Lessons Learned From 30+ Years in Business | Challenges, Coaching, and Growth

I actually filmed something I did in the 2022 event we held live, and that was to share some of my challenges in business and in life so that others would know that it's okay. You're normal if you're going through this because entrepreneurship can be hard, right? It can suck. It's a video that I did for the rant privately for the community, and I thought I'd share it with you. Enjoy. I'd love to know your biggest aha from it. For this week's rant, it's going to be a little longer, so buckle in here. I wanted to go through what I went through in— gosh, it was 3 years ago now. It was at the 2022 Summit, because when I did it, a lot of people came forward and said, man, that was super helpful. And let me tell you, let me stage it for you. I'm going to go through some challenges that I've gone through over the years. Some of you haven't heard them. If you've been in High Six or you're a coach, you've probably heard most of them, not all. And the reason I want to do it is real simple. That we all go through shit, right? The issue is we don't always talk about it. And what behind the scenes in the Wicked Smart community, especially in the High 6 and the President's Club, I'm doing a lot of that kind of behind the scenes helping people with their life challenges that you all don't see because they're private. So I want you to know that if you have challenges, perceived or real, there's some of the community that can help you. And if you reach out to me, I'll point you or I'll help you, right? And this is not to say, oh, look at me, look at what I went through, or in any way about me. What this is about is please know that people go through shit. And I'm going to go through the '90s were the worst. So some '90s and then the 2000 crash, that whole 10-year period. I'm going to go through some challenges I had. And the punchline is most of the challenges I went through were when I didn't have a coach. I didn't understand that till later, but that's a fact. I'd like to know at the end of this, I'm going to have 3 calls to action for you, but 1, 2 are going to be simple, just things you got to go do. Third is going to be, I want to know your biggest aha here, your biggest takeaway. And if you don't have one, it's okay. But I want to know if you go through this video what it was. Okay. If you have one now, it's important to know a couple of things before I get into the challenges. I— some of you have challenges with, say, upgrading or, you know, even in your own life, maybe hiring a health coach, right? Spending money on you. When I sat with one of my mentors in 2012, and this is what was the impetus of some of the things I've done, I flew there and back in one day and mustered up 10 grand to do it. One day. Just to pick his brain. Now, it wasn't a full day because I had to fly in and out. So it was probably like 3 hours. I want you to think about that. That was one of the many things that launched what we have going on now, besides some of the things you're going to hear, the challenges, because most of these lessons I'm going to share with you are life lessons and general business lessons. Why? Because we teach deals and we teach curveballs in deals. We teach deal structure. Frankly, that's the easy part, guys. Once you get that down, like I'll use Rick. Rick has the deal structure down, right? Mike has the deal structure down. Rusty, the coaches have the deal structure down, but do they still go through life challenges? Yeah, absolutely. Let me give you some examples real quick. When I was in college, this is going way back. This is more life, not general business. And I'll categorize these. I had one doctor, and this is the importance of listening to the right people. I had one doctor when I complained about my lower back, put me in a back brace from here to below my waist, and then tell me I had to be operated on. Now, this was, this was mentally complete depression and bummer. This is a complete mindset game. I listened to the wrong person, so I physically sucked and mentally sucked. And it was all because of one person. And then a friend of mine said, hey, they saw me going through it. And my— they said, my mom has a friend who knows a Someone that knows the doctor or the trainer at the Red Sox. And this guy has since passed away, but I went to see him. You know what he said right away? Take the brace off. Here are some exercises to do and you'll never need an operation. And he was right. Same back issue, 2 different people. Importance of listening to the right people. When I was 25 years old, this was back in '91. I'm looking at my notes. I'm going to highlight like 4 or 5 of these guys, so bear with me. And I hope I touch someone with some of these stories. I'll give you hope. I had my very first deal in the terms world in '91 after getting fired from my father's company that just sold, and I was supposed to run all these divisions and they fired me. And my kids were just born, like '88 and '90, right? Nick and Kayla. So here I am doing my first deal. We were collecting a nonrefundable deposit from a buyer. I had bought a split-level home and subdivided the lot off and was building a duplex. But we could sell the separate units. So this is one of the units. We would collect a nonrefundable deposit. We would build the house with some contractors and everybody would wait to get paid till the end. It was creative real estate back then. I was driving on that. I can— I know exactly where it was at night. It was getting dusk. I was in my white Honda and I was on Route 20 in Auburn, Massachusetts. And the buyer called and basically was backing out. And I'm thinking, oh shit. So my first deal, I have no income coming in. And now, although our agreement said we can use their deposit to start construction as soon as they get their bank commitment, which we did, they wanted to back out. That was a bummer. So I communicated well with them and long story short, we kept the deal together. Now, in hindsight, what would I have done? I'm going to try to give you some lessons that you can work on. I would have had lines of credit set up. If you don't have a process going yet with Fund and Grow or a process going yet with 7 Figures, you pick which. That builds your business credit over time and every 6 to 12 months you go in and do a redo and you get more lines at 0%, you're missing out because you need that in case this shit happens, right? So smartrealestatecoach.com/7figures, I think it is the number 7, and then Fund and Grow, I think is /fundandgrow. If not, ask Shayna, she'll get you the right links. Now, after that, I was doing some, some From a business standpoint, I was doing some condominium conversions where we bought multi-units and converted them. Now, where did I get that idea? Did I make that up? No. Was it a new idea in the marketplace? No. I had breakfast with someone. See, I would go to breakfast with people and say, hey, I want to pick your brain. It would be successful people in the community, business owners in the community, just to get a different perspective. And just casually at breakfast, he told me how his mentor, now in his 90s— this was back in the 90s— bought these multis and come run in the condos. That's why I got the idea. So it's not a new idea. It was something I acted on. Again, it's another little nugget that may be for you. I was 28 years old, around '94-ish, and I got a phone call that I've never gotten since and I've never heard of since and I've never known anyone to get it since. And it was basically my attorney saying, hey, Chris, you've been pushed into involuntary bankruptcy by your creditors. And I guess in hindsight, remember, it was— I think you needed 3 creditors. If you were paying slow, they could push you into bankruptcy. Bankruptcy. Now, you might say who cares, right? No big deal. Well, I didn't know what it was, so I had to learn what it was. But it hit the newspapers because we were pretty big. We were doing a lot of homes in that area. People, what happens when you do well, guys? People get jealous and people want to shoot arrows at you, right? The white horse running out front gets arrows shot at it. Understand that and be ready for it. It hit the newspaper. It hit. I was in the courtroom. I was abandoned by my partner and frankly some friends. And I had life threats. So we had to literally build a wall. My partner was the builder side of things. He built a wall as people came up the stairs, they couldn't come up. And I remember having a gun on my desk when my lumber supplier came in to talk to me, who ended up being a friend and sort of a mentor through the whole process. And to this day, and I wrote about him in my book, his name is Cle, C-L-E. You read the Real Estate New Terms, he's in it. That all came from back then, back then. So now, There's no nugget here that I have for you other than in the entrepreneurial world, it can suck, right? No one told you it's easy. My kids were 3 and 4 then, and I had basically zero money when that happened, right? Cutoff, boom. Now, in hindsight, I would've restructured with partners and had the money to do so, right? Very easily, actually, in hindsight, or had those lines of credit set up. I didn't. I didn't have either one. So it really, really, really beat me up mentally. And it sort of put me in a rotten stage for a few years, like the crash did. And to top it off, when we dug into why it happened, this will kill you. We had a controller who worked for my father's family company in the past who I trusted with all the finances, who the reason we got into this state, overdrafted our account $83,000. Guys, this was in the early '90s. Now, now I had to pay it back through the bankruptcy process, right? Because they made me pay back. So then we had to pay it back. Bottom line is we had a stamp with my name on it that he could stamp checks and we found them after, you know, went through bank statements and found them. You know, like, Chris, what are you, a moron? Well, I thought that was easy. I saved some time signing checks. Don't do that. Okay. In '95. Okay. So now I'm out of— I'm out of this crap with the involuntary bankruptcy with the company, not personally. And I go meet the owner of RE/MAX and I go, look, I'm going to go get my license. My building company shut down. He knew of me from building. And I said, what can I expect to do for deals? And I'm thinking in my head, I got to do like 50 or 60 deals to live, right? He said, well, first year, Chris, about 12, 10 or 12 deals. And I thought, oh, this is going to suck. That's not going to even pay the bills. So what I did is I wanted to do 100. I found an agent in the area doing 100. I said, can I be an intern for free? And I'll just kind of be one of your helpers, whatever you need me to do. I think it was like 6 months. She said, sure. I then asked who coached her. She gave me the coach. I then seeked out the coach, and then I ended up hiring that coach. And I remember $1,000 a month for his one-on-one program was like scraping every month to find what credit card I was going to put it on. But see, if I didn't do that, guys, and this is a good lesson for some of you, if I didn't do that, I honestly don't know where I'd be, where I'd be, because that gentleman launched my business big time and his private coaches did. Now, here's the thing for you guys to understand doing deals. You see, you know, the coaches doing deals and you hear about our story, you see Zach doing deals. And you go, okay, I want to do that. And then you compare yourself to that person, whether it's me or someone else or Rick, and you beat yourself up. Well, here's what I did. I said, I want to do 100 deals. She's doing it. I didn't ask her her whole story and all the horror stories like, like these I'm sharing with you, right? I just assumed she did it like that. Well, the first year I did 25 deals. I said, I barely scraped by. Then I did 48, then I did 72, then I did 84. And by the 5th year I did 100. So 5 years to accomplish a goal. Are some of you guys willing to stay in it, at it, grind it out to hit your goal if it took 5 years? Not sure where to get started? Go to smartrealestatecoach.com/getgoing for free books, strategy calls, and a whole bunch more. We're going to help you get going the wicked smart way. We've been after this for over a decade doing exactly that. Super important question for you. I remember being in my office there because my coach told me to close the door, put a sign on my door that I was prospecting. People banging on the door, making fun of it. I didn't care. I had blinders on. I had bills to pay. So super, super challenging things that went on. But it also— all these challenges, business, personal, etc., they stack the character, they stack you, they build you over time, right? If you think about it, from '08 to 2012, after the crash, I had things like— I don't know if some of you guys know this— I had things like the IRS calling. I owe the IRS a lot of money. I finally finished paying them with a payment plan thanks to a referral that I've now given to some of you by the name of Jerry DeLange. And he's spoken at some of our events. I finally paid them off in 2018, 10 years later. 10 years. Okay. So when you create some of these problems, sometimes it's going to be a little bit more costly than we think. So is maybe a coach earlier on better? Yes. I didn't have a coach. Remember I said that during these times? I had a tow truck show up to my house, 5 in the morning, when I owned the big home looking over the water before I had to downsize to the 1-bedroom, 900-square-foot apartment. The only reason he didn't repo one of the cars— he was there for one of the BMW trucks. The only reason he didn't repo it is I walked out the door simultaneously. It was meant to be with my daughter's husky. Now, the dog was an awesome, calm, friendly dog, but he didn't know that at 5 in the morning. All he saw was this husky looking at him. It scared the shit out of him. He didn't say it, but he kept looking at it like, is this thing going to attack me? I told him I sent the payment and I told him I had confirmation in the house, but everyone was sleeping, which was true. And he left. Meant to be. But I've had all that. I then refinanced that property, my last ditch effort to save all the companies and my mortgage payment to pull out $300 grand. My mortgage payment was $25,000 a month. I liquidated college savings, I liquidated regular savings, I liquidated the retirement account, all to, to, to make this work. And that's a meet, banks, credit cards, etc., all to make it work. Now, I'm not telling you to go to that extreme, but when some of you say to me, oh, I don't know if I can make the In the Trenches boot camp, it's going to cost $1,000 to fly there, or I don't know if I can upgrade for an extra whatever, $1,500, I cringe because you're leaving so much upside on the table. And that's just a side note. I wanted to share my horror stories, not give you guys a bunch of heat. All right. I could keep going, guys. I'm going to save the rest for QLS Live. How's that? In 2025, in Boston in October. Now, I told you that I've had a coach for everything. I'm talking health, energy, real estate, business scaling, everything. You found us. Now let us help you max out your experience. Don't play small, guys. This is my— if I have no other lesson than that, after all the crap I share with you, Don't play small. It's not worth it. Play big. Do whatever you can to get resourceful because the people around you, as you probably heard in some of the nuances there, the people around you are absolutely freaking everything. And I want you to think about 10 years ago. Think, okay, how fast did that go? The last 10 years for me, it was a blink. I'm sure for most of you, it was a blink. So the question is, are you okay If in 10 years you're in the same spot, that's the big question. And if not, it's not I joined a coaching program because I did, I'm going to have all the success. No, it's I joined the coaching program, I pulled all the stops, I go through the suck and I make it work. That's the person that's going to— in the community, every single event, you're going to see that person, the person who kind of trudged through it. You're going to see them on stage. That's a fact. Now I keep going. I'm going to wrap it up. 3 calls to action. 1, register for the ITTB, the In the Trenches Boot Camp for April. And if not, there's one in June live. But why wait? I just told you, don't wait. This is— the upside's too big. Go to smartrealestatecoach.com/ittb-confirm if you're an apprentice, starter, or immersion. If you're high 6, you got to apply just because we wouldn't have room for all the high 6s to hit it. Second, and you can see Kelsey. Second, register for QLS Live. I think it's smartrealestatecoach.com/associate-qls2025. If I'm off on that, which wouldn't surprise me, just ask Kelsey or Shayna. And last but not least, I want to know your biggest aha here. This was a long one for me anyway. I tend to be a lot shorter. I want you to know— I want to know rather if anything hit you there. Did anything give you hope? Did anything give you an idea? Did anything give you an aha? If not, it's okay. But if it— if you did, I want to hear from you. Okay. All right, guys, make it a great week. I will most likely be on the mastermind this week. Can't wait to see you. Make it an outstanding week because it's your choice.