Business FAILURE! Why It Happens to Even the BEST Entrepreneurs with Derek Daly

So when you hit a wall in business, how do you persevere and get ahead when everything around you is moving at hyperspeed? And how do you make a choice to stay committed to your business? All right, Chris Weiser here with guest speaker Derek Daly. Today got Derek's brand new book, A Champion's Path. Super excited. Just came off stage here at our Indianapolis event. Those of you that are watching us, racing is near and dear to my heart. I grew up in a racing family, in a racing community, drove race cars, started go karts at like 6 years old. And, you know, we were just talking here about risks in business and how business owners often hit walls similar to in motorsports. Like, I ran. I know exactly what you're talking about. My father brought me into racing, was a race car driver for years and years, and he used to talk about one of the ways to make a small fortune in racing was to start with a large one. And so, you know, many people hit walls, but then in business, you were relating this to me as we chatted, run into similar walls. Can you expand on that for me?

I think when I was a professional race car driver, you're so engrossed in yourself and your own performance, you don't realize the lessons that are all around you. When I move from being in the cockpit to being on television, broadcasting behind the camera, I had time to research what is it that makes some teams of people so successful and how can they be successful in different eras with different managers, with different drivers, with different engineers, with different people, they still are able to have sustained success. And it became a fascination for me, Chris, as to what is it? What makes the difference? What separates the teams who are successful on a regular basis? And there's some very basic principles. So whenever motor racing comes on television, what do they try and promo to grab your.

They're always promoing crash, crash, crash, crash, crashes. Because it's, you know, big thing. Fire.

Exactly.

Crashes, stuff flying all over the place.

That happens in our sport. I was unfortunately in one of those crashes and got critically injured.

I remember your crash. Actually critically injured.

And what. The lessons that I then learned became incredible because I had friends come into my hospital room and say, are you going to go back racing? Or an even more pointed question is.

Why would you ever. Why would you race? Because this was so dangerous. Right, Exactly.

And so how do you process what happened? How do you process the crash? And I could ask any business, how.

Are you going to process it when.

You hit the wall? Because everybody hits the wall at some stage.

Sometimes there's that big catastrophic accident, too. You know, losing a big client or maybe losing a key employee.

Exactly. How will you process it? How will you go forward? Will it defeat you? Or do you show that serial survivor mentality? Because when you show the survival mentality, the people that are still around, you see it, read it, feel it, and want to emulate it.

And they feed off of you.

Exactly.

Absolutely. I totally agree with that.

Yeah.

And you know, one thing I'll tell you that people don't necessarily realize about motorsports and racing. It's a big team sport. Like, we need a lot of people supporting. I say we. I'm not a driver anymore, but, you know, you have a lot of people around you. But it is so isolating because you're in the car and you're in. You're in the car for sometimes hours. You know, I never ran. I didn't run much asphalt. I was a dirt track driver in sprint cars and. And more of the shorter races. But still, it's so isolating because not now the cup guys and the IndyCar guys and the. And the Formula One guys, they have at least team communication. In my dirt track world, we were in a bubble. So, you know, it's kind of similar to how a lot of it is in racing and being an entrepreneur. And I want you guys that are watching this to really think about this, because being an entrepreneur, sometimes you are still. Even though you can talk to people, we're in that bubble. We are isolated because we're kind of on an island. Because a lot of the problems we. We can't talk to people about because it's like money problems or people problems or.

Yeah.

And maybe we can't even talk to our spouse or our partner because so much of that is just like, man, it's. It weighs so heavy and nobody knows the island that we're on. What's your thoughts or how can you relate to that?

And it can be lonely, right? Can be lonely. Your heart can begin to skip a beat.

Not sleeping at night.

Yep. But the most important thing for people to understand is you. Nobody possesses all the business skills necessary to make a successful business. A driver is a specialist. Don't ask him to engineer the car or take up the tools and put it together.

And that's such a good thing.

So all a group of specialists, make sure you have the specialists around you that will support your skills. Remember, you're the leader pulling all the specialists together, but you need to make sure all the specialists are individual thinkers who become team players. In their actions. It's so vital. And in the era that we now live in, which is a high speed era, more than ever you have to lean on the team of people around you and share the accolades with them whenever it's successful. But in addition to having them be paid a monetary sum, make sure there's emotional rewards for those people in your team also.

Yeah. And I think you know something, that is a really good point. As you're an entrepreneur starting out, we are expected to wear all these hats. Right. We have all this stuff that we put on us and especially in IT land. I'm not sure how familiar you are with IT land, but it's very easy because most of the msp, the IT owner, the managed service provider owner, starts out as the engineer, starts out as the tech mind and they oftentimes just almost silo themselves into that.

Yeah.

And it's really critical. And this is some of the stuff that I, I actively teach. So please make sure you're watching a lot of our seven figure MSP Chris Weiser content because we about this all the time, making sure that you hire and surround yourself with the specialists just like you're talking about.

Because I don't care if you're the best in the world at what you do if nobody knows. So, so where does it go? So you have to have a storyteller out there to tell the story. You have to have a believable story. You have to have specialists then who produce the product that, that gives people who buy it confidence because they then become storytellers for you. And it's this great big momentum ball that keeps running. And the most important thing is that people buy into it. They have confidence in what they are being taught, how they're being led. Because when you make disciples of 10 people that 10, if they just make one disciple, suddenly you see how it max.

It's like compounding interest scale, right, Absolutely. I agree with that. And I think you know that that whole mindset of moving yourself from that, that specialist key to be a specialist, but surrounding yourself with people and then helping yourself evolve. This is why I love live events and I love coming out here and having gentlemen like you on our stage because you start to see how important it is that you develop as a leader of people and growing those disciples like you mentioned.

And one of the most important things that people. It's hard to grasp this sometimes, but I tell my audience when you are being successful, one of the most important things is to disbelieve in the sustainability of Your own performance. Think about that for a second.

That's deep. I love that.

Because if you have a great quarter, a great year, you better disbelieve it's sustainable because the target's on your back now. We are most vulnerable at times of great success. So racing teams are trained to. To disbelieve in the sustainability of their own success. It doesn't matter if you won last week. The job is just as hard this week. It's a new week, just as taxing.

Most of your sports people, I think, have that. I'm a big football fan, American football, big motorsports fan, obviously, and have some really good friends in the motorsports industry. And it's, it's so true to, to get yourself out of that mindset of, oh, I'm dominant, I'm a winner, so you have to constantly be driving yourself forward.

And many times, because I do a lot of keynote speaking, many times I'll follow an NFL football player, we had a football player last year, blah, blah, blah. And I say to them, it's interesting, statistically, an NFL play lasts for seven and a half seconds. After that, they stop, they regroup, they get together, have a chat, and they work for seven and a half more seconds. In our business in motorsports, it's long, long run, where you then bring your pit crew in to equip you to do more long runs. And I don't know whether you could have a better business model, but I talk about preparation a lot. And in Indianapolis, we had Peyton Manning for 14 years and he was renowned for what? His preparation.

Super prep.

I often thought, what if he slacked off one week? What if he didn't care, didn't practice, didn't prepare well, and he went out and made a mistake through a bad pass, what would he lose? A down. Yeah.

Seven seconds.

The worst he could lose is a game. Yep.

Yep.

In our business, when you operate right on the edge of what might be possible and you have bad preparation and make a mistake, it could be catastrophic.

And also, you know, jumping on the back of that Peyton Manning thing, I don't know if you've seen what he's done after football, but he now has the Peyton Manning Monday Night Football deal, Also has his Omaha productions, his podcast, and his whole broadcast network. So his preparation. You know, it's funny because people talk about sports and how it's not related, talk about motorsports and how it's not related. It's all the same common themes that we're seeing here is if you do the work, you prepare, you take your Risk, you focus on building disciples and being a good leader. It carries on through business, too. And I think the same we've seen with you as well.

And when people in business talk about, well, business is faster than it ever was before. Yes, it is. Are people on the fast track? Yes, they are. And. But they have to understand in racing, let's just take Formula One, eight years ago, pit stop, took eight seconds. Six years ago, took six. Four years ago, took four. Two years ago, just two days ago, Miami Grand Prix, two teams did 1.9 seconds.

That's unbelievable.

So do you see how prepared you have to be just to stay up at the competition with the analogy of our sport? I think business is just the same.

Yeah, I agree with you.

All the principles are there for people to understand what high performance looks like. And I say performance is personal. High performance is highly personal. And you have to buy into it and make a decision yourself. You want to go to the edge. You want to operate out on the outer edges. If you think about it, simple words like choice. I think choice is one of the most powerful words in the English language.

Yeah, I agree 100%.

Because everything you hear, everything, all training and coaching and advice you get, you have a choice goes over your head, or you wrap your arms around it, absorb it, radiate it to people within your sphere of influence. And now you've created a benefit that goes way beyond just yourself and what you hurt. Yeah.

I love that so much.

Yeah.

All right, Derek, any final words? Love to have you today. Thanks so much for your knowledge and your wisdom.

Just remember, when people try and operate at peak performance, the zone of peak performance is not a crowded place. Think about that. There could be a high price for entry. Sacrifice, dedication, commitment, element of risk. And people have to make the choice do they want to operate in that? And it is a personal commitment. But the rewards, both emotional and monetary rewards, are huge when you absolutely focus and dedicate yourself to be the very best you can be.

I love it. I love it. Thanks, Derek, so much for being with us today. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks for joining us.