EP 588 – Staying Relevant Amidst Chaos And Profiting From Your Pivot With Aaron Scott Young

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This is the no Closers show where you get the latest developments in distressed note investing and learn the secrets of how you can control millions of dollars worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson.

Hey, no nation, thank you as always for listening. Subscribing to the podcast on this episode, we have our good friend and brother from another mother, Aaron Young, join us talking about how to find your pivot in this chaos. Aaron's been an entrepreneur and business owner for multiple decades and he's done a great job of pivoting as life has shown him curve balls and the markets has changed. So we discuss in this episode ways for you to find and discover your pivot and how to make it a profitable one. So definitely listen in and enjoy this episode. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the no Closure Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here today with you guys. It is a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. A little hummed after, got some rainstorms. I am wishing I was at the beach. It is a day that I would be having my feet, you know, my toes in the sand and chilling as best I could as we get into April and stuff like that. But, man, it has been a bit of a chaotic world out there with things and everything. But we are honored to have our brother from another mother, the one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend, our good buddy Aaron Young, joining us today on this episode of the no Clothes Show. How's it going today, Aaron? You guys hanging out okay there on the West Coast? Having fun?

We've had some really cold rainy weather, some snowy weather, hail, mud, muck, all that. And then the sun comes out and everybody forgets the bad weather and just goes, isn't this the best place in the world to live? So it's. And actually that's something we can talk about today, is that how quickly you can pivot when things change. But it just occurred to me as I said that, but it's really, life's good up here. Of course, it's a little quiet right now. Not doing as much. Well, not much. We're not traveling. We're not. But you know what I'm really loving right now in my life is I'm having time to really think about what do I want, what do I enjoy, who do I want to spend time with, what do I want to give My energy to have I things that have been working just because they're working. Do I want to keep doing that or could we do something better? And so it's been a great. You said, how am I doing? I'd say I'm having some of the most introspective time and some of the most forward looking forward building experiences right now. And I'm really enjoying it. The other thing is I finally just decided to turn off the news, turn off my alerts, turn off all that crap and stay focused only on what I want to think about. And I think in this digital age, we get a lot of, we allow ourselves to let a lot of people create, make their stuff our priority. Because some little alert pops up on our phone and it's just this magical thing and we must chase the shiny little message. So anyway, how am I doing? I'm doing great. I'm doing great.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I don't watch that much news. I'll watch a couple shows like Sunday night, I'll watch John Oliver, I'll watch Bill Maher on, on Friday night. And that's kind of opposite of my opinions a lot of time. But I still like to watch those and kind of crack up a little bit on some of the humorous side of things. But yeah, it's the. I will jump on us today, see what's going on in the news, usually in the morning and then usually in the evening for the most part. And then that's about it. I just, I think that's the biggest thing that we have to do out there. Especially if you're trying, if you're dealing with issues right now, you're struggling. The worst thing you can do is just have your face into all the negativity and all the social drama that everybody likes to. It's literally making mountains out of molehills a lot of times. And I think that's one of the biggest things that separates successful people from non successful people is like, listen, I'm going to focus on what? On my stuff. I'm going to focus on me. I'm going to focus on growing and moving in that direction versus, I guess you could say the whole idea of outwitting the devil. They love to throw things in front of us to cause us to drift, get to drift and not be focused on what we want to accomplish. Right.

Some people go, oh, it's virus. Or some people say it's oh, it's election or oh, it's whatever. You know, it's Always something. And the media will always find something to be fanning the flames of. And if we don't take intentional control of our time and our focus, it's super easy to be caught up in there. It's no different than going to a horror movie and. And you can't stop watching the horrible thing happen. Right. Even though you know this isn't good, not to compare too much to the media, but you know this isn't real. There's a level of sensationalism that will always be out there from everybody's marketing, everybody's advertising, every news outlet that has an angle, every webinar, every email, it's always going to be there. And if we don't allow ourselves the space to decide what matters to us, what our outcome is that we want, and then intentionally work toward it and not let things get into our view, that will throw us off. If we allow ourselves to be subjected to everybody else's agenda, we will someday sit back in our poverty and wonder, what happened? Where did my whole life go versus saying there's what going on? Okay, yeah, I'll wash my hands. Oh, there's what's going on. Yeah, I'll vote when it's time. Oh, there's something going on in Indiana, and I live in Washington state. Who cares?

Exactly. Who cares? A lot of the times. Yeah, that's the thing is now you have a call every pretty much most Monday nights with your circle, and you deal with a lot of entrepreneurs. People have gone to Magnifier, while some. And part of your inner circle. How are some of those conversations going with people pivoting? Because I think that's what we talked about before we started this episode. We want to really kind of focus on some of the things that way that people are pivoting or dealing with. Going from in person to the online, the virtual stuck at home, not being able to travel aspect of things. How are a lot of your clients working?

Well, so of course, my clients are all business owners. Right. So they might be solopreneurs, like people that you've introduced us to who are real estate investors or note investors. And then you have people that have five employees, 50 employees, 2,000 employees. Right. That group that we're talking about that you mentioned, the inner circle group, runs the whole gamut. And some are working from home and some are not. Some still are going in, some are essential, some are not. But so I'll give you an example that was interesting from just our most recent call. One of the fellows in the group owns A chain of restaurants. And he's very, very successful guy. And the restaurants have been in business for a long time, and he's traditionally made a lot of money, and he's in a good financial position now. But he said the restaurants are closed. They only have one of them that is open for takeout. They're at about 10% of their typical revenue right now. So I thought he was going to say, I don't know what to do. But he didn't say that. What he said was, but I'm really excited about what's going on. I said, okay, why are you excited right now while the restaurants are closed? He said, well, because some of the people around me who didn't have the same financial sort of strength that he has, he said there's nothing in this little area where his kind of flagship restaurant is. He said, in the 25 years I've been in that location now, not one building has ever come up for sale the whole time, 25 years. He said, the building next door to me just came up for sale and I'm going to buy the building. And he said they were not in a good position, and I've wanted to get that building for a long time. And all of a sudden, because of outside influences, he now gets to accomplish one of his goals. And because he's prepared himself up until now, he can do it. He can go buy it. And so he was saying. Yeah, he was saying the same thing I hear all the time from people who are prepared, which is this time of insecurity and flux. You know, things are moving around. It's not the way we normally do. Stuff creates horror for some people and bliss for other people, because new opportunities come around. So if you haven't consumed everything you've made in the boom times, if you've squirreled some of the money away, if you've increased your credit lines, if you've kept your businesses operating in a way that throw off cash instead of, you're always kind of breaking even. Then all of a sudden, sometimes when there's insecurity amongst the masses, those that are prepared can take advantage of it. And some people go, well, isn't that heartless? And I say, no, because if the person next door who's just boarded up their building and there's no other buyers out there and they're stuck, and you come in and you give them a fair price for the building, well, everybody wins. Everybody wins. That's one of the things I love about what you guys have taught with buying distressed notes Is that the first goal isn't to evict the person, it's to give them an opportunity to stay in the house. And how cool is that? The bank, yeah, the bank took a hit. But in some ways they get covered on that anyway, which a lot of people don't realize. The person in the house gets to stay in the house. Person who buys note gets to create a new stream of revenue. If it all works out, that's win, win, win. Everybody wins. But if your eyes are not open to it, you will not see the opportunities.

Yeah, and that's 100%. It's what we're telling people. Everybody's coming from a doom and gloom aspect of things. I'm like, yeah, it is scary. Can be a little nerve wracking out there. But there's. This is gonna be another huge opportunity like it was in 2008, 9 and 10 for investors, business owners. If you've ever wanted to expand your business and you're able to do that, opportunities or rise better locations, better, maybe cheaper rent in the places if you're moving into. That's the thing is you have to look at what's going on. And if you've been shaken up, this is God's wake up call to you. Like, hey, you may need to do something different. It can't be. Business is normal. Maybe you need to downsize a little bit. Maybe you need to go to where you're doing full takeout versus dine in. Who knows? There's a whole variety of different things for businesses out there.

I think right now we're in a time right now, as always happens every time we go through a series, especially if we go into a recessionary period, which happens cyclically. Every few years is typically a recession. Every three or four years we had this unprecedented 11 year growth. This is mind boggling. The longest in our history because there's always a dip and then it comes back. Right. So what happens in these times when things become recessionary or slow down or whatever is it shakes out the people that were marginal at best, the ones who really couldn't hold on, who didn't have good management, who were a business that was sort of already past its prime or whatever. Those companies shake out and then other things emerge in that to fill gaps and solve problems. And right now I just saw a thing that said, and I know that this is a podcast and so people may be listening to this years later.

Right.

You'll have to look at the dates and figure out what's going on right now. But I'll just say right now, because of circumstances, unusual circumstances, unemployment is high. And everybody keeps saying, well, you know, but, yeah, but it'll come right back as soon as we're able to get back to normal. Well, here's all I'll say. Unemployment is high. They say the highest percentage. Even higher than the Great Depression. Right. Well, you know what that tells me? I know a boatload of people who are working. I know a boatload of people who are investing. I know a boatload of people who are doing great right now while other people are struggling. Which tells me even when we look back at the Great Depression or if we look back at 0809 and the great Recession, it's horrible for some people and it's fantastic for others. And it's okay for a lot of. Right. It's not everybody's in the soup line. Everybody's selling pencils on the street corner. It's not really that way. And we, as business owners, we have to figure out a way to stay relevant no matter what's going on around us. That's the big lesson I've got right now, is how do we take what we were doing? Or let's put it a different way. How do we take all the ingredients that we have on the kitchen counter? And we've been making ham and cheese sandwiches and selling them, and they've been selling great. Oh, all of a sudden we can't sell ham and cheese sandwiches. Damn. What am I going to do? Because this is my business and I'm really committed to it, and I make the best ham and cheese sandwich ever. Well, okay, we can't. What can we do? We've got ham, we got cheese, we got bread. What else could we. Well, we could make a Monte Cristo. We'll go get some jam, some strawberry jampeta. We could make a Cubano. We could make chicken cordon bleu with ham and cheese. Right? All of a sudden, we can use the ingredients to do something that was not part of our normal service delivery. We take the same stuff we've got and do something else that actually works. Now, what if they say, well, nobody is buying sandwiches at all. There's no more sandwich stuff because everybody's on Atkins, so there's no more bread. There's no use for your damn bread. Okay, well, we can take the ham and cheese and roll it up into little things, and we can eat that. And it's low carb.

Or lettuce wraps.

Or lettuce wraps. Yeah. Guys, what do you have in the way of financial resources, your mailing list, your team, your stuff that you have in the storage room, your own experience. What else can you do with this stuff that you've maybe never thought of before? But if I have these things, I could do something different that makes me relevant in a changing moment in our business world. What do you think of that, Scott? Because that's sort of what I am thinking about all the time right now.

That's hitting the nail on the head a lot of times. I mean, that's a lot of people going virtual doing online. So you've got to, if you've got the ability to do that, like I was just on the phone with my mom this morning talking about their church and their churches want to meet in person and stuff like that. And then, yeah, they've. They've pivot a little bit. They live stream it, but they don't do a lot of work onto that. And so they're worried about their, you know, tenants being down, obviously, because it is across the country. People aren't showing up, they're not sure. I'm like, well, you need to pivot. You've got all the tools there. Let's just take it a little bit differently. Let's rebroadcast it, or let's change it and make it simpler for people to get on. Or you're not having donations. Well, let's create the links on PayPal and say, hey, if you want to donate $5, $10, $25, $100 and give people the options to do it, but then share it in a lot of places and let's have you have your email database.

That's a really interesting thought, actually. Let's explore that for one second. Cause I think this applies to a lot of business owners. So a church, most churches, even though they're a nonprofit organization, most churches, the minister is making their living from running the church, right? So clearly they want to get people into the chapel and be able to pass the plate and do a collection call and do all that sort of thing, right? Not a collection call. What do they call offering? Offer call. Sorry, I was in a different business there for a minute. And so all of a sudden, if they're free, live streaming it, YouTube or on Zoom or something, they could run the fear that this is free. There's no immediate need for them to give. So what's that going to do? To pay the bills of the church, to pay my salary, for me to take care of my family as a minister and so on. However. However, Most local ministries are. Most of them are not that big. Most of the. The ministers are not making that much money. So let's look at the big ones. Think about Joel Olsteen, or is Olsteen.

Olsteen out of Houston?

Yeah, Olsteen. Let's look at the Crystal Cathedral. Let's look at Agape in Los Angeles. These are enormous churches, but they have a huge reach all over the world because they're broadcasting. So people that would never show up in the chapel are watching them from eight time zones away and sending in their $5 or 25 or $100. So do you really have to get them all in one spot or can you have a much larger community? As long as your message resonates, right, people will pay attention to a message that resonates, whatever that is. There's a lot more people that will resonate with you on a bigger platform, like digitally. I just, I think that that's so true of most business owners who think, well, if we can't get the team into the door, into the office, or we can't get the trucks out to do the clean the pools or whatever, something's wrong. Well, so what else can you do with your knowledge? What else can you do with your database? How do you. I had somebody, one of the biggest restaurants here in Portland, Oregon, who is told by a dear friend of ours, well, everybody else is doing these GoFundMe campaigns. She's showing up almost every day, doing a Facebook live, showing people how they make their signature dishes. She's teaching her secret sauce in her fancy kitchen. So she's saying relevant all the time. Plus, when you watch her do it, unless you're really a dedicated cook, you're never going to do it because it's too hard. Right? You go, they do all of that stuff to make that magic food. Dang, I can't wait to get back to that restaurant. Right. So she's staying relevant even if attendance is off. Right.

And that's the big thing is staying relevant and staying top of mind. And I think that's where a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners I know we see this in our sneck of the woods, is they just don't stay relevant. You've got to stay relevant, top of mind all the time. This is what we've always been big about. Hey, you got to send an email blast out. You got to be communicating probably at least once a week with your clients or your database. Hey, what's going on? You know, that could be an email. It could be A Facebook Live. We got a student, Cody Cox, that does a. Has been doing like a Friday stroll he did for a while, and he's changed his business a little bit. I have seen you like my trainer. We've done. Instead of doing it in person, we do it via Zoom, and then we jump online and restream it to help to drive some business to him. We did. My attorney buddy, Jason Byrd got on last week, and we broke down the stuff going on with the sba, seven loans and the disaster.

The.

Yeah, well, we streamed it. And then I had a friend of mine who's in media, reached out to me this morning, said, hey, I want to have him on the media to talk about that. And he's like, what? And I'm like, yeah, let's get you on. She want to talk. Because it's relevant as long as you stay top of mind. And a lot of people aren't staying top of mind. I mean, I like to cook, but I'm no Chef Ramsay, but I'm doing something fun. I've really enjoyed this time to be able to cook more here in the house. Like, you know, I was cooking snapper the other night and then some rainbow trout. I did a quick 20 minute video or like an 8 minute video on making cheddar bay biscuits the Red Lobster way, you know, and just being. Just trying to stay out there and communicate. Yeah. I can't go to the gym and network with the people that are pumping the iron. Next to me are people that I see on a regular basis. But this way, people like, oh, Scott's still getting his workout in. Yep. Still staying relevant, still trying to stay on top of things. And instead of huddling in and waiting for the worst, this is the most important time to be like, what we're doing here, Just connecting. I mean, a phone call is great, but seeing it ii is so much better than a text message or an email. It just gives people a chance to really chill out a little bit, say, hey, what's going on? How are you doing? How are the horses? How's Michelle? How's the grandkids?

You know, Michelle was just saying to me this morning, she said, you know, we've lived here on this little hobby farm, 25 acre place for nine years. She said, I never felt like out there was mine. She goes, I always thought that was your stuff. The horses, the goats, the tack room, the projects. She goes, my stuff. My art studio, my coaching stuff, my. The grandkids. That was my stuff. That was your stuff out there. But she Said because I'm not going out and going over and being with the different grandkids, my children's homes and so on. She said, I'm walking the property almost every day and I'm going out and I'm doing my coaching calls while I'm walking out there and the horses come up to me and I'm getting to know the horses and the goats come up to me and I'm figuring out who's friendly and not. And I look around, I'm looking at the flowers that are starting to come out and the leaves that are starting to come out and the birds that are showing up and the ducks down in our pond and all this stuff. And she's like, this is like the most magical place. And I didn't even know it because I've just. And it's going to sound like Michelle's a shut in. She's not.

No, she's not at all.

She just didn't have. She didn't feel like out in the pastures, down in the corners of the property, down. And she just didn't see it as her world. That was stuff I was doing, putting animals out there, training stuff, building stuff, but it wasn't. It was all for the animals. It wasn't for humans. So she completely used up the two acres of the yard and did stuff there. But out there, no. Now she's going, this is a magical place. We have time when we construct our lives in such a way that we get to be in charge of our time. And then we make a choice to not fill it with other people's agendas. We have an opportunity to discover great, fabulous, uplifting opportunities, experiences that are literally right in our backyard that we just were ignoring before. You had the pots and pans, right, but you weren't doing all the cooking because it's easier to just go hit.

A restaurant, easy to get it to go, or just slap a piece of ham and cheese on some bread and make a sandwich. Whereas I could take a little bit of butter, put in a pan, trying to make it a grilled ham and cheese sandwich or grilled turkey and cheese sandwich or put it on the George Foreman grill and make it a panini if I need to. You know what I mean? But that's the thing. We've been walking around our neighborhood and noticing, oh my gosh, our neighbors got really nice. We could do some stuff with our lawn or oh, hey, they got a little box garden. We could do that in our backyard. You know, sometimes having a being shaken out of reality and just realizing resetting our images, resetting what we see is so valuable in the opportunities that are around us. It's just a matter now. Okay, let's. How do we approach those opportunities, how do we tweak those for what we're doing and then just doing it and figuring it out as you go along a lot of times versus a lot of people want to be, oh, perfect, it's got to be perfect. Well, it's never gonna be perfect. I was talking with a friend earlier today who's a teacher and they have had to evolve what they're doing with their kids. And he said, he teaches fifth grade and he said it has been the most comical thing getting these kids on ZOOM to network. He said he almost cried cause he's so excited to see them. And the kids were interacting and energy came across. And he goes, a lot of the teachers were very apprehensive about that. They didn't think they could replicate it. But he goes, everybody is evolving right now. Everybody is figuring out how the hell to do this. And that's really business is business figuring out how the hell to do stuff on a day in, day out basis, right, Aaron?

I mean, look, I mean if there was ever a situation where we really couldn't go out, I mean like nuclear winter, right? Human beings figure stuff out. So you become either a victim, right? You just. So I can't, I got no choice. This is just. I'm just going to sit here and wait to die, right? Or they go, okay, how do I go out and take control? I mean, the most ridiculous experience example of that would be something like the Mad Max movies, right? It's the whole dystopian world. But somebody's controlling the water, somebody's controlling the fuel. Remember the Kevin Costner thing about the postman? Somebody's delivering the mail because we're going to communicate. We're going to travel, we're going to eat, we're going to live. People need to quit wringing their hands and crying and saying how insane this is and getting sucked into the medias. All they're doing is selling ads. Kids don't ever forget that. So we have an opportunity as entrepreneurs. And it has nothing to do with market crashes, pandemics, elections. The World Trade center has nothing to do with any of that. No matter what happens. No matter what happens. Our job, if we want to claim the moniker we entrepreneur, our job is find a way. Find a way to provide value. Find a way to give service. Find a way to make money pivot so that we stay relevant. You notice when the rainstorms hit? So you're down in Austin, Texas, not a rainy place, right?

Not usually, no.

But if you're walking into the grocery store every, you know, twice a week all your life, sunny and warm outside, you're going to see sunglasses, sunscreen, all that, right? When you walk in, you're going to see that as soon as the rain clouds show up, they move the sunglasses out and they move umbrellas up to the front. Right? Because odds are you'll spend five or ten bucks for that disposable umbrella right now because it's going to rain cats and dogs for the rest of the afternoon, right?

Yep.

That's called pivoting. That's called adjusting to what's going on right now. We see it happen all the time. But many small business owners have never figured out that they can do it, too. And unfortunately, so many people get into business or begin their entrepreneurial journey, and I've talked about this before with you, on a path that nobody even wants, that path, nobody cares about that path. Nobody's ever going to buy their thing. They're going to beat their head against the wall and waste all their savings and max out their credit cards doing something, try to push an agenda that nobody else cares about but them. And they'll go broke and they'll be disillusioned versus the person who's going to adjust constantly to what the market wants. They're always going to make money. They're always going to have surplus. They're going to buy up the building next door that hasn't been. Nothing's been on the market for 25 years. And then they're going to own two buildings on that street. They're playing Monopoly with real money, and they're just going to adjust, adjust, adjust. And so many people right now are fearful. And I just say, okay, so what can you do right now with what you have from where you are, what can be done? And the people that can get that message, they're going to be the winners and they're going to see this time as any time of flux, anytime. They're going to see it as a. It's like, what do they call it on Black Friday, right? All the deals, everything's on sale, right? It's chaos, but everything's on sale. People that are prepared, people that can pivot, they know when to buy. Well.

It's the thing you think about all the grocery stores that have gone to, like, cart pickup these days, curbside delivery, delivery and stuff. Like that, needing drivers for that. Or even the trucking industry. My gosh, the trucking industry is always looking for truck drivers that can be always driving that. Then you've got diesel mechanics that. I have a buddy, a friend, that runs a Caterpillar sales distributorship out of Georgia. He would hire eight diesel mechanics right now or even pay him to go to school to learn diesel mechanics and then bring them on board for his cat dealership because. And then pay him 125 grand a year to do that stuff. Yeah, we've got a friend who. Mutual friend who owns one of the biggest plumbing franchises in Waco. She's always looking for plumbers. Yeah, it's a dirty job, but it pays well. He get your hands dirty and stuff like that. And that's the thing is some people are gonna have to pivot. You're gonna have to. And maybe it's in the same industry, maybe it's taking a job for a temporary while you get your assets out of a sling and finding things to be happy about. And that's just if you're in a point right now where you're scared, you're nervous, I get it. Understand that. But do yourself a favor, brainstorm. Hey, what are all the things that you have skills at? I'll give you an example. Like my. There's a hairdresser here in town. She took a video of her giving a haircut for stay at home haircuts using a, you know, a shaver. And then a buddy of mine, Garrison Gilbert, he's like, I gave myself a haircut from learning from this lady online. I was like, awesome. You know what I mean? Maybe you're growing a longer beard. Maybe you're growing longer hair.

Tell you what, this thing is driving me nuts already. It's too long. But it really is true. It really is true. There are things to do. And a lot of people that had jobs and who've been furloughed, some of them will go right back to work. But I really believe that a lot of high paying, kind of like factory or warehouse kind of jobs are going to end up going away. I think there are a lot of people who will be downsized. This is forcing virtual logistical exploration. And the more we realize that we can do our business virtually, the more it will open up the hiring pool for a lot of companies so they won't have to look just for people in their town who can commute into the office. Which means some people that were able to get by on marginal skills will not have a Job in a new, more virtual office space. So what does that mean? Those people who maybe have money in IRA or 401 going to and they've got a quarter million dollars there, they've been working for 20 years and put money in, not rich, but not without resources, are going to say, well okay, I need to self direct that now and to do something because I can't find a job, so what can I do? And I believe we're going to have an explosion of solopreneur businesses, micro businesses, one person or two people businesses. And I think, I actually think we're going back in certain ways. The US economy and even the world economy I think is going to move away from huge entrenched, monolithic giant companies for the most part. Not incompletely. Amazon will continue to be what it is, Disney will continue to be what it is, I think. But I think a lot of other businesses are going to go back to cottage industry. Working from home, working from my Zoom connection, doing work here, working the hours I want to work, delivering something very niche that people want. I think we're actually going into a very fascinating time where something that we went away from over 200 years ago with the industrial revolution, I think we're going to go back to the vast majority of businesses are going to be cottage industries. I'm pretty excited about what's going on because you know, what's happening in business right now is kind of like the advent of where we had three main television channels to then we had 500 cable channels and then now we have, and then YouTube gave us endless specialty channels. Anybody could have their own show and podcasting hundreds of thousands of of niche messages on comedy, on economics, on sexuality, on health and wellness, on exercise, on how to sharpen your knife, on how to make balloon animals, who knows? But you can find exactly what you want and you don't have to wait for TV Guide to come out to tell you what three choices you have at this hour. I mean that's what's happening in business. Instead of a few companies telling us how it's going to be, you're going to have endless opportunities to find something that fits exactly what you want to curate in your life. And that should be very exciting for anybody with a semi creative mind at all, even a little bit of creativity, you have an opportunity to find a very narrow, very deep well that will probably make you more money. I had one of my clients yesterday on the Inner Circle call this Mastermind group. She called me a month ago, three weeks ago, a month ago and told me that her, she had this little sort of side hustle she was trying to figure out. And then she was the western regional sales director for a pretty large medical equipment business making a really good, well about quarter million a year, which is a really good income. And she was her own boss. She had a small team. There you go. So she calls me a month ago and says I got laid off. We all got laid off. And it wasn't really laid off. I mean it's really, the job's done. But her and a whole bunch of her co workers were all cut. So she comes on yesterday and I thought she would be looking for a lifeline, you know, she said, in the last three weeks I've just had to focus on my side hustle. And I've now 80% in renewing revenue, replaced my old paycheck. In three weeks, in three weeks she had replaced a 20 grand, almost 70%, 80%, $20,000 a month income. You know why? Because she's focused on something else. She just quit focusing on this. That door shut, that opened up space to focus on this and all of a sudden it blossomed instead of us. I don't think anybody listening to this is much of a hand wringer anyway, a whiner, please give my free government cheese kind of person. But I'm just telling you guys, if you feel sad, desperate, fearful, what's going to go on? What do I do now? I've spent all this time and energy getting ready for this bonanza and that seems to have closed down. So now what? Well, I promise you there is something else. You just have to look at the ingredients and figure out a different way to put them together to get the results you desire. I'll give you one example. Am I talking too much? I'm talking.

Oh, I love it, I love it. You're hitting the nail on the head. You're doing good, Aaron.

My first significant business, my second company, but where I had more than three employees, my second, we had about 30 employees and we were in the cellular phone business back in the beginning, back in 1986 and made a lot of money and sold a lot of $3,000 phones. Right then one day in one meeting, effective right now, at the meeting, they yanked the rug out from under all of us. All the smart people closed down. I tried to ride it out. Pretty soon I'd use up all my resources over about nine months and I was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and I was sitting in bankruptcy court with my nine month pregnant wife. With our second child, right? So we're going to have these two little infants. We're bankrupt, we have no business. I didn't know what to do. I was tripping out. I was freaking out. I go over to visit a buddy of mine who owns some AM PM gas stations, a Lebanese guy. Whenever I would walk in, Nabil Canso would say, harun, it's good to see you. Haroon. Harun. Aaron is Haroun in Lebanese, apparently. So I go back and sit in his little shabby little office stacked to the ceiling with cases of cigarettes. And there's this long skinny box sitting there. And I said, he said, do you need any necktie? I said, what? He goes, yeah, look in the box. It's full of neckties in each necktie in a little cellophane kind of little sleeve. And there must have been 150 neckties in there. And I said, why do you have a box of neckties? He said, somebody owed me money for gas, couldn't pay it. He was a necktie sales guy. So he gave me this box of ties in exchange for the money he owed me. I said, how much do you want per tie? He said, I don't know, $5? I said, I'll take the whole box. So I took a. Gave him the money. Actually, I said, I'll pay you later. I took the cause. What's he gonna do with a box full of ties? Every one of them is different. There aren't two of any of them. They're salesman samples. So I start calling up all the people that these lawyers, stockbrokers, accountants that had all paid 2, $3,000 for a cell phone. They're all downtown Portland in the office towers. These are the big firms. I said, can I come down and put a bunch of neckties out on your conference table and you guys can buy the ties? And they range from $10 to $20 a piece. So they said, sure, come down, come down for like 30 minutes. I go down, I lay the ties on the conference table. They make an announcement over the intercom. Men and women come in, they're holding them up. They're looking at. They're giving me cash money for these five dollar ties. I'm getting ten to twenty dollars in cash. I go back, I pay him, I say, who is this guy that you got the ties from? And he tells me. And then I find out there's three main tie manufacturing companies that service the Northwest. I find the salesman for all three of them. I start buying all their samples. I do more and more. Pretty soon I hired two women to wear black dresses. And we got these rolling cases and we came in a little bit sharper and now we named it the Tie Guy. And we're going every day from conference room to conference room selling ties. The tie. I sold the business. The tie Guy is still in business today. This is 1991 or two. They're still doing it 25 years, 28 years later. I had to pivot. I had the relationships. Nabil was a relationship. All these law firms, accounting firms, were relationships. I couldn't sell them cellular anymore for $3,000. So I started selling them 10 and $20 neckties. I used what I had at the moment, and guess what? I didn't lose my house. We had crummy cars, but we still had cars. I kept our health insurance. I stayed relevant to all these people. Some of them are still clients of mine now, who now buy asset protection structures from Laughlin. You just have to move with what you've got. That's the sign of a real entrepreneur. At the same time I was doing the tie guy, guys, I went from being in the newspaper, on television, on the radio, being buying brand new cars. I bought two different houses during that time to being on my butt broke, bankrupt, selling neckties. You know what else we started doing? We went to video stores because they sold video stores. And we made these little punch cards. And I would go out in the evening along with a buddy of mine, and we would knock doors around 5, 6, 7 o' clock at night and sell these video punch cards for discounts on new releases, discounts on popcorn. And they would give us 20 bucks. And it was advertising for the video store. Didn't cost us anything to do it. We just had to make a deal. And we went to all the video stores all over Portland. And pretty soon we're selling. We had people out selling punch cards. Now, was that a step down from being fancy pants in the corner office, selling expensive stuff with technicians in my shop and doing interviews on radio and on tv? Sure, but who gives a darn? It was about keeping the lights on, buying food, taking care of my family. And guess what happened? Because I stayed relevant. Next thing I knew, I get offered a job as vice president of sales for a 350 office, publicly traded multinational. And I went from knocking doors, selling punch cards to making a. I was going to swear a whole bunch of money and three and a half years later, as a multimillionaire. So get off your high horse, feel good about anything you can do to stay in the game, there's relevance everywhere. You just have to do it. And don't think I'm too good to do that or I have this education or that's embarrassing. Get over it. Get over it.

Love it.

Remember those people in Mad Max who controlled the fuel or what? They had crazy hair. That's embarrassing, too. Okay. Get over it. Stay relevant. Stay in front of people. Keep making money. You have no idea what staying relevant. I watched a documentary about Garth Brooks last night. Everybody was turning him down. Seven meetings with the labels, everyone shot him down. Nobody understood Garth Brooks. He wasn't pop, he wasn't country. What's going on? Right? He just kept going to the Bluebird. He's selling boots at the Boot store and going to the Bluebird and playing a song, going out and playing at a bar. He just. And finally one night at the Bluebird, which in Nashville is very famous, only about 20 seat, little place where songwriters go to showcase their stuff. He was supposed to be number nine on the program, but number two on the program hadn't gotten there yet. So the owner of the Bluebird came up and said, hey, Garth, do you mind going on? If this person doesn't show up, will you go on and fill the number two spot instead of waiting for your spot? He's like, sure, of course. Well, there were agents from the record labels who'd come to hear number two. Number two wasn't there. They'd already turned down the same people had already turned down Garth Brooks face to face. Nope. But then they saw him perform live in front of an audience, and they're like, can you come in on Monday? Three years later, he was filling stadiums. Three years later, he was the number one performing solo artist in the world, beating out Nirvana, Michael Jackson, Metallica. He was the top guy on all the charts because he kept showing up. And all of a sudden, there was a moment when number two on the list didn't show up. He was staying out. He wasn't sitting home going, why won't anybody listen to my music? I'm so good. Nope. You want me to take that spot? Sure, I'll take that spot. And he had a deal on Monday, and he was the number one guy in the world three years later. Stay relevant. Stay in front of people. Reinvent yourself over and over again. That's how you are. Prove your stripes as an entrepreneur.

Amen to that, man. I agree totally. I think it's a great place to wrap it up there for everybody today.

I want to send. Can I send people somewhere?

Yes, Please do. Yep.

I'll just tell you, when things got wackadoo here a month ago or so, we really sat down and said, what can we do? I'm sure you're doing something like this too. What can we do at Laughlin to help everybody with as much good, solid, legit information as we can put in with no strings attached, no selling, no pitching, no membership, nothing. What can we do? Because we want to stay relevant to our almost 50,000 customers. Right. And to anybody else that might be a customer someday when the world is easier for them. Right. So we started a Facebook group and we call it Laughlin Facebook Thrive. Laughlin Thrive. Anybody can be a member. Go just join the group. We're making sure that it doesn't go political. We're trying to watch what goes in there so it doesn't get cray cray conspiracy, weird solutions. But we're trying to put as much relevant vetted material into there as possible. And it's just meant to help people. And so normally where I'd send somebody to a landing page or come check out my podcast or we're going to have this event, I mean we do have Magnify your wealth event coming up, which is a phenomenal event. Hopefully it's going to happen. June, is it? I think 12, 13, 14, something like that, that weekend of June. Hopefully it's going to happen. We're proceeding as though it will. But in the meantime, Laughlin Thrive is a place to go and get useful, applicable information. Everything from the SBA stuff to pivoting stuff to we're just dumping tons of good content in there to help business owners be more successful. Whether you're a one person business or a thousand person business, this stuff will apply. So rather than pitching any other idea or event or my podcast, Laughlin Thrive is our, is our harbor, a safe harbor in storm right now. So we want to invite everybody to come be there with us, come hang out and participate. The group is better if people come in and say, here's who I am, here's what I do. I'm looking for these kinds of affiliates, these kinds of partners, because you don't know, you don't know who's going to be sitting in that little bluebird cafe of Laughlin Thrive in that little small audience who's looking for someone just like you. So go participate with us and we'll try to make life as good as best as we can, help improve it. We'll do.

Yeah, we're all, there's the bell. We're all one connection away from big things happen. You never know who you're going to meet. Was your one connection that day to lead to a lot of other things. Right. So did not know, but I did not know that story. That's a great, great, great story there. Glad to hear about it. So is that why you don't wear ties? You got so tired looking at ties?

No. Well, I was the last one in the company I think to quit wearing ties and I cashed out a lot. But I'm going to tell you what I'm thinking in my speaking. I'm sort of thinking about going back to the suit. I think we've done this business casual thing and you got to change it up every now and again. So anyway, anyway guys, Scott, it's good to be here. I love your audience, love all your people and I always love being on.

The show and same thing here, man. Love you guys too as well. We had Michelle on a few days ago as well too. Sharing about how to find your superpowers in a chaotic world. Great, great stuff out there. Thanks for coming on today and we'll see you around. All right, brother.

All right man. You take care. Thanks pal.

Thanks. Alright guys, that's going to do it for this episode. As always, if you are struggling, feel free to reach out. Anyway, we're glad to help out. Anyone we can book a 30 minute call with me. Just as if you need some ideas on pivoting or things like that, reach out to me. It's talkwithscottcarson.com easy to do. Make sure to check out Laughlin's group. Laughlin Thrive as Aaron mentioned there on Facebook. Connect with people on there, share some experiences. If you're having success or struggling, reach out and share it with somebody. So go out, take some action everybody and we'll see you off top. Bye. Sa.