Take Hold of Your Financial Future | Linda McKissack

What would happen if tonight, at the stroke of midnight, the financial resources of your business totally disappeared? Think about that one. Do you have enough passive income not tied to your business to support your present lifestyle? That's a provoking and terrifying question. Because when it happened to Linda McKissick, she and her husband Jim didn't have any passive income. Today, they do. That's what Linda's message is all about. As an author, coach, trainer, speaker, and business owner, she teaches successful entrepreneurs the power of leverage and passive income. She runs five successful businesses that have created $4 million in passive income annually. Linda's title is take hold of your financial future. Please welcome Linda McKissick. Thank.

You. Okay, so what would happen if your financial resources went away? And because this is so much a smarter group than I normally would present this to, I'm going to ask you in a different way. How many of us, and you don't have to raise your hands, but how many of us have enough passive income that if we had a market disruptor or the economy changed or government changed the rules, or we just woke up one day and we decided we wanted options and we wanted freedom of our time to do something else, do we have enough passive income? When I was headed out of the door yesterday, my assistant handed me an email from someone who has asked me to come and work with the Indianapolis Colts. Now, these guys make a lot of money, so they're not thinking anything could happen, right? So I think the best way for me to make this point is to go back and tell you our story and our journey. I think Dan likes to call it research and development. We have a lot of research and development in this area. So I'm going to take you back to 1986 in Texas. The economy was built solely pretty much on the oil and gas industry. And my husband was in the restaurant and nightclub business. And we were doing fantastic. Everything seemed great, except intuitively I knew something was wrong because he didn't want to go to sleep at night, because he didn't want it to be morning, because morning was when the bankers would start calling. And what happened is what was gradually and then suddenly what felt like overnight, the economy just crashed. And he came to me and he fessed up and he said, Linda, we're $600,000 upside down in debt, and I need you to go to work and help. Now, I'm a hard worker. I come from a family of hard workers. In my family, if one job isn't enough, you get two. And if two isn't Enough, you get three. But what you don't do is not pay back people that have loaned you money. So I said, jim, you know, I'm a hard worker, but what in the world can I do to make that kind of money? And he said, you know, I had a football coach one time, and that football coach said, if you want to make a lot of money, real estate's the way to do it. Now, I think the man meant buy some real estate, not put your wife to work in real estate. But you know what? I had no idea I could sell. And isn't that true that almost every big failure that we have in our life, if we give it enough time and we do enough investigating, we find out that the greatest opportunities in our life will come from that? And that's exactly what happened here. I got into real estate sales. I became the number one agent in my office, the number one agent in my company. And then I got on the top 100 salespeople list for the Wall Street Journal and stayed there. So we asked ourselves, how do we not ever get in this situation again? Because that was not fun. And so what we did was we said, let's read books. So how many of you have read the book Cash Flow Quadrant? One of our most powerful paradigm shifts came from this book. And in the book, Robert says 95% of the people get their money from the left side of the quadrant, and that is being an employee or self employed. And we were right in the middle of being self employed people. And 5%, the wealthy actually get their money from the right side, which means they own businesses which are people making you money, or investments which are assets making you money. So we begin to say, well, let's look at the statistics on this. And so if you followed 100 people over their career and over their lifetime, what you'd find is 1 would be wealthy, 4 would be financially secure, 5 would be working because they have to, 36 would be dead, 54 would be broke and dependent on their family and their friends. Now, probably some of us in this room have some of those family and friends that are going to need us to be able to help them because they didn't create enough or they didn't prepare for long enough. I saw this magnet not too long ago and couldn't resist it. And it says, based on my calculations, I can retire about five years after I die. Now, I, like Dan Sullivan, hate the word retire. So I like to think more about freedom. When can I have freedom? The statistics. And most of you, we have some Great health professions in the room. And I'm sure you will attest to this. We're going to live longer. We're going to have the ability to live longer. What we don't know is are we going to outlive the money that we make? Most people will. So if we were going to be wealthy, we had to figure out what is wealthy, what is the definition? And the definition of a wealthy person is your passive income exceeds the income necessary for you to have your lifestyle so that you get the freedom of your time and your money to do what it is that you want. And when we really peeled back the onion and really studied what does wealth look like? What are the ways you can do it? There was actually basically only three ways to build wealth. Stocks, real estate, and businesses. So we said, okay, I like it when things that are complicated get simple. So we looked at stocks and we said, well, first of all, I don't think we could buy enough to control it. Second of all, I'm not that interested in learning about it. And if I'm not going to learn about it, I'm going to be a speculator. I'm not going to be an investor. So here's our wonderful great tip. You ready for our wonderful tip on stocks? Whatever the McKissick's do, do something else. So then we looked at real estate and we said, real estate, okay, I know how to sell real estate. I bet I could figure out how to invest in real estate. So in 1993, while we were still climbing our way out of the $600,000 worth of debt, we made a passive income goal that we wanted $250,000 out of real estate investments. So we backed that up. We'd have to buy 20 properties, have them free and clear in 15 years. Fast forward to today. We have 112 single family homes, 15 vacation rentals, nightly rentals, and six commercial properties. And we did it on a strategy that we call HOLD how to Find, Buy and Rent Real Estate to Build wealth, which we've given you a copy of here. But bottom line is this. We buy an asset that's a good deal. When we buy it, someone else pays it off and it's free and clear passive money for us someday. I love this quote that says real estate cannot be lost or stolen or even carried away. Purchased with common sense, paid for in full, and managed with reasonable care. It's one of the safest investments in the world. And that was roosevelt. So in 1996, we're doing real good. We have Income back again, we really have a pretty good lifestyle. We decided we're going to tackle owning businesses. So we had a business psychotherapist and he said, linda, the true test of a business is when you can leave it for a year or two and it actually grows while you're gone. And we said, oh, we basically have a job that we're walking around calling a business. And so when we really dug in and said, how do you have a business that's really more passive? The one word that we can equate to that is talent. And talent only leaves you when they think there's no more opportunity. So a couple of real big criteria on talent. Number one, they have to have really big goals because if they're going to drive my organization, they're not going to do it for me, they're going to do it for them. Number two, they have to have a past history of success because these people are going to win whether they're with me or they're not with me. And then my third one that I really love to find in talent is I want them to have a chip on their shoulder or something to prove to the world. Now our way of keeping talent is we give them the right to earn an equity opportunity. And the key words there is earn. We call these people wealth determiners and they're wealth determiners because they can actually build something and they're so good they can actually replace you, not just support you. Now, all the topics of building a business that's passive is probably a whole nother 10 minute talk. So maybe if Joel will let me someday we'll have that as a ten minute talk within itself. So this is my family and most of us in this room, in this country remember 9 11, right? 911 was a date that forever changed our country and it will forever change the way we think about things. Right? Well, this is my family. And in September 11, 2012, our family was changed forever. And we actually really had a test of our passive income. And this is what happened. Our daughter calls us and said, andrew, our son and new son in law, he'd been a son in law for about five years, has lung cancer and he has less than a year to live. So we did what any family would do. We packed up our clothes, we left our house, we left all of our businesses and we drove six hours south and we moved in the middle of his family's home because we needed to be there to help them through this, to do the day to day stuff and most of all to help him live out his final wishes, which were to write two books. One was on his faith and the questions he had about him. And number two was a book for his little girl that would teach her life's lessons because he wouldn't be around to do it. And I'm going to tell you why. We were there for those ten and a half months. Our businesses grew, our net worth went up, and our income went up. And so what passive income did for us is it allowed us to be where we needed to be when we needed to be there and stay as long as we needed to stay and all those other things. The income and the net growth is good, but the real true gift that we got is that it gave us no regrets. So I'm going to ask you, what is your freedom number? Within the next week, sit down with your person that you love the most in the world and write down what is that freedom number that you need to create so that whatever happens, you're ready. Thank you.