The #1 Mistake Entrepreneurs Make With Their Wealth

So many of us start our businesses to fill up a hole, to just feel good about ourselves. Until we have money, we're never going to be good enough. We have all of these stories that we create, and then we get to the other side of that. And I'm very much the rule rather than the exception here. The day I sold my company, I thought I'd never be unhappy again. I did all the things that society told me I was supposed to do. I went and tested myself in combat. I built this 8-figure company. I had all the money, the cars, the house. I had done it and I wasn't any different on the backside. And I was like, oh shit, now what?

Let me ask you this. So you're building this multimillion-dollar business and you're also coaching at the same time. I would imagine that that lowered your dollar productivity per hour, did it not?

I didn't start coaching till I was really on the backside of building that company. And what I mean was I was only working a few hours a week. Everything was completely systematized and automated and we were actually preparing for sale. You know, I definitely do not advocate to starting a side hustle, even if it's something as cool as coaching and detracting from growing your primary business. I think that there's something to be said for focus and eliminating as many distractions as possible, especially if you're driving toward that liquidity event. So yeah, my coaching practice really started on the backside of growing, and that company was winding down by the time I really started doing that formally.

So now let's go into the actual coaching business space now. So now, now who's your avatar that you coach right now?

My, my coaching program is called Unbreakable Wealth, and this really was born of my own experience. I kind of moved from the general business coaching side and really realized that from a personal finance perspective, like I said, a lot of us are really good at making money, but not necessarily knowing what to do with that money. Because for most of us, we got into business for freedom ultimately, right? Like, yeah, we want to make wealth, but really what we want is the ability to do what we want when we want with who we want, right? Like, that is why most of us started our business in the first place. And somewhere along the way, we lose sight of that, right? We get beholden to our business. It's almost like we have a tiger by the tail. And now, yeah, we might be financially successful on paper, but we're not actually living the life that we want to. And so, you know, what my program focuses specifically on is how do we design the life that we actually want to live and then use our income and our wealth to support building that life? And at the same time, how do we eliminate those money stories or limiting beliefs that are keeping us stuck from reaching that fullest best version of ourselves.

You know what's fascinating about that coaching niche there is, man, you are dealing with two beasts, money, and you're dealing with people's psychology and behavior around money. That's quite the uphill battle. If you could generalize here, knowing that we're talking about money, in my experience in coaching entrepreneurs, there's a large fear of money. Though, is it really a fear of money, or is it a fear of money from their past patterns of thinking and behavior? What, what do you experience with your clients?

So there's, there's really two fundamental problems that we have to solve. Number one is systematizing our wealth creation in a way that actually builds the thing that we want to build, what we set out to build in the first place. Right? So anytime we have a problem, there's, there's two fixes. There's a mechanical fix, meaning building systems and processes to, to make sure that, that you get to where you want to go. And then there's the emotional or psychological fix, which tends to be a little tougher. But I think both of those need to happen in tandem in order for us to achieve the proper outcome. So A, we give people a system to automate wealth creation in a way that gets them exactly to the goal that they set out to hit. And that looks different for everybody, by the way. There's no one-size-fits-all when it comes to wealth creation and anybody that that is telling you otherwise either has a vested interest in you investing in whatever thing they're pitching or just doesn't have the grasp of the complexities of what being an entrepreneur looks like. So I think there's a real gap in founder-led programs because a traditional financial advisor kind of just has a different mentality. Most of their people aren't entrepreneurs. They don't have the ups and downs and highs and lows where one year you might be earning $1 million, the next year you might be $500K in the hole. You know, that is not so easy to put a 70/30 plan onto and automate savings from your W-2. And then the second part is, okay, let's look at our actual decision-making and why we're making these decisions. And that is what's really interesting to me because all of us grew up with things that happened to us as it relates to money, either what we witnessed from our parents, maybe things that happened in early adolescence or early adulthood. And they imprint patterns on our brain. And those patterns run in the background designed only for one thing, and that's to keep us safe. That's right. Like that is what our brain's primary function is to do. And our brains are pattern matching machines. So it looks at things that happened in the past and it applies those things to things that are actually happening now and tries to match those things up and go, okay, well, this happened over here. So that therefore that must be happening now. And, and the real challenge is to extract those situations and go, hey, actually, no, your, your prior experiences are clouding this. This isn't what the data is showing at all. You're actually in a much different situation now. How do we anchor you into safety, get you back into reality, and then enable you to recognize those patterns and make better decisions with the data actually at hand?

What would you say to someone listening right now who is like, holy shit, I just had a— I see my patterns showing up every day and I don't know how to get out of them, right? I can feel them. I can see them. I've even been exposed to them by other people telling me. What would you tell them? Would be the first 1, 2, or 3 steps that they should take to realize and actualize that those are just patterns happening, that they can actually get out of them?

Yeah. So, you just nailed the first step of my 4-step process. So, the first step is awareness, right? Understanding, hey, this is a pattern or a subconscious belief that may not line up with reality. So, I'll give you an example for me. I hate being late. Like, I lose my mind when I am late. If we are 5 minutes late to a dinner reservation, You know, I start, I start having a panic attack and driving like a maniac, trying to make sure I get there on time. I am having an outsized reaction to being 5 minutes late. That's the awareness of the pattern. Okay. So my reaction is not matching this actual situation at hand. That means somewhere in my subconscious, something's being triggered. Okay. Second step on that is insight. Okay. Where did this come from? For me, that comes from the Navy because literally we would repeat you know, early is on time, on time is late, and late is dead. Because if we were late dropping a bomb, there were people losing their lives potentially on the ground. Like, we were creating a dangerous situation. So it was drilled into us that we had to be on time or we were actually at risk of death. So now I can tie this thing— what's happening here with I'm 5 minutes late to this dinner reservation. My body, my brain is signaling to my body that I am about to die. Okay, that is— so that's the insight portion. So now, to your question, what do we do about it? Third step is action because what happens is we love to get stuck on insight. We love to mine our past and be like, "Well, my parents did this thing to me, and so that's why I am the way I am." And this is why talk therapy, which by the way, love talk therapy, think it's a really important thing, but you can kind of get stuck in this mining loop of trying to figure out where all these things came from. None of that really matters if you don't tie an action to how do I arrest this pattern and start repatterning my brain? So for me, an action in that scenario might be a pattern interrupt and a series of questions that bring me back into reality and settle me back into my body. So in this case, I have a 3-question meditation. I just take a deep breath and go, okay, is this true? Right? Is this real? Am I really in a life or death scenario right now if I'm 5 minutes late? Number 2, how old is this? Okay. Yep. I know this is from the Navy. I go back to that time. And then what do I need to feel safe or feel good about this situation right now? So in some case that might be self-soothing. Hey, actually, I know that this isn't, um, you know, coming up right now, you know, this isn't a real, real situation, or maybe it's turning to my partner and going, hey, is it okay if we're, if we're late, are they going to give our dinner reservation away? And she can actually reassure me that, hey, I'm, I'm safe. Straight and level in this moment and that nothing bad is happening. And then finally, after we do that enough times, now we come to integration, right? So you can actually repattern your brain where I'm not having this outsized reaction to being late anymore because I've interrupted that pattern and then repatterned my brain to, to normalize safety in, in kind of what's reality versus what might be happening. So that's the loop. The thing is, it's, it's a loop because you still need to continue that awareness because even after you've integrated a pattern, it's still going to continue to show up in more and more insidious ways. And it's really just about— it's not about making it go away entirely, it's about shortening that time to recognize and time to kill.

All those listening, pause for a second, push rewind, go back to about 4 minutes and listen to that again. Uh, you did the cleanse, didn't you?

I, I did not do the Martel cleanse. I did my own version. I did, I did a 60-day carnivore diet, which is kind of the most extreme diet I've ever done, and it's pretty wild.

So, so we're talking about a cleanse here that Martell brought into the world of his fitness side. And I'll never forget, I, I was able to have a conversation offline with, with Alan, the fitness guy who had put this whole thing together. And when I saw the cleanse for the first time, it was 16 days, and I've never drank a cup of coffee in my life. Never had, never tried it. And the cleanse of 16 days, if I did the math right, I believe it was at least 3 cups of coffee for at least 14 days. And so my first question was, what can I substitute coffee for, right? But, but pause the story because that's a pattern, right? The pattern is I don't drink coffee. Well, why don't I drink coffee? I don't drink coffee because of the caffeine. I don't like the way the caffeine makes me feel from a jittery standpoint. Okay, where, where, where was that created? My parents drink coffee. Nope, they didn't drink coffee either.

Why?

Because my dad said if you got up early enough and did exercises, that was enough coffee for you, period, right? So this day I still get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and I'm exercising for my coffee, right? So now Alan looks at me and he says, um, okay, are you gonna do the cleanse? And I said, yes, I'm gonna do the cleanse. I said, but what can I substitute for coffee? He says, I have one more question. Are you gonna do the cleanse? And I said, I don't understand what you don't hear. Yes, I'm gonna do the cleanse, but I don't want to drink coffee. Says, well, then you're not going to do the cleanse. And it was at that moment in time that I realized I was letting my past pattern impact my future opportunity. And I had to stop allowing the past dictate the present action that I was going to be taking so that I could have the future, Adam, that I wanted to have. And I share that story all the time because that's exactly what you just said. The reward was truly what I went through in those 16 days. And it was powerful. So exactly what you just said there. Gosh, the outcome that we get when we commit to that, is powerful. It's so powerful.

Totally. And here's, here's what I love about that story. Doesn't mean that you need to become a coffee drinker on the backside, right? Right. You still get to choose whether or not you're a coffee drinker. And that's, that's what some people are really worried about. They're like, hey, if I do this work, what if I lose my edge? Like, what if I give up the things that make me great? And my answer is, hey, if your edge is driven from a, from a place of lack or a bad place, like you might actually lose your edge, but you'll be able to build something so much better on the backside and create from a place of true wholeness and alignment rather than being driven by some false narrative that, yes, maybe has made you successful up to this point, but don't you want to see what's on the other side of that?

Totally.

Totally. So many of us start our businesses to fill up a hole, to just feel good about ourselves. Until we have money, we're never going to be good enough. Like, we have all of these stories that we create, and then we get to the other side of that. And, you know, I'm very much the rule rather than the exception here. You know, the day I sold my company, I thought I'd never be unhappy again. Like, I did all the things that society told me I was supposed to do. Like, I went and tested myself in combat. I built this 8-figure company. I had all the money, the cars, the house. I had done it, and I wasn't any different on the backside. And I was like, oh shit, now what? Like, yeah, that didn't work. That didn't fill up the hole. Now what am I going to do? Right? Well, it was because all of those things were driven from a place of lack rather than truly creating the life that I wanted to create. That wasn't my dream, right? That was society's dream that was impressed upon me that I just tried to live up to. Now what I get to do is create on the backside of that something that is truly for my own self? And so, now money is just a means of keeping score. Money is a tool to create the life that I want to create, but it's by choosing that and diving into my own patterns and going, "Hey, what is it that I actually want and why? Did I inherit this belief or is this a belief that I chose for myself?" I think that's the powerful part of the story.

So, how would you teach or coach someone to go find that? They're listening right here. It's like, "Holy shit, that was an incredible statement that you just gave there and I want to go find mine. I don't want to have anything that's been impressed on me through society, through my past, through my family, through whatever it may be. What would you say to someone to stop listening right now and go do this one action to start to create awareness in that space for themselves?

So, the first thing that I like to have people do is actually envision the life that they want to live, right? So, I have an exercise called Perfect Calendar. I'll send it to you. You can link it in the show notes if you like. I'm certainly not the one that created this. There's lots of different versions of it. Dan has the preloaded year. The Perfect Calendar came from a, from a guy named Clay Hebert. That's a brilliant friend of mine, but it's essentially mapping out your ideal life on a, on a daily, weekly, monthly, and annual basis. Right. And this includes how much money I want to be making, you know, what kind of work I want to be doing, getting really clear about the outcome. Because once we have that, now we can solve everything by working backwards. Right. Okay. All the way to the state you are in today and go, okay, how do I get here? And what needs to be true for this life to actually happen? Right. And when you do that, you will start identifying places where you are not free. And that's one of my favorite ways. One of my favorite coaching questions is, where am I not free? Right. So maybe in my perfect calendar, I'm living by the beach because I love surfing and that's what I want to do every day, but I'm stuck living in St. Louis. Well, the first thing I do is start justifying why I don't live by the beach. Well, my parents live here and I couldn't possibly leave them and I need the childcare and this is where my office is. And so, immediately, our limiting beliefs start coming up and saying, well, this is why I can't actually live this life that I want to live. What if we throw all that aside? What if we take away all of your excuses? That is where we start to find these patterns and these ways that we subtly keep our— keep ourselves stuck. You may have aging parents and be stuck where you want, but like, just acknowledge the fact that you're making that choice rather than I couldn't possibly make another choice.