My honest thoughts on college as a sales millionaire with a degree

What's up, y'all? I'm sitting here, a little sunset, Dr. Goodwin, and I'm here to talk about why I'm not the biggest fan of college these days and what I think is genuinely a better idea. And now, before you start watching this video and you think, oh, he has an agenda, he's a sales guy who helps salespeople get sales jobs, well, you are right. But I'm also a bachelor degree holder from a Division 1 university. And, you know, I did the college thing. I went the college path. I went into the corporate job. Corporate job afterwards. I got the cozy base and the nice setup with the company vehicle and laptop and computer. I had the 6-figure job and I work with a lot of people that have done that, gone that route, who end up in the 1099 remote setting stuff or closing stuff. And I work with a lot of people that end up there not having gone that route, who have still made 6 figures plus year after year. And First off, let me say this. The winners are gonna win. So whether you go to college, you go into sales, you go do something else, if you're meant to win, you're the type of person that's supposed to win, you're gonna figure it out. That's what I always say about people that join our community. Dude, there's certain people that come in and they were gonna figure it out with or without us. Hopefully we just made it a little bit easier for them. And then the flip side of that is true as well. But the only thing that my college degree that I could 100% say that my college degree got me was an interview. And beyond that, man, everything else was something I could have done without college. In fact, the role that I not started in, but the role that I transitioned into within the same company from an internship to working with them post-grad to going full-time with them, the people in the role that I transitioned to did not have college degrees and they were making more than I was in the position where I had the college degree. I hate to be the old head, the anti-college guy that's like, it's just a piece of paper. But it's really true because right now, example, I'm hiring for a closer for the next couple of days. I'm taking in applications. You haven't seen that. I mean, go now. It's a once in a lifetime opportunity. But if I had an applicant right now that said, I went to Harvard, I went to Stanford, I went to Yale, I don't care. I don't care unless they have sales experience or unless they can show themselves as the right option for the hole that I'm trying to fill. I literally just don't care. And I think especially as we get more into the gig economy, Where AI's eating up jobs left and right. Like people are not just hiring based on where you went to school or if you went to school, they're hiring on the difference that you can make. Employees have always been one of the most expensive parts of a business, rightfully so, but now that's optional. And so if you are going to take up a lot of their operating costs or the costs that it takes for them to do business, you better be making a significant difference. Why I like sales, especially if you're a little bit more entrepreneurial, You're literally getting paid to learn how to start that business or another business. And at that too, I went to school for construction science and management. That allows most people to either go into project management of construction. I'm in Texas, there's a lot of it, or estimating. And there's some stuff in there, but those are the 2 main ones. So I went from project management into estimating and estimating with sales. And that's how I got into that rabbit hole. But let's say I look up in 5 years after being a project manager and decide I don't want to do that. I can't just go and jump into another industry. Like, dude, I am pigeonholed into construction. Okay. I could maybe, maybe make the case if I'm good enough that I could go and be a project manager in some other industry. Project management is a skill that I would say if you're good at that, dude, being better at that than like just being an industry expert because you can learn industries, but skills pay the bills. That's, that's a saying. So why I like sales, man, is because like, let's say you're in tech sales right now. You're really good at sales. That's what's making a difference. But what if tech falls off the face of the earth? Unlikely. But right now there's a big squeeze with AI, man. And so like all these old school tech companies, ZoomInfo stock is down 33% as of Monday morning, down from $25 billion to $1.8 billion. I know someone who was an AE at ZoomInfo. He went from high ticket closing, AE at ZoomInfo, back to high ticket closing because he just was making more in high ticket closing. But those companies like ZoomInfo are getting squeezed. Really hard right now. There's AI on this side of the spectrum and there's those blue collar, you can't AI these things. It's all that stuff in the middle, man, that's getting taken up. But great example for the guy that I just mentioned, he went into tech because he thought it was more stable, but it wasn't. And then he ended up back in high ticket. But what allowed him to do that and allowed him to get into tech in the first place is mastering the skill. Now he's a director of operations and makes, has like over a $200K a year base. And he started as a high ticket closer in our sales community. I'm not going to name drop, but You guys know, if you know who he is, you know who he is. That was like 3 years ago. So I would rather be the guy that knows how to sell and then I can take that door-to-door. Example, another example, solar. The solar stuff just got super messed up. There's so many people, there's a lot of companies going under, tax credit got pulled or whatever happened. But there's a lot of people with that skill now looking for the next thing. And I would so much rather be the dude with the skill that knows how to knock doors and close deals, get to the dinner table, close deals. That can plug into water filtration, pest, home securities, roofing, any of those other door-to-door things than going to school, going into a shit ton of debt, 6 figures of debt to be a dentist. And then you burn out of being a dentist and you're like, well, what else do I do? I have no option but to work this thing that I fricking despise. Right? And then you find yourself unhealthy, unhappy in the routine that you absolutely cannot stand, living a life that you do not want to live. And And I don't know about you guys, but optionality is really big for me. I hate to feel like I don't have options. You have to use your discernment to not always act upon options, but it's nice to know that you're in a good place for a strategic pivot if needed. There's some peace of mind there. Another thing that I like about sales is like, dude, you can compete in the market so much easier on skill and results than like the degree that you have, the school that you went to. If people are solely comparing you on who went to the best school and who has the flashiest degree, well, good luck getting into whatever company that is. And that's how some of these companies roll, you know? Now my stance grows even stronger if you're going into debt for school. And I'm not saying school, like college, is the worst thing ever, man. We need doctors, we need dentists, we need lawyers, we need engineers, we need all those people. And sales isn't for everybody. It wasn't for me in the beginning. But dude, if you're going to college for a communications degree, business administration degree, some sort of arts degree, unless you just have more money and time than you know what to do with, just get into the workforce, get paid to learn a high-income skill, put your head down for like 3 years. And I promise you, I promise you, you're gonna be glad you did it. When I first got into sales, I didn't know if it was gonna last. I just saw, oh, this one has a higher hourly rate. This one pays me $18 an hour and commission. Well, that's more than I get now. I literally got into sales because I was bamboozled into thinking that it was estimating. Estimating is like, hey, you need a new roof. I'll give you the price. Here it is. Let us know if you want to do it. After getting into that and not having deals come through, I was like, oh shit, like estimating is actually sales. Like the price doesn't sell itself, especially if you're not price gouging. So if you're going into debt, big debt, and you're going for a degree that's really not going to make a difference, like dude, business administration, talk about a career path that's just going to be completely obliterated by AI very soon. And if you feel like you're being pulled in a certain direction to be a business owner, to start providing sooner, to start gaining market experience, industry experience, go for the sales job, man, because you can always go back to college. But I promise if you get into a decent sales job, 1, 2 years, you're not going to want to go back to college because you're going to see it. The people Like right now, if I snap back to the degree that I got and that career path, that trajectory, if I would have stayed a project manager, I would be lucky to be making 6 figures right now. Because example, I was in construction science and management. Those are the types of industries where they don't even look at you for the promotion that is 6 figures or multi-6 figures until you're 10 years in. And not for any good reason. It's just like you haven't earned it yet. Now, construction science or For construction and home building and all these different types of construction companies, it's a different game. And you can definitely play the game right and earn well. I don't know about you guys. I wanted a good life while I'm young. I wanted to be able to travel and afford things and set myself up so I can start experiencing compound interest and get one of these before it hurts me to get in and out of it. What good is the race car, man, if you don't have friends to drive them with? If it hurts your knees to get in and out of it, if it's a manual and your body can't take it, man, like what good is all that stuff? Here's another one that might resonate with some of you guys. If you feel like you're always the guy that's like leading the pack, you don't have to be like the most outspoken leader, but like in the group projects, you're pulling a lot of weight. If your friends get together to do things, you're putting it all together, you're organizing, you're making sure everything goes smooth. If you're that kind of person that takes initiative to reach an outcome that's favorable to you, and you're going to do that whether you're in a corporate, like post-college job or doing something yourself, You're the type of person that will do well at this. Now, another characteristic that you might hope to have is risk tolerance, because if you have too low of a risk tolerance threshold, basically you don't like taking risk, you will struggle. And I was personally on the borderline of not liking taking that risk, but what allowed me to take the risk from my more corporate traditional sales job to the remote high-ticket sales space going straight into remote closing was I made so much money, more money than I knew what to do with in the corporate sales job at such a young age. I had over a year of living expenses, intentionally kept those really low, and it allowed me to fail and fail and fail and fail again. But honestly, within 6 months, dude, I was making 5 figures a month again after quitting my job. And I was earning in that time as well. But so going back to the whole winner's going to win thing, it really is true, man. In our community, I work with every single person that comes through one-on-one. Like I know their first name, last name, what they were doing before, where they're going, where they want to go, what role they landed, how much they're making. And like, I can tell really, really, really early on when someone's going to absolutely hit it out of the park or when they're not. And it has nothing to do with what school they went to. And surprisingly, it doesn't really have much to do with what sales experience they have either. We have to take into consideration the time value of money. The earlier we can get the money, the earlier we can get it working, The better it's going to compound, the less we have to work as humans later in our lives. And me personally, I don't like putting my outcome, the outcome of my life in somebody else's hands, in a business owner's hands. And you could argue there's a side of that with the remote setting or closing thing. But as a contractor, man, you got a lot more freedom and flexibility to do what you want, to jump ship, to join a new team, to stack offers. They legally cannot tell you what you can and can't do outside the time that you work with them. They can't tell you how much time it's supposed to take you to work their role. So again, to sum this up a little bit, if you suck at having agency and doing what you say you're going to do and chipping away at a seemingly never-ending task or job of trying to make this work, if you suck at handling the uncertainty, you have a very low risk tolerance, college might be for you. And I didn't even talk about the whole like alternative education thing, but I genuinely think like I have a full 4-year bachelor's degree. I've also invested, I don't know, probably more than like $30 grand into like courses, like online courses to learn things. I've ROI'd far more on the courses because it's like specific knowledge that I went and I knew I had this problem. I knew I had this hole to fill. I seeked it out. I evaluated the options. I pulled the trigger and I took action. College is like, Hey, your first 2 years, man, you have to pay us too for all these classes where we don't guarantee you anything. And we're going to teach you stuff that actually is probably going to confuse you because it has nothing to do with what you're actually here for. You're going to pay us a lot of money for that. We're not going to guarantee that. Actually, like you're going to go and you're going to talk about this with your friends in 5 years about how it was so stupid that we made you take all these classes where the whole time, man, if you wanted to be like, if I could do it over again, I went into construction science because my dad is military and I basically had a free ride. Which thankfully that was my scenario. I'd be a lot more pissed if I didn't have that, if I was in student debt. But dude, if I would have potentially gone into debt, I would have gone into debt starting a construction company, knowing what I knew then or thought I knew, right? Versus going and learning how to manage projects and calculate like structural loads and all this random stuff. Like I took a class, I took 2 classes on scheduling, scheduling construction projects and all those subcontractors and all that stuff. I would have rather just gone and like signed projects and learned how to schedule them from fucking up. So if you're here watching this college video and you're like, I kind of agree with what you're saying and I was kind of already on the fence, I feel like not liking college is not a hot take anymore. It's a take of people who are like high performers and don't like to leave their lives up to others. Then you're probably the same type of person that would like the performance-based remote 1099 sales stuff. So If you're at all interested in that, that's what we do. Been doing it since 2022. We've worked with over 500 people. I've worked, I don't know how many people I've worked one-on-one with, but it's hundreds. We're stacking up almost 100 $10,000 per month interviews. If you check out the playlist on my channel here, we have an annual in-person event where we have people come from all over the world. We're having our 4th one later this year. Get boats, dinners, speakers, some of the biggest names in the space. We're really good at what we do. And it's not because we do sales training. Our whole thing is like sales training doesn't get you hired. We do. It's because we pay special attention to where you're at, what you've got, where you want to be, the restrictions you might have, everything unique to you, your leverage and your lack of leverage. And we give you some targets. You pursue them ruthlessly. We supply the jobs. We post over 700 jobs per month, appointment setting or closing. Not the ones from Facebook, not from LinkedIn, not from Indeed. The stuff that if you were outside of our community, you're probably never gonna see it. Or if you do see it, it's too late. We have a recruiting team. We have a CS team, client success, multiple people. I'm in that team. And I mean, dude, this is one of the businesses that's allowed me to take sales, take the internship, take the funds that I built in sales, scale this up and live a life beyond my wildest dreams. And I'm not saying you need to start a similar business. You can, I don't care. We've had people do it, but I also started an agency and made multi-six figures profit, multi, multi-six figures profit in my first year running a sales agency. And it's because I had a late start into sales after college. But if I could have gotten those 4 years back, who knows where I'd be right now? I probably would not be making YouTube videos. Just keeping it real, man. I like making the videos. Sometimes I don't like to put everything out there online. Anyways, I just told you about our community that we run. If you're interested in that, go to the first link down below. If you're in college right now, we work with people that are in college. You can totally do this part-time. You could do it full-time. As long as you have some valuable schedule availability to a company, you present yourself well, you're fast. Maybe you got a connection or two. It's not that hard, man. Not rocket science. There's really only like 4 reasons why you can't figure this out. And a lot of those are just effort-based. Whether you have sales experience or any work experience at all. So don't go to college or go to college. If I helped you find out that you need to go to college through this video, go to college, dude. But college is not gonna save you. Nobody cares about your success as much as you do. Definitely not the people that are printing out the piece of paper and stamping the signature, not even signing it, man. They're stamping it. They don't care about you. I do. Me, I don't know you, but for the sake of this video, I'm trying to help you out here. Don't go into debt. Don't get a stupid degree because you're going to end up competing in the marketplace and you're going to end up competing for something stupid that doesn't pay you. That's going to get wiped out by AI. And I could just save you all that trouble right now by hopefully convincing you get a sales job. It doesn't even have to be sales, man. Get a highly sought after skill that you could work as a work in a company and then maybe start a company around that. It could be sales. It could be coding. It could be AI. It could be web design. A lot of those are getting eaten up by AI as well. But sales, man, like there's no AI that's doing what we're doing. And I don't think there will be anytime soon. So thank you guys for watching. Go down below, first link in the description, book a call, learn more about our community. And don't even think about it as sales, man. If you're just someone who, you know where you wanna be, but you don't know how you're gonna get there, but you know it requires money and a little bit of freedom, don't even worry about it being sales, book a call. Because if I could have given myself that advice, years ago, I would have jumped into sales sooner. I would have gotten where I'm at sooner. And I probably would have had other opportunities from that compounding happening earlier on. But I was the opposite of a sales guy and I'm not going to get into all that, but it was pretty painful for me in the beginning. So if you think it's, it's not your speed, it can be your speed if you want the outcome badly. And that's what I did. I can help you through it. So first link, book. See you next week.