Episode 450: The Sooner You Learn How to Play Hurt, The Better with David Landrum

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I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you.

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Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm here with David Landrum. We're having fun talking about his experiences in winning. And David has gone from the Deep South. Growing up in the Deep south, never left Mississippi, although he did move from Laurel, Mississippi, up to Jackson and the big town of Jackson, Mississippi. And you know, you can have a, David has proven you can have a worldwide impact or at least a North American impact since he's got offices pretty much all over the United States. Most of the United States. And I think he told me earlier, how many offices do you have up there in Canada?

About 80.

About 80. Total of 224 offices. And so making an amazing impact in the financial services world. And you know, David has been a coach and advisor to people coast to coast. And you evolve into that role as you build an organization. There are certain people that take to your coaching more than others. But David, welcome back. And let's, let's dig into that Bloom where you're planted but keep on moving type thing idea because obviously that's been a pattern of your life. And one of the things about bloom where you're planted is look how you can, what you were saying before is like, look how you can make a difference and jump in first and set the example, set the tone, set the attitude. That type thing where people realize you're not just talking a good game, you're doing it and try and really make an impact where you are rather than moan and groan about we don't have this, we don't have that. Try and make the best you can out of what you got but not stop there, keep on moving. And that's what I see, that's what you were saying. You also got your financials. I think you had enough of a viewpoint of being the manager of the gym that you realize the limitations. Let's just say, you know, and you realize, you know, how, what, what motivated you, what you really want to do in your life and how long you were going to be able to put up with those restrictions on your time and restrictions on your income and you started looking other places you were blooming where you planted. But that doesn't mean you're going to stay there forever. You're Looking for other spots and exploring other options. And that's a key thing, folks. You've got to be on the lookout for something new. And you didn't know if the financial services thing was going to turn anything. But the worst case, you knew. You learn some things, right?

Right. Yeah. As a matter of fact, Larry and I. And I think. See, I think this is such a key point for people. Regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur or work for a great company or whatever, one thing that you need to do is kind of play your life out, okay? And you know what I believe is, hey, look, whatever you're doing, just find somebody that's been doing it, maybe in your company or whatever, 10 years longer. 20 years and 20 years longer. Well, then, you know what? There's a good chance that that's going to be you in 10 years or 20 years, you know, And I think that. So really, you, you know, I think it's a good idea to kind of play your life out and think about how things. How that's going to, you know, what's. What's the best that's going to happen to you where you are. One of the things that I did for about five years. Ole Miss. I'm about two and a half hours from Ole Miss, one of the great, One of the most beautiful campuses in the country from a college standpoint, even though I went to Southern Miss, but Ole Miss, my son went to Ole Miss. But anyway, they invited me to come up and speak to the business school for the seniors in the school of business before they graduated. You know, it was just kind of a resume type class, and they would bring in different business leaders and let us just kind of coach the students on how to win in business, et cetera. And one of the things that I always told them, I said, you know what the thing about it is? And I would always ask them, of course, this was business school. And I'd say, look, how many of you, how many of you want to own your own business? And of course, in a business school, naturally there'd be like 300 of them in there, seniors. And all the hands would go up. And I said, okay, well, let me tell you, if you're going to be. If you want to be an entrepreneur, probably one of the worst things that could happen to you is for you to get out of graduate. And someone offered you a 75,000 a year salary. And you could see in the room. I really kind of let that sink in. You could see the room. They were thinking, man, are you Crazy. What would be bad about? I said, well, you know what's going to happen with that 75k? You're going to, you're going to get out of school, you're going to buy you a new car, right? You're going to get married, you're going to buy a house, you're going to start having kids, right? And all that's good, those are all good things. But then what happens is that treadmill is going to start running and then next thing you know, you know, you know. I said, look, let me tell you, the halls of life are full of 50 year olds that their goal, their dream was to be an entrepreneur. But now all of a sudden life gets in the way and they've got that treadmill starts going so fast they can't jump off. And I said, look, let me tell you, if you want to be an entrepreneur, the sooner the better. Because life only gets more expensive. Life only gets more expensive. Your expenses will never be lower than they are right now. And so they've proven that if you want to be an entrepreneur, the sooner, the younger you do it, the better. But naturally, I mean, any age is good to be able to make that transition. But yeah, I mean, I think that those are all valuable points, especially for younger people like that.

Well, the other thing, David, is that the 75k job can be a good thing if you're aware not to let it be a trap. Because what people do is there are 300 people sitting in that class. They're thinking visions of sugar plum. I want to be financially independent, I want to make big income, have freedom, make a big impact. But then when you get out there and all of a sudden you get a real $75,000 paycheck, if you're not on your toes, you're not thinking like you say, looking down the road in real world experience, looking down the road of your life, you know, playing out your life and saying, what do I want to get? Now I've talked to a lot of people that had been smarter than me when they came up the ladder and what they did was, I mean, there's some ladies, some young guys, it just blows my mind where they learned this, but they have been in the corporate world. I remember asking some of these people, how did you work for three Fortune 500 companies in a row and not get stalled out, not just get your initiative and drive and everything killed? And they said, well, I was there for a purpose. I was there to learn, I was there to meet people, I was there to find out how things were done. I did as many projects, I volunteered for everything I could. I met everybody I could. And because I had bigger fish to fry in my career, in other words, they had done what you did advise when we started this. So that's why, that's why these conversations, David, are so incredibly valuable. Because phrases go out there, people don't know what they mean. But like, play out your life. That's a big deal. But you can easily. It can just go over your head. But like, if you're, you get a big. Whatever you get now, it's like, how can I use that and leverage it to something five, ten times bigger than what I was thinking before that thing showed up, you know?

Yeah, yeah, right.

But I mean, and that's the way I, I tell you what, I got smarter as I grew up. Like, I knew when I built my business, you know, I first, my first month in my own business, you know, where I got my own office, you know, and I was in charge. I made $22,000. And I was smart enough to say to myself, big deal. Now up to that time, I had years of making three to 4,000amonth. And I just come off a three or four month ramp. Up to where it double, double doubled three or four months in a row, up to that 22. As I got to where I was launching the business, got my full office in place and all of that. But the first thing I said to myself was, I never want to make this little amount of money again the rest of my life. And so I did. I took, I believe that the smartest thing you do is invest in your own business, especially on the way up. And so I would take 10 to 20% of it every month and spend it on my management team. You know, we would have, you know, I'd have big meetings where I bought lunch for them. I found out they would actually come to a meeting if you fed them. And then we'd have periodic recognition events where you pass out awards and things like that to appreciate them, you know, proportional. You don't have to go overboard. But it was a way of keeping my focus on moving forward. And that's what I was able to do. Keep that uninterrupted going for like 17 years because I was smart enough to realize it. So these kids come in out of college and say, I'm going to start my business as soon as I can. However, I don't feel like it's my time yet. I don't know exactly what I want to throw my energy Into I'm going to go out there and learn some more things and develop some more skills, develop some more people, contacts, networking. And if they get the big salary, a person like that is more likely to have the energy and the pop that will cause them to actually communicate to the people who are hiring that this is a person who's going to go somewhere we want to get them, and they're going to be worth the money. So you're more likely to get that kind of, you know, a big, decent starting salary. Imposition. If you've got these kind of things burbling inside of you, you know, it all goes in there. But you've got to. When it comes to today, you've got to do a great job today day and talk about how you learned. When did you finally. When did you actually get that? It seems like you had that bread into you right as you were growing up.

Yeah, I mean, of course, the work ethic, one of the things, one of the biggest gifts my dad does, he taught us how to work, and we started when I was in high school. We started. He bought one time, of course, Mississippi, you got a lot of land, but. But anyway, we bought a hay baler, and me and my two younger brothers, we baled hay for everybody in the community. And, you know, so did that through high school. And so I had that work.

Yeah, the idea, the idea of baling hay. It's one thing to have the land, but it's kind of like you're sharecropping yourself. You're kind of like outsourcing someone to plant the hay, and then you outsource someone to actually harvest the hay. Right. The bale, the hay. Right. Yeah, yeah. So outsource. Hey, they may be backwater down there in Mississippi, but they know about outsourcing, right?

Yeah. So. So, so we did that, you know, having that work ethic and, you know. You know, as a matter of fact, that's another thing I would tell the kids in school. I said, college, I said, yeah, you know, what you ought to do is call your parents this weekend and tell them, don't send any more money and go out there and work your way through college. Right? And because so many kids, they graduate in college, they don't have work ethic, you know what I mean? And they don't know about really putting their hand to the plow, you know what I mean? And asking the Lord to bless their effort. But anyway, yeah, that's. That's important, the work ethic and all that.

The other thing, David, that's really a big thing. But to get kids to not dismiss it instantly when they hear it, which you know they will, to actually do it, we ought to give some time thinking about how we can do a better job of selling them, what that would be to their advantage. And one thought to put in people's mind, because if they get it, why it's in my advantage to do it, they could likely do it. But one reason to do it is like, even if you don't call your parents and say, stop sending the money, go out there and get a job and work like they weren't sending it, and take everything you save and start building your nest egg now, because that's going to give you the first thing that your nest egg, it snowballs. You know, it starts off as a snowball, and then it turns into, you know, bigger and bigger as it grows. So you get your nest egg started, and that's resources that you can use. If you get, you know, you don't get the job you want. You got to support yourself for a while. You can be careful about where you go or if you decide you want to, you got an idea you want to kick off, you got to have a little bankroll right now. So that's a way of thinking about it. It's like, sure, you could just goof off to college, or you could get some funding and you could get some experience and you meet some people through these working experiences that gives you an idea of something to do, or you make. Make new contacts, you know, and so kind of, you know, I think we could do a better job of selling students on. Get out there and get to work. You don't have to wait till you get the degree in your hand to go out and go to work. You know, go to. It's basically go to work now because you're going to be a lot more educated if you've been working your way through school. They found that the people in the work study programs at Georgia Tech, like, they worked quarter and then they came and studied a quarter. They always got better grades, you know, they were always more responsible.

Well, you know, think about it. When you do that, you learn how to play hurt. You know what I mean? You learn how to get up when you don't feel like it. You could learn how. And you know, that is. And you develop what we call that mental toughness, right? You know, mental toughness. You get knocked down, you get back up, get knocked down, get back up. Every time you get up, get a little stronger and you know Takes a steady hand to hold the full cup. And I. And I think that. But Larry, you know, the other thing, just like. And you mentioned this earlier, I mean, to me, I interpreted it as, you know, like your success that month that you made over 20,000 or whatever, you used that as a stepping stone to take it to the next level. You know, I think the kids, I think that regardless of any. Wherever you think, because I remember thinking that if I could make, back when I got out of, when I was in school, a business degree, you made about 17,000 a year. So I was thinking, man, if I could make this 43 years ago, this is 1977. So I said, man, if I could make 30,000 a year, man, it'd be unbelievable. I didn't think you could spend that kind of money. Of course, I found out you can quickly. But the thing that I saw was that so many times we say, look, I'm going to go with XYZ company and man, if, you know, people there do real well and man, I could make 75, 100, 150k a year and they commit to something like that. But then they've got kind of maybe a glass selling situation if they, if they aren't upwardly mobile to where they're willing to go from company to company and use those as stepping stones to do better. But the thing that I found is don't ever judge, say, well, once I get there, I'll be happy. Because, you know, the thing about is I found the more income you make if you, if you love and care about people, the more income you make, the more needs you see, right? You know, I've never sent a check back saying I didn't want it because, you know, whether it's in your own family or your church community, the things you believe in, man, it gives you such a, such a vehicle from being able to take care of people just like family members, you know, that, you know, how tall should a tree grow? As tall as it can. So anyway, those are important points too.

All right, thanks, David. These some great, great ideas for people to think about and to use. If you enjoyed what you've heard and.

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