We were lucky to catch up with Vincent Hervy recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Vincent, thanks for joining us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?

What’s your definition of success?

Is it the one you see from people online? Be inspired, but don’t try to mimic.

Let me tell you, to be successful, you don’t need to work a crazy amount of hours a day; you don’t need to have your face everywhere on social media and post daily; you don’t need a team; you don’t need to run ads, and yet, you can still run a multiple 6 figure business or even a 7 figure business.

The first thing to do is to define what is the life, the lifestyle you desire.
Then, you define how much you need to make monthly to live this life.

It’s that simple.

For instance, if for you, being a solopreneur, working less than 10 hours a week, generating around $200k or $300k a year so you can travel all you want, enjoy life, and have quality time with your friends and family, then your focus should be on how to offer the highest value at the highest price an audience is ready to pay for it.

If you are already in business with a strong offer, your offer doesn’t have to change, but your audience has to.

Finally, find the strategy that works for you based on your personality. People are pretty much everywhere, it doesn’t mean you have to be everywhere.

One of my mentors once said, “ok, so right now, your goal is to make your $100k/y. But how can you achieve your $1 million or even $10 million a year? Find a plan for it and tell me how $100k a year feels.”

Let me share my story that will give you a better idea.

I’m running a coaching business. I wanted to build a 7 figure business, and at that time, I was charging $1800 per client. That meant working with 555 people a year. Where does this idea of 7 figure business come from? Comparison and ego.

And if I have to be honest, I got the lowest value for the money invested from those successful coaching businesses hitting their 7-8 figures a year than working with solopreneurs.

I built a coaching business to help people, not just make money from them. As you can tell, there was a total misalignment between my values and my egotistical goals.

What did I truly want? Work 5-10 hours a week, travel, quality time with my loved ones, and have time for my hobbies, wander, read, leisure. While giving the highest value and helping people truly achieve what they signed up for – build the successful business they desire.
I could go 100% online and sell courses, but I love seeing people succeed and properly connect with someone and help them reach new heights. It’s not just about money but the impact on the community.

Then, what is the right figure to align with that lifestyle? With $150k a year, I’m ok, $250k it’s perfect.

So, I drastically increased my rate, almost by 10 times. Before you say I must have been in a wealthy niche, keep in mind I was working with music producers. It’s not the industry with the biggest budget to invest.

I kept the offer and changed the audience.

From 555 clients and feeding an idea of success, I needed 10 to 18 clients a year to hit my target and succeed according to my terms.

What did create this change? I was overworked, stressed, and not having the life I wanted. My brain snapped, I was tired and decided to be “selflessly selfish.” I help people only if it helps me first.

And from coaching music producers, I now coach other coaches and entrepreneurs about creating a business that matches their desired lifestyle by defining the strategy that works for them.

That’s what it takes, according to my experience, to be successful. Define your definition of success, define what you want to experience in life, define the person you want to be, and define the impact on your community.

Then you define the lifestyle and the amount of money to that lifestyle, and finally, you start thinking of a plan. Never think of the “how” before you have the full vision or your mind will say “I can’t achieve that. It’s not realistic.” Not realistic according to your reality. Change your perspective, change your reality.

To be successful, you want to find the perfect alignment according to your terms.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I had quite an atypical journey. I quit school early, by the age of 17, and even became a plumber. After a couple of different jobs, I opened my recording studio and used to be a mixing engineer. At some point, I got bored and was thinking of opening a record label or a management company. Didn’t like much the idea of taking all the risk to work on a commission-based fee deal.

One day, on the way to go to LA to mix an album, I met someone who was developing a cybersecurity technology. I found it interesting, especially the limitless ambitions you can have in the tech startup world, and that’s how I founded my own tech startup about data privacy.

I founded the recording studio and the startup with an associate each time. It didn’t work, today, they went back to a 9 to 5. They didn’t have what it takes, and so our visions and ambitions were not aligned. Don’t get me wrong, they helped me get the spark I needed.

When I help other businesses seeing all the things they have to manage with people and reorganizing everything, it’s not appealing to me. Being solo works best for me.

Even though I didn’t bring the startup to success, I got some recognition and even gave classes at university about the topic. It taught me a lot about myself, being more ambitious, and learning so much about business. To catch up with cybersecurity, AI, data privacy and business, I was doing polyphasic sleep.

Sleeping 4h over 24h.

How a plumber/mixing engineer could pretend to be in that industry?

As you can imagine, I burnt out and completely crashed. That’s how I went back to music, but this time helping artists build their music careers before transitioning to helping music producers build a business and a career hitting their $15k+ per month working with artists they love.

If I no longer promote this business, it’s because I had some duality in closing a deal to keep on building the business and scale. I wanted to only work with people I truly believe in their talents and their personalities. Music is too close to my heart to treat it like a pure business.

What led me to that transition of building the simplest business possible? I was overworked and burnt out, and that forced me to completely restructure my business, allowing me to build multiple 6 figures businesses working less than 10 hours a week. If I have to be honest, some months I was working only 10 hours.

I decided to help coaches and entrepreneurs with that. How do you create a tailored strategy so your business allows you to live the life you want? The reason why you wanted to work on your own terms was not to feel trapped but because you dreamed of a different life with more freedom.

I barely have anything going on social media, barely any pics of me online, not even a website. It goes against all that it says about how to build a successful online business.

It’s interesting to see how I invested over $100k in myself in various knowledge and coaching to see that I went to something so minimalistic.

My previous goals have changed, so now I’m scaling my business. Still keeping the idea of a 10-hour work week (or less), solopreneur, and ramp up to $50k-$70k a month.

Because I’m clear on my vision, the plan falls together naturally.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

It’s more about beliefs than about lessons to unlearn. This simple thing made my life harder than it could’ve been.

As a kid, I wanted to travel the world with my guitar. And when I decided to drop school, my mum said this simple thing. You need to get a real job and secure your life.

Her house, her rules. Not gonna go against that.

When I dropped school, I worked for a fast food chain and then I became a plumber. How did I pick that? Randomly! I could have said anything.

My vision of work was, that it needed to be dirty, painful, stressful, and no love in it. Work is hard, and making money is hard.

Meaning – you can’t make a living off what you love, you can’t make money from passion.

It took me years to realize that, so imagine working in a nice environment and asking for money. Really hard. Then get paid to guide people? Even harder.

You can achieve anything you put your mind to as long as you’re willing to question the origins and if it properly serves you. Because when it’s not working, you need to get the root of it.

Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?

I think this is what people always want to know: where do you get your clients, how can you find them?

Your ideal clients are pretty much everywhere; most people have at least one of the following social media on their phones. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

The question is, what do you use? What is the medium you prefer to use? How do you like to communicate?

For instance, I can find my audience everywhere, but because of my habits and ways of communication, I prefer Facebook. I don’t scroll much on social media. I only have Facebook on my phone for my business. I post 2 to 3 times a week and that’s it. I post and ghost.

Many people are like, but you should change, Instagram would be better. But what if I don’t like creating visual content and videos to promote my business? Why should I force myself?

Focus on what feels right and the most direct for you.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vincent.hervy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hervy.vincent/

Image Credits
I don’t have many pictures of me that could work. Feel free to pick from Instagram if you’d like. That’s the whole point of my brand: barely any online presence. Thank you for understanding.