Transforming Adversity into Entrepreneurial Triumph and Community Impact with Jason Sisneros

Every so often, we encounter stories that starkly remind us of the incredible resilience of the human spirit. This episode features an extraordinary individual whose journey from the depths of domestic violence and crime to the peaks of entrepreneurship and philanthropy embodies this resilience. Our guest's candid revelation of his transformative life story, spurred by pivotal mentorships and a relentless pursuit of self-improvement, will undeniably inspire you. He discusses the power of choice and the belief that we are not defined by our past, but rather by the actions we take to shape our future.

Navigating through the labyrinth of business success, our conversation turns to the invaluable lessons learned from failures. Our guest shares his insights into the importance of strategic planning, building assets, and the realization that success encompasses not just profit, but also creating value for the community. We delve into his commitment to tackling social issues, including domestic violence and human trafficking, revealing the profound impact that one's success can have on the lives of others when directed towards the greater good.

Lastly, we explore the foundational elements of a robust business culture, the importance of conversation, and the community in entrepreneurship. Our guest emphasizes the role of culture as the guiding force during challenging times and the necessity for leaders to understand and support their team's goals. This episode is not just a recount of triumph over adversity, but also a masterclass on the resilience needed for entrepreneurship and the transformative effect of giving back. Join us for a powerful lesson in how, with the right mindset and support, you can overcome your circumstances and contribute positively to the world.

Nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. 

The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.

 Sign up to The Lead-Lag Report on Substack and get 30% off the annual subscription today by visiting http://theleadlag.report/leadlaglive.

Foodies unite…with HowUdish!

It’s social media with a secret sauce: FOOD! The world’s first network for food enthusiasts. HowUdish connects foodies across the world!

Share kitchen tips and recipe hacks. Discover hidden gem food joints and street food. Find foodies like you, connect, chat and organize meet-ups!

HowUdish makes it simple to connect through food anywhere in the world.

So, how do YOU dish? Download HowUdish on the Apple App Store today: Support the Show.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

My name is Michael Guy at Publisher of the Lead Lager Port. You owe me for the rough hour of Jason's narrows. Jason, I changed the name of the space a number of times as I was listening to some of your prior interviews and I thought that your past does not define you. Bracing the cycle kind of sounded right given your background, but it's just the audience. Who are you with your background? What have you done throughout your career? Anyway, what are your thoughts on the story that you're currently doing and I know there's a huge backstory- there.

Speaker 2: 0:31

That's right, I love it. You know, having to define my own life on a day-to-day basis is also difficult, so I'm glad you found difficulty in it as well. I'm really excited to be with you today, brother. You know I love following you and learning from you and it's been really great as far as myself. The short story and you know we'll get into whatever we need to, but the short story is I was adopted fairly young and the guy that adopted me was not a good guy and, you know, beat my mom and he pretty badly up until the point where I was 17 when he went to prison for attempted murder of me and my mom.

Speaker 2: 1:08

In that time I learned how to do, you know, criminal stuff. Started delivering drugs when I was 12, started collecting money from people. Didn't pay for the drugs when I was 16. But luckily I had people in my life that were mentors, that were you know. I kind of look at them like angels, put into my life at the right times for me to just to offer a different path and then for me to either choose and most of the people that I know family members, whatnot they're either dead or in prison at this point and I chose wisely, when I could, to follow a different path.

Speaker 2: 1:45

I learned about business and had some really great mentors in my life and started my own company when I was fairly young, bankrupted three in a row. And you know sort of, I think, what, what happens with a lot of people when you fail at something over and over again, you sort of either go into a depression or you just keep failing or you turn it around one way or the other. But I fell into a deep depression and that led me to Tony Robbins and I ended up going to work for him, traveled with him for several years as one of his top speakers, and that put me in the presence of really great business owners and I had taken three notebooks of from my failures, of what was going on each time that I crashed a company and and I got an opportunity to be around some of the greatest business minds on the planet and I would just ask him I wasn't asking, michael was begging more to say, hey, I'll take out your trash if I can, you know, if I can get 15 minutes and ask you about these things so that I don't make those mistakes in the future. And I ended up with three notebooks of what to do and fell into a career after Tony doing turn around really terrible shape companies, and then I went from that to building my own portfolios portfolio of businesses, sold that in 2019, had a consulting company that I started about 17 years ago and that's still going strong.

Speaker 2: 3:10

And and along the way I, when I made enough money, I started my give back phase. It started in domestic violence and then went from there to feeding people I'm still CEO of an organization called feed a billion and and then that led into child rescues in the sex trade. I got an invite to go on an undercover mission and that was about eight years ago and I've been doing that ever since. I'm with an organization called cert ministry search, evangelize, rescue and train SCRT and we rescue kids. So that still doing business stuff and trying to learn the world that you live in, brother of trading and whatnot. So it's been great. So that's the short version.

Speaker 1: 3:54

So there's a lot to unpack there and, first of all, I mean I give you a lot of credit because you know and I think this is why I feel for a lot of what you're going to be talking about and what we've already talked about in the past. But yeah, I'm a big believer in the idea that if you want to develop strong relationships in life, you have to. Somebody has to be vulnerable at the front right, and vulnerable vulnerability for most people means being open and honest and not being ashamed, because the things that we have experienced in our lives, whether they were in our control or not, now we talk about being at that younger age. Listen, kids imitate their parents. I mean, that's just the truth, whether they're babies or their toddlers or their adolescents, their teenagers. Yeah, there is this parallel that happens.

Speaker 1: 4:34

I am curious, as you were, you know, during your upbringing, was there a point where you started saying to yourself this doesn't seem right? There's something odd about this, because that's all you know, right to really sort of baseline. You know good versus evil, so to speak. You know against, yeah it's a great question.

Speaker 2: 4:51

And I had a wonderful mother and I had a wonderful grandmother and you know, I remember as I was, as I took the beatings when I was, you know, when I was younger like I would get locked in my room and until my face would heal and my grandmother always made sure that I had a Bible. Now, I wasn't a religious person I got baptized a couple years ago but I was never really a religious person and I would read the Bible because it was really one of the only things that I had available to me and I read it sort of as a series of stories and and I learned the difference between right and wrong from those pages. I learned from coaches that were around me that, you know, I knew that the lifestyle that we are living, probably by the time I turned 11, I was like, yeah, there's just something off about this. There's not. You know, this is not what I see in other people's lives.

Speaker 2: 5:47

And you know, I had a coach, a wrestling coach, by the name of Charlie White back in the day and he took me under his wing during those years and that's really where I learned and started to fall in love with the idea that I could learn from other people.

Speaker 2: 6:04

Right, I had one example of what a father was for a long time and I knew that when I had kids as I was healing, you know, in the room or whatever, when I have kids, I was like I don't want to be that kind of a father.

Speaker 2: 6:18

And then strong coaches, like you know, coach White and other coaches and and I had an English teacher at this at that point in time that taught me to escape what I was doing through words. And she gave me a dictionary and she said you can create and paint a picture with words that will take you out of your current life. And she knew what I was going through. I mean, it was hard for anybody that was around us to not know what I was going through and what my family was going through, with this man as my father and so learning to fall in love with the written word, to be able to be able to put together thoughts and to be able to utilize a wide array of words for the same scenario. And that's the blessings, brother, that I think that were given to me along the way. That's why I say they're my angels that got put in my path at exactly the right time and place.

Speaker 1: 7:06

What about friends that were, you know, close to your age? You know I'm going to be the assumption correct we're wrong that you know you may have run and obviously you know not exactly the best of crowds With any people. As you look back, you know kids back then who were your friends that were trying to be a more positive force. Or is that just a hard dynamic to find?

Speaker 2: 7:25

Well, we moved around. It's a great question because we moved around a lot. So making good friends was fairly difficult. You know, with his criminal activities and whatnot, we were constantly on the road. But I did have friends and they would, you know, there were several as I. You know. I haven't been asked that question in a very long time but as I think back, there were friends that were like, okay, you can come over to our house and live.

Speaker 2: 7:52

I had one friend in high school that his family owned a hotel and when I got kicked out at for the last time, they put me up in their hotel and I just kind of started to go. You know, I kept going back to the house and it was during one of those times when I was staying at that hotel I had a roof over my head because of my friend. And it was one of the last times, right as I turned 17, that I went back home to go get some stuff for my last trip of getting my things out of it. And I went in the house and I knew something was wrong. And that was when I went downstairs and I saw. I saw, you know, body marks in the drywall where I knew he'd been throwing my mom through the wall and and finally went to the police. They hadn't been a big help throughout our life together up until that point, but I went to go get the police and that's when he finally made his journey towards prison for attempted murder, so you're around 17,.

Speaker 1: 8:47

I think is what you said when that took place. And then obviously that's a hard break in your life, right? Something massive happened and now he's no longer in the picture and everything is changing. Talk about that transition that maybe you went through mentally. Then, obviously, everything you went through is extraordinarily difficult and painful, but now you've got a fork in the road right In terms of the dynamics are very different for a number of years because he's now in prison.

Speaker 2: 9:13

Right and the excuse goes away, right. I love telling this that because my story is only one of one's. You know it's one of many stories and I've traveled around with Tony, I've spoken on stages around the world, I've gotten to meet millions of people that now I realize we've all got our stuff right and it's. It comes down to the point of do I have to accept and carry along those lessons of my childhood or can I make a different decision? And as I was going through that transition of 17, found out, by the way, that he wasn't my real dad. So I ended up meeting my real dad. That brought forth a new sort of a new history for me, a new journey in that path that I was on. But it was now. What do I do? I lost? I lost the excuse, right. I lost the excuse to say, okay, well, not that I didn't use it, by the way, not that I didn't use the excuse of having a terrible family and an adopted father that put me in the hospital, my mom, all that, not that I didn't use it, but there was now no excuse. He was gone, that had been extricated out of my life. It wasn't happening presently, and I talk about this a lot, from the idea that, no matter what happened to us in the past, it's not happening now. Now, if it is, I have a lot of friends, and this is what we do for a living now is if somebody's in domestic violence or there's a child in pain or something of that nature, we will go get them, we'll come get you, but otherwise, if we're out of that trauma, if we're out of the thing that set us back, we now no longer. It's not happening to us right now. So we can always, every second of the day, make a different decision about how to move forward. And that was the process.

Speaker 2: 11:02

When I turned 17, it was, I was still doing that stuff. I was a really well-trained criminal that was very angry and knew how to fight because I'd been fighting a full grown adult my entire life. So things continued down that path for a number of years until my first son was born, and that was my second to last drug deal. He was born that week and I was with a friend of mine at a bar and he said hey. And I told him I said look, I'm looking to leave the lifestyle and not really interested, and I don't know what I'm going to do. This is another thing for everybody. That I've noticed is a commonality as we go okay, I'm done with that, but I don't really know what to do next. And that was a conversation I was having with my friend. I'm like I don't know what I'm going to do next, but he said well, whatever you're going to do next, we've got something going down out in the parking lot here in a little bit and I'm like all right, because I had to have his back and it was that night, five days after my son was born, that I had to push him out of the way.

Speaker 2: 12:06

I saw a knife that came down. I've got a big scar across my chest. The knife went in my chest, opened me up and it was. As the knife went into my chest, I was thinking to myself.

Speaker 2: 12:17

One thing happened when I was telling you that I was reading the Bible when I was a kid, there was this Bible verse that popped into my brain and it was the sins of the father are born under the children. And again, remember, I'm not a religious guy. It just popped into my head as I was, as that knife went in my chest, and I thought to myself if I live through this. I'm absolutely done because I'm not going to allow this life to be my son's life, and that was really the turning point of me asking a better, a higher quality question of okay, that's done. I don't have any other options except for now. My objective is just to be a good man, a good father and eventually a good husband, and figure out how to do this within the legal bounds of whatever exists. I didn't know business structure. I didn't. You know my entire family's broke there.

Speaker 1: 13:12

You know there was no nowhere really to start, other than the inception thought of I want to be a better person, although I would argue that the one pill everybody needs to have as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, which you unequivocally had your whole life, was the skill of survival.

Speaker 1: 14:07

You've got to be able to survive physically, mentally, whether it's outside of business or in business. I am curious as you said you mentioned, you met your biological father when my father passed. I think, and I think it's probably common for most people, when a father passed, especially at a relatively young age, you almost subconsciously start looking for another father figure. Right, and I kind of look back and think that time of my life you know, separate obviously from you, where, yeah, I was looking for another anchor. I think it's somewhat natural, right, I would assume that other people me have had a similar dynamic. Now, obviously you had your biological father there. I don't know how long afterwards you met him, but you had mentioned mentors where you, as you think back on it, actively trying to speak somebody else, you could play that kind of a role of a father figure, because now your economy is starting a new life.

Speaker 2: 14:59

Right at the time. It's just such an interesting question because I admire your relationship with your father. That's one of the things that when I very first. There's two reasons why I started following you. One was the name of your podcast, which we can get into later. The other one was the relationship that you had with your father.

Speaker 2: 15:17

I admire people that have a strong relationship with their father. For me it was. I wasn't looking for a father figure, I was looking for teachers, and I was looking specifically for in the men area. I was looking for men that were loving fathers and great husbands. Those were even if it was up to your point, though it was unconscious, but I was looking for those guys because that's the stuff I wanted to learn the people that showed up in my life that I really adhered to. They had those qualities, because it's a whole quality set, whether you learn it or it's demonstrated for you as you're being raised.

Speaker 2: 16:03

It's something special to be taught how to be a good man. I know it's not widely, wildly rewarded these days as we look around us, but to be a strong man. What I've learned is it's to be a protector. That means that you take some bullets, you take some arrows to defend the woman in your life or the children in your life or the ideals that you portray and put forward at all expense, even up to death. That's who I serve with when we're doing these rescues for these kids.

Speaker 2: 16:39

I serve with a bunch of men and women, by the way, that are putting their lives on the line. It's a charity. None of us are getting paid. We all donate our time. I raise funds and put my own money into these rescues, but it's that core understanding that whatever branches out of it to be an ethical protector is what I've learned. That's who I lean towards. Those are the strengths in somebody's personality that I lean towards. Was it a father figure? I don't think I would have worded it that way, michael, but guidance, mentorship, teachers and those are probably words that I would have coaches my coaches were amazing in my life. That's how I would put it, because I really didn't have a lot of respect for fathers at the time.

Speaker 1: 17:31

Obviously you didn't do the business school route and that traditional format. That's a hard thing to do. After the life that you led, you had to start from scratch and you had to figure out a way to understand the business side of things. But what was the what was sort of the first step on that Meaning? Did you already know some people where you literally just looking at you know nearby speakers or doing research and trying to do blind reachouts? What was that initial sort of process like?

Speaker 2: 17:59

Well, before I married my first wife, she had a brother and it was lit. The only thing I was looking for was legit income. Right, that was all I was looking for. And he at the time was building log cabins. And so I got a job I think it was like six bucks an hour or something like that just literally hand peeling with. You know, with that, with the hand saw, hand peeling logs to build log cabins, and that was my very first sort of legit job.

Speaker 2: 18:33

Now I took other jobs in between when I was breaking the law. So you know, if I was getting into, you know if the law was after me or whatever, I'd go get a job at McDonald's real quick or whatever it was, but none of it. It was all a cover. But that first job that I got with my brother in law was my first foray into legit money. Now, six bucks an hour is not enough for a family. So I went from there. I went to work for my father in law three levels deep in a mine digging out sumps, and that was, I think I got a huge raise to like $8, $8.50 an hour, something like that.

Speaker 2: 19:08

But I was down there in the dark in that nastiness, thinking what do I do? Like it's the questions, right. So the quality of the question this is what Tony Robbins taught me a long time ago is it's the quality of the questions that we ask ourselves that leads to the quality of the life that we lead. And I was down there thinking to myself what well, I can't do this the rest of my life, and it coming from where I would make big chunks of money you know slinging weed or you know coke or whatever it was that I was selling at the time, and now I'm struggling for an eight dollar down in the bottom of pit like the pit of hell. I guess that was like well, there's got to be something better than this. And so it switched into I need to learn a trade.

Speaker 2: 19:49

Because I did not graduate from high school. I didn't have a diploma. I didn't have. I didn't have college. I had. It was literally just street smarts and I could and I knew how to work hard. So from that I went into learning how to. I became a journeyman carpet layer. I learned how to. You know, at the beginning I was just like pulling up tax strip and nasty carpet, and that went into that. That trail led into. My first business ownership was a carpet and window covering and tile business.

Speaker 1: 20:22

It's going from six to eight dollars that you mentioned, you know, compared to the money you were making before you were, did you have nights where you were? You were tempted to kind of go back into that life, seeing how hard the grind would be, you know, with the path you were just starting.

Speaker 2: 20:35

No once. And because I knew what would happen to my kids. It would you know again. I think a lot of us do you know. We taught you know again. It's just called this concept of like, how do you switch into you know, making money and all that kind of stuff. But for me, I knew what the outcome would be. I knew what path that would lead my children down. Like, my first born was a son, my second, third were daughters, you know, and I'm like there's no way I was never tempted to go back into that lifestyle. It was now. The objective is to become the best man that I can and to become and to hone my own skills to be able to be the best provider that I can for my kids.

Speaker 1: 21:17

Okay, so you have the carpeting business there. You're building that up, but you built a number of companies over the years, yeah, and you go through the transition. So you know you have to success. On that You're doing well. Most people would say you know. If you're doing well in a company, you know you either expanded, make it national, or you try and sell it out and you retire. What was the journey like, as you're getting some momentum there?

Speaker 2: 21:40

Yeah, it was. You know, again I feel like the forest gump of business. You know it's because it's just been this series of amazing coincidences. But I went from, you know, from learning just again, doing the tax trip thing and then learning the business. You know, accidentally, selling some carpet for the guy that I was working for, that brought me into his business. I learned the warehouse. Then he put me on the floor and, you know he started to get threatened by the how well I was doing for his company. This is the. You know. The stupidity of business owners including myself, by the way is incredible when we let our egos drive instead of data and taking the skill sets and the tools around us. But he was upset that I was selling more than him. He was the owner. I would think that would be something that you'd be happy about. And so we got into an argument. I drove an hour away, got a job somewhere else, ended up buying that company out of spite and pettiness, because I said you know what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down here and I'm going to put this guy out of business. The whole idea of making more money through.

Speaker 2: 22:50

Up until probably 10 years ago, michael, for me was residual pettiness of being the broke kid in school and you know standing in line for cheese with my mom and you know all of the things that I. It was sort of a I'll show you kind of a thing, and so that was a transition. I, you know, I, built that company up really well. I bought it by selling during the week and installing carpet on the weekends for five years straight probably three days off in that five years and crashed it.

Speaker 2: 23:22

I had another company that I'd started alongside of it. I crashed it, you know, did another third, so three of them in a row, because all I knew how to do was to work hard and I knew how to sell, which both of those things work really well in in a good economy or at least a stable economy. Anytime that an economy takes a little bit of a dip and those are your only skill sets, they don't hold up and so, as you know. So those were the lessons that I had to learn. I said I had to learn skill sets other than being able to sell and also being able to work hard, and that was the sort of the second. The second act of my life was learning those skill sets.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Yeah, those two characteristics right being able to work hard and sell. You have to have both, but that's not enough for sustainability, that's enough to get you off the ground.

Speaker 2: 24:15

Yeah, and you have to learn many other things. Most people you know now that I know what I know. I'm 52 now and I've had a very successful career and sold many companies and still do really well in the companies that I work with or start now. And one of the things that I learned along the way was when I was younger I was imitating a company. Right, it was just a great. It was a great imitation.

Speaker 2: 24:40

And then I started to look at the statistics and the numbers, which is what you're, you know, you're so brilliant at. I started to look at numbers and statistics and I go okay, 95% of companies fail in the first 10 years. 50% of them are out of business in the first year. So I'm like man, why would I want to know what anybody else is doing? I want to know what the 5% are doing. And one of the biggest awakenings for me was okay, there's people who are building companies, like you know, in the truest sense of the word, because a real company and I don't care if it's a restaurant or if it's plumbing and heady or commercial, janitorial or whatever kind of business it is that there has to be working assets inside of the business and that means that they're building those blocks along the way on purpose that link together so that you end up with a machine. Right, you've got a, you've got a. The example would be a $20 Casio watch versus a Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime. You know, the Casio 20 bucks. It's going to have three things that were. It's probably not going to last very long, and the Grandmaster Chime sells for $31 million and the other one sells for 20 bucks. So it's the intricacies and the time that goes into it that Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime took 100,000 hours, seven years right, to be able to build and they only built seven of them. Six of them sold before they were finished. Right, that was the.

Speaker 2: 26:10

Those were the things that I wanted to figure out. What did they know that I don't know, and so I started to look around and I was like, okay, I know quickly when somebody's imitating a company and that's what I, you know. In my turnarounds I was like, okay, these guys are imitating. What do we have to do? We have to get some for the four basic building blocks in there, with assets and processes and procedures that are going to guarantee a cashflow and output. Right, the lead measures. I started to learn lead measures, which are just an. It's either an indicator of an outcome or it's the indicator of a bad decision. So you change your lead right. That's why I love that. Again, I fell in love.

Speaker 2: 26:56

I have run companies, built my own career all of the things that I've done based on lead and lag. Because your lead is just a guess, to best guess. It's a well informed guess in some instances, but it's not a guarantee. It's a lead. The only time you know if it was a good lead is if the lag met your expectations of what you were trying to build towards. And so as I started to look at these businesses in turnarounds, I'm like, okay, they're imitating, they've got some good skill sets, they've got a good book of business, they have some cashflow coming in. They've got a couple of good employees. You know they have some great clients, but there might be concentration risk or whatever it is.

Speaker 2: 27:37

If you find out what building blocks you have, you you improve the quality of those assets, make your sales people better, make your sales processes better, make your operations better. You tweak and improve those while you build the rest of the assets. There's about 40. Most companies, most well-run companies in the 5%, have at least 18. All the other 95% that go out of business predictably over 10 years, they only have three or four at the most that are actually built and operating for them. They get wiped out when their sandcastle gets knocked down, when the water comes in.

Speaker 2: 28:20

I think that, especially the world that I work in with the sex trade, you think to yourself how can somebody sell a child? It's heartbreaking, it's heart-wrenching. Then how can people bring, allow these fentanyl, the drugs, and when they know that they're actually harming other people, there's a desperation level. I think that humans are in in that survival mode that they can justify pretty much anything. Now I like to think that I had ethics back even when I was dealing drugs. I kind of built a justification around the way that I did it and that I would only beat up people that deserved it. It was all stupid and illogical to try to make logic out of harming other people.

Speaker 2: 29:11

I didn't have the luxury or the training really to understand the difference between ethical and unethical until a little bit later. I think everybody's born with a little bit of right and wrong knowing that. But it wasn't. It wasn't trained in me. What was trained in me was succeeded. All measures. Make sure you watch your back. Don't trust anybody. The next person in could kill you. I mean my own father, who I thought was my father at the time, ended up being my adopted father. My own adopted father was beating the shit out of me and breaking my nose and throwing my mom downstairs and all this other kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 29:56

Now in the transition, when I was like, okay, I want to be a good father, a good husband, I want to have a positive impact. Now ethics was at the top of the list, because I don't believe that you can be successful long term unless you are playing the game along ethical. Now I'm a Christian, so biblical principles. I don't believe that you can be successful long term, or maybe even at all, unless you're playing the game ethically.

Speaker 2: 30:31

There's plenty of people that I know that make a lot of money and then they don't right. They make a lot of money and then they go to prison. They make a lot of money and then they overdose on drugs. They make a lot of money and then they get divorced. They make a lot. So it's not the a lot of money thing that was there as I was being mentored and following other people's example. It was that the happiness, the ethics were there, and the money and the success from that was a byproduct of that. And I think that's where, if I could speak to all the criminals in the world, if they just would say, behave ethically and stack those things in order over a long enough period of time, it has a predictable result as well. It may not lead to millions of dollars, but it's certainly going to lead to a pride to be able to look back on your life with pride, and not the wrong kind of pride, but the kind of pride that I did the best I could with what I had.

Speaker 1: 31:57

The three companies that you said you built and then that crashed? Was there any common thread on the reason why? I mean, it goes back to your notebook of what went wrong.

Speaker 2: 32:08

Yes, yes, I mean same threads which was I didn't have the skills. I wasn't educated as to the idea that I needed to be building assets. I didn't realize that there was a break between building for valuation versus building for profit or I hate the word profit, it's really free cash flow. I didn't have the skills and all three of those I built from the ability to be able to say okay, well, I'm selling homes, I've got a great personality and somebody needs homes. Until they don't in a down economy, or I owned it at Jim and you know you can definitely get in better shape. But at the end of the day, the common thing was that my psychology was not in the right place, my skill sets were not present at all and I wasn't. I didn't realize this is probably one of the greatest lessons is that I didn't realize that if you're going to start a company, you have to specify your end game. What are you building it for? Because what I was doing was I was trying to buy the world's love. I was like, oh, if I have the biggest house, if I throw the best boxing parties, if I have the most cars, if I have the cool boats and the jet skis and you know I'm flying around all over the world like then people will love me and that doesn't. You can never buy somebody's love, and this is a lesson that I learned, and I think a lot of people learn over time.

Speaker 2: 33:37

Was that your end game? It really equates, and I think where you lead people, where your information leads people, is to make decisions that free you as an individual economically. We talk a lot about First Amendment, second Amendment, we talk a lot about that, which idiots in the White House, what party we're going by, but at the end of the day, what they hide from us is that choice exists in economic decisions, in economic conditions, and so if we still are, you know, one of the greatest countries in the world with the greatest freedom, what changed this world happened back in 1890, where they brought where they were with the beginnings of the FTC Act. That was the first time in history where a centralized government stood up against coagulated money in the elite's pockets and said nope, we gotta keep the playing field level so that everybody has the opportunity. We're all playing the same game.

Speaker 2: 34:38

When you're in business, we're all playing the same game, and it just should be a matter of how much better I can get at that game and how much smarter am I, how much better can I be to my employees, how much better can I be, how much better can my product be for the people that I fell in love with? Their outcome called my clients, those type of things that really set the stage for flipping abject poverty on its head. And so, when I look at the environment, those things were missing in me. I didn't realize that I was imitating a business and instead of building an asset that would create cash, that's all. A business is a machine that creates cash. Now that cash can pay your people better, you can send them on vacations, you can train them, you can help them start their own businesses, you can do the rescues that I do. All the free cash flow goes towards a lot of philanthropy work that I'm involved in. You could do whatever it is, but you gotta get clear on what that end game is if you're gonna build towards it.

Speaker 2: 35:43

Most people, and then I'll shut up. I'm sorry, but most people build, they get in and they make a little bit more money. So what do they do? They get a better car, a little bigger house, and then you start looking at Instagram with all these idiots that are pretending to be rich, and then you find out that actually, if you have money, the last thing you want in the world is for anybody to know it.

Speaker 2: 36:03

And you start to think. You start to do that and all of a sudden you're like shit, I'm just as broke in a nicer house, in a nicer car as I was when I didn't have any money. It's just, I have a better environment. So building for freedom and targeting your own and this is what we do on my show on Saturdays is we really just talk about. How can you, the individual, keep yourself free economically, because that's gonna keep all of us free. That's the idea behind it. But yes, those things were definitely the same in all three of those businesses. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I had a really big ego and all the energy that in the world, but I did not have the skill sets to go along with it.

Speaker 1: 36:49

Talk about some of the types of companies that you've built that were successful, and then why go from that to just thinking about turning around companies.

Speaker 2: 36:59

So before I got into the turnaround business. I didn't build a successful company but remember they all went out of business all three of them and that drove me into and it was carpet and real estate and a gym. And when I got it again it was sort of an accident when I said that I feel like the forest gump of business. When I was leaving Tony working for Tony Robbins, I got a phone call from a friend of mine. I didn't even know that there was a career in turnarounds but I got this phone call from a friend of mine and said, hey, I need to know up with my company and I'm going through something that I know you went through in one of yours and I'm like awesome, I have a whole bunch of new skill sets, let's do that. And so I fixed his company. Then I went to another company and it was a wide range of businesses.

Speaker 2: 37:46

I ended up owning commercial janitorial businesses and car washes and it didn't really once I understood that the infrastructure of a successful business is the same no matter what the product or service is. Then it was conditions. I know you like that word right that it was conditions. Is there somebody that's at the end of their career and they're wanting to get out of the business. Is there a business that lost one of their crucial clients and they need somebody to swoop in and help? Is there a good group of employees that I want to keep working? And it wasn't so much the product, a lot of the stuff that I built in successful companies I had no idea. Still to this day really don't know how to clean a toilet, but I had a really successful commercial janitorial business and those type of things.

Speaker 2: 38:32

So it really, as I got into the turnarounds, I started to understand the cross-pollination ideas. I could take something out of the chiropractic world and I could implant that in a commercial janitorial company. Or if I could take that out of plumbing and heating and I could put that over in it. It was really just a gathering and I think this is what I like about you listening to you and the people that you follow and the people that give feedback and people that I learned from is that we're constantly seeking how to process, improve, incrementally improve what we're doing, and the only way that we can do that is by changing our context, the ability how big can we get?

Speaker 2: 39:19

What is our end game and then changing the skill set and the knowledge that goes into it and being able to then apply it to real world, measure the results, modify the behavior and execute again If everybody can identify with it. Everybody that's listening can identify with what's going on in the world right now. It seems like everybody at the same time has decided to not give a shit right, whether it's employees, business owners, customers are used to getting treated crappy, like there's just been this drop of give a shit.

Speaker 1: 39:57

Not sure, buddy, but that reminds me of the stories I've been seeing about how there's never been a time where people were so casual about ghosting others whether it's like an employer right and they just drop and leave. There's no even like semblance of respect anymore.

Speaker 2: 40:13

Right and I love that. And this should excite everybody, because when things are what, this is what everybody was talking about, with my turnaround career and whatnot, I would have never had a turnaround career. If everybody was running shit the right way, I would have never had that career. I would have never been able to build the business that I did. Because there's opportunity in chaos, there's opportunity in selfishness, there's opportunity that we live in Like literally this makes me laugh and everybody listening should be able to apply to their own business. I love that. We live in a day and age where customer service is a brand new idea. I love it. Now, if you're going to take advantage of that for your own career, for your own business, there's four things that you need to really look at, and I want to get to Big Z's. I love him, so I'm saying that right.

Speaker 1: 41:06

But here's how it stacks.

Speaker 2: 41:08

When we go in and we do a turnaround, I look at the assets that are there and that company is typically speaking, they're under attack of some kind, and the very first four tools that you have to know how to build are in sales operations. Operations is just delivery on the promise sales is making. Finance is measuring the decisions you made in sales, the delivery of the customer and what you should do. Next, it's the language that your business speaks. Now the fourth pillar is culture to get to answering your question and culture is the foundation that everything else is built on. Culture is predetermined how you're going to treat each other as in your company and how you're going to treat your clients in the tough times. A brand is never built when shit is going right. A brand is built when something goes wrong and you make it right. A cultural question I built a request of a bunch of people. I built a training system four years ago that has been very popular and in one of it, what we talk about in that culture is to have. You have to have those three premises, and the first one is the idea that it's my choice how I'm going to behave and when. You get that anchored in as your culture. You spend as much time as you can Even if you've operated business you said you've been in business for five years to sit down and actually go through and write out what is the culture, what is the expectation, and then it gets trained into everybody. It gets trained in to say this is how we're going to do it. Now here's how most companies do it the people that are imitating a company. They go in and the business owner is usually somebody that's gregarious and got a great personality, and they're out making sales and people like being around them. And they also come in with their garbage how they feel about money, how they feel about women, how they feel about men, how they feel about politics, how they and the people that follow you. If it's not concrete and written out, they will take on your negative beliefs. This is so powerful for people to understand. They will just model you. The people that you bring into your company that work for you will just model you and you'll go. Man, I can't understand why we're always like we always do. We have a good month and then we have a shitty month. We have a good month. Well, it's because they're modeling your belief, or lack of understanding that you should be targeting an end game and measuring your progress towards it. How can I look? I'll give you something for free here. How can I add massive value to my teammates and my clients right now? That should be on everybody's wall. We call that one of our primary questions. That should be on everybody's wall because it's easily trainable In my companies. If somebody couldn't remember the top three premises in the business after 90 days of training, they were self-selecting that they didn't want to work for me and that they didn't want to work with me. That's one major thing. How can I because it drives it back into the person who's asking it add massive value what kind of massive value to my teammates and my clients right now? It's always.

Speaker 2: 44:29

The second piece of culture that is incredibly important is that you have to have what we call whiffles. Everybody working for you has dreams, just like you, the business owner. You have to be able to dig that out of them to say what are you going to use my company for? If I could wave Mickey's magic wand over your life with my business, what do you want? When you really dig into it? It's an emotional thing. I want a house because we never had one. I want to bring mom up from Mexico. I want to take my kids to the NBA finals, because my dad never took me and on his deathbed, told me that these are real stories.

Speaker 2: 45:10

By the way, this is called we call whiffum. What's in it for me? If you can dig out the whiffum of your employees, the people that trust you enough to come to work for you and then set their job up and really care enough to be able to help them achieve that, now you've got a culture. Now you've got a team that will go to war with you and for you. Those are two things that I hope help you. I'm just going to call you Big Z because I can't pronounce the last piece of it, but I hope those two help you, brother. They're game changers. They really are.

Speaker 1: 45:43

I think that's hard as an entrepreneur because you take the risk. Primarily you have employees, but you're the one that takes the risk on the losses the most and you've got the most anxiety. It's easy to get self-absorbed in that feeling of it's about me as the entrepreneur when you also have to be very mindful of everybody else's hopes, dreams, struggles, pains, successes. It's not easy. I've read a lot of books on leadership. One of the things that one of these books I read made a point up is leaders make leaders of others, which is a very counterintuitive thought but is one that I think is valid. Jason, for those who want to track where you thought you mentioned you have a show, talk about where people can find that show and get more of your stuff.

Speaker 2: 46:30

Yeah, it's called the Chairman Project Podcast. I do it live on X every Saturday, 9 am to 10.30 am Eastern Standard Time. Then we just started. Now we're formulating and putting it out on YouTube under the same name and whatnot, but that's the podcast. People could come ask questions. It's a really great community of people that are real business owners and doing really great things in the world.

Speaker 2: 46:56

I do want to address just if I can. I want to address what you said about the hard part, because this will help every business owner that hears this. Yes, it's hard. Yes, we take the risk. Yes, again, the employee can find a job the day after we go out of business and we're losing our home and we're going through a divorce and we're all these other kind of things.

Speaker 2: 47:15

Right, and the greatest leap that you can make and the greatest understanding as a business owner is to understand this one phrase nobody cares, nobody cares and for the mature business owner to understand that nobody gives a shit about your problems. That's why you need an environment of like-minded peers, other business owners. That's where you share that stuff and where you can have those conversations. But your employees never need to, they don't need to know. Hey, if we don't make this, then I'm going to lose my house. They don't give a shit and it's not their job to give a shit, because you are the one playing the risk reward game, and the more that we seek that, it just shows how immature we are in the business building not immature as human beings, but in business building.

Speaker 2: 48:05

You have to understand that you have one job and that is to inspire everybody that works for you. Period, end of sentence. No matter how much of a pain in the ass that becomes sometimes, no matter how much they take advantage of, no matter how much they don't realize the pressure, the sleepless nights, the not getting paid for a year while you're running your business, they don't care, nor should they have to. So I just wanted to address that, brother, because it's absolutely you're spot on and hashtag nobody cares.

Speaker 1: 48:36

Well, I really care about those that joined the conversation. Please make sure everybody follow, jason. I really enjoyed it on my end. Again, this will be an edited podcast in a couple of days and hopefully everybody have a good weekend.

Speaker 2: 48:47

Thank you for doing what you do. It's really crucial and what you're teaching people is how to think and giving people a different perspective. And I know you have a lot of trolls and a lot of people that are out there, but I got to tell you, man, I love what your content and I love doing you. Doing what you do it helps make me better. Thank you, I appreciate that man.

Speaker 1: 49:06

All right, very good, thank you everybody. Hide and there zwr acceleration. This next has been like five or six comment ups for my okja.