Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / He Owns a $70M Business. He Doesn’t Run It. Here’s Why.

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He Owns a $70M Business. He Doesn’t Run It. Here’s Why. · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

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If you can fall in love with challenging yourself and getting stuck
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and then finding a way through eventually,
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that is the recipe for someone who's ultimately going to find success.
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It doesn't matter what you tackle in life.
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It's all
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about the journey.
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All right, Steve Roll, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
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Awesome to be here, Dave. Thanks for having me on.
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Yes, so happy you could take the time to be here.
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So Steve, you've got you've got quite a fascinating way you became
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an entrepreneur and really kind of the the perfect storm of a
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few different things coming together and aligning well.
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And then from there you really ~ you really took off and now you're the
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the head of role management group and you've got what is it what twelve companies
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now under that?
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Twelve attempts. Twelve attempts.
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Three that
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Okay.
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are still active.
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Okay. We'll get into all that.
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~ but just to set the stage for all our listeners,
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can you talk about how you became an entrepreneur?
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Absolutely. Look, my life is a showcase.
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You never know where opportunity is gonna find you.
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And you never know what preparation you're doing today,
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how that's gonna play out in your life.
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I've always been someone who wanted to experiment,
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who wanted to try new things, who considered myself to be entrepreneurial,
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but I didn't really know what path to take.
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And so I'm just a kid that grew up in the DC area who wanted to go
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and get an education, got an engineering degree,
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used the army to pay for because I had no money.
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And then they educated me further.
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I became a leader in the military.
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And while I was still in, I had this innate desire to start something,
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to be experimenting. And so I tried a couple different businesses while
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I was still in the military. And one of them that I never thought would take
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off was me just helping out my mother-in-law's company,
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who was selling, of all things,
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little soaps and shampoos to hotels.
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They didn't sell to the hotel directly,
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they would sell to distributors.
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And the distributor was out of the hotel.
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So it was a very basic operation.
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We manufacture it overseas, we import it,
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we sell it to distributors, and that was the entire business.
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They had this idea that they wouldn't start selling on Amazon.
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And so I started helping them out with that.
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But I had prepared for that long before by being on eBay when I was in college,
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selling hats and understanding that ecosystem.
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I had some Amazon experience and I'd read enough books that I knew
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I could pretty much figure anything out.
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And my background education had proven to me I can pretty much figure anything out.
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And so I took a stab at it and we went from zero to $150,000 a month
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for their company in about two years.
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But during that time, I had a lot of people who were coming back
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and they were giving this feedback saying,
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Man, this is great, but everything's so big.
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You got a thousand bar soaps, you all these shampoos.
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I got a little Airbnb. I rent out one room in my house.
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I don't need all of that. Can somebody make a smaller kit?
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And so I had this idea, okay, I'm gonna go make these kits for Airbnbs.
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I did not think this was gonna be a million dollar idea,
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Dave.
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I thought this was going to be an idea that,
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well, they're asking for it. I know what they're willing to pay for it.
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I've learned all of that. I'll go and make it for them instead.
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So I made it and it immediately sold out.
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No ad spend organically sold. And I knew there was something there.
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So I went to the owners of the company,
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my mother-in-law included, and said,
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Hey, I got this idea. Why don't we do these kits and manufacture them
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in bulk overseas? So our costs are low,
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and I'm not in my garage hand packing these things.
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And they go, Steve, we don't want all that complexity.
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Our business is very simple.
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We buy it, we bring it in, our brands,
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we sell it to distributors, distributors sell it to hotels.
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But if you want to go and do it,
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go and do it. And that's when I started my first successful business.
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And I had no idea that it would be as successful as it was.
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I just had enough proof points to know,
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hey, this is worth taking a risk.
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I needed to have $100,000 in order to buy the inventory from them to bring
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in all these containers. And luckily enough for me,
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I say lucky, but really it was more prepared,
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I had made enough money in commission.
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In my day job and working for them,
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that I had enough to put that investment on the line to bring
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in a couple containers, start selling on Amazon.
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And now we look eight years later,
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$70 million sold on Amazon of those kits.
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Unbelievable. I can't believe it got that big.
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I can't believe it got as professional as it did because I was the Wild West
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guy doing everything myself. And all of a sudden I wake up eight years later.
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And I have no active role in the company.
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The company is still very successful.
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We'll do $12 or $13 million this year with a great bottom line.
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It's run by my very first employee who is now the president of that operation.
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He's got 20 other employees that are working with him.
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And it's so professional and there's so many wonderful operations.
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And they got to merge with a larger company.
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And the whole thing is it's nowhere that I want to be.
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I'm a Wild West guy. I'm not an established company guy.
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But I see that this business is just performing so well.
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And it's what I started.
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But it doesn't look like what I did.
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And the fact that I don't have to be involved in it tells us
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a very important lesson. Here's the lesson for everyone to take away.
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Passive income is possible in business.
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And people say that passive income isn't possible.
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it's a pipe dream. The only way to get passive income is the SP 500 or real estate.
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No other way to do it. Well, I'm living proof that passive income
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is possible in business, but I understand the price that I had to pay
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for it to become passive income.
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And it wasn't an easy pass.
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And it was a lot of 60 hour days.
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And so if you want to go and achieve passive income in business,
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it's possible, but the price you have to pay might be the 60-hour work weeks.
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And it might be years of putting your head down,
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doing things that most people wouldn't want to do.
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And you better really enjoy that journey because you're going to be on it
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for a very long time. And if you don't burn out and you can get enough people
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in to take over the things that are only inside your head and do that for you,
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you can build a business that truly allows you to sit on a beach.
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while you're making money. Passive income is possible and I'm living proof of it.
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Okay, love that. So many great lessons to dig into there as well.
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so let's just start back in the beginning.
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you naturally have these entrepreneurial tendencies,
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didn't have any money growing up.
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You go the military college route,
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your engineering, so your understanding of systems and and all that type of thing,
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but you you naturally have this desire
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to start something, right? So you're trying stuff out,
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selling eBay, selling some stuff on Amazon.
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you get working at your mother in law's company and you see this opportunity.
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So when they passed on it and they said,
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Look, we don't wanna do anything that complex.
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We like our simple business, but hey,
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you go do it, right? Like, how hard was it for you?
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'Cause you like you said, you're a Wild West guy.
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And you were prepared, you had the cash on hand to take the risk.
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How hard was it for you to really make that leap and do something right
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in that moment?
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You know, it's a great question.
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I think one lesson that I've learned in my life is that when
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you have prepared enough and you understand the people that you're selling to,
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understand your customers at a very deep level,
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what looks like a big risk to other people doesn't feel like a risk
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to you because you have more information than they do.
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And so when I was taking a leap in my business,
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I had already worked in the industry for two years helping out somebody else.
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I learned on their dime. I read books and I understood,
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and I had gone through a lot of failures in a really low stress environment.
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And that I think is important that most people look at that first job
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or the first side hustle, that is your apprenticeship.
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And when you have an apprenticeship where you're learning on somebody else's dime
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and you understand who the customer is,
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how to get them.
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what they're willing to pay and what would solve a bigger problem for them.
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And you find a different problem that your company doesn't want to solve
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for those customers. They're not interested in it.
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So often industries will alienate a certain customer segment that they say,
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that's not a big piece of our market.
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We're all gonna focus over here.
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And so if you look long enough and get inside of an industry,
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you're gonna see the forgotten customers who have problems that nobody wants
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to solve. Those are generally the problems that if you go start a business inside of
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You can start something very successfully.
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It doesn't mean it's gonna be a multi-million dollar opportunity.
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It means that you found a desperate customer who has a specific problem that
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you have the skill set to be able to solve.
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And when you find that customer,
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that old adage of it's better to solve a problem for a hundred people
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who love your solution than to solve a problem for a million people who just kind
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of like it. The staying power comes from those,
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the 100 people who really love your solution.
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And that's where I felt.
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When I was given the opportunity to go and go and buy this inventory,
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I knew the market. I knew what they were willing to pay.
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I understood where to go reach them.
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I knew how to grow it. I understood Amazon ads.
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I understood the infrastructure because I'd been doing all of that
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on somebody else's dime. And now I'm handed this opportunity on a platter.
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And you can say, Steve, you got lucky.
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You know, that's they shouldn't have just given that to you.
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And anybody could have done what you did if they had just been given that
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opportunity. And I say, Well, there's a time in my life I would have believed you.
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But now what I understand is
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I was so prepared when that opportunity showed up because I had a lot
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of things that most people didn't have.
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I had the knowledge, I knew how to do it,
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I had the money, I'd been smart with the cash that I'd made,
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I'd saved it up. And so when I was given the opportunity,
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I knew what to do with it. And how many people are missed by opportunities that
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are given to them on a platter and they're not ready for because they haven't done
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the preparation work?
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They haven't given themselves a chance to save up their money.
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They have not been smart with their money.
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They have no money to invest in any opportunities.
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If you can pay attention to the basics and prepare yourself the right way,
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when those opportunities come,
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it's not gonna feel like you're taking a big risk.
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In fact, it's going to feel like you're just walking across a bridge from
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one location to the next that you're very comfortable in.
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And although it looks like a huge risk to other people,
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You walk across that bridge and say,
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no, there's a business here. I know how to do this.
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I'm already prepared for this moment.
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You can do that with confidence because you were prepared and you were smart.
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And you use that first job as the apprenticeship to learn a market
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on somebody else's dime.
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Mm. Okay. All right. So once you get started,
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like you said, everything came together.
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You were prepared. You had the money.
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you knew the industry, you go ahead and start.
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you said it sold out really quick and things took off,
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like growing that to like, 70 million sold on Amazon,
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career to date. Like, what was it like scaling that up and
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the inevitable, challenges that come along with like a business of that size.
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Yeah, it's funny when you start something off and you are an early entrepreneur,
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the early days of your company,
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you will do everything yourself.
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And that's a good thing. In fact,
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the company grows the fastest in the early days when you learn
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to do everything yourself. You obsess over the customer,
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you obsess over the product, you make everything perfect,
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you answer every single customer service complaint that comes in,
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and all that information goes right into your head and you can push
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all that forward. I got to my first two million dollars in sales by myself.
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There was nobody else to work there.
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I had no employees. I had very little technology.
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I was making images on PowerPoint,
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taking screenshots of it and uploading to Amazon.
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I was doing everything the wrong way and the unscalable way.
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But the lesson there is that in the beginning,
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you should do things that don't scale.
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It's okay for you to do things in a way that like no human or technology involved,
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like that's stupid. You should do things.
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And everyone thinks that, ~ you gotta build it to scale in the very beginning.
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And I say that's not how you should do a business.
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You should do
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very unscalable things and learn the customer.
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Find where we call product market fit where you know I know how to go
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and find these customers and the customers know how to find me.
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I'm bringing in as much business from referrals and repeat business as
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I am from going out and finding people using these Amazon ads and using
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the avenues that I know to go after and find customers.
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That's when you're in early business.
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The goal is to get to a point that you become scalable.
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What do we mean by scalable? We mean that
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Scalable means I can now put people and capital into the business and I
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can grow it exponentially beyond what I was capable of,
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my own ability. Scaling means getting all the stuff out of your head that only
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you know how to do and transferring that to other people who can use what they
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can do and they can also use technology to go and further
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the company and professionalize everything.
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You can go so much further that way.
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But it's a very difficult thing to do.
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In the founder mindset,
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When you do things the right way,
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you did everything yourself. Now you've become the person that everything goes
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through. So letting go of that is one of the biggest points that a
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lot of founders get stuck on. They have to let go of the idea that everything must
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come through them. And now it's going to go and transfer to other people.
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A lot of business owners are very uncomfortable with the thought process that
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they're not going to be involved in every single decision.
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And so isn't this interesting?
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The lesson you can learn here is.
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The very things that will make you successful when you start your business,
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which is obsessing over the customer,
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understanding the product, doing everything yourself,
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those are the very same things that will hold you back from being able
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to scale the business up to a level that's ever beyond your own capability.
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And so to successfully go beyond your capability,
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you need to be able to now take all the stuff that's in your head and
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you need to put it down on paper and you need to systematize that so you can say,
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Not only can I do this and understand all of what makes this business work,
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I now need to be able to teach that to somebody else.
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I can't just hire someone and then give them one task to do and then give them
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the next task. They have to understand the whole operating system of what makes
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the business work. Well, in the early days of the business,
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it all lives inside of your head.
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And so the process of pulling all that stuff out is as you go through your day,
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deciding I'm gonna work 50% slower.
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For the next six months, because every time I do something,
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I'm gonna write down what I'm doing,
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how I'm doing it, and why it's important.
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And then I'm gonna hand that off to a new employee who says,
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Here's how you do it, here's why you do it,
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here's why it's important. I want you to do it my way,
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but I'm gonna let you improve this process so it's eventually you doing it your way.
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You can go through a crawl, walk,
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run, sprint phase with your new employees by telling them exactly what to do,
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here's how you do it, here's why it's important.
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Now I'm gonna do it with you. And then on the last point,
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we say, hey, that was my system.
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But I want you to develop your own system.
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Because how did I learn to do what I know how to do?
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As the business owner, I put myself into a really low stress environment
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and I failed hundreds of times when nobody was looking.
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And there was no one to yell at me because it was just me.
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I'm failing myself. I'm failing customers.
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I would go and fix it. When employees come in,
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They learn the same way that the business owner did,
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or at least they should. They should be giving the same environment
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to go and experiment and fail with more knowledge of here's the stuff that actually
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works. Now go forth and you can fix what I have,
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you can improve on it, but I'm gonna put it into an environment where
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the employees are allowed to experiment,
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they're allowed to make mistakes.
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Here's a direction that we want to go in.
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Now experiment your way to turning it into a system and a process.
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That's how we were able to go from.
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Couple million dollars in sales and no employees,
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to adding the first employee, giving a lot of responsibility,
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delegating, trusting that whether or not I was looking over his shoulder,
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it was all going to get done. And the two of us working together to
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add another six employees, and then it was 10 employees,
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then it was 15, and then it was 20.
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But with each employee that was added on to the operation,
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we were getting more done because we kept the same culture all the way throughout.
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It was no longer that the only person who knew what was going on
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was the business owner.
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It was that each person that was added to the system was truly being added
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to an operating system where everyone understood what we're trying to accomplish,
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how we do it, why we do it, and they learned the why because they were able
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to experiment and fail the same way that I did.
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And then here's where we're trying to go in the future.
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It is our job to collectively improve the processes that the business owner started
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with when it was a business of one and turn it into something that now can
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go on and scale to the next level.
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That is a really complicated process for most founders to go through.
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They have a really hard time giving up and delegating authority to other people with
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things that they deem to be really important to the business.
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But if you can let go just enough to say,
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I can trust that I have taken it out of my head and built enough standard operating
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procedures, and I've built checks-in,
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so I know the stuff is still being done.
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My customers are still being served.
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The most important thing you can do as a founder in a company once you've reached
17:05
a little bit of success is get all the stuff out of your head and transfer your care
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for the customer and how much you care about the product to other people
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who can care about it more than you because they can give it more focus.
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They can have a small piece of the pie and put 40 hours a week into it
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in ways that when you were just a founder,
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you didn't have the chance to put enough time into it.
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You couldn't put 40 hours in, you could put in one because you were wearing 40 hats.
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All 40 operations got one hour from you in a single week.
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And so transferring that to employees and letting them take over those
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and put 40 hours a week into it,
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that's how you get yourself from where I was stuck at a few million dollars
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a year to then getting to eight figures in sales.
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And it wasn't anything that I was doing anymore.
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It was the decisions that I made to start the business,
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make it successful in the right way,
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and then transfer all of that.
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To people who could spend a lot more time putting their head down
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and figuring it out and improving the processes that I started.
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It doesn't take that much humility once you get started in the process.
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And for anyone who's stuck in that phase today,
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who wants to delegate more, they think,
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the business could do so much more if I would just be able to give it
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to someone and they could handle it and do it as well as I would.
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Think to yourself: at one point you didn't know how to do that stuff.
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You learned it. Somebody else can learn it too.
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And it's not that you don't trust other people.
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You don't trust that you've created a system to transfer your knowledge
18:31
and passion into other people where they can care for the customer
18:35
and the product the same way that you did.
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It's achievable, but it starts by letting go and allowing yourself
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to understand it doesn't have to all be on the founder.
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The employees can come in and it's going to be them that scales us
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to the next level. I'll go back to where I started.
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The very things that make a company successful in the beginning.
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Where the founder does everything is what holds that company back from scaling
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up to the potential of the company of what it can be,
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because that founder is involved in everything.
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And so there's two phases of your company that you have to navigate if
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you want to get it successful and then scale it to the next level.
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Okay. Yeah. And the that's that paradox of what got you here won't get you there.
19:16
~ okay, so at like you said, you reached a point where you're stuck
19:20
at a couple million dollars a year and then you went through this process,
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like get it like the process of figuring all that out,
19:26
because clearly, right, you can you just gave a lecture on the whole thing
19:30
and and ~ you know what to do and and how how to do it and et cetera.
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But the process of you figuring that out as a first-time business owner and kind of
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company almost exploding out of the gates with this idea you had.
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What was that like for you in terms of like the trial and error of
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of getting this right and delegating properly and getting everyone else
19:50
to truly buy in?
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It's funny you ask that because it's very easy for me to articulate
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now what that whole process looked like.
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In reality, it was a really messy process,
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going from successful business to scaling up to the next level.
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The amount of effort that went in to learn what the right thing to do was.
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It goes back to a very simple concept.
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When people say, All right, take the first step.
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And they're like, Well, what's gonna happen on step 17?
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People get way too far ahead of themselves.
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And if you try to solve for step 17,
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you're not at step 17 yet. Why?
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Because if you don't take the first step,
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then you don't get to experiment on what it takes to get to step two.
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When you take the first step, people will say the path will illuminate what
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the next step is. Well, what does it mean for the path to illuminate the next step?
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What it means is I take step one,
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I gained knowledge on step one.
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Okay, now I'm here. I can see more now that I'm here.
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There's compound interest in my knowledge because just getting to step one,
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I know more stuff. And I can see that there's three different potential
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opportunities to go into step two.
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Which one's the right one? Well,
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I don't know what the right one is.
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I'm gonna pick one that I think is the best and I'm gonna jump into it.
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And guess what? I'm probably gonna be wrong.
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If I have three choices, I pick one,
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I pick the wrong one, I get to go back to step one and then go pick
21:10
the next best one and the next best one.
21:12
Eventually I'm going to find what step two actually was and what worked.
21:17
And now I'm at step two, but the same thing happens again.
21:20
Step one, step two, I now have new knowledge.
21:23
I now understand more. That pathway being illuminated is being illuminated
21:28
by more failure of me trying things and figuring it out.
21:31
And so when you hear someone who goes from a business that started successfully
21:35
and they scaled it up to the next level,
21:37
understand this: they failed their way to the next level.
21:41
And they failed hundreds of times on the way to the next level.
21:44
When it was hiring their first employee,
21:46
they probably failed along the way.
21:47
When it was teaching that employee how to do things,
21:49
they probably failed during that process.
21:51
How to write something down on paper and make an SOP and make a policy
21:56
of here's how we do things as a company,
21:57
that probably was written down and then misunderstood by someone and taken
22:01
in the wrong context. And the company probably lost money along the
22:04
way because you failed to transfer that knowledge and you failed to take that step.
22:10
But if you take each step one at a time.
22:12
And you learn new information and you're heading towards the goal of the goal
22:16
is I want to scale the company.
22:18
There's a lot of stuff I don't know how to do in order to make that happen.
22:21
But what's the next step? What's the next logical step?
22:24
Each time you go through that process,
22:27
you will continue to fail, but you will move yourself forward towards
22:31
the ultimate goal. It was such a messy process for us adding employees,
22:36
for us figuring
22:37
out.
22:37
How we were gonna run payroll,
22:38
who was gonna get paid what, who was gonna own what.
22:41
Then you add managers in, and the managers are fighting with each other about
22:44
who owns what, who made the mistake.
22:46
It's it's a really messy process.
22:49
But anyone who's been successful,
22:51
when they remove themselves from it and look back,
22:53
they go, yeah, it was a pretty obvious path.
22:55
But what they're forgetting is that they've mastered that process now.
22:59
And there's a difference in mastering scaling a business and being
23:05
at the business level that you want to scale.
23:07
Where you're saying, hey, I've made a few million dollars,
23:09
like how do I scale the next level?
23:10
The the simplest way to understand it,
23:13
I think, is if you were to ask a the winner of the home run derby in baseball,
23:18
how do you hit a home run? He might tell you,
23:20
Well, it's pretty simple. Keep your eye on the ball and you swing.
23:22
The ball goes over the fence. And you go,
23:24
Well, I know there's more involved to it than that.
23:26
I've never hit a home run before.
23:27
How how would you break it down to me?
23:29
And then he will have the understanding that years and years and years ago,
23:34
Although he simplified it now to just keep your eye on the ball and swing
23:38
it goes over the fence, there were tactics and there were 13,
23:42
14, 15 thought points of things that were exercised and practiced and things that
23:46
he was doing over and over and over again,
23:48
repetitiously, failing frequently.
23:51
And then once you failed enough along the journey,
23:53
you get to the point that it's all so simplified.
23:56
And you go, Well, yeah, just keep your eye on the ball and you swing
23:58
and the ball goes over the fence.
23:59
But there was a day before the mastery when each step
24:04
was an actual trial and it was a journey that you had to go on and there
24:07
was failure at every single step.
24:09
Scaling your company is going to be no different.
24:11
You're not going to have a playbook to follow.
24:14
You can go and read books of others who have done it,
24:16
but your path is not going to be the same as theirs.
24:19
The big milestones along the way,
24:21
you will fail your way to learning how to get your company to a point that
24:25
it can scale without you. And the only way to do it is to take step one,
24:29
learn new information, find step two,
24:32
And then continue on in that process for years until you get to a point that
24:36
you have a scalable company.
25:14
Okay Love that. All right. Quickly while we got a few minutes left here,
25:18
let's just get into role management group,
25:20
and the other stuff that you've done since then.
25:22
So you scale this company, you remove yourself,
25:25
you still ~ own it, but ~ it's completely run without you in the day-to-day.
25:30
What happens next along your entrepreneurial?
25:34
Well, I think that you develop a skill set over time.
25:36
Once you've built one successful company,
25:37
you've got a playbook that you know how to do it again.
25:40
When you've mastered anything in life,
25:42
you go, man, the second time is gonna be so much easier than the first time that
25:46
I did it. And so if you gain the skill set of scaling a business,
25:49
you're always thinking about, well,
25:51
why don't I start another one and scale that up again?
25:54
There's lessons that you learn along the way.
25:56
And so in role management, I went through and thought,
25:59
hey, you know what? I'm really good at this piece of scaling e-commerce companies.
26:02
Why don't I go acquire and start new e-commerce companies and take them
26:07
to the next level? That's the first part where you realize:
26:10
man, a lot of things went right in that first business that enabled me to
26:15
be able to scale it profitably and have it run off into the sunset the
26:20
way that it did. That's not all repeatable because there is an element
26:25
of the stars aligning and the industry moving towards a point where luck becomes
26:30
a factor.
26:31
And so the question is, well, how do you become more lucky?
26:33
And that's all goes back to the preparation and positioning,
26:37
having the capital to do it, and keeping yourself in a low stress environment that
26:41
you can learn in. That's the formula for you to do things repetitiously enough,
26:44
doing it over and over and over again,
26:46
where ultimately you'll get lucky.
26:47
And so one piece is we're still actively starting new businesses,
26:50
working with e-commerce companies where we become the e-commerce arm
26:54
for their B2B operation and help them to launch on Amazon.
26:58
But more importantly,
26:59
I think it's important for all of us to level up to the next level.
27:02
You don't just want to repeat the plays that you've done before.
27:04
You want to take on bigger challenges.
27:06
And so what's next for us is looking at acquisitions.
27:08
We're looking at companies that have nothing to do with e-commerce whatsoever
27:12
at all. But we can take the knowledge that we learned of leveraging technology
27:16
and focusing on customers that were being ignored by the industry
27:20
to find new opportunities for those companies.
27:22
Where we buy a company that's already going in a direction that we like.
27:26
And we keep that direction going,
27:28
but we tack on to that, hey, there's some new opportunities here to
27:31
go after and some customers that no one's really servicing.
27:33
Maybe we can innovate around those as well.
27:36
And so that's what role management group is all about.
27:38
We are managing brands on Amazon for other companies,
27:41
starting our own, and looking at acquisitions in the future.
27:45
Okay. And let's talk about your book that you wrote out.
27:48
it came out about a month ago,
27:49
is that right?
27:50
That's right. That's right. But a new book out.
27:51
It's called The Future You Choose.
27:53
You can find it on Amazon or go to my website,
27:54
steveroll.com. It's R-O-L-L-E,
27:57
Steve Roll.com. And I'm Roll with Steve on all social platforms.
28:01
This is a book that covers two big pieces.
28:04
Number one, for the person who grows up and lacks resources,
28:08
who doesn't really feel like they're in control of their life.
28:10
All of us have the potential to live a life of control.
28:13
We call that agency.
28:15
And for me in my own life, growing up without agency,
28:17
growing up out of control, seeing my parents be out of control
28:19
in a low-income community to get where I am today,
28:22
it's like a mindset change. And part one is all about that change in mindset.
28:25
Entrepreneurship is an opportunity to be in control.
28:28
But having a nine to five is an opportunity to be in control too.
28:32
There's many paths to being in control.
28:33
If you are someone who can live a disciplined life,
28:36
live on less than you make, invest the difference over a long period of time,
28:40
you'll live a life of control.
28:42
I talk about those who are interested in entrepreneurship in the second part
28:45
of this book. How I did it, all my failures along the way,
28:48
where I found my ideas, what I did with them,
28:50
and how others can follow the same frameworks that I did in order to find success
28:55
in their life. And that's part two.
28:56
So this book's out on Amazon. If you'd like to go get a copy of that,
28:59
I appreciate it. But I'll tell you this:
29:01
I've learned so many lessons along the way,
29:03
and I've learned a lot more from the failures than I have from the successes.
29:07
And I think the simple way for people to think about that is.
29:11
Your goal in life is to get yourself into an environment where you can fail
29:15
and get lots of reps in where it's a low stress environment.
29:19
It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish in life,
29:21
if you can do lots of reps where it's low stress and you aren't going to have
29:25
to hop off because you go bankrupt along the way and failure is catastrophic,
29:29
you can get really, really lethal at anything you put your mind to.
29:34
Love that. Okay. And last question here,
29:36
Steve. Looking at your whole journey from,
29:38
growing up in a low income community and not having agency at first and kind
29:42
of the stars aligning and you being prepared and the first business taking
29:46
off and then everything you created thereafter,
29:48
looking back at the entire journey,
29:50
what's been the best part of it for you?
29:55
A lot of people would think that the best part of
29:57
a successful entrepreneur's journey is where they're at today
30:01
and arriving and having the financial independence and the security
30:05
and the flexibility to do what they want with their time.
30:07
But I promise you, the most the most important part for successful entrepreneurs,
30:13
they loved the journey. And that's why you don't see them hopping off
30:18
the train and sitting on the beach all day or sitting by the pool.
30:20
They're builders.
30:22
And they love the process that they had to go through of who they had
30:25
to become in order to become successful.
30:27
The things are nice, the money's nice,
30:29
the cars, the houses, all that stuff can be nice.
30:32
But that was never the ultimate goal for anyone who went along the journey.
30:36
It's the people who don't have money who want the big house and the nice
30:39
car and are very materialistic along the way.
30:41
They want to look like they're rich even if they're not rich.
30:43
The people who are, they value different things.
30:46
They value their flexibility, but they really value the journey that they went on,
30:50
and they're looking for.
30:51
Alternate paths to go on the similar journey again because it was
30:55
all about how rewarding the journey is.
30:57
Why is the journey rewarding for successful people?
31:00
Why do they want to recreate that?
31:01
Because they know what it felt like to fail and hit their head against
31:05
the wall and get stuck against a brick wall.
31:08
And they had got defeated. They didn't know what to do next,
31:11
but they didn't quit and they didn't give up.
31:13
And they found a way around it ultimately by coming up with some
31:16
new innovative idea.
31:18
That set them free from that, and they did that over and over and over again.
31:22
And nothing will get you as motivated or happy in life as getting stuck somewhere
31:26
and then allowing yourself, helping yourself around that obstacle
31:30
or going through that obstacle.
31:32
You feel like you've conquered the world.
31:34
People who have been successful in entrepreneurship have gotten stuck at
31:37
a wall and found a way through or around hundreds of times.
31:40
It's a dopamine hit. They get addicted to it.
31:43
And that's why the journey is so enjoying,
31:45
it's so fulfilling for them. And that's why they don't just stop.
31:48
they go and do it again because they love the journey.
31:51
If you can fall in love with challenging yourself and getting stuck
31:55
and then finding a way through eventually,
31:57
that is the recipe for someone who's ultimately going to find success.
32:01
It doesn't matter what you tackle in life.
32:02
It's all about the journey.
32:05
Okay, love that. All right. And as you just alluded to,
32:08
your role with Steve on all social platforms,
32:10
and of course you can go to Steveroll.com as well,
32:13
correct?
32:13
That's right.
32:14
Okay. All right. Well, Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to
32:17
be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
32:22
We greatly appreciate it.
32:23
Thanks Dave. I appreciate you having me on.
32:25
I had a good time and I hope people people got a lot of impact from it.