How to Build a Business That Runs Without You - Aaron Young

What's the real outcome that you're building towards in your business? So my guest today is Aaron Young and he says that most founders never stop to answer that question.

What's the real outcome that you're building.

Towards in your business? And you know, if they don't answer this question, it's why people end up in this overworked and underpaid cycle in their business.

I know, I've been there before. Can you relate?

So today Aaron is going to break down how to design a company that runs without you. It creates freedom and it scales well beyond what your own personal time and energy is.

And this works for people who are.

Just starting companies or if you have.

One that has been established. He's going to lay out exactly what.

The principles are, how to do it, and back it up with tons of.

Stories, including one where he was actually.

Forced, literally forced to go away for 14 months and one week and he ended up making almost a million dollars.

In take home revenue without even being able to lift a finger and write an email that's business related or phone calls. So like, just think about that.

It's all possible.

Aaron's gonna break it down.

Enjoy it.

Let's dive in.

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Aaron, how are you doing, my friend? Thanks for joining me today.

Yeah, Joe, always. It's really fun to be here with you. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah, yeah, I mean we've been chatting and we met recently at a local event. Got a shout out. Greg Reed.

Thank you, Greg.

Yeah, he was Greg just on. Yep. Scott Duffy made it happen too. So couple people that were just on this podcast. So People are probably familiar with everybody.

Yeah, well, I've known Greg and Scott. I met them both in, I think, 2011.

Okay.

So I've known them for some time and I've had numerous interesting experiences and lots of referrals back and forth. And, you know, it's fun to be around movers and shakers, which is why I'm glad to be with you.

That's right, man. And thank you. Yeah, I'm happy to be included in that because that's in that room that Greg put together, you know, his prosperity camp, if anybody want to peek at it. It's tough to get in, though, so I can't make any promises. But yeah, talk about movers and shakers in that room. And, you know, everybody just doing fascinating things in different aspects too. Not all the same, but definitely laser focused in on whatever it is and there to help. And, you know, you and I connected there, but also had a good hour chat, I think it was last week, and I was like, oh, my gosh, there's so many cool stories that you have. You're. Your mindset of. I mean, the whole unshackled owner and this unshackled concept that you champion is kind of like the ethos of what I've have on this podcast is like, hey, it's up to you if you want to shackle yourself to your business, but if you don't want to and you still want to thrive and scale something awesome, then this is your man right here.

Yeah. You know, a lot of people, the thing about the. The book, and there it is over my shoulder, and hopefully you got a copy of it. When we did the book signing, I didn't.

I missed your. The signing. Yeah. We're on this show. We'll make sure it's all good. I'll get it.

The point is, I'm not. I didn't create that book to say you. If you want to be a real leader, if you want to be a real success, then you need to be unshackled. And that was not the point. The point was if you are a true entrepreneur, especially right, and you've got a million ideas and opportunities are always coming at you and you're trying to figure out, how do I figure out what to do with my time.

If you can get one thing going well.

And you've got predictable revenue, you've got. If you can build systems, if you can build a team that. That are capable of operating without you being there to look over everybody's shoulders. Right. If the team and the system is built and the culture exists that this is how we do things here. Think about Disney, you know, for years, when they got to a critical moment, they would say, what would Walt do? Even though Walt was long dead. Right? Because the culture was a certain way. So the idea of the book and the. And the training course that came before it.

This is the simplified version of the training course. Because the training. The training course. Well, I won't go into that right now. The point is, I built it. Say, if you want to be able to go on extended trips, if you want to have something that's easily sellable, if you want to have something that you can pass down, if you want to have something that can make you a lot of money without taking a lot of time, then here's a. Here's my formula for doing it. I'm not saying it's the formula. I'm saying it's my formula that has worked three dozen times on companies in all different industries.

This is possible. So unshackled doesn't mean retired, but it can. Unshackle doesn't mean unemployed. Could. If you want to own and not work, you could own stuff and not work there. Or it could be, I only want to do this one little sliver of my business. I don't want to have to be responsible for everything. I want to stay where I'm great. That's what this course is all about. And thankfully, thousands of people have let me know that it was working for them. And it's everybody from small companies, two, three, four employees, to big, big companies, public, big, publicly traded household name companies. Wow. And it's. Yeah, it's good. And it just proves that once you learn a formula.

I always talk about. Same rules apply. You know, once you know a formula, you can usually apply it all over the place. So anyway, that's a long answer to what's the deal with, you know, or what's unshackled? What's the concept? And the concept is you be in charge of you instead of the company owning you.

That's a big piece. Because that's where I feel like most entrepreneurs get in that trap of you are now owned by this machine you built, whatever it is, whatever flavor size. I mean, you mentioned Disney, and obviously most people aren't running a Disney company, but how does this relate to someone that's like. I wouldn't say just starting out, but maybe that too. But, you know, the smaller teams, the smaller companies.

Well, first of all, I've been chastised by a lot of my readers or people that have taken the course that I always say this is really for companies with employees. And I've had solopreneurs take the class and go why do you keep saying this? This is really helping me organize my one person business. So please quit saying it's not for individuals. You know, solopreneurs.

Cool.

What I will tell you is as you grow, if you have two or three people or 10 people or 20 or 50 or 1,000, the, the, the more these tools are implemented in these very dynamic. In.

These companies that are, that have lots of teams and so on, you can by, by getting some boundaries around stuff and getting a common language and a common reporting and a common outcome amongst the, the dynamic and, and large group. You see rapid improvement in those companies where for an individual it's, it's harder to change an individual's nature.

Sure.

Right. So you can teach them good principles. You can show them.

Here'S a recipe to use. But if, if it doesn't change their nature of how they want to do stuff, it's harder. Also in a one person company, it's difficult to be accountable to anybody.

That's true. It's very true. Yeah.

It's just me. Right. So there's nobody looking at it. It's only did it work or not work? Did I make money, not make money? Did I get my job done or not get my job done? So the way. But as it applies to big or small companies. To answer your question.

So funny. I didn't know we were going to end up talking about this, but I love talking about it.

Let's do it.

When you have. Okay. The most important thing somebody can learn that almost nobody does. Almost everybody ignores or is unaware of what I consider to be the single most important thing in starting or growing a company. The, the one most important thing is what's the outcome? Like what am I trying to get from this? Why am I putting my money into this? Why am I getting investor money? Why am I putting all my time in? Why am I taking on all this liability? Why am I hiring people? Why am I signing contracts? Like why am I doing this?

Why?

What is it I hope to get out of this deal? What's the outcome I'm, I'm making effort toward and taking risk with? Like why. You know how many people work their butts off and they're not making any money?

Yeah, that's true. Doing it to do it.

Yeah. Or they're just putting all their time in because, well, I got to make payroll. Got to pay my employees. Well, I've got, I've made all these commitments to clients and I'm going to finish it. Or I've spent 10 years developing this, this, these books or this system or this software, and I'm damn well going to get it out there. And nobody's buying it. Nobody wants it. Right. Nobody wants it. And people will beat their head against the wall. We at that same event you and I were at, Brian Tracy was there.

That's right.

And he gave an. A different example than I've heard him give. But I heard him many times over the years say the old Turkish proverb is, no matter how far you go down the wrong road, turn back, still.

Going to be the wrong road.

Yeah. And I look at people that are going, but I'm making such good time, you know, but they're making no money. There's zero money. But they're working their butts off. And to what end? They end up becoming a slave. What, they become shackled, they become indentured to the business. And I was never willing to live that life.

How do you feel like?

Because I feel like, you know, starting is, of course, it's probably easier to figure out what the outcome is because it's a little fresher and with less momentum. But let's talk to the people right now who are in the middle of this. They're feeling a little shackled to their business, to exactly what you just described. Like, how would you, how would you lead them right now?

Good question. And most people who end up. Now, I want to be clear to your audience, I'm not a consultant. I'm a guy who's been buying companies for 30 years. Over 30 years. I was starting companies before that. Then I had one big. In a three year period between 29 and 32 years old, had a big economic boost and about 32, 32 and a half. I started buying businesses. And I own Laughlin Associates because I bought it.

Yeah. It was 29 for our company. Yeah.

Yeah. 29 years old when I bought it.

Wow.

Right. So it wasn't new. And whenever, any, any day, any day, no matter where you are in the continuum of your business, you can say, okay, hold on, let's evaluate for a second. What was Steve Jobs? He said that.

If he, three or four days in a row would look in the mirror and think, I'm not looking forward to what I'm going to do today, he would say, then I knew I was off track. If I'm not enjoying this, if I'm not Having fun. If I'm not excited about this, then something's wrong. And most business owners I know and that I come in contact with are just kind of showing up again. It's like they're, they're not a business owner. Oh, this is a good designation. They're not a business owner. They are self employed. Right. They have a job, they're the boss. But if they don't show up and do the work, there's no business, there's no money, they don't get an income.

It's like the box I'm, I'm visualizing, it's like, oh, are you employed self? Yeah. Or do you want to put something else there? You know, is there.

Is your business your job or is your business an asset that makes money for you?

Yep, yep.

Right. Are you the goose lady laying the golden eggs or do you have a whole flock of geese that lay golden eggs? I have a flock of geese, yeah.

It's a mindset.

Right?

How does someone like in the middle.

Of it, it's, it sounds like it's a shift mentally. Right. So it's a. My, it's, it's a. Yeah, you gotta obviously shift with the mind and I guess your heart too, and connect the person, you know, you as the leader. But how, like, are there parts of this. Yeah, because you mentioned, you know, if there's predictable revenue, it's tough to turn off sometimes. Or even if you feel like you're pretty shackled, I would imagine, you know, you have systems. I don't know if there'd be enough systems going on. I'm just thinking, where is, would you start in one area of the business?

Well, you're going to probably start in the, in the area of the business where there's the greatest lack. Right. So if you don't have systems, if you're good at selling, you're good at transactions, but you're not good at building systems that make that start to make it possible to do more transactions and service more people. Then if you're really good at sales but you have no systems, then you need to look at your systems. If you're really good at systems and you're really good at sales but you have no customers, then you need to look at marketing. Right. If you have tons of clients coming at you and you've got systems, but you can't afford to hire people to bear the burden of the work, we're doing that right now. Laughlin, I went out, found a great contact for us, set up a really good with My team, a really good affiliation with a really successful company and we find ourselves now buried in work. We're scrambling. I've got the president of the company doing client intake calls, right?

Yeah, it's definitely buried then.

And so. And we're rapidly trying to hire, but because we're so buried, but because we all of a sudden went to double the amount of work in, in one day, it just turned on the faucet, right?

Yeah.

So now we're hiring and we're going, but who's going to train? Because everybody's on the phone working, Right. So what you always want to do is make. Always want to do is make sure.

And this is going to seem maybe a little counterintuitive to what I just said.

So take three steps back and let me tell you how you get ready to deal with the windfall like that. How you get ready to shift a little bit where you're going to or identify this new target or a specific target, and you're going to start going toward it. First thing I ask people, I have, I don't know, at least a dozen companies that I own somewhere between 5 and 20% of, and those are things I didn't start. They've come to me and said, will you help us? And we'll give you equity in the company for helping us and we'll pay you for helping us.

When I first look at, I would say a hundred percent of these companies, the first thing I look at and I go, okay, you don't have any surplus money, but I see that your, your books show. When I look at three years of financials or 12 months financials or whatever they've got, I see that you're taking a significant share or all of the profit of the company. Does that sound familiar to a small entrepreneurial business?

Absolutely.

Oh, we just got some money in. Finally. I can pay myself back or I can get a nicer car. I'm going to give myself a raise or I'm going to take that $20,000. It's just sitting there and pay down some debt or whatever, right?

Yeah.

Okay, that's cool, that's fine. But if you don't have anything left over, if you're just cash flowing it. Right?

Yeah.

How do you hire somebody to be.

Kind of every bit as good as you, but in a complimentary side? So I'm great at sales, but you're good at operations and I need you, but I have no money to pay you. Right. So my first question to those owners is always, are you ready to take a pay cut? Are you willing to take a pay cut? You know what they always say? No. They always say no. And they wonder why they're treading water.

Because they can't grow, because they haven't left any meat on the bone for somebody else. And so you're gonna, what you end up doing is going into a death spiral down because you pretty soon can't fulfill the sales you've made. You can't fulfill them as easily. You're not doing a good job with customer service. You're not renewing that customer a year later or whenever their, their engagement with you is over because you're so busy with other stuff. Your, you started out strong, but over the time you got less and less communicative because you were busy dealing with other problems. Right.

Or new. New. Yeah, new. New clients coming in. So you're forgetting about the old. Yeah, yeah.

You bite off more than you can chew and you can't afford to get the help you need, so you end up actually getting a worse reputation in the market instead of being this glowing success story. So the first thing is if you're today and you're going, okay, well, I've been treading water or I haven't been growing the way I want to grow. And something Aaron may have said made the hair go up on the back of my neck a little bit, like that was me. Then I would say, the first thing you do is say, what, what, what sacrifice are you willing to make for a short time to leave some money in the company to go, okay, what is the next thing I need in order to move up in, in the, you know, revenue, move up in profit, move up in adding another affiliate or adding a new, you know, demographic to who I'm trying to attract, Whatever it is, what, what am I willing to do? Am I willing to sell my nice car or turn it back in or when the lease is up, I'm not going to get another one and I'll go get a 5 or 6 year old car or 10 year old car that's still nice and not have a payment on it, have lower insurance.

And, and leave an extra thousand bucks a month in the company.

Yeah.

Am I able to not have this fancy office? I had this beautiful office one time. Beautiful half of a floor of the largest office building, 26th floor I had half and Prudential Security said half. They had all these people in cubicles. I had like seven people and half of a freaking floor. You could sit there and, you know, putt across football game it was this stupidest ego thing I ever did because I always wanted to have my name on the big old door, come up, way up in the tower elevator, get off there. Company. There's a beautiful reception and a beautiful receptionist sitting behind the desk. And guess what? I got all of it. I got all of it. My name on the door. This beautiful young woman, Kylie. I remember this. She looked like a model, super cool girl, 20 years old or something, answering the phones, greeting people when they came in, then they'd come in. I had this giant office with a conference table in it and the. You know, the whole wall. Huge. I mean, a big room, all windows looking out at the mountains and the cityscape. Well, it was. It was absolutely stupid that I did that.

Yeah. What did it get you?

Nothing. It got me a big old bill. Got me a big fat lease bill every month.

Yeah.

And about three years into it, I thought, what the hell am I doing? I checked the box. I had my name on the door. I had the whole setup. And we ended up subletting the space, getting out from under it. And from then on, I thought, I never need that again. And look where I'm sitting. I'm sitting in my beach house, you know, in our little library here with.

The pig and where you live. Right? Like, it's not. Yeah. Like, yeah, we've.

This has been. We built this house here at the beach 24 years ago and. And always had a house in town. Well, in the suburbs. And then we'd come here and hang out for a month at a time or a week at a time or whatever. Matter of fact, the idea for Unshackled came here because we stayed for six weeks one summer, and after a while, people were going, how are you still there? How can you still be there?

Well, that's what I want to get at is like, yeah, let's go for it.

I'm telling stories, and maybe I'm not getting to your meat.

No, no, you're great. Because I think this is. It's relating to what people experience, and I think that's the big thing, because you definitely have. You know, I want to talk about some of the, you know, the bits of Maybe the frameworks that count. But I want to make sure that you also go deeper into how this proves out. You know, you said the ultimate proof of concept. You have an interesting story there. Beach House is six weeks is one thing, but how about 14 months and a week?

Oh, yeah. Well, if you want to go. If you want to go there right now, I Can definitely do it. So let me just say this.

Yeah.

I had had this long run of. Of pretty good successes, right? And. And we. We purchased Laughlin.

In August of 2001. We had purchased the land that this house sits on in 2001. Got the permits. I designed the house on a yellow pad and gave it to an architect to do it. But I said, here's the house we want.

Cool.

They built the house. Now it's. It's December 2002. And we had a tradition for many, many, many years of renting a house and coming down on Christmas afternoon. So later in the day on December 25, and staying for as many days as we could afford or justify. You started out early in our marriage at two or three nights, and then it kind of got to be like four or five or six nights. And so anyway, we were staying two doors up, and I woke up on the morning of the 26th, and I came outside. This was when I bought it. And there was the land, and we bought the land. And now it's the next Christmas, 2002. First time staying in our beach house. We just got the keys. It's done. And I'm standing upstairs looking out of the Ocean, December 27, 2002. And I get a call from the receptionist at Prudential securities, because my big office downtown. And she says, erin, call your office. And I thought, well, that's never happened before. I knew the lady. She was super nice lady, yeah, call your office. So I said, okay. I said, what's the matter? She goes, just call. So I call. And instead of Kylie, that young woman I just described a minute ago, I get Special Agent in charge, somebody from the FBI answering the phone. And I said, what's going on? And they said, we're exercising a search warrant. I said, is it about me or my companies? No, it's about this customer of yours that you've been doing business with. You. We used to do business. We hadn't for two years at that point. We'd stopped working with them on the last day of 1999. So now it's almost 2003. So we've gone all of 2000, 2001, 2002, not work. So three years.

And the reason I stopped working with them is because I had concerns about some of his. His activities. I was observing. I never saw anything illegal, but I saw stuff that was sneaky. And I thought, maybe it's time to just back off of this. Still really liked him. I admired him, but just thought, we better back off. And.

Still like him to this day, actually. So I haven't talked to him for years, but I still think he's an interesting guy. Anyway.

They wanted to drill the safe. They were. They wanted me to give them the combination. I said I didn't want to give them the combination. They said, we'll just drill it. I said, well, am I. Am I part of this? No, not at all. I said, give me two hours. I'll drive into town and I'll open it for you. Which we did. And my wife, to her credit, said, don't call your lawyer. I'm like, it's not about us. This is. I. I'm not surprised that this is happening, and it's not about me. We haven't done anything wrong. If I go talk to the people, open the safe, they're very polite, very apologetic. We have very limited conversation. They did ask me two or three questions about, do you know this logo? Do you know this signature? Do you know who this person is? And they were all his general manager, his company's logo, you know, whatever that. Like, nothing.

Yeah.

Four months later, I get indicted on conspiracy. And in a conspiracy charge, I thought it meant we conspired. The government explained, no, conspiracy is. You had to have materially assisted. Even if you didn't know about a crime, if you did something that in some way helped, then you can be indicted on conspiracy.

That's so broad.

Yeah, yeah. And we had formed companies for law firms who were. He was working with for their clients, Nevada companies. Nothing illegal. The judge said that throughout the case. But there's nothing illegal about that, is there? But the government especially. This was an IRS case. So it's the doj, the, the FBI, and the criminal enforcement of the IRS doing the investigation. We.

Fought the case three and a half years. Ran out of money, spent about $2 million in legal fees, ran out of money. The lawyers tried to get out of the case. My lawyers. And the judge said, no.

You can't get out. And they said, well, you can't pay us. We're like, too bad you're in. So that was where I got the clever idea to then play chicken with the government and just say, we're going to trial, we're going to trial. Nope, nope. No plea bargain. I'm going to trial now. Before that, I was considering plea offers that I thought were too big, and they started at seven years and were trying to work their way down. Finally, I said, I'm going to go to trial. I don't care. I don't care how long it takes. I didn't do anything wrong. And scared to death.

Yeah.

Freaking out inside, trying to be tough outside, like a total disaster inside.

Anyway, that got everybody's attention. All of a sudden, DOJ, you know, went down, said, how about 36 months? And I thought, okay, at this point, 36 months, you end up doing like a little less than 30 months, you know, because of good time and the way they calculate so that we just need to end this. It's taking over my whole life. Can't focus on anything. They didn't want my business. They didn't want. They never froze bank accounts, never took a passport. There was no fraud, there was no restitution. Nobody lost any money. It was just this weird deal. So we did the plea bargain, we went sentencing, the judge reduced it down even further to 18 months, which means you actually serve 14 months in a week in minimum security is what it. And then you have a little halfway house time and then you're done. There's way more to the story, but for the interest of time, I will just say that off I went and so did my business partner for 14 months and change to prison. You can't have one phone call about business. Can't talk business at all. Can't write letters about business.

Really can't even.

There was no email at that point. There is now, but even then, everything's monitored. No business. You cannot do any business.

Wow, I didn't know that. Okay.

No phone call, no. No meetings, no nothing. No nothing. If your system doesn't work without you, it'll all just die.

Right.

Thankfully, the same principles that I teach about we do in our companies. It's not this fluffy conceptual thing. This is what I've been doing for 40 years in business. Yeah, Right. And so.

You said ultimate proof of concept.

Yeah.

When you can go to prison. And my take home pay for that full year I was in prison was $974,000. So if you can do that now. I'm not saying this just magically happened. We had a team of people in place. We left my wife as the. As the president.

Speaks volumes about my wife. Because we had the founder of WebMD and the CFO of Intel, who are my friend and my partner's friend, both say they would be. They would look over the company for us, take care of it. Didn't want any money, just as a solidarity thing would help us.

Yeah.

My partner said the person I would most like to be left in charge, if she's willing, was my stay at home wife. Stay at Home, mom, wife with a bunch of little kids.

Yeah, yeah.

And she did. And to her credit, she did a very good job of keeping track of stuff and making some hard decisions against very challenging odds.

Yeah.

The point is the system. She didn't know how to need to know everything about the company because the system was built, the team was built. She just had to be there to go, you know, who's going to sign the big check to the irs? We had a tax bill. And I remember her talking to me on the prison phone and saying, it's like, you know, $400,000. I mean, does that sound right before I sign this check? You know, it's pretty important, you know, but she was. She had the presence of mind and the maturity and the intelligence to look at things and go, that seems like maybe we could change this. Or I don't think they're actually doing what they're supposed to be doing, you know, because the system was built and she was smart enough to be able to read the, read the, the documents and understand what's going on.

I'm going to pause this really fast and shout out a podcast that you should go follow. It's called the Science of Scaling. It's hosted by Mark Roberge, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the reason why I like this show is that each week Mark Roberge, the host, sits down with leaders in business and talks about scaling properly. So I like Mark because he is in the trenches. He is the founding CRO of HubSpot, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. He's a co founder of Stage 2 Capital, and he's diving into these secrets, the strategies, all these tactics of how to properly grow with people that are.

Doing it right now.

What I found is most companies, when they're growing, they either do the wrong things to grow or they do the right things in the wrong order. And that's what I gather from these episodes.

So it's a great way to straighten all that up.

So go listen to Science of Scaling.

Wherever you get your podcast.

Too many business owners hit a ceiling because they can't clone themselves. That's exactly what we do at AI Build Team. We build AI Digital twins, which are basically smart clones of you that know your expertise, they sound like you, and they help scale your reach to a bigger audience. So instead of repeating yourself or even missing opportunities, your AI twin becomes your always on educator, salesperson, even content creator, and a ton more. If you want to see this in Action. Go to AI Build Team AI slash Joe. You can chat with my AI twin right now. Again, that is AI Build Team AI slash Joe.

So I did. I'm not saying that I magically did this alone, but if you leave all your people and you've been the only one with the keys to the kingdom, you're the one. You've always been the end, the last word. Your. Your machine can fall apart very quickly or get stolen away from you.

Right. Yeah. So, I mean, you. It had to be set up prior to all this. And I mean, it's just fascinating. Yeah. It's the fact that you literally had your hands tied, you know, in all ways, and you had no way. The fact that it all ran and it's still around it. You were. Yeah.

Over $900,000 partnership didn't get ruined. The marriage didn't get ruined. The employees stayed on. I. I had two. My two vice presidents threatened that you can either be a witness or you could be a co conspirator. They were both threatened with jail time by grand juries. They still work for me today, all these years later.

Interesting.

Wow. Yeah. The law firms, the account. We didn't lose anybody because we'd built a good reputation. But the system had to work. And I know we're getting short on time. Do you have any clarifying questions or do you want any specific bullet points?

Yeah, I'm curious.

On. Well, I'm thinking of like, with that 14 months in a week. Like what? Did you have any big aha thing? I mean, I figured you just had so much time to kind of just, you know, marinate on what has been. But did anything new fresh come out that. That you're applying to your life still?

Well, let me give you the downer message. Okay.

That's okay, too. Yeah.

I wasn't afraid to drive in that day in 2002 because I believed that my behavior had been legal in alignment, not in the gray areas. Actually bending over backwards to tell people these are the rules. You know, you're doing this thing, and here's a white paper that talks about. This is after tax, or this is how you have to report, or here's a form you need to fill out. Right. I. We did all that stuff, and it was all in the 400 boxes of discovery. The downer thing, I learned there was.

I learned that I couldn't just trust my government anymore, that I needed to be.

That was another angle that I hadn't considered that could come after me or hurt me for things that even they Said, we know you didn't know about the crime.

It's just part of the system. Right. It's just something that. Yeah.

And it was never about this man, this human. It was a file that was moving on a conveyor belt. Nobody was trying to be mean to me. It was. I was a name with. Connected to a thing in a file. The file had to be completed. The completion put me into a place. And. And then when it was over, they're like, hey, we're glad, you know, glad you landed on your feet, glad everything worked out okay. You know, And. And so that was the big thing I learned. The other thing I learned was.

When you, when you've done the work to get yourself organized, to not only have a good team, but empower the team. Let them, even if they don't have legal ownership, have emotional ownership and a say so that they become creative and innovative and collaborative with one another, so that they. They want to give you. I heard a guy named Keith Cunningham say one time, we've done some work together, and he said, he said, when you hire people, you hire their arms and legs. The goal is to win their heads and their hearts. And I've strived to do that. That's why our average tenure of our employees is over 14 years. People stay working for us. I've got my. My VP of Operations. Been almost 36 years with us.

Dang, that says something right there.

And he's brilliant and he keeps giving his all. He's not bored, he's not marking time because he knows he has tremendous freedom to. To do things, to innovate. And, and when you have people, people that trust each other, they come up with their own ideas and they figure out things you would have never thought of. And they come back to say, what about this? And you go, I love it. What do you want me to do? Do this. Okay, cool. Let's go. You know, and when you have that kind of an environment.

It can survive, even thrive through all the ups and downs. Just at Laughlin, I've had the dot com bubble bursting. I've had the real estate growth, you know, from all the, all the incentives, low interest rates. That happened.

Oh, yeah.

After the dot com bubble burst. Then the real estate marketing burst. I had, I just had come off of Y2K with all my other companies, you know, because I've been doing this since 97.

Yeah. Wow.

Right?

Yeah.

So I'd gone through Black Monday. I've been through all that stuff. I've been through the COVID I've Been through, been through all this stuff over the years. And you know what, if you have a good system and you have good people, you will just ride the waves. And the other thing I'll leave for your listeners.

Yeah.

Part of what I've decided was I'm going to be the biggest recipient of value from these things I build. I'm going to get rich doing this. And I have, I have done that. And.

When we had the 08 crash.

We looked at, we lost about two thirds of our revenue in, in a year.

My partner and I were by far the highest paid people in the company. We made a decision to take a 75 pay cut, right?

Yeah.

And not fire anybody, not let anybody go. Wow. Cool.

Cool.

We quit doing the match on the 401k, but we kept, but we kept paying health insurance, kept doing all that. We both ended up short selling our homes.

Right. Because we took a big pay cut.

Yeah.

Everybody was down in 9, 10. The end of 8. 9 and 10 were bad years in business. Unless you had a bunch of cash, you were buying everything. But for people like us who were counting on all these business owners that we did services for, we just went like, somebody turned off the spigot. Right.

Jeez. Yeah.

But guess what happened in 11. Business started coming back and the team was there and could receive and you know what people that you hold on to and they know the revenues in the toilet, but you keep them employed. Do you think those people feel loyal? Oh, yeah.

Oh, man, yeah. Oh, yeah.

And when that business comes in, they're ready. And if they need to work late or come in on a Saturday, they do it. And, and as things came back, we took more money again. And you know, if, if you treat your team, your company.

Not as your.

Like your obligation or your, your pain in the butt responsibility, but as important assets that you want. Like a machine that you're going to keep it oiled up and you're going to keep it mate. You're going to do maintenance on it. You're going to make sure it works. You treat your employees like your most important asset in the company.

You'll. You'll be able to survive over years. I'm now.

How many years? 40. I started in 1983. So 42 years of making a payroll.

There you go.

That's real employees. That's not me selling some shit. That's me with employees on W2 paychecks.

Right. That's not just working for yourself too.

And so you can do it over time.

Right? Systems, right mindset, Right. Partners, my life partner and my business partner have been great and. And.

Work towards a specific outcome. If you know where you're going, it's much easier to get there. If you kind of know generally where you want to go, you end up groping around blind in the forest.

Someone else is probably leading you, right?

Well, no, I'm saying if you don't. Well, you might be blown around by different ideas, but if you know. If you know what the outcome is. That's what I said earlier in this interview. Know what the outcome is, why are you doing it, and what's the reward you plan to get? Not just then, but along the way. Right. What's the reward you get for the risk you're taking? If you. If you think that way, you will make very rapid progress to the outcome because you know exactly where you're going. You don't even look at other crap that gets in the way. You don't worry about all the extraneous ideas. I've got this big idea. No, no, no. You're here, you're focused. And when this thing works like a Swiss watch, it's just. It's a machine. Then you can go, if you're set up right, with, like, unshackled now, you can do this, the next thing. And once you have this one working where your foundation is solid, you can get involved in all kinds of cool stuff and take more risk because your foundation is taken care of. And people get too diverted by too many things. I always say get one thing really working well before you do the next one.

So is that why you refer to Laughlin? Because it is that one thing, right? It's that one that you've kind of had for, what do you say, 29 years, that.

30 years. I bought it. 29 years. I've had it for 24 years.

Okay.

Almost exactly. Because we bought it in August, so I think next week It'll be the 24th year.

Cool. So, yeah.

And that's the one consistent thing.

But you also own percentages of all these other companies.

I make money from a lot of companies and I. And I make a lot of money speaking. And so I'm. Laughlin is the thing most people know me for. It's not always my most valuable thing I'm doing.

But it is solid and I get to meet a lot of cool people. You know, I met Duffy and Greg Reed, Scott Duffy and Greg Reed, because I was out speaking on behalf of Laughlin at an event. All three of us were speakers. That's how I met Them.

And that's the thing. It's like, yeah, if you can generate or create one thing that then almost creates its own little ecosystem of referrals and networks. Because I know you're a big referral guy, deal maker. But then, like, it presents opportunities. Like you said, you're given equity percentage. And what you play, you, you call yourself, you're always in the chairman role. Right. Or something that's not on the org chart. Like you're not, you're not being called on day to day.

I'm at the top of the org chart. I'm the chairman of the board. Yep. We always have to have a president or, or general manager. Whoever the boss is, you're reporting, they're reporting to you. Yeah, Right. And then you have your lieutenants or your generals, whatever you want to call them, and then you have your org chart. Do you have time for me to give you a couple things for people to take away?

Please?

Yeah, let's. Let's do it.

All right, Let me give you the seven critical steps that I teach in unshackled. Okay, sure. The first one is begin with the end in mind. Define in, in nauseating detail exactly what life will be for you when you hit that goal. I mean, where do you live, how much money's in the bank, who are you hanging out with? What does the company look like? Just what is it? And you will, if you keep your eye on that. And you read that vision statement every day. You got to keep it short, keep it to one page, record it so you can hear the whole thing in two and a half minutes, you know, but your subconscious will live there.

Your subconscious doesn't know the difference between real and imagined.

True.

Right. That's why we jump when the shark comes up. And Jaws. Right. We're in a movie theater in our house. We know there's no shark logically, but are subconscious is in the moment and believes the shark is real. So we react. If you can keep your subconscious mind just fixed every day on this outcome, you will start getting it very fast. Number two, what am I great at? What do I suck at? Okay, so I'm only going to do stuff I'm good at. Anything I'm crummy at, I got to get somebody else to do it. And maybe it's part time, maybe it's a consultant, maybe it's a va. I don't know. But stay in your freaking lane because if you try to do a bunch of stuff you suck at, you're. You're going to quit. Doing what you're good at. And you're going to probably make a lot of mistakes with things you should never be touching. Like, I should never touch accounting or information. You know it. I should never touch it. I should not try to mess with my. I shouldn't set up my email in my computer. I suck at this stuff. But I know where I'm great. I'm a good presenter, I'm a good speaker, I'm a good, I make good deals. I'm good at biz dev, I'm good at that. I'm good at seeing the big picture. Stay there. That's where I stay. That's number two. Three is design the company on an org chart.

So that it describes. It demonstrates the company at the time of hitting the goal, not what it is today. But it's like if you're going to set up a baseball team, you know you need at least nine players, right? So if you say, well, okay, I have a pitcher, that's what I've. Or I've got a right fielder. Okay, put them on there. But I know I need a pitcher, catcher, first, second, third, shortstop. And I, and I need left and center field as well, right? I need these nine things. I only have one of them right now. So then as I'm going along, I'm going to go, okay, if the nine or the eight missing pieces, what's the most important one to add now? And then you fill that. So you're always looking at going, I know I'm going to need basically this thing and I only have these three pieces. Of these 20, what's the next right? Higher. What's the next right move? When you. I had the guy running M and A for Boeing who took the course and he said, aaron, I learned about org charts in high school, in undergrad, in grad school, and I use them every day buying and selling companies with Boeing. Nobody ever taught me how to use an org chart like that.

Wow.

It makes perfect sense.

You're starting with the ending goal or in mind every build, the company, the outcome.

It's all. Number three is use a formula that Stephen Covey taught me. DGRAC Desired results, guidelines, resources, accountability and consequences. If your job description is, here's the desired result, here are your guidelines, here are the resources we provide, here's how you're going to show accountability, reports, meetings, whatever, and here's consequences for success and failure.

Then anytime you're dealing with your, your team member, you go, let's go back to your job description. Read it to me. Where what's going on based on what I'm seeing and what's in the job description. Oh, yeah, right there. Okay, so what do you. What do you need to do about that now? I'm not going to tell you what to do. What are you going to do about this problem?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm going to do this. Okay. That's acceptable. Consequences for success could be more money, title, promotion, consequence of failure. Could be retraining, repositioning in the company, could be replacing them, could be firing them. Number four, you want to talk about having scoreboards so that everybody on the whole team knows every day how we're doing? We always know individually and collectively how we're doing. Number five, we talk about building an intentional culture, not an organic culture. Organic culture will always go to the lowest common denominator. It'll be the worst complainer, gossiper, pain in the ass in the company.

Yep.

You will go down if you have an intentional culture. This is how we do it. This is why we do it. This is how we treat each other. This is how we treat the client. This is why what we do matters. This, and we get the. Get the employees involved in it and demonstrating it and giving awards and giving acknowledgement based on our culture. I'll tell you what, people that come into the culture and are not a good fit will leave. Doesn't matter how good they are at the job, they'll leave. They won't feel comfortable. And once you build the culture, you don't need to be there anymore because the team goes, well, that's not how we do it. We do it like this. We talk to each other like this. We show up for the client like this. We use words like this. We fulfill our promises like this. You don't need to babysit anymore because it's ingrained. And the people that are there want to be there because they like it. Right?

Right.

Then you need to understand your financials, your balance sheet, your statement of cash flow, and your P and L. And you need two P Ls. One that's the regular P and L that you're using for taxes. And one is the reality check P and L that shows all the below the line stuff that you, as the owner, get. Your cell phone, you know, your loans, your car allowance, you know, the gas that you're. You have travel, all the things you're getting and benefiting from, that you really love that you're getting from the company. But you need a reality check that you look at and go, am I taking too Much out.

Yeah. So. So when you're ready for that windfall, right, you have the cash flow. Back to what you said earlier.

The last part is empowering your management team so that they can function without you always knocking them off at the knees. You know, if you cut them off at the knees all the time, pretty soon they will just wait for you to tell them what to do. If you celebrate risk, celebrate mistakes, learn from the mistakes, don't keep repeating them over and over, but have a, a culture that says, hey, I'm so glad you tried something different. Remember this, folks, the only way to give exceptional service is to make exceptions.

Yeah.

That means your team has to have the permission to make an exception.

Think about that.

Most companies don't let their people. They, they. If you don't follow the process, the SOP or whatever, you're in trouble. I'm like, no, if you can solve a problem right now, do it. If I don't like your solution, we'll go back and evaluate. Was your solution better than mine? Maybe we should change our process or procedure or. Thanks for doing that. Here's why I want to keep it this way. Here's some of the results that could, could happen from the choice. But good for you for trying. Good for you for solving the problem. So let's evaluate, talk about it. Make it into a learning moment for everybody of how we can improve, either change our processes or reinforce our processes. But if you're too egotistical to think you're the only one that knows what the hell's going on, you're never going to have good people with you. You're always going to have a crummy.

Group, and that's where you got to get that longevity. Like you said, they're going to go with you on the ups and downs, throughout it all. Like the person you have there for what, 37 yards, 36 years. Brent, there you go.

He's our chief strategy guy. He's the one that all the lawyers, all the accountants, all the investment funds, everybody's like, I know I have this rep, but I can still talk to Brent. Right?

That's it. You need to have multiple of those, but at least one. I mean, that just shows the culture's tight. And yeah, can weather literally any storm. So I think, Aaron, this is awesome. I'm going to be. I'm going to deep dive into unshackled. Get the book, by the way. And actually, how do people get the book and then also go deeper with what you got.

My encouragement would be, you could certainly go to Amazon and buy it. I always encourage people to go to Barnes and Noble and that's for maybe a silly reason. I think it's cool that we still have at least one major book chain out there. You can go in and look at books and flip through stuff and.

And you're going to probably pay two or three more dollars at Barnes and Noble than you will at Amazon. I love Amazon. I work with Amazon. Amazon uses the software based on Unshackled in their medical division.

That's right.

That's one of my. Their chief medical officer is one of our students.

So I love Amazon. Buy from Amazon, but I like Barnes and Noble. Plus Barnes and Noble has me on a book tour right now, so I want to support them. I like that they're the last company standing as a major bookseller.

Major book. Yeah. So go in there if you want to see some books. Touchbooks, get it in Barnes and Noble. Cool. What's your website, though? Just so people are, they can go.

To Laughlin USA and if they want to connect with me or the team or ask a question or find out about the course or find out about what other services. Because we're, we're a major asset protection company. You know, we're, we're, we've been all these years helping people not only start a business, but protect their business. Right. And so then just write to me@Aaron YounglinUSA.com Cool.

Aaron, this is, this is so cool. And thanks for being so open too and giving with stories, lessons and all that. Last thing, like, what do you, what are you most excited for in, like the years to come? And we'll just like kind of wrap on this.

I'm very involved with several companies in crypto, in AI and in advanced wound care. And I'm working at very, very high levels on all three of those industries. And.

I'm so excited to see, to be witnessing. And you're, of course, you're AI, right? So you know this. I'm so excited to be witness to a fundamental shift in how the world is going to work, how money works, how businesses grow, how information is accessed and distributed.

Quantum computing. I'm not involved with that, but I'm thrilled that the industries I'm involved in will all be significantly impacted by quantum computing. That I'm 61. My dad and mom both died at 80 years old. Okay.

My doctor just told me, he said unless you step out in front of a bus or do some crazy, get in some terrible accident, the odds of you living a very Highly productive active life over a hundred years old is, is in your, you're going to have that if you just don't do something so dumb that you kill yourself. But health wise we're going to be. Cancer will be cured. These, you know, heart disease, all this stuff is, they'll be able to drop microbots in and fix things. You're not gonna have to cut your body open for most kind of repairs.

I mean the world is such an exciting place. And if you've, if you position yourself where you become successful enough to get invited into rooms where a higher level of conversation is taking place and then if you're successful enough there to go to the next level, you know, there's always another. I have two good friends who are part of the World Economic Forum who've built massive multibillion dollar companies and I'm not invited to that room yet, but I'm hanging out with them, right? And I'm, I see opportunities where I'm going to get into that even higher level conversation. It starts by getting something working well enough that you get freedom and you have some, a little bit of money. You don't need to be real rich. You need to have enough curiosity about the world and enough money to be able to leave day to day and do something else that you start to elevate and the world becomes much more interesting and much smaller. And the people that, you know where there's big crossover, you know.

When I introduced the chief medical officer at Amazon, one of the big, the biggest seller in the world, one of the biggest companies to the guy that created telemedicine and, and built his company to $34 billion in annual revenue. When I was able to put those two guys together and they were both going, you know him, you know him. I'm like, I do know him. And the only reason is because I got my act together so I had time to go do other more interesting things, meet interesting people, get out into the me into the world, show up in front of humans, don't just be online all the time, tell I know you. Because we both went somewhere and stood face to face, eye to eye and talked. That's right. If I could give one piece of encouragement is what my dad always taught me. That was a great sales guy and beloved. And I said, what's the trick? All these people respect you so much, dad. And he said you got to get out and see the people.

Go out to say something to offer in the conversation. You'll be amazed at how big your life gets and how fast?

Ain't that the truth? That's how I created my business from the very beginning is like, I'm just going to go to conferences and start talking with people, and that's literally all I did. And, you know, went into debt for it. Always the goal is that I just want to break even on this trip, get one client, whatever it might be. You know, that was my target and just kept stacking. But to this day, yeah, you can't live behind your computer. They all. And with AI, you know, it gets.

So easy to just get all the information.

But, you know, the human connection, that's what I'm talking about all the time is.

And you got to. And you got to challenge what you got from A.I.

True.

Because I've had two different magazines write articles about me. 90% of it was right. 10% of it was like, who are they talking about? That's not me, that's somebody else. That's. They're not. They're saying, I did this, I did not do that. I had nothing. And I'm talking about. Started this company or went to school here or whatever. It's like.

There'S a father and son, Aaron Young, out there who are both in prison for the rest of their lives for murder. There's a football player named Aaron Young. There's a musician named Aaron Young. There's a lot of people named Aaron Young who, if AI just goes out and gathers stuff, that seems like it would be me.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, I'm not knocking AI. I use it every single day. I believe in it. I love it.

Perfect.

But it's. But there. There is something about looking somebody in the eye, having a human conversation with them, creating your notes, and then if you want AI to clean them up, if you've got a really good idea and you want AI to, you know, expound on it or expand on it. Good.

Yeah. Yeah.

But don't abdicate your own thinking to a machine, because then you become the slave of the machine, instead of the machine being the magnifier of the things you're doing. And that's how I look at AI as a way to magnify my goals.

Absolutely. It makes you superhuman. And what you're best at, what you know, and enhances that.

Yeah. Versus a shortcut to not have to think.

And I. Yeah, that's where I worry. Where there's a lot of other. Probably not us listening to the show, you know, but, you know, the people looking for the shortcuts, the not having to really use their minds. There's definitely going to be an interesting handful of years ahead of us where there's probably a split happening. I don't know. It's going to be interesting. That's a whole nother conversation.

Yeah, it'll be. It'll be a. It'll be obvious stuff until it becomes not obvious at all. It becomes so built into the fabric of what we do. We're no longer thinking, oh, I'm going to pick up, chat GPT and ask, you know, posit some question or give an assignment. It'll just. It'll become. Just built into everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

And we will not have the chance to influence the way we can now.

Now is the time.

So now is the time. And you're at the cutting edge. So I'm delighted you would bring me on to such a progressive program with such a cool company and tell you about my ideas of just how to structurally build the foundation. Doesn't matter how, how big of a company you want to build. If you do these things, your odds of success just go up exponentially.

Absolutely. It's timeless.

For having me.

Thank you, Aaron. I appreciate you being so open, man. So we'll connect again and. And let's go on this rodeo together. You know? It's gonna be fun.

I love it. I love it. All right.

All right, man. Good to go. Thanks. Thank you. Exit.