Scaling Secrets: Unlocking the Entrepreneurial Mindset with Gary MacDermid

Rather than later. So, Gary, looking forward to it. Appreciate you being here again. Tell us if you would. I mean, I talked about some of it in your bio, but tell us a little bit about your journey, your entrepreneurial journey, if you would.

Yeah, so the entrepreneurial part of the journey happened a lot later than I probably would have liked it. As you mentioned, I was sort of encouraged strongly by my parents, my father, specifically to join the military when I was a senior in high school. And so it was kind of a little bit of a shock. Right. I was already working part time through most of college. And then when I was a senior in high school, my father basically woke me up one morning and said, you know, I got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that there's no money for college. The good news is that I have a plan. Get in the car, drove me to the recruiting station. Basically army, air Force, Navy, Marines, and engineering department. Transitioned from the Navy, was a consultant, did a lot of design and analysis work for nuclear power plants around that country. Specifically around that time was to harden the defenses of nuclear power plants to prevent against beyond design basis accidents of what happened in Fukushima. And so I did a lot of work with the electrical response for nuclear plants, then somehow decided to. You know, I was always worried if something happened to me, you know, would I be able to provide. So I figured out a way to basically take advice. I learned early in my Navy career, which was to buy real estate everywhere. You get stationed and you'll make more money than the Navy will ever pay. So I took what was kind of an amateur. Let's buy rental property and turn it into a professional business.

It's a unique financial services company started by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to not only provide premier bookkeeping, accounting, tax strategy, and prep services, but also to advise businesses in growth and exit planning. And that's why we have Gary on the show. Gary, welcome to Mr. Biz Radio.

Thank you, thank you. Excited to be a part of the show?

Yeah, absolutely. So I gotta tell you guys, we were just talking about this before we, we. We started the show here, but we had someone reschedule and our. And we had an opening open up and we're booked out. I want to say, I don't know, maybe two months, maybe two plus months. And we were anxious to get Gary on the show. So we were like, we were talking to his PR person, like, hey, you got to go out and sign Gary up, because we don't want to wait, you know, a couple of months to have him on we want to get him on sooner.

Take your pick. I recommend Navy so you could see the world. And that was sort of what led to most of my, the first half of my career. So did the Navy enlisted somehow got a scholarship where they allowed me to go to the University of Washington, got my electrical engineering engineering degree. Then I was a surface warfare officer in the nuclear field running the nuclear plants where I could replace my active income with passive income through real estate. Continued along doing that, then realized once I replaced my active income with passive income, that as an engineer doing complex things previously in nuclear power, that the real estate was somewhat simple. So I transitioned into investing in businesses as an angel investor because that's substantially more complex and a lot more risky. And the evolution of that just naturally helped me to realize that acquiring businesses similar to real estate, or acquiring passive income producing assets, that was the next phase. And so what I've been doing since then is partnering or acquiring businesses to consolidate them to improve or increase enterprise value so that at some point I can sell and, and I continue to do the real estate at the same time. So between buying businesses and real estate, that is sort of where my entrepreneurial journey has culminated right now. And I'm also helping other businesses kind of do other businesses or business owners do the same thing.

I love it. I love it. So I have to ask you on the real estate side, I assume you were buying, you buying single family, right?

So we buy single family a little bit different. We buy it like multifamily and that's. We're actually targeting specific areas or neighborhoods so that it's almost a little bit like insider trading when if you're expanding in one neighborhood and you have a house for sale or something that comes up, you already know with pretty good certainty what it's worth, what it will rent for. And the way that we do it is under a home ownership program. So it's similar. You may have heard of rent to own or lease options. We do that. And the premises that we help families that want to own but don't currently have the ability to get a mortgage. And so great income just, you know, some of the way that conventional folks are able. The conventional mortgages are designed to basically look at maybe a number or a FICO score, but not the complete picture of a person. We're able to basically help a family that may not be able to do it right now. And so that, that's how we do it. So it's not just buying one or two houses here or there. It's to actually target specific neighborhoods that we can grow and help that community with this model.

I love to hear that Gary and I actually did the same exact thing and it was kind of by accident. I didn't have a plan going in to do it but, but I bought it was in a kind of a residential area that was a condo condo association and I'd own a couple other properties that were very close to there and, and then I ended up buying one there and then there was another one for sale and then it ended up buying several in that community and then just right down the road was another sort of non condo like but townhomes. And I love the, the whole concept of it. Like you said, it's, it's, it is single family, but it's much more like a multifamily because you're in the same area. Again, you know, all the demographics, you know, again like you'd mentioned. I'm curious though, if you were, if you were doing that in your military career, do you, did you own places in a bunch of different cities? How'd you manage all that?

Right. So throughout the, the, my Navy career, I did buy a couple places that I was stationed, even one overseas and, and I used conventional property management at that time.

Okay.

Since then I started my own property management company and and were trained specifically on this model. But yeah, it was, was a little bit learning. It was more trial and error for me finding property managers, figuring out how to motivate them because sometimes there's an inherent conflict of interest if you're an investor and you have a property management company. A lot of times property management companies make more money in certain ways that are not aligned with the. If a property turns and they charge you a little bit more on the turn or for remarketing, that's not really in alignment with me. Wanted somebody that's in there that's going to stay and pay as an investor. So I had to learn all that. But I did try when I was given that advice to at least try to buy and acquire over time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Love it. Love it. Guys, we're gonna hit a break here, talking with Gary McDermott. Come back after the break and we're going to talk about mindset shifts. We need to have to be successful as well. If you would like to reach hundreds of thousands of business owners every week, Mr. Biz Radio can help. Our show airs globally seven days a week for more than 25 hours across several Internet radio stations, plus TW20 plus podcast platforms. Also video exposure on the new exclusive Mr. Biz Network streaming channel which gets blasted to 100 plus streaming platforms and the Mr. Biz YouTube channel and our 350,000 social media followers multiple times every week. Join Mr. Biz Nation as an advertiser.

By emailing us@infoisterbizsolutions.com Attention Mr. Biz Nation. We have an exclusive offer just for you. Get lifetime access to scarcity countdown timers and logic links for only $69. Yes, you heard it right, only $69. These tools will add urgency to your email campaigns and website pages, helping you increase conversions, sales and capture more leads. Don't miss this incredible opportunity. Visit getpulsetools.com now and take your business to new heights.

Check out all three of Mr. Biz's best selling books@mrbizbooks.com now, once again, here's Mr. Biz. Welcome back to the show again talking with Mr. Gary McDermott this week. And by the way, and we'll put this in the show notes as well. But you can follow Gary first of all, his website, Gary McDermott.com it's, it's, it's spelled well actually, if you're watching, you can see how he's got spelled. If you're listening, you can see it in the show notes. It's spelled maybe not exactly like you would think. So I want to make sure you get it right. And you can also follow him on LinkedIn and on Instagram on the gram. So here we had to kind of gotten the great, kind of soft a little bit there. But, but so I love the, the whole concept of what you mentioned and the whole property management. I had to ask that selfishly from my own experience because I got to the point where I owned, like I said, several different units and I was doing all property management. Now they were relatively close. They lived there were 20 minutes from where I lived. But it became a pain in the neck especially as my career continued to take off my corporate career. And so I'm balancing career and oh, by the way, starting a family and having children and oh, I got to go, you know, take care of a hot water tank and you know, those kind of things. And it got to the point where I was like, well, I either need to sell all these properties and get out of this or I need to hire a property management company. And I ran into the same things that you talked about. Gary. It's funny you mentioned, it's like you're reading my mind is I had a lot of difficulty and I had friends, I Had a few friends that were kind of colleagues, not really friends, but that I was talking to that owned properties and trying to get a decent property management company for the same reasons you're talking about is again some of the things that they may kind of accelerate or not things you want as an owner and trying to make sure you have that. And we even talked about exactly what you ended up doing is forming own property management company to manage these properties and then continuing to build out that portfolio. Ultimately what I decided was I just got out of it. It just became too cumbersome for me. Got out of it, still made a fair amount of money and I'm back in. I got back into real estate investing. Oh gosh, I don't know, five, six, seven years ago, I guess something like that with multifamily. So I invest in a fund basically that buys multifamily or specific multifamily property. So I'll own a piece of that property. Everything so completely passive. Love the passive income model for sure. And it's something that's super powerful. I think not, not a lot, a lot of people realize or recognize the, the value in that especially as you mentioned, sort of future planning and things like that. But Gary, I want to, I want to shift gears a little bit, you know, especially with your career and again, thank you for your service, I really appreciate that. But as a naval officer and a lot of different things you've done, I mean being an engineer as well and you nuclear power plants, I can't even imagine the stress and the pressure that you have in all those different things that you've done. What are some of those things that you've noticed that, that how mindset is super important to being successful and what are some of those shifts that you have seen that people really need to take to get to that next level?

Right. And mindset very powerful. What I, what I've learned is is that almost anything that you want to do in this world is, is mindset. It's, you know, maybe it's 80%. Even nuclear power is difficult as some of the complex engineering is 80% mindset, then the rest is knowledge, skills and abilities. And you can train the knowledge and skills and abilities, but you also need to look at the mindset and maybe even train in that there. When I meet, as I started reaching some success and talking to other successful people, the one thing that I realized is that the consistency of the mindset of a successful person that's accomplished a lot of things that's very solid and so I look back because I'm often asked like, well, how did you do this? How were you able to do that? And it's really like I could tell you the five steps on goal setting that I came up with that I had to kind of do as a system. But if I just gave somebody those five steps and said, this is how you do it. The mindset shift is usually something that's hidden. And that was kind of the thing that was, was, was difficult. It was to kind of reverse engineer that and figure it out. And so having done this and been asked this many times, now I'm confident to be able to say, at least through my journey, the, the ways that I can translate the three mindset shifts that I made. And then when I meet other folks, a lot of times they've had the same mindset shifts. They may just call it differently or describe it differently, but in reality for me, and a lot of this was, you know, the way I was raised as a. My father was an accountant and he was actually a military officer. So some of the ways that he disciplined me or trained me and my brother when we were younger, that actually what I realized now after the fact actually put some self limiting beliefs in me. I was kind of raised under what was called my father called the school of hard knocks. So he would line me and my brother up, he would, you know, just like in the military, fall in a ten hut, dress, right dress cover. And then me and my brother, we would have to recite things like, this is the school of hard knocks. There's no such thing as a free lunch. Life is not a bowl of cherries. Money doesn't grow on trees. And I realized that like what that did is it actually put a lot of self limiting beliefs. And so I'll just boil this down into the three things that I learned. You know, my mother used to tell me, you can do anything if you put your mind to it. And then when I started trying to realize like, that was not just an easy thing that you could just do. And so the three mindset shifts for me were. One of them was around visualization. So it's the matter of looking at, do you have to see it before you believe it, or do you have to believe it before you see it? That concept is you really have to visualize and believe that something's possible, believe that you can do it, and then you can see yourself doing it. If you don't believe it, how can you achieve it? That was the first mindset shift. The next one had to Do. My father was also, you know, as an accountant we would have budgets. There was a budget on the back of my closet door when I was growing up. And it would say things like how much we could spend on groceries, how much we could spend on the movie, occasionally, once, maybe a quarter or once every six months. Everything was scripted. So that actually is what I call the scarcity mindset. And so not to say that budgets are bad, but the next mindset shift was scarcity to abundance. Being able to embrace the fact that there is an abundance in this world, don't look and focus on the negativity and the shortcomings and there's, you know, you're paranoid because you think that there's not enough of something to go around. Embrace collaboration, partnership, not scarcity, competition. So that there's, you know, in a nutshell, scarcity, abundance. There's a lot of there that you could do. The next, the third mindset shift for me was position yourself for success. And that is, you know, just look at if you have a goal, be around people that are also like minded. You're the sum of the five people that you're, you surround yourself with. And so over time, as you achieve success or as you want to get to access, you have to change the people that you spend the time with and really position yourself if you want to achieve success, you be around the people that are most likely to give it to you or help you get it. And so curating your schedule, week in, week out, day in, day out, who you hang out with, who you associate with, that really in and of itself will make a big difference. And for me it was tough because I ended up having a transition from some friends over time that I was close with. But at the same time, the more time I spent with people that didn't, that weren't locked, set in the same things that I would, it would be prohibitive. So those are the three things, you know, visualization, you gotta believe it before you see it. Transition from scarcity to abundance and position yourself for success.

So I, I again, Gary, I feel like you, you're reading my mind. So I'm not making this up, I swear to you. My Gmail email address that I've had for, oh my gosh, probably 30 years is believe and achieve24gmail.com. So we, we line up 100 right there. And in my last, my most recent book, I talk about achieving big goals. And one of the things I talk about aligns exactly with what you're talking about with people. And that is to find, you know, be around, model expert behavior, be around people that are achieving big things. On the flip side, think about that. And I'm sure you agree with this. If you're hanging around with people that are doing drugs and drinking all the time, you're probably going to be, you're going to be doing drugs and drinking at some point, right? Because you're going to fit in with the crowd that you're hanging out with as opposed to being with really ambitious people that are having tons of success. You almost feel a little bit of a pressure like, hey, I hang out with these people. I need to up my game a little bit here. And I think that's super, super important. Again this week, guys, talking with Gary McDermott, going to hit a break here. We're going to come back and I promise we're going to talk about scaling. We're going to get into that. During this last third segment, how would you like to have direct access to Mr. Biz to help you run your business more profitably and more efficiently? At MrBizSolutions.com, you get live access to not only Mr. Biz, but also several of his hand picked and trusted business Experts, each with 20 plus years of experience to help you optimally manage and grow your business. That's just the start of where Mr. Biz Solutions begins. Learn more at MrBizSolutions.com that's Mr. MrBizSolutions.com.

Attention Mr. Biz Nation. We have an exclusive offer just for you. Get lifetime access to scarcity countdown timers and logic links for only $69. Yes, you heard it right. Only $69. These tools will add urgency to your email campaigns and website pages, helping you increase conversions, sales and capture more leads. Don't miss this incredible opportunity. Visit getpulsetools.com now and take your business to new heights.

Got a question for Mr. Biz. You want answered on air? Email it to info@mrbizsolutions.com now once again, here's Mr. Biz. All right, welcome back to the show. And I did promise this. So we're gonna get this, but we're gonna talk about scaling. So what are some of the things that we need to do when you're looking at scaling your business, growing your business and then maybe even a little bit further down the horizon when you're saying, okay, now that I've scaled, I've got my business to a certain point I need to start thinking about what's that look like to Maybe exit my business to sell the business in the future. Exit in whatever way it might be, whether that's selling, whether that's taking venture capital that route or maybe even succession plan, maybe someone, your, your son, your daughter is going to take over your business. What are some of the things you need to do that. So Gary, give us if you would, with your vast experience and all, a bunch of different things that I'm sure pull into this, your experience with some of those things that we need to look for when we're scaling, right?

So there, there's just like a plant, right? There's different things that you have to do as, as you grow and, and in a business it's, it's a lot of moving parts and, and so just even having a good idea that has the product market fit, that's a lot of times, you know, having the idea, having the market fit, having the people, having the tools, having all of those things at any given time can be a break point. One of those things that is off could be catastrophic. Not having enough money, not having the right people, not having the right tools, not having the system. So when you look at that, how do you do that so that you can build the business with the right in mind, with the exit in mind. So it's not to say that you have to have, you know, you have to sell it, right? It's at some point in time you are going to exit as a person. Whether you've transferred it to your children, whether you've transferred it to someone else for a monetary value, there is at some point in time a point when you will exit personally. And you need to have some idea of what that looks like or at least options of what that could be like. Because if you want to get to say like $100 million business versus a $1 million business or 2 million dollar lifestyle business, the amount of effort and the steps that you take will be drastically different. So with that said, some of the tips or some of the things that I've kind of looked at and at least make into a cheat sheet is coming from the nuclear power field, as we mentioned earlier, is that systems and processes and procedures are ingrained in everything that I do. Checklists and being an engineer, those are important. It's not to say that everybody needs to do a multi stage checklist for everything that you do. Where like you want to change a light bulb, you have a checklist and you circle a step you're on and you put an extra it, like we did in nuclear power, that might Be overkill. But what is important is to actually have something that's systematic so that if you want to take a vacation or you want to clone yourself or have somebody else duplicate what you do well, and then in turn, you have people on your team that need to be able to duplicate themselves and so on and so forth. You need to have systems. So systemize before you scale. It's easier to build systems when you have three people than it is to have 20 or 30 people. And then trying to build the system, and then people might disagree on how it should be or what it should be. Start small, build the system, assess the system, implement the system, and then have constant feedback. When you start with the system, it may change, and it should change as things grow and things break. So that's systems, very important. The next thing is, is the right people in the right seats. How many times have you met somebody that might have been in a role for 10 or 20 years and they may not have even known? Like, maybe you have somebody that's in quality assurance or a sales role, and maybe they're in quality assurance and they make mistakes, or maybe they should have been in sales or vice versa. You really need to understand what skill set, what the job description is, what talent, what profile, what personality profile is needed for that role. I myself, I'm an engineer, I'm an introvert. Should I really be in a sales role? Should I be talking to people all day long? Is that going to put more of a drain on me versus somebody that is naturally an extrovert and loves talking, connecting with people? Sometimes somebody can put a resume, apply for a position, and a job description because they want the job or they think they might be able to do it, but in reality they're not the fit. So once you've got the systems understanding with clarity, the role and what type of person or skill set is successful in that role is very important. And there's so many different tools out there. You can be exposed to a lot of people and have a good intuition about personalities and fits. You can use things like the disc assessment or other types of behavioral. Behavioral personality tests. Just as long as you understand that getting the right people in the right seats is a very important part of this. As you scale, the next thing is.

No, let me jump in real quick, Gary. So I love that, and the simple analogy I use when I'm trying to describe this to people is if you got a football team, you wouldn't all of a sudden put your kicker in a quarterback, right? Because you might have the best kicker in the, in the whole league, but he can't play quarterback, otherwise he'd be playing quarterback. He's good at being a kicker. Just like you wouldn't put your, your quarterback in and play, you know, nose tackle because he's, he's not the best nose tackle. That's why he's playing quarterback.

He's.

You gotta have those people in the right, you know, the right people in the right seats, as you said. And if you don't think about how catastrophic it would be for a football team to all of a sudden put their kicker in and say, hey, play quarterback for us, buddy. Like, it wouldn't, it wouldn't end well. And so, and I mean, maybe you're talking about high school or something like that. You could do that. But I'm talking about in the professional, you know, just the same way in your, in your company. I love the example you gave. You know, if you're in QA and you, you're not, you don't have attention to detail, et cetera, et cetera, you might be terrible at qa and someone might be quick to say, no, let's just get rid of him or her. They're terrible at their job. Well, maybe they're fantastic as a salesperson. Just in the wrong seat.

Right. So that's exactly it. And the other. Just to kind of reinforce one point to that, to kind of take that point home, is it maybe it's always tough. As an entrepreneur, you're wearing so many hats that sometimes when you envision a role, you envision it from the same lens as an entrepreneur. And the difference between hiring somebody is they may not be able to do all those roles that you're able to do. And you put a lot more energy, energy into doing all those roles that you probably should. So it's often good. Once you think that you have a job description for one of those roles, maybe make sure that it's not actually two or three different roles. And that's something that, that I've learned and when I get clarity. And that's why it helps to have a team that's also aligned with the roles. Setting up these roles, or maybe a business coach is to kind of help you to do that at the right level and break it up adequately. A couple other points with the scale. So once you have the systems and the people, also the financials becomes important. Know your real drivers. A lot of folks just focus on one, maybe the bottom line or the, the top line. You really got to understand all of it. You got to understand, you know, how it's divided. You know, maybe you have a system like profits first and then you have different budgets for marketing, sales and the different pillars, general administration. But just, you know, we don't have too much time to go into that. But the other part, once you get the systems and then the team is the finances and the projections. Cash flow management, very important. We touched on building with the exit in mind. So just have an idea. You know, are you running a lifestyle business? Do you have goals where you want to get $100 million business and then have some of those really large exit strategies that are possible? Or do you just like what you're. You really got to understand which direction you tend and, and that that helps describe, you know, to what degree do the systems and the tools and then technology as you scale will become more important. The other thing is just, you know, simplicity is easier to scale. Whether. So some of that is just focus. If you have one product or service, maybe focus on one or two, get some ground, then scale it. Don't just try to be the one stop shop. Or some customer says like, can you do this? And you're like, yes, I can do it. Because you want more customers having simplicity and focus, it's easier to simply. It's easier to scale something simple than it is something with too many moving parts. So those are basically five points. You know, the systems, the tools, the people, the right roles, the financials, understanding that forecasting cash flow management and then simplify to multiply.

I love it. I love it. One of the things I know, I know we're running out of time here, but I'll just mention real quick, I tell people all the time that then when they want to start this franchise and I tell them, you alluded this earlier, like you need to have location number one operating at a 10, a 10 out of 10. Because if you replicate a seven, a seven becomes a six, right? The next one's a six. And now you're replicating again. And then to your point, now you're trying to add systems on it, it just doesn't work. So unfortunately we're out of time here, Gary. But I absolutely appreciate you coming on the show. It's fantastic.

Well, thank you for having me. This is just so fun and exciting to talk about this and so many commonalities. I really appreciate the invite.

Yeah, absolutely, man. Guys, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Have a fantastic rest of your week. And don't forget, as always, cash flow is king. To become part of Mr. Biz Nation. Follow him on all social media platforms or never miss a show by going to mrbizradio.com if you prefer free video content, visit the Mr. Biz YouTube channel or check out his streaming channel, which is available on 100/ streaming platforms@mrbiznetwork.com.