#210 The Ego That Kills Businesses: Sean Steimer on Partnerships, Failure, and Tenacity

If you really don't give up, like you may have to work harder for longer, but if you just keep working harder for longer, you'll get to that point eventually. Ego is the killer of 99% of deals from what I found. I've seen my friends who own other restaurants just go belly up because ego. And it's absolutely incredible to watch what that one small thing just annihilates someone's whole worth.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other Welcome to Wealth Without Wall Street Ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million.

Today's guest is the definition of a true operator. He's seen partnerships fall apart, companies implode from ego, and moments where failure felt inches away. Today, he runs multiple businesses, leads teams, and still spends nights packaging orders with his wife. He's the perfect example of tenacity, communication, and never giving up when things get hard. In this episode, Sean breaks down how servant leadership actually works in high-pressure environments, why ego kills deals and partnerships more than anything else, how to choose partners and spot the red flags early, why communication is the number one indicator of whether someone belongs in business with you, what it takes to keep pushing when you're underwater and want to quit, and how prioritizing family, support systems, and time management keeps everything together. If you're building something, or if you've ever considered giving up at the worst possible moment, this episode is your reminder. Nothing fails until you decide you're done. Let's dive in.

So Sean, we were talking a little bit about, uh, management, leadership, and what does it mean to be somebody in your role? Maybe you can give us a quick history before we dig into some of these rabbit holes about who you are, your entrepreneurial journey. You know, give it, give us the real stuff, not just the all rah-rah razz.

You know, good stuff.

Tell me a story, man, about you.

Oh man. So I learned a lot about leadership actually through hospitality. One of my early mentors, his name was Justin, and, uh, he taught me about something called servant leadership. And from there, I really took every, all those lessons to heart. Um, long story short, which we can get into the long version here. Yep. Um, right after high school, I tried a semester of community college, was not for me. I Just didn't, you know, me and homework just never got along. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna try and figure this out. I ended up actually started out serving and cleaning tables at some restaurants in Old Town Scottsdale. And over the next 10 years, I worked up all the way to regional managers, general managers, bar managers, bartenders. So I kind of worked my way up from the bottom of the totem pole to overseeing some pretty high operations and running, you know, multi, multi-million dollar restaurants. Um, and so along that way, I learned all about servant leadership, how to handle people's emotions. Um, 'cause that's all basically leadership is how well can you work with somebody to get the job done?

Yeah, dude, that's leadership in a nutshell. And servant leadership is an important aspect of that. Did you have an entrepreneurial family? Did they freak out when you dropped outta college? Did you not fit the mold anymore? Were you the dreaded stepchild?

Right. I was always like, Yeah, I was always the black sheep of my family. You know, my family, they're not— I wouldn't say entrepreneurs, but my dad has been in real estate for almost 40 years now. So, you know, kind of, you know, quote, eat what you kill, you know, commission only, sales only, no salary for the past 40 years. So entrepreneurship in the sense of he had to get to work every single day, work through the biggest recession in the United States history, like all this stuff. So he, you know, Housing recession, I should say. And, you know, he went through all of these times. So yes, he was an entrepreneur, but in the sense of, you know, real estate sales.

Yeah, that's cool because it taught you, I'm sure, the ins and outs of business. I would suspect you had some conversation around the dinner table or life that led you to a different way of thinking, maybe because just listening to Dad talk about real estate would've been an up and down conversation, I suspect.

Oh, it was. Yeah. I mean, growing up, I listened, I remember listening to square footage at the dinner table and thinking, God, that's Horribly boring. Who wants to work for—

Yeah.

Here I am. You know, my main career, 14-ish years later is real estate. I love it. I get to work alongside my dad every single day. My family, my wife is in the business, my sister's in the business, my mom's in the business. You know, my uncle, my whole family is under the umbrella of real estate. So it truly is super rewarding in that aspect. But I could tell you, you know, I never in a million years thought I would be doing that. That's for sure.

Yeah.

But it definitely, It taught me resilience. Honestly, that's kind of the biggest thing here is just the risk of being cheesy of don't give up. I can't tell you how many times I was just an inch away from failure, but watching my dad go through, you know, the 2008 crisis, high sales, low sales and everything, you know, doing what he could to keep food on our table taught me of, man, if you really don't give up, like you may have to work harder for longer, but if you just keep working harder for longer, you'll get to that point eventually.

Yeah, and that's true.

And I know it sounds cheesy, but it's still the truth. And hopefully people who are listening to this get it finally through their heads because we have a similar story.

Well, and that's the thing. It's like, that's the main, in my opinion, that's the main part of the umbrella, work hard. And then underneath the umbrella, you have all your support systems of how to be a servant leader, contract negotiations, what you need to do, who you need to be around. You know, your circle is who you are. And so you have your main umbrella of work hard, but then the supports of that umbrella. You know, when you open Umbrella, you have all those supports. Those are gonna be, you know, your, the actual, so, you know, the items that you need to do in order to be successful.

But the real question, Sean, is where did you fail?

Oh, all, all the time.

Where have you struggled the most? Did you have a financial event? Did you have a life event? I mean, every entrepreneur has something in their storyline that is very dramatic. I mean, maybe others are afraid of it, or maybe they've gone through it and just didn't see it the same way. What is yours?

So, you know, I had an old lighting company. We did actually the lighting structures in churches and for concerts. We started out doing live music venues, got into churches, and then, you know, my partner and I was handling basically all the back of house stuff. My partner and I was in the field. Ego killed that one. I'm in the field doing all the work. I deserve this. And then just could not meet in the middle. My personal failures, you know, I'm not much of a stock trader, so. I like to leave that to my pros, but I've made some major losses, you could say, trying to hit those one-hit wonders, those early Teslas, if you would. Real estate negotiations, trying to prove something when you don't need to prove something, forgetting what the end goal is. A lot of the time ego is the killer of 99% of deals from what I found. Everyone has a common goal and in the light of real estate, you're Seller and your seller's agent want to sell the house. The buyers and the buyer's agent want to buy the house. You all have one common goal. So ego has killed many deals for many realtors. I've seen it happen in the restaurant aspect now. You know, I'm a partner in 2 restaurants. We are soon to be opening a 3rd restaurant out here in Scottsdale. So I've seen my friends who own other restaurants just go belly up because ego. And it's absolutely incredible to watch what that one small thing, which looks like a big thing, just annihilates someone's whole worth.

Yeah. We talk a lot about you can't do a good deal with a bad partner. And the trouble is determining at which point are they a good partner or a bad partner? Do you have any insight into that?

Yeah. So from day one, assume they're a bad partner. It does not matter if it's friends, family, foe, whoever it is. I learned at a very young age, probably 21, 22 years old with that lighting company. That everything's in contracts. And if they truly are your friends, then they will go, absolutely, that's a genius idea. Because when you go into business with friends, next thing you know, someone feels like they worked harder or the other person put in a little bit more money because that person has the capital to do so. So if you are going into business with a friend, the first thing I always recommend, and I always do personally now, you know, I've done partnering here on a car storage facility. One of my close friends is the, is the sole owner. We, you know, we spent thousands of dollars on attorneys just to highlight everything in black and white. So should something go south, we, hey, this was outlined, man. Hey, this is this. So then there's no hard feelings. So go with, if you're, no matter who you're going into it, into business with, always assume they are the worst partner. You know, an analogy my attorney once told me is when you get into a car, you put your seatbelt on to protect yourself from an accident. Same thing with business. You're getting into a business with someone, you're gonna put contracts in place to protect you, just like a seatbelt. It is a worst-case scenario thing.

Yeah. Keep it all, keep it small until you understand where your success can come from that and who you put in place to help accelerate that success. I think a lot of people feel, maybe I'll say it in, in my own words and you can translate this into yours, but that you are not able to do something without someone else because if they get involved, it might happen sooner or faster, which always ends up sort of being a desperate maneuver. And especially when people are starting out or getting going in something, they're like, well, I don't know how to do all this. So if I bring this other person in, you know, they can, they could fill that gap. And there's a disjointed connectivity to that first step when they don't know what they don't know.

Yeah.

And they get somebody else in there that doesn't know what's going on either. And pretty soon they're in a conflict relationship tied to something completely irrelevant to the success of the business. And instead they're fighting over nothing.

Yeah.

They're fighting over— fighting over things that does not matter at all.

Yeah.

100%.

Until it matters. But then again, on the other side, people fight over when it's too much money.

Yep.

So how do you figure out along the way that that partner who maybe is in the trenches and doing great with you, when the money starts to show up, how do you identify the signs that say something's going to go bad in that partnership? What have you learned?

From what I've learned, you know, identifying the signs is always different because everyone is different. Business is, you know, when you go into business with someone, you're going into business with their personality. So if you're going into business with someone who has a personality of, Arrogant, quiet, doesn't speak a lot, then you're gonna have trouble finding those signs. So the first step that I've always entered into, you know, I think I'm a part of 6 different businesses now. I'm a part of 3 restaurants, escrow company. I have the car storage, obviously my golf company, Swingzy. And so the, what I always look for in a business partner is actually number one is how well do you communicate? It sounds almost kind of like a date, but it really is a date. You know, if you're gonna go into someone who's got an ego and a hot temper, well, they're your friends now until there's a million dollars on the line. And then guess what that ego and that hot temper is gonna be aimed at? You. So early on, it's, it's a dating age. It's a dating app almost. It's how do you handle communication? How do you handle stress? How do you handle all this stuff? And then once you get that read on that person, from there you can kind of decide, okay, this is someone I want to do business with. This is someone I don't want to do business with.

Yeah.

I have a very good friend who I'll leave names out. I've watched him burn 3 or 4 people.

Yeah.

And he recently approached me with an opportunity for some deals across the country where I would have to be 100% reliant on him for the day-to-day operations. And I passed. And he was kind of, you know, dumbfounded at first and called me and wanted to reflect on why I passed. And I straight told him, hey, it's because what I've seen how you operate with your other partners, you know.

So it's, it's time and priority. It's management, isn't it? We talk about this a lot, at least I do. Hopefully others do too. And it sounds like you'll understand what I'm about to say. There's a difference between saying I don't have the time and this is not a priority.

Yeah, exactly.

To somebody, right? This is not a priority for these reasons, so I'm not willing to dedicate this time to that. And it's a, it's, you know, you're, you're talking about the first date, first fight scenario. You find out a lot about who your partner is by the way they fight.

Yep. 100%. Are they willing to go dirty? Are they above the belt? No, I couldn't agree more. And I, I love that saying, you know, is it a priority or do you not have the time? Because everyone's got the same 24 hours in a day.

Yep.

So how do you prioritize all 24 of those hours?

I prioritize the things in the first rule of my life, control the controllables.

Mm-hmm.

If that person isn't in a place where we feel there's a mutual control together, or there's things that I control, or I feel like they can control, I have to let go of the things I can't control and I have to trust in them and verify that they'll do it at the same time. You know, as I've gotten older and longer in business, a little longer in the tooth, as they say, a little more gray hairs on my sideburns, I'm very, very restricted as to who I involve beyond my primary partnership, who's, you know, been around with me for 12 years. We've involved other people in our partnerships and then had to eject them for all kinds of reasons that ultimately didn't pan out from The no money fights to now there's money coming in and there's a fight about it, or they simply just wouldn't do their part and let it ride on us. So, yep, there's a lot of those things with partnership and time management that become, but you're right, um, it could become bad, but you're right. The communications component of it is, is experience.

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Visit voltage dm.com to start now. Um, you've had a lot of experience. Did any of the time around your table, your uncles, your dad, or anything, did you hear any of their bad business deals? It kind of sunk in as you talked through that and listened to that, or did you not follow some of that advice?

A little bit. So that's where I struggle is early on was my ego was, I'll figure this out. I do learn by being in the trenches. I'm not someone who can just read a book and pick it up. I have to go in and go, okay, this is how the operation's done. This is the right way. This is the wrong way and go from there. So, you know, as I gain more experience in life, definitely taking their wisdom with open ears has become something that I try to prioritize. But ultimately, at the end of the day, I still try to take in and calculate as much as I can. I've heard horror stories from them that I've done similar stuff with investors and taken risks on design remodel and everything like that, or Areas of the valley that they were like, hey, stay away from, but I hit a home run in it. So I take, you know, I take everyone's information, but then I try to process it at my own pace.

Okay.

You know, was the economy different during this time? Was the style different? Was there no margins or was there a lot of margins? I have a perfect example. I have a remodel right now where just to get there one way is about an hour and 5 minutes. And when I bought the project, there was a lot of meat on that bone. It was real sweet. So Bought the project first few weeks, driving an hour out, hour back. Not a big deal. Well, now we are 90 days in. We're about to close escrow, thankfully. And the meat that was on the bone got pulled back because everyone got their cuts. And now the hour drive time one way isn't worth it. And I have pops over my shoulder going, oh wow, should have listened to me on that one, huh?

You know, if anybody's hearing that advice, I encourage you to check out Sean's Instagram right here. Guys, if you're liking this and enjoying this conversation, don't forget to comment. And if you're on YouTube, subscribe, keep, you know, share this with somebody who hears needs to hear this advice because this is very important. Sometimes we just don't want to listen. We have to experience it ourselves positively and negatively before we get the wisdom, right?

Yeah.

Oh, um, I want to pivot just a second and ask you a personal question. How has it affected your life? I assume you're married. At least you're wearing a wedding ring. I'm not going to make that sound, you know, your situation. How has that affected your walk in your life with your family?

So, you know, my immediate family, my wife, she knows my work schedule. You know, I, I'm up early. I'm in appointments and meetings all day, carve out a little time for the gym, family walk time. But then in the nighttime, you know, for my golf company, I'm doing packaging every night till 9 o'clock-ish. So it's, you know, you kind of have to know what you're signing up for early on. Hence one of the reasons we got married. You know, when we first started dating 5-ish years ago, I, my schedule was pretty similar. So she knew what she was signing up on. You know, she, one of the reasons, you know, I got down on one knee is because she supported that goal. She was right there with me on, you know, one day we got, I think one day on my golf company, we got a few thousand orders. And rather than say, you know, text me, I'll see you later. She was right by my side opening and packaging and sticking stamps and all that stuff.

Amazing.

Because we're growing the company, so I don't have the payroll to do that yet. So as the owner, I'm still packaging and everything else myself. So. You know, she's right by my side doing it. So my immediate family with my wife, you know, it's, it's drawn us together. And don't get me wrong, it's not all dandelions and rainbows. There's—

Well, it wouldn't be. It's a marriage, man. It's a compromise. It's communication.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I have her birthday coming up and I just cleared off my whole day because that's, it's, it's her birthday. You have to.

Because you can.

Yeah. Exactly. And that's the thing is, as long as you're able to find that balance, And it, you really can, you know, people say I'm too busy or I can't do this. It's like, well, the whole point you got into entrepreneurship is to run your own schedule and manage your own schedule. I block out a whole day.

Do it.

Yeah.

People, you know, I think the problem is, is it touches back on ego. If I step away, everything is going to crumble. That's not the truth.

House of cards, right?

Exactly. So, you know, I have a car dealership. If I stepped away, would there be a hiccup? Yes. Would it crumble? No. my real estate team. Would it be a big hit? Yes. Would it fall apart?

No.

So, you know, it's stepping back and going, okay, what is the priority? Am I getting the, I forget the name of it, but it's basically the main character syndrome. Am I the main character of the story or am I able to manage my time and step away from it and be able to prioritize what I need to? So yeah, having a partner who understands that I'm going to have 12, 13-hour-long days at the office, but then I'm also willing to Do what I need to do to make her a priority when it's important is critical. My family, yeah, my mom, dad, my sister, everyone on the real estate side, they all love it. They're all supporters. They help out, you know, if I have golf meetings or whatever the case is, they're helping out with my real estate stuff. So having a support system is absolutely crucial, I believe, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah, if your family's not available, I can guarantee you there's people you can hire on, help out. Create that immediate circle. Like I said in the very beginning, if you don't have friends who aren't willing to support or able to help give you advice and support, I don't know if they're your friends.

You've actually touched on all my core principles: faith, family, friends, finances, freedom. And there was a bonus I heard you say, walk. So fitness, that's one of ours, um, is getting out every day with my wife and trying to walk at least 4 miles. Some days we miss it due to schedules, kids, we homeschool, things just don't always jive, but we try to do it almost every day. Sounds like you're following in that same footsteps. And I heard the word golf like 5 times. Is there a golf business behind this too that you're into? You said packages, you're moving 1,000 packages. Are you selling golf products?

Yeah, we are. So about 4 years ago, maybe 3 years ago, I partnered with a young gentleman and, uh, along in our agreement, I should say, to get a little bit more detailed here, um, I was to basically get this training aid past a patent and approved. And in return, our partnership was that he would then take over and run it and we would take off and make millions of dollars. You know, around coffee, that sounds like a great idea.

Yeah.

In reality, it's hard. So it took me about 14 months to get this patent approved. We got a mechanical patent on the training aid. The company is called Swingzee. And what this training aid does is basically gives you instant feedback on your golf swing and how to adjust it. And that's how we were able to get this patent on the product is when you swing your club through, through the ball, if you make contact with the training aid, By how much it rotates in the ground is how much you should adjust your swing, and we are the only golf product in the entire world that does this. Everything else is, hey, I just shanked the shanked the training aid or the training aid golf club kind of snapped in my swing. I need to make a full adjustment. My training aid tells you, hey, you need to make a 10% adjustment to hit the ball correctly, or hey, you need to make a 60, 70, 40. It gives you that instant feedback of a scalable adjustment. So that's how we got the patents, and that took about 13 to 14 months to get. And from there, of course, once my end of the deal's held up, guess what happens? My partner decided to exit. Crypto was taking off at the time. No blame to him. I'm still good friends with him. He went down a different path. But this is why I think it's important to like kind of touch on what I said earlier. I didn't do my research and On who he really was in the beginning before investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to get this patent approved. And the next thing you know, I'm sitting here with this company by myself going, oh crap, my, I didn't do, I didn't do my research on my partner and now he's gone. And, you know, the research I could have done in reflecting is he's younger than me. Um, you know, I'm early 30s. Um, at the time he was early 20s, I want to say maybe 20. And I, I, he had what every teen, 19-year-old entrepreneur has, a business ADD. Bounce here, bounce here, bounce here, bounce here. I got a thousand ideas, a thousand ideas. They're the, they're the master. They're almost the jack of all, master of none. So when we were finally ready to hit the ground running, long story short, he exited and I found myself twiddling my thumbs. And thankfully, you know, I, my inner circle came into play and I put feelers out for anyone who knew somebody. In a startup field. And I met my current partner, Sean, and for the past 14 months now, 15 months, he and myself have scaled this company to basically nothing to doing thousands of units. Yeah. So, you know, it's, it's all—

Shout out here, guys. Swingzy.com. Just see if we can get you a few orders, help you out along your way.

I appreciate that.

Anyhow, man, let's give you a shout. That's cool.

It looks like a gimmick, but I promise the people it works.

Yeah.

If you're a golfer.

Yeah.

If you're a golfer, I'm not, I'm sorry. But if you are, go check it out because that could be a really fun patented product that you guys might like.

And, you know, maybe— Yeah, it's super cheap. It's durable. It'll help you, you know, with your slice and not divot the ground. And you know what? It's funny you say you're not a golfer. It's for people like you.

Well, no.

Okay.

So I can use it on the mini putt-putt then?

Because I— You could, you could. It'll help with the contact.

I'd be the only guy with the best putt-putt score. On the thing.

Yeah, they—

I'm the guy they yell at, like, move on.

I'm like, come on, fight through. You got people behind you.

Stories, dude.

No, so, you know, the product— I have had a lot of R&D time with this. And, you know, one of the reasons I really like it— and people ask the time, like, oh, you must love golf, you're huge, how good are you at golf, you own a golf company— I'm terrible. I am not a good golfer. That's one of the reasons why I got into this, because I There were times, you know, I look at some of the, some of my associates or guys who want to go play golf every weekend. Well, you know, they're, they're shooting incredible games and I'm out there like, oh guys, I'm in the, I'm in the, on the other fairway, or, oh, that's my 3rd ball in the pond, or whatever the case is. So I almost felt a little bit inadequate.

Yeah.

And, and didn't want to go out and play golf with some of these guys because, you know, they're just way better than I was. So when I got approached with this idea, I was like, wow, this, Could help me out. I tried it out. Sure enough, it actually worked. And that was actually the signing of the dotted line was that it worked. It helped me improve my game.

Awesome. Are you guys on Amazon or is this primarily your website? Are you doing wholesale or multichannel? Are you doing other—

Yeah, we're on Amazon. We are on our own personal website, swingsy.com. We're sold on Fairway Jockey. We have a few more international stores coming up in Australia and overseas. Yeah. So it's scaling quite nicely, but almost all of it's on e-commerce right now. A few. A few golf pro shops, but that's it.

Fantastic. Well, I love that story because it's one of resilience and tenacity and stepping up to the plate when things don't go right, seeing what you need to do, finding the right person that actually fits in there, which is very key to the success you've had in the last 14 months. So, yeah, good for you for staying in the fight. I mean, you've got a number of businesses clearly you're doing across multiple, uh, segments of business. You are truly a serial entrepreneur. I don't often get to interview people like that, which is super cool to have you on here talking about the different breadth of experience and, and what you have.

Thanks.

So that's amazing. And I hope everybody else has heard some good things today. If you're a golfer, go check it out. If you understand the, the meaning of business and entrepreneurialism, hopefully you got something today from today's call. Hey dude, is there anything I didn't ask you or something you wanted to say that I didn't like get to the question yet on or anything?

No, this, this was fantastic. You know, I hope the big key takeaway from people is, you know, in the very beginning we said it sounds cheesy, but don't give up. I can tell you when my partner left me for the golf company, I wanted to give up. I was so far underwater on this. I didn't know where to go. But things only fail when you fail. So if you keep trying to pump life and pivot into something, that will never fail. It fails when you go, I'm done. And I have let that happen to companies that I look back and go, man, it only took a little bit more work. I could have had that thing up and running. And now I've applied that to my golf company, Swingzee, and it's just taken off. So, you know, the, the main thing is just don't give up and then have that support system of Really, you know, do servant leadership, help, you know, read people, try to get to know people. And, you know, just nothing fails until you fail. So don't give up.

Dude, that's such a wonderful story. Thank you so much for sharing it. Guys, go check out what Sean's doing. Just follow him on Instagram or comment, like, share, engage. As always, help us with big tech to get the message out there. If you enjoyed this podcast and the previous one, well, we're coming up on our 200th episode. So shout out to the whole team at High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Gonna have a little celebration. We're gonna interview one of our client success stories on the 200s coming up here shortly. You're very close, Sean, to the top 200. So I'm so honored to have you on. I'm so grateful that you and I got connected. Got a lot more to share with you in the green room after. I got some ideas and some connections I wanna make for you that I think will help you out.

Awesome. That sounds great. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it, man. Let's keep talking. As always, guys, you know, share this with somebody who needs to hear a good word about tenacity and perseverance and what it means. To be a business person, to know the 5 people around you who can be the most successful, to understand what you can control and should not control in your business, and to remember time management and communication are something you choose to do poorly or, you know, well, and you'll receive both outcomes positively or negatively. That's why it's called experience, because you cannot get to wisdom without it. So I encourage all of you to get out there and experience something, do something imperfectly, and something perfect will happen along the way. I'll see you guys on the next episode.

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