Business & Burgers: Season 1 Ep. 5: Breaking Bread with Business Gurus - Special Highlight Episode

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to Business and Burgers.

This time on Business and Burgers, we take a look back at some of our favorite moments from the past month. We start in Newport Beach, California at Muldoon's Irish Pub with our friend Noah Elias.

Whether he's creating for Disney, Star wars or painting those incredible cars for Fast and Furious, Noah has turned his creativity into a thriving business and a global brand.

One of the pillars is I start with, you have to start with impact first. Start with impact and income becomes the byproduct. Most people go through this life. I'm a fisherman. This is my career, and I'm going to provide for this family in this boat. I, and I believe the true heart of every entrepreneur is I want to do the least amount of work possible, doing what I love most while making the most revenue I've ever made. That's the sweet spot because we're not here to work, we're here to live. And if we're just on that hamster world, we're a human existing, not a human being. So I had to look at my life and go, man, I can't just be when I watch. When I started, remember, I was painting anything and everything. Problem that I had was I had two hands. I had to be present to make income. I had to figure out a way to make revenue while I was not present.

So how do you do that?

So here's how I did it. I basically took technology and realized that I can create intellectual properties. I started with paintings, so I started taking digital captures of the products, then publishing limited edition prints. Every single person's website is a bank. Every single person's brand. You both have a brand. I have a brand. How am I leveraging my time, talent and treasure to build a brand online that can go to work for me while I'm not present. That could be a mom at home raising kids. Kids blogging and selling products and speaking and writing books and ebooks. There are so many dimensions and on ramps to you as a brand leveraging technology that I finally said, you know what? I love painting, but it's not all of who I am. I started mapping out my entire year, which is another thing that I teach and then started saying, okay, this year I'm going to produce 52 originals. Of those 52 originals, how much money can I make from those originals? From those originals, how many scans can I make and make limited edition prints and posters? Every single show that we do online business and selling, and that was one year. So when you start batching assets, every single year that go to work for you, you've created this hopper that is moving all the time while you sleep. Every entrepreneur has to ask themselves this question. What are you doing with your time and your talent and your treasure, which is your money?

Watch Noah's whole episode@businessandburgers.com and while you're there, register to keep up to date with all things business and burger. Next, we're back at Muldoons with Mark Moses, author, ironman triathlete and co founder of CEO Coaching International. Mark started his career as a student painter and has taken his business from a Napkin to over $1 billion in sales.

You've got coaching clients all over the world. What are the most common things that you find in today's top performers?

That's a great question.

One of the things is they're willing to think big, like really big without limits. They know where they want to go, they have a plan. But a lot of times they fail to execute. I think it's predominantly really two things. One of them is they don't have the right people, and they need to figure out who are the people that are going to take me to where I want to go. So typically, they don't have the right people. And secondly, focus. They're out running around chasing every new shiny little object that comes around. So those that execute better than anybody else, they put the right people in the right jobs, and they follow their plan with relentless focus and discipline without distraction. Those are the people that are most successful.

Mark, I run into so many entrepreneurs when I ask them, you know, what's your job? What's your job as an entrepreneur or CEO? The typical answer I get is, you know, I do like everything. What is the job description for an.

Entrepreneur CEO once the business gets going? The job of the entrepreneur or the CEO is really just five things. One, where is it that I want to go? Where do I want to take this thing? Secondly, they got to watch the cash, because a lot of businesses really struggle because they run out of cash. They're not really watching their numbers. Third thing is making sure they got the right people to do the job. So put the right people in the right seats to do the job. Number four is the key relationships, the ones that are most important to the company, the ones that really matter, right? Key customers, key vendors, your bankers. And then number five, they just got to keep learning. And they can keep learning through a number of different entrepreneur groups or CEO groups like we've participated in that have helped them be better.

Head over to businessandburgers.com and see the rest of Mark's interview. And don't forget to subscribe. Being that Scott and I are both former surf bums, we head south to another killer beach town, Oceanside, California.

We try out some more outrageously good burgers at the local Taphouse and Kitchen, also known as lth. We couldn't be happier than our pal Miles Kovacs joins us. Miles is the president and co founder of Dub magazine, which is topping the charts in the automotive lifestyle scene. Miles is a self made man and millionaire. In fact, you may have seen him on ABC's Secret Millionaire. He shares with us how he turned his hardships of growing up in East LA into the character he needed to become the catalyst for change, for the betterment of companies and communities alike.

There's only two outcomes, you know, when negative things happen. We become either bitter or we've become better. I was bitter for so long, once I realized I wanted to be better.

My life changed.

Did you tell us about your school experience?

I barely graduated high school, got kicked out of school. Going to school is probably one of the worst times of my life because it reminded me of how stupid I was. Right?

Yeah, but see, that's the funny thing because the Miles that I know is the magazine publisher of Dub magazine and deals with the biggest companies in the world, the auto industry. This lifestyle magazine is iconic.

It's so ironic to hear you talking about having struggles reading and things like that when you're the publisher of this incredibly successful magazine. How did you teach yourself to read?

What I tell people is follow your passions. So I was passionate about lowriders. So I learned how to read by reading Lowrider magazine, not by being in school, but when I'm in these classrooms and I'm getting instructed to, I get so much anxiety, I usually leave.

But how do you get over the anxiety now?

You got to think about kind of the root of it. So you have anxiety, you have fear, you have, you know, nervousness. I started speaking and I was extremely nervous. I mean, really bad. I didn't want to do it. My first actual engagement where I spoke was in front of 200 GM employees for general Motors and they said, you know, go up there and speak. And I was just like, no way. Like, I can't. All I was thinking about that time is, what if they don't like me? What if they think I'm stupid? What if they think I'm ugly? What if the big monitor falls down? What if my, you know, mic turns off whatever it is, Right? That's all I thought about the whole time. And that made me extremely nervous. Well, extreme nervousness is caused by selfishness. We're only extremely nervous when we're only thinking about ourselves. So what I do now is I think about everyone there that I'm trying to spread a message to or help or give them tools or guide them. So it's not about me. Once I transitioned my life from being just about me to everybody else, my nervousness went away.

Check out our B and b website@businessandburgers.com to see the rest of Miles interview.

There's just something about San Diego. Sure, it has some of the best weather, beaches, and outdoor activities in the country. But what Scott and I love most are these tight knit communities and beach towns here in SoCal that each has its own unique character. One of those gems is Ocean Beach, a local surfing community where Hodad's Burgers has lovingly called home since 1969. The cherished family business is a favorite for locals, but people come from all around the world to stand in line just to have one of their amazing burgers and frings. Now, frings are definitely not on our diet plan, but Scott and I decided to dive in headfirst to see if this long standing popularity was all hype or well deserved.

All right, so Alan, I am so fired up to bring you to Hodads today. When I was in college, I worked a couple doors down the road, so this became my San Diego hometown burger.

I saw this on Triple D. Yeah, they have a crazy double bacon cheeseburger. And there's something special about the bacon. I can't wait to.

Yeah, and you get it with them all.

Don't forget the mall I'm in. All right. Joining us is Matt Theriault, a United States Marine Corps and Desert Storm veteran and an accomplished real estate investor and coach. After building a very successful music business, the market collapsed and Matt's world was turned upside down. He lost everything. He went from music mobile to bagging groceries in less than a year. He decided to reinvent himself and his career, and as a result, he created one of the hottest real estate firms in the country. Epic real.

Rather than simply helping his clients find their dream homes. Epic Real Estate helps its clients build wealth and prosperity through real estate.

So we're talking about team and I know one of your most valuable teammates in your business is your wife, Mercedes. What have you learned about building a business with your wife, with your family?

Yeah, that's never easy.

I think that what's really made us successful in working together is we have a pretty clear line of what her responsibilities are and what mine are. And there's very little overlap to our day to day activities, which is a.

Great key for any partnership. You know you're going to have a business partner. You want to make sure that you have non overlapping core competencies.

I guess kind of where our strengths, our core strengths complement each other is that I am the visionary. I do know what I want to do. I have created the vision, I've created the business model. And she's really good on fulfillment. So it's kind of like I throw her the pass and she takes it all the way to the end zone is kind of our relationship. So there's not a whole lot of disagreement there if you're both winning. It's one of the things that I've the lessons that I've learned from the failed music business where I tried to wear all the hats, I tried to do everything. I didn't want to let anything go and I didn't want to let control go. And I can see how that cost me in so many places back then. And moving forward, it's like, you know, let's go ahead and just kind of let go and hire someone that knows a whole lot more about it than you do and trust them with that. And it's, I mean, with just exponential growth since we've adopted that kind of principle of hiring out.

I hope you've enjoyed checking out some of our favorite moments from the past month. And if you like B and B and want some more, then subscribe@businessandburgers.com and get your weekly dose of great business advice and where to find some great burgers along the way. We'll see you next time right here on.

Check out more episodes of Business and Burgers and our BNB blog at our website, businessandburgers.com also don't forget to visit our Business and Burgers Facebook page and give us a big thumbs up. Join us each Wednesday for an all new Business and Burgers presented by Microsoft where we get to the meat of a successful business.