Episode 471: The Advantages of Making the Jump Before You’re Ready with Alex Makanvand

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind where we get real world insights on winning from people who have accomplished amazing things. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. And let's get going. I'm here Talking with Alex McEven and Alex is enjoying life out in Los Angeles and after, I guess in your third decade of having a business of your own. Right. So 17 years preparing, getting educated, working as an employee. And there's nothing wrong with working out of school or there's nothing wrong with working anyway, the problem is if you're not working. But there's no problem with that. But, you know, Alex decided he wanted more and he started his own business. And he'd obviously learned enough lessons about doing that where he could make this thing going. So how many years have you been in business now, Alex?

I'm in my 29th year, 29th year.

Making well over $1 million a year. How many $100,000 earners do you think you have in your organization?

We have about 30, I believe.

30. And so, you know, that's the test, you know, can you. It's not all about you. And plus, if you don't have people that come along behind you that are highly paid, getting compensated, you, chances are you're, you're not going to continue to be riding high on the horse. You know, it's not all just all about you. And so congratulations on that. And we were talking about when you jumped into this business on your own, it was really great that you started part time and I would encourage people to do that. Get as far as you can get, number one, with the time you have available and give yourself a chance to get educated at squeezing your schedule, getting rid of things that don't matter, your things you're wasting time on, recreation, you know, just goofing off and putting that into a business. But also money, you know, if you're, try not to borrow money, try and get as far as you can. A lot of times you're in a business where you building stuff, you've got to have, you got to raise capital, but get as far as you possibly can without bringing in the pressure of having somebody else loan you money. And so you do that by starting part time and self funding yourself as far to kind of get a running start on the thing. And I think that's one of the reasons so many people that start don't succeed is they didn't start right. And starting right doesn't mean you have everything in place. There's a real advantage that you Found, I found when we started making the jump before you're ready. Because the truth of it is you're never ready. You know what I'm saying? And you were talking, Alex, about saying that you had debt, you had run up expenses, you'd had a previous business that didn't work. It would be nice to start debt free. It would be nice for this and nice for that. But on the other hand, you could have had another 14 things go wrong that would have run up your debt the longer you wait. And also, here's the thing about the advantage of making the jump before you're ready. Don't look to jump and use your guideline, just what your finances are and all the things. Look, it can't be just your enthusiasm and passion and inspiration you got. But inspiration has a short shelf life. And if you're fired up about doing something, you better get off your butt and go get started. Even if you started part time, because that's like a candle that will go out. People would naysay, anytime you start something, people go to try and put out your party and you're not going to get a lot of encouragement. So the thing is, while your fire is burning on that, use that to get down the road a little bit to learn some things, to make some progress and before people know what's happening with you. And the advantage of making the jump before you're ready it is. I think most entrepreneurs are pretty dumb financially when they start. I know I was and when I moved to North Carolina out of Atlanta, we were at that expansion thing. I was and my wife didn't work outside the home. I had a three year old and a five year old boy, no savings, nothing. Had to have a yard sale to get the money to buy the Hertz, you know, pay for the Hertz rental truck to haul my stuff up there, two yard sales and you know, we're on fumes. But it still took me until, let's see, we moved up in early December. It took me. I was so stupid. Alex. It was the middle of March before I woke up in the middle of the night with cold chills saying, what have I done? But I immediately the thought said, well, it's too late to worry about it now. Go back to sleep. Because in the morning you got to go to work. And so it takes the indecision out. You're in. You got to figure out how to make it work. And then you find out you can. Your back's to the wall. But. So you went through that and was your daughter Born at that time.

My daughter was born about five years later. That is when the triplets came. You know, people ask me all the time, they say one of the most common questions I get asked is, how did you stay motivated? How did you, you know, what got you out of bed? You know, the answer was simple, man. I. I had my minimum payments on my credit cards just to keep the creditors from calling, was about $1,000 a month, right? Do the math. On about 50 grand of credit card debt, it's 2%, right? I had a mortgage, I had two car payments. And about four months after I went full time in the business, we found out that we were pregnant. Not with one, not with two, but with three little heartbeats, you know, inside my wife's belly. And I don't know how much more motivation a person needs than to go out and try to bring in some food and be able to pay the bills and pay the mortgage and all that. When somebody asks me that question, my first thought is, man, you better think twice whether you want to be an entrepreneur or not. Because how, how could you even ask me that question when you don't have a. You don't have something that burns you from the inside. You don't have something that makes you sweat just sitting there thinking about it.

Yeah, life is pretty good at giving you motivation, especially when you're young. And when you got started, did you know what to do? How did you know what to do? And you did some pretty amazing things because you dove into this thing and put so much personal activity, there was like no chance you could fail. The thing is, the point is you can't guarantee success. There is no guarantee, but you can stack the odds in your favor and you can do so much of the right kind of activity that it makes success all but inevitable. And you're never guaranteed, but you can pretty much make it inevitable because you overdo the things you've got to do to be successful. And how did you approach that? How did you coach yourself into making that big blast of activity?

Well, like I said, the bills didn't care. The bank didn't care. The car payments didn't care that I had switched careers or that I needed so much money or so I knew bills were coming due. So. So here's. Here's what my typical day was. Very simple. I would get up around 6, 7 o' clock in the morning. I'd leave the house by no later than nine or ten. Now this is pre Covid, pre Internet, pre physically, you went and did stuff where you pounded the phones for a couple hours a day or whatever you did. We used to have pagers and payphones basically when we were outside the home. But I would leave the house by no later than 9, 10 in the morning, get home. If I got home at 11 o' clock at night, it was an early night. I felt like a total loser. And again, the biggest motivation was did I have any sales today? Was I able to talk to somebody new today? Was able to bring on a new agent or a potential new agent into my agency? That was the question my coach taught me. He said, alex, don't worry about other people's activities. You go out and make it happen for now and then you can teach others later once you start to have some people in your team and people that come on board to your agency.

So talk about what that transferred into in terms of activity.

Well, I worked like that. Like if you want to call that crazy work or long hours, I did that for about five years. You know, people are funny sometimes. They talk about how hard they work that one month or that those six months or that one year. I knew that I had to let my, my efforts compound. So I went super hardcore for about five years. And that's when our daughter was born, five years after the triplets were born. And that's when I would sort of slowed down a little bit. I went another couple of years, not as hard. So really this entire thing that we built was a result of about seven years that started 29 years ago and ended about 22 years ago. Now, do I work now? Sure. I suppose you could call what we're doing right now work. This is more like visiting, you know, just, just hanging out. But yeah, I work. Yeah, I work. But nothing, nothing like what we did in those first five years or in those first seven. I remember I was averaging about 50, 60,000 miles a year on whatever car I drove. So I did the math. One time, I think I drove around the circumference of the earth about 27 times. And truth be told, I mean a lot of that was just sheer terror. Like you said, we're not very good financially. We're also probably not very good schedule wise. At the beginning of our careers, I just had to move. I was like a shark. If I stood still, I'd probably asphyxiate. I had to keep moving so that I knew that I was alive and I was out there trying to build something.

And how quick did you get it off the ground?

Well, I think I became a broker about a year and a half, 20 months. Yeah, 20 months after the day that I got licensed. And so that's not. It's not a tremendous record. It's okay, you know. And about another year or so after that, we started to feel finally that we weren't robbing Peter to pay Paul and we weren't under that tremendous financial stress anymore. But, you know, I wasn't going to. You know, I. Early on, almost the first day that I started, I took quitting off the table. I figured I'm going to be tempted multiple times a day. Sometimes I wanted to quit a thousand times in a single day. I knew I had the skills, I had the degrees. I could always go back and get a job. I kind of knew that. But like I said, I burned the ships in my mind. I blew up the bridges in my mind. Going back and quitting was just never, never an option. No matter who said what, no matter who was trying to discourage me, no matter who was trying to tell me I've lost my mind. I mean, my mom, you know, imagine. Imagine a mother's voice in your head going, sweetie, what are you doing? Go back and get a job. Come to your senses, please. You're an engineer. You don't need to do. You don't need to go through any of this. Do you need any money? Right? And I go, mom, I'm doing great. Thank you. Thanks for asking. I appreciate it, man, we're just rolling in the dough.

I remember what went in my mind during those years was the Bible. You know, this is where your Bible training is so incredibly helpful because the one verse that was in my head the whole time that he will. He who will not feed his family is worse than a heathen.

Wow. Wow.

He doesn't feed his family's worth. And heathen. I go, oh, great. You know, what a thought. And so. But, you know, whatever it takes to keep you motive. What did you do right? When you look at the patterns you fell into and what. What were you doing wrong? Because as one thing about that people need to realize is once you jump into this, whatever it is you got to do and you make up your mind, I'm not going to fail. I'm going to do it. And the first thing you can do is put tons of time in and just head in the right direction. And you're going to. What you'll find is things will occur to you. You know, people will give you advice, but circumstances will teach you. The voices in your head will come in and say, hey, notice this. Look at that. Don't do you know, avoid that and you start to fall into success patterns. Only if you're working hard though. If you're sitting over here trying to avoid, you know, get every, you know, because this is a whole thing about jumping in. There are all kind of people that are waiting to set this up and waiting to set that up and then I'll go for it. But it does, you know, that's, that's not the way that successful people have gotten where they are today. They've jumped in and sometimes you got people to tell you what you need to know. Sometimes you just have to go in there. So like it's just like this. There's a place you want to go to sometimes and you don't have GPS and you only know one way to do it. And it turns out, well, that was the long way. Now I found a direct link. Well, in the beginning, didn't matter that there was a direct route, you only knew one way, you had to go that way. And the direct routes you learn over time. And that's what I say. Alex, there's no such thing as shortcuts, but there are straight lines. And at the beginning we go around in circles to get our sells where we want to go, but once we get there, we say, oh, that's how you do it quicker. And so when you started falling into patterns, what were some of these things you stopped doing and things that you started doing more of?

Yeah, you know, first, first I want to preface it with this. You know, everybody comes into business, entrepreneurs come into business with certain set of skills. You know, when I look back, what skill did I have? I didn't have selling marketing skills. I didn't have recruiting abilities. I couldn't recruit, get someone to follow me into the bathroom, let alone get me to follow me in life and in business and all that. What else? Team building. I mean 00 team building ability. Never had really been a part of a team as a K and wasn't involved in a lot of sports or in any sports really. And so for me it was a whole new world, it was a whole new experience. So you might say, well, what did you bring with you? If I were to say, if I could put my finger on two things, one was work ethic. I mean I could to this day, I'm a thousand years old today, I could outwork most 20 year olds. So work ethic was something and you touched on that, that as long as you're doing it, as long as you're out there working, you'll figure A lot of this stuff out through simple trial and error. And the other thing that I think was a skill and I'm using quotation marks or a talent was the ability to modify my behavior, the ability to be flexible. And as silly as that may sound or as mundane as that may sound, I think that is truly one of the secrets to my success and the success of, you know, everyone that's had success at anything is that they're not so stuck in a particular way of thinking, a particular behavior pattern, you know, I guess self awareness would be another way to look at it is I am quite self aware. I always reflect on what works, what doesn't work. One of the things I teach is don't always throw the baby out with the bathwater. In other words, don't constantly go back and revamp everything you are doing. Look at what you are doing, look at what is working, look at what is not working. Get rid of the stuff that is not working. Keep building on the stuff that is working. And always keep your eyes and ears open. Listen to what people are telling you. Because all the secrets, you know, there are no secrets, right? All the secrets are right there. The writing is always right there on the wall. It's always, people will show you the way. They'll tell you. You know, sometimes I'd be at a kitchen table sitting down with a client and there would be no transaction or there'd be nothing. But I would learn so much about human behavior and about how people talk and act and what a husband does and what a wife does. I think I became a better husband and a better father simply by observing what not to do. I would see a dad or a father behave a certain way at the kitchen table. And I thought, oh my gosh, I don't ever want to be that guy. I don't ever want to be known. So a lot of it was trial and error. But be flexible and be self aware. It's shocking how so many people are not self aware out there.

Now, what last thing would you say at this point, last word to people about jumping and getting into their own business? Why? Why would you encourage them to do it? And what is your insight or thing you think they need to hear at the moment they're making that jump?

Well, I want everybody to think about something. Why are you so locked in on the idea that a job is the only way to make a living? Okay, it's. You think that way probably because you were raised in a family that, you know, your mom, your dad, your grandma, your grandpa, Your cousins, your uncles, everybody worked the job. So that's all we know. And so the reason sometimes a person does not make the jump is that they don't even realize that a job, not only a job, is not the only way to make money. It's not even the best way. If what you want to do in life is to earn enough money so that you're comfortable, so you can pay your bills, so you can save some money, so you can enjoy life, well, guess what? A job is not the best way to do it. So once you come to that realization, then you start to look around and say, well, what are some other ways, you know, legal ways that I can actually make a living, that I can earn money? And the answer is always business. It's always, always, always a business where you can earn in a month what you're used to earning in a year. And when that hit me, I thought, wow, wow, what am I doing? I'm giving the best years of my life. And to build somebody else's company, I'm putting somebody else's children through college. I'm providing for some. And I didn't, by the way, I never begrudged anyone for owning a business and hiring me. It wasn't about that. It wasn't that I, that I, you know, ooh, I'm mad at you. No, it wasn't about that. I thought, well, I want to be that person. I want to be providing the checks, not waiting for a paycheck.

Thanks so much, Alex. That wraps up this episode. Consider leaving a rating and review if you like what you heard. In addition, I have a free video for you and it contains my best insights from 20 years of running my own business and also coaching million dollar earners. You'll find it@whitelownwinning.com webinar. Thanks for listening and do it big.