Mastering the Distractions with Chris Achong

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 Weidell. And let's get going. I'm talking with Chris A. Chong and he's up in Brooklyn, New York right now, if I'm correct. Is that right, Chris?

Yes, sir. We're in Brooklyn, yeah.

And you're in your art gallery up there, correct?

Absolutely. Yeah. It's a fun place to hang out here, but we use it as an office slash gallery.

Yeah. Is that one of your paintings there behind you?

Yes, one of my earlier paintings. I just, you know, I have, my style has developed over the years, but this is. I like to keep some of my old stuff, you know, just, you know, look at where, where I came from, so to speak. And you know, this piece has actually been sold before and the person never came back for it. They paid for it, you know, complet. I think they moved, moved to another state or moved to another country or something like that. I don't know.

Well now, when, if you know, we'll do this, but people want to see your artwork, you like your current work and whatever. Do you have it on a website now or you have an Instagram where you post your stuff or where do.

They find you when you run into business? You don't know it. Okay, so galleries on the Minerva gallery.org.

Actually Minerva gallery.org okay, good. And so let's talk about, you know, you've done a lot of different things in your life. You travel a lot. And one thing that I know you're good at is staying focused. So talk about what you've learned about mastering distractions.

Yeah, it's a day. You know, I think the modern day self improvement is your ability to deal with stress and the day to day things. It's not really the big stuff that we used to look at before, just your ability to deal with that. And so we, on a day to day basis, things go wrong. Especially you know, one of the biggest issues is people problems. We always have people problems. When you're building a business, if you ever plan on getting big, there's always going to, you know, have some sort of objections, some sort of challenge every day that happens and your ability to deal with these problems and not get overwhelmed by it. So I always tell people whatever problem you're dealing with is about half a percent of what your real business is. And the reason I say it like that is because even if you focused on the problem, you might find A solution, or you might not find a solution, but still, business need to continue to keep going. And so over the years, just some watching so many people grow and so many people build businesses, I've seen that most of the problems, you know, some of them, you know, about probably 70, 80% can't go away immediately. But what we can do is focus on putting things in place that it never happens again. And so, you know, it's a strategy that, you know, that sometimes in business, you know, solutions, you know, hard to come by, but we could put, you know, roadblocks in place that these problems don't continue, keep coming in. Don't continue, keep coming in.

You were making the point. Most problems don't go away quickly. And so there's two things about that. You've got to find ways to stay on track. But also while you're solving that problem, you got it in the back of your mind, what can I do to make sure we don't get down this road again? Because it's one thing to have a problem, it's another thing to continue to have a problem, and successful people figure out solutions. You really can't learn a business without having problems that you didn't know could actually happen. But when you run into it, that tells you, here is the next phase of what I've got to learn about this business. I not only have to solve this problem, I've got to learn how to operate in a way where this is very unlikely to come up again. And that's what I had in my. I don't know where I got the idea, Chris, but I got the same idea early in my business. It's like, I'd like the system to eliminate most of my problems in advance. It's like making sales. You know, you're a good sales or great sales presentation. Let's say you handle the objections. You know, they're gonna, you know, most people don't buy because of whatever arena it is. One, two, three, four, at the most, primary objections. And usually it's one or two. And if you can hammer those down during the course of your presentation, they're not going to be asking that. You know, they're going to be like idiots to ask that at the end because you already answered it, you know, and so even if they do, it's just a matter of reminder. Remember, we said so? And so they go, oh, yeah. And so you, in the same way, your system, your flow of activities and ways you go about making sales, dealing with customers, solving problems, that flow can you Know, it's like a flow, your faucet out there in the yard. You can spray in whatever direction you want that'll create the least problems. And so how did you. When did this come to you, this idea of not just solving problems, but using that as a key to how we need to improve our system?

What I noticed was it really wasn't the problem is how I was dealing with the problem. So the stress of problems throws you off the game. So let's say, you know, I always tell my leaders or the people who work in the company, that's a fender bender, don't crash the car because you gotta fend a vendor, keep the car, keep going. Don't shut down the factory because there's a little problem. Continue to keep going, continue to keep pushing. You know, there's gonna, you know, obviously we have to fix this problem, but we gotta keep the factory going. And, you know, and everything is a consequence. So there's consequences of everything. So, you know, we didn't realize that we needed to have a lot more capital, so we should have fixed that in the beginning where we had a lot more capital in place. You know, for instance, in our business or, you know, in a lot of different types of businesses, I had. We needed to have a lot more money saved up and accumulated. So when we did run into a problem which was going to come, that we're better able to take care of it. And so we, you know, I just. I just. I've always just been, let's overdo. Let's. Let's have more. Let's say we had to shut down for a week or two or three, which. Which has happened in my career, you know, can we find, you know, do we have the resources to get back on? And so, you know, that. That's drastic. But, you know, whenever income, you know, we've always focused on cash flow in businesses. And the minute, you know, I probably had maybe three or four or five or six businesses, you know, outside of my main companies that fell apart because of cash flow. And so we're constantly, always working on cash flow. And I think right now, the majority of our companies that we have right now is creating a constant cash flow. And we're just looking for something else that could create a constant cash flow. So we don't have that problem. When it does come, we're able to just kind of go, okay, this was expected.

Now, how did you get your gallery and how did you get into that? Have you always done painting?

Yeah, I did all my life, you know, I kind of painted when I was a kid and draw and stuff like that. You know, I remember using. What's it called? Acrylic, you know, just, just, just the cheap stuff, the oil pastels. That was what I could afford back then, but then at 21, you know, and I always challenge people to do this. You know, some, that was my passion, art. But I got into art after I made money. Just, just, just, just to be clear, some people go, well, business, it hasn't been as successful to me as I'd like it to be. You know, we've sold a ton of work, but, you know, we opened up in 2009, so we're still, we're still going.

So what you found was if you overdo while things are running normally, you basically get ahead of the game and you create a cushion to handle the bumps. Right. When did you learn to do that?

It's, you know, because I've always ran out of capital early on in my career. And so we learned that, you know, really quickly because we realized that, you know, the strength of the business is based on how much you have set aside and your ability to just consistently keep that cash flow. It was probably, I would say, when I was like 22 years old that we realized that we had to, you know, fight a little bit harder. We had to keep a little bit more extra edge for ourselves. So, like you were talking about the gallery earlier. My strategy was I didn't want to stop. And I never stopped till I still haven't stopped. You know, I don't care what comes in. I still wake up 5:30, 6 o' clock every morning. Some mornings I wake up 4 o'. Clock. You know, I'll have my best. I think last month was my best income, mountain business. And, you know, and we still woke up at 4 or 5 o' clock in the morning. Granted, I don't work all day like I used to before, but I'll make sure I get up and I get things done. So there's a lot of accountability.

And so you're 22 years old and you're starting to learn lessons. Isn't it great to be in a position where you can start to learn these lessons early in your life and you can learn them from yourself? It's one thing to be told this, because we're all told, you know, save money, have a cushion, this, that and the other, but when you learn it for yourself, then it's your lesson. And then you find yourself telling other people about it. You know, it's like also you keep yourself on track when otherwise, if you didn't know that you would be out there spending the money, you know, and it was like, I've got some left, why worry about it? But you've got, it's like bumps in the road. You're always going to have bumps financially and in business, they can knock you out permanently. And if you're the leader, that's just one of the things you think about, you know, provide, you know, thinking ahead, looking down the road. And so how would, how did, how did it happen? Well, I'm getting distracted myself. But this whole thing of mastering distractions is it. You find it pretty much comes in around money most of the time, managing money, people, problems, money.

And some is just dealing with emotions, you know, concerned about what people think or, you know, arguments or fights or disagreements. So, you know, there's, there's your ability to get along with people, really kind of. So I've made a decision to get along with people. And once you make that decision, then you have to find ways, especially if you have, like, we have tons of people in our business that, you know, that they make a pretty good living. They make, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 grand a month. So getting these people to sometimes get along is a challenge, you know, not necessarily to agree 100% of the time. So I guess, you know, just understanding that everyone has a way of being. And just not, not being able to force them into any certain thing, but let them understand if we, if we did this route, this is what would. This. What the results would be. But if we did this route, this is what. And I know this is the result. So I've been able to, been, I've been professional. So I, you know, I'm very direct to people, but I've been able to say it with a smile, which is one of the things I learned that, you know, have probably made me a lot of money. Before I used to be directing people. I'd be serious now. I've learned actually you could be direct and, you know, just say with a smile and get the same result, get better results. And they don't want to not be around you because, you know, to continue staying in business, you know, we have to, you know, have to get along to some level. We're not going to be best friends all the time, but we gotta, we gotta be able to trust each other. So a lot of it, you know, when we talk about, you know, that those kind of challenges is. Most of it's just people problems.

That's what stops how did you learn that thing about, you know, there's some people, I basically despise them. They just seem to be able to go through, you know, like, all will go, you know, to hell in a hand basket, and they'll go, ha ha ha ha ha. You know, not. Not a problem. You know, like the Australians. It's like. It's like, yeah, no worries, man. You know, no big deal. No matter what happened, you cut off my arm. No big deal. You don't get a little blood. I didn't lose much blood. You know, I got another hand left, you know, just whatever it is. They seem to have this unbelievable good humor. And I tell you, when I have found it tough. When you're a leader and you're responsible for the numbers and you're working to do things like make sure people stay on track, they don't get distracted. You know, you're trying to create those margins and keep the train running. When things go haywire, it's just a little hard to go ha ha ha. You know what? You know, that's funny. I knew something was going to go crazy today. So that's it. Well, no big deal. Back. Back to work, everybody. And, you know, I've just always despised those people because they had.

They.

They had a stability I didn't have. I'm. I like to think it took me years.

It took me years. And again, it had to do with levels of stability. So, you know, we trained our businesses and our leaders to get results. And so if results was coming in, I was happy and we had a good flow. If results stopped coming in, then, you know, we had challenges and we had issues. So we kind of, like learned together that we don't want to go down that road. And so, you know, it takes a lot of work, and it's constantly adjusted, and sometimes new problems will pop up, but the majority of them, we deal with the same way, which is just, you know, dealing with that problem but understanding there's, you know, there's 99 other things we got to do or 90 other things we got to focus on, not just that, you know, one problem, okay? And so there's a bigger picture behind it. So, you know, there's times where it gets a little bit white on rice leadership, if you want to call it, but that's normal.

I think what you said there, Chris, is right on the money that you learn to keep the big picture in mind, and, you know, there's going to be distractions, and it's easier to be philosophical about when things go Wrong if you have the margins. And so that relates to what I've always thought that like a well run business, if you're running your business in the right way, you're making it as easy as possible for you to run the business because you're minimizing the opportunity for a lot of things to be going wrong all the time. Poorly run businesses, the leaders running around like, you know, like a fireman putting out all the fires all the time. The tyranny of the urgent, you know, the last minute nightmare of the last 30 minutes, you know, has changed your whole day. And so you try and create a situation and a flow in there and get people, also get people around you that have some stability and work ethic so that they're, you know, going to help you stay on track. But no, you know, we're going to get distracted. Things going to happen, you know, we. I won't go into all the things that are just in our office staff, things that happen that, you know, when you got a collection of people, one of everything happens and you kind of absorb and keep, keep on moving, you know what I'm saying? It's like you can't get mad at them because you know, something normal in life happened to them. It's like, like get Covid or something like that. You know, we right when we had top guy in the office, went to a training school recently, came back and gave everybody Covid in the office. You know, it's like thank you. But you know, he had it too. He didn't, he didn't want it. You know, what are you going to do? And so you just live through these things and you can do that if you keep your eye on the big picture. And I use that, by the way. You know, I first learned that in construction. Coming out of Georgia Tech is like this down cycles, you're low on money and you can't get financing or whatever. But if you can live through it, you've got your crews, you've got your subcontractors, if you can just keep a minimum of activity and get it through the downtime, when you come out of that and business is booming, you still have all your key people working for you and you can really hit it into overdrive. And so these things apply across the board. And so thanks for that. I can't wait to get you back on here. And we're going to start talking about how you got the entrepreneurial bug and where that came from and then how you got into doing your own businesses. So thanks, Chris.

Appreciate you. Thank you very much.

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 at whitelownwinning.com webinar thanks for listening and do it big.