Episode 55: The Mindset That Makes Million Dollar Earners with Millionaire Andy Young

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weidell, and let's get started. I'm here today with one of my longest term friends and colleagues in business. Super successful. Has made my life so rich. Senior national sales director, Andy Young. Hello, Andrew. Good morning.

Hey, how you doing, Larry?

Great to have you here. For those of y' all unfamiliar with Andy, Andy started in the business straight out of Wake Forest. We have been, full disclosure, we have been. It was a great day for me. Came in on July 4th, back in, I believe, 1980. We've been in business together, shoulder to shoulder ever since. And he's made my life so much richer. And I might have taught him a thing or two along the way, but I know he's taught me a lot. Now, look, the thing about Andy, he was all set on track for a career in the NFL. Played football, but at Wake Forest. But, you know, back in the late 70s, the surgery with fixing knees, I think he had five knee surgeries, things like that, they basically did it with a chainsaw, you know, a sterile chainsaw, but you basically drank half a bottle of whiskey. And they went in there with a chainsaw and did surgery, but it was not. Not really a lot of finesse. And so there, there went his NFL career and he didn't know what he was going to do. So fortunately, he came our way. But, you know, one thing that Andy may talk about is patterns of success. You know, when your kids show up, you never know what's in them. But Andy showed up. He had a good, nice, good, solid family and upbringing, but he was always motivated. And Andy, right from the time he was young, he was out making money. He was. He had initiative. He had things in his mind he wanted to do, and he had the ability to figure out how to do it. And, you know, you don't have to go to college to learn how to figure stuff out. He was figuring things out at a young age, accomplishing a lot. When he got into high school, he had a music interest as well as football. He was like the only one to reach high levels of music and football. I'll let him explain that to you. But, folks, there's nothing wrong with challenging kids to do something great early on. Now you don't have to. You know, you can go overboard on that. And I think a lot of parents are. But don't think that the patterns and work ethic and the teamwork and learning how to sacrifice for goals that you're doing with your kids or your kids are doing is a bad thing. It's a great thing because by getting involved like that, they're getting mentally organized for insane success the rest of their life if as long as they know they're in a position where they can pursue their dream. And so Andy showed up. It was outstanding in high school, outstanding in college. Unfortunately, the main thing he was going for was just ripped out of him. But because of that determination, he found another path. And I'll tell you, from the beginning, he was no good in the beginning. This was not what he was groomed for. He was just like me, no good at this. But he knew one thing, he could get good and he got good. And he went from getting good to getting great to becoming world class. And has duplicated his success not only long time ago getting over a million dollars in income, but he has produced a lineup of million dollar earners scattered around the country and, and they've continued to make millions. I mean he has million dollar earners that have been at that level and climbing for well over a decade and.

More, really more than ever on the.

Way up the ladder right now. So he's at a, you know, he's had fabulous periods his life, but nothing like what's happening right now. So Andy, such a privilege to have you on. Looking forward to the information about winning you're going to be able to pass on. And so that's a little bit of an overview from, you know, a kind of a general skeletal outline of how you got to where you are today. And so I'm going to let you tell people what you're most proud of and what you want to be. What, what you, you know, is kind of staggering to you that you've been able to accomplish. And then, you know, we get into those principles. But they need to know who you are right now.

I think one of the things, Larry, and thanks for having me. You know, early on I grew up in a great family, as you mentioned. And we'll talk about some of those other things as we go through, you know, the music and the football and things of those nature. But, but I grew up in a family where we didn't have any money with a lot of kids, I mean, one bathroom, seven of us. And it was always a disaster, most of them women. So we just like, you know, they talk about money all the time. You know, we don't have any money. Money doesn't grow on trees. And anybody that has money is going straight to hell. And so who wants money if that's kind of your lineup and, but I wanted some because I love sports and I wanted sports equipment. I wanted a nice glove for baseball. I wanted to, you know, get a new bat. I wanted. If we were playing basketball, we didn't have any place to go, you know, raise the money and go do those things. So there's always that drive inside of me, which I'll get to. But I think the biggest driving thing overall and everything that I did was to be able to deliver and do things, you know, that made a difference in my family. My mom was totally disabled when I was 14 years old. And so I remember flying to Palm Beach a few years ago, and one of my. I'm a big guy, old offensive tackle, and one of my buttons, you can guess which button it was, popped on the plane. I'm sitting there in first class, and people looking around, they didn't notice the button. But I. I got up and reached into my carry on and pulled out a sewing kit. And while I was sitting there in the first class seat, I sewed my button back on. And a couple people looked over and says, big guy like you knows how to sew. I said, oh, yeah. My mom was disabled when I was a kid, and shoot, I could sew, I can cook, I can do whatever you need to do, and you learn those things. But I didn't know how much time I had. And I think that's one of the things, the challenges that people in their life, they think they've got the people they need. Especially sports teams, you know, oh, we got good players, you know, like Nick Saban won a couple national championships. But he had hurts and he had two, you know, he had two all American quarterbacks. And both times one got hurt and the other one came in. You know, it just interchanged, I mean, layers of players. So people always think they got the people they need. Whatever it is, I don't care if it's a team, a band, orchestra, church, whatever. They think they got enough people, and then they think they got time. And that's another disaster. And I found out early on I didn't know how much time I had. I didn't know. At 14 years old, I didn't know how long my mom would live. She was in bed for three years for the first part of it, and finally we got her going. But one of the big motivating factors for me was to go out there not only to earn some money for myself, to do the things that I want to do, to go to ball games and buy sports equipment, you know, just have some options, but Was to be able to deliver and make her life better. And because I, you know, met Larry, you know, and 40 years later, as I look back on it, Golly, just was able to do so many things. Her brother got killed. The closest one to her, one year apart we World War II, she wanted to go to Hawaii. And they had a memorial out there with his name on it. And you know, when she was kind of sick and struggling, I said, mom, we're gonna go to Hawaii. You know, you gotta get better. Always had things to look forward to, whether it's a trip to Hawaii, going out of the country, going to baseball games, take her to the Super Bowl. She liked that kind of stuff. But then I had to, you know, make arrangements where we get the handicap seats and all that. But that was early in my. In my career. That was the big thing. Cause I really didn't know how much time I had. And the kids were growing up, but, you know, they weren't at an age yet where it really made that much difference. So that was my first motivating factor in force was making sure I was in position to do something for her. And that drove me. And really, as it turned out, you know, I ended up having about 17 years after I got in the business to really make a difference for her and buy her a home in South Florida and just really change her life and give her the quality of life. And I would call my mom and dad in the wintertime when they were, you know, wintering in Florida. And that was a concept we didn't grow up with. But I found out, you know, because I was able to be around people who travel and people of means. Hey, South Florida is a great place in the wintertime. I talked to them, you know, I called them every day, say, man, we live a dream. Every single day. We live a dream life. They were so glad you worked so hard, you know, to put all this in position.

Absolutely. And it continued on. That was just kind of like those were like door opening experiences. But your whole. Your life has been. It's all been tied together. The, you know, the foundation, the, you know, the grains of sand and the clamshell that kind of irritate to kind of create a pearl. All of these motivations and this, you know, in that environment combined to take the inside of that thing and turn the sand into, you know, pearls, you know, beautiful. A life that is just spectacular, but it. It hap. It takes time and you've got to deal with things. You've always been really good at dealing with Things and getting answers and getting around. Getting around the right people who can give you direction or give you some clues, but also getting the people around you who can help you. And so. And then, you know, the theme of giving back to others, it's just a spiral of accomplishment and success, but there you never get away from the work and the challenges and, you know, your. Your life kind of shows that. Unmistakably.

Yeah. I mean, it's early on, you know, to make money. I didn't have. We didn't have a lawnmower. Where I was, we couldn't use a lawnmower. I mean, we didn't have one. So I found old people and widows and said, hey, if I buy gas, you know, I can use your lawnmower. Cut the grass. And a year and a half later, I was like 10 years old, I bought my own lawnmower, my Craftsman lawnmower. And I was out there. I was a kid in school, had green all over my tennis shoes all the time. I had newspaper out. And then I got another newspaper out. When I was 14, I got my work permit, so I was a dishwasher, bus boy. So working never bothered me to go get something that, you know, something at a higher level. Some of the things I wanted, my goals. And I think when you're talking to people and if you're building a business, you always got to find those threads of success in the fabric of life. People that, you know, they're go getters. They're not stay at home sons, 35 years old, their mom's basement playing video games. I mean, you got to find motivated dadgum people. So. So that was one thing that drove me. And then mentors, you know, early on in my life, music. My mom was. World War II, broke out. She was supposed to go to Juilliard School of Music. Wasn't able to go. So she was a church singer, you know, and when Billy Graham had come to town, she'd organize the choirs and things like that. So I was always around music. But she made us all take piano lessons. And I started with a piano, and then I did. We rented a trumpet, and then from there they needed a baritone player. Well, you got to be able to read the bass clef. Well, if you play piano, you read the bass on the treble clef. So I said, yeah, I'll take a shot at that. And then they needed a tuba player. So I said, I can go ahead and do that. Well, anyway, I took lessons from a guy that was the first chair at the United States air force band D.C. it was $15 for a half hour in the late 60s, early 70s. I mean, that's a pile of money. My mom says you have to make the money. Which didn't bother me. I went and made the money. $15 for a half hour. But I'm with the best guy in town. And I got to a point where we played, we were the feature band. 8pm the last slot at the Midwest National Band and Orchestra Clinic in Chicago, which is world renowned. It's been there over 70 years. People go to it every year. It's one of the big things at that level. We had guest conductors, played grade six music, which, you know, every measure, the beat changes and goes from 3, 4 to 4, 4 to 2, 4. And it's just tough stuff. And so what I learned at an early age is you have to embrace the repetition. I can remember preparing for that concert and I got good training. Every, every week I'd go and my instructor would say, if you don't work harder and practice these arpeggios and these scales, you're never going to get any good. You're going to be sorry and not be able. Got all that. Okay, so you pay that guy to tell you that. Well, that's what you got to do if you want to get good at anything. And so anyway, we get up there and, and we probably practiced. I don't know, it might have been 500, 800 hours. I mean, for that big concert, the big 8pm we're the feature band for the whole country. And probably 5, 6, 7, 800 hours. And we never played the concert because every single time there was a mistake, the baton would go up. Bam, bam, bam. What are you doing back there? What's going on over here? We can't play that. You got to do this. We never played the concert through until the concert. Just like I found out later. You practice and practice and practice between winter workouts and spring, fall football and then getting ready for summer, and then 2A days and 3A days, you know, to play a football game. And if you look this, if you look it up, it's like the super bowl is actually 12 minutes or less long. I know it's four hours with all the commercials, but you take a football game, I mean, your offense or defense, that's six minutes. But there's a kicking game too. Field goals, kickoffs, punts. So you, you don't even play six minutes in a game. But you, you prepare for thousands of hours. Same thing in the gym. So mentors have Always been important. I was in a gym with Manny Sistron, played for the Redskins. I worked out with him. And interesting side note there is, when I asked him for advice, they said at the time he was the strongest man in the NFL, but they didn't have the combines and all that. So I don't. I don't know. But he was big and strong and a starter. But he said, hey, I'll tell you what, you can work out with me. Meet me at the track at Suitland high school at 7 in the morning and we'll run. And I'm thinking two linemen. What the crap are we running for? I don't want to run more than three feet away, you know, gonna go run. But I was, you know, I wanted to get better. That's what he said. He probably got rid of almost everybody that asked him for advice by saying, 7am and let's go run on a track. We didn't do a whole lot of running, but, man, I got my bench press up to £350 from nowhere and then ultimately over £400. But I was working out of the gym. And this is back in the days before they had juice bars and the TVs and all the luxury crap they have. And, you know, all these gyms everywhere. This was a gym in the back, like a warehouse area, cinder blocks. And the funny thing is, it was Manny Sistrunk in there. Mike and Ray Mentzer end up being Mr. Universe. Mitch Kupchak, you know, end up playing in the NBA after North Carolina and the general manager of the Lakers. I mean, there's a. Not more than 50, 60 people in there. And that's kind of who was in there. Well, if you hang out with people like that, you. You have nowhere to go but up. But if you keep hanging around the same meatballs like everybody else does, you have nowhere to go but the same place or drift on down. And I refuse to do that, Larry.

Absolutely. And the, the thing that you carried away, the lessons from being around that. Can you remember and think back the. Because that kind of formed the foundation moving forward. But what would you say is the main takeaway that you carried from that into Wake Forest and also allowed you to carry you out of Wake Forest to when like, all the doors were slammed shut in your face and everything. What did you carry forward from that early foundational type experiences? Because there was a. It was almost like you were in.

A.

PhD training program for greatness in life from the time you started those lot, you know, with the lawnmowers as a child, you know, it's like you were driven to succeed, to stand out. You had people depending on you. You know, you had to fight your way out of. You had to fight your way to get to the bathroom.

So.

Exactly seven people. And what was it like? Yeah, four. Four of those were five to.

Five to two. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Oh, five to two. Yeah.

But.

So, yeah, not counting your. Your parents. So, yeah, that. Fighting five sisters for bathroom time. You learned how to fight early on. So what did you. What would you think you carried out of that? And then how did that apply when you got into a little bit of college, but also, you know, in the. Your. Your business foundation?

Well, the first thing was, I don't. You know what, If I'm going to play piano, I'm going to play it a. It's the highest level I can. Or play the trumpet or the tuba. You know, if I'm going to do it, I want. I want to play at a high level. I want to win. And I think it's that mindset, the winning mindset, that you have to adapt and you get to the point. I don't care if it was baseball, Little League. We actually came. The team I was on, we came one game away from going to Williamsport for the Little League World Series. But it's just the mindset. I love winning, but I hate losing way more than I love winning. I mean, early in our career together, Larry, my first year when I was terrible, you gave me a little bag of peanuts because you said that's what, you know, my effort and the delivery and how much money I was making, that's pretty much the peanuts would go feed my family, and I slammed them up against the wall in front of a bunch of people. And there were people, you know, ducking and running the floor. Guy's got a bad attitude. I hate losing. And so I'll do. I mean, I, I'm. I don't want to lose. I don't care if you and I were driving in a car and it was raining, and I said, I'll bet you a dollar my raindrop this side is going to get down before your raindrop. I don't want to lose that either. I want to lose anything. So that early in my. My life was just something. I don't.

I don't know.

I was just hungry to. If I said about doing something, I want to get it done. So whether it was music and then paying somebody to get to a higher level, working out with Manny Sistrunk, you Know, getting better in school, if I didn't understand something, I stayed after for when I say, hey, if you can stay after and, you know, we'll do a tutorial session, I volunteered to do those things. I wanted to get better. And so when I got to wake and I had surgery, I mean, the first week of school was first game. So the first week of school, I missed the entire first week of school at a pretty tough academic university. And I never even thought about that for about 10 years. You and I were doing some big meeting somewhere, seminar, and I got up and I started to tell the story, and I'm like, crap. I never. I never told that story, even talked about how tough it was to go around crutches with that big cast after missing the entire first week of class my freshman year. Because even then, it's like, I gotta catch up. I gotta get moving. I'm gonna get beat. I don't want to get beat. I gotta find a way to get moving and not make any excuses. And so I listen to people later on in my life that, you know, they make excuses for almost anything. Well, you can't win and make excuses. So you got to find the best people to get around you. You got to understand that. So football was big to me, but music was big to me. And I felt like, if anything, that I could get involved in that I believed in, which I believed in what we were doing, you know, as a business, Larry. And it's like, if I can get behind that and say, okay, this is something I'm going to do, then as you said in the beginning, I can get better. And once again, your mentorship, you know, Bob Turley, you know, one of our guys that was in business with us passed on a great guy, played for the New York Yankees. I mean, crap. People change your vision. And the vision thing is a big thing. I remember Turley telling me, you know, I said, our guys want to go to an all you can eat restaurant. And he said, how about Outback? And I said, but that's not all you can eat. And he said, oh, yeah, that's all you can eat. You keep ordering steaks, they'll keep bringing them. You showed me that, too, Larry. We were at Long Longhorn. You asked me if I wanted another steak one time. And I'm a big guy. I'm like, are you serious? Like, I'm dead serious. Like, yeah, I have another steak, you know, so it's. Yeah, it's all you can eat. You got to pay the bill. Yeah, but it's all you can eat. So I learned that crap from you too, and you probably learned it from Turley, you know, but it's like, hey, I mean, it's a different way of thinking than the way I was raised. Everything's sold out. No, it's not. You see all these movie stars and athletes sitting the first two or three rows. If you put yourself in position and you make the money and then you make some contacts and as you go along, man, nothing's out of place. So it's, it really, it really is true. The mentors, the books you read. And another thing, just real quick on that, like, if you take Today, we got our, you know, intergalactic technological world. But I mean, cell phones, we didn't have those in the early days. But if you take the average, you know, the top 10 people, you figure out the minutes of who you were on the phone with in the last month, probably do that pretty easy. And you take their income, add it up, divided by 10, that's probably about what you're making. So the bottom line is you need to add some people around you who are where you want to be, if you want to be where they are. That's just the bottom line. So, yeah, one door shuts with football, but crap, I'm going to find some other way to go. And was. I added Spanish because I was a five year guy with the red shirt from being injured. They're gonna pay for five. I'm staying. So I added Spanish as a second major and then turned that into a scholarship to go to the University Andes in Bogota, Columbia, became fluent and came back. And that was another avenue. I was offered a full time job by Wachobee to translate. I was translating part time with them when I met you, Larry. So it's like I could have moved on and been a translator for, for Wachovia. That's just another area. And I, and I was awful at Spanish, but man, you immerse yourself in an uncomfortable situation. I live with a Colombian family in Bogota, Colombia, and we're down there and I mean, I took 10 years of Spanish my whole life. And I. They were speaking a brand of Spanish I wasn't familiar with. They were going so fast. But by three or four months when I came back, I actually, I got mad at the counter in Miami because they canceled my flight on the way back home after six months. And I had to remember how to say all the words, tell the guy how irritated I was in English, that's how long I'd been down there speaking Spanish, so you can get great at anything. And people say, but how do you do that? It's so hard. Look, for me, I'm a guy, it's like, okay, we'll start off with cerveza, that's a beer. Then you're going to need to go to the banya, which is the bathroom. And then you're probably going to want to eat some food. So that's comita. And then you want what kind of food? Like carne asada. Well, that's, that's going to be beef. So you figure it out as you go along and you get around people, put yourself a lot of times in uncomfortable situations, but that's how you grow. Like you said, the sand and the pearl or the clam, whatever, that's, that's where the pearl comes from. The sand and the oyster.

Yeah. And the thing about it, I never saw anybody have the strength to throw a 30 at the time, 35 cent little pressure pack, bag of peanuts against the wall and make it explode like you did.

Absolutely.

I think we were all stunned. But yeah, I just wanted to give you a little encouragement because you know that the numbers weren't coming in, but I knew you were working hard. So. Want to give you back.

Well, I was so broke, Larry. I was so broke, Larry, I had to eat the peanuts.

Save a few for the, for Debbie at home and.

Yeah.

But you know, it's amazing how high you, you know, the achievement you had in. You did taste ultimate achievement in two things in high school. You know, the two things you were. You can be interested in more than one thing, by the way. You know, this whole thing, you gotta focus on only one thing. That idea of reaching that high level. I mean, you had that in your mind, you had that confidence that, you know, going forward, there's something about achieving things that gives you a rock solid confidence that no matter what you might be facing at the moment, you've got it in your, you got it in the back of your mind that, you know, I, I think it's kind of like Michael Jordan hitting the winning shot, winning the championship at North Carolina, the NCAA championship he did as a freshman. He said, the rest of my life, when I was in those moments, I think back, like, I can hit this, I've done it. And you know, you with that reaching, what was the level in music and, and football? All Allstate or all whatever.

Yeah. All county, all metropolitan, the D.C. area.

Yeah.

And then music, grade six music is the hardest music you can play. It's our feature piece in that concert at Chicago was El Salon Mexico by, by Aaron Copeland. I mean, it's, it's a beast. Anybody knows music knows that piece. They're like, wow, you guys, 15, 16, 17 years old playing that. So, yeah, we were. Well, you practiced enough. You can play that too.

Yeah. And so, you know, you carry that, you've carried that forward with you, and that set the stage for some even, you know, you get that real world. You get in the right position, though, you start having success. And if you planted yourself in the right spot, the right industry, the right situation, the sky can be the limit because those principles never stop working, you know, that's why it's so important to teach kids the principles that never stop working. These things always work. And no matter what kind of meteor falls out of the sky on your head, like John Addison used to say, you know, you dig your way out and still keep on trucking, you know, and it's those principles that allow you to survive a meteor falling out of the sky on your head. So anyway, Andy, thanks so much. This has just been a great chance to get to know the early stage and, you know, if we're fortunate, we'll get back and we can take this and see how you took this kind of thinking and approach to life and went into the business world, you know, evaluating the options and putting things together there and how it's compounded for you, you know. So anyway, thanks so much, Andy.

All right, great to be on. Appreciate it, Larry.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind with me, Larry Wydell. If I've helped you in any way, leave us a five star rating review on Apple Podcasts. For more information like this, listen to our other Million Dollar Mastermind episodes and check out my Wydell Academy YouTube channel and visit us on widel on winning.com I'm the million Dollar Mastermind. And until next time, go, go.

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