Brilliant Business-Building Advice and Insights from a Serial Entrepreneur

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, thelandgeek.com and on this week's Roundtable podcast, we have a special guest. And when I say special, I'm going to put on my anchorman voice. This guy's a big deal. Okay. Sharon Shavaza is a 4 times 500 inc. 500 entrepreneur with 5 exits. And in the last 19 years, most recently, Sharon grew Telus properties by 10x in 5 years to 3.4 billion in sales. That's right, not million B billion in sales. And eventually sold the business to Douglas Elliman. Sharon is a former Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse banker, a sought after keynote speaker and angel investor. In addition to mentoring CEOs in his Ultra exclusive Legends program, Sharon also hosts the top rated podcast Business School and is the creator of the wildly popular 5am Club for entrepreneurs. He's also my friend and mentor and I just love the guy. Sharon, welcome.

Hey man, you're such a good hype man. I take you everywhere, wherever I go. I appreciate you doing this and I want to say one thing. It takes a lot of time and effort and resources to put this together. So for folks that just driving in their car, listening and saying, oh my gosh, that's another episode. It's not. There's so much more that happens to getting this all up and running, getting all of us on the call together, getting it post produced and show notes and out there. So I want to thank you for one, letting me be a part of it and two, for doing it.

Wow.

Absolutely. So Sharon, let's just rewind the tape. Like really rewind the tape because I never get tired of hearing the story. How did you come to this country?

So when I was in middle school, I was like a really. I was a very unspecial kid, very average kid. And I used to just get. I was colorblind, which is. Doesn't seem like a big deal, but you start to flunk out of art class. I was tone deaf, so that's not a big deal. But you start to get kicked out of music class. I was dyslexic, so that's not a big deal. But you don't do well in math. I was a scrawny little kid. So you don't get picked on teams and when all of those happen simultaneously, you get beaten. And you may I say it now with a smile on my face because after a lot of therapy. But at that point it was not funny, but it was not Funny and fascinating. I'll tell you the story. I wouldn't even Mark. I wouldn't even go from one classroom to the other classroom, walking by, because I knew that I would get beaten in the lockers. So I would run all the way around campus to go to the classroom that was 50 yards away. And my parents knew that something was wrong. This was all in India. My parents knew that something was wrong, and we didn't have the courage to, like, actually talk about it. So my dad, on my. I remember I was your 10th or 11th birthday. My dad told me, never left the country. Super guy. I'm the only child. And my dad said to me, he's like, I'm committed to giving you a better life. And I'm like, dude, I'm good. Like, are you kicking me out of the house? Like, what. What's this all about? And he says, I think you'll do really well in, like, either the US or in Canada. Like, that's very cold. Or Australia. And I was like, all sounds good. I'm happy here. But he's like, no, I want to make. I want to give you the option. Go. Okay. That's when, like, you know, I really thought about this concept of options. And my dad said this words, these words to me, if you don't know your options, you don't have any. If you don't know your options, you don't have any. And I think that is more prevalent for us today than any other time. If you don't know your options, you don't have any. And we were sitting in front of a tennis court, a couple tennis courts in a park bench, and my dad said to me, he says, can you cut it? I'm like, cut what? I was like, can you play tennis? And I was like, no, I've never hit a tennis ball in my life. He's like, well, we need some skill for you to, like, be wanted somewhere else. So I started trying to. I started learning how to play tennis, and that was my way of getting out of India and making it to.

The U.S. i love that story. I'm going to. I have so many more questions, Sharon, but I'm not going to be a podcast hog. I'm going to throw the baton to the Zen master, Mike Zaino. Mike, what is your question for Sharon?

Ron, it's nice to meet you. It's an honor to have you on here. So these. All these different successful businesses, obviously they involve the aspect of scaling them right? You know, growing them from their beginnings to the point where Maybe you exit them. So my question is, you know, we're looking people that are listening to this. A lot of them are land investors, and we're looking to scale. And I think what happens is we can get caught in the weeds, so to speak. How do you prevent that? Like, do you have an overall idea then? You know, there's a book called who Not. How do you empower people to bring this, this. This idea to life? Like, how do you. How do you make it happen without getting caught in the nitty gritty and. And therefore not moving forward very, you know, rapidly?

Yeah, great question. So it's easier for us to. Everyone's in a different place. It's easier for us to think in the perspective of frameworks. Let me give you a framework. First off, almost everybody defines scale differently. So let's define scale, right? Scale in my mind. And an online media buyer defines scale differently, saying, here's how I scale your Facebook ads. Bezos defines scale differently as, this is how I scaled Amazon. Ray Dalio defined scale differently, is how he actually scaled his hedge fund. But to me, if you define scale, you actually will get there faster. So my definition of scale is, can you actually formulaically grow your business? Formulaically, meaning I put $20 in, I get $80 out. Can I do that over and over until I get to that point, I have not hit scale. But to me, scale is in the fourth rung of this framework. The first rung of the framework is to standardize. We have to figure out how to standardize an operation first. So, hey, I go in, I look at areas where there's already a bunch of land investors. I look at this inefficient market. I see where they're buying and $6,500 to $9,500. I see how many I can buy there. I mark it, I buy something.

Cool.

I got that process. I'm going to do that over and over and over. Did I get that process right?

Cool.

I've standardized that process. Awesome. Now phase two. How do I optimize this process? Hey, can I talk to. Can I talk to Mike? Can I talk to Mark and say, hey, I'm doing this. Like, what would be one thing that you would do to upgrade this process? So now you're like, I already have this process. What can I do to upgrade this? Oh, hey, I would not. I would not mail to, like, Mark. I would not mail to out of area estate owners straight up. That's a good upgrade. Cut your list by a third, right? Did you guys see That I actually watch these videos, right? So, so, but. But you do that. So there's a small upgrade to that process, right? So now you do a few things where you're not fundamentally changing your standard process. You're just optimizing around it. Once you've optimized, now you're at a place where you're like, okay, I have a process that I can run that I know that given an input, I can get an output. This is really good. So standardize, number one, optimize number two. Now, the third part of it is where most people really struggle with, which is growth. Growth requires cash or it requires resources. But primarily growth requires cash. What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, hey, I have the standard process that I've optimized it. I'm going to throw some fuel, cash, resources, influencer attraction, more followers, more impressions, whatever. I'm gonna throw something at it that allows it to grow. Most people think that when you grow something, your top line or your gross grows. They think that your net grows at the same rate when growth happens, since it requires cash, your growth, your gross, and your net don't grow at the same rate. That is a fundamental thing to understand. Most people can't grow because when their gross grows and their net doesn't grow, in fact, it shrinks, it freaks them out, right? And that's very, very hard for most people. Growth is not for most people because they just can't stomach it, Right? But that's why growth requires cash. Once I've gotten to the point where I'm like, oh, okay, every ten grand I spend, I'm making three. Hey, I spent ten more grand. I made three and a half. I spent ten more grand. I made four. I'm getting better. So slowly, as you spend more on growth and you continue to standardize and optimize, you'll realize that there is a point where there is a formulaic function. You're like, I think I know when I can spend $11,000. I make $14,000 back in 30 days. You have a formula. That's when you hit your first step of scale. Step one, standardize. Step two, optimize. Step three, grow. And step four, scale. All our businesses follow the same thing. Whenever I look at somebody's business, I'm just saying, hey, what phase are you in? Right? And when someone tells me I want to grow my business, I'm like, that's great. But you don't have any standard. Like, you have no standardization. You have no. No fundamental Way to grow. Because you don't even have delivery figured out. So if I, if I just send you 18 more clients tomorrow, you couldn't take them? Like my pool contractor, I'm like, he's like, I want to grow my business. I'm like, all right, I'm going to send you 16 leads tomorrow. Can you. I can't do that. Or you can't because you don't have a standardized process. That's all it is. Right. So my goal is to always figure out where people are in the business to standardize, optimize, grow, scale.

Amazing. Thank you.

Sorry, I get a little excited about this stuff.

No, you got me excited now, guys, I could keep going, but I don't want to hog.

Cause now I know it was just in the beginning of the podcast. Let's pass the baton. The dude, buddy. The nightcap OG Scott Bossman. Scott, what pearls of wisdom would you like Sharon to impart to you?

Shawn. Nice to meet you. Thanks for being here. So in the land business, thousand foot view, really, there's two main pillars. There's mailing and there's marketing. Right. The more we mail, the more we buy, the more we market, the more we sell. So, you know, taking a look at your website here, one of the first things I see is learn marketing from my 10 year old son. But I thought that. So I think that's kind of cool. But can you just briefly tell us some marketing strategies that might help in our niche? Cause I know you know a little bit about the land business and maybe what your 10 year old son said in that, in that podcast.

Yeah, let's. So everyone should go listen to that podcast. So go to. It's the business school podcast. And I'll summarize the podcast very quickly for everybody. Awesome. My son and I were watching the Marvel series, right? We're watching the Marvel series and we saw. I was talking, I was, I was on a hoverboard with him and I said, hey, do you remember the car that Iron man drove in the movie? He's like, audi. And I'm like, do you think Audi paid him to do that? He's like, of course. I'm like, why do you think that was a good investment? He's like, well, just having a good car is not enough. People should know that you have a good car. That was his definition of marketing, which I think is so for astute for a 10 year old. Doesn't matter what you know and have. If other people don't know about it, who cares, right? And so we had talked about this idea of product placement, which is, hey, just by having the Audi R8 Spyder in the Ironman movies, Audi that was, that actually propelled Audi sale of that car. Just like the Ray Bans actually really got popular because of the old school Top Gun. Till then there were no aviators, whatever they're called, right? It didn't exist. And so a big part of marketing for me is like really trying to figure out how do I get somebody to know about something that doesn't already exist, right? And the more they know about it, familiarity starts to build a trust. Very simply speaking, it's the attraction phase, right? There's three ways to actually attract anything, something, everything. First way is organically, organically, kind of use your brand, small, big, medium to actually grow in some way. So when Mark has a trusted brand and Mark posts on social, everyone's like, oh, Mark said that, so something happens with it. So number one is organically using brand. People just think that that's the only way. But there's a second one which is the paid. You can write a check to make things work, right? In the olden days, there are only three ways to get notice and it was really expensive. You can either get on tv, get on radio or get in print. You can do direct mail, but get on tv, get on radio and get in print was the way you got. But all those three, if you're a Coca Cola and had a lot of money, you get on tv. If you were a local car dealership, you get on radio. And if you were like a real estate agent, you would get in print, right? Because the others couldn't afford the other tactics. But writing a check to get a result is very good because it makes you very responsible with your marketing dollars. And a lot of people don't want to write the check because they don't want to be responsible with their marketing dollars because they're afraid that they have not standardized, optimized, grow and scale. That's why. So when you have a standardized process, you actually don't mind writing the check. But third, I actually think this is the least used, most effective marketing model is JVs and partnerships. It is crazy. Someone else already has your audience writing them a check or doing some kind of trade with them to help promote or get more attraction is so much easier. I would always start with the JVs and partnerships today because you have micro influencers, you have, you know, you have, you have, you small time influencer, influencers, podcasters, whatever that can get the message out. So Much faster than they could 20 years ago. So anytime I'm looking at the marketing world, I'm thinking, hey, is this an organic strategy? Can I just email my list and have something happen? Is this a paid strategy where I can actually write a small check to get the result that I want? Or is this a JV strategy where I can actually partner with someone else to reach their audience that I could have never reached otherwise?

Dude. Buddy.

Oh, that's great. Yeah. Thank you very much. Can I ask a Fun question in 15 seconds or less? What's your and your son's favorite Marvel TV show that's gonna.

Dude, we've watched everything that exists, watched everything in order. We love Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that's our. Because it had, like, seven seasons, and it got all weird in, like, season four and five. But it gave us a chance. During the early pandemic, when my kids were home, we watched a show a day, every day. So for like, close to 12 months, we watched a show for, like 300 days in a row, which my wife didn't enjoy, but my son dramatically, which is really good.

That's the only one I haven't watched. So now I'm gonna watch.

Oh, it's really good, man. You totally get into it. It's great.

Oh, yeah. You and Bossman could geek out on this stuff. We could do a whole podcast on just that. Alas, time is short and valuable. So the technician, Eric Peterson, what question do you have for Sharon?

All right. Good to meet you, Sharon. I've listened to some videos and whatnot. There's something you talked about once, and it was a phrase, create tomorrow, today. And I want you to talk about that a little further. I think that that could be so powerful for many in our community. Just go with that. Totally. So there's a story behind it. My father and mother ran a small advertising company out of our one bedroom apartment. And the front part of the apartment was the office, the living room area, and we lived in the bedroom. Literally, that was us. I remember a day when. This is no joke. When my dad. I woke up and dad had a meeting, and I was stuck in the bedroom and I couldn't leave, so I just stayed in the bedroom all day. Didn't go to school. I didn't even have any food. So I ate, like, cashews for, like, the entire day. Which is. Which is fascinating, but I will never forget this, Eric. Every single night after dinner, my dad would sit at the dining room table because we didn't. That was the only table we had in our house. He would sit at the dining room table, and he had a big. This big leather journal, and he would flip the page to a new page. He had a fountain pen, like a real traditional ink pen. He would write the date tomorrow on top of the page, and he would just start writing a list of everything that he had to get done. He only gave himself one page worth of things to do the next day. So he would just write the list and he would kind of recap his pen, put the pen down, leave the book open. So, you know, that's where he would start the next day. And he would always. He would get up and say, sharon, always create tomorrow, today. And he'd walk away every single night, right? And so it was his idea that if he could plan and actually create that for the next day, the reality would actually happen today. And my dad would not leave, would not be done for the day unless all that, everything on that one page got done. And I'm like that in a lot of ways today. Like, I have a little notebook that I write my stuff in every single day. And you plan tomorrow, you create tomorrow today. It's a small little shift, but when you can live into the future in your present, it brings a lot of things, brings a lot of things to life. But it's a nice way of kind of just, you know, honoring my dad's memory every single day. He's fantastic. He's a good friend of mine. He is the first and only entrepreneur that I know who inspires me. So he taught me that.

Love it.

I love it. And if you're listening to this and you feel like, gosh, this guy knows a lot about a lot and productivity. Would it be great, Sean, if you made a productivity playbook? Awesome. You could learn a lot. Anyways, I have Shiron's productivity playbook. And I've become even more ambitiously lazy after going through that.

We all want to be like you, Podolsky.

I don't know. I don't know. But before the love fest continues, we gotta give. I love it when you call me Big Papa. Tate Litchfield, a crack at a question here for Sharon.

Yeah, Sharon, thanks for coming on. We really appreciate it. As somebody who has worked with high level CEOs and big time entrepreneurs, I gotta wonder, is there a common personality trait? Is there something that helps these people become so determined to succeed? Have you noticed any sort of characteristics in working with these CEOs or top level performers?

Yeah, totally. There's three, but I'll give you two of them. Because the first one's going to seem very egotistical. So I will not talk about that. But I'll give you two of them. Two traits that every single top entrepreneur that I know, and there are Several public company CEOs that I mentor who run, you know, like billion dollar businesses. It is common. Not just common, it is on point with them every single time. Skipping number one. Number two is an incredible sense of insecurity. An incredible. Like they wake up every morning thinking, I'm not good enough, I need to do more, I need to be more, I need to give more, I need to achieve more. That drive, no matter how wealthy they are, no matter how much they have created, it drives them so much. There's nothing that drives someone, drives someone more than their insecurity. And these people channel it in a very positive way. Right? That's number two of three. Here's number three of three. Obsessive impulse control. Obsessive impulse control in modern day language, discipline. Right. Hey, I promised that I would like. I'm gonna get this report done and I told Eric that I was gonna get this report done by Thursday at noon, come hell or high water. I'm gonna get this report done by Thursday at noon. I committed to my wife that I'm going to not eat, you know, carbohydrates for the next six weeks. There is no cheating. Like, it does not exist. It is like obsessive impulse control. Hey, we are looking at this metric for growth. We are going to mail out 97 cards every day for the next hundred days. We're going to mail out 97 cards every single day for the next hundred days. It is the discipline, impulse control for is so intense. It's super simple, actually. I'll give you actually the first one. The first one is a scent, is a, is this innate sense of superiority. It sounds like ego, but it's not. What it is is that when I feel like it's not a sense of superiority, it's a sense of responsibility. When I feel like I'm really good, I need to deliver. I was born with a gift. I wake up every morning and I act in congruence with that belief that I have to work harder, I have to be an athlete, I have to show up, I have to have better energy, I have to deliver more. Right. So the sense of superiority is actually a really powerful thing if channeled right?

Because.

Because it allows you to like wake up and act in congruence with that sense of superiority. That combined with the insecurities like, oh, crap, I need to do more. So it makes them work harder, and then the impulse control makes them stay on course. When you combine those three things, you get, like, the most successful people. But in fact, even if they have one of the three, you. They're already winning already. So, like, people that really. If you. If, you know, like, really successful people, you will think you're like, okay, does this person just have insane sense of superiority, as. In a positive way? And they act in congruence with that. Like. Like Kobe. Kobe is like, I am talented. I'm amazing, but I'm gonna show up. And he put, what, eight hours of the gym? Because he's like, I'm gonna act in congruence with that insecurity, right? You. You of a lot of people. Warren Buffett, he's not. He's. He's like, I don't know the market. I need to do a ton more research. I'm gonna read all the 10Ks and 10 keys and this extreme sense of discipline. David Goggins. I'm just going to be ultra disciplined over and over and over, and I will just win on my discipline alone. Right? But when you combine all three of them, like an Elon. Elon's an alien. We know that, right? Like, he. That is just hard to be. You're not human that way. But those three things, when you, like, put them together, and even if you think about it for our own lives, which one of those can I upgrade? Get to. You get to some pretty amazing results right away.

I love that.

That's. That's powerful. Because I think if you listen to other people talk about these traits of what it takes to be successful, you're going to hear, oh, you need to be. You need to be tenacious or you need to be, you know, a team player, or you need to do certain things. And what you just said is kind of. It's. I guess it's a little bit more raw. It's probably a little bit more real. It's like, look, you got to have a win at all cost attitude. These guys want to perform, and they're not satisfied unless they do. So I appreciate that insight. It's very, very helpful. Thank you.

Got it.

I love it. I'm kind of waiting for everybody to be like, no, Sharon, that's not true at all. Like. Like, no one's challenging any of the things he's saying.

I just. I just yell. So it's great. I just say, you want to say it, like, emphatically, you know, Kate Just doesn't want to challenge me back, which is great.

I'll challenge you off air.

Off air.

Off air, baby.

No, I mean, but you know, the reason, you know, because typically, you know, we just for fun, we'd like to challenge our guests, but the pearls of wisdom just keep coming out. So there's. And I was saying this to Eric, there's Sharonisms. So there's certain phrases that Sharon will say and that really sort of open up your mind to different things. They could also keep you out of making a colossal mistake and ruining your business. One of my favorite charonisms is don't risk the empire for a pot of gold. Sharon, do you mind elaborating on that?

Dude, Totally.

I.

My part, my mentor Walter Schneider said some version of that to me. And I'll tell you, Walter owns, We used to run a real estate business. Walter, he is so under the radar. Walter owns one third of the world in ReMax, so he has like 41,000 agents that work for him. It's stupid. He's awesome. I was sitting with Walter in the Canadian woods and he said something like that because I told him about this opportunity that I had. And I said to him, I was like, hey, I'm going to, I'm going to take this opportunity. It's going to allow me to. I really want to do this startup company. They're going to put me in a CEO. I'm going to raise money, get this company up and running. It'll only be a three to six month project and then I can come back to our real estate company. And I'd already made up my mind that I was going to do that. But Walter's like, dude, you have a $3 billion business and you're going to go run a startup for six months? Yes, it's a pot of gold. Yes, you can do it to like feel better about yourself, but you're risking the empire for a pot of gold. It looks great. You're gonna. He's like, what you need? You need more people to give you a CEO title? You know, it means nothing, right? And. But the 28 year old and me was like, I want to do that. There's a lot of, a lot of things that happen in our lives would come up as opportunities. And we want to do it because it's like, oh, that looks lucrative on its own. As we say on Wall street, idiosyncratically, that looks in isolation, that looks, you know, lucrative on its own. But when you put it in the grand scheme of things, made Effect, like, for you, Mark, hey, you're like, hey, I don't care how much that is, but if it's going to take away nine hours of my week, like, I'm out. I just don't want to do that. There's a. There's a. There's the opposite side of that quote, Mark, is when you don't have a strategy, everything looks like an opportunity. When you don't have a strategy, everything looks like an opportunity. And I think the opportunity mindset of we live in a very opportunistic generation of, oh, give me a little affiliate commission here. Let me get, like, one piece of land there. Let me do one little flip here. When you do that, we all like the land. Business is the perfect example of how you shouldn't risk the empire for a pot of gold. It's like, hey, I got this gold great deal that I'm going to owner finance. I'm like, brute. No, stay. Buy that piece. Market it out. Owner finance, Buy the next one owner, like, it's very. Just stay with the plan, right? That's the empire. And that's why, you know, when Mike asked about the original question of the scale, that's why the standardized, optimized growth scale are really important, knowing where you are in the life cycle because it forces you to not be enamored by pots of gold. It forces you to realize, I'm in the standardization phase. I'm the optimization phase. This is all I care about. I'm in the growth phase. I'm spending cash and like, hey, everything else is a distraction. My. My. One of my partners in our multifamily business. We run a multifamily business, and one of my partners, my partner in the multifamily business got this insane opportunity, and he. This. These two guys reached out who run a New York hedge fund, and they're like, hey, we want to work with somebody who's done multifamily. We will gladly, just to coach us for the next year, we'll play pay you whatever you want. And Robert, my partner, was like, hey, can you find my other coach? I'm really focused right now. I'm like, bro, he's gonna write you, like, the biggest check you want. He's like, bro, I'm focused right now. And it was so insane to, like, just HEAR that, because 10 year ago, Sharon would have taken that opportunity. But. But today, a lot of times we have to look at the pot of goal as the opportunity today, in the backdrop of how we want to live our lives and so sometimes when you don't have a strategy, everything looks like an opportunity.

I love that. In fact, when's the book going to come out of Charonisms, Dude, I. I'll.

Give you the ten second book story. So I wrote, I wrote this book and I'll give you the title to it. It's the book is called Underdog How Ordinary. How Ordinary Entrepreneurs Build Extraordinary Companies. That was kind of the idea and I didn't enjoy it. I wrote it, it was okay. And then I had my friend updated and ghostwrite it for me. He did a good job. Then I read it and I just didn't feel it. So it's the manuscripts on the shop somewhere right now. Hasn't. Hasn't been published. So you need a second.

If you need a second opinion on it, feel free to send it to my way. I mean, I'll read it for you and give you some feedback.

Sean, you should like, I think this is going to be one of those where it probably just makes its way to the masses in manuscript form and never actually gets published. So. But it, you gotta leak it like WikiLeak. WikiLeak the book?

Yeah, you gotta leak it on the dark web. Make people like go deep for.

Didn't, you know? Like, I wish I could. I wish I wrote Dirt Rich. Like that would be great, right? I wish I wrote that. But it didn't. Like, after I read my book, I was not. I, it didn't float. My. But my dad, my dad read it, he's like, bro, you should publish it. And I'm like. And so I think there's this, this thing of, do you want to write a book or do you want to write the book? And I, I know I can't write the book, but I'm also in my head. So this is me being vulnerable and saying it's. I'm in my head.

Well, I, I can help you because I'm actually. I actually wrote a second book that had nothing to do with land. And I read it and I hated it. I'm like, who am I to write this book? Maybe. I mean, I, I kind of wrote it for my kids, like, kind of thing. I kind of had them in mind. But then when I read it, I'm like, do I really want to share this with the world? I probably wasn't ready, but I'll probably do the same thing, you know, I'm committed to it.

Yeah, I'm committed.

Marinate.

I'm committed to it. I think I did this for about a year Mark, I don't know if you know that. For about a year, I wrote this little mini booklet every month to all our portfolio companies. It was called the CEO Playbook. And I would pick one idea and I would write maybe 20 or 30 pages. It was actually some of my best work. It was really good. I did it for 12 months, but it took forever because it would take me three days a month to write this. This thing. I was like, I don't want to do this anymore. But then I got the idea that maybe I'll do like, these shorter playbooks. Because the. The avatar of the person wanting to read something is, hey, I want something tactical. So I was like, maybe I'll do a culture playbook. Maybe I'll do a growth playbook. Maybe I'll do a brand playbook. So I was thinking about doing that. That's the idea right now. But, you know, I need to. I need to standardize it, Mike. Standardized first. Haven't done that yet.

Well, if there anything like the productivity playbook, you know, you take my credit card now.

I appreciate it, man.

You're too.

You're too kind.

I want to be respectful of your time, Sean. I don't want to do a whole other round of questions. What should I have asked you? Or what should we have asked you that we didn't ask you?

The one topic that we should all be talking about today is I think, the idea of, like, greatness. And I mean that in a very, like, non, look at me amazing way. Not, not that way. But what makes. What makes each of us great? How do we. How do we actually tap into some insane potential? And I've been thinking a lot about kind of greatness as a. As a construct, not. Not in a. Not. Not linguistically. And to me, I think greatness. The question that I would. That we should all be asking and talking about is like, where does greatness lie? And the thing that I come back to over and over again is like, greatness is in the granularity of the things that we do. Greatness is in the depth. Right? So that you have a lot of influencers today that have tens of millions of followers, but they've never run a business before. Right. I actually have friends who are influencers who have never actually recorded a video that is longer than 60 seconds in their life. Right? And I tell them to their face because I don't care, right? I'm like, bro, you don't know. Like question number point number four. You have your three points that are perfect, but you don't know the fourth point, or you don't know how to actually execute that, or when something breaks, what do you actually do? And they tell me straight up, I don't need to, I don't need to. And I think that's okay because this generation is allowed for this. But I think true greatness is in the granularity. I'll give you a simple example. I run this thing called the 5am Club. The 5am Club is a traditional phone call. Five minutes in the morning at 5am Pacific Time. So everybody dials into one conference call number. It started off with three people and.

Me.

Five, six years ago, maybe more. And I just wanted some accountability to wake up at five in the morning. So I had three friends get up with me and they're like, sean, I don't want to be on this call with you. I'm like, here's a call, a number. I'll say something somewhat entertaining for three to five minutes. It could be inspirational, it could be story. So I did it the first day and I got three dings. Ding, ding, ding. When people came on the second day, I got, ding, ding, ding, ding. I got four dings. And I'm like, I didn't give the number to anyone else. The third day I was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I was like, why are seven people on the screen call? So three went to four, went to seven, went to 70, went to 700. And today we have 7,000 people on this call. So there's 7,000 people that wake up every day. Some of them cheat, but every day at 5:00am Pacific Time, right? Rain or shine, and 365 days a year, holidays, Christmas, weekends, whatever, right? And I've been doing this call for six and a half, six some plus years, every single day at 5:00am Pacific Time. And you get. Talk about the granularity of showing up every single day with a message like that. And my wife asked me, she's like, of all the things that you've done, she's like, is that important to you? I'm like, of all the things that I've done, that 5am club is probably my most dearest accomplishment. Because nobody in the world can beat me because I'm. Because I'm 2,000 calls ahead. Even if you started today, you could never beat me, right? I think the granularity of how we actually show up is super important. So I end every call with this phrase. No matter how you slice it, greatness is a choice, right? And I think it's. It's Choice, like greatness is truly a choice. You can wake up and choose to go back to bed, or you can wake up and choose to hit snooze. You can wake up and try to get a mentor. You wake up and try to watch a thousand videos and still not get the answer right. You can, you can. It's a lot of it is just a choice. In fact, Summer Mark is a choice. Like, you are like, peace out, Arizona, I'm going to Asia. Like, you are like that, which is smart. You don't want to be in 120 degree weather. Right? But I'm really, I'm really attracted to people who are, who are so focused on, like, understanding that component of, like, hey, how do I level myself up and tap into something that I've never tapped into before? Like, what can, what can someone else outside looking and say, man, that, that was just great. That was great. So I just really love the concept of the construct of greatness.

I love that. I love that. Eric Peterson is this awesome, awesome dude, buddy.

Yeah. Great words.

Thank you, master.

Yeah, thank you very much, Sharon. I really, I really appreciate your time today.

I love when you call me Big Papa. Tate Litchfield.

Thank you. Thank you for joining us.

I, I wish Sharon could just do like the mic drop now, but we still have more. We still have more. So, Sharon, your mentorship. This podcast has been invaluable, but as is the Art of Passive Income podcast tradition, we're going to ask you for one more tip. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the Art of Passive Income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. But before you do that, I do have to give out a shout out to our sponsor. This week, it's flight school. Learn how the next 16 weeks can literally transform your life. Start building that passive income quickly, safely, efficiently, with Scott Todd as your Sherpa. He's done it thousands of times. And that flight school tuition ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make it back 180 days or less. Just show us your work. Learn more. Go to thelandgeek.com training thelandgeek.com training Sharad, what is your tip of the week?

You know, my tip of the week is I love virtual assistants. And I actually don't even want to call them virtual assistants anymore. I have nine on my team alone, just on shron brand, just on my brand team alone. And they're all virtual team members. They're more team members than anyone else there around the us. Us And I recently started advising an insane company called Assistantly and they're my secret resource. Let me tell you why I love them. Assistantly.com I don't get any kickback or anything. Assistantly.com I love it because they actually take my advice on the various ways in which virtual assistants can help people's businesses. But my favorite part is for, based on, for all, all the clients that they bring on, the company builds homes for these virtual assistants in the Philippines. That's what I love so much. Because they're like, hey, you're pouring into clients around the world. We're gonna pour into you and build homes for you and create infrastructure for you so you can have a better life. That really touched me a lot. So I've given them ideas on, hey, you should do a 10 hour a week va. You should do part time vas. You should do social media only vas. You should do Instagram specialists. So instead of just hiring somebody and training them to do what you do, giving people a lot of options on how they can fit their lives is super important. So assistantly.com mention my name. You may get like a water bottle or something, but that's all you'll get. But I love, I just love when we can grow our team because when we grow our team more, we enroll more people into the greater vision that we have. So just small ways to grow your team can be bringing on some virtual team members that can help help you further your mission.

I love it. And everybody who's listening to this in the land business or any business, you know the, the value of a great VA and to have, you know, the Sharon stamp of approval and to have that layered upon their why and that purpose, knowing how you're supporting a a business like that, assistantly.com is amazing. So Sharon, I would usually haze you for your tip of the week, but that one's amazing and this podcast was amazing. However, I've got my tip of the week which is learn more about Sharon. And I promise you, just like this podcast, you will walk away feeling smarter, more energized, more focused, feeling your inner greatness. So go just to simply sharon.com sharon.com I'll put a little teaser out there. There is going to be another podcast with Sharon, myself and the slow talkers, Russ Morgan, Joey Murray from Wealth Without Wall Street. We are all in a mastermind group together. We talk about our insights from that experience and share it with you. So you'll get even more Sharon wisdom than pumped into your veins. Your brain and it's just a total pleasure. And I've, I have to say, I'm relishing this opportunity.

Sure.

I don't even want it to end just because it only took about two years to get you on the podcast.

I'm so sorry. Well, kudos to you because I have not done an interview podcast in almost 18 months. And by design, because we went to a solo only show and so we've been. We've been focusing on things. So it's my. This is my. This is my. This is my comeback tour, man. Starting with. Starting with you.

Wow. I'm, I, I can't tell you how honored. And I'm humbled. I am. So. Thank you so much. Are we good? All right. I want to thank the listeners, Remind them the only way, the only way we're going to get the quality of guests like a Sharon Shravaza is if you do us three favors. Follow rate Review the podcast. Send a screenshot of that review. Support thelantgeek.com we're going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich, which is now worth about a million dollars in Ethereum. So please, please, please do it. All right, we ready to do this? 1, 2, 3, let's freedom, freedom ring. Thanks, everybody. Shroud's like, oh, I didn't even know they were going to end like that then. Might have been 19 months jumped on. All right, well, thanks, everybody, and thanks, guys. We'll go check out some marvel shows after this.

Thank you.

Thanks.

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