An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Always challenge your own ideas and ask yourself often, “What would I do to beat my company right now?” Play chess against yourself and you are much less likely to be caught off-guard and much more likely to discover new solutions that will give you an unfair advantage.
In the world of business and within every industry, there are forward-thinking leaders who go against the status quo and find success. Their courage to take risks, embrace innovation, and inspire collaboration separates them from the competition. Until 2002, Apple’s famous slogan was “Think Different”. This attitude likely helped them become one of the most successful organizations in history. This interview series aims to showcase visionary leaders and their “status quo-breaking” approach to doing business. As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alex Kutsishin.
Alex Kutsishin is co-founder and CEO of FUEL !nc, the world’s first Performance-as-a-Service platform for sales teams and leadership designed to redefine business education and performance standards. With an entrepreneurial spirit evident since his youth, he has co-founded ten companies — from pioneering medical offices in Washington, D.C. to introducing the first American-based low-code, no-code platform for custom mobile websites. Kutsishin has won numerous awards, including EY Entrepreneur of the Year.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. Can you tell us your “Origin Story”? Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1982. My parents brought me and my brother to this country in 1990. We lived in a small, two-bedroom apartment. My mom worked at a salon doing nails and my dad drove a taxi and delivered pizza.
In a few short years, both my parents had opened their own small businesses. My mom has an engineering degree and she was (and still is) an amazing artist, so she started her own interior design business, while my dad, who now had two engineering degrees — one from Ukraine and one from the United States — launched a limo company.
I was super competitive, so I played sports year-round, both organized and pickup games with friends. I played soccer in college for a couple of years until I decided to try my hand at entrepreneurship.
I ran my first business at age 20 — it was a physical therapy office. In the first year, we brought in nearly $1M in revenue with just six full-time employees. In the second year, our revenue grew to over $2M and then slightly over $3M in the third year.
I fell in love with being my own boss and controlling my own destiny. I also fell in love with building a team. I very quickly learned the lesson of choosing your team slowly and letting go of bad fits quickly. ONE OF THE BEST LESSONS anyone in business can benefit from.
Can you give us a glimpse into your journey into this industry and share a story about one of the most significant challenges you faced when you first started out? How did you end up resolving that challenge?
Since FUEL !nc is now the tenth venture I’ve founded and led, I have faced my share of challenges. The beauty about challenges is that within them lies the most important ingredients in the creation of your idea.
The biggest challenge in FUEL !nc so far has been securing the highest-quality talent (authors, speakers, gurus, coaches, etc.). We are a content platform, so if you don’t have top-shelf quality, you could face some competitive threats sooner rather than later. With Todd Duncan (my co-founder) being a successful author, he called on a couple friends who’ve had massive success in the publishing industry. After a one-hour call, we had our first board of advisors’ member who would go on to unlock the BIGGEST NAMES in the world for us in the following 30 days. IT WAS INSANE.
Todd has taught me that we all already know everyone we need to know, and he proved that by calling on Mac Anderson, a highly successful entrepreneur and author, to join the board. It just so happened that Mac was the perfect person to help us acquire the best talent in the world so quickly.
In case you are interested, here are the industries I have been in so far:
- Medical
- Printing Supplies
- Digital Marketing Agency
- Website Development Software
- Nightclub
- Apparel/Merchandise
- Mobile Software Platform
- Business Consulting
- Borrower Intelligence Software Platform
- Alt. Education — Performance-as-a-Service Platform
Who has been the most significant influence in your business journey, and what is the most significant lesson or insight you have learned from them?
MY MOM. My mom is a beast in business. Every industry she has been in, she has become the best in her local community. She has this belief behind pretty much everything she does, which is: If you’re going to do something, be the best at it. I love that.
I would also give a lot of credit to Brian Tracy. I was never an A-student — in fact, I had to go to summer school every year in high school. When Brian said we could turn our cars into “universities on wheels”, I was like, “WOW… that’s a brilliant idea!” I devoured Brian’s content NONSTOP. The Psychology of Selling was in my car until cars didn’t take CDs anymore. I understood how people wanted to be communicated to because of Brian’s content. I then listened to behavioral psychology books, book after book.
Can you share a story about something specific that happened early on that you would consider a failure but ended up being a blessing in disguise or ended up being one of the most valuable lessons you had to learn on your own?
We launched Alpha as soon as we had something tangible for people to engage with, so we were able to test some early concepts quickly. One of our first ideas was to have a calendar with predetermined times for sales practice activities. You could practice scripts, make partner calls, follow up with current deals in progress and complete other sales and relationship-building tasks. We know that high performers all follow a regime, so we thought this made a ton of sense.
THANK GOODNESS we didn’t go live with that feature. No one wanted that at all. Looking back, we understand why, but if we didn’t have an alpha partner who was honest, we would have made a terrible mistake.
That experience made us completely flip our thinking and we started to ask, “How do we make it feel easy, playful and limitless, and what if the professionals just had to show up and have fun doing the thing they are getting paid to do, while becoming even better in their career?”
How do we change the landscape for our professional sales athletes rather than trying to change their mind? What if improved performance came to you on your terms and on a playing field you already trust, from people you trust? That “misstep” created the vision for what FUEL !nc is today.
Leading anything is hard, especially when grappling with a difficult situation where it seems that no matter what you decide, it will have a negative impact on those around you. Can you share a story about a situation you faced that required making a “hard call” or a tough decision between two paths?
So far in FUEL !nc, we haven’t had any of those challenges; however, in my career, I have faced this situation many times.
The beauty of my career is that I have been blessed with amazing business partners who I consider my friends. We always found a way to make the best decision for the company and, for some reason, when I look back at those moments, none of them felt HARD. They all felt necessary. Meaning, going to the dentist could be a “hard” call but it is necessary, so it’s not actually a hard call — it’s just something you have to do that might not feel great in the moment.
Let’s shift our focus to the core of this interview about ‘Successful Rule Breakers’. Why did you decide to “break the rules”? Early on, did you identify a particular problem or issue in how businesses in your industry generally operated? What specifically compelled you to address this and want to do things differently? Please share how you went about implementing those changes and the impact they had.
I love this question, because I think the best part of being an entrepreneurial rule breaker is that I want to break this rule also. You see, in my opinion, the reason you created a category of “Successful Rule Breakers” is because the most successful entrepreneurs don’t just break the rules — they write new ones.
When building a business that doesn’t currently exist, there are no rules to break. It is a beautiful white canvas and you can do whatever you want to. Remember, when you are the first to put paint on a canvas, nobody knows what you are trying to create. People may look at the first 20 strokes of your paintbrush and say, “What in the world is that going to be?” and the answer is, “Whatever I can imagine.” By the 1,000th stroke, people are like “Wow, that looks amazing. You are so good. How did you come up with that?”
Entrepreneurs often look like geniuses, but what people don’t know is that many of the first strokes of paint were covered up by an entirely new layer of paint — and not because you planned it that way, but because that’s what needed to happen to continue painting.
The problem sales and leadership training faces is that it’s a ONE-TO-MANY solution, while the rest of your world is a MANY-TO-ONE (the one being YOU) solution. Your Instagram, Amazon, Spotify, Acorn and Netflix accounts are built for one person: YOU. Almost all, if not 100% of training programs and platforms, have focused on providing every person in a sales organization one approach, which is always claimed to be THE BEST of all programs out there.
Most, if not all programs, put all the ownership on the salesperson, claiming, “We can transform your team” and, “Your sales team will do more because of how amazing our approach is.” The entire premise is flawed. This approach still says to the sales team, “What can you do for me to make my company better?”
On the surface, you might say, “Well yeah, that sounds right. What has my salesperson done today to make more sales for the company?” But, if you look at the most successful models for performance — professional sports, professional music and professional arts (acting) — you will find that the model is 100% backwards.
Coaches (in sports, acting, music, etc.) don’t ask, “What have you done for me lately?” Rather, they say, “Here is how I think I can help you be better for the next game, movie or performance.” If every CEO focused on making every person on their team BETTER in their role, then that CEO would never have to worry about the success of his or her company because he/she would know that every role on the team is filled with someone who is supported to be better tomorrow than they are today. WIN, WIN, WIN.
The beauty of providing everyone on your team with resources that can help each individual become the best version of themselves in their career and at home is that when someone isn’t making positive progress in their role or is actually trending down, you can make a simple decision. For example: “I’m sorry, Paul, it just doesn’t seem like this position is the best option for your skills. We love you and we are sure there is something much better suited to your skillset.”
Why is this decision made easier than ever before? Let’s take a look at the sports model again. In sports, there is a concept called Minimum Performance Standards. An example of this can be easily found in the NFL. During the combines, each athlete is tested to make sure they can run, jump, throw, push, pull, lift and so on to a particular standard. If you don’t meet the standard, you don’t make the team. This is how the NFL teams ensure they have access to the highest-quality athletes at all times.
Does the athlete get angry and pissed off at the NFL or the NFL teams because he could not run the 40-yard dash in under six seconds or bench over 300 pounds or jump over three feet? The answer is NO. The only anger is directed towards himself, and if that person is determined to become a pro athlete, he will go and do whatever it takes to improve his performance and then tryout again.
So, there are two things the business world can take away from this:
- When you give a person on your team access to all the tools and resources to become the best in their role and they fail to meet even your minimum standards, you can rest comfortably with your decision to release that person to find the best career for themselves. You will know with certainty that this person is just not the right fit for your organization.
- Instead of setting targets, set minimum standards. Imagine the NFL was only looking for people who could run a 40-yard dash in in the current record time, which is 3.9 seconds. Instead of a minimum standard, they went to a target-based recruiting policy. The NFL would look completely different and the benches of these teams would be nonexistent.
What would happen if 90% of any sales team in any industry would meet the minimum standards of performance? You show me a team that can do that, and I will show you a team that is DOMINATING their industry.
All we want to do is democratize learning and give access to every single professional to become the best version of themselves.
When people see an organization that is POWERED BY FUEL !nc, we want that to be synonymous with “This company wants me to be a better version of myself tomorrow than I am today, and they have the desire and the tools to support my growth.”
Hundreds of millions of people around the world will now have on-demand access to the world’s best video performance instruction (in the future, AR, VR and Holographic instruction) to help improve personal and professional skills. And all of this will be at little to no cost to the learner.
This mission has led us to create the world’s largest digital video library of performance instruction. This ever-growing library is filled with content from the brightest and most heart-forward coaches, authors, speakers, gurus and leaders from around the world and the library is updated with new courseware WEEKLY!
In the ever-changing business landscape, how exactly do you decide when to adhere to industry norms versus “breaking the rules” and forging your own way? Can you share an example?
Only the curious survive!
You adhere to norms when it’s best for your company and you break the rules when it’s best for your company. This is a lesson for life too. Do what you must in the moment and don’t be apologetic about it.
Here is a great example — enterprise sales roles usually require a long and tedious onboarding process that spans various departments. The norm says, “Figure out a way to make it easy for all the departments to see the value and the safety in moving forward with you over another solution.” But what if you eliminate the fear of lack of value and you eliminate the fear of this being somehow dangerous for the organization?
That’s what we decided to do. In a very rare occurrence, we offered our customers a 90-day money-back guarantee and we eliminated the grossly unnecessary “onboarding” process. Where most companies promise 30–90-day onboarding, we offer a “60-second” onboarding experience.
Where most solutions offer education and training in silos, we bring the entire team together so people can learn how to take advantage of what’s working for others. Every engagement with FUEL !nc is tracked, and then each individual learner’s experience is curated to make the learning process as unique as the learner. FUEL !nc is designed to be tailored to the way each individual needs help and not a blanket solution for all.
What guidance or insight can you offer to new entrepreneurs trying to follow existing and accepted industry norms while at the same time trying to differentiate themselves in the marketplace?
My number one piece of advice for entrepreneurs is: Build your business for an existing customer base. Meaning, if there are no customers, DON’T BUILD YOUR BUSINESS.
I often hear of entrepreneurs saying things like, “I hope people will buy this” or “Hopefully enough people like this.” Nope. Stop right there. A business exists because you have something others want, and if you haven’t proved that others want what you have, then don’t launch until you have.
Second, you have to know why you are about to invest a large part of your life into this project. What’s in it for you? What excites you about this? Once your answers include a lot of words like FUN, JOY, IMPACT, EXCITING, then you can move into building your business model and go-to-market strategy.
Here is the main question of our interview. To make an impact, you have to champion change, get creative, and take risks. Please think back about the decisions you’ve made that have helped your business get to where it is today, and share your top 5 strategies or decisions that helped you succeed by doing things differently. If you can, please share a story or example for each.
1. Always challenge your own ideas and ask yourself often, “What would I do to beat my company right now?” Play chess against yourself and you are much less likely to be caught off-guard and much more likely to discover new solutions that will give you an unfair advantage.
An example of this is our 90-day money-back guarantee. I asked myself the above question and the answer was: “If I launched a competing solution tomorrow, I would offer people a guarantee so I could show the world how confident I was that my solution is better than anything else in the market today.”
2. Don’t fall in love with your hand. Why is this a rule professional Texas Hold ’em poker players live by? The answer is: because falling in love with what you hold in your hand blinds your judgement of what’s on the table and what cards could come out next. Let’s say you have two kings pre-flop; that’s a great starting hand, but after the first three cards are revealed and you notice all three are hearts but you have spades, the quality of your hand just dropped drastically.
If you allow your infatuation with those two kings to dominate your thinking, you could find yourself on the losing side of that hand. Look at what’s on the table, and look at all the possibilities, even if it means changing the way you THOUGHT things were going to go to an entirely new approach.
This philosophy supports a more agile and more fluid approach to building your business. Do your best not to make your ideas so concrete that if something changes you won’t be able to adapt. The most successful companies expect change and cultivate a culture of change.
3. Not everyone is your customer and you need to be okay with that.
This is true for all industries and businesses. If you invest all your efforts into making EVERYONE want to buy your solution, you will suffer greatly. “But Alex, look at how many customers buy Apple products, don’t they sell to everyone?” It may look that way now, but Apple had a crystal-clear audience it marketed to during its early years.
Steve Jobs didn’t care about everyone buying his products — he only cared about the people who UNDERSTOOD his vision. And he marketed to those people exclusively. The audience he wanted is very similar to the audience that reads this content — rule- breakers, creatives, risk-takers and curiosity-driven people.
If you find yourself CONVINCING people when you start to sell your solution, then you are talking to the wrong people, or your message is WRONG. If it feels like you are pushing a boulder uphill, then you are talking to the wrong people, or your message is WRONG.
The right customers don’t need to be convinced, they want what you have and are willing to put up with a little discomfort while you perfect your solution. Think about your customers like a dog whistle manufacturer thinks about its customers. The dog whistle does not care if a duck or a donkey or a penguin does not respond to its call, all it cares about is that the dog responds and is attracted to this sound.
Build your value proposition like a dog whistle and you instantly have a huge advantage over your competitors. You will always be doing things your own way which means you are making your own rules.
4. Get really excited when someone wants to buy your solution, but get even more excited when someone says “NO.”
When all you’ve been hearing is how amazing your idea is, you should get overly excited and curious when someone tells you they don’t want to buy what you’re selling. Your only two-part question should be: “What’s missing, and what would make you want to buy it?”
Honest people are what you need to build a solution that can be the best in the world. The more times you hear “NO,” the more chances you have for improving your offering and results/experience for your customers.
5. One of the best decisions you can make early on is your financial model. Find your CFO quickly and make sure your model can scale profitably. Once you know your model works financially, or at least at some point it will, the real fun begins.
Never take an existing model and try to fully replicate it because you will fail. No model is what it seems like on the surface and it’s never as “simple” as the successful organization is making it out to be. Borrow ideas, test them and make them your own. I often recommend borrowing great ideas from companies outside your industry.
For example, if you own a law firm, what could you borrow from the fashion industry to stand out? If you are launching a software company, what can you borrow from the hospitality industry to crush your competition? Maybe you are getting into landscaping, what can you borrow from the architectural industry to show your customers you are different and better?
As a leader, how do you rally others to align with your vision? Also, how do you identify those who may not be fully committed or even silently sabotaging or undermining your efforts? What steps do you take to address these situations?
I love this question, because in my opinion it is easier than it looks on the surface.
When I owned a nightclub, patrons would often ask me, “How come every person we ever speak to at your club is so friendly and courteous?” And my answer was always, “Because we hire friendly and courteous people.”
My point is, to get alignment on your vision, you must blow that dog whistle during the hiring process. Only attract the types of people who already similarly believe in what you believe. The moment you notice that someone’s beliefs no longer align with the vision of the company, it is your responsibility to get the team realigned or replace that person.
Realignment shouldn’t be difficult if you used the dog whistle approach to build your team in the first place. Here is an example:
If you were starting a folk music band, you would find people with similar values and beliefs, as well as the skills required to play that music. If one day one of your band members said, “Hey, I think we should start playing electronic dance music,” you would very quickly and easily remind your band member that you are a folk music band. If that member still insisted, you might hold a full band member meeting and ask the rest of the members if they think this is a good direction for the band. Those that agreed it would be fun to play EDM would likely go start their own band and you would find new members who wanted to be in a folk music band.
When we take the decision out of the business industry, the decision is obvious and simple. You can do the same thing in business. If someone is no longer aligned and you don’t agree with the new vision being presented, then it’s time for them to find a new band. If you do like the new vision, then it may mean that others on the team have to find a new company — but alignment should not be complicated.
Identifying those who don’t fully believe or are sabotaging your efforts should be as easy as finding a bruise on your body… when you touch that bruised area, it hurts.
People who don’t believe in the vision of the company tend to show it without even knowing they are showing it. These people are contentious just because, they always find the negative in things, they talk about others in the company negatively or they speak poorly about customers or leadership or always have reasons for something not being completed on time or with the expected quality. In other words, it HURTS to be around them.
The moment you have identified someone like this on your team, you must address it head on. It’s okay for people to stop believing, it’s okay for people to fall out of love with their career, with their industry, with their leadership, etc. People change, minds change. It is okay. However, what’s not okay is you not addressing it or hoping the problem goes away on its own.
As the leader, one of your responsibilities is keeping the right people on the bus, which sometimes means letting people off the bus before the next bus stop. Communicate with your team often and be on the lookout for changes in energy levels, because when the excitement is gone, so is the belief in your vision.
Imagine we’re sitting down together two years from now, looking back at your company’s last 24 months. What specific accomplishments would have to happen for you to be happy with your progress?
We have over one million learners on the platform and over 100 million lessons completed.
We have awarded over $10 million to high-performing and most-improved professionals in over 50 industries and have donated as much to charities.
We are recognized globally as the best Professional Performance Management platform.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
FUEL !nc is the answer to this question. Why should education and personal skill development be reserved for those with access to large sums of money? Ivy League schools and $3,000 ticket prices to attend a lecture, or $50,000 to get a guru to speak to your team one time.
How much talent are we suppressing by preventing or limiting access to the highest-quality instruction by making it too expensive or limiting the amount of people who can get access?
By democratizing education and focusing that education on performance testing and skill testing, we are ushering in a new experience for humanity. An experience where your talents are grown and not squandered, where everyone on your team wants you to be a better version of yourself and you have unlimited, on-demand access to support your growth. An experience where the smartest people in the world share their wisdom with you simply because they want you to be better tomorrow and not because it makes them richer.
The number one criteria for an instructor to join FUEL !nc as a Performance Instructor is having a GIVER’S HEART. Meaning, to become an instructor, you must want to share your wisdom with others because you want others to benefit from it and you don’t want to take all the wisdom to the grave with you.
When you organize the most giving and the most talented people in the world to share their gifts, you make the world a better place for people today and for generations to come.
How can our readers continue to follow you or your company online?
You can follow me or my business partner, Todd Duncan, on LinkedIn.
You can also visit myfuel.io.
Thank you so much for sharing all of these insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
Successful Rule Breakers: Alex Kutsishin Of FUEL On How To Succeed By Doing Things Differently was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.