for kinesiology. And I moved to San Jose to go finish my degree, moved in with my grandmother.
And I walked across the street to go get a gym membership. And they saw that I was studying for kinesiology, kind of offered me a job on the spot. I was like, no, I'm not looking for a job. I'm actually coming over here just to finish school. They said, oh, well, you can work part-time and you can actually go through our school and we can teach you and educate you.
and took a part-time job as a personal trainer and actually started to fall in love with entrepreneurship again. Because even though I worked for a company, building your business as a personal trainer is very much so like building your own business.
Now, I had the beautiful luxury of a mega company that paid for advertising and marketing and kept the lead traffic and stuff like that coming through. And so it made building my business easier than it would have been by myself. That was the first real taste of, leadership and building a business I think that I ever really had.
And that's what gave me the skills I'd say that I started to put into play later on in life was going to work for that company. And they did a really good job. That time, 24 Hour Fitness was a multi-billion dollar company, largest health and fitness business in the world at the time. And they had all this data and analytics. And so I worked up my way up as a trainer
within a short period of time into management. And so by 21 years old, I was managing a team of 20 trainers that were all more educated, more experienced, and older than I was. And so I was kind of thrusted into this leadership role, running this business at a very young age, not really knowing what I'm doing, but passionate about it, loved it. And had a lot of tools from the company.
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Chapter 3: How did sports influence Adam Schafer's growth mindset?
And he says, son, until you were 18 years old, none of that shit is yours. In fact, your parents could light it on fire and there's not a damn thing that you can do about it. And that just hit me like a ton of bricks, like, oh my God, I have no rights. hour to control the situations I was in. It just, I don't know, nothing felt that hard to me.
Even the hardest of things that I went through in business, it's like no one's screaming and yelling and cops and tears. I mean, none of that was happening. It was like, yeah, sure, it's hard. I got to work longer or I got to get up earlier or I got to go through 20 no's before I get one yes. But I think that I was just built different and because of my childhood adversity.
And of course, in my early teens and even early 20s, I probably harbored some animosity and resentment towards my parents. As I got older and more mature, I realized, wow, they gave me a superpower they didn't even realize they did by putting me through all that shit. And so my relationship with them today is incredible. I mean, I thank them and I love them
for the drama and the adversity that we went through. And my biggest fear as a father today, I have a young son who's five years old, is that he won't have as much adversity as you. So I talk to my wife all the time about, we've got to manufacture adversity in his life. It was so important to my development. I don't want
My son, to have it so easy, he doesn't build these great characteristics about him and he doesn't build that armor. We've got to find a way. And so as a father today, I fear not having enough adversity for my son because I think it was so important to my development as a leader and as an entrepreneur.
Something that I just want to stick on here and kind of call out is that we are the stories that we tell about ourselves, right? Another person might have been like, you know what? I'm weaker because of all this stuff that happens to me. I have a disadvantage. But you decide to kind of reframe your past and then put a positive spin on it. Hey, all this stuff did happen to me. I'm honest about it.
I'm not denying the fact that all this stuff happened to me. But Here's my like positive twist on it. And that's the story that you told yourself, which allowed you to just like move forward towards like a positive future. And I think that's really important for anyone tuning in. Like if something bad happened to you, try not to just tell the story in a way that keeps you weak.
100%.
Whether you think you can or can't, you're probably right.
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Chapter 4: Why is vulnerability important in business according to Adam Schafer?
He learned about having to understand their challenges and their objections. And he learned about offering discounts and bundles and offer development. So he learned so much and then became this like incredible entrepreneur. I'd love to hear some of your experiences in terms of like sales, even leadership and what you learned as a trainer that you've now brought into entrepreneurship.
Someone told me that when someone makes a decision to buy, it really comes down to two things always, value and price. Everyone will have excuses, oh, I can't afford it, or I'm making all these, that's all noise. It really comes down to how much they value that thing and what the price is in relation to that thing.
And that resonated so much with me because I began looking at every deal that I didn't close or every client that didn't resign as I didn't provide enough value. They decided that I wasn't worth that investment to them, and that falls on me. It's not because something came up financially. No. If I was so valuable... They would find a way to pay for it. And that had been confirmed.
I had watched clients take a HELOC out on their home just so they could pay for their personal training with me. When you figure that piece out, again, reframing this, every time I went into any sort of sales deal of Adam, it always comes down to two things, value and price. They didn't buy. Okay. I'm not going to listen to their excuse.
It goes, it falls back on me that I didn't provide enough value. And it's literally how we built this was when we came out, like none of us had any sort of media experience. So none of us were like, Oh, we're going to be so great at podcasting and talking on YouTube. Like I was terrified of all that stuff. It's, Definitely out of character for me. It's not something I wanted to do.
I don't think it's natural at all. I still, to this day, can't stand making YouTube videos, even after doing it for over a decade. Don't like it. What I do know is that my, or what my goal is, is to provide value. All I think about whenever we're creating content or whenever we're helping people is value, value, value.
And if they don't become customers, I didn't find a way to provide enough value to that. Now that becomes a little more unique when you're talking about you're communicating to
million people and like how do you give them all value well that's you know that's learning how to speak to each platform and content creation for your exact demographic or your target that you're going for and there's there's a little bit of a learning curve to that too but really comes down to providing value And then always looking back at yourself.
I mean, just like the other stuff that we talked about, people are so quick to point the finger at the other people, right? The victim, like, oh, well, they can't afford it. Oh, they're not the right customer. Oh, it's like, no, none of us ever look at that like that. Like if something is not working in the business or we're not being successful, it's like, what are we doing?
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Chapter 5: What is Adam Schafer’s top sales strategy?
This was something that we found out after we got connected was we had these friends that would be like, man, you got to meet Sal. Have you ever met Sal? You and him would just, you guys got to meet each other. You guys got to meet each other. You're great. You're great. And he would hear the same thing about me. And we didn't, and this was for like years before not knowing it.
Now we are both top performers at 24 Hour Fitness. So I seen his name, right? So you, and his rank, cause you get ranked and you just get trophies. And so if you were like a top producer, you won all the Hawaii trips and he'd done stuff like that. And so I'd seen him like in passing and like knew of his name on like the production report, but we never even had said hi to each other.
So we didn't know each other. him and Doug, his client, start working on a digital product. They start working on MAPS Fitness products, which is a product I was telling you that we already had. The reason why we already had it was they built it before we even met. And Doug has a background in, he used to sell insurance and he was getting into digital marketing. He was
as a kind of a hobby, not like he was professional in it whatsoever. It was like a hobby. He was interested in the space. So he was, he had like the equipment and he had done some of the seminars and he had done stuff like that. And he kept telling Sal, like, man, you, you were made for this. You like, you should think about making a digital product.
And Sal was like, okay, well, I mean, if you lead the way, cause Sal's like me, we can barely turn our computer on. So he's like, I'm good at communicating health and fitness, but I don't know anything about the digital marketing side at all. And Doug's like, well, I can do that. I'll do that for you. So they had built that together. We're working on it.
Justin and I are kind of working on this app. Sal and I have these mutual friends. We're always talking about it. Sal finishes his digital product. And because so many people had told him about me and like my business acumen, he's like, you know what? And we had like passed each other on Facebook one time. We had just added each other on Facebook and we were following each other.
He slides into my DMs and is like, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, kind of reintroduces who he is. I'm like, yeah, I know who you are. And he's just like, I wanted to show you something. I've heard so much about you and your business acumen. I want to know what you think about this product, this thing. And he sends me over kind of the sizzle reel to this digital product they make.
And it was interesting because at that time we're building this app up. And I know that Justin and I are about to finish this fitness app and I don't have anybody to sell it to. I don't have Instagram. I don't, I mean, I have Facebook, but it's like family, friends. I'm not doing anything on it, right? I'm not actively building a social media platform.
And, but I realized that I'm going to have to move in that, in that direction at some point, he sends that over to me and I'm like, oh, let's, let's meet. I'd like to talk to you. And I'm big. You know, one of the things I know we haven't talked about, but if I were to hang my hat on one of the most important things in being successful for me, it's been relationships.
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Chapter 6: How did Mind Pump Media start and scale?
It's so much better to like have somebody to lean on. And so what is your advice to people who are kind of like holding their equity to their belt and just they don't have a partner? Like what's your what's your perspective on that?
Yeah, this is an interesting conversation because I would tell you that my advice normally is to people is don't get a partnership. Don't do it. And I think a lot of that is because I recognize how blessed I am to have met three other guys that align so much with each other. It's probably the most interesting thing about this. I mean, we haven't got into all the things
that we've built, but we've got multiple seven, eight-figure businesses. We invest in real estate together. We own 15 homes together, even partnership. We have angel investing together. We have a stock portfolio together, and we are evenly split on everything. We do think, Sal wrote a book. He was published by Hachette and wrote a book. I made royalties from that book.
I didn't spend a single minute doing anything to do that book, but I make royalties out of that. I do business coaching for people on the side on my own time at home with that. I give that portion to my... It goes right into the pot. We have just agreed that everything we build and we do together is an equal four-way split no matter what time and effort each guy puts into.
And that is freaking very, very unique and very, very special. And I'm very, very blessed that we have that. A lot of that has to do with ego. And... This is the other thing that probably connects us really well. We all have that kind of work ethic thing.
And the other thing is that we all met each other at a place in our life where we had the opportunity to all be leaders and to work with teams long enough to know like the power of team over the individual. And we all are so competitive that we want to win more than any of us care about any sort of individual accolades or who gets the credit or who gets more money or a split that way.
And ultimately, we knew if we positioned ourself that way in the business like that, that we would have abundance everywhere. And everybody in the business makes way more money than I think they ever dreamed or thought they would make. And so it's easy now. At this point, it's like the revenue has got to places where everybody's so comfortable and stuff like that.
It's actually not that big of a deal. But early on, that was really unique and special to have four guys like that. And I think it's difficult. So we talk about it a lot that it's marriage. I honestly think that, I think my marriage is easier than my business partnership. I think being in a business, because you love that person, right? You love that person. You're attracted to that person.
You sleep together every day. Like you chose that person to do life with. Like, so I actually think marriage is easier than business partnerships. I think business partnerships are like a lot of people get into them because they see like, oh, you're talented in this. I'm talented in that. We would make a good team. Let's go build this business. But it's like being married.
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