How to Scale Your Business FAST

The first goal that you have as an entrepreneur is to find something that can work repeatedly. One thing that I can offer to a customer, whether that's to a business or an end consumer, and not only can I offer it once and they, and they buy it and they love it and everything like that, but I can do it over and over and over again until you find that, keep the ideas for me. Go with a minimal viable product mvp. Don't get crazy. It's. It doesn't have to be this big thing that sets you apart or whatnot. Make your marketing set you apart. Make the way that you treat the customer set you apart. It doesn't need to be this crazy intellectual property that was developed out and everything else and the way that you did the process, like, no, just go. Just be awesome at delivering something that's really boring. Once again, if it works now, eliminate the ideas. Focus in. Dig that sucker a thousand feet deep until you hit oil.

Bro. I'm super excited to talk to you. One of the things I like to do a lot of times for the audience, especially in the entrepreneurship field, because I always feel like there's a lot of just random content out there, like it's not super organized or, you know, there's six ways to hustle your way to success, or seven ways to hustle your way to building great teams or whatever. And then you, you do some little back, little backstory and you discover that they're. They're running basically a lemonade stand. Like, they're very early in their entrepreneurship journeys. Like, where the hell did you get your content? Right? Whereas someone like yourself who's built and sold several businesses, you know, I shared with you, I just exited one recently. And, you know, there's a lot of learning lessons in 25 plus years in building this correctly. So I won't give me a position to show a bit of a master class where entrepreneurs should know if they're going to build a scalable enterprise. So maybe help me understand two or three specific challenges that you think everyone is going to face when trying to go from a mom and pop shop to a scalable enterprise.

You know, I think initial growth is probably the most difficult in any organization. Right? Like, going from one to two is probably the most difficult thing that anybody will ever overcome. Whether that's going from being a solopreneur to getting your first employee, whether that's going from one crew to two crews. Going from one location to two locations. Yeah, like, that's the most difficult. And the reason is because it's when the greatest percentage of growth will ever happen within your organization. Yeah. Right. So if I go from one to two, I literally grew by 100%.

Yeah.

There's no other time in your entrepreneurial journey that overnight you will grow from 1. Grow 100%.

Yeah.

And. And that is the hardest leap for any entrepreneur to take, and rightfully so. Right. Because expenses doubled, risk doubled, opportunity doubled. Right. Like everything. Everything doubles. Where versus you go from two to three, you grew by 50%. You go from three to four, you grew by 33%. Right. And so it just continues to go down as you just add one more. And so I think that's where, you know, most entrepreneurs that have had a lot of success, they under. They. They forget yet that how much that initial growth actually took. Right. And it's like, yeah, of course I grew from 9 to 10. Well, congrats, dude. You grew 11%. You're asking this person to go and double the size of their organization. And so I think, like, one, being willing to take that risk and. And when. When people go and take that risk, like, you got to be willing to lose and lose for a long time. Yeah, Right. And so whether that's. Whether. Whether that's like investing more into marketing than you than you expected, invest more into labor than. Than you expected, not get a ROI for a very, very long time. So, you know, whatever's on the spreadsheet usually take that double, triple, quadruple, especially on the expense line.

Right.

Like, so just understanding that that's where you got to go. And typically, what it means is the entrepreneur, the founder, the initial group, right. They've got to put in extra time. So if you're going from one location to two locations, you got to demand more from your first location from all the crews. They're like, hey, look, we. We've got to prop this up as we go and we grow. And the same goes if you're growing from a solopreneur to two, three, four employees, like, you've got to be willing to take up the slack, go put in 70, 80, 90 hours, and. And then, you know, incrementally, as you grow, that goes down. So I think. I think a lot of people underestimate what that actually takes when. When they're first going.

Not only that, I mean, if you think about the first location, like, all right, so I share with you. Just before we hopped on officially on the call here, you know, I built mine from literally nothing. Like, literally a hammer and a nail and a trash pile of lumber that we Turned into scaffolding, right? And then, you know, built with almost nine figures and recently exited. Several things that I learned along the way is that that number one shop, if you will, is your model. That's your, that's your first McDonald's. If you can't maximize or somehow increase performance in that thing, you definitely should be scaling outside of that one location. Right?

Yeah. And that, that actually, that actually brings me up to. There's. There's two other aspects that like, are absolutely necessary to your point. One, if you have something that works, make sure it's well documented. You create those standard operating procedures.

And like a lot of people SOPs, they're so boring.

Right, right. Well, and, and a lot of people, they hear these words, right? They hear these acronyms and they're like, they, they don't even know what it is. Okay? Like first of all, an SOP is not a tool, okay? A lot of, a lot of people look at it like, oh, the SOP is like in Salesforce or Service Titan or, or whatever. No, like those are tools to make your SOPs better. An SOP is simply a documented process from your mind on the way that you're going to go about something. Whether that's the way you call a customer, the way you close a deal, the way you pull a permit, the way you install. Right? Like getting that out of your mind, your employees minds, getting it well documented and starting with just an overall process. Like don't over complicate it. Don't think you have to have it all figured out day one. Get that, get that process. Because to your point, like, you should not bring somebody in to do a job that is not documented.

Yeah, right.

Like that is where most people, it's like, man, I'm overwhelmed. I need to hire an employee, I need an assistant.

You bring in, my mom's brother's out of work, come on over here.

And then they come in and then it's more work because you're literally holding their hand the whole time. You have nothing to train them off of. And so like go lock yourself away for a weekend in a hotel, at a park or whatnot. Get stuff out of your mind. Get some basic processes, get some training material, take out your phone, record yourself doing something. Right? Like create some processes, hand them over and then go get the tools. Then go get the, the learning management software, the lmss and everything else, you know, to, to put them in and to make them better and more efficient and better to train with. But like have something to build off of that's number two. And then we could talk more about that or I could dive into my, my third one since you asked for three.

Oh, yeah, we'll definitely get the next one for sure. And I, I guarantee I'm probably going to set you up for it right here because one of the things, the biggest struggle. Well, there's two big struggles I had in building businesses, especially as someone who didn't go to college and had. Just has a GED and like had to figure it out along the way. Number one is I try to build a business without building myself, so I just, you know, try to wing it. But we just kind of briefly alluded to that, which could go up pretty deep. The other thing is I was thinking tactically and not strategically.

Yeah.

So I'm curious to know from your perspective.

Well, how do you best recommend that entre. Because I mean, entrepreneurs by definition are visionaries, right? They're, they're creating something out of thin air. Maybe they've been doing the thing that they want to start a business in for 10 years as an apprentice or working for somebody else. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's a bad thing because they could be learning bad things and good things and like, you know, it's. But at the end of the day, you know, they're, they're creating something out of thin air. Okay. Most organizations, ideas, concepts, visionary. Right. You know, to that first hire, there's got to be that integrator. It's gotta be somebody can help you put that dream on paper and in, into practice.

Absolutely.

So from your perspective, how, how can an entrepreneur switch the mindset from being supervisionary being. You know, because we entrepreneurs as. And, and I am one. Right. So have a tendency to live in the clouds a little bit. Almost 2. Opportunity, not enough risk.

Right. So first of all, yeah. Like you, you speak to. I mean, there's, there's a lot of different directions we can go there. Right. Like the entrepreneur is easily distracted, has too many ideas, gets really unfocused. You know, like the, the first goal that you have as an entrepreneur is to find something that can work repeatedly.

Right.

Like one thing. Right. One thing that I can offer to a customer, whether that's to a business or an end consumer, you know, residential, whatever it is. Right. And not only can I offer it once and they, and they buy it and they love it and everything like that, but I can do it over and over, over again and get stuck doing something that's boring. Right. Like that's, that's the goal, can I do something that's boring Repeatedly, over, over and over again until you find that keep the ideas flowing. Right. Like keep, keep it going. Like I, the way I look at like any business development stage is like, initially, like, yes, you may have one idea, like, work on that, but don't be afraid to have other things come in. Right. And, and, and until something actually starts to work, like so you, you have two mistakes made here. One is, is people like, they, they come up with this great idea and they think it's going to work. And so they spend hours and days and weeks and months developing it out, recreating the perfect product, everything like that, only to find that demand for that is not there. Right. And so it just didn't, it didn't work. And so like, it's too much investment into one thing that doesn't work. And then you have the complete opposite. Once they actually find something that works, they continue to get distracted with new ideas. Yeah, right. Like so, so the goal once again is to go and just, just find something that you can repeat and don't. And go with a minimal viable product. Mvp. Yeah, don't, don't get crazy. It doesn't have to be this big thing that sets you apart or whatnot. Like, make your marketing set you apart, make the way that you treat the customer set you apart. It doesn't need to be this, this crazy intellectual property that, that was developed out and everything else. And the way that you did the process, like, no, like just go and, and just be awesome at delivering something that's really boring. And it, once again, if it works now, eliminate the ideas, focus in, dig that sucker a thousand feet deep until you hit oil.

Yeah, absolutely. Mastery is the key, for sure. And I mean, it's interesting you mentioned that. The, I think one of the most underestimated value proposition is how you interact with the customer, how you actually interact. What. You know, I'll give you an example. The company I just exited recently, one of our core things that I would just, I don't know if I did it organically or naturally. It just for some reason just made sense to me to send a handwritten card or to go, rather than just email my proposal, I would take my, promote my proposal, go to their office, shake a hand, drop the proposal off, and like, just for points of contact, when they would pick up the phone, you know, and they would have an issue, it's like, okay, I don't have the answer right now, but I'll have the answer for you in a few, you know, 48 hours, 24 hours, and you set the precedent and then you follow up. Like super simple stuff. Especially in the service based business organization. So much so to that point that one of the things that I loved was our client base would say, hey, you guys aren't the cheapest, but we're going with you because we know you're the best.

Right.

So you can actually pick up margin points by making sure you're running a very successful organization. Talk to me a little about the experience in developing an ideal customer relationship, the things that you see that work. Because again, that's a tactical thing that can be done very strategically.

Yeah. So. So first of all, in order to be able to develop out this incredible process in which you are going to treat the customer. Because. Because especially if we're talking about like the construction, the service industry, there is not a lot that separates you from a product based level. Right. Like I grew a solar business in which we were installing probably the same panels that everybody was in the space. We were doing it on the same type of homes, everything like that. So that did not set us, set us apart. Y so in. But in order to set yourself apart, to invest in that customer experience, to do these extra unique things, you have to charge enough.

Right.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my first business, that led to a bankruptcy. So in 2008, I launched a business at the age of 24. Two and a half years later, I found myself firing Chapter 7 bankruptcy for $2.2 million. And the reason for that is I did all kinds of things to impress others. One I wanted to implement, impress my customer, right? And impress my customer was the best way to impress them was to lower the price, right. Be the cheapest in the marketplace.

Let's run to the bottom, right?

This race to the bottom. Oh, everyone's charging this. I'm gonna undercut them and we're gonna sell the crap out of this thing because it's, it's the cheapest. And then I tried to impress my other customer, which was my employee. Oh, they're paying you this. How about if we pay you this? And so my, you know, we paid more and charged less, which led to razor thin margins, which meant we could not invest into the experience. We could not be profitable. We could not go and grow. Yeah, Fast forward. I launched this solar business out of my garage. I say, hey dude, we're going to, we're going to charge the most and not. And it's not even going to be close. Right. Like you got These local mom and pops, we're going to charge two to two and a half x. Like, and we're not talking about a $10 product. We're talking about a $40,000 product. There's literally, we were out offering a product for 45, 50 grand that you could literally go get us undercut for 20 to 25,000 bucks. Like. And so. But the reason was we wanted to create this incredible customer experience where we could invest in that interaction. We were sending the best professionals looking the best in the best trucks. The good quality product, their price still made sense to the consumer. When competing against their utility company, they get a welcome box with a soul gen blanket, soul gen water bottle, different custom website for them to be able to refer their customers. The text messages are on point. They know exactly when somebody's coming, when somebody's showing up. They have their own customized app in which they can be able to monitor the process of how the permitting is going with the city, the communication. They can either text, they can call, they can do all the different things, right? Like, and you create this incredible customer experience. The customer never, ever wants to cancel before their installation because the way the experience. And then on top of that, we're increasing the offer. We're not just solar panels. We're coming in, we're blowing in glue into their ducting system to seal up every. Everything. We're enhancing their H vac system so it runs the most efficient. We're coming in, we're blowing insulation into the attic so that they're actually decreasing the amount of usage that they're. They're using. And we're throwing in these freebies that, that, you know, cost us 2 to 4,000 bucks, but we're charging $25,000 more than the, the most, the, the lowest competitor. And so for me, like, when you're in a commoditized business, I always want to be the Louis Vuitton, right? Like, I want to invest a little bit more in my product, a lot more in my employees, a lot more in the customer experience. And I want that to be memorable when they, when they come in and quote, unquote, walk into my store. Right. And so, and, and I, I've. I've done all kinds of case studies around this. So I'm a part of a Harvard program. It's called owner's presence management. And it's where 160 of us from all around the world. Quarter of my group are billionaires. Like, they, we come in, we, we live together for three weeks and we do Case studies around these different companies and there's this company called Bugs Burger Bug Killers. And that's a mouth. I mean, dude, the worst, the worst name you ever heard. But these guys, they did, they would not call it pest control. They hated that word. They call it pest extinction. Right? Pest. They were bug killers. They did not, they were not there to control your bugs or, or anything like, and they did high end commercial. They would come in and do hotels and, and Michelin star restaurants and everything else and they charged seven times more than their nearest competitor. Seven times. Like, and we're talking for like similar type of product, everything. But dude, these guys come in and they freaking guaranteed that they were going to eliminate their bugs. They're coming in full hazmat suits, spraying that crap down, they're investing and they had like warranties in place where if you see a bug, we will actually cover everybody's meal in the, in the restaurant. Or you know, if, if somebody staying at this five star hotel sees a bug, we will cover their next three days of stay. We'll reimburse your service, we'll pay for you to have another company come in and do the bug killing. Like, dude, it's, it was crazy. And like that, that case study, like is probably one of the greatest ones. If you can look it up. It's Bugs Burger Bug Killers Harvard case study. Like, see, I mean that is a masterclass on delivering a customer experience while charging an extreme prem.

Yeah, dude, I, you know, I think that's so good because again, I think people lose sight of the fact that raving fans, when you can make raving fans out of your client base, there's deep rewards in that. First of all, you're 10 times more likely to be referred.

Yep.

To future business. Second of all, the, the folks that did just buy from you will likely buy from you again or trust you. Even if you were to introduce a new product a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, you send them a, a tickler, right. And you know, the tickler says, hey, we just launched this new product. And that's after you've already sent anniversary updates and happy birthdays and you know, all these different touch points to show them that you care. Yep. Right. People, I, I learned, I learned a little bit recently that, you know, I used to say that if you want to start a business, go find an ideal problem that someone needs solved and that you can provide a service for. Right. So in business, in general, that's what businesses are created to do, is to solve Problems. Okay.

Yep.

I've recently learned that if you can solve problems at depth and even prevent future problems, that people will pay a premium for that. So in that bug example, it's like, okay, not only am I, not only about can I make the bugs go away, but I'm also going to back that up that if you see one, I'm doing X, Y and Z. Yep. Which took, which is a credibility marker for the, for the entrepreneur or for the client to say they got my back. And if you could back that up with Google review, after Google review, after Google review or reviews in general, that that's exactly how you operate. I mean I think that's vital because I also think the, one of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs can, can face right now is to make a promise and then not stand behind it. That's incongruence. Right. So let's talk a little, let's talk about the flip side, the importance of integrity. Why it's so important to be congruent with your, with your offering.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So like one, I mean you, you quoted raving fans. You know, one of the, one of the principles of raving fans is delivering what's called a plus one experience. And a plus one experience is setting the expectations in a way that you know, you can always over deliver.

Yeah.

And where if you set the expectation like a customer, it's the craziest thing in, in a service type industry you can deliver a, a product and experience that's way better than anybody in the marketplace. But if you set the expectation above that, you're going to piss off customers so, so much. Right. And, and I'll, and I'll give you an example of one of the products that we actually had to eliminate because we were not able to meet expectation every single time. So in my, in my solar business, we provided monitoring of your, of your system and it was fantastic. Had a great app. You could see exactly how much your solar was producing all, all these different things. And we're like, and so every time we'd sell it, like hey look, you're going to get monitoring all the, all the stuff. But what happened was, is occasionally about 5% of the homes we would go out to, we could not get an Internet connection or a cell tower connection to wherever we installed the solar panel. So if it was like a ground mount away from the home or whatever else, and since the expectation was set that we would be able to monitor which put us leaps and bounds above everybody else. Right. Like we, we guaranteed all these things the People that could not get that, even though we were like, hey, look, it's your property. It sucks. Like, I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do about it. Those people were pissed, right? And we'd get negative reviews by these people, and it's just like, look, we literally gave you the best system, the best process, the best experience. You got the handwritten letters, the welcome package. You got this, that, and the other. We did this thing in two weeks where the industry average takes eight weeks. Like, you know, like, all these. All these things. And. But it was misaligned from the expectation. And you get people pissed off and bringing up timelines. That's another thing, right? Like, so one thing that we have to train our salespeople is, like, do not set the expectation that we're going to be able to do it in under six weeks. Like, you know, industry average is. Is eight weeks. Let's. We've got to make sure that we're. We're in at. At six weeks. Like that. That's the best we can do. We would have people that we'd get installed in two and a half weeks, which is double fast. Like, so fast. But for whatever reason the salesperson had told them two weeks, man, the lid would blow off. They think that, like, it is so important that whatever you say in that sales presentation or your offer that you are 1000% know that you can control it. And if you can't control it, let them know, hey, look, there is a chance that we could screw this up. There's a chance that this may not happen. Set the proper expectation. That's the world operates off expectation. It's the reason why people go to McDonald's. People don't go to McDonald's because it's the greatest burger or whatnot. They just know what to expect. They know I can go in and if I order a Big Mac, I'm going to get a Big Mac. It's not the best burger in the world, but I know that it's going to have three buns. Two. It's going to have two burgers. It's going to have the Big Mac sauce. It's going to have this, right? And so, like, make sure that you are setting the proper expectations for wherever it's at. And if you want to better your expectations, just make sure that you can 100% control it.

Yeah, dude, that's so good. We just gave a masterclass on customer service. Like, everybody needs to go back and literally watch the last 15 minutes, because nine times out of 10 your business is going to go out of business because either you're not charging enough for your product or you're not serving your client with ideal service. Yeah, those two things are going to lead you to go out of business long term. I want to talk about a little bit differently. I'm going to spend it a little bit. So, and this comes from a learning lesson I had. So the company I just exited, when I first began to build the company, I wasn't building it to sell it or ever exit it. Yeah. So I'm in my mind, I'm just building the best construction machine I can build, you know, serving the clients. And however, when the time came later on, 20 plus years later, I was like, you know what? I'm, I think I'm ready, I think I'm ready to kind of do something new and you know, and take on a new challenge and I got a good team and da da, da. I realized pretty quickly in as you start going through the diligence process, which ends up being several years long if you've never done it before, it takes a while, right. That I would have built the business totally different had I been planning for an exit later on. And you know, in the five phases, I always say there's, you know, there's the startup, there's the testing, they're investing, there's a scaling and there's a sell or operate kind of mentality.

Right.

If you were to do it all over again, would you automatically start with the mindset of I'm going to build this to one day exit it or would you counsel other entrepreneurs to, to build it, to operate it?

So I think they're one in the same and most people don't realize that. Right. Like if, if you want to build a company to exit or you want to build a company to maintain, they literally should look the exact same way. The, the thing is, is most people think that if I'm building this to operate, I can skimp on a different things because it's going to give me a little bit more cash flow. But guess what? It's going to take a whole lot more time and energy and everything out of your life. Right. The reason, the reason why private equity or a strategic buyer is going to come in and buy your business is because it operates without you. Right. It like that. That is the reason people like, they want to know that if they come in and they replace you, kick you to the curb, that you're not going to miss a hitch and that thing is going to continue to grow and continue to develop. Which I would argue to say that that is exactly what you want to do as an operator. Like, you want to be able to have options of whether or not I show up to work every single day or not. And so the goal has to be, like I said, make this thing operate without you. And what does that look like it means? Means proper structure. It means proper roles, goals and responsibilities, proper KPIs, proper standard operating procedures. It means an incredible management team that can operate independently of you and is only held to a very high standard of certain KPIs that you can check in once a week, once a month, once a quarter. Right. Like the, these are, that is the goal. And, and if you're, if you do that, from like I said, from an operating standpoint, you will have the option to sell. Now, having sold it, it's so funny. Like we, you've experienced this recently selling your business. You go through this like, weird phenomenon of like, I go and I sell an operating business to make money, only to turn around to invest into operating businesses to make more money.

And it's like, so true.

No matter what, no matter what, you will be in an operating business in some level for the rest of your life. Whether you're investing in the S&P 500, which is a bunch of operating businesses, you're investing in real estate, which is an operating business. Right. The only time that you're not is if you're an idiot and you just sit and live off of cash. Right.

And which eliminates very quickly when you do it that way.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so like, if you understand, like, no matter what, I'm going to be an operating business for the rest of my life. I just got to make sure that whatever am I building or investing in are things that give me the option to participate in or not.

Yeah.

And so that, that's really, I mean, the, the biggest advice that I would.

Give, dude, I think it's brilliant advice. I also think that again, just using that as a, as a launching point. It's interesting to me that yes, you go from operating a business of people and, and stuff and you go to operating relationships of other operators that actually need your skill set, mentorship to develop their own, their own, you know, organizations. When you think about it, you're always compounding. So I think that's the difference is when you're operating in one singular revenue lane, a business, construction business, a service business, a hair place, a nail place or whatever, and you are able to exit that now you're kind of transitioning to now you're getting compounded efforts on other operators that if you're wise, you can mentor and teach and educate.

Yep, yep.

So with that in mind, I know you guys got, I know you got some really cool stuff coming on. I know you got a private Facebook group you just launched. Who's, who's this private Facebook group for? How do we join? What's, what's the. What's. How do we do it?

Yeah, so the, the name of the private Facebook group is Next level Home Pros and it's targeted towards people that are in the residential home product service construction industry. So like if you sell a product or a service to a homeowner, that's the group. So it's a free group on Facebook. We also have like an ascension model where you can come and buy our course and get, you know, mentorship and coaching. We have masterminds, we have all, all that. But that, that's definitely not what I'm here to pitch. Like, my, my mission is to change the world through entrepreneurship. And if you can take a free piece of my content and do it like, please, please do so. So, yeah, that's, that's one of the, the best. We're actually in the middle. I have a, a top. I've been as high as top 15 business podcasts called the founder Podcast. We are actually currently rebranding it to the Next level Home Pro Podcast. And so we're, we're kind of doing a whole rebrand. So you can either look us up at the Founder podcast or it, depending on when you listen to this, it might be rebranded already.

No, that's awesome. No. And here's the crazy part. I think, I think people underestimate. I know I did early on most of the external wisdom that I didn't have to learn. The hard headed way of hitting my head against a wall or losing money or whatever came from outside mentorship. Like, to this day I invest in coaching. To this day I invest in masterminds. To this day I invest in getting myself around other people who are more successful with high values, integrity, character and things of that nature on a regular basis. How's it been for you in this transition? Obviously you were able to grow and scale organizations, exit organizations. Are you still using coaching and mentorship in your own right to take yourself to the next level?

100%. So in 2015, I made the commitment to myself that I would invest in something at least once a quarter. And that's really when my career changed right up until that Point I had been moderately successful, you know, but it wasn't until I invested in coaching, consulting, masterminds, events, whatever else that everything changed. And so since 2015, I've spent a million bucks on my personal education and I continue to do that and, and host that myself. And so I do that in, in one of two ways. Like I, I host masterminds and I have two different level masterminds. I have one that's targeted towards the home service, but I also have this high tier one of people that are doing like 8, 9, 10 figures. Like crazy minds, like literally have billionaires. And it's just something that I have put together. We go out to my Hawaii property, there's 10 to 12 of us, we talk ideas, strategy, everything like that. People pay to be a part of that. I put it on but like, man, I get as much out of that as, as anybody else does. That's part of that group. And, and then on top of that, like I continue to pay coaches, I continue to pay consultants. I paid, you know, Steve stage speaking coaches. I've, I've paid content creation coaches. I'm currently a part of this Harvard OPM program where I spend 50 grand a year to continue to go back and gather with these people for three weeks at a time. Man. It's, I, it's so invaluable that you have to invest in yourself. It's the greatest asset you'll ever have.

Dude, I'm so. Yeah, I'm glad. It's funny, no matter how many times I ask that question, I have yet to have a single guest that is, that is, that is uber successful in their own right. That doesn't still have coaching and that they attempt like it's, this is an intangible that I think is very underrated with most entrepreneurs. I actually think that's why 8 out of 10 businesses does, you know, basically go out of business in the first five years. And I believe that that's the case is because is there they're doing the whole isolation thing and I'm guilty of that. I know it was a while before I was like, crap, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Yeah, I built a 10 million dollar company at the top, at the, at the time in the top line. And I was like, I had done it off of sheer energy and passion, had no idea what the hell I was doing. I'd never really led a team. I didn't know what I was leading out of insecurity and fear because I had a GED but yet I had people with 4 year degrees reporting to me. I didn't want them to know I didn't know what I was doing at the time. Like the masterminds and the coaching and the, I mean this is, this is real material that everybody should take advantage of.

Let me, let me actually share an example story that would blow most people's minds. That's regarding this. So like I am so committed to my personal development in every area of life that if there is a piece of knowledge that I can gain, like I'm not going to try to be the biggest of the walk in any room, right? Like I recognize that I am dumb, right? Like, and, and, and that there are people out there that know more about me in everything. I'm a big, I'm a big investor and everything. So two and a half years ago I was buying a jet, okay? The Phenom. Phenom 300.

That's my jet.

Yeah, you have it?

No, I don't have it. That's the one, that's the one I'm after.

Okay. So I go to buy a jet. I'm buying a $7 million jet cash two and a half years ago. And while I'm going and it's in Florida, I'm in Washington state. I go to pick it up. But knowing like I'm going to be, I want to be out there for a couple days, I start looking for a way that I can be educated while I'm out there. So I find this mastermind of guys that are teaching trailer park real estate investments. And I, and I'm like, man, you know I'm going to pay to go to that, okay. And so I show up to this thing and I'm a student in the room. There's 30 of us, right? I think it was like 5,000 bucks. It was a cheap mastermind or two day event. And like it comes out, people figure out that I am literally not only there for the mastermind, but I'm there to pick up my jet, right? And, and, and, and people like, it blew their mind. They're like, dude, why are you sitting in this room? Right? Like, like there is no reason you should be sitting in this room. We should be learning from you all this stuff like that. And I'm like, why? What are you talking about? I'm like, I'm like, I have, I do not know how to invest in trailer parks. That's why I'm here, right? Like I want to learn from you and everything like that. And so it was Just like this huge, you know, dichotomy. Just huge shift for everybody. It's like, look there. There is never a time that you should think, I know enough, I've learned enough. I have enough knowledge. Right. Like, I don't care if you're going out and you're buying your jet. You should be looking for opportunities to go and grow and develop and. And, dude, that was. That was pretty awesome. So I attend this event, established some great relationships, flew the jet home. Fantastic experience.

Dude, that's awesome. That's so good. That's such a good. That's such a good story, too, because again, I kind of look at it this way. If you're not going to be hungry now, meaning hungry for knowledge, hungry for wisdom, hungry for growth, you're going to be hungry later, meaning hungry for food, hungry for lights, hungry for housing. Like, you can really. You can really set yourself apart, because especially in entrepreneurship, there are so many things that can become a pitfall.

Yeah.

Like out of the blue, some team member of yours might do something dumb and you get sued for it.

Y.

There's. I mean, there's so many different ways that if you don't have knowledge from those that have been there, done that, got the T shirt and spent and spend time with them to get that. That nugget here and nugget there. I mean, I'm. People ask me all the time, you know, they're like, well, how did you go from homelessness to whatever? And I'm like, honestly, I just decided I didn't know everything and I wanted to learn as much as I possibly could.

Yeah.

So now I can. Now I can sit into a deal and I can talk private equity terms, and I can talk to family office, and I can talk about operators over here and building great teams over here. And it's because I never stopped learning.

Yeah.

And I think the moral of the story, of especially this. This segment of the show is if you're going to be an entrepreneur or C suite professional, then you got to be a continual learner.

Yeah.

You've got to be invested in it. You can never get to the place where it's. It's all because of me that we're successful, and it's all because of me. Like, actually, so because of y', all when we're not successful and, you know that. That kind of thing.

Yeah, you know, you know, you know, it's interesting. I saw this chart the other day. It. It was like, from age 12 until age 80, and it was based off of how much you think you have life figured out, right? And. And from age 12 to about 26, 27, it's just straight up, right? Like. Like, you. You think you know so much about life and you essentially refuse to learn from other people because, like, I've got it figured out. I'm doing it on my own. Everything like that. And then you reach this peak at the end of your twenties when you start realizing, holy crap, I do not know what I. I don't know what I don't know, right? And then for the rest of your life, it diminishes. And. And like, the older you get, the wiser you get, the more you realize, the more humble you become. And, dude, there is so much more information out there. And I suffered from this big time. That's literally what led to my first. To my bankruptcy. My. My first business failure was that, like, I was unwilling to ask people for help. I was unwilling to go out and learn more. I thought I had it figured out. I thought I knew what success looked like and all these things. And so, like, the faster we can figure out that we do not know, nor will we ever know enough, the better position we're going to be in, bro.

Told you Master class today, guys. Master class. Chris, man, I can't thank you enough for being on the show, bro. You're always welcome to come back on anytime where somebody find out more about you and kind of engage with you.

Go ahead and follow me on Instagram at Chris Lee, qb, like quarterback. That's across all the different platforms I'm probably most active on on Facebook and Instagram. I got a Twitter, I got a Tik Tok, but I don't think that I don't post to them very often, so. But yeah, just go ahead and shoot me a DM on Instagram. And as long as not spam, y' all respond.

Love it, dude, man, thank you so much again.

Appreciate it.

I hope you liked that video. And if you did, make sure you check out this next video right here.

I would say there's two major things that we see newer investors get wrong. The first one, they only focus on return and they do not focus on risk. I. I would say that's the biggest.