When You Are Specific, It’s Amazing What You Can Accomplish with Entrepreneur John Akhoian

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here talking with John A Coin. And we're getting some real insights to the mind of a winner and how he organizes himself to keep moving forward, stay on track, keep moving forward. And John, thanks so much for taking the time. Thanks for being so generous in sharing how you get yourself organized, how you keep yourself on track. And I've just really enjoyed what you've had to bring so far and looking forward to hearing what you have to say about, you know, when you wrote the books, you know, there's a phrase John called you have that that was formative for me is you have, you have to be specific to be dynamic. And it's, you know, if you look.

At.

Can be something that's not really that clear, but somehow people understand it. I understood it, but you've got to know basically you're not going to be able to go anywhere in your car until you decide where you want to go. It's no more complicated than that. But the more specific you are, the more in motion you can get. And so does that ring a bell with you?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm definitely very specific on what I want to accomplish and in what industry I want to accomplish it in. And to me, it's about home services and building a nationwide brand. And I know it's going to take a lot of time and effort and focus to doing that. But, you know, I've got very specific outlined goals and how to get there. And, and I'm not afraid to put the time in or, you know, or, you know, put the risk in to get it done. So I totally agree with you. You got to be specific and, and you got to be willing to give it all you got as well.

Well, the thing is that you take when you write things down that's you have to be specific. You know, it's like, what am I going to write down? And the great thing, you know, we'll get into how you got going on writing your books and you got your course. You know, one thing to have an apprentice course, someone's got to put the course together. And this has everything to do with what we were talking on our last episode about how you start habits, because I Went through the same process John with I, I've wanted to for decades but finally I got my staff to research it. They came up with the best daily journaling app out there. I forced myself to learn how to use it, but what made it work for me was I created these templates. So I have a different thing. It's basically my thinking, meditation, prayer, study, affirmations type thing. I've got all these different things, but when I start my day, you know, I get my, the first thing is, you know, I got my, I call it activate. The first thing I do is activate which is go through the stretches, the, you know, the push up, sit ups, this, that, the other. I've got a routine there and you know, I'll write that down. My first thing I do is I weigh myself, you know, and then I'll do my activation of the body, you know, wake the body up, use it or lose it and then I'll go get the coffee and sit down. But I take the thinking is out of it because I've already prepared in this journal as like, I know here is my, here's what I'm going to think about, reaffirm, read. You know, I've got selected Bible verses, you know, you know, and you know, this whole idea of meditate, sit in a corner and empty your mind and think of nothing I don't get. But I do understand think, I do understand reaffirm, you know, affirmations. I do understand prayer, I do understand Bible verses and I do understand principles. And so what I've done is I just took the thinking out of it. And folks, if you're an action person, as an entrepreneur, take, take the thinking out of controlling yourself and set yourself up for success. Like John said in an earlier episode, he has a daily checklist of things he does. So you get to manage yourself like you're going on a vacation or like you got a project, you got a deadline, you know, the more important the project, the more detail we get on what we're going to do, how we're going to do it and the more time we spend on the planning. So spend it on getting yourself organ organized for a great start every single day. And at the end of the day have a routine, have it written down and go to it and give yourself one of these things. They asked Jerry Seinfeld if you want to be a comedian, how do I be a comedian? He said, take out a calendar and spend time every day writing jokes. And he said when you threw, put a red line through the date and he said, your idea is every calendar has an uninterrupted red line. So you know, that you spent time every day writing jokes. And that's what this thing is, this diary will tell me, you know, it's like 208 days in a row without breaking the cycle, you know, and so manage your. You know, you can get. I think that most entrepreneurs are so busy putting out fires and, you know, running from the tyranny of the urgent that they never take control of their life and say, no, how do I want to start the day? And I'm going to write that down. I'm going to put myself, give myself a little schedule so when the day I start the day, I don't have to remember it. And it's just like, John, when you're in sales, when Monday comes, you want to know where you want to already have your plan for that week. And you don't want to wake up on Monday morning and say, well, what are we going to do today? Because otherwise it's going to be a wasted day. And that's what it is with planning yourself. So when I say those things, does that ring bells to you?

Yeah, it does. I. I purposely actually plan on Sundays. I plan my entire week. So I. I have this in my journal. I have a weekly planner, and it's. It's all broken out in four segments, and. And one of them is, you know, my business. You know, one of the segments is cleanups, and the other one is my personal. And I have an investment side of it as well. So I make sure that I have at least a half a dozen, you know, projects or things planned for each section. And. And then I. And then I take that weekly planner, and then I put it in my daily planner, and. And that's how it gets done, you know, so I think about it. I spend an hour every Sunday, hour and a half, sometimes, planning my entire week. And then. And a lot of it I take from my quarterly plans or my quarterly goals and my yearly goals and just how it gets done. You have to have a process or you're. It's almost like navigating the ship without the sails, you know, just going out there and going, well, let's see where we end up. Well, you'll always end up somewhere, but it's not going to be where you want to be, you know, unless you actually have a map. And to me, this is the map.

What did writing books teach you?

I. The books I wrote are short, and it taught me how to use stories, how to use real life stories in our business and, and how to make it interesting. So it taught me, you know, it taught me, first of all, I like short books myself, so I wrote short, short books because I figured I'm going to write it for somebody like myself. But it did teach me how to use a lot of stories and how to connect stories with principals and how to drive it home. So. And it also taught me that it's not really that difficult to write a book. I mean, I've always dreaded it because I always thought, man, must be a really big task to write a book. But it really isn't, you know, it really isn't. You just have to, you know, it's like planning your life. You know, you start out with a blank sheet of paper. First thing you plan is the chapters, and then you fill the chapters with the content. You know.

Now when you, you started, why did you start with values? There had to be some experience from business, from observation or whatever. The first book, why did you write on values?

Well, we use, we're big in values in our business. You know, we, what we do is, you know, we created values by, first of all, you know, bringing our management team in and going through an entire exercise on how to, how to build the values of the organization. And then, and then we said we're going to use these values as leadership principles in our business and how we make decisions, you know, for everything we do. And, you know, and now, you know, we read, we recite our values before every meeting. Okay. And then we also have these things that we call know positive. We have positive experiences. And we start out our meetings by talking about, you know, what's happened in our life that's positive, both personally and professionally. And a lot of times, you know, the values come out. You know, I mean, people have stories about, you know, how they've had a principle that they learned and how they applied it in this or that and how it worked and how, how it became a positive experience.

So when you talk about values now, like, how many are we talking about? And give me an example of a value and how someone applied that and, you know, there would be relating it.

To the group, hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over 5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to whiteellawinning.comwebinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks, just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Yeah. So our value, the book I wrote is Values First. And our values in our organization is faith, integrity, respect, service, and teamwork. And what I did is I wrote a chapter on faith, chapter on integrity, a chapter on respect, chapter on service, and chapter on teamwork. And there are stories that in each one of these values, they're stories of our staff that's actually, you know, like, used one of those values in the business and with customers or in their. In their life and. And how it's actually transformed the relationship. So this is a book that we send out to every new employee that comes into our company with a welcome letter from me because I want them and their families to know that, you know, these are. These are what we want to help be held accountable to. You know, this is what we want everybody to live their lives, you know, by. In the organization. And, you know, the. And, you know, that's. That's the whole moral of this book is we created it for our own people.

Where did you get the idea of taking a concept like faith and then to teach it or to train on it through stories? Where did you get that? Because you hear a lot of people, well, but they immediately go to sleep. You know, it's just like, blah, blah, blah, here's the Boy Scout pledge or values, let's go to sleep. Ethics in college is not the most exciting thing, but when you go to stories now, you can have a lot of attention and a lot of people paying attention to what you are wanting to communicate. So. And you said connecting stories with principles. Where did that idea come to you?

I've always, you know, I mean, reading so many books. I've really enjoyed books that had stories in it. I really didn't like books that just went directly into, you know, A, B, and C. And this is what you got to do. I mean, I really connected with stories. So. So, you know, we purposely, you know, captured a lot of stories from our team interacting with customers. Like, I have a story in here on, you know, the first chapter, which is, you know, faith. And it's. It's about Lee and the doctor, right? And it's. It's about a story of one of our plumbers that was in the home, you know, with the, you know, with a couple that, you know, the. The man was having, you know, he was going through cancer treatments. And. And how he connected with them and how he used something called magic moments that we use, which is a principle that we learned, you know, from. From some training that we took that. That we did in the house and how that, you know, made the customer feel and how it actually made them feel about our service and our company and how we ended up winning a customer for life. Now, that customer said, I wouldn't have anybody else touch my plumbing except you guys because of the way you made me feel. So stories make people feel a certain way. And. And I. And I think that that's how we get connected. That's how we find commonality. So, you know, we just. You know, we just use those. Those principles in the books.

And you evolved, but now you felt the need to write another book. So your second book was. Was.

So we have. My. Actually, my first book was the Secret to Real Wealth. And this is. This was the book on how plumbing changed my life. How, you know, plumbing was plan B for me, but it was the best plan B I ever had. You know, I. I take this plan B over plan A any day. So. And it talks about how that's what we do to our kids. You know, we always. Right, you know, want them to, you know, get into certain types of careers and things that we think are good for them. So it talks about how the plumbing industry creates real wealth and how you could retire early and wealthy. So that's the first book. And the second book I wrote was creating 99 millionaires. And the third book was Values First. And the reason that's called Values first is because, you know, faith, integrity, respect, service, and teamwork, you know, is our values, you know, so, you know, we. We called it Values First. And this is the one that talks about the principles of leadership.

What is the idea behind creating 99 millionaires?

Creating 99 millionaires is a. It's funny, it was back in. I remember it being back in August. I think it was August of 2018, you know, and I. And one of my. One of the guys I work with, you know, asked me, said, john, you know, how many millionaires you think we've created, you know, is, you know, doing what we're doing. And. And it was a great question because, you know, I knew of quite a few people that have become wealthy working in our business. Salespeople. And. And some people that were running our branches, you know, that we went off and sold. We sold quite a few branches, you know, for millions of dollars. And they've. And they participated. I've always had My management staff participate in the upside. So I calculated. I said, man, I think. I don't know, but I think it's a handful, maybe a little more than a handful. And he said, you know what? Why stop there? And I said, you're right. Let's create 100 millionaires while we're building this business, and let's go ahead and start doing classes. And then that's when we started doing the budgeting classes, and, you know, we started giving out books, you know, books about the millionaire next door and. And just how compound interest works in your life. Because most of the people that became millionaires didn't do it by earning a million dollars in a year. They did it by earning a good living, but by taking that and investing it and. And. And making compound interest, you know, one of the. One of the eight wonders in life work for you, you know, so we started teaching those principles, and that's basically what the book talks about. It talks about a story, you know, about us, you know, sitting down at a table with, you know, with 99 millionaires, you know, and we're talking about how this all happened, you know, and there's a guy at the table who's waiting the tables, and he's going, wow, that's interesting. And he wants to learn how these guys became wealthy, and then, you know, ends up wanting to learn more about, you know, the things that we're doing and joining the movement. So that's what that book is about, and that's how it came about.

That sounds very, very cool. Very, very cool. Great idea. And it's organic. It came from, you know, your business, your team, and the idea, you know, it was just like a book that wanted to be written, and it appeared, the idea appeared, and so very exciting when those things happen in your life. John, we've got to go. Thanks so much for spending all the time. Any last word you'd like to pass on to. To the people listening and that a last, final word that you'd like to pass on, anything jump into your mind.

Larry, I want to first thank you for having me on your podcast, and it was a pleasure doing it. And the last thing I'd like to say is, if you want your life to get better, get better, just purposely start reading and create a habit of learning and reading and being curious about how to get better. The more you invest in yourself, the better life you're going to have. And that's where I want to leave it, because that's what's happened to me.

That is absolutely right on the money. Thanks so much, John. This has been great.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are definitely dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world. I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.