Episode #792 - From Sleeping On The Street To Building An Empire with Stephen Scoggins

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

I'm talking with Stephen Skoggins from Utah. Hello, Stephen.

Larry. What's going on, my friend? Dude. Scott, Happy to see you.

Yes. You've just moved back. Moved to Utah or back to Utah?

No, I was born and raised in North Carolina but exited the business this year, or technically last year.

Yeah.

And decided I wanted to stay at the mountains for the rest of my life and.

Yeah.

So moved out here and they're going to bring live events, business out this way in the near future and all that good stuff. So.

Yeah, we're in North Carolina, New Virginia. Where in new.

The Raleigh area.

Raleigh. Okay. Well, I was over in Greensboro for about 28 years, so we were right down the road. Yeah.

Yeah. That's awesome.

Yeah. So. And I'm talking to you now from Aspen. So we're not too far apart now. About six hour drive.

That's awesome. So.

Congratulations on the big bounce you did at a young age. You really showed a lot of courage.

Thank you.

Where you found yourself and you can tell the story, but what we show is that you found yourself homeless for some reason and you got a second chance. I don't know how that happened, but then you turned that into launch a multimillion dollar construction firm and out of. I've got a degree in construction out of Georgia tech and built 100 houses coming the first four years out of there. So I know, I know how brutal that business would be, at least in the residential area. You know, I don't know what area you were in, but it's a brutal area to go out and make your mark as a young person because everybody, you know, most guys are going to be older than you and want to pull tricks on you and everything.

If you went through what I went.

Through, they try and pull their BS on you, you know. But yeah, how did you find yourself in that situation at 22?

You know what's crazy is I think it's the same as what takes most business owners out from mouth from business. And I say that loosely because a lot of the statistics will show that most businesses fail because they're under capitalized. They don't have the right management team, they don't have the right product fit. I actually believe it's completely different and I believe it has more to do with pride, arrogance and ignorance and Those are the three things that also led me to homelessness. The year prior to becoming homeless, I had been making really good money. My dad's employer at the time gave me a business of my own, bought me all the equipment, everything I needed to work, and put me in a business for myself. But at 19 years old, I went to making about six figures. And this is late 90s. So as you can imagine, the six figures is a lot of money for a 19 year old kid that's never been trained to handle money, who's always grown up in kind of a, more of a, more of an impoverished environment than not right. And as a result, between the ignorance that it had with, you know, handled it, having the character to manage wealth on top of the arrogance that came with it, that ultimately led me to severe depression, anxiety and things of that nature. And yeah, it later led me to kind of sleeping on the streets for a little while. Not something I'm super proud of.

Talk about the depression, you know, because young people, you know, the older we get, we, you know, we feel like the young kids have the idyllic life, you know, but then you find out that, you know, even the young teenagers and eight, you know, pre, you know, in elementary school, they're going through all these traumas and y' all hear and I'll interview people and they'll say, you know, they were talking to God in the middle of the night, you know, at 8 years old, you know, and because of their father or their, you know, some kind of situation. And the thing is that it's, you know, trauma, depression thing. I mean, young people commit suicide, folks, you know, so the thing is that they go through all of the, they feel these emotions and you know, we need to be aware of that. But what I found is that the young people, if they get the right information, you know, you get things to run on. And that's why I do this, is because I was recovering, I've been. Last 16 years, I've been recovering from a monster bicycle accident in the middle of Palm beach. And I got shut down on the couch and I was realizing, you know what, your life would have been really bad if you hadn't had these people, not really mentors, but friends, acquaintances, relatives, whatever that were high achievers that you, by the grace of God intersected with at a young age. And they were able to say things to you and, you know, put these thoughts in your head. And that's really why we do this, is to kind of get those things out there, remind people of it. But what I found is that young people, like, if you had been told, I think at 19, that you're doing great. But let me explain life to you, Steven. You know, most young people are inconsistent. And the track for most young people, you want to be like most people, you want to be special. Well, if you want to be special, you're going to do one thing, you're going to be consistent, because young people usually blow it. And then it's very hard to come back because they realize all the work they went through to get started. And so, you know, things like that and a timely way can make all the difference in the world. And I've got one kid right now that has gone in like 12 years from making like $40,000 a year. This is probably about 12 years, $40,000 a year to now he's up into the, know, 4 or 5 million range and climbing because, you know, and he points back to that one piece of advice early on. You know, I'm not going to be the kid that's inconsistent. And so.

That's right.

Don't be too hard on yourself, Steve. That's what I'm saying is like you don't know what you don't know when you're young. Right?

Yeah. Well, that and you, you gotta remember fact. The interesting thing about depression specifically is there's typically three, three key factors. One is a grossly overstated, limiting belief, whatever that may be. My father. Overstated, limiting belief. An overstated, limiting belief. For me, my father used to run around saying, scoggins don't get ahead, they get by.

Ah, okay. Really?

So 400 plus years of Skoggins history. Up until that point, there had not been an affluent or a influential Scoggins on the planet that we were aware of in our direct line. Okay. On top of that, there is also the chemical imbalance of not getting enough to your brain. Because we were an impoverished environment, we ate when we could. We didn't have a lot of, you know, I can have overabundance of food. As a result, you're undernourished in many respects. So there's a nourishment component to it. And the third thing is the, the types of materials that you're consuming, that's either helping you break away from that limiting belief or get deeper into the limiting belief. So what I mean by that is a lot of times I see a lot of folks that are struggling with anxiety and depression, but they're continuing to consume the same materials through their eyes and their ears on a regular basis that is not beneficial to them to begin with. They're not reading the right books. They're not going to the right seminars. They're not listening to podcasts. They're not really. They're not really spending enough time in the area of trying to grow themselves to a new level within themselves. And fortunately, Steve Merrick, you mentioned a mentor. The guy that gave me my first shot was the guy that gave me my second shot that I didn't deserve. And never forget this, he asked me one quick. He asked me one day, he said, stephen, what is the difference between a rich man and a poor man? And, you know, I was a teenager, so I was like, duh, of course it's money.

Yeah.

He said, absolutely not. It's the way they think. Now, the next question was twice as important as the first question. He said, do you want to learn to think like me, or do you want to continue thinking like your father? My father worked for him. Okay. But here's the contrast. And I find that you can overcome depression and anxiety by getting to a healthy respect of contrast. Contrast. My father would make money on Friday. It would be gone by Monday. He would borrow money with no intent to repay. He struggled with alcoholism for a long period of his life. He's been, thank God, sober for a long time now. He's been. He's a great grandfather right to the. To this day. On the other hand, Steve Meyer was very influential. He was very affluent. He was a gracious giver, continually, always giving to other people. You never knew what he was. You never knew what he was giving because he would always make it kind of with the right hand, didn't know what the left hand was doing. Like, when you look at those contrasts, you have to ultimately say, what life do I want to live? And when you decide what life you want to live, then you can decide what business you need to build. And that's how I kind of look at the contrast. When Steve told me in that moment, he gave me a quote that I've kind of used as my North Star, if you will. He said, you have to be willing to do today what others won't, so you can have tomorrow what others don't.

Right.

What I didn't fully understand at the time, he wasn't necessarily talking about houses and cars and fun stuff. Now, thank God, you know, I'm able to enjoy those things now. He was talking about the overall condition of life. Are your relationships healthy? Are you. Is your finance healthy? Is your business healthy? What kind of leader are you going to be, you know, I went the first 15 years of building a large, large organization as a really terrible leader because I was leading out of insecurity from the homeless kid. Right. Which is how, which is when you start going in and getting other levels of mentorship. So those are some of the key factors I think that led me to that place, got me out of that place. And I think the, hopefully the audience can take away from, if they, if they just ask themselves right now, am I living the life that I want to live? Because Time and Harris Paul did A thing probably three years ago, it discovered that 70% of the people would say they're not living the life that they're meant to live. They would say that they're living someone else's life because of someone else's. Conditionally.

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Now, as you started that, that turnaround, how did that turnaround proceed? You know, because usually turnarounds, and I know you're a, you have made yourself an expert on turnaround. You've written a book on, on it. I'm going to let you talk about it. You've got a foundation, you know, you, I'm sure you talk to people about it all the time. But, and I'm sure a lot of those lessons came out of your original turnaround. So talk about that for sure. Yeah.

Well, the turn. All right, so the turnaround happens and you've already mentioned it. Okay. It's understanding that motivation is not discipline. Okay? The discipline to do the right thing at the right time in the right way. Consistently. You mentioned that work earlier. Consistently, over an extended period of time is how you turn around anything. It's how you turn around a business, it's how you turn around life, it's how you turn around a marriage, it's how you turn anything around. Basically. There's an old saying that one of my mentors used to say that he would say that principles govern promises and the wealthy get wealthy because they follow a set of principles. Great marriages are built on a set of principles, you know, I. E. Don't be unfaithful. Hey, there's a great principle right in the finance category. Don't spend more than you make. Like these basic principles most of us know at a high level, but none of us ever apply them through the course of discipline consistently over time. You know, so one of the things I always say that you look at the area you're trying to turn around, whatever that area is, what I would do is I would look at it and say, okay, am I following a set of principles that can guarantee success? Because principles govern promises. If you're going to live a promise, I. E. A blessing, you know, some kind of level of enjoyment out of this area, you've got to find the principles that you can align yourself with consistently to ultimately lead you to the result. Because principles by nature give a defined result. So if your principle is, I'm going to spend more money, I'm not going to pay attention, I'm not going to budget, I'm not going to look at my PNLs, I'm not going to treat my team well. You're going to receive the consequence of living that principle or the anti principle versus I need my number one principle in business. I need to become a consistently better leader over and over and over again. That never needs to stop. Okay. If I have that as a guiding light, then the promise I get to live out is I continually become a better leader, which means I build a better business and lead better teams. So I think at the foundational level, it's principle based fundamentals through the lens of discipline consistently over time can get you out of pretty much anything.

Now as let's go back to how you got that in that information in your head. Because the thing, Stephen, about the podcast and I do, in our financial services business, I do a Monday morning call where we, we, we spotlight the best and brightest in the company is because you can, you know, we all can learn. We, we learn like layers of an onion. You know, it's just like degrees of these truths or this wisdom or these, these principles are not formed like overnight, you know, it's like making, you know, the pressure on an oyster, you know, makes a pearl type thing. And yeah, it's a, and it's a grading type process, you know, rubbing off the edges, you know. And so how did you, I'm sure you, you, you had a lot of rough edges And a lot of things, you know, you were starting from scratch. Young person, you don't know what you don't know. But now they. The guy got your attention, right? He gave you the chance.

Sure.

And so what changes did you make right away? And then what changes did you, you grow into?

Well, I think it's, it's first of all that, that, that moment was what I refer to as the awakening. And I find that on average we'll have five or six awakening moments in our lifetime. Now the power of choice comes into that. I could have chosen to not listen in that moment, or I could have said, hey, this guy knows something I don't know and he can teach it to me, or maybe he's willing to teach it to me. So I think just being open, number one more than anything else to a transformation. And you also have to understand that a transformation is an inside job. Everything flows out of the inside of you. So if you want to replace the negative things that are inside of your head, your heart, your environment, your, your experiences, you have to choose books, resources, seminars, podcasts, and consume that stuff as if your life depended on it. I'm self taught. I have a ged. That's the extent of my, my, my education, right? And I went on to build a pretty sizable business in several of them, matter of fact. And it's only because of the self taught of being teachable, right? But being teachable but while simultaneously maintaining a spirit of humility, arrogance and pride got me in trouble. Humility, confidence, discipline, consistency got me out of trouble, right? I'll give you this. So you know, I know you know Zig Ziglar, right? So everybody knows Zig Ziglar, right? He used to have, he used to have something called the Will of Life. It was seven areas, seven pie slices. And he says you have to focus on all these areas at the same time for your life to have meaning and purpose and significance and be successful. Okay, so great. Thanks, Zig. I use that. And I also added on a, a, an additional pillar. We call them the eight pillars of life. Same same concept. The eighth pillar is contribution. Okay. I believe a life well lived is adding in the factor contribution. I say all that to say that one of the things that I had to decide to do, and I think everyone should decide to do right now, is to pick one area of your life that you're going to consume content on that you can take actionable steps on on a daily basis. I'll give you an example. On Mondays is my financial pillar. I'm reading I'm getting ready to start Tony Robbins new book which is, has more to do with private equity since I've. I now have liquidity and resources and stuff that I need to invest in different areas to make sure I stay out of trouble. I'm also going to have more advisory calls with other, more, you know, more advisors. Right. I'm going to spend time in that financial pillar, that financial lane. On Mondays. Tuesdays I go to my spiritual pillar. I'll do a deep dive on my spiritual nature. Wednesdays I'll go to my deep dive in my emotional nature. My, my ability to have, feel emotionally secure, confident, self reliant, motivated, inspired, things of the things of that nature. On Thursdays it's relationships. How can I better my relationship? Who do I need to pick up the phone and text right now that I haven't talked to in a while? That was a major impactor in my life. Right. When you start segmenting these categories on your, on, on a daily basis throughout the course of your life, you got seven days in a week. Technically there's seven slices. Contribution kind of happens as a byproduct of doing the seven. Well, you're able to focus with laser, laser attention on those categories and develop them over time. That has been the number one thing that I do differently than other people that I'm aware of that have been either not successful or even successful. There's a lot of super successful people that are very successful in one or two or three categories. Right? I know, I know. I got a couple of friends of mine that are, they're in the billionaire club. They're really good guys. They make a lot of money, they do a lot of, they do a lot of charitable contribution. They have a lot of assets, they have all the things that you would think would make a successful life. A couple of them until recently were very unhappy. They were lonely, they were isolated, they didn't have relationship, they didn't, they, they, you know, they, they someone coming into their inner circle. What does this person want from me?

Right.

Rather than does this person want to build a relationship with me? Which is why I say you can get yourself into success if you will, but also get yourself into trouble. That well rounded approach on a consistent basis will deliver you long term results through consistency. And I think that anyone that will follow that principle of following the eight, those, those seven areas on a consistent basis will not only break three, they'll also provide a way of legacy. You see, Steve Meyer created a legacy that outlived himself through me. I stand on stages all the time and I talk about this and that and Steve Meyer's incorporating their stories. Like he died in 2003, long before I ever even tripped over 50 million, $60 million in revenue. Like that was long before any of that stuff had ever happened. I'd never graced the stage. I'd never written a book. I'd never started building course curriculums for entrepreneurs. None of that stuff ever took place. That one conversation in that Jeep Grand Cherokee of do you want to learn to think like me or do you want to continue thinking like your father? Right. Transform my life from the inside out. Because by definition, if I chose to think like Steve, I was going to have to learn to think differently every single day for the rest of my life. And by segmenting those seven categories in that area, you can learn to think differently about those seven categories every single day and build a very well rounded life and mass success. Success.

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