Ready to transform a business into a thriving, heart-led powerhouse? This episode of the Heart Led Business Show features Ernesto Mandowsky—the genius behind turning businesses into million-dollar machines with strategy, dedication, and heart.
Explore how Ernesto helps businesses enhance peace, performance, and profitability by creating efficient systems and unlocking heart-led transformations. This conversation is the golden ticket for anyone wondering how to balance compassion with commerce.
Discover how to empower employees, streamline operations with technology, and stay true to core values while scaling a business. Ernesto shares proven strategies and real-world success stories designed to inspire and guide any entrepreneurial journey.
Perfect for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and leaders looking to create both impact and income, this episode is packed with practical tips and heartfelt wisdom to help any business thrive.
🎧 Hit play and get ready for a dose of motivation!
Key Takeaways from this Episode
- The essence of a heart-led business
- The impact of high vibrational states on success
- Transforming businesses with technology and intention
- The importance of understanding profit in a heart-led venture
- Implementing hospitality in business practices
- Empowering businesses through systems integration
About the Guest
Ernesto Mandowsky is the mastermind behind The Million Dollar Machine, helping companies design systems that fuel peace, performance, and profit. On a mission to make business transformation tools accessible to all, he shares his wisdom far and wide. When he’s not revolutionizing businesses, you’ll find him reading, working out, baking challah, or soaking up life in Miami with his wife.
Additional Resources
Website: www.yourmdm.co
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ernestomandowsky
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
- NewBee: Lessons Learned while Cross-Pollinating my Life, Discovering my Passions, and Creating my Honey
- Power vs. Force
- Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
Support for the Show:
Consider supporting our continued efforts to bring you great, free content each week. Click this link to become a monthly supporter and get a shout-out on the next episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1793649/supporters/new
Next Steps:
- Subscribe to The Heart-Led Business Show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
- Pass the Torch of Wisdom: Share this episode with someone who embraces holistic practices in their business journey. It’s a treasure trove of insights waiting to ignite their path!
- Join the Conversation: Connect with me on social media. Let’s exchange thoughts, inspiration, and heart-led wisdom.
Up Next…
- Dive into an inspiring journey where heart-led purpose and profitability collide, with Dr. Kristin Wild — an entrepreneur, strategist, and founder of Modern Health Solution, leading a team transforming chronic health care with passion, innovation, and heart.
- Sales Mastery Awaits: Boost your Health and Wellness sales with our complimentary training. Start selling with integrity today! → https://go.businessleadmaximizer.com/script-training
- Spread the Heart-Led Message: Loved the episode? Your review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify fuels our mission. 📑
- Need some recommendations on great tools to help with sales? Check out my preferred tools here: https://tomjackobs.com/resources
Explore the Dialogue’s Treasures: Unearth the insights within! Delve into the profound wisdom woven throughout our conversation.
Speaker: 0:01
Welcome to the Heart Led Business Show, where compassion meets commerce and leaders lead with love. Join your host, Tom Jackobs, as he delves into the insightful conversations with visionary business leaders who defy the status quo, putting humanity first and profit second. From heartfelt strategies to inspiring stories, this podcast is your compass in the world of conscious capitalism. So buckle up and let’s go. Let your heart guide your business journey.
Tom: 0:36
Ernesto Mendowski, the mastermind behind the million dollar machine with a sprinkle of strategy and a dash of dedication, Ernesto helps businesses craft systems that not only enhance peace and performance, but also makes it rain profits. And you don’t need an umbrella with that type of rain either. So when he’s not turning business dreams into reality, you’ll find him working out on the sunny Miami shores with his wife. So get ready to unlock the secrets of heart led transformation with the amazing Ernesto Mendowski. Welcome to the show, Ernesto.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 1:11
Thank you Tom, I love, you know, your sprinkle of, uh, food in my little bio there.
Tom: 1:19
Absolutely. And you like cooking as well. Is that right?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 1:22
Yeah. Yeah. I love cooking. I love baking. I love baking bread
Tom: 1:27
Okay.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 1:28
All things food to dining experiences for friends and family.
Tom: 1:34
Awesome. Yeah, me too. I’d love eating, which is why we work out. Right. So we can eat.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 1:40
Totally.
Tom: 1:42
Awesome. Well, I’m excited to dive into you and your business and, and how you are heart-led but of course, my first question is always, what’s your definition of a heart-led business?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 1:54
I think there’s two sides to every business, every person. The brain, the logic, the numbers, the sense, the metrics. And then there’s the heart, which is like the soul, the feeling, the emotion, the connection. And so I think a heart-led business is one that it’s not just transactional, but it actually connects with the human and it transforms them. It, it really like on every, on every level, not just the, Oh yeah, I feel good. But like, wow, like a genuine, this is life changing.
Tom: 2:32
And that would be both on the business owner as well as their clients?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 2:36
That would be on a business owner, that would be on the clients that would be on the team. That would be on the community stakeholders. I mean, when you have a heart led business, it’s, it’s one that is, is the change it wants to be in the world. It’s not just changing in dollars and cents, but it’s, it’s, it’s emanating, something much bigger than, than it’s, than itself.
Tom: 3:00
That’s a great definition. I’ve not, not heard one quite articulated like that. And I like that because it really brings in everybody that’s involved in the business and how you want them to feel versus just like you said, making the profit.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 3:15
Yeah. Yeah. Have you heard of David Hawkins?
Tom: 3:18
Author.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 3:19
He’s an author. He wrote Letting Go. He’s a physician. He wrote a book called Letting Go. He also wrote another book called Power vs. Force.
Tom: 3:27
Oh,
Ernesto Mandowsky: 3:28
Reading Power vs. Force was very fundamental in my development, even of this definition where a lot of businesses or people, they’re kind of operating at a low vibrational frequency, and that’s when they try to force things to happen. They, you know, you want the customer to pay on a certain timeline, or like you want to, you want, your company to get selected by the RFP, or you want, you know, you like want things, so you almost like force them into happening. But that’s a very low vibrational state. When you, shift into higher vibrational states like love and peace and joy and fulfillment, it is you are generating power within. That’s kind of the title of his book, Power Versus Force. And when you have that personal power, things start to kind of happen. They start to flow for you. And so that’s when a word that definition of like, you know, when your business is emanating, it seeks to be that’s when things start to happen for it.
Tom: 4:30
Yeah. And it’s so true. I know times that in my businesses, they’ve forced things to happen and it just, just doesn’t feel natural. It’s not never a good outcome. It’s just, it’s a struggle as well. And I think that’s, where all this, you know, like, Oh, you got to grind it out and just work, work, work, work, work. I think that’s, you know, complete BS because it, it doesn’t come from the heart, it’s not natural, like you said.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 4:57
Exactly.
Tom: 4:57
Cool. Well, tell us a little bit about your business and what inspired you to create a heart-led business.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 5:03
My business, a million dollar machine or MDM may seem like a profit hungry business. You know, Oh, it’s a million dollar machine. It’s just a machine. It’s so robotic. But it actually, the inspiration for it is found in the idea of, of a dinner table. I shared cooking earlier, when I was younger, I, my family, we’d always get together around the dinner table, different parts family from different parts of the world. We’d always just have these elaborate dinner experiences. And I, that led me down a career in hospitality, bringing in systems engineering and technology into restaurants. And in that journey, I realized when you run a restaurant, most softwares or technologies or, or systems as entrepreneurs like to call them, they’re broken, they’re disjointed. And so if you have to ever ask a question of like, what items are selling on the menu. It was always like this long, laborious process, of like figuring that out, like running the reports and then doing the analysis so long. And I, in, through my career, like learned how to use technology to quickly come together with these insights. And so in 2020, when COVID started and I published my first book, I said, you know, entrepreneurs are just like these restaurant owners. They’re trying to run their businesses, all their technology’s broken. And whenever they have a question about like what’s happening, it takes so long to actually figure it out. Like so many reports and Excel sheets and documents and different software tools that like they don’t even get to that part, which is actually a huge problem because it leads business owners to actually be disconnected from their business. And I sought to change that. I sought to launch my business, help business owners turn their companies into million dollar machines. And through doing that, you not only have a deeper spiritual connection with your business, but you have technology now that’s integrated and actually powering the workflows, actually like freeing up your time, actually helping everyone on your team. what they do best and, you know, they can feel connected in doing so.
Tom: 7:32
So the technology is just to paraphrase and just make sure I understood what you said. So the technology is there to do the heavy lifting, get the answers, do it faster, get the answers that, that the business owner needs. So then they can spend more time with their customers, with their employees in just making the business better, which, you know, really comes from the heart then, and they’re able to get away from just the numbers and just trying to figure stuff out and have that information available so that they can lead appropriately. Is that kind of the insight?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 8:07
Yeah. When you’re, when your machine is running well, when the brain, when the logical side of the business is running really well, you can now kind of tap into what makes it special. What, whatever it is that you’re doing, whether you’re a marketing coach, consultant, agency, website builder, organizational trainer, you know, we’re all, we all, we all offer a commodity service. Like the service is, is, is a commodity, but how we do it is not, but the how we do it, the special sauce is kind of found inside of the heart, inside of the emotion, inside of the connections that are manifest through our own personal, unique experience and or viewpoint on the world. Like plenty of operations, consultants, fractional COOs out there, but how many of them actually teach every single concept through the lens of a restaurant. Which is a universally understood principle across any industry, whether you’re a truck driver or a lawyer, you know what it is to eat at a restaurant. And so you’ll understand these, these systems concepts when taught through that.
Tom: 9:14
Yeah. And I like that, that analogy too, of, of any business is like a restaurant. I mean, I remember one restaurateur that I knew in Houston and she was very, very successful, had like five, five branches of her shop. And. She said that because she ingrained in all the employees, it’s all about how you make the guest feel rather than, you know, mistakes are going to happen. Operational things are going to happen, but focus on how you make that person feel. And that’s what they’re going to remember. They’re not going to remember that you forgot the ketchup when you, when they had to ask it twice, but if you make them feel really great that they’re there and they’re enjoying themselves, then everything else is going to work. And obviously her growth was was a testament to that. And I just, that always stuck in my mind as well. Interesting.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 10:05
Yeah. Hostpitality lost art form. Willa Gidara wrote his book. He, if you haven’t heard, he’s a, the restaurant tour behind 11 Madison Park, which was a very famous restaurant in New York, and he wrote this book, Unreasonable Hospitality, and it’s been like trending in the business world. So it excites me that that’s making its rounds, but the next question people have to ask is like, cool, I read the book now, how do I actually implement that in my company?
Tom: 10:35
And so that’s what you help businesses do is do. You do the implementation.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 10:41
Yeah, I mean, do, do the implementation of of their software, because when it comes to actually setting up project management tools or setting up a CRM or setting up Zapier kit, I mean, any of these tools, it, it takes either, it takes a lot of headspace or it takes a 25,000 dollar fee to hire a consultant to come in and do it. And that person only focuses on one point of the business.
Tom: 11:14
Back in my corporate days, we did an implementation of SAP and I was working in oil and gas, and that was a million dollars a week to implement. Across your oil companies. There’s a lot of cost in that. And if you can simplify it and get the, and even when it was fully deployed, it still didn’t get me. The answer is that I need it as a manager. So I wouldn’t call that a success, but in a small business, one, you don’t have the time. You don’t have the money necessarily, or the huge margins to be able to invest in these main systems. And especially if they’re not set up, right. It just makes sense to bring somebody in to do that for you.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 11:54
Yeah. It’s not even cause there’s that story like, Oh, now I’m hiring Ernesto and he’s going to come in and set up my systems. And I’m going to be like bonded to Ernesto forever. Cause he’s the one who set up my systems. Like that is not what I want to do. Going back to the book power versus force, my entire MO, like my focus is to actually empower, not empower the company that hires me, not by like teaching the visionary CEO how to use Notion and, you know, all the things that, no, I don’t, I have no business teaching, that CEO has no business learning about technology. That CEO must bring in an operator, which sometimes looks like a business manager, sometimes looks like a COO, sometimes looks like a VA. And it’s that person that I teach how to use these tools, how to ask the questions, how to actually create an intention when it comes to implementing a strategy and having that person become the person who’s a master of these tools, because I don’t want to, want to be around the, I mean, sure. I want to like. I want to be around, but I don’t want to be inside the business, kind of trapped, you know trapping anyone there.
Tom: 13:10
Yeah.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 13:10
So I really want to focus on empowering the, the operator, or the number two of a business.
Tom: 13:16
Now, do you have any stories of transformations that you’ve either gone through yourself or you’ve helped clients do that brought forth more heart in the business after the implementation of the technology that, you know, what we were talking about earlier, but in terms of freeing up that headspace to actually take care of the actual business instead of, you know, with the nuts and bolts of systems in technology.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 13:40
Yeah, I wouldn’t say my transformation brought in more heart. I would say the heart was always there, but there was a coach that I worked with a transformation coach who is kind of a heart-led leader. This company actually is called Head, Hands and Heart. And When about two years ago, when we first started working together, he had his, his course, his coaching program, but every time he met with someone, he’d have to kind of not start from scratch, but like teach the person the material, teach them the concepts. And when we first started working together, we said, Hey, let’s take your concepts, turn it into a course that you can deliver to the client, outside of your sessions. So that when you’re in the sessions, you’re exclusively focusing on not what’s in your head, but like what is coming up in the client’s hearts. So through setting up that course, that, you know, that content delivery system, he could go deeper with his clients and he could actually increase his capacity. So he was able to triple his capacity. He could work with 12 clients at one time instead of the three or four. And not just that, as, as we set up his system and he brought in his virtual assistant, he actually was able to produce content to be six weeks ahead of schedule. So now most entrepreneurs like, I mean, you run a podcast. I don’t know how many weeks ahead of the schedule you are, but like it’s stressful when you’re on the same week and you don’t have any content scheduled. So the fact that we were able to give him a vehicle to now be a month and a half ahead, he could now be a lot more present. In his day to day when he’s working with clients and trying to grow his business.
Tom: 15:25
That’s a great example. And yeah, yeah, it is, it can be stressful if you don’t have the content scheduled up or ready to go. Luckily for, for this podcast, we’re about three months ahead of schedule. So.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 15:36
There you go, so you understand the value of being,
Tom: 15:39
And what’s great is, you know, having that team in the systems behind the scenes, I’m able to have these better conversations with, with you and the other guests. So that I’m just, I’m present versus having to go, okay, I really need to get this really good so that we can get it out by tomorrow, you know? And that’s never a good place to be in terms of coming to a business with heart. Or even making a profit at that point.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 16:06
Yeah, I mean, it goes back. You were trying to like get something to be really good so you can get, you’re like forcing it. You’re, you’re not like feeling like empowered as you’re doing the thing. So you know, kind of going back again to the book, like, it’s just such a fundamental principle here.
Tom: 16:21
Yeah. It keeps coming back to that as well. So let’s, let’s shift gears a little bit in terms of talking about money and profits and being heart-led. I know a lot of heart-led business owners struggle with being okay with charging what they’re worth and making a profit in their business, they just want to give, give, give, give, give. What have you seen in terms of balancing profit and heart in your own business, but also in the businesses of your, your clients as well?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 16:50
I think many of my, I work with earlier stage entrepreneurs, people under a million dollars they actually don’t understand what profit means. And,
Tom: 17:03
That’s not uncommon, unfortunately.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 17:04
And it’s not that they don’t know what profit means. Obviously they know what profit means. But you say, Hey okay, your 15 hundred dollar website, how long does it take you to build it? And they’ll say, Oh, I don’t know. And, and, and you like Brit and then you ask them, well, like how long? Guess, you know, what? 10 hours. Okay. 10 hours, 1500, that’s 150 an hour. Okay. 150 an hour. That’s not bad. But then you ask them, okay, what was the end of the year? What was your revenue? And they’ll say, Oh, 80,000 dollars. It’s like, okay, well, 80,000 dollars. You work about 2000 hours a year on average, 50 weeks at 40 hours a week. 80,000 divided by two, that’s 40 an hour. So it’s like, okay, something’s not adding up here. Like either you’re just not selling, you need to sell more or you’re, you’re charging off, like your actual dollars per hour are off and like something’s just not there. And because you’re like almost calling someone, you’re not calling someone out. You’re just like making them aware of the numbers. They start to feel some sort of way I’m being attacked and be, you know, they don’t want to understand profit at that point. So you can’t be heart-led if you’re not understanding profit because at some point that the business goes out of goes out of money and you get out of business and you can’t even have the business to begin with. So I you know, I think that many people can take ownership, And ask, like, actually clarify, like, okay, how much does it cost to deliver what I am offering? Because if that’s not clear from the get go, nothing, you can’t really build a business on top of, on top of that. That’s why, you know, when I work with clients, like transformation is the first thing that you clarify. And when I say transformation, not like cultural or digital, but like, okay, what is the offer? How much does it cost? What are the steps? Like really getting like razor clear on that.
Tom: 19:12
Yeah. You know, and going back to that exercise, I recommend every business owner, especially coaches and, and solopreneurs do this exercise of taking the revenue that you brought in last year, divided by 2000 to get your hourly rate. If you work 40 hours a week, like most. Probably work a little bit more than that, or, you know, or maybe, maybe less. But if, when you do that exercise, like I, I did that once and it was quite scary. It’s like, oh wow, I don’t even make minimum wage and I’m still, you know, cleaning the toilets in the gym bathroom. So yeah, I mean, it is very sobering to give a nice little wake up call. I can understand like how entrepreneurs might be a little agitated by that, but it’s a good agitate, good agitation for their education on their business. What type of other turnarounds have you seen in terms of getting this information to, to the heart-led businesses, and they’ve embraced it, and then something happened. Like, what, what would that, that happen?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 20:23
So I have another client they’re, they help authors sell more books and when I first started working with them, literally hundreds, dozens of spreadsheets. Dozens and dozens of spreadsheets. And they’re, they do podcast booking, they do video production, they do book reviews, several different services. And in our first three months, basically got all of those spreadsheets. We, we consolidated everything into a tool that I use called Notion. That’s the tool that I get all of my clients on, which now collapse like all their project management, all the task management, show scheduling podcast reporting. They could now like understand how many shows have been shows by genre. Like how many business shows did they book? How many women’s focus shows did they book? How, you know, really understand the data and the information. through going through that process, kind of like that sobering wake up call of our business systems are a little all over the place. A couple of things happened. The CEO realized that he was not interested in doing this stuff. He was not interested in learning it, which, which is a great realization. It’s exactly in line with my hypothesis. The team members realized that they were so busy. They couldn’t keep up with like actually maintaining all this information. And that opened up the question of, okay, we are. Approaching seven figures. We are growing. We want to double our business next year. Like, what do we do? How do we do that? If the CEO doesn’t want to learn this information and the team members are so overwhelmed to actually do what now they hired basically like a customer experience manager who was going to be kind of that backend person who would manage all the information, manage all the client back and forth, feedback, really help. Streamline the administration of these experiences. And now the CEO had someone who he could go to. It wasn’t me. And it never was intended to be me or our company. And, you know, we’ll see what happens. This is all like this year, but I’m very hopeful that now they have this business manager who’s going to be overseeing all this information and as the business continues to grow, he wants to double the next 12 months and maybe I’ll report back and let you know how it goes. But it does bring that awareness to all the parties involved and inspiration to act.
Tom: 22:51
Yeah, I thought you were going to go down the route that instead of consolidating the spreadsheets and getting one system in place, they just put a person on it to just figure it out. Which a lot of businesses do. Which is a huge mistake, because they’re not addressing the root cause of what their problem was, which was a hundred different spreadsheets, nobody knowing what the left hand was doing from the right hand, and bringing a coordinator in that just adds another human element to it, which is not great.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 23:23
Yeah, well, you know, we do the systems integration and then you empower the coordinator because now that coordinator doesn’t have to spend 10 hours collecting all the information. Like now they have, they have like, like they have the Xbox and now they can just play the game.
Tom: 23:41
Yeah. I have a couple of clients that could definitely use that type of work that you do. And I’ll make an introduction after, after the show. Working, especially in the sales coaching that I do, like, I want to see the numbers and a lot of the clients that I work with, they struggle to get all the numbers out of the database or get it somewhere that they can just look and then it becomes five or six different spreadsheets and it shouldn’t be like that. It should be automated. Yeah. So Ernesto, how can people find out more about you and what you do?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 24:17
People can come to my website yourndm.co, and the first place that I invite people into my world through is by getting your scorecard and your scorecard every single business has these six key numbers that they must understand if they want to enact any change. And those numbers are revenue per client per year, the number of clients you want to work with, the conversion rate, the number of leads that you get, the utilization rate, which is the percent of people that actually book a call with you that are already on your email list. And that’s your, and then the sixth number is the number of people on your email list. And when you take these six numbers, you, it’s actually, it’s an equation that translates to the revenue per year. So if you’re telling me I want to build a million dollar business, or we just work backwards across each of these six numbers to help you understand like what your business must look like to hit that million dollar goal.
Tom: 25:22
Wow, that’s great. And those are, those are excellent numbers to track in any business. They should be everybody’s KPIs going forward. And, and especially as we go into like at, we’re recording this at the end of the year it’ll be published at the beginning of next year, but at the end of the year, you know, that’s so important to do that analysis of what the business did the previous years. And I always like to do a SWOT analysis and just kind of do a review and then work with our leadership team to see what we can do to improve next year and hit those numbers, the numbers that we want, with heart, of course.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 25:57
Of course.
Tom: 26:00
Awesome. And so one last question. What type of advice would you give to somebody that wants to do a heart-led business, but it’s just like, I’m not quite sure if it’s going to work or not. Like, what’s your experience been? What kind of advice could you give to somebody like that?
Ernesto Mandowsky: 26:17
I would ask, I would invite them to consider asking, why, like, why do they want to do a heart-led business? I think it’s the, it’s the same question of like someone who’s like, Oh, I don’t know if I should build systems. It’s like, okay, why do you want a system? It’s like, Oh, because I want to free up time. I want to like be more efficient. I want to feel more peaceful. Okay. That’s something people get excited by. And so when you ask like, Why a heart-led business? Oh, because I want to give back to the community. I want to feel like I’m contributing to a social cause. I want to, I mean, you know, these are good reasons. These are great reasons that will like leap someone into action. So asking her more like, why, why do you want to do it?
Tom: 27:02
That’s great. And a lot of times I’m sure people are like, gosh, I don’t know why. And that’s, that’s a good answer too, to know like where they need to start as well. That’s great. Great advice.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 27:16
Thank you.
Tom: 27:17
Awesome. Well, Ernesto, thank you so much for being on the show today and sharing your wisdom and sharing your insights on heart-led businesses and what people can do to free up their time and, you know, automate, get some systems in place so that they can be more bring, let that heart come out in their business. That’s always been there. So I really appreciate you coming on the show today.
Ernesto Mandowsky: 27:40
Thank you for having me.
Tom: 27:40
No worries. And to our show listeners, thank you so much for tuning in today and watching the podcast or listening to the podcast on whichever platform you’re on. And if you could do us a favor and check out everything that Ernesto is doing, that’s all that’s going to be in the show notes. So make sure you check that out and definitely take that scorecard test to figure out where your numbers are and connect with Ernesto to see how he could help you out as well. And until next time, lead with your heart.
Speaker 2: 28:13
You’ve been listening to the Heart Led Business Show, hosted by Tom Jackobs. Join us next time for another inspiring journey into the heart of business.
