30 Years of Business Knowledge in 1Hour (With No B.S.) Feat. Brian Tracy and Keith Cunningham

What actually makes a successful business? That most of what is taught in the entrepreneurship faculties of the universities is nonsense. In fact, if you said that there's something 1687 Professors of Entrepreneurship and their primary focus is drinking their own bathwater and telling that entrepreneurs have to have a business plan and if you have a business plan, you'll be successful. And they spent two years in their faculties teaching people how to set business plans.

And.

And 49 out of 50 businesses are started without a business plan, including some of the most successful businesses in the world today. So we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses. And what Joe is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work, hundreds, even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much, much faster to shortcut. We say there's always a learning curve in anything. And what we want to do is we're going to jump the learning curve. We don't want to spend years and years learning what we need to learn to reach a certain level of income. And so I've majored now in the last few years on doing seminars and talking and books and articles and programs for owners and would be owners of small and medium sized businesses. Now I've got 45 minutes, so I'm going to have to condense what sometimes I share in seminars for days, but I understand you're some of the smartest people in the world so that you could take a lot of information in a short period of time. Is that true? Did anybody not understand the question? So I'm going to try to bottom line several of the concepts. One of the first concepts which I thought was interesting was a little story that was in the papers recently. Warren Buffett, who is one of the richest men in the world, and Bill Gates, who is the richest man in the world, and Bill Gates Sr. Were at a dinner party and the three of them are good friends and they were talking and a gentleman came up to them and said, you know, I was looking at you and you gentlemen are very successful. What would you say is the most important quality of success? And all three, according to a bystander, all three broke off their conversation and turned and simultaneously said, focus. Focus is the most important requirement for success in our fast moving world today. If you can focus, you can succeed, and if you cannot, you cannot. It's almost a black and white thing. Well, I thought that was interesting because the way Joe and I met is I put together a program some years ago called the Focal Point program, which basically brought in business owners like yourselves and taught them to focus. And we spent three years going through every single aspect of Life. We had 82 exercises that dealt with family and business and marketing and product and service and competition and positioning. And it was focus, focus, focus. And my offer, which is not as good as Joe's, but my offer was that you will double your income and double your time off within 12 months or there'd be no charge for this program. And I never had to give a refund. In fact, many people doubled and tripled their income within 30 days just by learning to focus and just by thinking in terms of focus. So it's really, really important. I read an article about myself. It was a very successful entrepreneur in New Zealand, and the article was sent to me last week. I'm reading this article. He said the turning point in his life was when he went to a Brian Tracy seminar and learned how to focus. He was broke, he was unemployed, he had no money, and he walked out of the seminar a completely different person, and he had written goals. He then looked around, and as it happens, he saw an article on coffee shops and Starbucks success in the United States. And it said, coffee shops are a good business to be in because more and more people like the idea of a specialty coffee shop. And if it has a WI fi, then they go there. It becomes a social center and so on. He knew nothing about coffee, and before the dust had settled, he owned 80 coffee shops in Australia and New Zealand. And then he says he got into a divorce and had to sell it for $50 million to share the proceeds with his wife. But he did not share. He did not sell off the worldwide rights to it. So he's rebuilding. Anyway, his point was at the end of the article, they said, well, what would you say to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be successful? And he said just two things. He said, focus and fail fast. Focus and fail fast. Learn quickly. Try something new. And I thought I would just pass that on because it's sort of what I have discovered over the years is the faster you fail and learn, the faster you succeed. You actually learn to succeed by failing. You know Thomas J. Watson's famous line, if you want to increase your rate of success, you must double your rate of failure, because success lies on the far side of failure. Well, over the years, I've done a good deal of reading, and I came across a concept that I want to share with you. And we were talking about this a little bit earlier, and the concept is, the question is, what Is the most valuable and highest paid work that you do? It's a really interesting question because when I heard the question, I didn't know what the answer was. What do you think the highest paid and most valuable work is that you do? And the answer is thinking. Thinking is the most valuable work. Now, I am the best selling author in the world in time management. Also on goals, also on some other subjects. But I began studying time management about 30 years ago. And I came across a word in my studies and the word was consequences. And what it basically said is that something is important if it has big potential consequences. And something is unimportant if it has low or no potential consequences. Number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences. Number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential consequences. Exactly what Joe was saying earlier, the famous Drucker quote. Very worst use of time is to work intently on something that need not be done at all. And one of the things that is holding back entrepreneurs, business owners, is killing them, by the way, and it's wiping out an entire generation, is this obsession with technology. I see people that are walking with their phone. It's almost like drug addicts that are mainlined. They cannot stop staring at their screen, they cannot stop pushing their buttons. I hate to say there are people in this room that had that problem, but the fact is that this obsession with looking at the screen and staying connected is killing people because it stops them from focusing. You cannot focus if you are distracted, like an attention deficit disorder dog. So you're constantly ringing and responding to bells almost like a crazy person in a toy factory. And so just as a quick aside, if thinking is the most important thing you do because of the consequences of thinking determine the entire quality of your life, then the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life. And so the more time that you spend thinking and thinking well and thinking clearly, the more successful you are. Over the years, I've worked with some very powerful people, billionaires and multi billionaires, people who are on the Forbes 400 list repeatedly, over and over. And I've had a chance to be with them during crises and at times where something was happening that was serious, it was a major problem. And I noticed that they all had one quality in common, is they all went calm. It's just they went calm. People around them were angry and upset and worried about what happened and who did it and so on. And they would just go calm, Almost like a pawn would go calm. And they knew and I learned later I didn't know why this was. I, I admired it, but I didn't know why it was is that when your mind is calm, your entire cerebellum, the thinking and deciding brain functions at its highest level. Like turning up all the lights on a dimmer switch, it's functioning like a Christmas tree. But when you get upset and angry, what happens is your thinking reverts to your limbic or emotional system and your ability to think clearly diminishes dramatically. And you make a lot of mistakes. That's why when you are facing a difficult situation, you have to use every skill, trick, game, whatever it stay calm. And that's why they teach you to meditate. And they find that meditators in business are far more successful because they can automatically trigger their mind into the calm of meditation when they're facing a crisis. It enables them to think with greater clarity. Now, a couple of years ago, a man named Daniel Kahneman, a very fine man from reading him, who had won a Nobel prize in psychology and neuroscience, wrote a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And this book was a very esoteric book and I don't recommend that you read it. It's 500 pages of hard slogging. I will give you the essence of. I will give you the essence. I do the reading, pass it on. I will give you the essence of the book. He said that there are two types of thinking. There's fast thinking and slow thinking. Fast thinking is intuitive, it's instinctive, it's automatic, it's reactionary. I think of it very much as how you would drive through busy traffic. You're not giving a lot of thought, you're just interacting. He said the other type of thinking is slow thinking. And slow thinking is where you just slow down the thinking and take time to think through issues. Now, if an issue has little or no consequences, then you can think quickly. You know, what do you have for lunch? What do you pick up on your plate from the buffet? Where do you park your car? The consequences of these decisions are almost non existent. But if it's a major issue, then you say, wait a minute, this requires slow thinking. Here is his contention that made the book a best seller is that the biggest problem that people have is that where they should use slow thinking, they use fast thinking. And entrepreneurs are extremely guilty of that. As we make important decisions that have long potential consequences, including affecting the lives of people and costing money and even leading to the bankruptcy of a business, we make those decisions with fast thinking. When in Reality, we should be making them with slow thinking. Now, I'm a great Drucker fan, as many people are, and Mike was saying something about hiring the right people. And hiring the right people to work with you is very important. And the biggest mistakes you make is hiring fast. You hire people quickly. The best decisions you make are you really take your time to hire slowly. And Peter Drucker said that fast people decisions are invariably wrong people decisions. Hiring an important person for an important job has tremendous potential consequences. So therefore you need to take a long time. One of the things I teach, which is in my book, how to Hire and Keep the Best People, is a simple rule that will increase your hiring accuracy to 90%. And I've taught it to Fortune 500 companies and they make it a rule within their companies to use. Brian's rule is to this is you cannot hire except by doing this. And I didn't invent it. I just studied the hiring practices of the companies that hire the best people and keep them the longest. And they all, at the beginning have a certain process that they follow and they follow it religiously, no exceptions. And so their accuracy in hiring goes up to 90% or better because they think more. Interesting. Professor at the University of San Diego last year wrote a book on sort of thinking fast and slow, but it was on decision making. What he said is the longer that you take to make an important decision, the better the decision will be. The higher quality decision. And Lord Acton once said, when it is necessary, when it is not necessary to decide, it is necessary not to decide. In other words, the professor said, buy as much time as you can for a decision. Put it off. If you can put it off for a day, a weekend, a week, a month, put it off. Some of the best decisions that you make will be decisions that you will allow to steep for a while, like water and tea. So thinking is the most important thing you do. We call it thinking fast and slow. So remember, anything that is important that has long term consequences is a candidate for slow thinking. Discussing it with other people, sitting quietly, going for a walk, letting it ruminate in your mind, sleeping on it. You know, they say if it's a big deal, sleep on it.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So there's three thinking tools I want to give you and then seven ideas. So the three ways of thinking which I start off, the first way I start off every seminar is, is what I call zero based thinking. And everybody who knows me for any period of time knows that I harp on this. Zero based thinking comes from zero based accounting where you instead of increasing an expense in the next accounting period, you ask, should we be engaging in this expense at all? Now with zero based thinking, you look at your entire world and you ask this question, knowing what I now know, is there anything that I am doing that I would not start up again today if I had to do it over? This is one of the greatest thinking tools I've ever learned because in a time of turbulence, you always have an answer for this question. Each person has an answer. Some people have multiple answers. There's lots of things that they're doing today that knowing what they now know they wouldn't get into today. They wouldn't start them up, products they wouldn't offer people they wouldn't hire, investments they wouldn't make. And these are the greatest drags in life. These are sort of like a sea anchor, you know that you drop it and it drags, it slows down the boat. Well, how do you tell if you have a zero based thinking situation? And many of you were asked to write your problems, challenges, opportunities. The answer is stress is whenever you experience chronic stress, it's something that buzzes around when Joe's talking or somebody else is talking, you're busy thinking about that, you drive around and you think about it, keeps you awake at night. It's something that pisses you off, it's something that irritates you and angers you and frustrates you whenever you have chronic, which means ongoing, continuous. This is a candidate for zero based thinking. So you ask yourself the question, if I was not now in this situation, knowing what I now know, would I get into it again today? If the answer is no, the next question is how do I get out and how fast? How do I get out and how fast? If ever the answer comes back that I would not get into this again today, it's too late to resolve it. It's over. The only question now is how long do you suffer? How much emotional suffering, how much financial suffering do you make before you walk? And so the most important requirement for practicing zero based thinking, which a lot of people don't like to practice, is courage. I call it the C word. You need the C word. You need to have the courage to look at every part of your life and say, is there anything that I'm doing that knowing what I now know, I wouldn't get into? Now? The starting point of zero based thinking is always with your relationships. And those are both personal and business. Whenever I give in this talk, by the way, within a short period of time, divorces take place all over that city. People go home and say, geez, if I hadn't married this person, I would never marry them again today. And that's what's making me miserable. And many people are working their heads off on the outside to achieve success, but inside they're frustrated and unhappy because they're in a situation that, knowing what they now know, they would never get into. So I call this a quink analysis. And I'm going to ask you to do this for the rest of your life and help other people do it. K wink. Knowing what I now know. Do a kink analysis on everything. Do a kink analysis. In my company, what we say is we look at every single person on a regular basis and we say, if we had not hired this person and they walked in today to apply for their current job, knowing what we now know, would we hire them? If the answer is no, they're gone that day. There's a little rule, by the way, that in one of my books, it says the best time to fire a person is the first time it crosses your mind, because after that it's only pain and suffering. And the longer you keep them in place, the more likely they are to sue you. And the longer they sue you, the more it's going to cost. So therefore, if you find that you've made a mistake, belly up to the bar, have the courage to admit I made a mistake and cut your losses. There was a great book by an author called the Zurich Axioms some years ago, and it was Principles of Success. And anybody who's in finance has probably read the book because a very successful New York financier, and he was talking about the gnomes of Zurich, whoever they are, and the rules that they go by. And he said, the number one rule for success is in business, personal lives, cut your losses when you realize you made a mistake. Bad investment, bad hire, bad relationship, cut your losses quickly. What do they say in Las Vegas? You know, cut your losses, let your winnings ride. So in life, that's what we do. And the faster you cut your losses, fail fast, the faster you can start doing things that are much more productive the second area has to do with every part of your business. Joe and I were talking about what I think is a revolutionary new field. Though it's not revolutionary and it's not new, but it's business model innovation and it's based on the concept that whatever business model you're using today is probably obsolete. If you're in any kind of a business that uses technology to market it, especially an information based business, knowledge based business, consulting, services, training, anything else, chances are your business is obsolete. The way that you and visit and the business model is your method, your step by step process of generating profitability. Now there are some companies that struggle along, struggle long, struggle on, then find a new business model and the next year their business is up five or ten times. Profits are just overwhelming. They're living in big houses on the hill, driving Cadillacs and flying private jets. And you say what on earth did they do? They changed their business model. And if you don't change your business model, if it's the wrong business model, two things are going to happen. Your competitors are going to come up with a new business model and eat your lunch and or you're going to go broke. So it doesn't mean that your business model is wrong, it just means that you must be open to the possibility that your business model is obsolete. And that just means that there is a better business model, there's a superior business model and your job is to find it. And again, there's no fixed answer to it. But I think that this is a great area of thought. I think this is a great area and it's sort of like a tool for you to have. I wonder if I need to change my business model which is your way of generating sales, producing and delivering products and services, getting payments and achieving profitability. Well, so coming Back to the second is look @ anything in your business. Look at your products, look at your services, look at your people, look at, look at the way that you advertise market and ask is there anything that you're doing today that knowing what you now know, you wouldn't start up again today. And the only question that you ever ask is does it work? Does it work? Does it work? If it's not working and you can tweak it, then that's fine. If it's not working, have the courage to admit this isn't working and abandon it. Now the third area has to do with investments in zero based thinking, investments of time, which people hate to lose. Someone said earlier that people hate to lose. It's One of the greatest emotions, we hate to lose time. If we've invested a lot of time in a course of action, a project, a business, a relationship. The second is emotion. If we put a lot of emotion into a course of action, a product, course of study, a relationship or money, we hate to admit that we made a mistake and that what seemed like a good idea at the time has turned out not to be a good idea. And knowing what I now know, I wouldn't get into it and have the courage to cut your losses and run. Now, the reason I teach this first is because you can't make any progress unless you clear the decks, unless you get this 800 pound gorilla that's holding you back out of your life. And then many companies that I've worked with, literally transformed, became multimillion dollar companies, when everybody said, all right, we're going to go through and do a quick analysis on this whole company and realize that half the things we're doing and half the people working here are, are not the right people for us at this time. And half the products that we're offering aren't selling and never will. They've been replaced by better, cheaper, faster products in the marketplace. So cut your loss. What happens when a big company gets into trouble? They bring in a quick analysis man and he comes in with a chainsaw and he shuts down all the factories and all the stores that are not profitable and the company goes from profits to losses in one year anyway. The second thinking tool that I teach people is WPO thinking, which is worst possible outcome in everything that you're doing. Always ask yourself, what is the worst possible outcome of this course of action? And can I survive it if it were to occur? And if not, what could I do to make sure it doesn't happen? One of the number one reasons that we worry about anything in life is because of fear. And when you ask yourself, what is the worst thing that can happen in this particular situation? And then if you can say, all right, if that happens, I'll live with it, then your worry goes away and your mind goes clear and calm. And now you say, now what can I do to make sure that the worst does not happen? And then you become proactive and you take charge of your life. The third thinking tool. I hope I'm not going too fast for you. The third thinking tool is called the principle of constraints. And it's one of the most important thinking tools ever discovered. It says, between you and anything that you want to accomplish, there is always a constraint, a limiting Factor or a choke point that sets the speed at which you accomplish your goal. So I was just talking, doing a teleconference a few minutes ago. So the question I said is, let's always set the goal of doubling our income. You want to double your income? Okay, want to double your income? Then why isn't your income already twice as high? Now, in business, we don't think of doubling our income. We think of doubling our profitability. What we're concerned with is net cash flow. We're concerned with the amount that we take home to our family at the end of the day, not the gross, but the triple net. So we say, if I want to earn twice as much and everybody in here can and can and will earn 2, 3, 4, 5 times as much sometime in the future, if I want to earn twice as much, why aren't I already earning twice as much? And the number one reason for most people is distraction. So they're so distracted they're doing things of low or no consequences. But we found the 8020 rule applies to constraints. 80% of the constraints that are holding you back from achieving your financial goals are within yourself and within your business. They are not on the outside. They are not the competition, they are not the market. They are not the people in Washington or the taxes or regulation. They are 80% are within yourself. So the mark of the superior person is whenever they have a problem, they say, what is it in me that's causing this problem? Mike and I know this very, very clearly, what is it in me that's causing this problem? In illness, by the way, 85% of illness is psychosomatic. As Dennis Waitley said, it's not what you're eating, it's what's eating you that's causing the problem. And so the starting point and the, the first thing a doctor will tell you or a psychologist is what is it that you're not dealing with? And you go back to zero based thinking. What is it that you have in your life that if you had to do over, you wouldn't do it? So ask yourself, what's holding you back? And usually it's the quality of self discipline or it's a skill. Now, one of the things that changed my life forever was when I learned that all business skills are learnable. You don't have to be a genius to learn any business skill. You can learn any form of technology. As Mike has proven that with his products. You can take a person who's basically shoveling shoe polish in shubokin and teach them how to be technologically sufficient, superior enough to earn a living from it. Every business skill is learnable. And so I say, what one skill, if you are absolutely excellent at it in your business, would help you the most to double your income? What one business skill? If you could wave a magic wand and wake up tomorrow morning, superb in this area, what skill would it be? And you know, when you ask that question, everybody knows the answer. They know what it is. But here's the challenge. You don't like the skill because it involves rejection, embarrassment, ego, potential failure, loss. You've tried it in the past. You haven't been good at it. But nobody asked you what would be an easy skill to learn. They just asked you what skill would help you the most to double your income. And here's what we have found, is that most of us are only one skill away from doubling our income. And all business skills are learnable. And if you study the people who go from the top to the bottom in the Fortune 500 or Fortune 1000, they found in 25 years of research, these people learn one skill at a time by climbing the ladder of success and the ladder of income. Like sniper. One shot, one kill. They don't try to learn 50 skills. They learn the one skill, focus, the most important skill, and they get their company focusing on the one skill that can help you the most to generate sales and.

Profitability. What is the road less.

Stupid? How would you describe.

It? If I gave you the opportunity to unwind any three financial decisions you've ever made in your whole life, how much money would you have? And there's not a person in this room that if I gave them the ability to unwind any one of three financial decisions wouldn't have more money. It turns out that the key to making more money is to doing fewer stupid things. That's true. I don't need more good ideas. I need fewer ideas that I think are good, that I've executed.

On.

Yeah. And so I've had the experience over the last 47, 48 years of being in business of having done some smart things where actually it wasn't that smart. But in reality, I was lucky. I happened to catch a big wave, and I mistook catching a big wave with being a good swimmer. And it's what Warren Buffett is very famous for saying. Most of you have heard it. You never know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. And so the key is not, can I make it? The key is, can I make it and keep it? Those are two entirely different skill sets, and in fact they are almost diametrically opposed. What it takes to make money is very different than what it takes to keep it. And most people are so obsessed with making it that as they become more successful, they do stupid things, which winds up sabotaging their overall success. And I know this story firsthand because this is one of the reasons I appreciated you so much, Paul, and your presentation is because I've had the experience of losing a lot of money. $100 million of my money that I made. I didn't inherit it, I made it. You were better off than me because you cut the bleeding at plus 600,000. I didn't cut the bleeding until I was minus 50 million. So I went from plus 100 million to minus 50 million in a matter of 24 months. And when you do that, it takes your breath away. I mean, that's a major, major event. Not only because of the size of the money, but also because the loss is so devastating. And I had so much of my net worth, I had my self worth entwined with my net worth, which is a deadly.

Combination. How old were you during that.

Time? 40.

40. And that was during the. For real. In real.

Estate. Real estate, yeah. And what led to the loss? Look at your losses. It's not necessarily pleasant to think back on, but everybody's had some kind of loss that they've sustained as a result of a bad decision or excessive optimism. Unexamined assumptions. Unexamined assumptions, faulty expectations, excessive optimism are killers. Arrogance is killers. Hubris is a killer for creating and sustaining wealth. So the goal to me is not to get it. The goal is to get it and keep it. You can get lucky and make it. And I know lots of people who got lucky, but the problem is they weren't able to keep it because they didn't have skills that would allow them to sustain. So the truth is, to me, sustainability of wealth is the holy grail. Making it. I can catch a big wave, I can get lucky. I can happen to hit a crease in the market at exactly the right point and you know, we can wind up being, you know, affiliate associated with you or Tony Robbins or any number of other people. And you know, there's a degree of luck in all that and there's a skill set in all of that. And so I'm very much about, let's make sure that if we're going to all this effort in order to create the success. And people do stupid things in the creation mode as well. People oftentimes think that If I just improve my product, that. That would somehow allow me to create business or financial success. And yet the truth is, it doesn't require great product in order to make a lot of money. If I ask you to think about your favorite restaurant, the place you would go to have a huge celebration, you're thinking about it. You know where it would be. There's not one person in this room that's thinking about McDonald's. Not one. And yet nobody has made more money in the history of mankind in the restaurant business than McDonald's. How did it happen? Is it because their cheeseburgers are so good? No, their cheeseburgers are horrible. Right? They are. Their French fries, on the other hand, are really good, but the cheeseburgers are horrible. What allowed McDonald's to. To make a lot of money was not an obsession with the product. It's never. Write this down. This will be a takeaway. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. It's never what you do. It's how you do it. Southwest Airlines, their whole business model is put butts in seats and fly those butts from point A to point B safely. No mention of your luggage. Right. Your luggage is immaterial to the airlines. Whether it makes it or not, we don't care. Let's just make sure the person gets from point A to point B. Doesn't even have to be on time. Southwest Airlines has made more money in the last 10 years in the airline business than the rest of the airline industry cumulatively since Orville and Wilbur Wright. Now you think about that one airline has made more money than everybody else since Orville and Wilbur. How'd that happen? Is it because their planes are so good? Is it because their first class section is so roomy? Is it because the food is so outstanding? Is it because the hostesses and stewards and stewardesses, is it because they're so good.

Looking?

No. I can't tell which is older, the stewardesses or the airplanes. Right. It's never what you. Southwest Airlines success is not based on what they did. It's how they did it. You name me any product or service. I don't care what it is. Give me one week. You could say chewing gum, shoelaces, seminars, pins, socks. Name me any product or service. Give me one week, and in one week I'll come back and name you one person who's made millions and 100 people that have gone broke with the exact same idea. The problem is, as entrepreneurs, we become obsessed with the product. We become Obsessed with the. Either the quality and I'm not opposed to great products. That's not the message. The message is what is it as a businessperson, what is it that we're focused on? The artist side of me wants to focus on the product and making it better and longer lasting and prettier and more robust. And I'm good with that. We need artists. The operator side of me wants to get busy and get a bunch of stuff done. I just, I got so much to do and holy cow, if it's going to get done, I'm going to have to do it myself because I don't know how to hire a team or keep a team or have a players or create a culture or I don't know any of that. I just got a lot to do. That's the operator side. The business person side says, wait a minute. The job is not to react to the problem du jour. What I need to do is leverage and structure. Write those two words down. That's the difference between a solopreneur and a one person army. A solopreneur and a business owner. A business owner has mastered two things, structure and leverage. And without structure and leverage, there is not a way to create a sustainably successful business. I'm going to say the structure part a different way before I talk about.

Leverage.

Yeah. Opportunity without structure is chaos. Achilles tendon of most entrepreneurs is structure. They hate it. That's why they started their own business is because they hate the idea of having structure. And yet structure is critical for scaling. I hear a lot of people in here talking about scaling or scaling is just a Silicon Valley word for growth. That's all it is. How do I grow this thing? Okay, well, if I'm going to grow this thing, I need structure in order to be able to do it. Otherwise I got kind of a fire drill working with a bunch of people doing a bunch of stuff and it's not necessarily the most productive thing that needs to happen. Leverage, one of the highest forms. When I talk about leverage, most people think, oh, he's talking about debt. In reality, I'm not. I mean debt is a financial instrument, it's leverage. But, but the more powerful form of leverage is who's on your team. So I'm going to ask you a question. If I gave you an opportunity to build a world class team of a players and the only people on your team were a players, I mean, seven footers, these are the Kevin Durants, they can do it all. If you only had a team of a Players, how many of your existing problems that you have right now would go away, disappear. It turns out the problems that most of us are dealing with are not even really the problem. Unison where I need a little whiteboard if I can get one. That one right here. Joe just handed you a piece of paper a second ago and said thank you and said, write down one of your biggest problems. So I'm ask you right now to write down on your piece of paper one of your three biggest problems. Maybe you just did that. Maybe you can refer back to that piece of paper. Maybe you're not going to have to share this. We're not going to talk about it. It's not going to be anything. So you may want to write really, really small so that nobody else can see. Write it really small and just write down or revisit one of your three biggest problems that you think you have with your business. Let me give you a thought. The exercise is over. You don't have to complete writing it down. The exercise is over. Every person here has an is line. This is reality. This is the way it looks. This is point A. Point A. And the problem that most people have, in my experience, I know I have this problem, is that I'm not particularly honest with myself about the reality of my situation. I sugarcoat it. When I was at the University of Texas, every day I'd walk past a little message etched in granite over the the doors of a building. And the message was, you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free. See, you know this, right? And every day for four or five years, I walked past this saying. And I went, I don't know what this means. What does that mean? You should know the truth and the truth will set you free. Well, the reality, it dawned on me later, is that as long as I'm lying to myself or not telling the truth, I have no opportunity to make a change. So it's why addicts don't stop using is because they say, well, I don't really have a problem. I can stop anytime I want. Yeah, I know it's a little. I know it's a little bit. But, you know, the reality is it's I'm functioning right? It's why alcoholics or poor people pick a topic. People don't tend to tell themselves the truth. This is point A. We also have point B. Point B is ought. This is the way I'd like for it to look. This is point B. And it turns out that most of us are experts on point B. We have massive clarity on the way we would like for it to look because we've done all this visualization. We've done all this goal setting where you make a goal and then you make it vibrant, and then you turn it into black and white, Then you bring it closer and farther away, and then you put music around it. And so we're really good at visualizing what ought we tend to suck at. What is. And when asked what our problem is, we describe the gap. The gap between where you are and what you want is what you typically describe as the problem, when in reality, this gap is not the problem. This gap is the symptom. I just ask you. Joe just asked you the last exercise you did. Write down one of your three biggest problems, and everybody got busy real quick. We knew what the problem was because we were visualizing the gap between where we are and what we want, when in reality, that's not the problem. That's the symptom. The gap sits right here. This is. Sorry. The problem sits right here. This is the problem. This is the obstacle that I need to overcome in order to move the needle on my is line. In order to move the needle on my is line, I need to get clarity on what it is that's truly blocking my forward progress. What's blocking my forward progress has nothing to do with where I am versus what I want. What's blocking my forward progress is the obstacle that sits right here. And it turns out, Joe, that the hardest part of thinking time is getting clarity on the problem. That is, if you don't have clarity on the problem, that is, you'll be tactical instead of strategic. So I say 10 pounds overweight. What do I want to do about it? Well, as long as I view the problem as being 10 pounds overweight, which is not the problem, that's the.

Symptom. Hello.

Hello. Are you with me that? Being 10 pounds overweight is not the problem. That's the symptom. But as long as I identify being 10 pounds overweight as being the problem, then what I will lurch to. Okay, should I buy a jump rope or should I join a gym? Should I buy Oprah's latest diet book? Or should I get a personal training? Oh, I know what I'll do. I'll get a piece of home exercise equipment. That's what I'll do. If I just had a peloton bike in my house, then I would get in shape, which is why most home exercise equipment and most diet books don't work, because it's a Tactical response to a tactical question. As long as I'm dealing with the symptom, I'm going to be dealing in tactical. And once I say it's not a tactical issue, I need to be strategic and think strategic and identify the problem that is. So here it is. And then I'll stop, Joe. If I don't have clarity on the problem that is, I'll build a machine for the problem that isn't, which is what we do 99% of the time. We identify the gap, call it the problem, when in reality it's a symptom. And we're highly tactical in our response because we have a tactical question that we've asked which winds up sabotaging our results. If you tell me your sales aren't high enough, I'm going to say that's a symptom, not a problem. If you tell me you don't have enough profits, if you tell me you have a crummy culture, if you tell me you have weak employees, if you tell me your balance sheet is screwed up, I'm going to look at you and say, all those are symptoms. What's the problem? So if I gave you an opportunity to rethink the problem that you identified a minute ago, is that really the problem? Really? Is that the problem? Is that the core root underlying problem that's blocking your forward progress? Or is there something below that, something buried where you got to get busy and figure out what in the world is going on? So business, to me, is an intellectual sport. It's chess. Money and business does not respond well to emotions. Warren Buffett said it. Optimism is the enemy of the rational investor. It turns out in business, optimism is your enemy, which is why one of the pieces of advice that you gave is so good, Paul, which was, we all need a board, we need advisors, we need people that we will listen to. The higher you go or the higher you want to go, the greater the requirement to have somebody around you who will tell you the truth. Because I can't smell my own breath. I can smell your breath, but I can't smell mine. I can't see my own swing. I can see the shot. I can't see the swing. I need people around me, watching me swing who will give me advice. And then I gotta be willing to hear that advice. As long as I'm arrogant, right? Unwilling to listen, it does no good to ask. So business is an intellectual sport, and the people that win the game sustainably have got skills and tools, which is why I wrote the book, Let the road less.

Stupid. How did you raise yourself from, you know, homeless to billionaire? I mean, how the hell does that.

Happen? Well, I think if I put it in one sentence, which is difficult to do when you're really down and out and you're at the very bottom, all you could do is look up. You know, I think it's kind of in life a lot of times when people are down, they look at how to survive while they're down, but stay at that survival mode long term opposed to, I'm gonna learn how to survive right now and make it, but I'm immediately gonna work towards the next step. The next step and the next.

Step.

Yeah. Great, great. So what was the most difficult time in your life? I mean, was it. Has it been when you've just been under maybe immense pressure from everything you created, or was it when you were really just.

At. No, I think when you're down and out, can't pay the bills the next day, that's the most difficult time. When I was homeless the first time, it was in my early 20s. My wife just couldn't handle being a mother anymore, so left a two and a half year old in my arms and wiped out all the money we had and never paid the rent for three months. So we were actually evicted within three days of the time that happened. And I was in between jobs, but I had money, but she took it all. So my son and I were on the streets with this old car that we were in and we realized that, hey, we're going to make this together, this two and a half year old kid. But where do we get money? We don't have any money. So what we did was even though we weren't really thinking ecology, we were thinking survival is. I went around to vacant lots and picked up, you know, Coke bottles, seven UP bottles. And in those days you got two cents for a little one, five cents for a big one. So I'd go there and they'd have to give you the money. And that's kind of how we survived. Then a couple, you know, several days later, a dear friend of mine who was what you would call a heavy duty biker with a gang found me. He just found me, old buddy of mine from high school and said, johnny, come on in, your son could come live with me here. And we've got a couple really cool biker mamas here that'll help watch him while you get yourself reorganized. So that was a nice break.

Too. I mean, so how did you learn, how did you learn how to be a successful.

Entrepreneur. Well, I don't think it's learning how to be a successful entrepreneur. I think it's just being able to do something and know that you have that ability to do it. You see, the human race has the ability, all of you do, to do 10, 50 times what you're doing right now. Well, if you realize you have that ability, as you go along, you find obstacles, but you overcome them or you go right around them like water might go around them a little bit. And that's really it. You look at what assets you have. It's a little bit like selling. Whether it's a tangible product or a service, it's got to be the very best. And you put forth its features and then how it benefits the customer. Well, with yourself personally, you put forth the features, you have, how these features might benefit. And if you have a product, and I'd love to share this with everybody, don't ever go into the selling business. Whether you have the greatest service in the world or the greatest product, never go in there to sell your product. Go in there to be in the reorder business. That's gotta be your mentality. That's true, yeah. Because if you're gonna sell it, that's where your focus is. If you wanna be in the reorder business, even if it's a one time product, whatever you do is so good that they'll wanna tell somebody else reorder themselves. Right. So that kind of helps along the way if you have that mentality. And I think selling. Oh God. Whether it was flower pots when I was a little kid or newspapers or in my early 20s, encyclopedias, Collier's Encyclopedia, door to door, you knock on, they could be closed in your face. You had to learn how to be just as enthusiastic on door number 51 or 105 as you were in the first door. Now that's difficult to do, but you learn how to do that. I believe the average encyclopedia salesman commission only door to door was three days. That's how long they lasted. I lasted about three and a half years. But I learned to kind of overcome rejection and be prepared for it. If you're prepared. And we'll cover that a little later too, I saw your questions. If you're prepared for rejection before you start anything, whether it's your personal life, whether it's a business life, when you're prepared for it, it doesn't shock you when you come along and all of a sudden see rejection in your face, you see, well, I was prepared for that, but I'm Gonna continue on just as enthusiastic and as confident as I was when I started. And that's not.

Easy. Absolutely. Do you experience rejection today in the same way you kind of did then, and you just keep yourself an enthusiastic state, or is it just much.

Bigger levels of rejection or it's a little different today? In those days, let's say you'd knock on 100 doors to. To get somebody that's reactive to what you're saying will listen to you. Today it's a little bit easier, I think, in life as you build a history that's conducive to a good life, where in business you realize success unsure is failure. And you try and be honorable with what you say you're going to do no matter what it costs you. Well, it gives you that clout to be able to talk to people and they know, here's a sincere guy. You know, this guy's a track record of doing things right and not ripping off anybody. And, you know, by gosh, there are ups and downs. There definitely are, but much more easier to overcome.

Today.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So, yeah, I did prepare some questions that I thought would be the most valuable to have you.

Share. Thank you. Thank.

You. So what are your core values, personally and.

Professionally? Core values are, I would say it's the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. That's the basis for most religions, but they get sometimes carried away in rites and rituals. But that's the core value. Do unto others as you'd have others do unto you. And then it's the feeling of knowing that success unshared is definitely failure. In other words, when you make it, it's not really just about yourself making it. Hey, if you make it, you know you made it. But along the way, one of the great lessons to learn is it's not all about you. It's about your ability to be of service to this planet while you're here. And by saying, me, me, me, me, look what I did. This is me. Hey, here's my building. My name's on it. You know, I did this. You didn't. By doing something like that, it kind of takes away from how genuine you are. Because people don't like to just listen to people talk about themselves, how great they are. They want to now incorporate it to make them successful also or do something a little different. And I think that's very, very.

Important. Yeah, you know.

What? I hang out with a lot of quote unquote, successful people. Most success in this culture is viewed Financially, although I know a lot of extraordinarily wealthy people that are miserable bastards. So there's a difference there. The thing that always annoys me is if there's someone that knows the answer to something, then there's a person who is asking them about how to build a business or how to do something and they know what to tell the person but they kind of withhold it, they don't say anything. And I love what your whole notion of, you know, success unshared is failure. Because I think that's why. Because so many people that know you have said so many great things about such a nice guy, so caring, so generous. And my experience with you has been absolutely that you just want to be.

Helpful. You know, Joe, it's also very self rewarding. We look around and I'm a child of the 60s so I know what we were looking at in the 60s for self rewards. But anyways, the highest high you're going to ever get in your life, the highest high, if you want to be satisfied, the highest high you'll ever get is to do something for somebody else and ask absolutely nothing in return. Boy, do you feel high and are you energized and that lasts a while. It's very contagious. Yeah.

Totally. Thank you. So what is your decision making process or thinking when it comes to investing your time, your money, your.

Energy? Sure. It's very important because time is the most valuable thing you have is one. Make sure where you're putting your time and energy is something you want to do. Not just because you're exploring with people you don't like or a business you don't like, or a situation you don't like. Time is so valuable. Try and speak. If you're speaking to people or a situation to people you feel there's hope for that you could do something with to do something great, not just make money. Whenever you go into business or in a relationship with someone just to make money, then it means you've already decided to take a portion of your time to make these papers that are backed up by nothing but will buy stuff. Call it a possession. We have all these great possessions. Well, if you have these great possessions, could you give them away? If you had any possession, you could give it away, hey, great, it was a possession and you moved on. If you can't give that possession away to somebody, just give it away. Then it possesses.

You. Yeah, yeah, it's true. When I look out at a lot of my friends, they don't own their houses, their boats, Their planes, their stuff, it owns them. So that's very, very important in.

Life. I think you develop a way of having what you have, have our wonderful things, but understand that them. And if something happens to them, don't get upset. Something happens, don't get upset. If you lose some money, don't get upset. You know, just be so gracious for what you have already and know that you're going to come back and do something.

Else.

Yeah. You know, I don't know how you would describe this, but my sense of when I think about you without really knowing kind of your MO on how you do it, is that you are very skilled at where, where and who and what gets your attention. Like you're, you're attention is such a valuable asset. And when I first met you, I was introduced to you by our friend Dave Kecich and when. And then you called me because you don't have an email. And I would love to have you share how you manage people reaching out to you, how you manage communications. Because I don't know if you have an email now, but you didn't have an email. And I was like, wow, think about.

That. I still don't. And I'll roll over to the last question also that you asked about how do you get into situations? When I started John Paul Mitchell Systems, I had been in the beauty. And I knew there was an opening for products that were unique and different, that weren't in salons. Even though I had no money, that's what I went after. When I started patron tequila in 1989, we were doing shots, you'd hold your breath. I knew there had to be a way to get something so smooth and the world was ready no matter what the cost was of a sipping tequila. Hence Patron came out. Harley distributor says you'll never make it. It costs too much to make it. You have to sell it for $37. And who cares if you sit around and sip and enjoy that tequila. And even though you don't get a headache the next day with Patron, unless you drink the whole bottle, we don't advise that. Okay. That, you know, they said people don't care. See, but they do care. And I believe that there was a better way to do it. When I got involved with John Paul Pet, I knew there was a business I would start where my profits would help out pets throughout the world. With the profits, not with me. I knew it had just a good thing when I got involved with Irwin Jacobs and Marquis yachts. That was something that I did that realizing that during the bad situation of 2008-2011, 12, that the boat industry was down. But if you had the highest quality boats, by gosh, this is the time to get in. And that's when he and I got in it together. And I'll tell you a little bit later about Rock Mobile and about Abio, but, you know, just you look for the situation, the quality of the product, what the end result's gonna be. And the people you're with are these cool.

People.

Right. Do you all have the same energy together to kind of move.

Forward? Yeah, I think that's so critical because trying to do business, there's no such thing as a great business with a bad.

Partner.

No.

Yeah. For any amount of money.

Whatsoever.

Yeah. So, so you, you obviously like how big is between your companies? How big is your, your team, your staff, your.

Employees? We're in the thousands. Yeah. We don't tell Forbes everything because I like to be low key. In fact, I wouldn't even be on that list if it wasn't for Bacardi getting involved to get a little piece of patronal minority interest many years ago. I try and stay off that list, off that list. Okay. But I have darn good people, darn good partners that work with me and they're just the very, very best. And the end result is we have thousands. But I'd like to share with everybody here, if I could, how we treat our people and why we, these thousands, love us. Let's take John Paul Mitchell Systems. I started the company 35 years ago. We are in 90 countries. Our turnover in 35 years is less than 70 people. But I teach people to do unto others as you do unto you. There were so many times, Joe, when I worked for people at a dollar for lunch. You don't get much for a dollar. So as soon as we could afford some money, first thing I did was give everybody free lunch. Today, even in Mexico, with my staff and my partners down there, 1500 of them that make the patron. If you work during the day, a chef makes you lunch. If you work at night, a chef makes you dinner. You want to pray, I build you a chapel. At John Paul Mitchell Systems, no matter where you are, you've got free lunch. If you carpool, we take care of that gasoline for you. So you do things for people. We have a good profitable year and every year we have, we share through profit sharing with all of our people, but we treat them the way we'd want to be treated ourselves. It's not like we're Bosses, it's you're my partner. Right. Anybody could pick up the phone and call me. I don't have email. And the reason I don't is I'd be inundated with all the stuff I do, business wise, philanthropically, not to mention family. I'd be so inundated I couldn't do all the things that I do and expand upon it. I couldn't have had email. So I'll take a phone call, obviously go through my executive assistant. I'm inundated. And if so this is important, I think, for you guys to know. If someone writes you a letter, people just email back and forth. Try some time. If someone writes you a letter, to take their letter and write the answer on and sign it and then mail it back to them or pick up the phone and call it. It means a lot to people. Have that personal touch. A whole.

Lot. Infinitely. Infinitely greater than electronic.

Communication.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things, like every day trying to send 10 personal postcards, even if it's coming from my team, it makes such a huge impact. I mean, it's the simplest thing. I mean, if someone just hand wrote a note to 10 people a day or figured out how to have with your, your team, your assistant do it, and you did that for a year straight, your. Your life would transform in terms of the depth of the.

Relationships.

Sure. And it's such a simple thing to do. So did you come across this method of communication or you just knew intuitively that I'm not going into this, this world of email? Did you, have you ever had an email and you're like, this is crazy, there's no way that shit.

Works? Yeah. Well, when I started looking at it and looked at people around me just being on the computer all the time, even though all my companies, believe me, are state of the art computerization, they're technocrats anyways. So I get my reports the way I want them, but I saw that it takes so much time and I wouldn't be able to call people as much or write handwrite people, special people letters or, you know, being able to do or time to think. Listen, my case, not for everybody, but in my case I thought, let me try and stay away from this. And it.

Worked. Yeah. Awesome, awesome. So what does success and happiness look like and mean to you? I mean, how do you think about.

That? Success is not how much money you have, which a lot of people equate to success. Success is how well you do what you do. How well do you do what you do? And do you continue doing it that well? Do you master mastering something is doing it extremely well. But doing it that way every time and then having the ability to grow from there and realizing success and shared is failure. Now, how can a janitor be extremely successful? I'll take a quick minute with a quick story. Worked all my life, from 7 years old and then paper routes at 11 years old. Throughout high school. I worked for a while at Stuart's Cleaners. I'm the guy that swept the floors, put the little drape on the hanger and just did all the work after school and on Saturdays. And Stuart was so tight, this guy squeaked. They paid me a dollar and a quarter an hour because he had to or he'd give me 75 cents an hour. Anyways, one day after school, he calls me and says, johnny, come over here. He says, last night I was working late. I went up to my mezzanine to lay on my cot for a few minutes. And I took my watch off, put it on the table, dropped on the floor. So I went down there to pick up my watch and looked under the cot and there was no dust. Well, the cot's light. I moved it. No dust. Look behind the cabinet. No dust. Pick up a rug. No dust. You clean this as if I'm watching you every single minute. But, Stuart, that's my job. You hired me to it. And my mom, growing up, taught the boys how to clean. I know how to clean. So my job, which I like, my job is to the best job I can. Whether you tell me or not, that's my job. He was so touched. He said, johnny, I'm giving you a 25 cents an hour raise to $1.50 an hour. AM I Godfrey Stewart to do that? It's like, wow, I won the Academy Award. But the lesson learned is this. Successful people, whether you're working for somebody else or working for yourself, do whatever you do as if whoever's really involved is watching you every single minute do it. And that's difficult for people to do. If you can do that, you do your job so well. I had a housekeeper once, 66 years old. Everything was great. I said, deanie, go home. No, mister, I'm going to stay here. Okay, for the next two and a half hours, watch Mexican television. I know you like to watch it. No, mister, I'm not going to do it. Why? She says, because I'm 66 years old, you think I'm going to waste my life watching television? I'd be more productive and happier if I found Something I missed dusting. I'm gonna go through the whole house again. And she was genuine in what she said. She loved what she did and who she did it for. That's.

Success. That is really awesome. I mean, talk about just having that as an operating system, how that would just pave the path of your.

Future. And don't be afraid to say you're wrong. Many of my staff will come over and say, jp, that's great, but this way would have been a little bit better. Be open to that. Can't be your ego. Well, yeah, you know what? Your idea is not bad. Mine's not the best one in the world. By being open also, it helps you.

Grow. Well, so what. What would you consider yourself just really skilled at? And what are you just not skilled.

At? Do you think about. Yeah, I would say I don't think about it, but I think what I'm really skilled at is being lucky enough. Lucky enough in life to be able to have the ability to listen to somebody else tentatively. In other words, listen to them, everything they're saying and not just think about what you're going to say next. And that took a while. I think I'm pretty good at that. And I think I'm also pretty good at being nice to people. I believe in just being nice in life, just being nice, even with people. Have just a lousy day and maybe do some really stupid things, try and handle the end result in a nice manner. If we did more of that in the world, we wouldn't have wars and everyone would take care of everybody. I think that's.

Important. Well, absolutely. I mean, one of the ways that I gauge who I develop deeper relationships with because I interact with a lot of people is how people that are more powerful treat people that are less powerful than them. I mean, it bugs the out of me when I see someone kiss ass to someone who they want to, you know, curry favor with because they want something. And then they're, you know, they don't say thank you if someone opens up a door or they're rude to, like, a wait staff or.

Something. I've seen a little bit of that. I see a little bit of that. And when you all see a little bit of that, just learn from and say, whoa, that's not going to be me. That's not.

Cool. Yeah.

Exactly.

It's. Yeah, every. Everybody has a purpose in life, even if it's to serve as a bad example. So. Yeah.

So. So, so.

What. What do you. What are you not good at that you have learned to like, avoid because, you know, it's just not your thing. Like Dan Sullivan has a thing called unique ability where you're skilled and.

Then he has, you know, what I'm not good at is taking all the time to do all the little details, fill out expense reports, just all the details. I leave that to accountants or leave that to other people that are much better than that and try and take that segment of my life and think in that segment or do something else. I have a little saying that I picked up selling encyclopedias and it's pay attention to the vital few, ignore the trivia. Many too many people get tied up. I know I was at the CIA on a couple of times. I trained them in management motivation. And to Buzzy Krongar, their executive director, I said once, I want to teach all you guys here how to handle a piece of paper. Once. He said, at the CIA, if we could handle a piece of paper 100 times, we'd be doing good. In other words, fewer moving parts. Try and pay attention to the vital few. Ignore the trivia. Many or let somebody else handle that that might be much more capable than.

You. That's awesome. So clearly you have really learned how to build teams, encourage teams, you know, grow, grow teams. And, and so you're obviously very good at having set up management structures, which I think first stems from self management. You obviously learned how to manage yourself, if you could speak to that, you know, how do you not go off the rails at times? I'm sure you have, but you've learned from this. So what would you say about self.

Management? Yeah, we all have self management. My God, I could take it back to the US Military when I was in the Navy, if you want to close, you folded your own clothes, you know, and they had to be exactly perfect and you had to manage your locker and manage your time. Little bit of a start managing yourself and your time. If you cannot manage yourself and your time, where you're just at the end of the day totally frustrated, or three phones are going at one time and you haven't figured out how to that one yet, don't think that you're a manager. You got to manage yourself first. Your time, how you allocate it, the time you have for your family, the time you have for yourself. Very important, the time you have for yourself. Many people, especially entrepreneurs coming up forget that they're busy from morning to night and well, where's your time? It's like money. If you get money, whether you work for somebody or make money, what do you do first. Most people, you pay all the bills, whatever's left. Well, then I have something opposed to. Another philosophy is pay yourself for what you've done. Pay yourself first, even 5%, take it off the top and just stick it in a stupid savings account. If you had to, just pay yourself something first. If you can't afford 10%, 5%, then believe me, the rest of the money will be allocated out. Take care of yourself first. That's part of your own self management. And then try and find some time. I find love to share this with you. About five minutes in the morning. I wake up in the morning, do obviously what you have to do when you wake up. Then I go right back to bed and I try and clear my space. Let's say I'm in this room. I will look at the ceiling, look at the walls. I will be in present time or try to. And then I normally have just one saying, you know, creator of souls, thank you for all that you've blessed me with and may I go forward to be able to do something that helps make this world a better place. And try and be in total present time. Not about what I'm going to do today, not about my next appointment. Just be. And then when you wake up, your head's a little clearer, your mind's a little clearer, and it's not.

Cluttered. That's.

Great. It works. Love.

It. Love.

It. Works for.

Me. Well, you're buddies with Tony Robbins. Yesterday I interviewed Tony and Peter Diamandis over here, founder of the X Prize. And they talked about morning rituals with. And Tony does a thing called priming where he primes himself. And so I love hearing people's rituals because what they do in their habits is what creates their.

Life. You can do that on the road, you can do it in an airplane. And it's free, right? Don't have to carry.

Anything.

Yep. Awesome. So what's the biggest or most important business lesson that you have learned either on purpose or by.

Accident? By accident. One of the biggest business things that I ever learned was I started John Paul Mitchell Systems with $700. The business partner I started with was a top hairdresser, but he didn't do business. I didn't do hair. So we had no money. No money. Okay. So I did 10 or 15 things. After six months, we were able to hire our first employee. Shirley Wong was her name. I gave Shirley 10 jobs and said, I hope you could do them, Shirley. Whatever you can to, honey, I'll figure out how to help you. Shirley learned how to do 10 jobs, not one, but 10. Then I realized, wow, it's not just the person that started to cut me through necessity, but people do a heck of a lot more than what people say you should be doing. We're all capable of that. So that point forward, I paid people very well but gave them the opportunity to do more than this is just your job. This is just your job. Now that might be anti union. Okay, no disrespect to the unions. Okay, no disrespect. But when one has the ability to do whatever they can do that they want to do. I'll give you the end result. Four months ago I'm in my office, I fly from Austin to LA, had do some work. My staff closes up at 4:30. Some come in at different hours in the morning to miss traffic. So by 5:30 I'm there to hear something in the office. So I go back there and there's a couple of girls working, a couple of guys. I said what are you doing here? Hey, it's an hour, two hours after we close. What are you doing here? They said jp, we love working here and we wanted to finish these little projects. I said, how many people are here? They said, I don't know. Hey, who's here? JP's here. 12 people came out with the same exact thing. JP, we just want to be here. We know we don't have to be here. We're not paid for this. We want to be here. We love what we're doing jp, we just want to finish this. You know, they didn't want to leave. Well, needless to say we all went out for a really good dinner and a couple great bottles of wine and a little bit of good tequila too. Anyways, we were a team. But when people feel good and respected and you give them the ability to do more than this is just what the job is. You'd be amazed at how they expand their business for our size company. Take John Paul Mitchell Systems. I should be in the thousands with employees. John Paul Mitchell Systems alone now this includes the warehouse has 300.

Employees.

Wow. That's it for the world. Now we have about 800 part time but 300 full time employees for the world. Petrona has a lot more because hand bottles blown out of recycled glass. We have a lot of labor intensive there but you can't have fewer moving parts. But my people do, my family, they do more. More than three times that many people because they love what they're doing and who they do it for. Very.

Important. That's.

Awesome. Well, you know, I mean, just as an aside, I got some prepared.

Questions here, but I want to do all your questions are great questions. Let's do them all. I'll do these, and then I'm here.

For. I'm going to ask you after this. I have an interesting question. So what have been one or two of your biggest business or life challenges, and how did you get through.

Them? Well, the first one was obviously starting Paul Mitchell with $700 and living for the second time in my car because our backyard pulled out. That was extremely difficult. How do you start a company, balance your bills not going to be paid, knock door to door selling your products? Extremely difficult. That story would take up too much time to tell you right now. But if you want to see that story, there was a fellow named Donnie Deutsch who on cnbc had the big idea. I was on his show four times. He has a half hour special on step for step, how I did it and how you. How the hell do you do it on $700 and no money? Start a company and grow it. So it was along the way that was the biggest challenge. And you want to know the success out of that? This was a success. How do you know you were successful? Two years later, we should have gone bankrupt every single day. Two years later, we were able to pay our bills on time. Not pay them off, but pay them on time. We said, hey, we made it, and we got $2,000 left over. We made it, we're successful, we're all happy. And that was a real challenge. Another challenge is on, and there's many businesses I started that didn't go so well, but they were good learning experiences where when I had a partner that I really trusted and they're like stealing money or kind of stabbing in the back, that was very, very disappointing. But on the whole, other partners are really great. So it weighed itself.

Out. Yeah. Well, I've. I think. How many of you have ever had embezzlement in your.

Company?

Yeah. So, I mean, it's usually. It's not a matter of if. It's just a matter of.

When. Yeah. And try and handle with love. When you do. I mean, it's kind of like you son of a. Anyways, try and handle love. Hey, you screwed up, man. Now what are we gonna do to make this right? You know, I mean, you handle these things when they come up and it happens in life, you know, just something that happens. And I'm sure it'll happen again somewhere along the.

Way.

Yeah.

Awesome. Handle with.

Love. So what's the most useful life and business advice you can give to someone who is a high level of achiever or entrepreneur? Not just startups, but people that are already at a certain level because the vast majority of people here are run very successful.

Companies. One sentence. Success. Success. Unshared is failure. One sentence with your own people, with your family, with your friends and the world. Success. Unshared is failure. We have 118 Paul Mitchell schools nationwide of cosmetology. They're all taught over several months, a culture of giving back. They all do fundraisers. We pay for the whole fundraiser. Every dime goes into their local community, their state, our country and the world to make it a better place to live. Success, unsure it is failure. And you don't need money to be sharing. You could do just something nice.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. So when it comes to money making it, keeping it, giving it away, what should every person in this room.

Know? Have six months worth of what it costs you to live in the bank in cash. If things went wrong, I mean about movie theater tickets, gasoline, insurance, have that in the bank. No matter what happens, you know you're going to survive the way you survive right now for a period of six months minimum. I would say try and eliminate as much debt as possible. Pay off your house if you can, first, very, very important. And then as you're making money, whenever you make money, don't invest at all. Oh my God, don't invest at all. You're investing on the next thing to come along, that's fine. But take a portion of it in, of a secure investment, you're not going to lose. Take a portion of that and be a little conservative on that one. So as you're building your own empire, you're building something for you and your family and your friends in the future that no one could touch. Then of course, with others, you want to take gambles, you want to invest it in, in yourself and your own growth. But take a little piece of everything and pay yourself first where it's a stable investment so that you feel really, really good. And the bigger you get, the harder it is to make sure you're investing money. I'm part of a group called the Giving pledge. There's about 103 of us, Warren Buffett, Mike, Bill Gates and a few of us. And we've already pledged, we were so blessed in life that 50% of our wealth while we're alive or after we die, we'll go to make the world a better place to live. But we Found in our seminars that we do, you've got to check who you give the money to. There's certain great charities, but 50% of it goes to fundraising. In one case, 80% went to fundraising, 20% went to actually helping the people out. So when you do that, check it out. But don't just give money. Give something that'll let somebody do something for themselves to continue. It's like you feed somebody, hey, it's good you should feed people. But when you teach them how to fish, they could do it themselves. So that should be part of what you're doing. What's the end solution long term? Not just what the.

Bandage.

Gotcha. Great. So what are the key characteristics that you think make the best.

Leaders? One, be empathetic. If somebody comes to you and talks to you and they're just pouring their heart out to you, listen, you may have been there once yourself once, and nobody ever listened to you. Listen to that. A great leader is someone that could listen. A great leader that doesn't look at, okay, what am I going to get out of this? The great leader looks at what's the entire team going to get out of this? And how does this benefit the end customer, not just me and my team, how do they benefit more than anybody else? And when you have that mindset, it's easy to move ahead. And you move ahead with a lot of people that are right on the same, shall we say, thought pattern that you're on. Very.

Important.

Yeah. Awesome. So what are you working on now? Because you're working on a lot of stuff that you're. You're most.

Excited. I'll just mention two, and it's ways that, you know, and those that have really made it, you know, big financially or businesses, think about the next thing you do, how it benefits the world, and don't be too greedy on your profits. One of them is called Rok R O K Rock Mobile. We knew there was a better way. And if I could take someone that is spending $1,000 immediately, have only spent $300, they just made $700. What's your mobile phone cost? Just, you know, what your mobile phone costs you. Rock Mobile and my partners are the biggest phone companies in our nation. Some of the biggest phone companies in the nation are my, my partners, my carriers. All the big record companies are my partners. $49.95 a month. $49.95 a month. Right. All your phone calls, all your texting, all your data with no limitations, and all Your music, over 20 million songs, all Straight on down, no limitations whatsoever, flat fee. And in approximately, we think about three or four months, we'll be able to put on all international calls for maybe another 15, $20. On top of all that, no roaming. But in the United States, that's it. Well, that's revolutionary because the average phone bill on a cell phone is a heck of a lot more than.

That. Can you do this with an.

Iphone? Yep. Any phone you have, it's done on any telephone you have. You don't have to, you know, get rid of your phone, take your existing phone. If you need a phone, they'll help sell you a phone. But you know, existing phones, any kind of phone you have just transferred on over. You know, it's very, very unique. Now, you'll notice if you go online to rockmobile.com that whatever carrier, pick maybe the carrier you already have, and it's a heck of a lot less what we charge than what that carrier charges. Well, if there's a charge to disconnect from that carrier, that 100 or 200 bucks a month, you know, or just 100 or $200 flat fee, you got to pay it. You know, we can't do that for you. But when you look at what you save, maybe you'll make it back in a month or two. The other one is, and it's revolutionary what? Because I always wanted to affect, which most of us probably do, millions of people everywhere. The next one is Abio Aubio. Au is the chemistry sign for gold. Bio, of course, for nature. Nature's gold. Abio. Most of the population of our planet has one form or another of the herpes complex. Now, the herpes complex is like a cold sore, a fever blister, a mouth ulcer, as well as, you know, oral or genital herpes. And there's other types of herpes in that.

Category. In this room, it would be probably much.

Higher. Okay. Anyways, I worked with some genius people. It goes all the way back to the Native Americans. And over the last several years, I have funded, put millions of dollars into it, double blind studies and everything else. It's topically applied. You topically apply it, Right? And let's say if someone has a cold sore, you feel a tingle when it comes out, you put it on every hour. And more than 90% of everyone that does it, it doesn't come out. But if it comes out, you put it on. And in over 90% of all people, you put on every hour for a day or 2. In about 90% of all people, it disappears. In A matter of a couple of days, it's gone. I mean, it's a revolutionary product. Unbelievable. I did it under two conditions. Number one, we'd be able to have something that was all plants that was topically applied. And it is all grown in the United States of America. Some of them are very hybrid plants. Like we took some carnivorous plants and hybrid them. But number two, and this is an important thing, I wanted to be available to everybody and everybody could afford it. I didn't want it to sell for $1,000, a little tube or 500. I want everyone to afford it. Try a retail of $39.95. That's it. So now. And we just launched it right now. Just being launched right now. But throughout the world, it's amazing. The majority of the world has one form or another of this herpe complex that this could address and be extremely beneficial on. And a lot of doctors and other people are very excited that we have something like that. And I know when I looked at your demographics that about 30% of you and somehow are in direct marketing. If you want to see what the model is with Abio, you're very welcome to. But I won't take your time right now. Go to abio.com, you'll see what the model is there for merchandise in that product. They'll get back to you, Rachel, or someone will get back to you. But that was something where I wanted something that was necessary. There was a need in the marketplace research shown that involving plants on it did such a great result. I mean, people were blown away at what this product did. So I knew it was something that was necessary. I knew if I priced it properly, it was benefiting the world. So by doing that, yeah, maybe I made a little bit less money, but I still made enough money. And what do I do with this extra money? It's going to give me ways to go and help more people on this planet with revenues do more.

Things. Wow, that's.

Awesome. And better.

Things. So do you yourself seek out things like this? Are they brought to you on a con? Because I imagine you're barraged with a bazillion.

People. Barraged. And I would say I probably get hit with a hundred things a week. Maybe my assistants go through everything and I may see one occasionally because I am over inundated. There's no more room for anything in my life, business wise. But along the way, if you leave yourself open, just leave yourself open to the universe and that, believe me, it works. Just leave yourself open. Things will Come your way and either interest you or doesn't interest you. So let's say 10 things came my way that really interest me in a big way. And I got involved with, let's say eight of those things. Okay, eight of those things I got involved with. Well, maybe four of them went wrong, but the others went really, really right. Leave yourself open the universe. Get a feeling. What do you feel in your gut? Not just what does it say on paper and how much you're going to make. What do you feel in your gut? Is this something that'll do the greatest good for the greatest number? Be beneficial and if it is, you'll still make your profits, but you're going to do it with light, with light in your eyes and light in your soul. Very important. The frequency of our planet is changing, Joe. It's rising more and more people. Believe it or not, if you look at the news, more and more people are doing things for other people than ever before. It is rising regardless of how bad it seems to be than they plan. That's getting.

Better. Well, what's perfect is we got the author of the book Abundance, Peter Diamandis here, who, you know, has clearly proven that the world is getting better on all levels. That's great. So what are you most proud of in your.

Life? Two things. One, and one of my fellow brothers from Horatio Alger is part of your group here. I was able to in the Supreme Court receive the Horatio Alger Award. It's the only award given to the Supreme Court court. And it's for Americans that went through a lot of adversity but shared along the way to help make America a better place to live. And I was very, very proud of that because I know I did a lot and continue to do a lot. And to be able to know that someone that's with a high school education that was able to do this, that America still works. And that was an unbelievable proud moment. Another proud moment was when I started grow Appalachia several years ago. All these people on welfare, on how to get them fed and put them all in businesses in agriculture. We have 30,000 people just eating off their own gardens now and going to farmers markets, selling their eggs, selling their products. And it was something I was able to do philanthropically and see an unbelievable result. Very proud. Needless to say, all my kids, my family, wife, everyone is doing great. My loved ones are doing really, really great. And my God. Hello out there. I love you. There's a lot of great people are doing a lot of work things right now and I'm very proud of my association with them. To give them a helping hand. Do.

That.

Yeah. You know when we talked backstage and even when I interviewed you, you know that I'm doing work with addiction. I'm doing a documentary on helping addicts. And you have a tequila company and you actually gave the land to.

Arbor.

Yep. Talk about that. For them to build a recovery.

Center. You Betcha. In Georgetown, Texas I bought this fabulous ranch, almost 80 acres. We put horses there for equine therapy and I built it out for them so that people would have a place to go. It's quite a program. But get an end result. I saw even within close friends of mine, close to me, they would go into rehab, come out of rehab, go right back into rehab. Like a revolving door. And I knew there had to be a different way. Some wonderful people, Justin, Harvey and Jim and several others found a way because they were addicts. How to get out of it but stay out of it. And put a whole program together where someone had to go there for three months and live but then for the next 12 months be monitored. I believe they have the lowest return factor anywhere in the nation, maybe even the world because they cared about it cost wise. It was very exciting too. You go to some of these shishi rehab places, they're extremely expensive. 60, 70,000amonth. Their whole year long program. Actually it's more than a year is. I believe it's 48, $49, I mean thousand dollars, that's all. And which is really cheap. Consider there's room and board involved in this. So they did and they had a smaller program but it was able to have good results therapy by communicating with horses, communicating with one another, keeping the guys and girls separated and having a good end result. I believed in that. And by the way, I don't own any part of the company. I got the land and basically at cost. I let them just pay me back over a long period of time for the whole infrastructure I put in for.

Them. That's.

Great. It's helping people out.

Awesome. So you know, with Paul Mitchell Systems and Patron and all, you know, Rock Mobile and all the different things that you're doing, you know, I sit and I can't help but think of like a guy like Elon Musk, you know with SpaceX and SolarCity and Tesla. These types of entrepreneurs are so damn unique where they can be in charge or running or owning something like you know, either all of it or parts of that. Who do you call for advice? I mean when you're like, I need to figure out what to do. Do you employ those people or do you have, like, a few key relationships that coach you, that help you, that when you just don't, you know, how do.

You. The answer is, I don't. If there's something I don't know something about, I'll look within my own groups of families to see if there's someone there that can answer it. Or I look for outside advice from someone that knows a heck of a lot more than me. I go out there and I seek it. I don't have a regular, ongoing mentor that I go to. If it's law, I'll go here. Of its administration, I'll go here. If it's getting rid of AIDS to the world, I'll go here. You know, I look for those people that are much more knowledgeable than I. Much more. And they're out there, you know, And I think I do this because if you go to one or two people, which is wonderful, if you have good people, as long as those people are smart enough and kind enough to say, I know so much, but, boy, this person can know a hell of a lot more, go to them.

Also.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click.

Here. Go.

Ahead. You're over.

Here. Do it now. Come.

On. Thank.

You. Watch.