How I Turned Failure Into a $30M Business!

I help entrepreneurs and high achievers step away from the lanes that they suck and step into the lanes that they're an absolute genius by getting the greatest clarity they've ever had about who they are, what on earth they're meant to do, and how to monetize their genius, their brilliance, and their passion. Well, Scott, excited to be here. And, uh, man, I think when I think about my entrepreneurial journey, I would say It really began in college where I was waiting tables at a restaurant and I was like, man, I don't wanna just work a normal job. I wanna own a restaurant someday. And I'm gonna have a BMW by the time I'm 30 and make $100,000 a year by the time I'm 30. And sure enough, I did all those things except I got an Audi instead of a BMW, but I like my Audi pretty great. But man, I think I knew I was meant to create my own path. At the end of the day, I remember being in the mortgage business and just hating going to the office and hating being directed by a manager. So some of us, we know pretty early on, I think.

It's funny, I actually thought about getting into mortgages at one point because I'm originally from Toronto and like everybody and their mother is like either a real estate agent or a mortgage broker. And that's actually a very entrepreneurial career as well, right? It's not like that's not entrepreneurial. You eat what you kill with that business. So anyway, So you were doing mortgages. Where did you go from there? Where did you want to start helping people, working with other entrepreneurs, helping them build their businesses, all the things that you're currently working in now? How did that evolve over time?

Yeah, so I was selling real estate and investing in real estate, building my own little real estate empire. And that's where I went after the mortgage career as I joined, you know, just started creating wealth through real estate. And I remember doing positive affirmations, or incantations as Tony Robbins called them, through Tony Robbins' Personal Power 2. And I did them for the first time. I remember writing down the 7th one. And it said, I mentor and lead some of the brightest and best people in the world. I knew that I was meant to do that. But at the time, I was just investing in real estate, building my own little real estate empire, selling a little bit of real estate. But I was like, I'm supposed to do this at some point. I didn't know how I would get there, but sure enough, 4 or 5 years later, I had started at that point 5 or 6 different businesses, and I was doing like $30 million a year in my businesses. And I felt like I was called to start mentoring because I had people reaching out to me every week saying, Mike, can I get 30 minutes? Mike, can we grab coffee? Can we grab lunch? Can we do this? And I was spending like half my time mentoring people pro bono.

Well, you just— so you just dove into you dove into real estate, you started building other businesses. Obviously, probably a lot of lessons learned there that you could teach over to other entrepreneurs. What do you think, to sum up what you do in a sentence, like what do you think the value is that you bring to entrepreneurs that when you go into a conversation, they are looking to solve X and you bring Y to the table?

So the next conversation after our podcast interview is with a former Ivy League graduate that is looking for a career change. And what I end up doing more often than not is I help entrepreneurs and high achievers step away from the lanes that they suck and step into the lanes that they're an absolute genius by getting the greatest clarity they've ever had about who they are, what on earth they're meant to do, and how to monetize their genius, their brilliance, and their passion.

That's what I do. Why do you think that so many people— and I always sort of bring it back to like, let's pull out lessons from your own journey. You figured this out. You were self-aware enough to know what you like to do and what you didn't love doing, and you just pursued passions and you failed and you tried and you succeeded and whatever. That's great. But why do you think so many people have an issue figuring out what makes them happy, what they're a genius at, what they should be, what they're put on earth to do when they just, they can't see it for themselves and they just end up sticking in a job their whole career? Not that's a bad thing, or maybe a job they hate, or they end up being an entrepreneur and building a job that they also hate because they accidentally did that as an entrepreneur and they aren't living their best life.

Yeah, so two things come to mind. First, imposter syndrome sneaks its ugly face in, and so we all doubt our genius. We all doubt our gifting, our calling at some point. And then secondly, when we're on the inside of a bottle, it's hard to read the label. So that's why we need coaches. That's why we need people that are smart, thoughtful, and supportive of our dreams and vision to give us feedback. So I found, hey man, most, most of the clues for your genius are also littered about your life. They're all over, and they're mainly in 4 main quadrants, but no one's organized and synthesized them so that you can interpret and understand the data.

Understand.

Okay, that makes sense. And that's why I came along.

Yeah, so that's what you do. That's what you do. So, okay, so this is, this is what I want to do for this show. I want to First of all, I even mentioned we were chatting before, like one of the shows you did with JLD, Entrepreneurs on Fire, it was titled 4 Lessons from Losing $1 Million. So first I want to understand, how did you lose $1 million? Tell me that story. Then I want to understand those 4 lessons and then I want to go into those, I think those 4 traits, I think you mentioned 4 traits that are core to finding out how you can basically be, live, be in your, I think you call it the zone of genius. Is the best way to put it. That's what you speak about when you do podcasts or in your book as well. So let's go through that story because I think that story is interesting and that's going to bring out a lot of perspective for people that now understand how you can help people through losing a million bucks. You probably learned a thing or two.

So I definitely learned a thing or two. Well, first, my genius, what my gifting was, also has a shadow side. Right? All of our— all of us, when we have a genius, we have a drawback of that genius. So what am I really freaking great at? Uh, if I go through the wealth dynamics, I'm a creator. Like, so I'll give you a little backdrop. Uh, 4 key quadrants that indicate clues about your genius. First, your unique talents. I have people go through 5 different personality tests. Second, your key relationships. The relationships of the people that bring you life versus the people that bring you death. The hotbeds, the clusters of relationships that you naturally have. You know, it's not accident that I have all these relationships in the entrepreneurial and author space. Like, I looked at my life pathway and I was like, why do I have all these bestselling authors as friends and I haven't written a single book yet? That was a clue. Third thing, you're defining life moments, those moments where Things went really wrong, those moments where you had whispers in your soul, whispers of like, oh, you felt alive, you felt connected, you felt inspired. And then the fourth thing, your values and passions. So there's clues in those four main quadrants. So rewind, my genius, I'm really great at galvanizing momentum, driving progress, growing things, getting things off the ground. I'm a high-risk taker. I can improvise and think on my feet pretty quick and move fast. Drawbacks, I'm not so good at managing details and operations and the legal administrative side. So when, as the business grows in scale and complexity, if I don't have the right operating partners, I'm gonna suffer. And I did, right? And I thought I had the right operating partners at different points. At the end, I really didn't. And that was a handcuff for me. And if I stayed, You know, all of us can play out of position for a bit. I can go over here and do my accounting for a little bit. I can go over here and, you know, if you look at athletes, athletes can play out of position for a little bit. Dennis Rodman can, you know, when he was with the Bulls, he could play, he'd go down low and score if he needed to, but he wasn't really good at it and you wouldn't want him down there long term. So if you play out a position too long, you just get frustrated and unhappy. When you— the science actually shows that when you're playing to your strengths, your tendency to step into this, this psychological concept called flow, it actually more than doubles. So if I'm in my strengths, I'm more likely to step into flow. If I step into flow, that's where work becomes play. That's where I'm just unconsciously great. So I did all these things, then I grew these businesses, but they got beyond my ability to manage and I didn't have the right managing partners in place. And then that's when the cracks started forming one by one by one. One business falls, cracks start forming. This cash cow business, my real estate business was my cash cow, I was working 50, 5 to 10 hours a week in that business, making a nice multiple six figures in profit. Boom, that falls apart. Had domino effects in my other baby businesses. Some of those businesses were baby businesses. And I really, then I had a real estate investment go bad, my first and only one that went bad out of like a dozen. But it went really bad, like it cost me $250,000. And then I lost like, couple hundred grand in my agency, a couple hundred thousand dollars in my men's clothing line, all combined. I just, I went through a season where 7 out of 10 things didn't work when I was used to 6 out of 10 things working.

And you think that this is because you were not at the time aware of what that unique talent was in your life and you tried to play outside your comfort zone, you tried to play outside that zone. It didn't work out. You didn't have the right operational partners. So going forward, this is, this is obviously what we have to solve for, right? Like this is one of the things that we have to solve for.