Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / He Stole Food to Survive. Then Built $450M in Revenue. Jerry Brazie on Street Smarts Over Degrees

Transcript

He Stole Food to Survive. Then Built $450M in Revenue. Jerry Brazie on Street Smarts Over Degrees · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:05
  All right, Jerry Brazy, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:08
  Absolutely.
• 0:09
  Dave, I appreciate you having me on.
• 0:10
  Thank you.
• 0:11
  Hey, thank you, sir.
• 0:11
  I appreciate you taking the time to be here.
• 0:14
  So Jerry, I was reading your backstory and we were just talking off camera about what a wild journey you've had as an entrepreneur over the last couple decades here.
• 0:25
  And you had a very, very tough start to life and to your business career before you really got things going.
• 0:32
  But just to set the stage for our listeners, can you talk about how and why you became an entrepreneur?
• 0:37
  Accident.
• 0:37
  I mean, I, I, I think that my story is more reflective of entrepreneurs than, you know, what you see in Forbes and Fortune magazines and, you know, what gets popular culture and, and social media.
• 0:49
  I think that, that most of the hundreds of entrepreneurs that I've known, maybe thousands now at this point over the years, have more stories that are closer to mine, maybe not quite as bad as mine, but closer to
• 1:00
  mine than, than kind of what, what, like I said, media is going to tell people that they are.
• 1:05
  And so I, I'm child number seven.
• 1:07
  My mother had six kids when she was 23 years old.
• 1:10
  She brought home an infant that she took a bus to have and at home she had a 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 year old.
• 1:17
  Six kids under 5 years old.
• 1:20
  And seven years later I came along and they didn't want me to be an only child.
• 1:23
  So I have a little brother and a little sister, lived, grew up in abject poverty, stole food to eat as a kid, me and my little brother, I have a little brother's 22 months younger than I am.
• 1:31
  And so we had scams, you know, that, that us doing just that in order to really survive.
• 1:37
  I had five, six older brothers and sisters.
• 1:39
  So the food didn't always make it all the way down to my plate, if you will.
• 1:44
  And so I had a great childhood though.
• 1:46
  I, I, I, you know, a lot of terrible things, a lot of terrible stories.
• 1:50
  But I am who I am in spite of where I come from and because of where I come from and I'm not a victim.
• 1:56
  And I have my own agency.
• 1:58
  And I always thought about it in those terms and so I didn't know what an entrepreneur was.
• 2:02
  I got my first job as an 11 year old.
• 2:04
  I paid tax 1980, as an 11 year old at a local restaurant that I got a job at.
• 2:11
  And then I left that job to go to a better job that would pay me more money.
• 2:15
  And it was all about what I could get paid.
• 2:17
  And as I moved up the ranks, I made $2.35 at that first job and which I immediately went to the store, cashed the check, got all ones.
• 2:25
  I had $17, 35 was the amount of that check the first day.
• 2:29
  And I wanted all ones, you know, so it looked like I had a, a roll with me in my pocket as I was hitting the town on a Saturday night at 11 years old.
• 2:37
  But I just left one job to the next job.
• 2:39
  And what it taught me was that I had value.
• 2:42
  So International House of Pancakes paid me more than that local restaurant would.
• 2:46
  And they'd let me work two days on the weekend instead of one day.
• 2:49
  And so at 12 years old, I moved to International House of Pancakes and went to work for them as a dishwasher.
• 2:54
  And then ultimately I moved to Safeway and McDonald's and on and on and on as long as people would continue to pay me more money.
• 3:01
  Always learning lessons them, and I say this all of the time.
• 3:05
  I learned lessons in the nine months that I worked at McDonald's when I was 16 years old on how to put a company together, how to run operations, how to do things efficiently that I used in my businesses
• 3:16
  for the next 25 years.
• 3:18
  And they paid me $2, $3 and 10 cents at that point to do that work.
• 3:23
  And so every job I moved to was just another step up.
• 3:27
  And I've had probably 20, 25 different jobs on the way before.
• 3:30
  I settled at a job as a driver for a transportation company when I was 20 old and then ended up running that company and at 28 got approached to come out and start a new company, competing with that
• 3:45
  business.
• 3:45
  I gotten a bit of a reputation for the job I could do and I jumped at the chance when I did it.
• 3:52
  So I don't even.
• 3:54
  Honestly, Dave, I don't think that I even knew what an entrepreneur was.
• 3:58
  I don't remember at 28 years old.
• 4:01
  My idea, I mean, I, I'm a kid.
• 4:03
  When I was 17 years old, I was living with hookers and heroin addicts in a $25 a week flop house, holding down a full time job.
• 4:11
  I bought a house when I was 20 years old because I had read an article that you should buy a house and that is a good investment.
• 4:18
  I barely knew what investment meant.
• 4:20
  I didn't know what an equity was, I didn't know what an interest rate was and I didn't know what a mortgage was.
• 4:24
  I had never heard of these things before.
• 4:26
  And so I bought that house when I was 20 years old and I used that house 10 years later to finance my business three separate times to keep it alive in the early days.
• 4:37
  Hey, let me tell you about Max Capital Hub.
• 4:40
  If you're an entrepreneur trying to get funding but your credit's holding you back, these are the people to call.
• 4:47
  They do business loans, business funding, and they'll actually help you clean up your credit so you qualify for more.
• 4:54
  They're not just handing you paperwork.
• 4:56
  Their team builds an actual strategy around your business.
• 5:01
  So if you've been stuck or the bank has told you no, give Max Capital Hub a call or book a free consultation@maxcapitalhub.com tell them I sent you.
• 5:13
  Okay.
• 5:14
  Wow.
• 5:15
  So a lot to unpack there.
• 5:17
  So you've one of numerous children, very tough time growing up, had to steal food just to survive.
• 5:25
  And then even you were, I guess you were on your own at 17 years old.
• 5:29
  Yeah, correct.
• 5:30
  Okay.
• 5:30
  Yeah.
• 5:30
  Really?
• 5:31
  15 years old, but yeah, you know, okay.
• 5:34
  And like you said, just renting a room with some unsavory characters nearby and just, you know, trying to get by as a kid.
• 5:41
  So you develop this hunger and this, this fight, you know, basically having a fight to survive very early on.
• 5:47
  And like you said, you had all these different jobs and even working at McDonald's where, you know, some people might complain about that or some people might look, you know, you know, look down on something like that.
• 6:00
  You had the attitude of you're, you're getting paid to learn operations.
• 6:03
  You used that knowledge in your future businesses.
• 6:07
  You know, what, what you learned.
• 6:08
  And McDonald's, of course, is famous for their systems and, you know, the, the enterprise that they've built.
• 6:15
  But so talk about, you're in your early 20s, you're a driver, you're working your way up, you're with this transportation company, and you get offered the chance by a competitor to come and be a part owner of a
• 6:28
  competing company.
• 6:28
  So what, what, when that happened, what was, what was going through your mind?
• 6:31
  Well, I had the second big epiphany in my life.
• 6:36
  I was sitting at my desk at 28, and the, the, the, the biggest event in my life, the most consequential event period, was the birth of my first son at 28.
• 6:46
  I have a daughter two years later and then another son two years after that.
• 6:49
  But at 28 years old, my son was born.
• 6:52
  And when my son was born, the world changed for me.
• 6:54
  One second, your wife is pregn.
• 6:57
  She is not.
• 6:57
  And when she was not pregnant and my son was there, I, I was already had a fire.
• 7:03
  I already had, you know, survived the things that I had Survived.
• 7:06
  And I've been shot at, I've been beaten within an inch of my life.
• 7:09
  I've been stabbed with a 10 inch screwdriver that I pulled out myself over a weekend and went back to work Monday morning in a mugging.
• 7:15
  I mean I've, I've, I, I've had, I've seen multiple murders, I've seen suicides.
• 7:19
  I had that life.
• 7:20
  I should not be where I was even at that point at 28 years old.
• 7:24
  And so when my son was born, it changed my life.
• 7:27
  And all of a sudden I had to go out and conquer.
• 7:30
  He was not going to have the life that I had grown up with.
• 7:33
  I was committed to my wife, I was committed to my son.
• 7:37
  And it was time to go do things.
• 7:38
  That means I had to go get uncomfortable.
• 7:40
  And I'm sitting at this desk, this is four or five months later, and an envelope arrives on my desk at this office in this company that I'm running.
• 7:47
  We were doing about $4 million a year at the time.
• 7:50
  And I open it up and it's a proforma.
• 7:52
  And I didn't know what I was looking at.
• 7:54
  It was a prospectus, you know, looking forward.
• 7:58
  Financial statements, I didn't know what they were.
• 8:00
  I knew everything about the operations of business and I could do, I had a mind for these sort of things and the minutiae.
• 8:06
  This is all pre computers, right?
• 8:08
  Everything was kept in our head.
• 8:09
  Hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pieces of paper every day.
• 8:12
  And I was remember looking down on it, sitting in this desk.
• 8:14
  The second big epiphany that changed.
• 8:16
  I've had two big epiphanies in my life.
• 8:17
  This was the second one.
• 8:18
  First one was at 14 years old.
• 8:20
  And this one said to me every, shut up and listen.
• 8:23
  Because I didn't know what I was looking at.
• 8:25
  But I lived in this world where I knew everything.
• 8:28
  I was the boss of this company.
• 8:30
  Everyone was twice my age but was doing what I told them to do.
• 8:35
  I had all of the knowledge.
• 8:36
  People were coming to me, like I said, with these business offers.
• 8:40
  And so I had to get to the point in my life where I was ready to accept that and hear that because I was incorrigible when I was younger.
• 8:46
  And that was the point.
• 8:48
  And so as I looked at that, I thought I.
• 8:50
  There's a whole side to business that I don't understand.
• 8:54
  I need to shut up and listen.
• 8:56
  And that was the epiphany.
• 8:57
  My, my, the voice in my head said, jerry, you got to shut up and listen.
• 9:00
  And so what I did over the next two and a half months is I evaluated what I was doing and I ended up getting rid of all of my friends that I had grown up with because I figured
• 9:11
  out that I talked about sports, played sports, watched sports while talking, playing and, and arguing about sports.
• 9:19
  Everything we did was all about sports related.
• 9:21
  And then I worked and I didn't see a value in that because that's the same things that the 50 year old guys were doing at the same bars that I was hanging out in.
• 9:30
  And again, that epiphany that said shut up and listen, you got to go learn, you got to go be uncomfortable really taught me that.
• 9:36
  And so I ended up, the first guy I approached was an architect that I was on my basketball team.
• 9:42
  I'd never really known anybody that was educated and I just started asking him questions and then he introduced me to, ended up introducing me to accountants and attorneys and just a whole different level of people that had some
• 9:57
  very specific knowledge that I didn't, that I didn't have.
• 9:59
  But also what they did is they just opened my mind to thinking outside of those boxes.
• 10:05
  When you live, when you come from abject poverty like I do, the world becomes very small and everybody commiserates.
• 10:11
  And that's why sports are so popular, because everybody has an opinion.
• 10:15
  And regardless, regardless of how much you make an hour, when you have an opinion, it's strong.
• 10:20
  And I mean Ty Cobb was the best hitter, Babe Ruth was The best hitter, LeBron James is the best basketball player in Michael Jordan.
• 10:26
  And really there's no answer, there's just arguments.
• 10:28
  So everybody has authority and that's a comfortable place to be.
• 10:31
  And then I'm 6 foot 4 and 230 pounds.
• 10:34
  And so I was really good at sports and I was kind of the biggest guy around, so I just held this position.
• 10:39
  And I figured out at 28, because of the birth of my son and that epiphany that said shut up and listen, that I needed to go from this position that I saw myself in and put my, myself down
• 10:49
  here on things that had nothing to do with sports and nothing to do with athletics and, and, and, and, and, and, and being physical and had everything to do with perspective and how my brain works.
• 10:59
  Wow, okay, so you have this epiphany, right?
• 11:02
  And you realize, it makes you realize you want to cut everything that's not providing real value in your life and there's all these other things that you need to, to go learn.
• 11:12
  And so, so what happens next?
• 11:14
  So I, I, I, I, I took the deal and My job was to start the business, and their job was then to finance it.
• 11:23
  And I did what I was supposed to do.
• 11:25
  We grew that to $4 million in the first year.
• 11:28
  And again, this is average ticket price of about 12 bucks.
• 11:30
  And I was able to move a bunch of customers that I had had to this new to this new business.
• 11:36
  The problem was a little thing called cash flow.
• 11:39
  Now, I had no idea what cash flow was.
• 11:42
  I didn't have any context for how business worked outside of the operations.
• 11:47
  And so they walked in on the annivers anniversary.
• 11:51
  February 11th, my anniversary, one year to the day, we're doing $4 million.
• 11:56
  We had about 70 employees, give or take.
• 11:59
  And they fired me and said, so long, we're going to run it ourselves.
• 12:02
  But by then I had learned lessons.
• 12:03
  And again, I'm a street kid, so I don't overreact.
• 12:06
  I don't get pissed off.
• 12:08
  I've never done.
• 12:09
  When I was young, again, because of the bridge between my older brothers and sisters and me, I got to watch them, how they behaved.
• 12:17
  And so I never did.
• 12:19
  I never smoked cigarettes because I watched cigarettes lead to drinking, and I never drank because I saw drinking lead to drugs, and I never did drugs because I saw drugs lead to prison.
• 12:28
  And that was how I grew up.
• 12:30
  And so I avoided doing all of those things.
• 12:33
  Sports helped in that context, probably saved me from doing all of those things.
• 12:36
  So when I got fired with a brand new son at home, and my wife is now pregnant with our next child, and I don't, you know, have anywhere to turn, I just said, okay, what have I learned?
• 12:46
  Let's take stock of what I have.
• 12:47
  And so I went to my six biggest customers at the time and said, you know how I moved y' all last year to here?
• 12:54
  Yeah, I need to do it again.
• 12:55
  They fired me.
• 12:56
  They don't have the cash to run the business.
• 12:58
  And I'm going to go start my own.
• 12:59
  Jerry, Jerry, Jerry.
• 13:01
  But okay, we'll do it.
• 13:02
  I said, no, I'm not done.
• 13:04
  And I need you to prepay me because I don't have any money.
• 13:07
  And this little thing about cash flow that I'm learning About now, this 25, 28 years ago, this little thing called cash flow that I'm learning about, I need the cash flow.
• 13:15
  And I went six for six.
• 13:16
  And here's the thing, Dave, about entrepreneurs, I didn't know that that's not a reasonable request.
• 13:22
  Right?
• 13:22
  I didn't know that.
• 13:24
  You don't go ask banks and title companies to prepay you a quarter Million dollars a month to get your business up and running and off the ground.
• 13:32
  And so it was what I didn't know.
• 13:33
  It was that naivete.
• 13:34
  It was that, that win at all costs.
• 13:37
  That the only answer to a question never asked is no, I'm never afraid of getting turned down.
• 13:42
  It didn't.
• 13:43
  None of that really bothered me.
• 13:44
  I don't really care what anybod about me.
• 13:46
  And in that context, I just steamed forward.
• 13:48
  But I had gained enough of a reputation that they were willing to take that risk on me.
• 13:53
  They were customers.
• 13:55
  Oh.
• 13:55
  I mean, they prepaid me for a decade, probably right before I finally was like, guys, I forgot all about this.
• 14:01
  We don't need to do this anymore.
• 14:03
  And I went and started my own business.
• 14:05
  I did 4 million the first year.
• 14:06
  I did 8 the second, 12 the third.
• 14:09
  14 million the fourth year.
• 14:11
  And again, that was an average ticking price of about 12 bucks a piece.
• 14:14
  I had, I don't know, 250, 300 employees.
• 14:17
  And we were off and rolling really quick.
• 14:20
  Okay, and this is in the transportation industry, correct?
• 14:23
  Yeah, courier, messenger over the road, trucking.
• 14:25
  Okay.
• 14:26
  All right.
• 14:26
  So the, the new job or the new opportunity, right where you got hired to start this company, Cash flow dries up.
• 14:33
  They fire you.
• 14:34
  You get all your six biggest customers to prepay you.
• 14:36
  And you didn't realize that was unreasonable.
• 14:38
  You just asked because that what was.
• 14:40
  That's what was necessary.
• 14:42
  That gives you the fuel to start the, the, the Runway to start the business.
• 14:46
  And you just took off and never looked back.
• 14:48
  That's right.
• 14:49
  Yeah, that's.
• 14:50
  That's exactly right.
• 14:51
  And I don't want to make it sound like that was easy because I was really good at selling.
• 14:57
  I had a personality for it.
• 14:59
  For whatever reason.
• 15:01
  I, you know, I always say selling is easy.
• 15:03
  There's nothing easier in the world than selling.
• 15:05
  Selling profitably, that's difficult.
• 15:08
  That's where it starts to get difficult.
• 15:09
  And so I had to learn that lesson the hard way.
• 15:12
  And ultimately, in that fourth year, I ended up cutting the company back from 14 million to 8 million.
• 15:18
  I fired two huge customers simply because I wasn't making any kind of money.
• 15:23
  And I couldn't get my hands around it right.
• 15:25
  I couldn't figure it out.
• 15:26
  Again, this is all pre computers.
• 15:28
  And so at $8 million, I remember as I had grown to 8 million, I knew everything that was going on.
• 15:34
  It started to get above 8 to 10 million, and I was starting to lose track of what was happening.
• 15:39
  And so in order to save the business, I had to cut it back.
• 15:42
  So, you know, probably the next big decision I ever made is I, in one month, 33 days, I cut from, from 14 million down to 8 million, essentially the company in half and started again.
• 15:54
  Took me two and a half years to get it back to 14 million.
• 15:57
  But this time I did it right without those two customers that I, that I ultimately cut and you know, learned those lessons, took, swallowed the pill, took, took the beating and recovered the business.
• 16:10
  Okay, all right.
• 16:12
  And then so you went through all these, I guess, growing pains, right, of understanding the profitability and the cash flow and you know, then getting your arms around the business and trying to understand why it wasn't profitable and
• 16:26
  cutting back and then growing more intelligently and then.
• 16:30
  So you've had several other businesses thereafter.
• 16:33
  Where did it go from there?
• 16:34
  Well, I quickly figured out I rented the first building I was in and then now, you know, I have an app.
• 16:40
  It turns out I had an aptitude for business and I have an aptitude for numbers.
• 16:48
  As a street kid, I have a lot of common sense and a lot of street smarts that kept me out of a lot of trouble over the years.
• 16:56
  And so I think that those are superpowers for an entrepreneur.
• 17:01
  I'll take somebody educated, that's great.
• 17:03
  And I've had 10,000 employees over the last 30 years.
• 17:07
  I want common sense and street smarts over everything else.
• 17:10
  So if someone is out there thinking about being an entrepreneur or is one, and you think, well, I don't have some fancy Ivy league degree or even some degree at all, or even associates or I didn't even go
• 17:21
  to college.
• 17:21
  I have a 15 year old years old education.
• 17:25
  That means I dropped out in my sophomore year of high school and never looked back.
• 17:29
  I didn't know what a mortgage was when I was 20 years old when I got one, or what an interest rate was to give everybody some context.
• 17:36
  But the reality was, once it hit, I had to learn.
• 17:40
  And so I set aside everything else and just immersed myself into the middle of it.
• 17:45
  Lived very uncomfortably because, you know, at 30 years old, learning things that you don't know, particularly as a man, is something that's very difficult to do.
• 17:53
  Right.
• 17:53
  You hate being told what to do.
• 17:55
  But I had to learn how to do these things.
• 17:57
  So in that environment, I quickly figured out that renting was dumb and I needed to own the building I was in.
• 18:04
  If I had an operating company that was paying a rent, I should put that operating company in my own business or in my own building.
• 18:13
  And so within about four years, I had Bought my first building.
• 18:16
  I went on to own and manage a couple of hundred thousand square feet.
• 18:20
  At one time that was when I lived in Portland, I'm down in Tennessee now.
• 18:23
  And that just started to build on itself.
• 18:26
  I owned an operating company that was in transportation, so I might as well buy gas so I can buy gas from myself.
• 18:32
  So I bought gas stations and that turned into car washes and convenience stores and I had a woodworking business, investment companies wherever I thought I could make money and do it.
• 18:40
  Where the, where there was some overlap or I, there wasn't any overlap.
• 18:45
  And I thought I could lose money as the case may be, because nothing is ever, you know, they're not all winners.
• 18:50
  But the reality was my brain opened up to the possibilities and the things that I might be able to do and how can I not pay someone else but pay myself in a different entity and make money?
• 19:02
  Okay, and what was that process like?
• 19:04
  Because like you said, the paying the rent kind of opened up your eyes to, you know, I should really own.
• 19:10
  And then so you went ahead and got your first building a couple years later and then you did all these other things.
• 19:15
  What was the process like of kind of like you said, learning all this as you go?
• 19:20
  Because it was, it sounded like you were just taking action, responding to the feedback, learning from your mistakes, iterating as you went.
• 19:28
  What was that process like?
• 19:30
  Yeah, there's no, I, I, I have supreme confidence in myself and so I always assume even when I lose, I'm going to come out on top eventually.
• 19:40
  And I've made, I mean, I've lost fortunes, I've made fortunes and I've lost fortunes.
• 19:44
  And the reality is I don't get too high and I don't get too low.
• 19:47
  I'm very even keeled.
• 19:48
  The streets taught me that.
• 19:49
  So I, I teach that, that my business and business generally should not be an emotional endeavor for people.
• 19:56
  They should be passionate about it, but there being emotional about your business.
• 20:00
  And in that context, as I was learning and I was looking at the business, I just stayed even keeled.
• 20:07
  And I always think that I'm going to come out on top.
• 20:10
  And so I was, I, I have an appetite for risk that probably a lot of people don't have, but a lot of entrepreneurs do.
• 20:17
  I have a lot of appetite for sacrifice.
• 20:20
  I can work 15, 18 hours a day without thinking twice about it.
• 20:24
  Goes back kind of the McDonald's thing.
• 20:26
  I was lucky to work at McDonald's.
• 20:28
  I have a perspective on my life.
• 20:30
  I never forget about those boys that were that were.
• 20:33
  One day they're in a cornfield in Iowa at 17 years old, and a few months later they're getting off of a boat at Normandy, where 80% of them are going to die, throwing up on themselves because they just
• 20:46
  came across the English Channel and they never even seen the ocean.
• 20:49
  And the Germans are shooting down on them.
• 20:51
  I never forget those people.
• 20:52
  I keep that perspective always.
• 20:54
  And then I bring it forward to say, my life growing up, you can't take away from me.
• 20:59
  I've seen what the bottom looks like.
• 21:00
  But compared to those poor guys getting off that boat, you can put in a different.
• 21:04
  A bunch of different examples of that same thing.
• 21:07
  That was a superpower for me.
• 21:08
  And so with that perspective, I just go, okay, does this make sense?
• 21:12
  I'm not sure.
• 21:13
  Let's go for it.
• 21:14
  Does this make sure?
• 21:14
  Yeah, I'm sure.
• 21:15
  Okay, let's go for it.
• 21:16
  And this appetite for risk, assuming that I'm going to come on, come out on top, sometimes I jump in willy nilly, Sometimes I do a bunch of research, but it was just a personality trait in me that just
• 21:29
  said I'm going to come out on top.
• 21:31
  And also, I'm not a rule follower.
• 21:33
  So if you're a rule follower, this is very, very difficult thing to do, right?
• 21:36
  That rules are instructions, and whether or not they get followed is.
• 21:40
  Is another thing.
• 21:41
  And so in that context, I'm not talking about breaking laws.
• 21:44
  I'm talking about.
• 21:45
  Right.
• 21:46
  There's this idea of how everything works.
• 21:49
  The average person has an idea on how everything works.
• 21:52
  An entrepreneur, particularly if you've done things the way that I have over all the years, understands that what the average person thinks the world is and how things operate, they're 180 degrees the wrong direction.
• 22:04
  And that the entire world, at least from an entrepreneurial perspective, largely works on how the system is played.
• 22:11
  And that yes, there are a set of rules, but how those rules are followed, whether or not they have to be, how they can be interpreted.
• 22:19
  All of these different machinations that make up, I think, the most successful entrepreneurs was one that I was able to just dive headfirst into.
• 22:28
  And I understood really at, At a most.
• 22:32
  At a.
• 22:33
  At a basic and fundamental level.
• 22:35
  Okay.
• 22:36
  All right.
• 22:36
  And Jerry, when you look at your, your, Your whole career, from, you know, how it started and all the growing pains to the transportation industry, and then when your mind really opened up about all these other businesses and
• 22:51
  commercial real estate and the gas stations and all that, what would you say is the most important lesson that you've learned through all of that.
• 22:59
  Well, I'll give you the practical one from the business perspective, and then I'll give you the real.
• 23:03
  I'll give you the real one first, which is all I care about is my family.
• 23:07
  It's the only thing I care about.
• 23:08
  So all the things that I've worked for and all the things you just talked about and all the things that I've done and the stuff that I'm working on right now, when my son was born at 28, it
• 23:16
  was all I cared about.
• 23:17
  And now today that.
• 23:19
  That they're all out of the house and it's me and my wife.
• 23:23
  I still feel exactly the same way.
• 23:24
  So all I care about, the only thing that has any real value for me is my family.
• 23:28
  If I had to work double shifts at Taco Bell, I could do that and be happy because I have my family.
• 23:36
  So I would say that's the most important lesson that I learned.
• 23:39
  Specifically, though, to answer, I think the question that you were asking me relative to the business is that you can't be scared of risk and you have to make changes.
• 23:49
  You got to burn the boats.
• 23:50
  If we're talking to entrepreneurs specifically, you have to take risk, and there's no way to.
• 23:57
  You know, I think Dave Ramsey, everybody knows who Dave Ramsey is.
• 24:01
  And I think Dave Ramsey's advice to the average person out there that's paying their bills, works 9 to 5, and wants to have a retirement when they.
• 24:09
  When they get older, it's great advice.
• 24:11
  If you're an entrepreneur, it's terrible advice.
• 24:13
  And you're just going to struggle because the opposite of what you need to do to become have a nest egg when you retire at 65, you have to do the opposite.
• 24:24
  If you're going to try to be an entrepreneur.
• 24:26
  If you're going to go in, you got to burn the ships and you got to go hard.
• 24:31
  And I think that's probably the lesson that I learned the most and that I was fortunate enough to have the skills to do it in the wherewithal, emotionally, to handle those huge swings and those big bets.
• 24:43
  I mean, Dave, I've had $200,000 payrolls due on Friday and no money in the.
• 24:48
  Or, excuse me, on Monday and no money in the bank on Friday.
• 24:51
  So, you know, everything that entrepreneurship can throw at you, I have had both good and bad.
• 24:58
  And so I think the most important lesson that I learned is just my appetite to.
• 25:04
  To exist in an environment that most people not.
• 25:08
  I'm not the only one, obviously, but most people would have a Very, very difficult time doing.
• 25:13
  I'll just add one more thing that isn't to say that everyone can't be an entrepreneur.
• 25:17
  You, you.
• 25:18
  If I put a gun to your mother's head and said unless you go do these things and act this way and sacrifice this way and put in this amount of work and work this many hours, you would go
• 25:27
  do it because you want your mother to be alive and you find that instinctively inside of yourself.
• 25:31
  But to go do it on your own the way that I did, like so many other entrepreneurs do, that's another, that's another undertaking entirely.
• 25:40
  All right.
• 25:40
  And you talk, talk too about some of these big, you know, the big risks and the ups and the downs.
• 25:47
  Like when you're in one of those down times, right, like where you have a big payroll due and you have no money, like emotionally, right when things went sideways, how, like, how'd you handle that?
• 25:57
  Just like I handled.
• 25:58
  This is.
• 25:59
  It's probably not the answer that, that people want to hear, but I don't get, I don't get high when the times were good, and I don't get low when the times are low.
• 26:08
  And I have had incredibly low times.
• 26:10
  Like I said, I have made, I've made two big monetary mistakes in my life.
• 26:14
  One cost me $14 million and another one cost me $10 million.
• 26:19
  So I mean, I've, like I said, I have made fortunes and I have lost fortune.
• 26:23
  Two separate incidences across 25, 30 years.
• 26:26
  But gigantic mistakes.
• 26:28
  The 10 million dollar one took me six years to, to climb out of.
• 26:31
  And so in that context, I just, that's my answer is I don't get emotional about it.
• 26:37
  My emotion is my family at home.
• 26:40
  And I say it this way, Dave, I am a caveman.
• 26:44
  And I mean that.
• 26:45
  I'm a caveman and I leave my family at home in a cave with a fire burning and I have to go out in the tall grass and hope, hope that something doesn't bite me.
• 26:54
  And I got to go into the trees and hope that something doesn't grab me so I can find a pterodactyl that I can hit over the head and I can drag it back to my family.
• 27:03
  And that passion that my family eats is what drives every single thing I do.
• 27:08
  In the 450 odd million dollars in revenue across a dozen businesses that I have done, not a single dollar of that money was ever earned doing something I love.
• 27:17
  It is a fallacy from my perspective that entrepreneurs looking to go and become their own, their own business and be their own bosses should strive to do this thing that they love.
• 27:28
  No, I took the money.
• 27:30
  I want to find something I was good at that I could make a profit at.
• 27:33
  And my passion was driven by taking that profit and sending my kids to Chinese immersion school when they were three years old until fifth grade so they read, write, and speak Chinese fluently.
• 27:42
  And then I sent them to Catholic school and then to Christian school to give them a well rounded education.
• 27:47
  We've been across the world a dozen times.
• 27:50
  We've done things that are unimaginable.
• 27:52
  And then right back to work I would go.
• 27:54
  And when that call would come in at midnight, it was simple to take because it's all in the journey to making sure my children and my wife and my family, my extended family, my parents are both 88.
• 28:04
  My dad's been working for me for 30 years was to make sure that they were taken care of.
• 28:08
  And that impetus is the way I was able to, to, to climb to the highs that I did, but also survive the lows that I had because it was all in service of making sure that my passion was
• 28:24
  taken care of, which is my family.
• 28:26
  So the low times just meant, jerry, put your feet on the floor, stand up and go face it.
• 28:32
  Because if you don't, the repercussions are something's getting in the cave and it's going to eat your family.
• 28:39
  And that sounds funny and dramatic, I know, but I'm telling you, that's how that's the fire that burns inside of me is to go out and conquer in a way that my family is taken care of.
• 28:49
  Okay, love that.
• 28:51
  All right, and so what does your businesses look like today?
• 28:54
  So I have a transportation company that operates Oregon, Washington and Idaho.
• 28:57
  That's the one that I started all those years ago.
• 29:00
  It got sold and then it ended up coming back.
• 29:02
  But it's been in continuous operation now.
• 29:05
  Coming up on 30 years.
• 29:06
  I have a large development that I'm working also.
• 29:09
  I've been in development for years and years, 20 years for also out in Oregon.
• 29:14
  And then I just started and we're just getting this off the ground.
• 29:18
  This, this podcast is named the Kronos Group.
• 29:20
  The one that I do, and it is used to be the Jerry Brazee podcast.
• 29:25
  It's now the Kronos Group podcast.
• 29:26
  Because I started a company a few months ago that is a peer to peer group.
• 29:31
  When I was 30 years old.
• 29:32
  I was doing, you know, $8 million.
• 29:36
  My second year in business, I was doing $8 million a year.
• 29:38
  And in doing that, a guy came to me I got written up in a local business.
• 29:44
  Guy came to me.
• 29:44
  He was 60 years, 60 some years old, and he was retired Fortune 500 CEO.
• 29:48
  And he told me this thing about a mastermind group.
• 29:51
  I didn't know what it was.
• 29:52
  Now I'm working 15, 18 hours a day.
• 29:54
  I'm refereeing basketball games at night and on the weekend to pay the bills because I can't get my company to make any money.
• 29:59
  And he sits down and he says, I want you to come be a part of this group.
• 30:02
  And I said, okay, that's great.
• 30:04
  How's it work?
• 30:05
  He said, you come every Monday.
• 30:06
  It's half of a day.
• 30:07
  Everybody gets a half an hour.
• 30:08
  There's going to be eight to ten guys in it.
• 30:10
  And in that half an hour you get to talk about your business.
• 30:12
  And everybody goes back and forth and they serve as a board for you.
• 30:15
  And then you get one hour, hour with me a month to kind of go over all of that.
• 30:18
  I said, that's great, except maybe you didn't hear this part.
• 30:20
  About 15 to 18 hours a day.
• 30:22
  I, I don't have time.
• 30:23
  He said, you can't afford not to.
• 30:24
  I said, well, how much is it?
• 30:26
  And I was like 650 bucks at the time.
• 30:28
  And I said, well, maybe you didn't hear that.
• 30:30
  I'm not making any money.
• 30:30
  That's why I'm working all of these hours.
• 30:32
  He said, you can't afford not to.
• 30:34
  And I joined that group.
• 30:35
  And that group was together for 25 years and we still get together.
• 30:40
  At the time when I joined, everybody was in their 40s, and now they're all in their 40s and 50s.
• 30:44
  And now they're all in the 70s and 80s and I'm in my 50s.
• 30:47
  And that group, for the first two and a half years, I didn't say much of anything.
• 30:51
  And I just soaked up all of this information that these entrepreneurs who had been there before I was and had done the things that I wanted to do, were doing.
• 31:01
  You would sit in this group and I mean, it wouldn't even be my turn to talk.
• 31:04
  The two guys would go back and forth and I go, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
• 31:08
  Did you just say that?
• 31:09
  You know, if I take this phone and I move it to this side of my desk, I can save 25 grand because it avoids me having to do X, Y or Z.
• 31:16
  Yeah.
• 31:17
  I go, perfect.
• 31:18
  I have a phone on my desk.
• 31:19
  I'm going to move it.
• 31:20
  I've got that thing sitting on my, on my, on my, in my shelves right I have an employee just like that.
• 31:25
  And I realized the value in information from people who have been there before that.
• 31:30
  Until then, I was just throwing elbows and fists as much as I could, fighting my way to get to this.
• 31:36
  Now I'm 30 years old and I'm sitting with these guys that had an idea how the world works.
• 31:40
  So that group still gets together one time a year, even though all of the guys are in their 70s and 80s.
• 31:45
  But it dawns on me.
• 31:46
  I enjoy working with businesses, and I've consulted for years and I said, you know what?
• 31:50
  I'm going to start my own group.
• 31:52
  And that's was born the Kronos Group.
• 31:54
  K R O N O S was the God of time.
• 31:58
  And so I said, yeah, that makes sense for.
• 32:00
  For entrepreneurs.
• 32:01
  And so I'm just putting the first cohort together now.
• 32:05
  Eight to ten business owners get together one time a month.
• 32:08
  It's all digital, it's all virtual.
• 32:10
  And again, the setup is exactly the same.
• 32:12
  And what you get is a board that is interested in your success.
• 32:17
  Maybe it's your home success, maybe it's your business success, maybe it's your health success.
• 32:22
  It doesn't matter.
• 32:23
  But you get somebody that you can bounce things off of and you can get feedback.
• 32:27
  Might be how to unclog the toilet, it might be how to finance your $10 million building and everything in between.
• 32:34
  And.
• 32:35
  And that is valuable.
• 32:37
  And so I thought, you know what?
• 32:38
  I've been talking about starting one of these long enough.
• 32:40
  It's time for me to jump and go do that.
• 32:43
  And then you get an hour of my time every one time a month after that, after that meeting to get together and make sure that we're working on the things that.
• 32:51
  That we want to work on.
• 32:52
  And then get the value of.
• 32:53
  Of all of my good and bad experience, as the case may be.
• 32:57
  Okay.
• 32:58
  All right.
• 32:58
  And Jerry, if people want to learn more about your work or connect with you online or follow you for any other reason, what's the best way people can find?
• 33:07
  So you can go to the kronosgroup.org k r o n o s the kronosgroup.org and you'll find everything you'll need there.
• 33:16
  If you're not an.
• 33:17
  The Kronos Group is for entrepreneurs doing seven figures and above.
• 33:21
  If you are a less than seven figure or you're just on the outside looking in.
• 33:25
  If you like my message, the way I talk, the way I view the world.
• 33:28
  I've also started a community, the Kronos Forge.
• 33:32
  It's on school but again, if you go to the kronosgroup.org forge, you'll find that there's a school community there.
• 33:39
  Every week for a couple of hours, I'm on there with a live Q A.
• 33:45
  So access to somebody, I, you know, this sounds egotistical.
• 33:49
  I get it.
• 33:49
  But I want to help people.
• 33:50
  So if my experiences can help anybody either get out of the life that they're in and try to grow or become an entrepreneur.
• 33:56
  I'm in the best shape of my life at 57 years old.
• 33:59
  Whatever.
• 33:59
  I've been married for 30 years, got three great kids, whatever.
• 34:02
  One of those pieces that I determine to be my successes or what I'm successful at, that makes sense with you.
• 34:07
  For you then.
• 34:08
  And you're not a seven figure entrepreneur, you too can have access to the group that I'm putting together, the Kronos Forge.
• 34:15
  So depending on what your needs are, just go to the kronosgroup.org and everything will be right there for you.
• 34:21
  All right.
• 34:21
  And we will link all that in the show notes for everyone.
• 34:24
  All right.
• 34:24
  Well, Jerry, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 34:30
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 34:31
  Absolutely.
• 34:32
  Dave, I appreciate you having me on.
• 34:33
  Thank you.
• 34:33
  You all right?
• 34:34
  Thank you.