Financial Independence: Your Growth Plan for the Future with Garrett Gunderson - Genius Network Episode #13

Foreign. Welcome to the Genius Network show. In this episode you'll discover how you can get the strategic advantage to create financial independence. Stock market slip ups, how to avoid two common money mistakes, the surprising truth about passive income, and more with Genius Network alumni Garrett Gunderson. Garrett is the founder and chief wealth architect of Wealth Factory and New York Times best selling author of Killing Sacred Cows. Overcoming the financial myths that are destroying your prosperity. If you would like access to the full feature video presentation, the special resources and the show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 13 that's geniusnetwork.com 13.

Hello, this is Joe Polish. I'm here with a longtime friend, Garrett Gunderson. What's up?

How's it going?

We're just shaking hands just for the video so it looks professional. Just so you know.

Okay, well, this is the most professional it's going to get.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We're going to share some really. Well, hopefully this totally depends on you, Garrett. Yeah, you got to say some good stuff today that's going to be helpful to all of our viewers that are watching this on video and people that are listening to the audio version of this. This will be some good stuff. So if you don't know who Garrett Gunderson is, I'll tell you the quick bio. Garrett is chief wealth architect at Wealth Factory and author of the New York Times bestseller Killing Sacred Cows. Wealth Factory helps entrepreneurs optimize cash flow, streamline their finances and keep more of their hard earned money so they can make more powerful investment and their best wealth creator, which is their business. Garrett has appeared multiple times on ABC News, now you, World with Neil Cavuto on Fox, CNBC's squawk on the street and more. And his first Firm made the Inc. 500. Read more about Garrett and his company at wealthfactory.com you can also follow him at facebook.com wealthfactory twitter.com wealthfactory so what else do they need to know about you before I get into asking you a bunch of questions? And you're trying to be serious now too, which is funny.

That's a serious bio. It's like after people see me, they have to hear those, you know, we use these really fancy words like chief wealth architect.

Right.

Kind of stuff.

Yeah.

All these times when people see me like, oh God, that's the finance guy for sure. Look at him, you know.

Right.

But I'm not like a Wall street guy. I'm more of like all about cash flow keeping, more of what you make. I'm not really like an investment guy telling people where to invest their money. I'm more like, what's their investor DNA? What aligns with who they are, how do they manage risk, all that kind of stuff. But I think that I bring simplicity and a little bit of fun to a boring ass topic of finance that most people never confront. And I'm solving the entrepreneur's dilemma where they're always saying, I'll just earn more money. They think that's a solution to everything. And it's great to earn more money. But Biggie says more money, more problems. And I think that's what actually happens to a lot of people is they just don't know how to handle that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think having been totally broke even growing up, I mean, half my, half my childhood we lived in trailers and stuff. I mean, we weren't completely dirt poor, but we certainly never had. I never lived any sort of extravagant life growing up. And my father coming from the Great Depression, he just was. He was paranoid about doing anything. So I've had different experiences. And then starting my own company when I was in my 20s and then literally having a multimillion dollar business by the time I was even 30 years old. I've seen extremes, and what I've learned is that there's big difference between making money and managing it. I mean, they're two completely different skill sets. Because I know people that have had millions of dollars come through their hands, that are broke, and other people that have earned very modest incomes and they just do things very intelligently and they amass quite a bit of wealth and investments and they're safe. And at the same time they're able to live out their entrepreneurial, you know, life. Because if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you're kind of going to trade off security because there are certain levels. You know, David Kekich has that quote, if your purpose in life is security, you'll be a failure. Because security is the lowest form of happiness. And that's a philosophical way to maybe talk about it. But it is nice to not have to be stressed continuously related to money. And the truth is most people are poor and rich. And see, when people have at least the illusion of being successful financially, people think they don't have problems. And you know, as well as I do, I spend a lot of time talking with, you know, I mean, I run Genius Network. I mean, I'm dealing with people that are running multimillion dollar companies. I mean, most of my clients are millionaires. And there is a lot of stress and a lot of angst. So that's one of the reasons I want to talk with you about all this stuff. And so I've got a whole list of questions that I think will get us talking about things that will be most useful for our viewers and our listeners.

I think just to what you're saying here though is the bottom line is the greatest asset anyone has is them, their ability to earn money. It's not a stock, it's not a bond, it's not a piece of real estate. And if people start getting distracted by their money or their investments or things that they don't know about because they're speculative or they're exhausted because they're worried about, is this handled when it's not, they're not sleeping well or they don't have peace of mind or financial clarity, it starts to drain their actual productivity. So if someone gets their financial house in order first, it takes some courage to confront that. But second, if they do that, I see A year later, 20% increase in their revenues and if we use some of the things we teach today, 25% increase in their net profits simply because of what the distraction is when that pressure's on. Like I get sometimes there's positive pressure of okay, I need to produce. But a lot of times it destroys creativity, it creates adrenal fatigue, it hurts relationships. It has people like making, chasing what I call bad profits like, okay, I need to make this money. And so they take on a project or they take on a customer that really isn't a good fit just in the name of a short term profit. So they miss a lot of the foundational, like financial principles that I'll keep them. I just don't want people to discount them because they're so damn simple. But if people implement this, it is going to push them so much further ahead. And I think that one of the most strategic advantages for business owners if they can create economic independence, which is just simply how do you create enough investment in entrepreneurial income? And there's no such thing as passive income. That's just a big lie. I mean, passive income, if someone's owned real estate, it's not passive. You have to manage it. Right. What I like to call it, just to be really clear, because I think semantics matter, is recurring revenue. How can you create enough recurring revenue that comes in even if you don't show up the next day? But you still have to be a steward over, you still have to be responsible for. So entrepreneurial income is income that would show up to your firm if you didn't show up the next day. But if we look when you started Genius Network, a lot of that was probably very driven by you that now you have kind of an organization that can handle a lot of that or investment income that comes in every single month. And the problem is there's this big fault where everybody thinks that investing is about setting money aside, waiting for that to develop over time. And I believe investing first and foremost and safest is about cash flow that covers your expenses. Because as soon as that happens, you have recurring income to cover that you can swing for the fences in your business. You lower your stress level and every dollar you earn is unencumbered to your lifestyle and can go to create exponential growth inside of building more cash flowing assets. Gotcha. So anyway, that's a little bit of the framework.

No, that's awesome. You know, let me even ask you, like, how would you to take it at the most basic level? This is going to sound totally ridiculous, but I'm interested to see how you would answer it. What is money?

Money is simply a receipt. I think that money is a receipt of two other things. The first thing is how effective we are at taking our mental capital, which is our ideas, our knowledge, our wisdom. And business is the bridge between what we know and people. And that's the, that bridge is business. So it's how effective do we serve other people? And then money is just the receipt to show how effective we are at it.

Okay, so if you were.

So some people call it energy, some people call it, you know, but it's, it's just a representation of value. It's not value in and of itself. It's a representation of value that we can store that value. Because if I, if we're not bartering and I do something for you or like when I joined Genius Network, right then all of a sudden I paid before I came to all the sessions, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But it was stored value until, until, until I did.

Until I didn't give you any value whatsoever.

Yeah, I was like, screw this guy. But you pulled out this thing right here.

You have been listening to the special presentation with Garrett Gunderson. We will return shortly. If you would like access to the full feature video presentation, the special resources and the show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 13 that's geniusnetwork.com 13. Let's get back to the presentation.

Oh yeah, this is our first phone call. So just background, by the way.

So people that aren't seeing this on video. They're hearing, like. Cause a lot of people listen to my podcast. They listen to the audio version. And if you are listening to the audio, you can always go to the Genius. You can type in Joe Polish and Gary Gunderson and find this video or go to Genius Network and you can find it there. So this is new rules to get rich. How to optimize your wealth and maximize your fulfillment. Because we're in one of my conference rooms in my building that has about 2,200 books on the shelf currently. And I know the value of every one of these books, by the way, the ones that are not old editions and stuff, because there are some that you can't trace. But it's like $88,000 worth of books sitting in this room right now. So nonetheless, this is a Nightingale Conant program that was done how many years.

Ago, in 2008 or 2009. And so this is how it came about 2006. I have two business partners that Dyna plane crash. And Babs calls me strategic coach and says, hey, what can we do to help you out? And I was like, I don't know. I'm, you know, I just, I need some help for sure. We have 42 employees. I don't really. I'm figuring out how personality based we were. We don't have a lot of systems in place. And she goes, all right, why don't you just come out to Toronto? And so I flew out to Toronto, had dinner with her and Dan stayed at their guest house, went and, you know, interviewed Dan for a series thing that I was doing. They showed me the business and they just talked to me about how to navigate a lot of that process. And all I said was, look, I would like to know how to market better. I don't really know. Like we had Now, I lost two partners. These were big personalities. They drove a lot of business in. And they said, well, you need to know Joe Polish. So it was a chaotic time. So you and I didn't meet. But then I wrote the book Killing Sacred Cows, and someone sent it to Robin Robbins. She sent it to you. And then Dan happened to tell you about me that week. So we ended up connecting on the phone because of that. And on that first phone call, we were talking and I said, yeah, Nightingale Conant was going to do something with me, but they decided to go with the cheapskate millionaire because it tested better. You're like, let me make a phone call. The next thing I know, I'm doing The Nightingale Conant program. So then you're like, hey, would you like to join my mastermind? And by the way, I don't know if you remember this, but I just written a check for $91,000 to plan television arts. I just written a check to promote a book for $95,000. I just written a check for 66,000 revenant rate. It goes on to be $500,000 of checks. And then you're like, hey, do you want to join my mastermind? Well, I already listened to Prana marketing because I bought it at strategic coach. It was sitting out there.

Yeah.

So at the end, you're talking about the importance of Mastermind, you marketing S.O.B. you know, just getting me totally boug. I'm like, oh, God, I need to be in this mastermind. Then you're like, hey, do you want to be in. I said yes before I even KNEW it was 25 grand. I'm like, absolutely. I'm like, when is he. Next week. I'm like, great, I'll be there. You're like, cool, just send the $25,000 to Eunice. I'm like, oh, okay. I just wrote a bunch of checks, so let me figure this out. And I just. I figured it out, and it was really kind of a tough thing because I didn't have the exact resources based on everything I was allocating towards the book, But I just knew that it was going to be a good thing for me. So I came out the next week when you introduced me to someone that helped me sell a thousand books. The first week my book was out, and someone that's been a longtime friend on that first session. And then, I mean, I came into that room, and I kind of felt like the baby of the room. Like, I didn't know much about marketing. I felt a little bit out of my league. I was a little bit nervous.

Yeah.

And then now I feel like when I'm in the room, you call on me now.

Oh, yeah.

One of the contributors. But that's where a lot of the background was. And so it was a pretty transformational thing for me to invest in myself. And I kind of figured. I was like, look, if I put all my money in this book, it wasn't all my money, but if I put a lot in this book, like, that's something I have a lot of ability to. Course. Correct. I have a lot of ability to influence. To me, it was a great investment, you know, going to the Mastermind. I'm like, hey, an investment in relationships. I'm Going to meet people that I never met before. And it was, it was definitely an exponential thing for me because all of a sudden, I mean, where you're brilliant and other people just don't do what you do, is someone that you didn't know really well, you met in New York and they were going to Park City. So you just call them me. You're like, hey, this is Patrick. He's coming to Park City next week. Now, look like I knew 10 people that knew me and knew Patrick. No one connected us. So I get on the phone with Patrick because you awkwardly hand your phone to him.

Yeah.

And then the next thing you know, he's in Park City. The next week we meet. I go to a thing for that. He's hosting the week after in Denver. Get seven clients, by the way, from a 10 minute talk. Not because it was a Joe Polish 10 minute talk. Just because that's all they had for me. And I was just there as a guest. Transformed my son's health because it was all these health professionals and we didn't know what to do. And so you just think about the power of an investment in yourself and all the peripheral things that come about from that. And I think in the world of investing, too many people think it's about a product. And there is no magic product out there. There is no like, oh, cool, if I do this investment, then that's going to be the game changer. If that happened, we'd all call the 800 number, we'd all line up, buy that investment. But the bottom line is it's basically building your foundation. It's making sure that your money's safe so it could be sustainable, and then keeping your growth totally aligned with where you have expertise, where you have knowledge, and staying more in cash than almost anyone will tell you. Because real investors pounce when there's opportunity and stay in cash. Rookie investors constantly stay invested because they're indoctrinated to do that by the entire investment world, which is because of the system, the compensation, not because of the reality.

Interesting. Yeah. So when it comes time for them to have available cash flow to put in cash to put into any opportunity, it's just not there.

Right. A market they don't control starts to go down. Now they're going, well, I don't want to take those losses or they get burned by that loss. And then they don't want to invest. And then everyone else like McDonald's goes, it's time to buy real estate. Apple goes, it's time to start acquiring Businesses, everyone else goes, now's the time. And then the other people were going, oh, the market's going up. I better jump in and get into this. And look, I believe real wealth is built through focus, not diversification. Diversification is admission that we don't know what we're doing. I don't know. Diversify. Maybe this will work, maybe that'll work. And it actually spreads us thin and moves us further away from understanding the outcomes. So I believe diversification creates risk in some sense. Even though it might create more stability to your money, it creates more risk in it because you're further removed from the outcomes and the knowledge.

So you said diversification is the. Say that line again. Yes.

Diversification is admission of ignorance.

Admission of ignorance.

I don't know what I'm doing. Let's diversify. You see, Andrew Carnegie said, put all your eggs in one basket and watch it like a hawk. Look at the wealthiest people in the world. Did they get there from diversification, or did they get there from ultra focus, with ideas, with business, with something that made an impact? And most people think investing is about ROI numbers, but investing is actually about how. What kind of mental capital do you have that actually impacts other people? And the more people it impacts, the more wealth that could come about. Or the deeper it impacts people, the more the wealth could come about. So when people wake up in the morning and want to know how they can make more money, that's not a good question.

Right.

It's not powerful. The better question is, what mental capital do I have that's unique, that I can actually do something with? Marketing is one of the accelerators to business because it helps that bridge become more effective to reach more people. Right? So I think that people just have a faulty equation because Genius Network proved this for me. You're either one idea or one relationship away from the next level of prosperity.

Right?

So I show you. You were that relationship that had an exponential growth. For me, Patrick was another relationship. Exponential growth. We can kind of, you know, tie that down the road. And my book brought a bunch of great relationships because I shared mental capital that the marketplace hadn't seen yet. So when people read it, they resonated and they wanted to talk.

Well, I mean, look, just like what we're doing here, just like putting out my podcast that I do on, you know, the Genius Network podcast, which, you know, just the time we're doing this interview, recently launched, you know, just, what, a little over a month ago. And putting ideas out to the world like, this is a way of Just anyone, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will end up listening to this. And there's a small percentage that will actually do something with it. And now when someone pays a large sum of money, their likelihood of doing something with ideas and relationships is greatly.

We pay attention to that which we pay for.

Exactly, exactly.

You taught me, hey, the quickest way to build a relationship is write a check, right? And look. But the other thing is, I think people get so enamored, like leaders, visionaries, people that are up to something. They get caught in the details too often instead of the vision. So I have a kind of a philosophy of people over projects. So for example, when you're like, dude, come to Vietnam. I was in a pretty big project at the time. I was like, man, this is kind of bad timing. But I went home, told Carrie and she's like, you gotta go. That's gonna be a good group of people. You know, you're gonna like build something out of that.

Right.

So you immediately asked me, we're on the flight, hey, you should come speak at my event. Okay. You know, I meet some new people that I still have relationships with that have, you know, that have become valuable. But I think a lot of people, they want to build relationships without putting in the work, but they get that it takes work to build a company. They get that it takes work to finish a project, but they don't get the work that it takes to build a relationship. And that's where they miss most of the wealth. I think most wealth in the world right now that's under capitalized is relationship capital.

Right, right. Well, look, you'll get no disagreement for me. I'm totally biased on that because that's what my whole world consists of, is curating the right relationships and putting them together. Well, talking about Vietnam, we gotta tell the Tim Ferriss story because we're on that trip with John.

I like to tell people that they're like, how do you know Joe Nom? We went to Nom.

Yeah, that was actually great. That was a great. We won't spend a lot of time on this just because we obviously wanted to dispense useful financial advice. But we invited Tim Ferriss on the trip. John and Missy Butcher, who are my partners and artists for addicts, and they founded Lifebook and he's the chairman of Precious Moments, the largest collectible company in the world. And so he had put this trip together in 2009. And so Tim Ferriss, Matt Mullenw, the founder of WordPress, and John Vasily and Who else is Brad Fallon? Yeah. A bunch of goofballs. Yeah, it was. And so we go there and anyway, I mean, Tim, who's Mr. You know, Vagabond sort of thing, has, you know, he basically packs very light. And he also prides himself in dancing and doing karate and martial arts.

His umbro shorts.

Yeah, well, the orange shorts that we kept giving him grief about, like in.

A really formal, nice hotel in Saigon.

Yeah.

He comes out in his umbrellas, but.

You know, he does he comfortable as could be. Give him credit. I mean, he knows how to, like, travel for. I don't know how often he does it.

Now he knows how to do it.

You know, you can take like a backpack that's like half full and travel for like a month. I mean, I just can't do that. I mean, I just don't know how people do that. So John and Missy, on the other hand, you know, they carry like semi trucks of luggage.

Seriously? Yeah. Which is how much stuff they shipped home and.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I even bought a bunch of art and I had them ship it. It was great. So here's the thing, though. So we go to a puppet. A water puppet show.

Oh, God, dude.

And it was the most painful experience.

Now, when I say painful dinner with John and Missy. And that's the first thing I said. I said, remember the time when you sent us to the puppet show and you guys didn't show up? Yeah.

We're crammed in this smelly, sort of.

Moldy, watery puppets in water. They don't move. Yeah, just stick puppets.

If we were looking at each other.

The entire jet lag, we just landed.

Right.

So I'm like half falling asleep.

I mean, watching bugs die would have been more entertaining than that show. I mean, it was like. Anyway, but it was. It was enormously me.

Matt.

Yeah. We're just, like, looking at each other like, we are here. I can't believe this. And you couldn't leave because it was like, you're in the middle of this thing. Yeah, you could not leave. So we just had to sit there and, you know, I mean, look. I mean, these are all first world problems for us, going to a third world country and whatnot. But it was a great trip, though. And the people there were incredibly nice. And the most interesting thing was how entrepreneurial that country was. You know, I mean, there was. It was weird, though, because I remember there would be streets that you would in. The only shops would be.

This is Pineapple Street. Yeah. Everyone's in one section in a category.

Of shoes.

And I'm like, this is shoe Street.

Your competitors selling the same thing you're selling. And one of the weirdest thing, I think it was, you know, Saigon, which is, you know, Ho Chi Minh City. There was a Louis Vuitton store and then there was a knockoff store right next door selling the same exact purse. One was like $4,300, I think, in the real Louis Vuitton store. And then right next door, a knocked off version of that purse was $80. And I'd never seen anything like that about, you know, just into IP intellectual property where they literally could knock off something and they'd sell it right next door. And somehow that just, it worked. I mean, so if you really wanted the real authentic stuff, you go there. And if you want the fake stuff is the strangest thing I'd ever seen. You know, I never forgot that. Anyway, then the Kentucky Fried Chicken was pretty funny too.

Remember?

Well, it was like a Colonel Sanders that looked like a Vietnamese Colonel Sanders. It was, it was funny. All right, so let's go back. Let's go to some money.

You showed that, like at one of your events.

I had a picture of it. I wish I could. If I had easy access to it, I would just. We would make it part of the promotions of this podcast. All right, so let me ask you this question. What kind of advice are people following that actually hurt them rather than help them when it comes to money?

So the main advice that hurts people is this kind of scarcity driven accumulation philosophy that, you know, we could hear things like start early, dollar cost average. The market goes up, the market goes down. But long haul, you know, all that is actually really damaging because it doesn't have people look and say, is this working? How's it working? How am I benefiting? So that whole notion of compound interest being a miracle, the only miracle is that people have actually bought into it.

Thanks for listening to this episode with Garrett Gunderson on Genius Network. If you would like access the full feature video presentation, the special resources and show notes for this episode, please visit geniusnetwork.com 13 that's geniusnetwork.com 1 3. Don't miss out on more insights, strategies and wisdom like this on Genius Network. Subscribe to Genius Network today by visiting geniusnetwork.com subscribe. That's geniusnetwork.com subscribe.