074 From Struggling to $1.5 million

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. What does it take to go from struggling to clothe your children to a million and a half dollar business? Well, in this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show, we're gonna have a conversation with a friend, Josh Coates. We're gonna have a conversation because this guy, his story is incredible. He was struggling financially. He had a newborn that needed heart surgery. He and the aha's, the enlightening moments and the journey to wealth, the journey to entrepreneurship and how he did it is in this show. So I look forward to seeing you in the episode. Check it out. This one's a big one. Cheers. This is the affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact than living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there, Josh. So good to have you on the Affluent Entrepreneur our show, man. Just great to to get a chance to share a little more time with you, my friend.

Dude, thanks for having me, man. I know we had like a seven hour conversation for my podcast, so I'm, I'm happy to do this again.

Sweet. Yeah. So, hey, for my listeners and, and viewers, because we do this on YouTube, we do it all, we do wherever anyone will watch or hear. So.

Sounds good, man.

Who, who is Josh Coates? And I mean, in the introduction, I let them know that, you know, you and I met through a mastermind and just kind of connected. And here we are on this entrepreneurial journey and seeing where we go. So let's talk about Josh a little bit.

Well, I'm going to give you kind of my favorite, like, short bio, which is failed rockstar who detailed cars for nine and a half Years turned seven figure life and business coach.

And I like that.

I, I love to like present it like that because so many times with our bio it's like, here's everything that I've accomplished, but not necessarily where we came from. And so one of the things that I try to emphasize over and over and over with my brand is, yeah, I'm a 38 year old who, you know, does a million plus a year in business, which sounds real sexy but also sounds ridiculous and completely unrelatable. Unless you know that I literally detailed people's cars for nine and a half years in my 20s while playing in rock bands on the weekends. So, you know, it's, I'm not someone who comes from money. I'm not someone who's like, dad had a business that handed down to me and you know, not say there's anything wrong with people that did that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But like, I really want people to know, like I literally came from being broke my entire life. Basically had a mom who would every single school year notice the week before school started that my kids had no new clothes and offer to take them shopping, buy them their school clothes because I couldn't afford them. You know, we couldn't afford to eat out. We couldn't afford to really do anything other than just survive, wake up another day and try to figure out how we were going to survive. Yes. So for me, it's very important that people know. Yes. What I've accomplished because I want to give you that hope and that inspiration. But like where I came from, so that, you know, this isn't some magical thing that somebody that was lucky. This is someone who comes from nothing but was still able to figure it out.

So I love this, Josh, because I think this is really an important message and for those of you that are watching and listening to realize that statistics. Actually a study.

Was put out that over almost 80% of millionaires are first generation millionaires. In other words, they created it themselves. It wasn't handed to them, it wasn't a lottery win, it wasn't inherited, it wasn't any of that. They didn't take over dad's or mom's business, they created it. And, and, and I hope that it gives hope, like you said. Yeah, I, I, you know, my dad was a aerospace engineer. I mean he knew nothing about investing, he knew nothing about, about entrepreneurship. They thought they, my family, I mean, when I said I'm going to be an entrepreneur, they thought, they looked at me like I had this like Contagious disease. Is it contagious? God, I hope so.

I hope so.

You know.

But when we live in that possibility, the challenge is, and I'm going to ask this question, we live in such a world right now where the things we, we fail to realize that the things that sell on media are the things that get ratings. And the things that get ratings are typically people's dirty laundry, people's problems, the demise, the destruction, the hell that people are going through. I can get on my soapbox. I. But that, but what that does is poisons society to possibility, to. To not seeing what is actually possible.

In their lifetime.

Yeah.

You're 38. I'm 60. So I got a year or two on you. But you found yourself in a situation where you're.

Effectively getting subsidized by mom and dad.

Yeah, yeah. As a 29 year old with three kids.

Yeah. And so at what point.

Well, I'm gonna ask two questions and you can answer in whatever order. At what point was the tipping point where you said enough's enough? And then at what point were you in a place where you said you could see it was possible?

Well, when I said enough is enough. My youngest son, I now have four. My youngest is a daughter, but my youngest son was born with a heart defect and he had already been through two different open heart surgeries. And during those heart surgeries, I'm gonna try not to trigger anyone that's had to deal with similar things. But you know, like, sometimes pain is what motivates us. Right. So I don't mean to trigger anybody. If it does, I apologize. But you know, after going through surgery, when you're that young, his first one was at six weeks old.

Second one at a year and a half and you're in hospital and this is the most stressful thing you could possibly imagine during, other than, I'm sure, you know, actually losing a son or a child, I'm sure, you know, goes to another level. But you're sitting here living in this stress, meanwhile feeling like the worst parent in the world, because while your son is sitting on a bed being kept alive by 30 machines, you can't help but think about how you're going to pay your bills because you have no paid time off. And so here you are, should be 100% focused on your kid. Right. But then like 30% of your brain keeps wandering off. What are we going to do about the bills? How, how, how are we. I mean, we've almost been evicted already once this year. We're already at the like end of the grace period with every single person we have to pay in order to live. And, and, and so you mix the trauma of a real life emergency that you can't control with this other thing that you've never learned how to control. But think maybe, but maybe that doesn't have to be an issue. You know what I'm saying? Like.

Right.

And so the first two times I. It's a total process, you know, of up to six weeks to get in there, get the surgery, get recovered. And each time I would stay the night with my kid, wake up, go to work, detail as many cars as I could have the energy to buy. Usually I'd work a little bit shorter of a day during this time. So like noon or one, go home. So the kid's mom go spend some time with him at the hospital. Had two other kids, but I hadn't slept the night before. So I'm passing out in bed. I got kids wanting to play, wanting attention, and I'm yelling at them because I'm trying to catch some sleep before I go back to the hospital and stay up all night with her little brother. So went through two of those.

And then at the age of two and a half, found out he needed a third one. And I was just like. And, and at that time, we thought they were saying he might need a heart transplant if that was the case, we were going to have to possibly move to another city and be on call. And so at that point it was, it was the third one. The. We don't even know what's gonna happen. We just know our life is just up for chance at this point. That something in me was just like, you know what? I love music. I thought it was my way out. I thought it was. Was going to do the rest of my life. But the reality is music is going to keep taking me further away from my family. The if it does reward me, it's going to take me further away before it ever pays back. And I can't live paycheck to paycheck anymore. I can't put my kids through that. Yeah, it's just like I have to find a way to do something that fills my purpose. I've always, I grew up from a long line of preachers, so purpose has been instilled in me. I was like, I gotta find something. I didn't want to be a preacher. Didn't like the life of everyone telling me what I could and couldn't do. And, you know, watching my life with a magnifying glass. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not, not going down that path. But I do want to help people. I want to make a difference, but I gotta find a way to do it in a way that actually makes me money and keeps me from having to leave the house in order to do it. So that's when I just made a decision to start learning. And I didn't even know what to learn. I just knew I didn't want to go back to school. And so I literally just downloaded hours and hours and hours and hours of podcasts and I put myself through what Zig Ziglar calls Automobile University. Except I also worked a job where I could wear headphones. So I listened to podcasts for an eight hour shift in the detail shop, put in think and grow rich in the car on the way home. I did end up signing up for a life coach certification, but that didn't happen for, I mean, there's about three or four months where I just listened to personal growth like 10 hours a day.

Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine because, you know, I'm a brand new granddad and she's going to be. Congrats. Thank you. She'll be one year old in, in August, but I just can't imagine looking at that little angel and.

Having that uncertainty not once, but three times in a short span as a parent and then to.

For a man, also to feel like I'm not taking care of what I am really responsible for. I just, I mean, you talk about motivation, you talk about finding purpose, you know, I, I. Good on you. Good on you. And he's doing, he's doing all right now, huh?

Yeah, he's, he's 11 now and he's the most active kid I have. He. So that, that, that third one, he ended up not needing a transplant. They were able to do. I mean, it was like a 12 hour surgery. It was intense. But they got everything they needed fixed. And every time we've been to the doctor since, he's had to have some like smaller things done, which to most people are like major things, but to us it's like, oh, they're just gonna balloon something real quick through the leg. That's fine. No big. As long as we're out of the hospital in 24 hours, it. Nothing does. It feels like a flu to us. You know what I mean?

So well. And I think that's really where some of this comes into play, this whole idea of entrepreneurship. You know, we were talking before we actually went live and, and Everything. I just. I. That's what drives me is how do I make. How do I give someone the opportunity to have the control, to say, the most important thing right now is my child. The most important thing is my parent. My dad, when he had his stroke in 2010.

He was in rehab. We thought he would come out. I literally spent every day for the last 21 days of his life. He never came out of there.

But I had the blessing of spending those 21 days with him. And if I had.

If I had a 9 to 5, if I was tied to PTO, if I was tied to, you know, living check to check, there's people that are making over a hundred grand a year, and they're just living check to check and. And all that. And I didn't have that ability to control things. We're going into uncertain times now. I would have never been able to experience that, or I wouldn't have been able to navigate it effectively. And I think that.

Entrepreneurship can get demonized for all kinds of reasons, but we fail to recognize, one, the solutions they bring to the world, two, the generosity they create, and three, the flexibility that it brings to our life.

Yeah.

You know, the ability to. To take care of what's actually important, which is our family, our experiences, or, you know, those. Those things that they seem to be easy for us to neglect.

Right. Yeah. And what's. What's super rad is. I mean, like, this week alone, it's the kid's last week of school. And I just completely rescheduled two days yesterday to go with that same kid on a field trip. I wasn't planning on going. He's a fifth grader, and they were going on a field trip to. Is a play field trip, not an educational one. I was like, he's gonna be playing bowling, doing laser tag. He doesn't want his dad there. And then literally two days before the field trip, he goes, dad, are you coming? I was like, I wasn't planning on it. You know, I got a couple calls, and. And. And I saw the look on his face. He was so disappointed. And so I. I mean, I pulled out my phone. I messaged my assistant. I said, we got to cancel everything for Tuesday. My kid's got a field trip, and he really wants me there. So I just. I just rescheduled the whole day, and then kind of the same thing for tomorrow. It's their last day of school, and they have, I don't know, some little activity thing that they're doing that I didn't think was Like a big deal. And then they asked if I was coming, and when I said no, I. I saw the looks on their face. Okay, never mind. Reschedule Friday. I will be there. And that's, you know, it's. It's a. It's. It's really, really, really cool after telling you that story, because, you know, I don't think about that every single day, obviously, for a really good reason to tell that story than to think about this week that I literally rescheduled two entire days to go be with my kids at school. And. And I can do that anytime I want to. Any. Not pretending that I could just disappear for 365 days. But, you know, there's so much fle to fit things in in a way where I can be there for my kids.

Well, so this is. This is cool, because I think that that's. That's why I say we ought to measure our wealth.

In how much we control our time versus how many dollars we're in control of. That's good, because I could have $100 million in the bank, but if I don't control my time, it's a poor life. And I don't mean this judgmental for. For those of you that are listening and watching, I mean it with. With the absolute love and caring to say, it's your life. And both Josh and I want to give you the opportunity to live it fully, to know that at those end of those days, you can look back and go, like the old song goes, I did it my way. You know, and.

That'S the case. And that's why. Because you use this as a vehicle to.

Move into your own coaching business, your own training, your own stuff. And that journey, obviously, wasn't just straight up. It was probably with some challenges, especially with, at that time, three kids, one going through these kinds of things. Tell us, what were the things? I think I know. What drove you. What kept you going? What. What were the. The biggest things that. If people are sitting here today listening or watching, and they're saying, I so want to start something new. I so want a new direction.

What were the things that. That you found that could. That helped you make that step?

I just needed this one thing, and kids are my passion and my motivation. I'm not pretending to be the dad of the year because I'm not dad of the year, but. But I love my kids like crazy. So for me, this is all it took. I would regularly make up this fake scenario where my oldest kid at that time, so this would have been 2014 is when I started my business. Okay, so.

My seven years old was my oldest kid at that time. And I would regularly imagine that we. Fast forward.

10 years. Okay, you're almost there. And my oldest kid would look at me and say, dad, how come we're poor?

Why is it that when everyone else goes to out to eat after church, we go home and have quesadillas? Why is it that all my friends have money to go do stuff on the weekends, go to the mall, go to the movies? We don't see. Like, I got started, the kids were young enough, they didn't know they were poor yet.

But I know that for me personally, I started to notice that kind of stuff around middle school. I started to notice that when we'd go to the mall with the friends, my parents would barely scrounge up five bucks. And all of my friends showed up with 20 bucks. Which, you know, now doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but when you're a kid, that's a really big difference. Like, right, Everyone else going to the mall, 20 bucks, you can buy something. I'm with $5. I'm like, I don't know, who can I get a pair of socks? Like, what, what could I. Me and my brother both bought so many, like Nike, like wristbands, because that's like all you could get for like five bucks, right? And so I. I knew that there was coming a time in my child's life that he would be more aware of the things that we didn't get to do that others did get to do. And I am just one of those people. Like, I'm too honest for my own good sometimes. But I use that in my favor against me to help me grow, knowing that I'm honest. And I knew there's no way in the world I could look my kid in the eye and lie. So I imagined myself looking Dakota in the eye and having two different things. In the first scenario, I would say, honestly, Dakota.

I saw some opportunities to possibly change that, and I was just too scared.

That was the first scenario. Now, the second scenario is actually going to surprise you because most people think I'm going to be like, you know, in the second scenario, I was like, look what I did. I made the best life in the world. And I actually don't do things that way because I think that it is kind of a false sense of hope. So for me, when it comes to making decisions, to me, every decision is an investment. I'm. I'm sacrificing one thing to have another thing and I gotta decide is, is this a smart sacrifice? Right? And so for me, what I like to tell people to do is I always look at the worst case scenario, and if the worst case scenario is still better than the. Than what I currently have, then it's a win. I'm all in. Let's go for it. So in the second scenario, my son would ask me the same question. Dad, why are we poor? And I would look him in the eye and with a hundred percent honesty, I would say, son, I honestly don't know. Because I gave everything I had and it just didn't work for me. And I would ask myself, which one can you live with? I can live with looking my son in the eye and saying, I literally gave everything I had for you. I'm not good enough. I'm not lucky enough. Like, apparently some people are special and it's not us. I'm sorry, I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but I gave everything I had to at least try. I could live with that. I could not live with saying I punked out because I didn't care enough about you.

Ouch. Ouch.

Because to me, that's what it is like. And this is what I tell my clients all the time. And this is, you know, nothing nice to say. It's just truth. And the truth hurts, right? I tell my clients all the time that you will either face your demons or you'll leave them behind for your kids to face. And so I would imagine my son growing up to be 30 and having to text me to see if I could buy his kids clothes because he was too poor. I'd be like, this is the cycle that will happen if I don't break the cycle. So either I break it and I do whatever it takes, no matter how hard it is. And it was hard, right? The mental battle was hard, to be honest. The business part, not that hard. The mental part is really hard because I'm fighting against 30 years of pre programming and really generations of pre programming.

It's that plus it's supported by society, it's supported by media, it's supported by all kinds of, of other mechanisms that, that can keep that kind of thought process, that kind of. And we don't see.

It'S just the way it is. So then we don't, we don't see the other side of that coin. We don't see possibility that's on the other side of the tracks. You were lucky. I mean, I see it. People commenting on Some of my stuff on.

On.

On the social media, you know, I. Look, I will say that I'm. I would not say that I'm lucky. I will say that I'm living a lucky, blessed life.

Yeah.

I didn't. I worked. I continue to work. I love what I do, so I'm lucky to love what I do. But it wasn't without intent. It was always intentional.

Right.

Were there opportunities that came my way? Yeah, but they weren't going to go anywhere if I didn't do something with it.

And I think that's the thing, that it's easy to look at someone and go, look what they got. They're lucky.

Yeah.

And that just. It can either bring us down or it can fuel the heck out of us to go. I'm gonna be lucky, too. I'm gonna create.

Yeah, absolutely.

So you. You, you know, obviously, you did it.

Yeah.

And I'm just curious. And I know we've. We've spent a little time talking, a fair amount of time talking about family, but it's. It's important because I. The other thing I think about wealth, and people that follow me will know this is that it's not about the number in the bank, because wealth is a statistic. It's about the richness in the life.

Yeah.

It's the way we live. It's the experiences, it's the feelings, it's the conversation. Like, I'm having a conversation with my son, who's 32, you know, and we're having conversations about business, about money, and we're having conversations about him being a new dad and. And all those things. That. That's the richness. That's the riches of life.

Yeah.

So what's it like now?

Well, it's pretty great. I will say that.

During my business, and that was hard. That was tough to go through. That happened. I got married really, really young. And so there. There was. There was a hiccup in the. In the process of creating a better life for my family. But, man, my current wife is the most magical and amazing thing in the world. And we are so in alignment with the kind of life we want to create for our kids. And that's really all I wanted. I, you know, I wanted alignment in the way we do life, in the way we raise the kids and what we're creating in our. So I throw that out there because I never want it to sound like, yeah. And then it's not a Disney movie. And then one day it worked. And then. And then everything was happy and magical. Forever. That's not the case. However, man.

Now it's like, so I have my kids 50% of the time, which obviously I'd rather have them 100% of the time, but. But going into it, I knew I'm gonna have my kids 50 of the time, but they're gonna get a thousand percent of me 50 of the time, which I didn't feel I was able to do. So now it's like we have the kids Mondays and Tuesdays. On Mondays, they come home from school, we just go do active stuff. This Monday, we went out to the reservoir that's like down the street from our house. Just like walked around, watched the sun go down together. Tuesday, my little one has. My daughter has swim practice. So we go out to swim and then afterwards we got to eat together. And then I'll have them every other Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So when we have, you know, that three day weekend with them, like tomorrow night we're going to the drive in. Saturday we're going to Comic Con because me and a couple of my kids are nerds. And then Sunday we're going to the lake. And it's just, you know, it's like, I work hard during the day. Intentional is probably a better word than working hard.

Yep.

But the second I clock out, I'm out. It's party time. It's party time, man. It's party time. It's. We're. We're at the pool in the backyard, or we're going to the playground, or we're going to our favorite coffee and cupcake shop. We're basically on the go all of the time without necessarily having, like, activities. Like, I played four sports growing up and none of my kids are into that. So we don't have like the busy life, like when I was a kid where it's like, Monday night is soccer practice, Tuesday night is baseball practice, and then it's basketball season. We don't have that kind of a busy. We have more of a kids are home from school and we have them. So, like, let's go find an adventure and let's go do something awesome. And that's. And that's literally what we do about every day. We have the kids.

So let's assume someone's sitting here watching us, listening to us.

And they're saying, I want that.

What would you tell them is the first step?

Well, the first step. The first step to me is always, this isn't the sexy step. We can get to the sexy steps in a minute. But the first step is growth Inwardly, one of the very first presentations I ever gave that nobody really showed up for. But I gave it anyways, and it was a pretty good one. Talked about how I told everyone in the room, all, all eight of them to close their eyes and imagine their very favorite flower, the most beautiful flower in the world. What's the most beautiful flower to you? And everyone closed their eyes and they thought about it, said, I want you to open your eyes. I said, how many of you only imagined the part of the flower that's above ground? And they all kind of looked like, well, yeah, duh, that's the flower. I said, none of you, not a single one of you even thought about the seed and the roots and everything that had to happen underground to even have a flower. And it's like, we all want to be the flower, right? We want to be the six figure, the seven figure, the nice car, the nice house. We all want to be. Be, but or have, I should say, but very few of us want to be the seed who grows roots and really holds firm to something that we're willing to put time into. And I know that's what you teach about investing as well. You know, it's like, you're not going to become Elon Musk by tomorrow.

Nope. Beanstalk syndrome is only in the fairy tales.

Exactly. So it's like the, the very first step is you have to commit to, to becoming the kind of person that can sustain whatever outward success you want to create. Every successful book by every successful entrepreneur, every chapter one, even though we all hate it, every single chapter one addresses the mindset because everyone knows everyone's ever had success. It's like, oh, by the way, before I get into the sexy stuff, like I just said, you have to know this or it won't work and it won't matter.

It's funny, when I started more openly teach about affluence and money and wealth creation, all that I. I had my CPA hat on and I said, I'm going to tell them the tactics. I'm going to tell them how to structure a portfolio, how to build assets, how to do all these things. And it didn't take but a few conversations with folks going, oh God, if I don't get their mind out of the way, if I don't obliterate the stories, if we don't deal with those things, the tactics aren't going to work, you know, and it's like, wow, so you can't. And especially when we start to realize in the wealth creation space and actually all of it. Now, there are some things like, look, I'm never going to be 6 foot 7, okay? There's just, that's an impossibility. I mean, I can get platform shoes, you know, and, and, and all that, but I'm never gonna, But I, I, I live life with the pos. With, with the fact that anything's possible given the pro. The amount of time, the dedication, the discipline to do it right. And wealth has nothing to do with money, has everything to do with behavior, has everything to do with habits, has everything to do with decisions. Success, I think, is the same way. Now, you can get a raw deal, and I get that, but what do we do with it? I got wiped out one third of my net worth in a Ponzi scheme. What did we do with that? You know, how do we proceed? And, and, and if it's behavior, habits and decisions. Well, behaviors, habits and decisions are driven by the mind, the thoughts. And when we get that, as much as it feels soft and fuzzy, and I'm a cpa, Left brain, columns, rows, numbers add up, all that stuff. But as, as soon as we start to understand that we have to deal with those elements, then the rest of it becomes easier. Yeah, I agree. I think, I think you're right on. Get our head in the game first.

Yep. It becomes way easier because beliefs drive behavior. That's what I teach in my life coach certification. That even if you were to try to change your habits without fixing the mindset first, it's kind of like having a garden full of weeds.

Yeah.

And then just throwing a bunch of seeds on top. And can you grow some flowers? Sure. But the reality is the weeds are going to end up choking it out. So it's like if you have, you know, rocky, thorny ground, it doesn't really matter how many. I mean, the reality is you end up working 10 times as hard to get less results.

Yeah.

Versus if you were to fix the beliefs part. What? That. And, and I know it sounds crazy, it sounds mysterious. It sounds like some freaking unicorn magic crap. But the reality is the way we are actually wired internally, this is science. The things that you actually believe are a programming, like your computer, Sorry, your brain is more of a computer. And if you rewire the hard drive, sure, it can go do whatever you program it to do. But the reality is like, I went into business with 30 years of programming, and I'll just give you an example, Mel. I grew up in a super religious home where I was told over and over and over and over that you have to be in God's perfect will. And everything we talked about and everything we said was about whether it was right or wrong, good or bad, God or sin, all the time. I mean, we evaluated everything. We weren't even allowed to listen to music unless it was like Christian based music. Because if it wasn't God, it was the devil. And if it's the devil, my God, you can. You're gonna get a demon in you for listening to the wrong kind of music. Talk about putting fear in somebody, right? Like I'm walking through all worried about getting a demon with my $5 in my pocket trying to pick out a wristband. That's a rough life, right? So. And I heard this said. I don't know where this analogy came from, but somehow it came up in the church circle that I grew up in and got repeated over and over and over and over and over. And it basically said this. If you take an airplane from LA to New York and that plane gets off by even just an inch, it could end up in Canada instead of New York. It could end up. It could end up in the wrong country. And this analogy was used to try to plant fear about getting outside of God's will because you might accidentally end up in hell instead of heaven. You know, you might accidentally end up on the wrong side of the planet. And then. And so I had this huge fear that really was more of a fear of doing the wrong thing. Okay. If you get a little bit more educated on personal growth, it's just a fear of failure is really all it is. But like, I didn't know how to call it that. So I go in my 20s detailing cars. As I mentioned, I started my own detail business five different times where I detailed cars on the weekend and could make five or six hundred bucks in a day, which, based on what I was making at the time, was a lot of. I mean, that was almost a whole week's worth of pay in like a Saturday. Right. And I would get so excited about it. You know, even people at church would be like, man, you got to start a business around this. I'm like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do this. But then a week or two would pass and I'd be so scared to death of doing the wrong thing that I would quit.

Wow.

I actually had the idea for WIX when I was Wix.com where you have these like pre made websites and stuff. I had that idea as like a 23 or 24 year old. And I. It was because I was designing, I was Playing around with some web design and Photoshop stuff that I had done a little bit in high school, one semester in college, that's all I lasted in college was the one semester. But I was messing around with, with this stuff. My dad had a ministry, so I was designing some stuff for him. And then there was a pastor who thought it was pretty cool, so I designed some stuff for him. And then I had a church that I did a little bit of stuff for and I was like, you know what, I feel like there's a lot of more like faith based ministries, churches, things like that that can't afford like the five thousand, ten thousand dollar website. But if I could build a bunch of really beautiful websites that were modern looking and let's say I just sit down and I just crank out 20 or 30 designs and then they could just pay to have access to the design and I'll just plug in their info for them and obviously was a good idea. Wix.com and Squarespace proved it. But I did the same thing. Yeah, I stayed excited about it for two or three weeks. The whole time the back of my head is going, I don't know if this is right, Josh. I don't know. This might get you off the path, this might not. But we what God has, maybe God had some type of other opportunity for you and this is going to mess that up if you go too far in on this. And so what I kept doing was actually pulling away from these brilliant. I mean, apparently I was a pretty creative person all along, but my mind kept pulling me back to the place of safety. And it actually took life coaching to teach me how I'm wired to understand. This whole time it wasn't God. It wasn't, you know, the Holy Spirit speaking to me. It was my own pre programming and limiting beliefs that was trying to keep me safe. Because that's the way our caveman DNA works. It's built to keep you safe, not to help you reach your potential.

I wrote about this in my first book, a conversation that I had with a dear, dear friend. He had retired at 37 years old.

And I was having this conversation about wanting to do something, but I was scared to do it. What happens if I fail? What happens? And he just said to me, he says, mel, if I told you you're standing on first base, if I told you you could always come back to first base.

Would you try to steal second?

I said, yeah. He says, you can always come back to first base.

Yeah.

And, and here's the thing, it's about being smart. It's about giving a system. You have systems, you. You. You teach that. You. You give them the tools and. And everything, and you do it smart. We don't mortgage with. There's a difference between, like, I've had people say, I'm. I'm going to start my business. I'm going all in. I'm cashing in my retirement account. You know, I'm burning the boats. I'm committed. I said, nope, you're reckless. Okay? Committed and reckless are two different things. You got kids at home, you've got a wife depending on you. You don't burn the boats. Cash out the retirement and do it. Let's put a plan in place. Let's do some things that you do it right. And if you do it right, you got to ask yourself, like you said, what's the worst that can happen?

It might succeed.

Right.

And if not. Or you succeed and you don't like it, there isn't a question in your mind anymore of what if I did?

Yep.

And so wherever we are, y', all that are listening, financially, personally, whatever circumstances you find yourself in, as hard as it can be sometimes to climb out and see the light, I. I gotta ask you to just look in the mirror for a little bit.

And ask the question, what if it were possible? What would be that first step? What would be the first thing that I need to do? What kind of support? Who do I need to call? What is the book that I need to pick up the course that I might need to do the podcast, like you did? It's free. Go to these things and start taking and making.

The actions that would move you towards that. That desired freedom. Because, look, you could still be living in that fear, detailing cars on a Saturday, struggling to see your kids, or having, you know, having those challenges. You could still be doing that if you didn't take some steps. It had to start with you. It wasn't handed to you. Did after that opportunities come. I'm sure they did, but it was, because I remember Brian Tracy, dear, dear friend of mine saying to me.

He said, the doors, Mel, the doors of opportunity are in the hallway, not the room. Get out of the room. Basically, get into action. Because action will beget opportunities, and if you're open to them there, your path starts to get carved out.

Yeah.

And I think that that's where I start to look at. And we had nothing planned for this conversation. I wanted it to be organic, for us to have the conversation about your journey.

The struggle that you had, the need to be successful, which was partly, I'm guessing, psychological, but obviously it was financial.

Yeah.

So I'm going to ask another question, you know, and that is this. As you look back on where you are, where you. You've come from, what. Because this is a money show, what does money mean to you?

So.

John Maxwell taught me this that I've held on to so dearly, because I think it's amazing. He said that money won't make you happy, but it sure does give you options.

Yeah.

So to me, money is options. You know, used to. It was.

The only option was, hopefully mom notices the kids don't have clothes. Right? That was the only option. Like, we gotta plan some type of family dinner, right?

Hey, mom, you think we can come over this, son? And when I say plan a family dinner, I don't mean at my house. I mean, we had to invite ourselves over, right? And. And now, you know, the options are, what do we want to do? Where do we want to go? Do we want to know? And I want to make it clear it doesn't mean that we do everything that the kids ask, because I did learn after a couple of years of trying to give them everything that I missed out on as a kid, they got a little spoiled, and they had to pull it back a little bit and start. Start making them learn that they have to earn it, too. Right? So, you know, we went to Chuck E. Cheese last Monday night because my wife made up an outdoor chart for them. She noticed they were on electronics a little too much. And so my wife, God, I love her so much, she said, I'm gonna make up an outdoor chart for you guys, and when you hit 30 hours, we're gonna go Chuck E. Cheese.

And so they became, who says bribery doesn't work? Right?

Right.

Not a smart parent. Smart parents use bribery. So. So they started, you know, just so.

We'Re clear, I'm a new puppy owner, and bribery works there, too.

Bribery is the only way. Like, we all. We all are motivated by a reward, right? And if you're not motivated by a reward, what is wrong with you? Right? So you know, that just an intentional way to get the kids to understand, a way to earn an opportunity, okay. But also teaching them a very healthy value of being active more often and getting outside and doing cool stuff. Even though we do, you know, like I said, we do a lot of cool stuff together, this is a little bit more intentional about being active. So, you know, like, if we go to the movies, that does not count as outdoor time. Like, you know, they, They've got to specifically, we got to go to the playground, we got to go on bike rides, we got to go actually swim in the pool. We got to do something active, and then there's a reward for it. So. Options is such a cool thing. You know, I sit around thinking about what's the next upgrade I'm going to do to my Bronco.

Options. Just looking through all of the options. What's the thing? I'm going to take my. What's the adventure? I'm going to take my kids on this weekend and I try to mix it up, you know, not just do the same thing all the time. And me and my wife have date night every Thursday night. You know, what do we want to do? And like, we were created. So this is. This is a new thing that I'm really trying to build everything I do around Mel. And it's just a simple idea that you deserve freedom.

Look, I say financial freedom is a birthright. I truly believe that to the core of my soul, it's a birthright. We gotta just go claim it.

Yeah.

It may be a journey, it may not be easy, but it's simple if we understand it.

Yep.

I agree. I totally agree, man. I'm. I'm with you, brother. I mean, we deserve it.

Ah, we deserve it. And, and, and it's like. So sometimes, you know, my clients will struggle with the idea of money because it's been taught as maybe that's a selfish thing or a greedy thing. And so there's a. There's a quote from Winston Churchill that I like to reposition a little bit. It says the only thing for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. And I add this little spin to it. I say the only thing for evil to prevail is for good people to be broke. Because the reality is broke people, that was me for my whole twenties, can still have a heart and a passion for people that are in need, but just can't do much about it.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, giving. Giving homeless people a hug is still great. Like, if that's all you can do, absolutely do that. Right. But over the winter, there was a couple days where it was freezing cold and there was, you know, the homeless population was struggling. So I put my kids in the car and we went and handed out blankets. The next day we went out, everyone was running low on, on jackets and blankets. So we went through a drive through and just went through Burger King and just bought like 20 chicken nugget meals. And we just Drove around handing out chicken nuggets to people. And my kids, you would have thought we went to the amusement park. My kids loved it. Because. Because kids have this natural intuition that they. They know that doing positive things for people is the way life is supposed to be like, kids just know that we. We sometimes lose that in our own responsibilities. You know what I'm saying? But like, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to do that. Ten years ago, I could barely buy my kids a meal. Which means even if homeless people are freezing downtown, I feel bad about it, maybe even have a tear in my eye about it. But what do I do about it? Nothing. Because I can't afford to buy them food or blankets. The second good people have money, I truly believe that good people do good things for other people. And so, my dear, wealth is friend.

Chris Harder lives by that. I mean, it's just. It's so true. And I think that generosity has to start with us being generous to ourselves. And when. I mean generous to ourselves.

First in emotion, the love for ourselves, the caring for ourselves, then to our loved ones, and then to the outside.

Money.

Is one part of that, to be able to be generous. We hear all kinds of crazy stuff about entrepreneurs and wealthy and they're. I mean, if you just watch some of the cartoons, how they demonize the wealthy. But the fact is that we don't hear stories. Like, I have a colleague who literally walked into a school supply house, and he says, how much for everything on the shelves? And he goes, what are you talking about? He said, I just want to buy everything.

You can't buy everything. And I go. He looks at me, goes, aren't you in the business of selling stuff? And he said, yeah, but I have, like, open orders. He says, creep, creep. Keep the stuff for the open overs. Sell me for the rest. He cleaned out the store, he took it to a school, and he donated it.

Yeah.

Because he could.

Right? Right. Yeah.

So I think it is important for us to live as big as we can. Not flamboyant. You know, this is why when they say, oh, you're talking about affluence, they confuse it with opulence. It's not opulence, it's meaning. It's impact. It's peacefulness. It's all kinds of other things.

Yeah.

So it's not about driving the fancy, crazy cars and the planes and the. When I talk about true richness and what you're talking about is the giving of yourself.

Yeah.

And some of that can be given bigger, wider Stronger because we had the blessing of money, of wealth, to give us the options, to give us the alternatives, to give us the chance to say, I think I can take care of this.

Yeah.

You know, and so I'm with you. I totally agree. This is not about the money for money's sake. I know that I can do better, I can do more.

If and when I'm successful. And that's what drives me. I don't need to do the show. I love doing the show because I get texts, I get DMs, I get people that are saying, you changed. I have one person that just sent me a note saying, you got a different conversation around money between my husband And I after 20 years.

It affected our relationships so much that we just planned a second honeymoon.

I'm going, that's what it's about. Because you tell me that's not going to, in fact, affect and impact their children.

Right.

And the ripple effect of what you get a chance to do and what you're doing by helping people, I mean, you go out there and you're giving them the tools to create an independent life and freedom. That's what you're doing. That's what all the stuff that you have. I mean, you have programs that you're doing to help people do this so.

They can move beyond the torment that you were living in and come to a place where you can sit back and say, be with my kids today. I'm just gonna reschedule. Yeah, dude, man, I could talk to you. I mean, we did it on your show. I could talk for days and hours. But here's the thing. A couple things I'd love for them to know a little bit more about what you're doing now. What are you excited about now?

Yeah.

And how can they follow you? How can they kind of. Kind of.

Stay in touch? Stay in touch with your journey, as I know you and I are going to do some more things together.

Yeah. Well, so if. If you're the person.

That hasn't got started on any type of entrepreneur journey and you want to take the first step that I talked about, which is working on yourself. I have a new book. I don't know how new it is as this is being released, but it's still new. Ish. It came out, and this year, uh, it's a Wall Street Journal bestseller. It's called the Best Version of you how to Coach Yourself and Others to the Next Level of Success. I give away free copies of that on my website@joshcoats.com and then obviously, if you're already in the entrepreneur game, but just need to keep working on yourself, which we do, you can grab a free copy of that. But what I'm like really psyched about right now is kind of a recent revelation that I had. I was talking to someone the other day and they, they, they, they brought up this thing that I thought was so powerful. That's so funny because I, I had kind of just had this little aha moment with myself. She said, the thing that comes so easy to you sometimes you don't realize is the greatest gift that you have to give the world because it just comes so easy to you. You didn't even think to tell anybody about it. Cause you just thought everyone knew that was me. With sales and marketing for the last eight years.

I taught on mindset and leadership and system, like more about intentionality more than how to do the things right. Because for me, if I'm just being perfectly honest, like having conversations with people about buying my products, it's the easiest thing I've ever done in my life. When I was a 19 year old kid, I won first place in an accessories contest between 300 different famous footwear stores. So there's 300 stores around the country. Is anybody having this accessory contest? The winner gets a thousand bucks. I was 19 years old. I said, I'm gonna give that a try. So I put sneaker cleaner both my cargo pockets. This is like 2002, 2003. So I wear my cargo pants and I just cleaned every person's shoe for the whole first week. I just cleaned every single person's shoe. Every single. And at the end of the first week, the report came out, I was in first place and I said, okay, I got a shot at this. But I literally can't sleep at night because I am just cleaning every single. I was driving myself. So I said, there's gotta be a smarter way to do this. So even at the age of 19, my process was, okay, work hard, but then figure out how to make it smarter, right? So what I did was I said, okay, the insoles are worth the most. Let's try to sell those. Let's just take a couple days, see if we can figure it out. Said, who wears insoles? Well, not people are buying dress shoes. They don't fit in those people buying tennis shoes. I said, okay, why do people get tennis shoes? I said, well, either they're being athletic or they're like me and they work on their feet all day. So I'd walk up and down the Athletic shoe aisle. Every person that grabbed a shoe, instead of being a weird salesy guy and being like, hey, have you tried an insole? I would come up with these creative ways to start conversations. That was just a conversation. So here's what I did. I would walk up and I'd say, hey, man, see you looking at some running shoes. Are you getting into some, you know, like a new workout program or are you like me and just stand on your feet all day? And then because this doesn't sound like I'm trying to corner you, they would. It just, it's a normal question, right? They said, well, actually I, I do stand on my feet all day. And I'd say, doesn't it suck? Like, I, I hate being on my feet so bad. My heels hurt so bad. That's actually why I changed out the insoles in my tennis shoes. I don't know if you've ever seen this. I'd grab the shoe from them, pull out the thin little insole that came in the shoe. I'd say, I don't even know this, but the shoe companies, they assume that if you are on your feet all day or super active, that you'll pull this piece of trash out and replace it with a thicker insole. Which is super annoying because I didn't know that for the first four years that I work tier, but thank God somebody told me. So now I wear these and I show them and they'd kind of look at them. I could say, oh, they're curious. I say, you want to just like throw one of these in your shoe and see if it makes a difference? And they'd be like, yeah, sure, throw it in their shoe. They would walk around and they would walk out with a pair of shoes and in, I'm talking like 90% conversion rate as a 19 year old kid. And so when it comes to when I became a life coach and started selling, the creative process of finding curious questions to ask people, to get people engaged in a way that helps them to see it as more of a natural flow and less of a pushy, weird, awkward car salesman situation, I just realized in the last six months is something that no one else really knows how to do naturally. And I've just done it since I was like 19. So it actually took me on the backside of my life coach certification. I started teaching people that were starting from scratch, and since they were starting from scratch, I had to teach them everything. And I started teaching them how I go about having these kind of conversations with people. And I had A couple people who had done my other programs because they had some type of another business, and now I'm teaching them from scratch, something I had never taught before. They said, if you would have taught me this back in that other program, I would have made so many more sales. But I didn't re. My thought was, everybody's teaching sales. I don't need to, like, add to that confusion with more scripts, with more setups. So I'm just gonna teach people mindset. Because if you aren't selling, my thought was you're not talking to people is what I would hear. And if you're not talking to people, my thought was we need to fix your mindset so that you have the confidence to talk to people, but not thinking about the fact that if you're not a natural conversational person like me, even all the confidence in the world won't matter because you don't know how to build a conversation to sell. So that was a really long way of saying, mel, I've spent the last three or four weeks diving in and writing the copy and getting new people into this program and teaching them how to kind of, like, tear down their sales system and rebuild it from scratch. And I haven't been able to shut up about it. If you can't tell, I'm geeking out about it because just it's. It feels like a game to me. It literally feels like playing.

Yeah. So good. So good. Because when you do it that way, look, the mistake is people think, oh, we're selling is manipulation. It's not. It's service.

Right?

Because I don't want to sell someone into something they don't need. If I am doing that, then I'm a thief, right? I'm a con, okay? And there's plenty of those out there. But the reality is, is that, in fact, I did an episode on scammers and the. The 1010 triggers. We'll hook it up at the end of this video so you can check it out. The 10 psychological, emotional triggers they use to get you in the scam, which is how, believe it or not, my Ponzi scheme. Not my Ponzi scheme. Let me be really clear. I didn't run a Ponzi scheme. I got caught in one. Eight of them. They use seven or eight of them on me, so. But. But point being is that if you teach someone how to naturally have conversations, what you're really teaching people to do is connect, right? To serve. And when we connect and serve, there's nothing that can happen. But to Win on both sides.

Right, Right.

So you're teaching people to win.

Yeah. And I'm teaching them how to ask the right questions that help other people. To give you all the data up front.

Yeah.

So that you can present to them the thing that will actually help them. And here's. Here's what's crazy. Everyone listening to this that has a product or a service or a business has something that they believe with all of their heart is the best thing for their customer, or they wouldn't be doing it. Right. But here's the biggest mistake that we make. Here's. Here's. Here's a little something from my 626 program. The biggest mistake we make is we at one time had some type of a desire to change something. So for me, let's say I had a desire to grow a business. Right. So what did I do? I went and learned all of the ways to grow a business. And on the other side of my growth, I had learned a whole new language that nobody else knows unless you've been down the same path as me. And if I'm not careful, I end up using that language to try to sell people who haven't been down the path. And it's a foreign language to them. And so what we do is we take our new language and we speak it to an audience that does not know this language. And when that doesn't work, we think, well, we just need to add more hype to it, more excitement to it. We need to. We need to hit them up 20 more times with. And so that's where the whole consistency thing that I've actually taught for years doesn't work very well. Without the right messaging consistency, without the right messaging, we'll just piss everybody off.

But it's like the consistency is about the actions that it takes to really get out there and just collect data from people. And what happens is in that sales conversation, you're a hundred times more likely to actually convert. But you take all of the data that you're constantly collecting from people and you turn that into your sales pages, into your emails, into your webinars, and now you become fluent in the language of your customer instead of trying to get them to become fluent in the language of your service.

So good. So good, dude. We'll hook up all of it in the show notes, in the description and all that stuff so they can. They can kind of follow you up. I may bring you back on Cool Talk a deeper dive into sales, because I think it's a skill set that all entrepreneurs and all people need.

Because really what we're talking about is communication. So.

Right, right.

So. So at some point we'll make sure that we make that happen. Our right, my friend.

Sounds good, man. Sounds good.

I am. It's so such a blessing to always chat with you, always get a chance to to connect with you and I appreciate you taking the time coming on and sharing with my community and the affluencers and all that stuff. So if you're not following Josh, go reach out, follow him, let him know you heard heard it on the show and let's go out and make a difference. Let's make this a breakthrough year forever. Thank you for being a part of the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join the affluent entrepreneur facebook group@melabraham.com group and I'll see you there. Cheers.

Bye.

Foreign.

And that's it for this episode of Building your money machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review, review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.