Latest / The Hannah Hammond Show / Why Making Millions Isn't Enough — Dan Sachkowsky on the Mistake That Led to Bankruptcy

Transcript

Why Making Millions Isn't Enough — Dan Sachkowsky on the Mistake That Led to Bankruptcy · The Hannah Hammond Show

• 0:00
  When you made $4 million by the time you were 24, did you keep
• 0:04
  it? Do you remember that moment when
• 0:06
  you realized you were going to lose it all and file for
• 0:09
  bankruptcy? I just built this whole empire
• 0:11
  and it's all gone. And I'm like literally signing
• 0:14
  this piece of paper and it's going to be gone.
• 0:16
  Everything's gone. Why do so many people fail in
• 0:18
  business? Because they ultimately try to
• 0:20
  be over prepared. An incredible entrepreneur that
• 0:23
  has literally stood the test of time from making it all, losing
• 0:27
  it all, making it back, losing it again.
• 0:30
  I self sabotaged my entire life for 40 years because I chased
• 0:34
  things and once I got the thing I was still empty.
• 0:37
  How did you shift out of that and rewire your brain for
• 0:41
  something different? When people fail, they become
• 0:44
  victim of their failure. And when you're the victim, you
• 0:46
  can't be the victor. At the same time, you can't win.
• 0:49
  How would you coach me on? Here's exactly what you need to
• 0:53
  do and next steps. You've got to figure out.
• 0:57
  Welcome back to the Hannah Hammond Show.
• 0:58
  I'm here with Dan Sakowski or better known as Big D, who is an
• 1:04
  incredible entrepreneur that has literally stood the test of time
• 1:08
  from making it all, losing it all, making it back, losing it
• 1:11
  again, and then ultimately sharing that message with the
• 1:14
  world today on how to truly build a business that lasts and
• 1:17
  become the kind of person that is deserving of actually holding
• 1:21
  and keeping that kind of success.
• 1:23
  So welcome to the show. I'm super excited to meet you.
• 1:26
  I know we, I think we got introduced through Pedros Cooley
• 1:30
  and you who you're very close with and absolutely love him and
• 1:33
  had a very nice CEO coaching lesson when, when he was on the
• 1:36
  show. But we, we were just talking
• 1:38
  offline about your journey. And I mean you made $4 million
• 1:41
  by the time you were 2424 crazy and started your business 17.
• 1:45
  So who were you as that 17 year old that launched this company
• 1:49
  and had all the success and then did you keep it?
• 1:53
  Let's backtrack and I'll tell you how it happened because
• 1:56
  that's a better story. So I grew up super humble
• 2:00
  beginnings. We grew up, you know, in the
• 2:02
  project areas with the projects across the street.
• 2:04
  Live in apartment or to apartment as a kid, and from the
• 2:08
  age of 7 to 13, my dad had identified me as something that
• 2:14
  truly changed everything about me.
• 2:16
  So my mom's background is Portuguese and the word for fat
• 2:20
  is Gordo. So as my dad would introduce me
• 2:22
  to people, 'cause I was a little fat kid, he'd be like, this is
• 2:24
  Danny Gordo. So if seven years old, eight
• 2:26
  years old is a joke, go around with a joke.
• 2:28
  But as you 1011 years old, you're like, wow, like this is
• 2:30
  who I am. So the shame was there and
• 2:32
  everything was there and, you know, I would look at myself and
• 2:34
  I just wouldn't feel good about myself.
• 2:37
  So what happened, you know, for that time is I tried to like,
• 2:40
  just be better for my dad, show up for my dad.
• 2:43
  How can I, you know, be someone he's proud of?
• 2:45
  How's he going to tell me that? You know, you're going to do it?
• 2:48
  I believe in you. I what?
• 2:49
  Whatever, whatever I was looking for by the age of 14, I've
• 2:53
  totally give up. We were passing Bon Jovi's
• 2:56
  house. We were from New Jersey.
• 2:58
  I grew up in New Jersey and passing Bon Jovi's house and you
• 3:01
  know, when you live in apartments and then move to the
• 3:05
  suburbs and you're in a three bedroom house and your uncle and
• 3:08
  your grandparents move in with you, you know, the situation
• 3:10
  doesn't change. The space just gets a little bit
• 3:12
  bigger. But as we pass this house, I
• 3:14
  like literally didn't understand like how that was possible.
• 3:19
  And I said like, what is that? And my dad said to me, those are
• 3:23
  rich people will never be rich. So though I didn't trust them
• 3:29
  from an early age, at that point the switches went off.
• 3:32
  I was just disconnected. I was like, you know, there's
• 3:34
  like such limiting belief here and I didn't know what limiting
• 3:37
  beliefs were then. But there's just such negativity
• 3:39
  here that like, how do you live this way?
• 3:41
  I want better. Believe it or not, one day
• 3:44
  later, I'm riding my bike around the neighborhood and I stole
• 3:48
  four quarters from my parents draw 'cause I used to, I was a
• 3:50
  fat kid. Yep.
• 3:51
  And I used to steal money to go buy ice cream at the local
• 3:54
  store. So I steal four quarters and
• 3:57
  passing, you know, buy a garage sale that was in the local
• 3:59
  neighborhood. And when I passed by, I see they
• 4:02
  were cleaning up. I just want to see if they had
• 4:03
  baseball cards, what they were trying to get rid of.
• 4:05
  And what caught my eye on the end of the table you'll like
• 4:08
  this was a book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
• 4:11
  There was a circle on it. You know, when at the garage
• 4:13
  sale and it had a one and a dash.
• 4:15
  So it was obviously a dollar. So I played real stupid.
• 4:18
  I go, how much is the book? They were like, kid, you could
• 4:20
  have it. We're going to throw it up.
• 4:22
  We're throw it out. We're cleaning up.
• 4:23
  Anyway, I was like, cool, get the book and I get my ice cream.
• 4:27
  I was in heaven, right? So drive to go get my ice cream,
• 4:30
  sitting on the curb, open up the book, and I didn't really know
• 4:34
  where to start. I wasn't a good reader, I wasn't
• 4:35
  a good student. But I just kept staring at the
• 4:38
  front of that book and I didn't know what a rich dad was.
• 4:42
  I thought it was a fake book I didn't understand.
• 4:46
  Took me two times to read the book, probably in the course of
• 4:48
  like four months. One Saturday morning it's
• 4:53
  torrential downpours outside. There's nothing to do.
• 4:56
  I can't play, I can't do nothing.
• 4:57
  I read the book cover to cover the entire day.
• 5:01
  At the end of that I just had such a misunderstanding of what
• 5:06
  life could really be like and that showed me value of the
• 5:10
  book. But I still didn't think it was
• 5:11
  true. I thought the book was fake.
• 5:15
  Fast forward a year later, I'm a junior in high school.
• 5:18
  I'm done with school. I hate school.
• 5:19
  Like I don't even want to be there.
• 5:21
  I went to a trade school 'cause I feel like let me do something
• 5:23
  with myself. I'm never going to go to
• 5:24
  college. So I still my guy's counselor.
• 5:27
  She's like, hey, you can go on a work opportunity.
• 5:29
  Like I can hook you up with a job, come to school for two
• 5:32
  hours and then go to work. Oh my God, let's do that.
• 5:35
  So she introduced me to a contractor guy who's building
• 5:38
  houses. I spent the next 18 months with
• 5:42
  this guy, and I would say about two weeks in and working for
• 5:47
  him. His name's Dave.
• 5:49
  He said, hey, what are you doing on Saturday?
• 5:51
  I said nothing. He goes, I need you to come over
• 5:53
  to my house and do some stuff for me.
• 5:55
  I was like, OK, what? I have to rake his leaves.
• 5:57
  He told me to get a bunch of my friends because he's at a big
• 6:00
  house. So I called like 10 people.
• 6:02
  One guy showed up. So at that time I realized that,
• 6:04
  you know, you couldn't depend on people at a young age, But me
• 6:07
  and my one friend did show up. So we show up and he shows us
• 6:11
  everything. This guy lives in a big house.
• 6:12
  He's got, he's got the dream, you know, 3 kids, wife,
• 6:15
  everything. So Fast forward a year and a
• 6:19
  half later, maybe a year later, we're at lunchtime on our job
• 6:23
  site. And I said to him, I said, Dave,
• 6:26
  you know something about you. When I grow up, I want to be
• 6:29
  just like you. And he goes, when you grow up, I
• 6:33
  want you to be just like you. And I said, well, I want to have
• 6:37
  all that you have. I want to do all that you've
• 6:39
  done. And he goes, if anyone's going
• 6:41
  to do it, it's going to be you. I believe in you.
• 6:44
  Now imagine 17 years old, the first time you hear your entire
• 6:48
  life, something that you strive to hear, that someone believes
• 6:52
  in you. Life just changed in a second.
• 6:56
  So then how the business started was I went home.
• 7:00
  That was a Friday. I went home over the weekend
• 7:02
  ago. He believes in me.
• 7:04
  I could do it. I'm going to start my own
• 7:06
  business. I had no business doing
• 7:09
  business, but those words filled my tank.
• 7:13
  I needed to use the fuel. So I remember going up to him
• 7:17
  and I said then on that Monday or Tuesday following, I went to
• 7:19
  work and I said, hey, I really appreciate what you said on
• 7:23
  Friday. And because of that, I'm going
• 7:25
  to go out and start my own business.
• 7:26
  And he was like, what? He goes, I said, you told me you
• 7:31
  believed in me. He goes, I do believe in you,
• 7:34
  but you're not ready. I didn't hear that part.
• 7:38
  So probably about two weeks later I like gave my two weeks
• 7:41
  right? Started my first company
• 7:43
  knocking on doors. Went from installing windows and
• 7:45
  doors to building houses. By the time I was 2021 years old
• 7:50
  and did about $10 million in that seven-year time frame.
• 7:54
  I remember 2006 I made like 684,000 clear.
• 7:59
  Then in 2007 happened. So at this time I had two kids
• 8:05
  already. I wasn't married yet.
• 8:08
  I live in a 5000 square foot house.
• 8:10
  I had the Escalades. I had everything because rich
• 8:14
  dad, poor dad, taught me I could do something with myself.
• 8:17
  But MTV Cribs taught me that if you have all this stuff, you're
• 8:20
  wealthy because that's what we used to watch as kids.
• 8:24
  So I had all this stuff, but one thing I never learned from 17 to
• 8:29
  that age of 24 was financial literacy.
• 8:33
  I had no idea. So people say, like when the
• 8:36
  economy crashes or the economy shifts, like it's great for the
• 8:41
  smart business person, but I wasn't a smart business person.
• 8:44
  I was spending money foolishly because it was a coming in
• 8:46
  foolishly that ripped me apart. What was it like?
• 8:49
  So when you build something so big at such a young age, it's
• 8:53
  like ignorance on fire. I had no idea what I was doing.
• 8:56
  I was just doing the thing. And I was so confident because
• 9:00
  the jobs were coming in, the money was coming in, the company
• 9:02
  was growing. I had 13 trucks at 24 years old,
• 9:06
  and you're not gonna hear nothing from nobody who's
• 9:09
  telling you something. Unless the guy's got 26 trucks.
• 9:12
  You're not listening to him, you know?
• 9:14
  So every time someone tried to say, hey, save your money, do
• 9:16
  this and do that, it's like, who are you?
• 9:18
  So everyone always asks me, like, what is the one major
• 9:22
  lesson that you learned at that time?
• 9:26
  Do you regret going bankrupt? I said no.
• 9:28
  That was probably one of the good parts about it because I
• 9:31
  use the law as leverage. But what I do regret is not
• 9:36
  asking for help. Dave told me I wasn't ready, but
• 9:39
  I forgot about that. And maybe if I would have asked
• 9:42
  Dave to show me the way, he would have prepared me and this
• 9:46
  wouldn't have been happened. But I'm really glad it all
• 9:48
  happened because it set me up to understand that we're not
• 9:52
  invincible, you know, we're not bulletproof.
• 9:54
  And when you're making a lot of money, you're doing stuff, your
• 9:57
  ego gets so big you feel like you could blow through a wall.
• 10:00
  Do you remember that moment when you realized you were going to
• 10:02
  lose it all and file for bankruptcy?
• 10:05
  Yeah, so it was about 6 months. We, I was just ripping money out
• 10:10
  of the safe, trying to save it, trying to save it, trying to
• 10:12
  save it. The phone's not ringing.
• 10:13
  Like we had a foreclosure epidemic.
• 10:15
  The everything was falling apart.
• 10:17
  So for me, people were literally getting loans.
• 10:20
  They couldn't get loans. We were putting $400,000
• 10:22
  additions on houses. We were building houses because
• 10:24
  people were getting no doc loans.
• 10:26
  And it all stopped. And that was my business.
• 10:29
  So I'm like, all right, well, like I still got to pay my guys
• 10:31
  and maybe we got to finish some work.
• 10:33
  You know, we had not enough money to finish all the work
• 10:35
  that was there just because there was no money coming in.
• 10:38
  And the construction, you just kind of flow with it.
• 10:40
  You know, it's like you just keep coming as the money comes
• 10:42
  in, you just use it. So after about $500,000, there's
• 10:46
  a couple $100,000 left. I'm like they're saying, good.
• 10:51
  So I called a bankruptcy lawyer and it's hard to trust lawyers,
• 10:55
  right? Maybe this guy just wants me to
• 10:59
  do this because he's going to make some money.
• 11:00
  But when you realize bankruptcy attorneys don't really make a
• 11:02
  lot of money, you know, they just do volume, you know?
• 11:06
  And he said something to me that was super important.
• 11:09
  I walked in and and when I walked in, he's like, what's
• 11:11
  wrong? I'm like, what do you mean
• 11:13
  what's wrong? Like I just built this whole
• 11:15
  empire and it's all gone. And I'm like literally signing
• 11:18
  this piece of paper and it's going to be gone.
• 11:19
  Everything's gone. He goes, So what?
• 11:23
  He goes, I want to tell you two things.
• 11:25
  Number one, you're probably the youngest person I've ever had in
• 11:27
  my office that's done what you've done combined to the some
• 11:31
  of the older people that came in his office.
• 11:34
  He said, the second thing is you've already learned the how
• 11:37
  you know how to do it. Now you got to learn what to do
• 11:41
  with it. And the second time around is it
• 11:44
  will be way easier. I mean, I was like, OK, maybe
• 11:48
  he's supposed to tell me this. So then I went home and I had
• 11:51
  two kids. And when I opened the front
• 11:52
  door, all that worry, all that fear, all that stuff was gone
• 11:55
  because my two kids ran up to me and just were so glad I was
• 12:00
  home. And I was just like, on the way
• 12:03
  there, I felt like I'm losing everything.
• 12:06
  But this really should be my everything.
• 12:08
  And it shifted everything about my life.
• 12:10
  As somebody who had to take care of yourself and take care of a
• 12:13
  family with young kids and what were you, single or you were?
• 12:17
  No, yeah, I was like, we were. We weren't married.
• 12:19
  We were together. But together, yeah.
• 12:21
  And knowing it's staring that right in the face that you're
• 12:24
  going to lose what you've built and all that work that you've
• 12:26
  poured into it and that you are the sole provider.
• 12:29
  I'm assuming she was raising the kids and not bringing.
• 12:31
  In income, No, we had, we had a nanny and she was making 100
• 12:33
  something, $1000 a year. Oh well, that's good.
• 12:35
  So you did have a so you, you lose it all right, So what were
• 12:39
  your next steps to starting to make money again?
• 12:42
  Because of course, you have to provide for your family.
• 12:44
  Take care of your. Family fire the nanny, I become
• 12:46
  the stay at home dad. She started resenting me because
• 12:48
  she's making all the money, doing all the work, waking up
• 12:50
  early, I'm home. You know, why aren't you doing
• 12:53
  something with yourself? Go get a job.
• 12:54
  I mean, when you're conditioned for seven years, you're not
• 12:56
  going to get a job. You're just trying to find the
• 12:58
  next thing. And if I was able to cut the
• 13:01
  nanny out and spend some time and just figure it all out, we
• 13:04
  were kind of just floating, like, let's just figure this
• 13:06
  out. But when you're used to the
• 13:07
  cars, the vacations and all that stuff stops, even though like,
• 13:10
  you know, we were both contributing to that.
• 13:13
  I was a major contributor, you know, she, her stuff was like
• 13:15
  side change, right? So I would say probably about
• 13:18
  two months later, I got involved in direct sales, network
• 13:21
  marketing. Someone called me up.
• 13:23
  Another guy was in construction. He's like, hey, you know, I got
• 13:25
  an opportunity for you. He called me like 7 times.
• 13:27
  I'm like, bro, what are you talking about?
• 13:28
  Like we're not going to make that.
• 13:29
  There's nothing going on. The, the everything shut down.
• 13:32
  And he's like, dude, just come. I said, if I come, will you stop
• 13:35
  calling me? And I went to the meeting.
• 13:38
  I saw the guy in front of the room.
• 13:39
  He was making some money. I didn't even pay attention to
• 13:42
  what it was. He just said he was making 30
• 13:44
  grand a month. So the only thing going on in my
• 13:46
  head for the next hour was 30 grand, 530 grand a month, 530
• 13:49
  grand a month, 30 grand a month. What can I do with that?
• 13:52
  So again, another opportunity to just do what I have to do.
• 13:56
  And what I realized at that point over the next 2345 years,
• 14:00
  maybe a couple 1,000,000 bucks, is I really didn't know what I
• 14:03
  was doing. Same thing with construction.
• 14:07
  Why do so many people fail in business?
• 14:09
  Because they ultimately try to be over prepared.
• 14:12
  Why do so little people make it in business?
• 14:15
  Because very few people will actually do the thing without
• 14:17
  knowing a thing and just learn the thing as they go.
• 14:20
  And that's what I did twice. So that was 1 valuable lesson I
• 14:23
  learned, probably by the time I was like 27 years old.
• 14:26
  And so you start making money in network marketing.
• 14:29
  And then what happened after that I.
• 14:31
  Spent like 7 years doing it, maybe 3,000,000, maybe 4,000,000
• 14:35
  bucks. Then got back in construction.
• 14:37
  2012 Hurricane Sandy came. Anytime there's a natural
• 14:40
  disaster, the government prints money.
• 14:43
  So how do you get in front of this?
• 14:46
  So just got back into it, did my thing.
• 14:49
  I built the company over the course of the next two years.
• 14:54
  There was always this guy who I was competing against.
• 14:58
  So all the stuff I've talked about in this point is in my
• 15:00
  book that's coming up. So it's it gets very deep.
• 15:02
  So whoever likes this, like my book will get very deep in all
• 15:05
  of this stuff. We just don't have this much
• 15:07
  time. But anyway, two years later, I
• 15:10
  find a guy who's always bidding me and against me on these jobs.
• 15:15
  I find out he's going out of business while he's selling his
• 15:18
  business because he's getting divorced.
• 15:20
  Grand Slam. Hey, if I can own both companies
• 15:23
  and people don't know I'm bidding against myself and I'm
• 15:25
  going to win. So I sat down with this guy,
• 15:28
  find out, you know, get his number, call him.
• 15:30
  Hey, I'm selling cool. Spend about four months
• 15:34
  researching, doing everything. I did all the due diligence I
• 15:37
  was supposed to do, lawyer, accountant, everything inside go
• 15:42
  to buy the business. The day we bought the business,
• 15:47
  I think like it was 2 hours prior to doing it.
• 15:51
  All of this money was inserted in QuickBooks that was received,
• 15:55
  but not on our review. So I was on my way to the
• 15:58
  broker. I didn't see any of this
• 15:59
  happening. I buy the company that was three
• 16:00
  and a half, $1,000,000 in debt. Him and his wife took all this
• 16:04
  money. They didn't insert it in
• 16:06
  QuickBooks. It looked like it was
• 16:07
  receivables, but it was already received and I didn't find out a
• 16:11
  closing. I found out over the next couple
• 16:13
  weeks as customers started being irate and calling what's going
• 16:17
  on with my project. Hey, you know, here's where
• 16:18
  we're at. Like we already paid that.
• 16:20
  What do you mean? And just one after the next,
• 16:23
  after the next people knocking on the door.
• 16:26
  Hey, you owe us money. I was like, what?
• 16:28
  I I don't owe you anything. Yeah.
• 16:30
  Yeah. We we worked on this job that
• 16:32
  you now own and we were told to talk to you.
• 16:36
  I go, you're not in my creditors.
• 16:38
  Like I'm. I'm not supposed to take care of
• 16:39
  you. And it just the list went on and
• 16:42
  on and on. I'm like, oh, man, what do I do
• 16:46
  here? All right.
• 16:48
  So I got a striving company and a dying company.
• 16:51
  I need to figure out how to make this happen.
• 16:53
  It's all on me. Like once you buy a company,
• 16:55
  it's on you. You know, it doesn't matter if
• 16:57
  it's good or bad. Like I made a decision.
• 16:59
  I did my due diligence even though he screwed me.
• 17:01
  Like I have to prove all this. So I go to a prosecutor.
• 17:04
  I tell him what's going on. I'm like, yeah, keep him close,
• 17:06
  keep him close. We'll watch over and see what
• 17:07
  he's doing. He found out probably about two
• 17:11
  months later that I figured it out.
• 17:13
  Never came back to work 'cause he was working for me for a
• 17:16
  period of time and I was going to pay him off like overtime.
• 17:18
  So I paid him a little bit and then I was going to pay him
• 17:20
  overtime. So he flees to Florida.
• 17:23
  He doesn't come back. I start getting like levies on
• 17:25
  my accounts, lawsuits, all this stuff.
• 17:28
  I'm like, we need to think quick.
• 17:32
  Even though the name of the company was the same, he was he
• 17:35
  was LLC, I was incorporated. Things were still tying back
• 17:39
  because of the sale. So we started taking money in
• 17:42
  and going to check cashing, getting the cash, taking a 2%
• 17:47
  hit, putting in a safe and just doing our whole business in cash
• 17:50
  until we can clear this mess up. So 2016.
• 17:53
  So now two more years later, 2016, we've got a half 1,000,000
• 17:58
  bucks saved up in a safe. You know, we're doing good.
• 18:02
  We've got contracts on, we've got things going on.
• 18:05
  My project manager at the time, it's got a gambling problem so.
• 18:12
  This is life I love. This is like real life.
• 18:15
  People don't understand. They go how he's still alive.
• 18:17
  But this is what happens, right? Yeah.
• 18:19
  So my project manager's got a gambling problem.
• 18:22
  My one guy who was supposed to be a partner of mine was a
• 18:25
  bookie. But after, like, I don't know,
• 18:28
  six months, he wasn't doing anything.
• 18:29
  So I was like, hey, listen, I don't need you.
• 18:31
  But he was still dealing with my project manager. 4:00 in the
• 18:34
  morning on a Monday, my office manager sends me an e-mail and
• 18:39
  quits. 7:30 that morning, my brother shows up to our shop and
• 18:44
  our garage door is wide open. He's like, garage door's open
• 18:48
  and compressor's missing. And there's a couple things that
• 18:50
  are missing here. I'm like, oh, maybe we left it
• 18:53
  open, maybe someone took it, I don't know.
• 18:55
  Calls me back Like less than 5 minutes later he goes the safe's
• 18:59
  gone. We literally cut a hole in the
• 19:03
  floor, epoxied and bolted this safe in the floor and there was
• 19:07
  a camera facing the safe. They blew it out of the floor.
• 19:12
  So I'm like, oh man, I'll be there in like 10 minutes.
• 19:16
  We watch the surveillance video. The guys put the garage door
• 19:20
  coat in and they walk right to the back door, right in the
• 19:22
  office, right to the safe. How do they know it was there?
• 19:26
  Someone told them office manager quits, whatever, call the cops.
• 19:32
  The cops aren't in a rush to do anything there.
• 19:35
  If they do solve this, what's it going to be?
• 19:36
  It's not a big break for them. It's not a big story.
• 19:38
  They don't care. So two of my friends are ex
• 19:41
  state police detectives and maybe opened up a private
• 19:44
  investigation company. I call them.
• 19:47
  I'm like, I need you guys come over here.
• 19:49
  They solved it in one day. They head down to the police
• 19:51
  station with me and the cops go get out of here.
• 19:53
  This is our case, not yours. They go, we have all, they go.
• 19:56
  We don't care. It takes them a year to arrest
• 19:59
  the guys. Money's gone.
• 20:01
  I'm struggling trying to figure this thing out again.
• 20:05
  And another year later we go to court from the time they got
• 20:09
  arrested, finally went to court. I had to close shop.
• 20:12
  Like I'm like, I'm not supporting this thing with
• 20:13
  something. I'm just not doing this.
• 20:15
  So another bankruptcy, that company show up to court.
• 20:21
  One of the guys who got arrested all got into a car accident and
• 20:25
  died to me. I'm from the Northeast.
• 20:28
  That's called witness protection.
• 20:30
  You know what I mean? He didn't die.
• 20:32
  He's just changed his name and he's doing something on bigger
• 20:34
  levels. The other guy shows up to court
• 20:37
  and this is the guy who was going to be my partner and I
• 20:42
  kicked him out. That was the bookie.
• 20:45
  He gets prosecuted, 6 months probation, no restitution, first
• 20:50
  offense. This is the court system.
• 20:54
  So I had to start all over again during this time of going
• 20:58
  through all this. I'm in the middle of a divorce.
• 21:01
  My life is turmoil. That's the first half of my
• 21:04
  life. Oh, and I love it because
• 21:08
  there's so many, there's so many lessons, right?
• 21:11
  And ultimately to get through your second bankruptcy, like,
• 21:15
  when did you see the pattern and when did you point the finger at
• 21:19
  yourself? Because I know accountability is
• 21:21
  a big part of your message and what you share.
• 21:24
  When did you figure that out and, and not and understand that
• 21:27
  if you just did again, what you had been doing, people not
• 21:31
  vetting the right people, not having the right values, the
• 21:34
  right standards, sharing the same mission.
• 21:37
  Having a, a gambler have, you know, get, have a good ex
• 21:39
  business partner that's going to come out and steal your safe.
• 21:42
  Having a, a business that you bought that you didn't do proper
• 21:45
  due diligence on or you thought you had like what were those
• 21:47
  key? So let's go back to the business
• 21:49
  purchasing because obviously people listen to the show,
• 21:51
  they're buying businesses, they're an M&A or they want to
• 21:53
  buy a business, right? How would you have gone back to
• 21:57
  that key lesson and avoided that whole situation?
• 22:00
  Is was there a way that you could have done different due
• 22:02
  diligence or run a different process to protect yourself from
• 22:05
  that happening? So I just went off of everything
• 22:08
  that was given through the broker.
• 22:10
  So when I went to go sue the broker, I couldn't sue the
• 22:14
  broker because I signed some piece of paper, right?
• 22:17
  He's not at closing that he's not liable.
• 22:19
  But when you're dealing with a business broker, ultimately
• 22:22
  they're supposed to be doing the digital, just putting all the
• 22:24
  stuff together to position the sale.
• 22:27
  So we weren't allowed to talk to customers.
• 22:29
  I wanted to go talk to customers.
• 22:31
  And he's like, I don't really want my customers to know I'm
• 22:33
  selling. I'm going to stay on like it's
• 22:36
  going to look bad. And now I know why, you know?
• 22:39
  So I probably wouldn't buy a business again just because it's
• 22:43
  a lot easier to start something from the beginning then try to
• 22:46
  figure out someone else's mess. You know, I can start from zero
• 22:49
  and go out faster than trying to fix someone else's problem.
• 22:53
  But I think a lot of times in business we're always looking
• 22:55
  for like the next big thing. And I thought as hey, if I'm
• 22:59
  bidding against myself and I own both companies, it's a win win.
• 23:02
  My whole thing was like, I'm going to be my own competition.
• 23:05
  That's all I thought about. Nobody, 'cause this guy's ads
• 23:09
  are going here and mine are going here and we're literally
• 23:11
  fighting and nobody will know. Nothing's going to change and
• 23:14
  it's all going to come in house. And that's where I was looking
• 23:17
  at. It was greed, right?
• 23:18
  So like we look at greed, we look at how do we take it all?
• 23:20
  How do we be the biggest thing? And then the next company, like
• 23:24
  I just trusted too many people. The company was so big and there
• 23:28
  were so many things going on and I had so many people.
• 23:30
  I just trusted people and like, didn't really trust myself
• 23:34
  because I didn't oversee what people were doing.
• 23:36
  I just allowed people to do what they were doing and hope that it
• 23:39
  was going to work out because I never had a company of that
• 23:42
  scale yet. So I'm like, yeah, you, you do,
• 23:44
  you do the office management, you do project management, you
• 23:46
  do sales, you do all that. And we all report back.
• 23:48
  We have weekly meetings. Everything looks good.
• 23:49
  The numbers are going up, right? Like, you don't know, there
• 23:52
  wasn't CRMS back there. We didn't do stuff like we
• 23:54
  didn't have stuff like that. It's just basically, I'm
• 23:56
  listening to what your word, his word, her word, all these words
• 23:59
  and sounds good. Let's keep going.
• 24:01
  And that's all I knew. So I knew if I built another
• 24:05
  company, I had to build another company on purpose, the right
• 24:09
  way, and I had to have control. Not me having full control, but
• 24:14
  I had to have control and understanding and everything
• 24:17
  need to be tied together. And that's where I felt into the
• 24:21
  CRM world, into putting things together, into systems and
• 24:24
  processes and understanding. Like if you don't know your
• 24:27
  numbers, you don't know anything.
• 24:29
  And if you don't know your people, you definitely don't
• 24:31
  know anything. So culture was a big thing, you
• 24:34
  know, culture, core values, all those kind of stuff.
• 24:36
  So I built my next company on all of that route and I spent a
• 24:39
  year building the base of this company, the foundation of all
• 24:44
  of this until I actually did business because I wasn't just
• 24:47
  going to go into business. And that company went on to do
• 24:51
  30 million and. Same industry or different?
• 24:55
  Same industry but I had another problem.
• 24:57
  So was it So I had I had a heart attack for this August, August
• 25:02
  3rd. So like a couple weeks from now,
• 25:03
  we four years had a heart attack.
• 25:06
  So I had my project manager at the time killing it.
• 25:09
  I mean, amazing guy, doing great.
• 25:12
  My doctor's like you really need to take some time off and and
• 25:14
  like heal yourself. Like don't go into work.
• 25:17
  Don't go under the chaos, don't go under stress.
• 25:20
  So I say to the project manager, go, hey, listen, like you're
• 25:23
  doing phenomenal. Like you're not super busy, so
• 25:25
  you can take on a little bit more and I'll pay you a little
• 25:27
  bit more. Would you be willing to do the
• 25:28
  sales as well? Yeah, absolutely.
• 25:30
  I said I'll give you a Commission on all the sales on
• 25:33
  the back and I'll give you 2% of all the contracts, you know, on
• 25:36
  top of your project management fee, on top of everything after
• 25:39
  the job's done. And also I'll give you an extra
• 25:41
  2%. Cool.
• 25:42
  So for the next seven months, this dude's selling better than
• 25:44
  I am. How the hell is he selling
• 25:46
  better than me? Right?
• 25:46
  He's like contract of the contract of the contract.
• 25:49
  Yeah, that's so rare, right? And.
• 25:51
  You're not better than me bro you.
• 25:53
  Know what I? Mean, but I didn't think about
• 25:54
  it. I was just like, oh, keep going,
• 25:55
  keep going. Why?
• 25:56
  Money's coming in, money's coming in, Money's coming in.
• 25:59
  And about seven months into it, my bookkeeper calls me up.
• 26:02
  She's like, your numbers are flipping.
• 26:06
  You've got all this revenue coming in, but more revenue
• 26:09
  going out. Something's not right.
• 26:11
  So I went and sat down with them and I'm like, hey bro, like I
• 26:15
  sat down with the bookkeeper and here's what she said.
• 26:18
  He's like, what are you talking about?
• 26:20
  I'm like, she says our sales are going U, but our revenues
• 26:24
  dropping O our bottom line is literally negative.
• 26:30
  And he's like, there's no way. I'm like, I need to see these
• 26:34
  bid sheets 'cause I wasn't looking at the jobs.
• 26:36
  He was, he was bidding them, putting all the stuff together.
• 26:38
  And then he, he says, all right before we do that, you owe me
• 26:41
  $7000 in commissions. I'm like for seven months, 7000.
• 26:45
  I said if he completed that work, he goes, it's not on
• 26:47
  completion, it's on date of sign.
• 26:49
  I'm like, bro, you don't get paid if the job's negative.
• 26:52
  Like it doesn't work like that. I'm not going to take it from
• 26:53
  you, but you're not going to get paid a Commission if the job
• 26:56
  doesn't have the Commission in it.
• 26:58
  That's not what we said. And he just got very disgruntled
• 27:01
  with me. So this was probably like March,
• 27:05
  April. I went to Aruba with my family,
• 27:09
  and he knew I knew something. He showed all my cameras off in
• 27:14
  my office while I was gone, got rid of whatever documentation I
• 27:17
  would need to see to prove that the numbers are wrong, made
• 27:20
  photocopies of everything goes to the attorney general, told
• 27:25
  him I was selling work just to sell work just to bring money
• 27:28
  and not finishing the job when he was doing it.
• 27:31
  Wow. I didn't know.
• 27:33
  So now June, I'm just, I'm irate with this dude.
• 27:37
  I fire him. October I get served.
• 27:41
  But the attorney general with a $3,000,000 lawsuit for fraud.
• 27:45
  And I looked at it and it was all these customers that he
• 27:49
  brought in taking money, not doing work and he's not getting
• 27:52
  done. And he called all these
• 27:54
  customers and told him what I did, but which is what he did.
• 27:57
  This was another thing. So I was just like, Oh my God.
• 28:02
  So when I had my heart attack, let's drive back to that.
• 28:07
  When I had my heart attack, I was in the office, He was in the
• 28:10
  office and I went numb wrist to wrist.
• 28:13
  Whole body felt warm. I'm in the ambulance and when I
• 28:17
  get in the ambulance, my one son wasn't talking to me.
• 28:20
  Like after my divorce for about a year and a half, I text him,
• 28:23
  sorry for not being a dad. I should have been text my other
• 28:27
  kids like, hey, I'm sorry for not showing up the way I should
• 28:29
  have. Like I love you guys.
• 28:30
  Like this. Is it blacked out when I blacked
• 28:35
  out? I don't know.
• 28:36
  I feel like I had an intervention with God and I
• 28:38
  talked to him and I said I'm not ready to go and like I was not
• 28:42
  awake. I was not alert.
• 28:44
  But I do remember this conversation and I said, you're
• 28:48
  going to take me away and my son's not talking to me.
• 28:51
  This is what you're going to do to me.
• 28:53
  And he goes, It's not my doing. You can give me goosebumps.
• 28:58
  And he said, I've given you an assignment and every single time
• 29:04
  I check you, you go right back to who you are.
• 29:08
  He goes, I instill discipline in you.
• 29:10
  I've showed you how to build businesses, but you refuse to
• 29:14
  teach anybody else. Like, why am I teaching anybody
• 29:18
  else? He goes, you always talk about
• 29:21
  legacy, but you're not going to leave one if you go right now.
• 29:26
  So that was a wake up call. So that was a year and a year
• 29:31
  and a half into that lawsuit. So after I come out of the
• 29:35
  hospital, I tell, all right, God, yeah, I'm with you.
• 29:37
  I'm I'm on your assignment. I'm going to do this.
• 29:39
  I'm going to sell my company. And what do I do?
• 29:40
  I give it to somebody else to go sell more instead of listening
• 29:44
  to him and getting rid of it. And this is what happens.
• 29:47
  So when this when I get served, I literally, I remember I was in
• 29:50
  my journal. I was like, this is a game to
• 29:53
  you, isn't a God. And he goes, are you going to
• 29:56
  listen now? And that was it.
• 29:59
  I was like, I'm getting ready for all my companies,
• 30:01
  everything, and I'm going to teach people how to go from
• 30:03
  operator to CEO. And that's what I've done for
• 30:06
  the last four years. And the fulfilment of watching
• 30:11
  people change and not be like me, like how I used to be and
• 30:16
  challenging me on why they think what they're doing is right.
• 30:20
  I'm like, I was there. That's not right.
• 30:22
  And just seeing transformation, seeing families be saved,
• 30:25
  marriages be saved, dads be home with their kids and just stuff
• 30:28
  that I couldn't do because I was so entangled in my world.
• 30:34
  I don't make as much money as I used to.
• 30:36
  I have no stress and the satisfaction of seeing people
• 30:42
  change and do things and just honoring like someone else's
• 30:48
  legacy and helping them build it is much more rewarding than any
• 30:52
  money I've ever made. The success doesn't teach us
• 30:55
  what we need to learn to become who we need to become, right.
• 30:59
  It's the failures over and over and over again that really
• 31:03
  teaches us that we have to change who we are fundamentally,
• 31:09
  like almost on a cellular level in order to actually hold real
• 31:14
  success for long periods of time.
• 31:18
  And so I want to dive into, because I went through this in
• 31:21
  my own journey, the, you know, the art of becoming, the art of
• 31:24
  transformation. And a lot of my story is
• 31:27
  transformation like that, that resilience, that grit, that keep
• 31:30
  going. But there was a point where I
• 31:32
  realized continuing to force things wasn't going to get me to
• 31:37
  where I wanted to be, which was ultimately to feel happy and to
• 31:40
  feel peace and to feel fulfilment and to be truly
• 31:42
  wealthy, not just financially, but physically, spiritually,
• 31:46
  mentally, relationally in every single area.
• 31:48
  And success, wealth, financial success without wealth in these
• 31:53
  other areas is nothing at all. And So what was that journey
• 31:58
  like for you? Like who you had to become?
• 32:00
  How did you shift and transform? Because at the end of the day,
• 32:05
  you made the call on by the business, you made the call on
• 32:08
  who to hire and the interviews, you made the call on all of
• 32:11
  these decisions that ultimately didn't get you to where you
• 32:16
  truly wanted to be. And so when you decided like,
• 32:19
  were you, were you following God before or were you like, I got
• 32:24
  this all figured out and I'm doing this on my own?
• 32:26
  And then when you had your wake up call of that near death
• 32:28
  experience that you really shifted your priorities or what
• 32:31
  was that transformation like? For you, I was following God
• 32:33
  since 2007, but I wasn't listening.
• 32:35
  Listening. And there's many times he gives
• 32:39
  us messages and it's our job to be fully aware of what He's
• 32:44
  trying to do. But the problem is it's
• 32:46
  uncomfortable. And every time we get an
• 32:49
  assignment, it's uncomfortable. Human nature's comfort.
• 32:54
  Why don't you keep doing what I'm doing?
• 32:55
  Good at it. What do I want to change?
• 32:58
  And it's just like being a product of your environment.
• 33:00
  Why do you want to step into the unknown when you know, like if
• 33:04
  you just kind of push a little bit more over here that you're
• 33:07
  going to win, but you don't realize you're not winning
• 33:09
  because you talked about like the all the wealthy things in
• 33:12
  life. It's not until you make money a
• 33:17
  byproduct of your purpose and what you're doing, then anything
• 33:21
  changes in your life. Money has to be secondary.
• 33:24
  You have to be able to provide something to someone and other
• 33:27
  and and whoever of more value than a dollar because it's got
• 33:34
  to lift them, change them and position them for something.
• 33:38
  And then you get rewarded. But when you look at it at
• 33:41
  first, it's like how much money can I make?
• 33:42
  What can I buy, what can I have, what can I do?
• 33:45
  Because that's kind of the game that were played as a young kids
• 33:48
  who aren't financially educated. It's about the stuff.
• 33:51
  It's what rich people have. But we don't realize that the
• 33:54
  Uber rich don't live their life on stuff.
• 33:58
  You know, they dress like normal people, they just make better
• 34:01
  decisions. And we're never taught these
• 34:03
  decisions. So like our education, our
• 34:06
  conditioning all through our life, most people will never
• 34:10
  change. People will continue the habits
• 34:12
  I continued until they're aware and ready to surrender.
• 34:16
  So you've got to be willing to give up what's brought you this
• 34:19
  far and release it so you can go even further.
• 34:22
  Yeah, yeah, 'cause when you're forcing, I call it flow versus
• 34:27
  force. And when you're in that force
• 34:28
  mode, it's driven by fear and scarcity.
• 34:31
  Like especially coming from low income parents and I don't know
• 34:35
  what your life was fully like, but just based on your
• 34:38
  experience, I can assume that they probably didn't have the
• 34:41
  highest values or standards. They didn't believe in
• 34:43
  themselves, they didn't believe in their own dreams and they
• 34:47
  definitely Doctor Gabbar mate says this.
• 34:51
  He says the primary wound and all of us, I talk about this on
• 34:54
  my show all the time is simply not feeling seen, heard or
• 34:58
  protected by your parents when you're a child.
• 35:01
  And we take that wound and that wound is what opens up the door
• 35:06
  to all of the other traumas that come later in life like
• 35:10
  bankruptcies or lawsuits or being beaten or a more severe
• 35:15
  traumas, right. But the primary wound is the
• 35:17
  same because if you felt seeing heard and protected, it would be
• 35:21
  a different story. You probably wouldn't have had
• 35:22
  those those other traumas in your life.
• 35:24
  And So what we do is we say, we say F you, I can, I can do this.
• 35:29
  I'm made for more. I'm different.
• 35:31
  I'm not going to settle for what you're telling me.
• 35:33
  I'm going to be the opposite of you.
• 35:35
  I also I people call me the Mcflurry millionaire.
• 35:37
  My dad wouldn't buy me an ice cream and I loved food and and
• 35:43
  that was like that F you like I don't need you.
• 35:45
  I don't need anybody. I got this on my own.
• 35:47
  Force, force, force, fear and scarcity.
• 35:49
  I need to do this to survive. But then ultimately realized
• 35:53
  when I had this money that I would have been chasing that I
• 35:56
  still didn't have that peace or fulfillment inside.
• 35:58
  I still didn't have great relationships.
• 35:59
  I still looked in the mirror and saw the ugly kid that wasn't
• 36:03
  worthy of anything great in life.
• 36:05
  I still had the anxiety, I still had the nightmares, I still had
• 36:08
  the depression. I was still on medications.
• 36:10
  I was still numbing out with, you know, every single day,
• 36:14
  numbing out to avoid my own pain.
• 36:17
  And I had to go through this massive transformation of diving
• 36:20
  inside and actually facing God, who I had hated at the time,
• 36:25
  right? I was like, I don't need you.
• 36:26
  You've never been here for me. I'm just going.
• 36:29
  To. Yeah, right.
• 36:30
  And it's a it's that victim, that victimhood.
• 36:32
  Poor me, my parents suck. God does not doesn't care.
• 36:36
  And people keep screwing me over and people keep stealing, like,
• 36:39
  poor me, poor me, poor me, right?
• 36:41
  And so when you had this awakening, like this moment when
• 36:46
  your heart attack, how are you different coming out of it?
• 36:50
  Like I know you shifted your industry, but how did you change
• 36:53
  who you were as a man? Because when you're about to die
• 36:57
  and you feel like you're dying, the houses, the cars, the money,
• 37:00
  nothing matters. It's irrelevant.
• 37:03
  Like you're not taking it with you.
• 37:05
  You think about all the stuff that you don't have, which is
• 37:08
  love, which is peace, which is security of your heart.
• 37:13
  And like, you know, that you feel good about yourself.
• 37:16
  And I self sabotage my entire life for 40 years because I
• 37:21
  chased things. And once I got the thing, I was
• 37:24
  still empty. And it wasn't until that heart
• 37:27
  attack that I was actually woken up because it was like, yeah, I
• 37:29
  got into a motorcycle accident at a young age.
• 37:31
  Yeah. I got divorced.
• 37:32
  Yeah. My son fell out of a window, you
• 37:34
  know, when he was 18 months old. Like all these episodes would
• 37:37
  happen, but I wouldn't stop. And I just kept going and going
• 37:43
  and going. It's like you, you live on
• 37:44
  adrenaline and you live on this rush that you know it's for you.
• 37:48
  But then you look back and it's like nobody cares about you and
• 37:52
  what you're doing. They care if you're present,
• 37:54
  they care. And then all this stuff opens up
• 37:56
  when you're laying in the hospital and going like, well,
• 37:58
  why am I still here? What did I do wrong?
• 38:02
  But why are you keeping me here? And you start really thinking
• 38:04
  about how do you approach life differently so this doesn't
• 38:08
  happen again Because nobody wants to die.
• 38:11
  Like you don't want to die with your kid not talking to you.
• 38:14
  You, you don't want to die, you know, with people upset with
• 38:17
  you, you don't want to die with like not being able to give the
• 38:21
  greatest gifts that you've been trying to give.
• 38:23
  But if you keep running the way you're running in business,
• 38:26
  every entrepreneur, you know, business owner gets involved in
• 38:29
  business and they want to make more money.
• 38:30
  They want to be their own boss. They want to do this, they want
• 38:32
  to do that. That's why I call everyone an
• 38:33
  entrepreneur because you're not truly an entrepreneur until you
• 38:36
  leverage life and understand that money is a byproduct.
• 38:41
  That's when you become an entrepreneur, when you can have
• 38:42
  leverage in life, but you're an entrepreneur because you're
• 38:45
  chasing the thing. But until you realize what The
• 38:47
  thing is and it's going to take self destruction to rebuild
• 38:51
  yourself. That's what I do with my
• 38:52
  clients. I reverse engineer them and I
• 38:55
  had to point the finger at me. So it takes me about 90 days to
• 38:58
  work with my client and then they're finally bring their
• 39:00
  finger like this one, that one, that's all the problem.
• 39:02
  And then all of a sudden after 90 days, they're like, I'm the
• 39:05
  problem and it's an awakening. And once I realized I was the
• 39:09
  problem, accountability, who wants to be accountable?
• 39:12
  But once you take accountability, your entire life
• 39:15
  changes. Everything changes.
• 39:18
  Did you have any coaches or mentors or books along the way?
• 39:21
  Yeah, I've read like 960 books. I've had a coach since I'm 24.
• 39:28
  But we don't listen. We listen to what we want to
• 39:31
  listen to, you know? What do I need right now?
• 39:34
  Let me go do the thing. But we don't we we miss so much
• 39:36
  information. Even when you read a book, you
• 39:39
  hear the one liner or the one paragraph or the 1 chapter that
• 39:42
  really impacted you, but you don't put the whole book
• 39:44
  together because you get lost in that moment.
• 39:47
  Like I need this, I want this and this is what we do.
• 39:50
  Do you feel full fulfilment now? I'm so happy, I feel so good.
• 39:57
  Me and my kids all have great relationships.
• 39:59
  That's like the most important thing in my life.
• 40:01
  Like my son texted me yesterday. And he's like, I'm so proud of
• 40:05
  you, Dad. Like you've taught me
• 40:08
  resilience. He's 21 years old and has his
• 40:10
  own business. He's like, you've taught me
• 40:11
  resilience. You've taught me that no matter
• 40:13
  what life throws at us, as long as you keep standing, nobody can
• 40:16
  take you down. I'm like a 21 year old, you
• 40:19
  know? And like, just to know that my
• 40:22
  kids and my daughter, when she was like 10 years old in school,
• 40:25
  she had to write something. I still have him to draw on my
• 40:27
  desk. Who's your hero?
• 40:31
  My dad's my hero because no matter what happens, he never
• 40:33
  gives up. What 10 year old says that, you
• 40:36
  know? So I know that I've done the
• 40:37
  right thing by my kids, and now I show them that, you know,
• 40:43
  money's not important. I never spoiled my kids to a
• 40:45
  fact where I would buy them the best sneakers, buy them video
• 40:48
  games. My kids never owned a video game
• 40:49
  in their entire life. Any of them.
• 40:51
  I refuse. But my kids have had their own
• 40:54
  dirt bikes, their own quads, their own stuff, and we did
• 40:55
  stuff together. So the outside world would be
• 40:58
  like, oh, you have your own dirt bike, you're spoiled.
• 41:00
  But no, but that's our time. We go out together, we do
• 41:02
  things. You know, you buy your kid $1000
• 41:05
  video game system and three screens and you let him go sit
• 41:08
  in his room because you don't want your kid to bother you so
• 41:10
  you could do your own time. That's not me.
• 41:12
  So how the world looks at what I've done with my kids is like,
• 41:16
  I've given them so much, but I've given them value and I've
• 41:18
  given them things that they're going to do with their kids
• 41:20
  connection. Like I'm going home tonight, I'm
• 41:24
  taking a red eye home and then this entire weekend me and all
• 41:26
  my kids will be together at the shore like 21/20/16.
• 41:30
  Like who wants to hang out with their dad?
• 41:32
  My kids do. How does that make I can go man
• 41:35
  to man versus most men out there?
• 41:37
  One out of 10 will have what I have.
• 41:40
  That's rich. That's wealth.
• 41:41
  It is truly and I, you know, I have so many interviews.
• 41:44
  I know so many incredible successful people and it's
• 41:47
  always, almost everybody has the father wound, right?
• 41:52
  And the father wound is what drives so many successful people
• 41:58
  to not give up and to prove their father wrong.
• 42:02
  And they almost use this anger. But I was in William Lamb's
• 42:06
  session. He's a, he has a company called
• 42:08
  Upgrade. So it's about upgrading
• 42:09
  yourself, upgrading humanity and rewiring the mind map that we
• 42:14
  have and that belief system that we have.
• 42:16
  And it was interesting that he said because he really gets into
• 42:18
  the science behind it. And he said that we become, and
• 42:22
  you talk about this too, we become addicted to the self
• 42:26
  sabotage because we actually relate like Pavlo's dog, we
• 42:31
  relate our success and our accomplishments to the pain or
• 42:35
  the anger that drove it in the first place.
• 42:38
  And so we realize we have this anger inside of us and that
• 42:43
  anger or that lack or that fear drove us to do something that we
• 42:49
  got accomplished. And so then we are trained that
• 42:53
  oh, this anger, this pain, this force, this grind is going to
• 42:57
  lead to more of the things that I want.
• 43:00
  But then that ends up in that infinite cycle of, well, I still
• 43:03
  don't feel fulfilled. I still don't feel worthy.
• 43:05
  I still feel like the fat kid that isn't worthy and nobody
• 43:08
  believes in. And So what do we do?
• 43:10
  We just push the goal post forward.
• 43:12
  I just need more. And let's use that anger, that
• 43:14
  unsatisfaction, that insatiable hunger, and go for more and go
• 43:18
  for more and go for more. And then people don't actually
• 43:20
  realize that more never comes, ever.
• 43:23
  And it's those things in life, the true wealth in life, that is
• 43:28
  the hardest thing to figure out. But when you have that, that's
• 43:31
  where everything starts to shift.
• 43:32
  And that's where you start to think, OK, it's not the
• 43:34
  Lamborghini that is the I just did a video on this.
• 43:39
  That's the Lambos, not the flex. The flex is who you've become.
• 43:43
  The flex is who are you serving? Who are you helping?
• 43:46
  What are the ripple effects that you're doing to truly improve
• 43:50
  the lives of others. And I felt that same thing in my
• 43:53
  journey when I started to have gratitude and stop thinking why
• 43:58
  me? Why do I have this situation?
• 44:01
  Why can't I be different? Why can't I look different?
• 44:03
  Why can I feel different? Why can I all of the things
• 44:06
  right that victimhood into how do I serve, How do I help and
• 44:10
  how do I shift it from I just need to get money because
• 44:13
  money's obviously not going to fix it.
• 44:14
  I learned soon early enough more money wasn't going to make me
• 44:17
  feel different inside. But when I started saying, how
• 44:20
  can I give more in value than I receive in compensation and
• 44:23
  actually make it about the people and the impact that I'm
• 44:26
  having and, and also serving God, right?
• 44:29
  And that's when that fulfillment started to come.
• 44:31
  And when that fulfillment started to come and that peace
• 44:33
  started to come because I was operating from a place of
• 44:36
  gratitude and coming from a place of abundance and, and love
• 44:40
  and passion for life. And that that deep sense of
• 44:44
  appreciation, that's when I started to attract the right
• 44:48
  team members. That's when I started to attract
• 44:50
  the right partners, the right friends, the right mentors, the
• 44:52
  right leaders, and everything started to flow in my life
• 44:55
  versus having to force it and grind and continuing to restart
• 44:58
  and restart and restart and restart.
• 45:00
  So important you just said, you said through abundance, but your
• 45:04
  abundance was built. And that's what most people
• 45:06
  don't realize. Abundance can't be bought.
• 45:09
  It has to be built. It has to, you have to go
• 45:11
  through the pains of life, go through things to understand
• 45:14
  that abundance is the missing link.
• 45:16
  And like you talked about your biggest flex, like my biggest
• 45:19
  flex is going home to my kids. Like, it's not money.
• 45:22
  It's my adult kids want to hang out with me.
• 45:25
  Like I didn't, I was 20 years old.
• 45:26
  I want to hang on my parents, you know, but my kids want to
• 45:29
  hang out with me and they want to spend time with.
• 45:30
  That's a flex, you know, and I was talking to my friend.
• 45:33
  He's like, yeah, my biggest flex is like, I can let my daughter
• 45:35
  do what she wants to do and be an Olympian and spend a quarter,
• 45:38
  $1,000,000 a year. That's my flex.
• 45:40
  It's not the Lambo. But we're in a society where the
• 45:43
  big shiny objects and the things make you who people think you
• 45:48
  are, but it's not. That's an emptiness.
• 45:49
  When you get in that Lambo, you're still sad, you know?
• 45:52
  When you walk into that house, it's still empty.
• 45:55
  It's not about that. It's about everything outside of
• 45:57
  that. And people have such a hard
• 45:59
  time. But once they figure it out,
• 46:02
  once you figure it out, once Robert figured it out, once I
• 46:04
  figured it out, Bernard figured it out.
• 46:06
  All the people that we know, Pedro's figured it out.
• 46:08
  Once we all figured it out, it's like this is not what we
• 46:11
  thought, but we wake up so much easier, we sleep so much better,
• 46:17
  and life has just changed because our thought process of
• 46:20
  what we thought was totally off from what it should have been.
• 46:24
  And you talk a lot about standards, right?
• 46:27
  And that there's a quote that I love that says we do not raise
• 46:29
  to the level of our expectation, we fall to the level of our
• 46:32
  standards. And how you look, how you talk,
• 46:36
  the energy that you have met, the company that you have, the
• 46:39
  relationships that you have, all of that is a reflection of your
• 46:44
  standards. And this is where like when I do
• 46:48
  interviews and people were like, oh, you shouldn't be judgmental.
• 46:50
  And like how somebody's appearances, I'm like,
• 46:52
  absolutely, I will be forever. Because if you can't take care
• 46:56
  of your own flesh and be the best version of you physically
• 47:00
  and get your ass to the gym and have personal development and
• 47:04
  try to grow as a leader and try to grow as a father or a mother
• 47:07
  or a friend or a daughter or a CEO or a manager or, or a, or a
• 47:11
  janitor. Like if you're not trying to
• 47:13
  grow constantly and take care of yourself and improve yourself
• 47:16
  every single day, then how are you ever going to be able to
• 47:19
  take care of your people, your team, your clients, your
• 47:22
  children? Like it's impossible.
• 47:24
  I always talk about that if you don't trust yourself and people
• 47:27
  look at you and you're a fat shit, how are they going to
• 47:30
  trust you? You know, most of the successful
• 47:33
  people in the world, they look good, you know, because they
• 47:36
  understand the value of it. There are some guys that don't
• 47:38
  look good, very few and far between, but you know, they're
• 47:41
  not happy in their marriage, your wife's cheating on them,
• 47:43
  whatever's going on. Because for them, it's just
• 47:45
  they're all about making this money and being this person and
• 47:48
  being this thing. Which isn't success if you have
• 47:52
  money in the bank with nothing else, it's not success.
• 47:54
  But it shows that they're they're still just trying to
• 47:56
  feel the wound of I'm not enough, I'm not enough, I'm not
• 47:59
  enough. And this little dopamine hit.
• 48:02
  OK. And that just made me think of
• 48:04
  this. So back to William Lamb.
• 48:06
  He says that we get addicted to that trigger, right?
• 48:10
  This anger or whatever created this success, but then it
• 48:14
  ultimately ends up leading in self sabotage.
• 48:16
  But we become addicted to it. Like we become so familiar with
• 48:20
  the pattern of this happened, this was the outcome.
• 48:25
  And then I'm going to continue to recreate that outcome in my
• 48:28
  life. To continue to sell myself on my
• 48:30
  own dogma that this is the way life is.
• 48:33
  That everybody's going to screw me over.
• 48:35
  That I can't trust anybody that my team's not going to do a good
• 48:39
  job or they're going to steal from me, or I can't buy a
• 48:42
  business and trust the the person because I got burned on
• 48:44
  this business or whatever that that story might be that we've
• 48:47
  bought into. How did you shift out of that?
• 48:50
  Like to get rid of that addiction to self sabotage in
• 48:55
  your life and rewire your brain for something different?
• 48:59
  Well, I stopped looking for the end, like what can I accomplish?
• 49:04
  And I just kept looking at the growth like how can I just keep
• 49:07
  becoming bigger? So I sat down one day and I said
• 49:11
  if I were to evaluate my life right now, and I don't think
• 49:14
  I've ever even said this is like I'm evaluating my life and I'm
• 49:18
  building my life 1/4 mile at a time.
• 49:20
  Basically I'm on a drag strip and I'm racing against life.
• 49:24
  Quarter miles on as fast as I can go.
• 49:26
  But every time I pass that line and I get to the end, my
• 49:29
  parachutes don't open and I blow apart.
• 49:32
  Then I'm going to go wet walk back by myself because I got no
• 49:34
  car and I got to rebuild it and do it all over again.
• 49:37
  What if I just took life and life was just an uphill battle
• 49:42
  and it was just windy and I just said, hey, as long as I can get
• 49:45
  myself to the next loop, get myself to the next loop and just
• 49:47
  know that, hey, I might fall back a little bit, but just keep
• 49:50
  going and know that the destination is somewhere I just
• 49:53
  don't know where. And I don't set my time on that
• 49:56
  thing, that turn, that stop. And when I realized that as long
• 50:01
  as I keep growing, I'm going to keep climbing.
• 50:03
  So that's kind of like my book, like falling your way uphill,
• 50:06
  like you're going to fail, fall, but you can't surrender.
• 50:10
  Like you can't just give up. And if you look at life's
• 50:14
  failures, they're used for you to grow from.
• 50:19
  But a lot of times when people fail, they become victim of
• 50:22
  their failure. Something bad happens in their
• 50:25
  life. They're the victim.
• 50:27
  And when you're the victim, you can't be the victor.
• 50:28
  At the same time, you can't win. So how do I use all these things
• 50:33
  that have happened to me to get to the next thing, but now say,
• 50:36
  all right, it's over. I'm not going to do that no
• 50:37
  more, and I'm just going to keep instilling this in other people
• 50:41
  and helping other people not make my mistakes.
• 50:44
  So I think looking at life as just a journey, everyone's at a
• 50:49
  destination in mind. If I just do this, if I just hit
• 50:53
  this position, if I just make this much money, there's always
• 50:56
  something if, if it's just this. But what if, hey, as I'm on my
• 51:00
  journey and I hit this milestone, that'd be amazing.
• 51:03
  But throughout that process, look what happened to my family.
• 51:06
  Look at look at the things that we've done.
• 51:07
  Look at the memories that we've made.
• 51:09
  And you combined your entire life.
• 51:10
  How many people do you know that are entrepreneurs or whatever
• 51:13
  you want to call them or business owners?
• 51:15
  And if you say, why are you doing it and they have a family,
• 51:19
  what are they going to say for my family?
• 51:21
  Check them. Really.
• 51:22
  Look at their calendar. What is your that was supposed
• 51:25
  to put up yesterday? Yeah, look, look at your
• 51:27
  calendar, number one. But #2 what is your family?
• 51:29
  Get what you have left, your aggravation, your frustration,
• 51:33
  the late nights you're still on your phone when you're with
• 51:35
  them, and you're not giving your family what you truly tell
• 51:39
  yourself you are. So they're not important.
• 51:42
  It's about you, it's about your flex, it's about what you just
• 51:44
  hit, how much you just made, how big your company is, and it's
• 51:47
  about you. So the day you realize that
• 51:51
  nobody cares about you, only you do, and all the people around
• 51:56
  you care about how they could be a part of you and be with you
• 51:59
  and be recognized just like you're trying to be recognized,
• 52:03
  your life won't change. Yeah, I think so many people
• 52:07
  think that business is separate from personal life, but it's
• 52:11
  not. It's all, it's all one, right?
• 52:15
  And how you show up in your personal life is a reflection of
• 52:18
  how you show up in business and vice versa.
• 52:20
  And I think that so many people make that excuse of I'm like you
• 52:23
  just said, I'm doing this for my family.
• 52:25
  And it's the biggest, it's the biggest lie.
• 52:27
  Yeah, because it's it's all selfish.
• 52:30
  It's all self-centered because just like you said, all your
• 52:32
  family wants is you. They want your time, they want
• 52:35
  your attention, they want your energy, they want your presence.
• 52:38
  And of course there's a level of like you got to provide and they
• 52:41
  want some like fun experiences together, but ultimately those
• 52:43
  experiences just comes down to time together.
• 52:46
  And I think a lot of us and I, I get caught up in that too,
• 52:49
  right? Of I mean, I, I actually, I
• 52:51
  don't have a, a family, I don't have children and I'm not
• 52:54
  married and things like that. But I'm still in the selfishness
• 52:57
  point of like, I don't know if I am ready to make time for that.
• 53:00
  And I want to be fully present and give it my all because I
• 53:04
  don't want to half ass anything that that I do.
• 53:07
  I want to, I want to show up the same to my team as I would to my
• 53:12
  my children and not have this one personality over here to
• 53:15
  show up one way over here and pour certain attention over
• 53:17
  here. And then I don't show up the
• 53:18
  same over here because that's when you're out of alignment.
• 53:20
  You're living out of integrity with what you value or what you
• 53:23
  say you value. And then that's what's going to
• 53:25
  continue to attract chaos. I think you've been through so
• 53:27
  much though, and you understand life's journey that if you were
• 53:31
  to get in a relationship or something were to happen and a
• 53:34
  year from now you're going to get pregnant.
• 53:36
  You figure it out and you know how to put it together.
• 53:39
  You know, if it were to happen like 10 years ago for you, then
• 53:43
  you'd be all over the place. You'd be like a bomb.
• 53:45
  So I had my first kid, I was 23, you know, and I was went
• 53:49
  bankrupt a year later. Like, so all of my bad things
• 53:53
  happened as my kids were growing up, but I still have to stand
• 53:56
  there and be the man. I wasn't an alcoholic, I wasn't
• 53:58
  a drug addict. I didn't turn to nothing.
• 54:00
  I just turned to the next thing to support them.
• 54:02
  And I think if I didn't have kids at a young age, maybe I
• 54:05
  would have been a drunk. Maybe I would have just given
• 54:06
  up. Who knows, but I had a reason to
• 54:08
  fight for it, But most people don't do what I did.
• 54:11
  Most people just give up. And then you have a deadbeat dad
• 54:14
  who just gave up on his dreams, gave up on his life.
• 54:17
  So you, there's a funny way of like figuring life out when you
• 54:20
  have to. And I think that you're at a
• 54:22
  point right now where, I mean, you can get other things
• 54:26
  automated in your life, in your business, and you can step away,
• 54:29
  but you just don't have to, you know?
• 54:31
  And you talk about being selfish.
• 54:32
  I think being selfish is something that I learned.
• 54:35
  It's one of the best things for us if we don't put ourselves 1st
• 54:39
  and become the best version of us, show up the best way, take
• 54:43
  care of us. How are we expecting to do
• 54:46
  anything for anybody else? That's the trust factor.
• 54:49
  You know, you're, you're not doing for you.
• 54:50
  You're not working out, you're not eating well, you're not
• 54:53
  sleeping. But you want me to believe in
• 54:55
  what you're doing doesn't work. Yeah.
• 54:58
  It's like, did you ever read Atlas Shrugged?
• 55:01
  I love that book. But she says I swear by my life
• 55:04
  and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of
• 55:07
  another man, nor ask another man to live for me.
• 55:09
  And I read that book. I think I was a freshman in high
• 55:12
  school, and that stuck with me and I had it printed out.
• 55:17
  Yep, exactly. And I realized that in being
• 55:22
  selfish and not in the way of you don't care about others at
• 55:26
  all, but putting yourself first is required as a, as a good
• 55:31
  leader and as your best. Because if you, if you're
• 55:33
  putting yourself last and you're running on fumes.
• 55:36
  I was talking to a really amazing person in my, in my
• 55:39
  life. And we were talking about this.
• 55:41
  She's like, I don't have time to go to the gym.
• 55:43
  I don't have time to invest in my, my growth.
• 55:46
  I have to be there for my family.
• 55:48
  I have to be there for my place and all this stuff.
• 55:49
  And she's running on fumes, right?
• 55:52
  And so when you put yourself last, you can't share your
• 55:56
  greatest gift with the world. So you're actually robbing
• 55:59
  everybody around you, your family, your team, your clients,
• 56:03
  everybody from your highest and best self.
• 56:07
  And so that was a shift for me too, of instead of people
• 56:10
  pleasing and trying to just please everybody around me, what
• 56:14
  do I want? Who am I, what do I stand for?
• 56:17
  What do I stand against? Instead of just trying to be
• 56:20
  liked and accepted and get this approval from the world, when
• 56:24
  half, if you're really authentic and really true to who you are,
• 56:27
  half the world's going to not agree with how you operate.
• 56:31
  And that's, that's a sign that you actually are standing for
• 56:35
  what you believe in. And when you stand for what you
• 56:36
  believe in, if you stand for everything, you stand for
• 56:39
  nothing. And you won't be able to attract
• 56:41
  and magnetize the people that actually stand for the same
• 56:44
  thing and share the same values. And that was something that my
• 56:47
  one of my mentors taught me that really, really helped change my
• 56:52
  life was do you even know what you stand for?
• 56:57
  And are you actually living in integrity with those things?
• 57:01
  And so I had to really get clear on what are my values and being
• 57:07
  absolutely brutal when I interview somebody when I like,
• 57:14
  even if a client, right, even if it's a money opportunity, don't
• 57:17
  care about the money opportunity.
• 57:19
  What are your values? And are our values shared and
• 57:22
  our values aligned? And if they're not, it's just
• 57:24
  going to bring chaos into my life.
• 57:26
  Yeah, it'll control the transaction.
• 57:28
  So how what are what are some of like the values and standards
• 57:32
  that have done well for you in your life that you live by now?
• 57:36
  Well, I think first is trust and, you know, being loyal to
• 57:39
  yourself and being able to show up every day for me and being
• 57:43
  who I need to be and waking up in the morning and getting ready
• 57:48
  for the world, not the world preparing me is the biggest
• 57:50
  thing. So I think you talked before
• 57:53
  about your calendar. It's about really collapsing
• 57:57
  time to make sure that everything can get done in the
• 58:01
  time that it needs to get done. So you talked about this woman
• 58:04
  that says she has no time. We all have the same amount of
• 58:07
  time, right? Says it all the time.
• 58:09
  But the problem is is she runs on chaos and she's trying to do
• 58:14
  and serve everybody else. She's not loyal to herself and
• 58:18
  what she teaching her kids. Our kids are going to run the
• 58:22
  same way. Why didn't I understand how to
• 58:24
  be in a relationship because my parents never taught me because
• 58:26
  they didn't have the values. So what are my values with my
• 58:29
  kids now? You know, so it's all about look
• 58:32
  at what you're doing and I understood big time is being a
• 58:36
  father is that my kids are watching me.
• 58:39
  It doesn't matter what I tell them.
• 58:42
  It's what I do, and we have the opportunity as business owners,
• 58:48
  as coaches or whatever, to be the example.
• 58:53
  But there's so many people out there, especially in the
• 58:55
  coaching space who are full of shit.
• 58:57
  And you know, they did. Their discernment is everything
• 59:01
  in their life is way off. But they just want people to
• 59:03
  believe what they say and people do.
• 59:06
  And unfortunately, people get hurt.
• 59:08
  So it's not about how you're living online, it's about how
• 59:11
  you're really living and how people know you.
• 59:14
  So if you talk to my coaching clients like they're going to
• 59:17
  appreciate me. I appreciate them.
• 59:19
  We do the same thing. So it's about being loyal to
• 59:21
  yourself and teaching others to be loyal to themselves, number
• 59:23
  one. The second thing is do what you
• 59:26
  say right away. Like if I say hey, I'm going to
• 59:30
  connect you with somebody, I'm going to literally do it right
• 59:32
  now. As soon as we're done filming,
• 59:33
  I'm going to just in a group chat.
• 59:35
  Boom, done. It's done.
• 59:37
  Why? Because how many times does
• 59:38
  someone say, yeah, and I'm going to connect you with someone and
• 59:40
  you're like, hey, you don't want to text them back and be like,
• 59:43
  hey, can you do that? Like you're not a man or woman
• 59:46
  of your word. But for me, I'm like, I'm going
• 59:48
  to do it right now. So there's so many things in
• 59:50
  life that we avoid, but if we simply just do the things that
• 59:54
  we said we're going to do and just do them now, they're gone.
• 59:56
  They're out of the way. So living by your word, being
• 59:58
  loyal and, you know, just really respecting people for where they
• 1:00:04
  are. I think, you know, we look at
• 1:00:06
  people and, you know, people have looked at us.
• 1:00:09
  People who don't respect you, they don't respect me because
• 1:00:11
  they don't understand, you know? Oh, lucky.
• 1:00:14
  You're lucky. You know, I'm lucky.
• 1:00:16
  Yeah, I'm real lucky, you know? So it it, you don't have to make
• 1:00:20
  it. Your values don't have to be so
• 1:00:21
  big, but they have to be narrowed down to a funnel where
• 1:00:24
  they all kind of bring yourself back to you.
• 1:00:26
  Who are you? How are you showing up?
• 1:00:29
  And if you're respecting yourself, you're loyal to
• 1:00:31
  yourself, you're doing the right thing, so you're showing up the
• 1:00:33
  way the world needs to see you. Everything around you will kind
• 1:00:38
  of filter that way. If you got shitty people, shitty
• 1:00:41
  people hang out with shitty people, you know, and then you
• 1:00:43
  make shitty decisions. But good people hang out with a
• 1:00:47
  few people because there's not many good people around.
• 1:00:49
  Right. You're the average of the five
• 1:00:51
  people you spend the most time with.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah. So shifting gears into
• 1:00:55
  operations and you're philosophy of operator to CEO, what are
• 1:01:02
  some of the core principles that you teach in running and scaling
• 1:01:06
  an effective company and how to shift from operator, right?
• 1:01:13
  Like I walked in here, I'm like redlining everyday like I am in
• 1:01:16
  full operator mode right now, right.
• 1:01:19
  And so with the my newest company, HB Capital, we're two
• 1:01:23
  years in business, built a year building the foundations, one
• 1:01:26
  year in in operations and scaling, right.
• 1:01:31
  It's going to be a billion dollar organization.
• 1:01:33
  So it's like I got big dreams for it started at Bootstrap and
• 1:01:36
  that's how I've always rolled but always want to hear as a
• 1:01:39
  founder CEO, but right now a lot of hats and and running on fumes
• 1:01:45
  every day. How would you coach me on here
• 1:01:49
  is exactly what you need to do and next steps as to get out of
• 1:01:54
  operator mode running on red every day to actually CEO
• 1:01:58
  strategizing on the company and 30,000 foot view making moves as
• 1:02:04
  as that that leader and CEO. First time I've asked you, did
• 1:02:07
  you ever try to run a car on empty?
• 1:02:08
  Yeah, doesn't go well. Doesn't work.
• 1:02:10
  And then you just stop and get enough fuel to get to the next
• 1:02:13
  gas station. So the thing as ACEO of a
• 1:02:17
  company and your idea of being a billion dollar company is all
• 1:02:21
  you need. ACEO needs an idea.
• 1:02:24
  Now after you have the idea, you've got to figure out really,
• 1:02:28
  really quick what you want to do and what you want others to do.
• 1:02:33
  And I think the biggest problem in business is even though, you
• 1:02:37
  know right now you can hire 2345 people to do some of the things
• 1:02:40
  that you're doing, internally, we just feel like people aren't
• 1:02:43
  going to do it as good as us. Reality is as we suck.
• 1:02:47
  Because if you think about however many things you're
• 1:02:49
  doing, if you're so let's say you're doing 5 things, which one
• 1:02:53
  of those five things are you the best out out of the five?
• 1:02:56
  You're going to say maybe #3 all right, imagine you focused 100%
• 1:03:00
  of your time on #3 and you've got everybody else in 1/2, four
• 1:03:05
  or five. How would your business operate
• 1:03:08
  right now? You're like, oh, so much better.
• 1:03:10
  Because we feel that we're only good and nobody can be better
• 1:03:14
  than us. But that's not true.
• 1:03:16
  They're skilled people at every position available, but we just
• 1:03:20
  don't want to let go of control. And it's about creating the
• 1:03:24
  systems and processes before the people where most businesses
• 1:03:28
  think they got to get the people first.
• 1:03:29
  You know, you create the systems, the processes of how
• 1:03:33
  you want things to go, then you insert the people into those
• 1:03:38
  systems and processes, and then you are the idea and you're the
• 1:03:41
  catalyst of what's going to happen next.
• 1:03:44
  And how do you build the proper systems and processes?
• 1:03:47
  It goes based on the end goal, like what are you trying to do?
• 1:03:50
  So you want to be a billion dollar company?
• 1:03:52
  OK, well, like how do we get to 100 million?
• 1:03:54
  How do we get right? So let's go to the first step.
• 1:03:58
  Let's not look at a billion because the problem is, is when
• 1:04:01
  you're looking at the end, it seems almost impossible to get
• 1:04:05
  this first step right. So 2X is harder than 10X, right?
• 1:04:09
  A great book. So at the end of the day, you
• 1:04:12
  just got to figure out how to do it.
• 1:04:14
  So that was like me when I was, you know, 24 years old, I
• 1:04:17
  figured out how to build a business.
• 1:04:18
  It was easy because I didn't know everything.
• 1:04:21
  I just did the thing right now you're trying to be really good
• 1:04:25
  and get everything figured out. Just figure it out as you go,
• 1:04:28
  but get people involved on your team to work with you.
• 1:04:32
  So for example, football team, whatever, whoever your favorite
• 1:04:36
  football team is, the coach is watching film for the next
• 1:04:38
  week's game, brings the whole team together, has the team
• 1:04:42
  watch film and watch who's gotta take care of who, who's gonna
• 1:04:45
  guard who, who's not, You know, who's doing what.
• 1:04:48
  When the coach is on the sideline, he's reading the
• 1:04:50
  paper, he's reading the blueprint, the plan.
• 1:04:52
  It's your job is to read the plan.
• 1:04:54
  It's the billion dollar plan. And your job is to get the
• 1:04:56
  quarterback, to get the running back, to get all these guys out
• 1:05:00
  in the field doing the thing and trusting that they're going to
• 1:05:05
  go to the end zone. What does the coach do
• 1:05:08
  throughout the whole game? He makes correction.
• 1:05:11
  He's got someone up top over watching them.
• 1:05:13
  So you got your CECEOCFO, you got all these people who are
• 1:05:16
  watching with you, and you're building this whole thing with
• 1:05:21
  your idea, but other people's talent coming together.
• 1:05:26
  You're not supposed to be the most talented person.
• 1:05:28
  You're just supposed to have the idea and you're supposed to hire
• 1:05:31
  the talent. And most people don't want to do
• 1:05:33
  that. They want to be the one.
• 1:05:36
  I built this business. I'd rather say, listen, I had an
• 1:05:39
  idea and these people built the business.
• 1:05:41
  This is my team. Look what we did together.
• 1:05:44
  I would rather someone execute at a way higher level than me at
• 1:05:49
  whatever that one thing is that I don't want to do.
• 1:05:51
  Like I got a guy who builds my funnels.
• 1:05:53
  You know, I don't even want to look at a funnel.
• 1:05:54
  I don't even know what a funnel is.
• 1:05:56
  And he's like, he's showing me the I'm like, bro, I don't care.
• 1:05:59
  And I got people who make calls, I got people who do editing, I
• 1:06:02
  got people who do social media. It's low task.
• 1:06:05
  I don't want to do it. And the problem is, is we don't.
• 1:06:08
  Once we don't want to remove these things because we want to
• 1:06:11
  do them, we devalue ourselves and we slow our mission down.
• 1:06:15
  Yep, who not how delegate and elevate.
• 1:06:19
  Yeah, it's an important. I know a lot of a lot of people
• 1:06:23
  I talk to really struggle with that delegation.
• 1:06:25
  They want to be special and unique in the one.
• 1:06:27
  And this can't happen without me.
• 1:06:29
  And it holds them back because you, we all have the same amount
• 1:06:32
  of time in the day. Elon Musk has the same amount of
• 1:06:34
  time in the day. I'm actually just started
• 1:06:35
  reading his book this morning. Not his book.
• 1:06:37
  It's a book called out the the algorithm that his last
• 1:06:41
  president wrote. And he's talking about how he
• 1:06:45
  operated and how he came in before he even started working
• 1:06:47
  at the company. And Elon was like, Hey, you
• 1:06:50
  know, you're so good at systems you've built.
• 1:06:51
  So multiple companies go look at our operations and, and let me
• 1:06:56
  know what your feedback is type thing.
• 1:06:57
  And he went in there and he made a decision without Elon's
• 1:07:00
  permission and was like, oh gosh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:07:02
  I just put in my my owner hat, right?
• 1:07:04
  But the decision ended up drastically improving sales like
• 1:07:07
  immediately on the spot. And Elon's like, you're a
• 1:07:10
  perfect fit for this team, right?
• 1:07:12
  And having that owner mentality and that's what I try to build
• 1:07:14
  is that entrepreneur mentality. Like I don't want a team of
• 1:07:17
  order takers. I want a team of creators, not
• 1:07:20
  just consumers. So crew they to build that
• 1:07:22
  company, but when you're when you because there's two
• 1:07:26
  different routes, you'd go raise capital, sell, sell your equity
• 1:07:29
  right off the top, raise capital and you have those resources to
• 1:07:31
  hire that top tier talent right out of the gates or you
• 1:07:34
  bootstrap. And I'm a bootstrap because
• 1:07:37
  freedom is always core value of mine.
• 1:07:39
  I'm like, I don't report to anybody.
• 1:07:41
  And so maybe that's my own limiting belief, but I love my
• 1:07:45
  life and I have a great time with with not reporting to
• 1:07:47
  people. But as a bootstrap founder, the
• 1:07:50
  biggest challenge that I face right now isn't that I don't
• 1:07:53
  want to delegate. I want to delegate everything.
• 1:07:55
  I understand that that's what is required to build a billion
• 1:07:59
  dollar company is you do your one thing and you hire the best
• 1:08:04
  people to do their one thing, but you have limited resources
• 1:08:08
  in the beginning. So so who, how do you make the
• 1:08:12
  strategic decision on who that right purse is?
• 1:08:14
  Is it hiring from the bottom up? Is it hiring?
• 1:08:17
  From the top down, lowest task first, right?
• 1:08:19
  So your first thing is going to be your assistant because you
• 1:08:23
  don't want to send out emails, you don't want to make a point.
• 1:08:24
  That's your first thing. Then your next thing is going to
• 1:08:26
  be your media team. Then your next thing is going to
• 1:08:29
  be your editor, and it's going to just keep going like this.
• 1:08:31
  So lowest wage job, if you're doing a low wage job, you're
• 1:08:35
  considered someone who's not going to grow, right?
• 1:08:38
  So you will, you don't bring in the top guy, you don't bring in
• 1:08:42
  a partner, you don't bring in, you know, a manager, you don't
• 1:08:44
  bring in none of that stuff until you've got all these other
• 1:08:47
  things starting to get filled 1st.
• 1:08:49
  And then you're, there's gonna be a point where you're 2345
• 1:08:52
  people in and you've got to bring someone in now to deal
• 1:08:54
  with them 'cause that's a way. Now you push that away.
• 1:08:57
  Then you go to the next couple, bring somebody in to deal with
• 1:08:59
  them and you work your way out. It depends how big your company
• 1:09:02
  is. So I was just talking to one of
• 1:09:03
  my clients and I'm right here and he's like, he's got a new
• 1:09:06
  team. He's got a huge landscaping
• 1:09:07
  company and he started a whole nother lawn division and he's
• 1:09:12
  got this big commercial properties that he's doing and
• 1:09:15
  he got a whole brand new crew. And the one brand new foreman
• 1:09:19
  his first week on like this one property manager was giving him
• 1:09:22
  a hard time and he's like, hey, I want to ask you how I should
• 1:09:24
  have dealt with this. He goes new property manager.
• 1:09:26
  Some guy came up and said something in my foreman.
• 1:09:28
  My foreman goes, hey, I'm the new foreman here.
• 1:09:30
  You know, I'm a new guy. The crew was the new crew coming
• 1:09:32
  in here. What are your issues?
• 1:09:34
  Let's walk through. He goes, how do you feel like he
• 1:09:37
  addressed that? I go, bro, how do you feel like
• 1:09:39
  he addressed that? He didn't say call him or the
• 1:09:40
  owner. He took ownership.
• 1:09:43
  The guy is in the company for four days.
• 1:09:46
  He took ownership. I go, bro, that's culture.
• 1:09:49
  That's what you want. Those are the standards that you
• 1:09:51
  set. You should be so proud.
• 1:09:52
  I literally would just tell that dude, like, bro, you're what
• 1:09:56
  we're looking for. Let's go build a culture around
• 1:09:59
  what you just did because that's value.
• 1:10:02
  And most people would be like, oh, why didn't you call me
• 1:10:04
  first? You should have had me deal with
• 1:10:05
  it. That's how the regular business
• 1:10:07
  owner wants to feel because they want to take care of this
• 1:10:09
  conversation. They want to have control of the
• 1:10:11
  conversation. I'd much rather not deal with
• 1:10:13
  it. I want it to come to me after
• 1:10:15
  everything has been exhausted. Then bring it to me like my, my,
• 1:10:20
  my assistant, like will literally anything I got to do.
• 1:10:24
  She does everything and until it's almost like urgent to a
• 1:10:29
  fact where it's not getting done or someone's not responding, I
• 1:10:32
  don't even hear about it. I just look at my calendar.
• 1:10:35
  That's what I do. That's what I got to do.
• 1:10:36
  This is where I got to go and that's it.
• 1:10:39
  And it's such a good life. Like, Hey, what are you doing
• 1:10:41
  today? I don't know.
• 1:10:41
  Let me look at my calendar and and we don't even have to
• 1:10:44
  communicate because she knows the times I want to operate,
• 1:10:46
  what I need to do, where I need to go, book the book, the
• 1:10:49
  flight, do this, do that. And it's like you just wake up
• 1:10:52
  in the morning and you look and you know, but most people will
• 1:10:55
  never get there because they want to be in control of it.
• 1:10:57
  And hey, I don't work Thursday afternoon until Monday morning.
• 1:11:01
  Like I don't do it. So she knows not to put anything
• 1:11:03
  on. And if people call me or text
• 1:11:05
  me, I'm not answering because that's not that's, that's my
• 1:11:08
  time. How do you manage your calendar
• 1:11:10
  and how? How much do you work these days?
• 1:11:12
  I work probably about 5 hours a day, Monday through Thursday.
• 1:11:16
  Wow. That's rough.
• 1:11:20
  It's intense schedule there. Yes.
• 1:11:21
  I wake up probably like 5:30 for about an hour.
• 1:11:24
  I just kind of sit there and chill, like trying to bring
• 1:11:27
  myself to the world. I don't touch my phone for two
• 1:11:28
  hours in the morning. I have coffee, have water,
• 1:11:32
  chill, read a little bit, journal a little bit, and then I
• 1:11:35
  jump on cardio for about 45 minutes, jumping to sauna, so
• 1:11:39
  for another 15 minutes. So first two hours I'm hit, go
• 1:11:44
  take a shower real quick, jump in the cold, plunge, then work
• 1:11:46
  out another hour. First 3 hours of the day I'm not
• 1:11:49
  doing anything. Now it's nine o'clock 9:30 I'm
• 1:11:52
  cooking breakfast, doing what I way to do.
• 1:11:53
  Now it's coaching call start at 10:30, they're done by like 230.
• 1:11:58
  And then by that time, depending where I'm at, if I'm in Florida,
• 1:12:01
  you know, whatever, like at the pool, if I'm in Jersey, I have a
• 1:12:05
  farm, my kid has a farm. So you know, taking care of the
• 1:12:08
  cows, you know, having some fun out there.
• 1:12:10
  But I just really collapsed my time and I, my calls are 1234.
• 1:12:16
  You know, people call me like they know the restriction and
• 1:12:19
  I'm a voice texter like we were texting earlier anyway.
• 1:12:21
  So I'm a voice texter. Like I'm not texting you, I'm
• 1:12:23
  voice texting you. And like, I don't care if I'm
• 1:12:25
  working out. I don't care if I'm running.
• 1:12:26
  I don't care what I'm doing. Like you're getting a voice
• 1:12:28
  text. And that's how I tell my clients
• 1:12:29
  to hit me up. Like, hey, voice text me so I
• 1:12:31
  can hear it wherever I am. I'm voice texting you back.
• 1:12:34
  That's how we operate because you have to learn how to be on
• 1:12:37
  the go, but also respect your time.
• 1:12:40
  A voice text takes 30 seconds, but if you were to type that
• 1:12:43
  out, it would take 3 minutes. Now multiply that.
• 1:12:45
  I do the same thing, yeah, unless it's like a just a quick
• 1:12:48
  thing, but yeah, being efficient, ruthlessly efficient
• 1:12:52
  with your time. What about, you know, with
• 1:12:56
  delegate and elevate and through my own journey of building and
• 1:13:00
  leading teams, how do you instill systems to effectively
• 1:13:07
  manage in your coaching, right? What are the systems to
• 1:13:12
  effectively manage A-Team? You decide, OK, I got to hire
• 1:13:16
  this person out, whether it's the CMO or general manager
• 1:13:19
  operation, whatever that role is, that's the next most
• 1:13:21
  expensive thing that you got to get off your plate and and is
• 1:13:24
  required to move the business forward.
• 1:13:26
  How do you manage your team? So, for example, if you have 30,
• 1:13:29
  a team of 30 people or 100 people or five people, how are
• 1:13:33
  you effectively managing them to make sure that they are actually
• 1:13:37
  driving the needle forward and not like doing what your manager
• 1:13:40
  was doing and selling vids and not actually doing the work?
• 1:13:42
  Like to actually keep your finger on the pulse without
• 1:13:44
  helicopter mom or helicopter dad over everybody?
• 1:13:48
  First thing you need to do is so I sit down with every owner.
• 1:13:52
  First time we get together, we're sit down for four hours,
• 1:13:54
  half day and we whiteboard your entire business.
• 1:13:58
  Where are you in business? Where you want to go?
• 1:14:00
  Where? Why you currently stuck?
• 1:14:03
  And the reason why they're currently stuck is not the
• 1:14:04
  reason why they're currently stuck is why they think they're
• 1:14:06
  stuck. Then what are you doing every
• 1:14:10
  day? Walk me through your day, Monday
• 1:14:11
  through Friday. What are you doing?
• 1:14:13
  Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this?
• 1:14:15
  Why are you doing this? Because.
• 1:14:16
  Because then we just say, OK, like we just draw lanes and we
• 1:14:20
  say, all right, let's let's say the guy's got or the girl's got
• 1:14:24
  five people on their team put all five of their names.
• 1:14:28
  And I say, OK, what's X good at? What's Y good at?
• 1:14:33
  Why did you hire this one? And I individualize who they are
• 1:14:37
  and I take their skill and then they'll be like, Oh well, this
• 1:14:40
  one does a little bit of that. People cross pollinate in
• 1:14:43
  businesses. You can't do that.
• 1:14:45
  I said, imagine this, you've got a 5 lane highway, you and your
• 1:14:49
  entire team's on A5 lane highway.
• 1:14:51
  You're driving 100 miles an hour and I tell every single one of
• 1:14:53
  you on an alert through a microphone on your helmet,
• 1:14:56
  switch lanes and you all start switching lanes.
• 1:14:58
  What's going to happen? You're going to crash.
• 1:15:00
  But if all of you were in there and I go, hey guys, next mile
• 1:15:03
  marker. Hey guys, next mile marker.
• 1:15:04
  Hey guys, and you're just focused on driving and none of
• 1:15:07
  you are switching lanes because you're not getting involved in
• 1:15:10
  the other people's business, how much better would your business
• 1:15:12
  do? Oh, be amazing.
• 1:15:14
  Why? Because this one does what you
• 1:15:16
  want this way and that one does it this way.
• 1:15:19
  Who's better at it? Give them a task.
• 1:15:21
  Pull it from the other person and you need to individualize
• 1:15:24
  who is doing what number one. And then you need to talk to
• 1:15:27
  them individually. Have your meetings with them,
• 1:15:29
  talk to them. How can you help them grow?
• 1:15:31
  What's next? Who do they need?
• 1:15:32
  What do they need? Where are they going?
• 1:15:34
  Are they flowing with the values of what you're trying to do?
• 1:15:37
  Are they team players? You know, are they telling you
• 1:15:42
  how to build or are they telling you why it's not building?
• 1:15:45
  You know, like how how are these people's personalities?
• 1:15:47
  And a lot of times in the first, I would say four months, 50% of
• 1:15:52
  the team's getting fired to get new people because people just
• 1:15:55
  hire people to hire people. They're desperate.
• 1:15:59
  I needed somebody to fill the role.
• 1:16:00
  So I just put this person there when they got people bumping
• 1:16:03
  heads because they're not coming into culture.
• 1:16:04
  So when you're putting an ad out, whether it's an Indeed or
• 1:16:07
  whatever, depending on whatever your company is like, your
• 1:16:09
  values need to be in here. Here's what our company stands
• 1:16:11
  for, here's what we're doing. Could you be a part of it?
• 1:16:13
  Do you see yourself being a part of this?
• 1:16:15
  You have two or three interviews before you hire.
• 1:16:17
  You don't hire at a desperate because you're just going to fix
• 1:16:19
  another fire and try to put it out when you don't even know
• 1:16:22
  where the flame's burning. So it's really positioning
• 1:16:26
  people in the right spots and taking yourself out, but being
• 1:16:30
  able to have conversations with each one of them and know that
• 1:16:32
  they're best for that role. Too many people hire people
• 1:16:37
  because, oh, it's my friend, I like them, they need a job.
• 1:16:40
  Oh, you know, I feel bad for this person.
• 1:16:41
  They're not really doing what they're doing, but I feel bad as
• 1:16:43
  a single mom and, you know, she's got to take care of her
• 1:16:45
  kids. Well, she's burning your company
• 1:16:48
  to the ground and feeding her kids.
• 1:16:50
  What's more important to you right now?
• 1:16:52
  Have a conversation with her, tell her where you're at.
• 1:16:54
  Give her a couple weeks. She doesn't change.
• 1:16:56
  She's got to go. And people have a hard time
• 1:16:58
  letting people go. Have a hard time getting rid of
• 1:17:01
  people because they have emotion.
• 1:17:02
  Your emotion can't be tied to your business.
• 1:17:05
  You can respect people and love people, but at the same time, if
• 1:17:09
  they're not respecting and loving your work and what you're
• 1:17:11
  trying to do, they can't be a part of your team, right?
• 1:17:15
  The goal of the business is to serve the client and to be
• 1:17:18
  profitable so it could stay a business.
• 1:17:20
  A winning team doesn't pull people.
• 1:17:22
  A winning team pays big money to have the right people in the
• 1:17:26
  position. Like look at the New York
• 1:17:27
  Yankees, right? Like, look at them.
• 1:17:30
  They pay for talent. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:34
  And that's why I always, I have a lot of coaches and, and do a
• 1:17:37
  lot of interviews also and read a lot of books.
• 1:17:39
  And it's interesting. And I find myself sometimes in a
• 1:17:43
  little bit of analysis paralysis.
• 1:17:44
  I'm pretty good at like the signal versus noise, right?
• 1:17:46
  What's saying I take, take the pieces that resonate with me and
• 1:17:49
  just leave the ones that don't. And everybody has a different
• 1:17:52
  methodology. And that's the thing.
• 1:17:53
  There's a thousand ways to skin a cat, right?
• 1:17:55
  And it's the worst thing is to just not take action because
• 1:17:58
  you're overwhelmed with the amount of options and, and
• 1:18:01
  opportunities. And I've recognized that I'm in
• 1:18:03
  that, you know, in this phase right now, like I need, I need
• 1:18:06
  to hire more of my coaches, say I need to hire ACOOA corporate
• 1:18:13
  COO over all my enterprises because I don't just have one
• 1:18:15
  company. They're all vertically
• 1:18:17
  integrated. But there's a lot going on with
• 1:18:19
  the podcast of the speaking and the the brand and then the real
• 1:18:22
  estate brokerage and then the real estate agency and then the
• 1:18:24
  the commercial lending company, all the things right?
• 1:18:28
  And so, but I'm like, I know to get the COO that I want, it's
• 1:18:32
  going to be a very expensive guy.
• 1:18:35
  It's multi 100 thousands plus bonuses to get who I who I want
• 1:18:40
  to need. So I've been hiring more kind of
• 1:18:42
  like you said, from the bottom up, like this is the next
• 1:18:44
  cheapest thing to hire that we need to move the business
• 1:18:46
  forward. And I'm building that team, but
• 1:18:49
  I also have never built a billion dollar equity firm
• 1:18:53
  before. And so it's like someone has,
• 1:18:57
  right? There's somebody that already
• 1:18:58
  has the playbook out there, an ex CBRE executive, for example,
• 1:19:03
  or one of my competitors that has a large amount of market
• 1:19:07
  share. And so it's like, is the
• 1:19:09
  strategy to keep building from the ground up when I'm the
• 1:19:11
  leader only leading from my own experience and figuring it out
• 1:19:16
  as we go? Or is it worth taking the leap
• 1:19:20
  and going and getting the absolute best team player like
• 1:19:22
  the Yankees and taking the risk of, OK, I'm going to I'm going
• 1:19:27
  to bet on this person and hope that they can then go build out
• 1:19:30
  the teams in the organization because they're better at that.
• 1:19:33
  They've already done it. They already have the
• 1:19:34
  relationships. They already have made the
• 1:19:35
  mistakes versus me trying to be a one as little of a dollars as
• 1:19:40
  I can at a time higher that next person that's needed.
• 1:19:42
  It's a depend. It's a pendulum of like time,
• 1:19:44
  the value, what's your time worth, right?
• 1:19:47
  So if you had to hire somebody and take a 50% cut on the money
• 1:19:52
  that you're making right now, but you bought 50% of your time
• 1:19:56
  back, what can you devote that 50% of your time to?
• 1:19:59
  And you probably would increase by 4X versus just missing out on
• 1:20:04
  2X. And that's The thing is like
• 1:20:06
  most people don't want to hire big and pay big, but if you pay
• 1:20:10
  big, you release so much. That's accountability.
• 1:20:14
  You've got someone who's going to come in and do the thing
• 1:20:16
  because they're worth it. Yes, people out there think
• 1:20:19
  they're worth more than they are.
• 1:20:20
  But if you find the right person, you pay the right
• 1:20:22
  dollar, you're going to eliminate so much in your life
• 1:20:25
  that that phone call that you had coming here would have been
• 1:20:28
  taken care of. You know everything.
• 1:20:30
  And it's a little things, but they compound, right?
• 1:20:33
  It's like the compound effect. It just keeps going and going
• 1:20:34
  and going. So I always tell people like,
• 1:20:37
  you may make less, but if you've got.
• 1:20:41
  For a for a moment. Yeah, but if you got 50% of your
• 1:20:44
  time back, what can you do with that 50% to excel in some of the
• 1:20:50
  things that only you can do? And they're like, dude, I could
• 1:20:54
  blow up. Well, you just answer your own
• 1:20:55
  question. You know, you nodded like you
• 1:20:57
  answered your own question. You know, you need that person.
• 1:21:00
  And for the next 6 months, it might be pain.
• 1:21:03
  Oh my God, financially, like you're not dying.
• 1:21:06
  You're not dying, but you're just like, you're floating.
• 1:21:08
  But imagine when that float, just that bubble just pops and
• 1:21:13
  you're like, wow. But then there's also the fear
• 1:21:16
  of what if you make the wrong call and you bring, especially
• 1:21:19
  in an early stage company, you bring in the wrong executive
• 1:21:23
  that doesn't actually deliver and then not we're.
• 1:21:26
  Going to get bonus that you're going to pay them X amount of
• 1:21:29
  money and within six months and then nine months and then 12
• 1:21:32
  months, you're going to pay them dividends based on production.
• 1:21:35
  Instead of guaranteeing them front end, you're going to
• 1:21:38
  guarantee them back end based on their performance and proving to
• 1:21:41
  you that they are who they are and if the right person comes
• 1:21:45
  about, they're willing to show you who they are and what
• 1:21:48
  they've got to do that. Well, thank you.
• 1:21:51
  It's been great and time flies every time.
• 1:21:54
  But I would like to end with rapid fire school, hard knock
• 1:21:57
  style. Sure.
• 1:21:58
  All right. How old are you?
• 1:21:59
  And you became a millionaire. 24.
• 1:22:02
  What line of business were you in?
• 1:22:03
  Construction. What are you in now?
• 1:22:05
  Coaching. What's the best piece of advice
• 1:22:07
  you've ever heard? Don't listen to anybody else
• 1:22:10
  because they don't know what's going on in your head.
• 1:22:11
  What's the worst piece of advice you've ever been given?
• 1:22:14
  Don't do it. What's the number one book you
• 1:22:16
  think everyone should read? Not winning the devil.
• 1:22:19
  It's a good one, one of my favorites.
• 1:22:22
  What is the number one thing you attribute to your success?
• 1:22:25
  Grit and resilience. Who is your hero and why?
• 1:22:28
  Dave because he told me it was possible by telling me he
• 1:22:31
  believed in me. And if you could leave one
• 1:22:33
  message with the next generation, what would it be?
• 1:22:36
  You don't know the day you're born or the day you die, but in
• 1:22:39
  life you're given a control stick.
• 1:22:42
  You have the opportunity to go forward backwards or just stay
• 1:22:46
  stagnant on that dash in the middle.
• 1:22:49
  You decide. Because some days not a day of
• 1:22:50
  the week, and you never know when the last day is.
• 1:22:52
  If today was your last day, what would you do?
• 1:22:54
  You have amazing advice and it's been such a pleasure, so thank
• 1:22:58
  you again for coming on the show.
• 1:22:59
  Appreciate it. Thank you so much.