The Freedom And Prosperity Podcast

Welcome to the Freedom and Prosperity Podcast with your host Desi Arnaz. Join us as we explore the journeys of top achievers who share strategies and stories about their success and living life on their own terms. Get ready to be inspired.

Well, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Freedom and Prosperity Podcast. I am Desi Arnaz, your host, and I am so really thrilled to be able to introduce to you guys today, probably one of, from the previous conversations that I've had before this call, I'm gonna say this is gonna be one of my favorite interviews. I can just feel it. Sometimes you have an energy, guys, you know that? Well, that's what I've got with this gentleman today. His name is Thomas Powell. He is a senior advisor at Brehon Strategies. He is also the founder of a founder's company, which is a little bit different than what I had thought. But I'm gonna let him explain all of that. And he brings more than 3 decades of experience to the table in the area of helping entrepreneurs and investors simplify complex issues to reduce risk and create enduring value within their businesses. So welcome in, Tom, Thomas J. Powell.

Desi, thank you so much. Tom, you know, however you wanna do it is, is awesome. It's such a pleasure to be on your show and, and thanks for having me today.

Yeah, my pleasure. I'm looking forward to it very much so. So before we came on the air, you were just kind of filling me in a little bit on your background, and, uh, but if you don't mind just kind of going over that again so that people can have a little bit of a frame of reference from which you're speaking.

Absolutely. So, you know, I've had the benefit of being an entrepreneur for now, uh, gosh, coming up on 5 decades, which is hard to believe. But, you know, the— as we, we were talking about resilience, and I think, you know, resilience is not something you have or something you just get through hardship, because we know people that have hardships and they don't become resilient. And we know other people that have hardships and do become resilient. And so through hardships, you know, I did become an entrepreneur at a pretty early age. I was making payroll well before I was driving a car. Oh my goodness. It was the '70s. So as you know, you could actually go and open a bank account. It wasn't like how it is today, right? Kids have a much harder time to start companies. And my career took me down to Silicon Valley in the '80s, which was a great time to be down there. And in the '90s, we started one of our first venture funds. At that time, we didn't even know what a venture fund specifically was. But we had, you know, interest rates were coming down from 18%. And so you had people that wanted higher returns than what the banks were paying. And we had businesses that were really kind of cool starting up. And so we kind of married up the two. And that became my career for the past 35 years, a little more than 500 ventures and $3 billion in capital deployed. And so we now take a lot of what we've had there and we've institutionalized it and we help founders recognize that 100% of founders will exit. It's just whether they'll exit on their terms or the universe's terms or the market's terms or whatever else happens. And so we help them along that process. And many— once a number of founders work with us, they actually never do have that. You know, they may have that ultimate exit, but they don't. Choose to exit their companies, they just have truly a self-running company. And so that's what we help them build.

Wow, self-running company. That sounds like music to my ears.

You know, it does. And it's not the easiest thing in the world, especially for a lot of founders, because they're the center of their universe and the center of their companies.

Yeah, it's difficult. It's difficult. I'm just really learning how to let go and let my team do what they do personally in our company. You know, we are a— we are, I guess you say, a startup company, but I run an investment fund. I don't even know if I'd mentioned that to you. No. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I run an investment fund and we develop real estate and we also buy mortgage-backed promissory notes between our two different funds. So those are the things that we do, you know, but I do have my hand involved in a lot, but I have stepped back a lot over the past 12 months since I'm the founder and, and I'm letting my team step up and do more and more. Is that what you're talking about in general?

That's what we're talking about. So we started with this concept. So again, so Breyhan Group's our family office and then the Founder's Office is what we do as our venture to help founders at this point. So in the Founder's Office and by the way, I, through all of my travels, I went and got my doctorate at Northeastern University a number of years ago. And one of the things about having a doctorate is you have to name stuff. That's like a requirement of the job, right? Okay. I teach at the university. And so in identifying this problem that I saw just time and time again from founders was that it's 2 a.m. and they're staring up at the ceiling and maybe they've grown their company to $10, $25 million in profit and they're a good-sized company. They've got all the teams around them, the lawyers, the, the the accountants, the, the, the board of directors, their spouse probably helped them do it. They've got marketing and C-level, you know, all of that stuff. And it's 2 AM and they're still wide awake because they're the only one that can solve this problem that's pending. And it's because none of the, the, you know, outer layers of that are actually working together. And we named that the Founder's Isolation Paradox. And you can actually check it out on our website. We kind of show a diagram of it. And so it looks like this, you know, kind of atom of where their things are all spinning around. And so we help the founders do is build the systems and structure and get the multiple of the company up higher. Because once you get the founder out of it, it's actually a company. While the founder is still the principal within there, they've got the biggest, you know, client base, they've got the biggest control within all the various pieces. Then when somebody comes in to buy them, they're actually buying the founder, and the founder is just going to get a job. And most founders don't do really well with jobs.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so what you're helping these guys do is to say, okay, let me show you how to separate yourself from your business. A lot of it has to be right here, at least in my own mind. For me, it's here, thinking that only I can solve this problem, or I can just do it so much better than they can. You know, maybe they could solve it, but I can do it better, quicker.

Everything does it. That's how the— that's how your business probably started, was because you saw a problem. The definition of being an entrepreneur is seeing a problem and, you know, basically solve solving it for the betterment of the market, right? So the market pays you for your skills. With those skills of being an entrepreneur are different than the skills it takes to actually build a company. So the entrepreneur is the spark that starts that. And within a good company, the entrepreneur, entrepreneurial, can continue to go and build. Mark, you know, Zuckerberg's a good, good venture of that. He wasn't building the company, brought in professional management, but that entrepreneurial spark is still within there. Steve Jobs is another one. Yeah, when Steve Jobs has been gone, and I would argue that his last real venture was the iPhone, and that is still today the valuable part of, of Apple, and he's been gone for a long time. Yeah, so, you know, without that entrepreneurial spark, the company doesn't continue to go in that space. So you need both, but you do need the professional management that can come in and actually systemize and structure the pieces so that the founder can move into that entrepreneurial spark as opposed to actually running the companies because very few founders can actually run the companies.

Well, that is interesting. Well, you can't tell that to a founder, though, because they don't buy it.

No, but their spouse does. Their spouse does. Their, their team around them does, too. They're like, yeah, we can't do anything without them because we can't make the decisions, but we sure would like to. And so you can start building that scenarios in there. I'll give you another small one. Most founders still bank with the bank that they started with because they— it's a relationship. Well, so it's all tied around actually that founder and that banking relationship. Well, the reality is for most of those banker relationships, it doesn't matter about what the founder does once they no longer want to give personal guarantees. So how do you move them out of that banking relationship? In many cases, it's got to move to a new bank. And there's lots of banks that want to bank that business. But the founder has so much, you know, just heartfelt for that bank that helped them get their start that they won't leave. And yet that bank still holds on to their personal guarantees, which means everything that they do, it's, it's the, you know, Desi, it's the difference of being the chicken in a ham and egg breakfast or being the pig. The chicken's involved. The pig is committed.

Right?

Yeah. As founders, we're committed in those scenarios and they slice it right off our butt as we get into it, right?

Yeah.

So that, that's the part that we help, we help founders with.

Yeah. Now, uh, a lot of people that are listening aren't there where you're talking about, you know what I mean? That's not where they are. And my goal here with this particular podcast is to help folks that are coming along to say, okay, here's some direction, here's some things for me to to consider and to keep in mind as I grow. And so can we, like, dial it back a bit?

You bet.

Yeah. And share what you can.

Yeah, I think you and I were talking about, you know, what are some of the pieces? And I was on a show here recently and they said, you know, what's one of the most— what's the biggest characteristic? And I used to say it was tenacity, that it was required to have tenacity to be able to succeed. But I've actually modified that a bit more and say it's actually resilience. And we show— we throw resilience out there quite a bit. But my definition of resilience is when you fall down, you've been able to train your mind to get back up. And so I'm, you know, I'm in the competitive ski industry as part of my nonprofit ventures that I do. I run a ski mountain up in Lake Tahoe and for— for that's nonprofit and we work a lot on the snow. Well, when you slide, when you fall down, you need to be able to get back up and you need to be able to get back up over and over and over again. Being a founder, especially being an early-stage founder, that's the definition of being a founder, is you fall down, you get back up, and you get running again on the next side. And so I found, I found really 3 things that helped me do that. Uh, one is that I, I became a very strong learner. And so I learned through books, and in our, you know, in our youth, it was through tapes. We were talking about Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and all these people that I would just, just eat all the tapes I possibly could get. Right. And then the second thing I'd do is I'd get a coach. So everything that I wanted to learn, somebody already knew. So like in your case here, you're running this podcast, which is phenomenal because partly what your founders need to do is they— that they're having a hard day. They need to be able to listen to you and say, oh yeah, there's— here's how I get freedom. Here's how I get prosperity. Here's what's on the other side. This is why I'm doing this for my family.

Right.

And then the third part of it is, is learning some way to teach your body resilience before you need it. So for that, what I do is a lot of times for people, it's exercise. So, you know, my wife and I will do some endurance sports, and it's not the endurance sports for the athleticism. It's the endurance sports to teach my mind that I'm not going to quit just because it wants to quit.

Okay.

Right. So at the 2-mile mark, I want to quit on a run and we're running 5 miles and I'm like, no, I don't want to run anymore. And my, my mind is like, you don't need to do this. Why are you doing this?

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, nope, we're going for 5. We said we're going for 5. And why that matters is when you show up at work and in the business and the hard days show up, which are more days than actually the good days, Mm-hmm. Your brain is able to say, nope, I'm gonna keep going through.

Mm-hmm. You know, we talk about that and I think of the word discipline, right? And that's what I heard a lot of during the '80s and then the '70s, kind of like you, you know, back when we were younger, when I was much younger. Um, but I like resilience better than the word discipline.

I do too.

Yeah.

I, I don't know about you, but for me, I— discipline oftentimes makes me feel bad for me because I'm like, I didn't— you know, that candy was sitting on there and I still ate it, right? So, so, so my assistant makes these little, little cups of these. I have this, uh, good— you remember Good Plenty's little— oh my goodness, white and pink, right? So that's my, that's my candy of choice. And so she puts it in a little cup so I can only have so many during the day. And then I get, you know, I get put that, because if I have the whole bag, I'll eat the whole bag. Yeah, I'm not disciplined, but everybody else thinks I'm really disciplined. No, I set up systems so I can be disciplined.

There we go. That's— well, I'm so happy to hear you say that, because people are always telling me how disciplined I am, and I know that I'm not disciplined. I, I know it, but I get a lot accomplished because I do set up systems to accomplish things that are really important for me to get done. And then I just work that system. And usually the systems, you don't even have to have a very elaborate system.

No. You know, do you lay your clothes out in the morning or the night before?

I lay mine out usually the night before.

I do too. That's one of those small systems that I find of a lot of founders is they lay it out in the morning because they don't want to have to use the brainpower in the morning to think what they're going to wear. Yeah.

So they actually—

yeah, they see the day before them before they go to bed. So that doesn't take up any occupancy in their brain. That's a system.

Okay. I hadn't thought of it as a system, but yeah, that's— and by the way, that is the reason that I do it, because I don't want to have to think about it in the morning. In the morning, my brain is fresh. Yep. It's energized. And I don't want to sit here and say, well, what shirt should I wear? Oh, no, no.

Yeah.

Well, I have to think— I have to think through the whole day then in the morning instead of being present in what I'm going to work on. Whereas if I do it the night before, I look at it and say, what am I doing tomorrow? I'm able to preview the day. And then I also think during the night, my brain kind of works through and solves things that I wake up in the morning and I've actually already started thinking of some of these things. Now, that's a benefit. That wasn't what I intentionally did, but that's what I found over, you know, 50 years of laying basically my clothes out is being able to say, this is what happens. And I know the handful of times I don't lay out my clothes, man, that day is just a mess.

I'm only laughing because I feel you on this one, brother.

It is crazy.

You messed up my routine here.

Ah, I put stuff in a fridge. I need it to be there because that— my keys go in a certain place because I don't want to have to think about it. Those are all systems. Comes, right?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can tell you too that a lot of people let too many little pieces of their life go happenstance, and, and it doesn't take much. I'm not trying to say that a person needs to be rigid. I'm simply saying you need to be thoughtful and you need to be a little bit of a planner. You know, it doesn't even have to be that much because most people are so like chaotic I was gonna say undisciplined, but it's just chaotic. They're not undisciplined, but they just have no real systems in place. There's chaos and they, and they sort it through. They sort through it and over the course of the day it starts to work itself out, but they've already wasted 2, 3, 4 hours, you know?

And so, well, and, and I will go to the discipline. So my wife is extremely disciplined. She was a, a, you know, 20-year officer in the military, Lieutenant Colonel. She's got the discipline. She hardly ever sets up systems because she has the discipline.

Yeah.

And so if she says she's going to work out during the day, she will make sure and get the workout during the day. If I say I'm going to work out in the day, I have to have it at 6 a.m. and I get it done and it's over with. Because if I don't, then I know I'm just not going to get to it during the rest of the day. And it's such a different personality. And I had to come to terms that I used to beat myself up around that word discipline and say, no, I just have a different way of making sure that these things happen. And so I think, I think part of that is, is in building resilience. If we, if we both agree that resilience, like tenacity, or it's part of tenacity, is an ingredient for success, then part of the things is we need to make resilience one of our learning, just like listening to those books and tapes. And the way you do that is to have something that is hard during the day that you do, that you have set up the process so you succeed past it where your mind said quit. So whether it's I'm going to go to the gym, well, then get in the car and go to the gym. Make everything possible for you to get to the gym. Don't worry about working out. Just get to the gym, right? Atomic Habits talks about that. Go to the gym. Once you get there, you're going to work out. Yeah, it's the getting there that's the problem, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So figure out what those are. If you need to make— I mean, anyone, any of us in business are We need sales. And in almost all cases, we stop right before we need to make that last call, that that last call would be the one. You know it in real estate. It's the last call that you get, whatever that, that's going to be, or it's the last time you're talking to somebody and then the door opens up and it's the preparedness meets opportunity. You become more successful.

Yeah.

Yeah. And what I have also found is that success isn't nearly as elusive or difficult as I used to think it was.

Tell me about that. What do you think?

For, for decades, I thought that you, that you had to really be, uh, just a workaholic. And by the way, that destroyed my first marriage, you know, just trying to build this success by being a workaholic, but not really taking advantage of some of the things that you mentioned earlier. I wasn't taking advantage of being a strong learner. I never took advantage of a coach early on in my career, where I really should have, because I always looked at it at the budget part of the coaching, you know, taking on a coach. And I thought, ah, I'm smart, I don't need them, you know. Wrong. Um, and then, um, I have been pretty resilient. I'm a pretty resilient person. Very few things— nothing keeps me down. You know, I mean, I get back up. That's truly me. Nothing keeps me down. And so bad things— I don't worry about bad things because I like to say it this way to folks: I haven't, I haven't really had a bad day. Now, I've had a few bad events within a day, but a bad day? None.

Yeah, you know, it is so amazing because I, I share that with you in that I've, you know, oh, it's— you've had a bad day. It's like, no, I, I had a bad event.

Yeah.

Uh, the day— here's all the good things about, you know, what went on with the days. And I think that, I think that, that I didn't create. The ability to have the resilience I've been able to build upon, but the kind of sunny disposition seemed to be something that came with that early part. Because I have, you know, a lot of siblings, and some of them didn't have that, and some of them do have that. And so, you know, so something happens, it's like, oh Well, gosh, I, you know, I love the story of the two little boys run in and they're doing chores and it's a bunch of horse poop and they're looking for the horse and, or they're cleaning out the horse poop. And it's like, why is one boy smiling? He goes, well, with all this horse poop, there must be a horse in here somewhere, right? Yeah. And it sounds funny, but when you can have that change of mind always that there's something that's good, or I can, I mean, the reality is, Desi, of everything that you've learned, all the successes you've had, is it because you had a success and you learned from the success, or is it because you had a failure and you took that failure to the next success?

Yeah, I think I can say for sure in my life I've had so many failures, but I do take that to the next success.

Yeah, I think that's every successful person.

Okay. And people look at me now and say, man, you've, you've, you're so lucky. You've been so lucky in your life and It's like, hmm, I didn't see it that way, you know.

It certainly didn't feel like it some of those times when you're taking the blows.

I've had my ups and my downs for sure, without a doubt, you know. I've had my business, business failures. I've had my disappointments. I've had partners that have ripped me off. I mean, I've had all these things, you know.

Everything, everything. Yeah, I had one, I had one like in one year I had a, a massive— it's actually out on the internet there, so I'll say it here— we had, we had an investment where I lost $400 million. Now most people— now my wife always said like, well, you had $400 million to lose, so first of all, be thankful about that. And I'm like, okay, I like her. Uh, and then, but I had— at the same time, we had had a bump up against the U.S. government, so all of a sudden we're having to battle somebody who has endless wealth and endless time. And I lost my best friend who was my business partner, and she died suddenly. They found, you know, a cancer tumor on my body. And all of these things happen in a short period of time.

Right.

And again, no bad days, right? Truly, at that time, boy, it certainly seems like it when I look back and go like, how does that happen? But every single one of those became truly learning lessons that helps us now guide founders because the founders are always going through that. And if you can help people not go through that, that's phenomenal. Yeah, but more so if you can help them when they are going through it to understand that it's not just, hey, you will get through it, but that, you know, it's actually going to be better on the other side and you're going to be able to be stronger and more powerful. And it is those challenges, you know, that help you get there.

That sounds like a cliché. No, you know what I mean?

Well, it gives you the freedom though, right? Viktor Frankl talks about that. They can take everything away from you, but they can't take your mind. Yeah, right. And that's what, that's what the power is.

Yeah. Well, this is fantastic, fantastic stuff. Let me ask you this. How can people learn more or even connect with you? I don't even know if that's an option. I appreciate the fact that you're sharing information, but I'm sure there's people on here that would love to just learn more?

Well, Desi, if you go out to foundersoffice.com, just foundersoffice.com, uh, you will be able to see, uh, you'll be able to connect with my company and my team. And we've got a whole team, uh, you know, a bunch of lawyers and MBAs and such that are on our team. We've built a lot of companies together over the years, and we share information in there. Uh, the, the other one is we have a Wednesday podcast called— that you can get to from that website— called Lunch and Learn. Where our general counsel and my oldest daughter, who runs the family office, and myself, and once in a while my youngest daughter joins as well. We always have great guests, so we'd love to have you on as a guest at one time as well, which is great. And the last one is I have a Substack, so you can find me at Dr. Thomas J. Powell or Thomas J. Powell on Substack and follow me there.

I've never heard of Substack.

It's a great— have you ever seen Reddit? The, the new, you know, you can get get articles on there, but Substack is a place you want to go and it's just Substack. And you see a lot of people that are out there going now and writing and recording their, their videos out there.

Oh, no kidding. I have to check that out.

Yeah.

All of that. All of that you can get to off the Founder's Office. You can also see me on LinkedIn at Thomas J. Powell.

I got you there.

That's where you found me.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's where you got me.

Yeah, it sure is. Well, this is fantastic. I really appreciate you taking some time today to share your wisdom and your experience and your wit. This has been really good. I, I really do appreciate it, and I'm sure that our listeners will too. So you guys that are out there, you guys that aspire to have your own businesses, to grow your business, and to someday obtain, uh, freedom and prosperity, then I think this is a good place to start, right? A good place to say, okay, I can learn some things. I love the fact that you have a podcast too, by the way. I will be checking that, your Wednesday podcast out Uh, moving forward, but you guys can head over to foundersoffice.com to learn more and to meet with Dr. Powell here and, uh, and his team and see where it goes from there. Guys, I love the words of wisdom that you have shared with us here today, Doc. I really do. Thank you.

Thanks, Desi. It's great. It was my pleasure to be on the show, and thank you and all your listeners. I will tell you this: free enterprise saves the world. I believe it. I've lived it and I see it for all the travels I do around the world. It is free enterprise. So when you are out there working to better the world and you are able to do that as an entrepreneur, that brings you freedom. And there's tools. Get the coaches, get the readings, and grow your business.

Yes, that's right.

All right, Desi.

All right. Thank you, Doc.

Thank you.

God bless you guys. Thank you guys for joining us here today. I'll see you guys on the next episode of the Freedom and Prosperity Podcast. Again, I'm Desi Arnaz. May God bless you. God bless your family, and God bless America.

Thanks for tuning in to the Freedom and Prosperity Podcast with Desi Arnaz. Want to share your success story with our audience? Head over to freedomandprosperitypodcast.com and apply to be our next guest.