Profile of Success: Jake Steinfeld

You may know Jake Steinfeld from his years of TV infomercials, as the “Body By Jake” guy. It’d be easy to underestimate him, if you didn’t know his whole story, including the fact that he launched the cable-TV channel “Fit-TV” from scratch and sold it just 4 years later for an eye-popping $500-million. Jake re-launched that channel in 2004 and quickly drove it to more than 30-million subscribers, continues managing his Body By Jake businesses, and is the author of a terrific business book: “I’ve Seen A Lot Of Famous People Naked, And They’ve Got Nothing On You.”

From the book:

“Nobody stamped ‘future millionaire’ on my birth certificate. I was the sort of kid that parents charitably described as ‘stocky’ and I had a terrible stutter…back then I never would have dreamed that I’d be able to appear on TV talking to millions of people…”

“There I was, doing my thing as a fitness trainer with a few people around Hollywood when I got this call to work with Steven Spielberg. Back then in 1981, I was still thinking like a bodybuilder, not like a businessman. I had a ‘limited vision’ for my life. That’s something you have to watch out for. You’ll never make it as an entrepreneur if you consciously or unconsciously place limits on what you can do….”