It Took a Decade to Learn Not to Be Pennywise and Pound Foolish with Gary Kornegay

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weidell and let's get started. I am here today with a great friend of mine, a inspirational leader. He's got something in his makeup to where he can express things and people can understand them. And that's why it's just so much fun to talk to him. And I recently had him on a business call and I didn't tell him, but I just really enjoyed it because it was so much fun listening to him talk and explain things that I explain and talk about all the time. It's just so much more fun hearing it from him. And help me welcome. He's now a two plus million dollar earner and climbing offices all over the United States. He's an entrepreneur, he's a leader, he's a builder, he's a communicator, a trainer and has had success in many different areas of life. So help me welcome Gary Carnegie. Hello, Gary.

Hey. Hey, Larry. How you doing, man? Good seeing you. Good talking to you. And I'm excited about this conversation we're going to have today.

Yeah. And are you still out in California now, Louisiana San Diego?

Yeah. I'm in my home here in Beverly Hills, California? Yes, sir.

You're in Beverly Hills?

Yes, sir.

Okay, Beverly Hills. You're in the hills, just sitting there, just chilling in your house.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Enjoying this pandemic environment.

If you still gotta do a pandemic, do it in Beverly Hills, please. So, Gary, what's most astounding to you about your life today that you're most grateful for? And don't hold back because you don't want to feel like bragging. Just talk from your eyes about how you see your life and how amazing it's become and is, and you know, the opportunities in front of you. And then we get back to where you came from. But you know, where are you today in life? You know, what kind of life is this? Other than we know you're in Beverly Hills.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, geographically, obviously when you say Beverly Hills, people kind of know, you know, your lifestyle has to be above the average to even say that you live in Beverly Hills. So that goes without saying. But the most important part is, is I live like I'm on vacation every day. Larry, for real, okay? I have 30 staff members that work for me and my family around the clock. From doorman to personal assistants, to people who wash my car, gas my car, go grocery shopping for me, you name it. Take my wife to the doctor or take me to A meeting with you have a technology department. So my life today is like I'm on vacation, but every day I was just in Cabo San Lucas at a home there in Mexico, on the beach there. And we were there for a week with our children, adult children. And I told my wife when I was in Cabo, Larry, I go, honey, I can't wait to go home. You know what I'm saying? Because home, because home is a vacation. You know, it's like you leave home to go on vacation and then about three days into the vacation, Larry, you relate to this. You go, my house, where I'm going is better than where I'm at right now. And so I couldn't wait to go home for the vacation. So our life obviously is a story tell. Been with my wife now 37 years, have two beautiful children. They're doing very well in their marriages and their business that they have as well. And so yeah, I pinch myself all the time. But I think the biggest thing, Larry, is, is I was able to grow a business from nothing and still keep my family intact. That was important for me, you know, at the end of the day was to keep my family intact and not jeopardize my relationship with my wife or have estranged children because I was pursuing success, whatever that is to people. So I think that's my biggest thing today.

And the thing is, let's talk about your kids. Real. You got Gary Jr. Does he go by Gary Jr.

Gary II deuce.

G1, G2, G1, G2 now. And your other child?

Yeah, my daughter. Yes. She's 21 and she actually is an artist. So she has her own online paint gallery, artist gallery that she has online and she spends all her day in her beautiful condo in downtown Georgia as a 21 year old, painting and doing things and putting them online for sale.

Well, what do is have her text me that gallery and I'll put it on here and tell her about my Axion gallery and maybe she and I can have some phone calls and maybe I can stop by and see her gallery when I come to Atlanta.

But yeah, she lives in the art district, so in her high rise she lives in, she's on the 23rd floor on the bottom floor, that high rise. They have office space for art galleries. So she has the benefit of living and also having her own art gallery, brick and mortar. And also mostly because she's 21, it's mostly online now.

When you moved back to, you moved to Atlanta and were living there for a while, was that to help get her situated. Was that related?

Yeah, yeah. We have a home at the Chateau line as a family home that we all go to. So that's our main headquarters right there on the golf course out there. But I live in Beverly Hills. My kids live. My son lives in Alpharetta, Georgia. My daughter lives in downtown Atlanta.

Yeah.

But we all congregate at the house at the Chevron.

Where, where. Where is the art district in Atlanta?

It's right there in Midtown.

Midtown, where that Midtown thing is a new Midtown. Yeah, that's a go go area. So right north of Georgia Tech, where I.

That's right. She's right there.

Where I spent five miserable years. But I got the degree. It's done. I was not going to let them drum me out of the core without getting a degree, so. And plus, I never wanted to go back, you know, get it and be done with it. But that's wonderful to see this is happening, how your life is playing out through your kids, because we never guaranteed that. And what I hear from you is, you know, the good things in your life are results of decisions. You know, I'll tell you a funny story. A friend, my son was down in my. Many years ago down and brought a friend from North Carolina down with him, and they were doing all kind of stuff in the Palm beach area. So they came by my townhouse and. And his friend said, man, it smells good in here, you know, and I don't know, just off the cuff. I said, yeah, that's by design, you know, and it's just like, you know, I wanted to smell good in my house, you know, I've got things set up to where when I walk in, I want my house to smell good. But it was just kind of off the top the cuff comment, you know, but that really registered with my son Adam. It was just like, if you want good things in your life, just make a decision. And I hear what I'm hearing with you and what people can learn from this is, you know, you focus when you're starting out, it's so easy to focus on what you don't have and disadvantage everything. But what you do have is the right to make decisions about the kind of future you want to have. I mean, you can set your parameters, you can set your course. Even though you're just getting started on your course, you can draw the line and say, this is what I'm going to have. You know, if I'm going to have success and I'm going to get where I want to go in life. I'm going to have this. I'm going to have my family together, you know, and talk about where that came from and why. That was a priority right from the beginning.

Okay, sure. I'm a preacher's kid, so my dad was a pastor. My mom was also in the ministry as well. So my entire life before I moved on and got my own place, and I was living with my parents seven days a week. My parents were out doing the work of God and they were into community activism, feeding the homeless, dealing with drug addictions, dealing with people who have marital problems, alcohol abuse. So that was a common thing. But at the same time, Larry. Okay, the blessing was that the curse was my parents were always helping other people's kids and forgot about us. So three of my. So I'm one of four boys, so three of my brothers, which is 100% of my siblings, bro, basically ended up going to the streets, you know.

Oh, no.

Yeah. So my dad felt like he was a failure as a preacher because three of his four boys were doing the street work, the outlaw stuff. And I said, well, I'm not gonna be a businessman and become successful and lose my family trying to help somebody else's family become financial, independent. So I made a conscious decision, as you mentioned, to chart my own life and say, wherever I go, my wife goes. Wherever we go, our kids go. And if they can't go, then we're not gonna go, you know, and we made a commitment to that.

But that continuity, people think, you know, well, you're talking about family. Wonderful. But the deal is you need to make that a priority, because if you're gonna be successful in life, it's gonna take all the energy you've got, and it's going to. It's going to be a fight, and you're going to be challenged. You're going to come up with solutions, and you're going to deal with things, and you got to stay on your feet. Now, that's hard enough if you're. But it becomes. I don't even have people do it when they've got kids in drug rehab or they've got kids that just somehow they just grew around and create problems. Maybe they don't get into drugs and they don't do anything of the. The things that get them in trouble with the law, but they just somehow are always creating issues for the parents, and the mom and the dad have got to carry that. It's. You know, if you're a parent, you just can't forget about the stuff that's happening to Your kids, you know, and just know, just having that together has allowed you to maintain continuity and consistency and to allow your business to compound because you, you're not sidetracked in a lot of different. Because I imagine your father spent a lot of his time dealing with situations with your three brothers with that.

Absolutely. Absolutely right. It was a Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde lifestyle for him.

Yeah.

You know, because honestly, he's in the pulpit on Sunday, but there's been many Sundays where he had to step out of the pool to go and bail out his son at the police department. Yeah. And so that was always that lifestyle that he was preaching, you know, it was haunting him through his own boys, if that makes sense, to see if he, maybe that was his challenge or maybe that was his quest for God to prove to him. God proved to him that. I'm going to challenge your own sons to see if you stay the course. You know, I don't know if that's the truth or not, but that's what I'm thinking. But I personally did not want to do that with my family.

Yeah. And what kind of mindset did you start? I mean, were you middle class, upper middle class? You know, preachers never get paid anything, you know, and not back in the 70s. Yeah. And most of them, you know, you have the, you have the TV stars and all, but a lot of them don't make any money either, you know, and of course they're not in it for the money. I understand that. But you know, congregations usually do a really bad job of taking care of the pastor with financial planning, pension, health plans, and doesn't exist, much less the poor associate pastors and those of y' all that are in churches. I challenge you to take a look at those people and see if you can do better to support them. You know, and I really chat, you know, you're looking to mission fields on the other side of the world. How about taking care of your own that are working with your kids and your family every week, you know, in full time ministry. But the thing is, you growing up, there's probably a lot of pressure on you to go. There are probably a lot of preachers. Kids have a lot of special pressures on them anyway. And so talk about what kind of situation you came out of as you were coming out and what you thought your potential was and that you could kind of aspire to, you know, things that you wanted to do and things you aspired to do. But you know, maybe that was in your mind at that point. It was kind Of a long shot, let's say.

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you, Larry, my dad is from North Carolina. My mom is from Sweetport, Louisiana. And they migrated to the West coast in the 1950s to get away what they was perceived as Jim Crow, if you know that language. And so they wanted to get away from that, so they came over here to California. And actually, to be honest with you, found it was actually worse in California than it was actually, you know, in North Carolina. But the point is, is that when my dad bought his first home in 1961, he was renting from a man and he used to cut his grass, and then he'd take the lawnmower and cut the next door neighbor's grass as well, because he was already cutting the grass for himself. And his neighbor was an older guy. Older means 70 years old. My dad's 30 years old. He used to cut this man's grass. And when that man one day walked to my father and said, Mr. Carnegie, would you like to buy the house you're renting? And My father said, Mr. Sabo, Jewish guy, Mr. Sabo, I don't have any money to buy a house. He goes, jimmy, I didn't ask you if you had any money. I asked if you wanted to buy the home. And my father said, well, how would I do that? He says, I'll carry it along for you. And he sold my dad the first home. And that starts the process of having a middle class lifestyle. Because now my mom in school to be a teacher. My dad married my mother, Larry. He was 34, she was 19. Okay. Yeah. So she was in college getting her education to be a school teacher. And they got married young. And then he ended up moving into his place and he rented. Then he ended up owning that house. Thank God for Mr. Sabo. And then when Mr. Sabold died, he gave my father the house that he lived in. So now we have two homes on the same block.

Wow.

So we grew up lower middle class, weren't poor, you know, we weren't rich, but we were right at that lower middle class. And then my dad started renting out the homes that he ended up buying more to the church members in the church. They would be his tenants. So my dad had multiple properties and apartment duplexes and four plexes that he would rent. So I grew up not privileged, but I've never been broke a day in my life. I don't even know what it's like.

And the thing is that the lesson there is, number one, work and opportunity. If you Work, you're going to stand out because most people are lazy and they don't work, but just by working and then if you do a good job with your work, somehow opportunities come along. Now, that might not have sounded like a big opportunity, but if Mr. Sabo had not noticed how your father carried himself, how he put his energy into it, how meticulous he was, conscientious he was, he was not going to loan him any money because he knew he wouldn't get paid back.

Exactly right.

And so he did his own background check just by watching him work in the yard, you know. And it's funny, my grandfather who started off a sharecropper in South Georgia, basically got his hundred acres and house the same way, you know. Wow.

Yeah, I guess that's the way they did back then. The handshake was really more than the contract, you know.

Right. And what I will say this about, you know, the African American, Caucasian relationship in the south, in the farmland, you know, they did have the separation and some of that, you know, even when I was probably, I remember seeing it some in the growing up, I can't remember specifically, but it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been unheard of. But in terms of relationship, I mean, you had to get out in the fields and work. And so when it came time to plant or to crop, you know, crop tobacco, bale the hay or whatever, you'd go around the neighborhood and gather up anybody you could, white, black, whatever, you know, anybody who needed work, I mean, they'd be, you know, there'd be African Americans out there along with my 60 year old grandmother picking cotton. You know, this is before, before they had the cotton pickers and automated and I spent a couple of miserable weeks out there as a little kid doing that too. But it's like every, everybody was in the same boat, you know. And when you get in a lot of these other areas, you feel like, well, you know, discrimination didn't exist. Yes, it does, because there is never, you know, life didn't force the interaction like it did in a lot of the rural areas, you know.

Right, right, right.

And so that's why it might have been more severe in areas where you feel like, you know, shouldn't exist at all. You know, it wasn't just a thing in the South.

Right? It was, yeah. My dad discovered that by the way he left the south thinking that he was running from something and ran into a different form of discrimination, if that makes sense.

Right.

So he was disappointed. He told me personally that he Was disappointed, you know, because he felt like I was better off in North Carolina where it was. It was obvious, you know, versus the hidden hand game. He didn't like that.

Well, tell me what. So what did your attitude, you know, you weren't starving, you didn't feel like you were in the. Covered up with. With shootings and drug addicts on your porch and everything. So, you know, you're coming up, you're going to school, you're getting your grades. What was in your mind? What was your motivation? What do you think was the initial propulsion that caused you to move up and start to separate yourself from that environment to where you are today?

You know, Larry, that's a very, very powerful question you asked me, at least, because out of my three brothers, four of us, 1976, ish, they started the busing program where they take these inner city kids, regardless of race. Inner city kids, they would send them out to these schools in the suburbs. And so my parents, for some reason, Larry, I still don't know why this day sent me on that bus to the suburbs, but not my three brothers. Okay, so now here I am in elementary school, pretty much. Well, I'm sixth grade, and I'm going to a whole new community, a whole new neighborhood, meeting people from all different walks of life. But I'm in the suburbs. I'm not in the hood. Okay? Yeah, My exposure changed when I was probably about maybe 8 or 9 years old. I started seeing the world differently than my brothers. And that shifted my thinking, you know, like, wow, I can do anything I want. I can have anything I want. You know, I can live in this neighborhood. I can live in this neighborhood. Yeah, I got to get my money right to do it right. But it was isolation of South Central la. My world expanded.

There's something to seeing it with your own eyes. You can see it. A lot of people say they saw it on television and that opened up their minds to a different way of life. They didn't have to be, you know, go to the factories if they were in Pennsylvania, or go to the mines, you know, because West Virginia, because that's what everybody is, a coal miner or something, that there's other worlds out there. But it's much better if you can see it with your own eyes. Right. And so how did that transform. Did you talk about that when you went, went back? Was that something you talked about?

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I would catch the bus back home, you know, on that long freeway, like an employee, you know, I'm a minor, you know, it Takes two hours, well, hour and a half in traffic to get to school. Takes an hour and a half to get back home. So that's three hours of your day. So I didn't have time to get in trouble, Larry, because when I got home, the sun was gone, okay? And it was in the house. Do your homework, get ready for school tomorrow, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And my brothers were already out of school at 2:30, Larry, but they were out of school at 2:30 and home by 2:40, you know, and so they're running the streets. You know, I'm on this bus and I'll tell you, that experience that I had, I didn't like it at that time. I was too adolescent, too immature to understand what my parents were doing. And to be honest with you, I didn't know if I was going to be a project they would try to experiment with me, you know. Well, guess what? Maybe they were. It worked in my favor because now I have the rubber bands popping off, right? But I'm not limited by my skin color, my gender, my religion, my political belief. I'm only limited by my inability to either find an opportunity and then go work in that opportunity and, you know, do the right thing, you know, don't take shortcuts. And I found a company that gave me a chance, right? And I took that and ran with it based on my viewing of the world. So I didn't come in like this when I started my own business. I came and looked at the world like this.

Yeah. And the thing is, and let's wrap up this first segment with this, because I don't want to keep you forever, is the fact that we need to point out you were like 8, 9 years old, 6th grade, you know, around in there. And that can happen. Those of y' all that have kids, be careful of the exposures that they have, you know, because patterns of thinking and expectation are being set now in their, you know, now. But on the other hand, if you came up bad, I, you know, you and I both, because we've been able to recruit, train, work, develop and help people evolve to where they're running their own. You know, they couldn't stick their fork in their mouth when they came into our business. But then all of a sudden they're running these big organizations and speaking on stage and they've got their own big house and cars and vacation homes and everything. We've seen that transformation. That can happen regardless of where your circumstances, where you are. That can happen today, folks, for you, if you'll let it, you know, don't say, well, you know, use this. Well, you know, how can I expect anything, you know, because that didn't happen to me, you know, I haven't had those exposures or whatever that can, that transformation can start in you right now, but it's got to start if you're going to have a new life. You can start with new expectation of you starting, consider bigger possibilities and you get to the point where you accept and realize. But I got to get after it, you know, I got to, I got to look, I got to find out what appeals to me and stands out, what I really want to do. I got to make decisions about what I want my life to be. And I can't. They're not going to come. It's not going to come knocking on the door to me, you know, and, and if you've gone through a restrictive period of your life to where you've been held in place like Gary was when he was forced to do so, and you're bitter against it, how about taking a step back and see how that might be working to your advantage to send you in another direction? Because, you know, Gary, when I came out of Georgia Tech, you know, I always wanted to be a, you know, artist, photographer, and, and then I couldn't figure out how to make a career out of that. So I wound up going into architecture. And then after two, you know, I didn't have any idea what it was, but, you know, architecture at Georgia Tech, unbelievable. But then in two years, it took two years for a professor to sit down and tell us the career path. After you were the one out of seven who actually graduated in architecture, you ran that gauntlet and you were a winner. Your reward was you're gonna be basically a draftsman and making minimum wage until you're 35 years old in architecture, then you could start to make money. Well, I liked architecture. I didn't like it that much and so I went and got in construction. But then, you know, mainly because it was the fastest way out of Georgia Tech with a degree. And so I went in, built houses and I was telling Gary Jr. I built, you know, I built. The last place I built houses was up near him up in Roswell. But the thing is that you've got to go with what the opportunities in front of you. And after killing myself, you know, I was in construction. At least I was, you know, married, had had the first child, another one on the way. I was glad to have a job, but I was working like 80, 90 hour weeks and with a manic depressive guy because he was always under pressure to hit the 10th of the month with all the bills paid. And frankly he wasn't really that good at managing the money anyway. But he was Mr. Inside, I was Mr. Outside. And all of a sudden the economy went south. Nobody could get mortgages. And so the home building business cratered in the early 70s and I'm out of a job. I've been working 80, 90 hours a week, four years out of Georgia Tech. You know, I was like the king of the hill. Until one morning I went out there at 7:30 in the morning and said, we ran out of money, man, and you're out. So I'm on food stamps and unemployment. And I went nine months before I really found the opportunity I went with. And the humiliation of getting those used to have to go downtown and stand in line to get the checks. There was no direct deposit, no sending in the mail. You had to go down. And in my mind it was like a ceremony where you'd walk down Gary to some government, low paid government employee. You'd wait in line and to me it was like you'd have to get down on one knee, put out your hand, accept the check and she would give you the check and then spit on you like, you know, that was a feeling, you know. And you know how much that check was? $75. Oh my God, that was it, you know.

But you stood in that line, you didn't get on that line.

I needed that $75. But nine months of looking around to find a new thing. But guess what? The greatest experience of my life because I wouldn't be. Have found the industry that allowed me, you know, didn't get off to a fast start, the new industry because I had a lot to, you know, total new things to learn. But had I not gone through that trauma, you know, I wouldn't be where I am today. And you know, had you not gone through that busing situation. So I just challenge people to look around and say maybe this misery I'm going through is for a purpose, right? Not just. I'm just not being persecuted for nothing. And so talk about, have you, you seen people wake up at, in their 20s or 30s or 40s and never been able to get traction? You know, like Ray Kroc never found the McDonald's brothers until he was like 52 years old and, or something like that, you know. Yeah, the, yeah, Kentucky Fried Chicken, the Colonel, he was, he got his first, he retired, got his first pension check, you know, retirement check. From the government. He said no, you know, because country people back then, you know, my, you know, they wouldn't accept any money from the government. You know, they would rather die than eat off a check from the government. And he had that mentality. And that's when he started Kentucky fried chicken at 65. So these light bulb things can come to you at any point in your life. And do you have any that you've seen that you want to close this thing with or any comment about that that you'd like to close this episode out with?

Well, yeah. You know, success is an inside job, Larry. I think most of us were taught through school that it's an outside thing. You know, you got to learn this, read this, know this, do this, and you get this. But really, success is an inside job. So when you, it's not what happens to you, it's what happens within us. Right. And those experiences set us on course, get it to do whatever we end up doing, you know, and some people use it as an excuse, you know, to ruin their life. Let's say, for example, Larry, you know, I could have used my excuse of my dad was, you know, had money, I'd never been broke, and that's why I'm in jail, that's why I'm on drugs. Cause I've never had to struggle. And it's my dad's fault. I didn't struggle and he protected me from struggling. You could use that excuse, too. You could say, hey, Gary's problems is because his dad helped him out. Or you could say Gary's success because his father set him on the right course. So either you make it as an excuse or you use it as a reason to go win, regardless of your scenario that you're in right now. Either excuse or reason. I chose the reason route. My brothers chose the excuse route.

Absolutely fantastic. Thanks so much, Gary, for sharing. And I know that wheels are turning while people are listening to this and examining their situation for really breaking out. And even if you've had success, and we'll talk about this in our next chance, even if you've had success, there's always opportunities you're going to come into where you can double, triple, quadruple where you are today if you've got your eyes open. So thanks so much for sharing, Gary. Look forward to the next time.

Yes, absolutely. Forward to it as well. Thanks for the opportunity, Larry.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind with me, Larry Weidel. 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, go.