5 Biggest Takeaways from Freedom Fast Lane Live

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Hey fastlaners. Ryan, Daniel Moran here with Freedom Fastlane. This is the first full week that I've been back since Freedom Fastlane Live where I kind of collapsed being tired after not sleeping and hosting an event for three days. It was a huge success, an unbelievably good time and the feedback has been phenomenal. So thank you for all those of you who joined us in Austin, Texas for Freedom Fast Lane Live. What I want to do today is dial back and go through the biggest takeaways from the collective speakers, the interviews, the backroom discussions. We had billionaires and multi millionaires in a room for three days. Some really interesting ideas and topics came out of this and I want to share with you the biggest threads, the biggest commonalities behind all of these ideas, behind all of these discussions that were had both in the room and outside the room. So let's, let's start from the very beginning. I think the biggest, probably the biggest takeaway, the biggest thread among everyone who spoke at Freedom Fast Lane Live was the recommendation to build something outside of yourself. Or a different way that I would put this would be to work on something rather than in something. And that's not necessarily just working on your business rather than in your business, but just the idea of building something outside of you or your perception of yourself really frees you up to be the architect of something great rather than a high paid employee. This resonated with me because it's a shift I'm going through right now in my life and my business. And one of the ways that this was tied together in kind of a unique way was when Travis and I were talking, we talked about the idea of working on yourself rather than inside of yourself. And by that we mean separating yourself from the results that you have so that you can manage your results outside of how it impacts what it means about you. That when you can disassociate your results from your self image that you can actually manage and work on the results freely. It frees you up to do your best work rather than having a tense ego based approach to all the work that we do. This also obviously showed up in business when we talked with Jeff Hoffman or Grant Cardone, especially Robert Herjavec. We talked about this idea of building something that is bigger or outside of you, building, working on something, working on projects that are not just made for the purpose of extracting money. That was a word that came up a lot. Extraction is our purpose to extract money because that's a cash flow business or is it to build something outside of ourselves. And that would be a disruptor company. It'd be something bigger than us. And Gary had, I think, probably the most actionable takeaway for those who tend to think in cash flow businesses but know they want something bigger. And he said, I'm summarizing. These are my words. But he basically argued that there are. There's things out there like student loans and expenses and kids, and they require a certain amount of cash flow. So most people get into this business, they get into entrepreneurship because they want to make more money. But shame on us if we do not recognize when we are stuck in a cash flow business and then pivot when we can to build something much bigger. Shame on us for not shoring up cash flow. And I think the fastest way to do that is to build a cash flow business and then switching and building something bigger than us taking the cash and using it to support where we want to go next. I have a regret in life and. And that regret is that I didn't make that pivot sooner. I regret in life that I did not go that I wish I could go back a few years and say, all right, we've got this income stream shored up. We're investing it in this, and now we're going in this much different direction, and this is gonna fund it. I wish I had done that years ago. And it's one of the reasons why I talk about investing and I talk about the difference between cash flow businesses versus disruptors so much here on the show, because I wish that I had done it differently five years ago. And Gary put it even more bluntly than I did. You know, shame on you if you. If you realize that you're in a business that you don't like, that you don't want to be in long term, and you don't pivot when you have the opportunity to pivot to do something bigger and better, and that produces more happiness and more impact for those around you. And that was. That was big for me because he put it in a different way of. We tend to analyze this. We tend to analyze this difference between something that puts a million dollars in your bank account versus something that's worth a billion dollars. And we tend to look at them as two different things, and I think they are. But one of the common threads in this discussion was that kind of the way to look long term success is to shore up the income through one of those businesses and then pivot and build something much bigger. And whether that is a bigger company like Gary is doing or like Mark Jenny is doing, or if it's making a difference in the world like Wesley Chapman is doing, where he built up his cash flow businesses that will support him for a long time and now he just gives back whichever it is. Whoever brings you the most fulfillment comes on the other side of you shoring up your own income streams through cash flow business. And I wish I had heard that five years ago. One of the big takeaways, the second big takeaway from Freedom Fast Lane Live has to do with that pivot, has to do with that transition from those two pieces. A cash flow business versus a disruption company. And that big takeaway was building a team of all stars that you can rely on. This came up over and over and over again. We tend to glorify the idea of solopreneurship. The older I get or the more experience I get, the less I think of solopreneurs. Because if you're a solopreneur, that means that you haven't automated your life enough to actually be a business. You just have a way that you produce a lot of cash flow and that's where most people start and that's fine. But if we don't transition into getting our life back, if we don't transition into building a team that builds our business for us, then we don't really have a business. We have a cash flow stream that if we stop working, no longer brings in cash flow. It no longer serves as a, as something that can provide value for the world. So if it is you doing everything, you're either A, not prioritizing or B, your time isn't, you're not spending your time in valuable things. Because if you can't, if you can't identify what hundred or two hundred dollars an hour, thousand dollars an hour, ten thousand dollars activities are in your business, then you're naturally going to fall to the lowest. You're going to be doing $10 an hour work, you're going to be answering customer service emails, and you're going to be changing things on blogs and websites which are $10 an hour jobs. When you as the leader of a company need to be doing $10,000 an hour activities, which allows you to produce more and less time and serve more people. And you can't make that transition without a clear team. Jamie Tardy talked about the Culture Index as a great way to discover who's right for your team and who isn't right for your team. I also like the Kolbe Index. K, O, l, b, e.com as a way to vet out skill sets and how you get things done so you can build a team around you that supports you. The third biggest takeaway from Freedom Fast Lane Live was the power of focus. Now there were some differing opinions on how this could be implemented. So I'll give you my take. Jeff Hoffman, the billionaire founder of Priceline.com put put it very beautifully, I thought, where he said, get a gold medal in something. You can't get a gold medal in something if you're focusing on six things. Do one thing, pursue excellence and money will follow the excellence. And when you get the gold medal in that one thing, then you can pivot to something else and you can make a change. And I asked him in our Q and A time, I said, how do you get so much done? And he said, there was never a time in which I was doing multiple projects at once. Or maybe more accurately, he was doing the major projects that were successful one at a time. He was never touring with NSYNC and producing Cabin fever and launching Priceline.com he was never doing all of them at the same time. It was one thing at a time.

Now, some people had different opinions on this. Mark Jenny kind of shares shared with Jeff's opinion where he kind of left everything alone in order to build RV Share, which is the world's biggest peer to peer rental site for RVs. So he shared in Jeff's opinion. But then there were people like Grant Cardone and there's Robert Herjavec who has lots of different projects and he makes himself available for those different projects. He runs the Herjavec Group. He has all the investments that he does on Shark Tank. Grant Cardone has three different businesses, but he said they all fund his real estate ventures. And even Gary Vaynerchuk has his audience and then he has VaynerMedia. So there were several really successful people that had multiple projects. But this idea of focus came up a lot. And this was my takeaway, my interpretation of this. Your team has to be in place to run a business without you before you can give your full attention to something else. A different project, growing something new. We love as entrepreneurs to start new things. But my interpretation of the common theme among all the really successful speakers at Freedom Fast Lane Live was that you build one thing, you automate it through having an all star team and then you personally can focus on something else. Because if you can give 80% of your attention to something, that is about as close as we as entrepreneurs get to doing one thing. If 80% of our attention is on something that is, from my opinion, from the way I see it, good enough to call it your one thing. You have one thing going on. So you can only give 20% to the rest of your projects. You can't have six things and give 18% to each of those. They'll all fail. But if 80% of your focus is on one thing, and part of that is building the team that will run that without you, so that you can then give 80% of your focus to something else, I think I hallucinate that that is how.

A lot of the entrepreneurs that we interviewed and that we had at Freedom Fast Lane were able to manage multiple projects and do them well and get a lot of them done because their focus was 80% on one thing and then the rest of their attention. The remaining 20% was on other things. Even Grant Cardone, who talks about having lots of projects, saying yes to everything over committing to everything. Even Grant talked about how real estate is his primary focus. He works on it every single day. And that everything else supports that. His speaking gigs go to fund his real estate, his other businesses go to support and fund his real estate, and that his real estate was the primary focus of everything that he did. The fourth big takeaway was setting up and building a responsive audience. Specifically, this was covered in Gary Vaynerchuk, Pat Flynn and Ryan Deiss talk. I believe that building an audience, having a rabid audience is the lifeblood to just about any business. If you can click a button and have 100,000 to a million people see your ad, see your call to action, and they actually want to hear it, that is, that is the foundation for everything that you do. Those three men went into practical steps of how to do that, of how to have that rabid audience. Gary Vaynerchuk talks about you're setting them up and setting them up and setting them up through goodwill, through being you, through delivering value and content. And, you know, Gary has a following of millions of people, but he doesn't have digital products, he doesn't have a mastermind. He doesn't do any of that. It's just the lifeblood and the foundation for everything that he does because he gets clients from that, because he gets book deals from that. The same thing with Tim Ferriss. Have you ever seen Tim Ferriss pitch his.

His info product or. I know he's done a couple workshops. I don't think he has a mastermind, but his authority gives him the ability to invest in companies and gives him inroads to Being involved in companies and opportunities that most people wouldn't have. So even there they look at their audience as a foundation for everything. If you look a little bit differently, like Pat Flynn. Pat Flynn monetizes his audience mostly through affiliate offers. But he was very clear that he limits the amount of asking that he does to his audience because he does not want to diminish the goodwill that's possible and that he has a much longer term plan, a much longer term vision utilizing his audience than most people do that are just doing sales letters and masterminds and stuff like that. So the audience can be used in different ways. But treating them in a consistent upfront and both value driven way is the secret to supporting wherever you're going next. Ryan Deiss does do info products. Ryan Deiss does do masterminds, but he was in agreement with the way of speaking to and treating your audience. He believes that retargeting and more long term sales cycles are the next wave of advertising. Instead of doing direct response or going right to the sales letter, he all three of those guys who are really focused on building audiences, talked about delivering value upfront, letting that be that goodwill, that relationship with those who follow you. Be the lifeblood for everything that fuels you moving forward. The fifth and probably the most interesting big takeaway from Freedom Fast Lane Live was that targets are meaningless now. Notice I don't say that they're not important, but they are meaningless. If you target $10 million or you target a billion dollars, both of them are meaningless. Both of them have no inherent meaning. Neither of them mean anything about you. They are simply targets. Now targets do make a difference in the direction or the decisions of that you make moving forward. But in and of themselves, they are meaningless. You might even argue that results are meaningless. They don't have any internal value. Robert Herjavec talked about how when he hit $50 million, he felt empty. It meant nothing, there was no meaning. And he wished that he had gone bigger.

I've heard this from many entrepreneurs throughout my career that when they hit what they wanted, they were like, why didn't I go bigger? Like this means nothing. Why didn't I go even bigger? Now that can be dangerous because there can be an egoic attachment to that saying, I need more, I need more, I need more, I need more. But if we realize that we're gonna be the same person whether we get 100 grand or 100 million, cool. Then we're free to just go after what gives us the most satisfaction. Travis Sago talked about this in great detail when he spoke on the topic of separating your value from your results. Targets mean nothing about you. Results, you could even argue mean nothing in the greater scheme of things. They're just what we focus on. There's just what we shoot for. There's just. They're just what they are. So the idea of.

Setting a bigger target may or may not be a good idea. Most entrepreneurs in the stage agreed that since targets are meaningless, it would be a good idea to go for really big, impossible targets because we're going to naturally align with that in order to make that happen. Everyone on the stage agreed that the target should be in line with where the most value creation was, meaning that.

Where we put our focus, our emphasis, where we shoot for will come easier and faster and have more meaning or at least impact if it comes from a place of value creation rather than money extraction. Everybody agreed on that.

So the idea of targets being meaningless was a common thread among all everybody who spoke on the stage. I have one bonus takeaway from Freedom Fast Lane Live, and that is that everything is an investment. You've heard me talk about this, but this came up often. The idea of fitness, how we spend our time, our relationships are all investments and they all have an roi. Gary Vaynerchuk talked about his relationship with his wife, and if he wasn't really clear with his wife, it would cause a lot of problems, which would really hurt business.

The the Mastermind panel. Everyone on the stage had a regular fitness regimen, meaning everybody up there and everybody up there had at least doubled their business in the last 12 months. Most of them had 10x their businesses in the last 12 months. And all of them had regular fitness regimens, meaning that they were active, they had a daily exercise habit. Now, is correlation causation? I don't know. But I do know that when I feel completely dialed in, energized, like I'm in the best shape of my life, I do better work. I have more energy to get things done. When I'm arguing with my partner, I do worse work. I know that when I'm eating clean, I focus better. I know that when I am clear on how my time needs to be protected and managed, I'm happier and I get more done. So everything is an investment. Choose your investments wisely. The tribe in 2016 is going to be open to the public and that's going to be a heavy emphasis. It's going to be a heavy emphasis on everything being an investment so that you can give your most precious investments, like your health and your time and your focus to businesses that also produce the best roi. So you can use that ROI to invest into your precious assets like your health and your time and your relationships. It is all connected people and when we realize that and we stop thinking that one is more important than the other, like we love to say, I want to get my cash flow so I can spend my time how I want. Why not just organize our time so that we can produce the most cash flow so we can actually enjoy the process?

That is going to be a heavy emphasis of the tribe moving forward as well as a lot of other goodness coming to you in 2016. 2016 is going to be a year of a lot of changes for Freedom Fastlane. Some things I can talk about, some things I am sworn to secrecy about. But you'll be hearing more here on Freedom Fast lane and@freedomfastlane.com as always, thanks for listening. Thank you for coming out to Austin for Freedom Fast Lane and and we will see you next year at the next event. Until then, thanks for listening and I'll see you on the next show.