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The Transformative Power of Mentorship with Ryan Blair

2025/3/19
logo of podcast Escaping the Drift with John Gafford

Escaping the Drift with John Gafford

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Ryan Blair: 我的人生经历充满挑战,从毒品交易到成为一名成功的企业家,这其中离不开导师的帮助和自身的努力。我从小在充满毒品和暴力的环境中长大,11岁就开始参与毒品交易,15岁时面临牢狱之灾。然而,一位导师的出现改变了我的命运,他引导我走向正轨,并帮助我获得了事业上的成功。在创业过程中,我经历了多次失败和挑战,但始终坚持学习和适应,不断提升自身能力,最终将一家负债累累的公司扭亏为盈。我的成功秘诀在于不断学习、适应和坚持,以及拥有优秀的团队和导师的指导。在公司重组时,我会采取果断措施,例如裁员和精简业务,以提高效率。我采用零基预算的方法,从公司的基本需求出发,逐步增加支出,以确保资源的有效利用。同时,我也注重团队建设和员工激励,努力创造积极的工作氛围。我始终相信,成功离不开团队的共同努力和个人的持续学习。在个人生活中,我也注重时间管理和能量平衡,通过冥想、运动等方式来保持积极乐观的心态。我将导师视为一种使命,致力于将成功的经验回馈给那些准备好接受指导的人。我坚信,给予和感恩是人生中最重要的财富。 John Gafford: 通过与Ryan Blair的对话,我深刻体会到导师制在个人和职业发展中的重要性。Ryan Blair的经历展现了在逆境中如何通过自身的努力和导师的帮助获得成功。他的创业故事充满传奇色彩,从负债累累到创造巨额财富,这其中体现了他卓越的商业策略和领导才能。同时,他也强调了团队建设和员工激励的重要性,以及在企业管理中如何平衡效率和人情。此外,Ryan Blair的个人成长经历也为我们提供了宝贵的经验,他强调了时间管理和能量平衡的重要性,以及如何保持积极乐观的心态。他的人生哲学和价值观也值得我们学习和借鉴。

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Chapters
Explore Ryan Blair's tumultuous journey from his chaotic upbringing in Los Angeles to becoming a multimillionaire and successful entrepreneur. Learn about the transformative power of mentorship and how it shaped his path.
  • Ryan Blair was involved in drug distribution from a young age due to his family's environment.
  • His father, despite being an intelligent engineer, struggled with drug addiction.
  • Ryan faced potential incarceration at 15 but received leniency from a judge.
  • A mentor, who dated his mother, played a crucial role in redirecting Ryan's path.
  • Blair's mentor introduced him to personal growth materials and provided him with a job, significantly impacting his life trajectory.

Shownotes Transcript

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I was trained to cultivate marijuana, bag it. I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood. At 11. Even before that. So marijuana, we grew it. We bagged it. I would give it away. I'd trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood loved me because I'd just hand them handfuls of it. Drugs were in my house from the very beginning. ♪

And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm Jon Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift, and it's time to start right now. Back again, back again for another episode of the show that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, ladies and gentlemen in the studio...

With me is a guy, and this is a dude, man, that had a troubled youth, ran around with gangs, did a bunch of nonsense in the streets, but turned it around and became a multimillionaire. He is the former CEO and founder of Vysala Sciences.

which is a company that went from basically being $6 million in debt when he showed up to $150 million in revenue within 16 months. So the dude knows how to turn it around. He's the best-selling author of the books Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain, a New York Times number one hardcover business bestseller, and Rock Bottom to Rockstar in 2016, A Guide to Achieving Entrepreneurial Success. Success!

Good Lord, man. I'm struggling today. So anyway, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the program. This is Ryan Blair. Ryan. Thank you for having me, John. I think they took too much blood out of me this morning. I was stumbling there a little bit. I had a lot of entrepreneurial excess. Yeah, excess. It was. It was. Yeah. So for you to listen to this, I had to go do my every three-month blood work so my wife can keep me alive forever today. Okay.

And yeah, I think they took too much because, man, that was a little struggle. That's all right. It's early in the morning. I thought I was having a stroke halfway through that. I didn't know it was good. It's because I was fasted. I'm now drinking my protein as we do this interview. So if you hear me gulping, that's what it is. But dude...

But Ryan, man, obviously, you know, you've got so many different levels of things you've done in your life. But I'm always curious when you have somebody that's an entrepreneur that reaches those high levels of success. And if you've listened to the program before, you probably know we always kind of like to start with that nature versus nurture argument. So tell me about young Ryan. Tell me about you, man. Where did you grow up? What was that like? So I grew up in the Los Angeles area. My dad was an engineer, a really brilliant man. My mom was a housemaker.

A lot of love. And they both got addicted to drugs when I was a child. So my house was in turmoil and trauma and violence. Brothers and sisters all went to prison. So wait, dad was an engineer. So he's a professional guy. Yeah, he was an aerospace engineer. So he was very intelligent. In fact, too intelligent. His mind got the best of him basically toward the end. Wow. So you normally hear those stories from...

terrible situations of socioeconomic, you know, hardship. I was in the middle class. So in the middle class, dad had a hundred thousand dollars plus salary. This is the, how does dad start using drugs? Do you know, like, how does this happen? Cocaine. Yeah. Everybody was doing it in the eighties. It's kind of how it was. And you know, he, he was, you know, in the middle class, uh,

uh, doing really well economically. He had some vices and, you know, some self-sabotaging behaviors. He's, he's no longer with us. So I've, I've healed my relationship with him spiritually, so to speak. Um, but yeah, yeah, his brain got the best of him. So he had a lot of unhealed things that he was dealing with. How old were you when you knew this was going on? Um,

It was always in my life. So it was always marijuana, always weird stuff going on, always violence. But I recognize that we had a drug problem in the household at about 11 years old or so. I knew that that was a problem. Oh, man. Yeah. And I was trained to cultivate marijuana, bag it. I would give it to my friends in the neighborhood. At 11? Even before that. So marijuana...

Uh, we grew it, you know, we bagged it. Uh, I would give it away. I'd trade snakes for it, skateboards for it. Older kids in the neighborhood love me because I just hand them handfuls of it. Yeah. Drugs were in my house from the very beginning. Oh my gosh.

So I asked what your first hustle was, but I guess it was giving bags of weed for skateboards. I had two paper routes. I had a little marijuana distribution business, but I didn't understand the value of it. You know, I'd give them probably a pound for a snake and they'd be like, you know. Did you know that this was illegal? I mean, did the...

the weight of that sink in at you at that time? No, I mean, I was raised, my dad had a criminal element to him and I was raised, you know, to, I knew it was illegal, meaning that if the cops came, this was a problem, but I didn't understand the consequences of criminal behavior by any means, because it was just naturally a part of my environment. You were just exposed to it. Yeah. So,

- So at what point, so obviously you start this at 11. - Yeah. - You said everybody went to jail. Who went to jail? - Brother went to jail for, one brother went to jail for armed robbery. Another brother went to jail for many times. My sister went to prison many times. And then one sister was the good sister. She was a straight A student. She kept to herself. She read books. Everybody else, we acted out on our trauma.

went their own way yeah she went internal and we all went external where is she and how's she doing she's doing great she's amazing she ended up marrying a police officer you know and so uh one side of my family was criminals and the other side were cops interesting family reunion it was quite fascinating uh conversations i have a buddy of mine i have a buddy of

mind literally that half of his, like he's got relatives in the DEA and that he's married to a Latino woman and she has relatives in the cartel. So that's always an interesting mixing of folks when they need to mix them. There's only a small degree of separation between a cop and a criminal. There's a fraction of a percentage because to be a great cop, you have to be able to catch a criminal. So you have to be able to think like one. You have to have some of the same attributes. You just have values that steer you toward the law as opposed to away from it.

Yeah. All right. So growing up in this, did you ever get, do you ever get in trouble? Like there's trouble. Yeah. Um, I, uh, I was facing four years, uh, in juvenile hall and, um, uh, I was being, I was being sent. What'd you do? Allegedly strong arm robbery. Oh my God. And battery.

So you mugged somebody? Yeah, a couple times. How old were you? 15. And this was just the group of guys you're running with? It's what you guys did? No, they placed a case on me. So I was in a gang, and I got in a fight with an older guy, and he was over 18 years old. And I took his hat off his head in the fight,

And so they loaded me up with charges. Now, because I had a public defender and I didn't know any better, you know, I was going to prison. If you have a wealthy family that can hire a good attorney, you'd never get, you know, armed robbery. Come on, the scales of justice are blind, I thought. You'd never get armed robbery for taking a hat off a person's head during a fist fight. It was a hat. I took a hat. But, you know, my mom didn't know any better. And so next thing you know, I'm heading to four years in prison. And I knew that...

because of the path of some of my family members and people in my neighborhood, in the event that I went to prison, I was done. I'd be a professional criminal because I was very smart. I was very capable of creating a lot of problems. I was leading over a hundred people in the gang I was in at a very young age. And so I knew that once I went to jail, I was done. So I wrote the judge a letter begging for leniency. He granted it to me under the condition that I never returned to see him again. And he told me I should be writing in college, not in prison.

And that changed my life because no one had ever believed I should go to college at all. I was a dropout, went to a continuation high school. And all of a sudden this man believes I should be writing in college. And so I had the dream to become a writer at that point. Okay. All right. So you had your GED at this point? No, no, I was 15 years old. I got my GED shortly after that. And then a mentor came into my life and he was in real estate and he was a very wealthy person. Let's talk about that. How did you meet your mentor? So he started dating my mom and...

And because my mom was near and dear to me, she's no longer with me, I protected her. The neighborhood we lived in, I wouldn't allow any man to come near her. I had to be very protective of her. We were worried about drive-bys. I was always worried about her being killed. And so she said, I met this man. He's a good man. He's wealthy. He's in real estate. And he wants to meet you. And I thought to myself, this is my way out of the ghetto, right? And

I had the meeting with him and he was very harmless, nice man. And next thing you know, my life changed. So did he offer to mentor you right away? It was just kind of, okay, did he stay with your mom for long term? Who was with him longer? You or your mom? He took me under his wing. By the grace of God, he took me under his wing immediately. He saw I had tattoos all over me. He saw I was heading in the wrong direction.

He gave me motivational personal growth materials like Lead the Field, Tony Robbins, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie. He insisted that I read these things. In fact, he paid me to read them. He bribed me because I wouldn't have otherwise. He said, I'll buy you new clothes to go get a job if you just read this book. And so he really leaned in on me. Then he gave me his job as what they back then they called it a person Friday.

And because I was a big kid, I was tough. He would have me do evictions for him. So I'd knock on the doors of his rentals and I would evict people. And that was my job is to process serve basically. Process serving at that. So it's so important, I think, especially at any point of your life, if you want to get to that next level to find people that will mentor you.

And, you know, now I'm going to fast forward a little bit. So have you given back to others in that same way? Or is that the biggest joy of what you do now? Yeah. You know, there's an old, there's a proverb, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. So my job is to give to anyone that's ready, right? I pay it forward as much as I can. And because I'm a spiritual person, you know, my desire to mentor people is really a

Beyond that, I think of traditional coaching or something of that nature. I really see it as an assignment. I'm here to help this person through whatever season that I've been assigned to. If they're suffering from trauma, addiction, or if they're just trying to scale a business and figuring out how to rise to that level of success,

I'm there to mentor him. Okay. Did you, did you go to college? Yeah. Okay. So, so he insisted, my mentor insisted I went to college. So you started just community college, I'm assuming. Went to a community college. And then from there, um, it turned out because in the gang, I used to steal computers and I used to have to reprogram them. And I was really good at that. That was my racket. And this was,

at a time when computers were, you know, very valuable. The skill of computer programming and computer engineering was highly coveted and, and people were paying good money for it. So I went to college, studied computer science and

And then got a job in the computer sciences field and took off. My career accelerated right away. By the time I was about 20 years old, I was making over $100,000 a year and going to college in the computer sciences field. Just doing that. Yeah. So at what point, because like most, most great senior entrepreneurs, like I like to say, are chronically unemployable.

Yeah. Right. You just can't work for somebody else. At what point did you realize you were unemployable? So the company I worked for, the engineering company, bought a company out of Las Vegas that did player tracking and player management for the casinos. Yeah.

And they dispatched me to meet with the casino heads and to meet with their heads of IT and to develop the product and to actually be a part of the sales of the product. I said, I'm developing the product. I'm selling the product. Why do I have to have these other boneheads in the room with me? And that's what had me go out on my own and start my own technology company. So that was the first thing was a technology company for casinos. Was it that? No, it was just tech in general. It was called 24-7 Tech.

Our byline was, if your network is a wreck, call 24-7 Tech. And I just dispatched network technicians to help people with network issues. I love that. Dude, in my previous life, right? I was a partner at a tech firm called Pattern Recognition. At the time, it's so funny now. Tech is such an interesting business to be in. And because...

Very rarely do you land on what your original core mission was, right? You just never laid on it. So there was a program at the time, this may ring a bell for you, but they had a software called Marimba. It was essentially where you could manage endpoints remotely. Oh, yeah. So instead of having to go into a company and drop...

you know, a thousand new windows CDs into the computer. See, see, information kids used to come on these silver shiny discs. The blue screen. Yeah. You had to manually put them in. And what this software did was allow us to manage a lot of endpoints remotely. And it was really just for big companies because it was very expensive. But we convinced Marimba.

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the the clay county school board in florida wants us wants help with this inspection software you know just on palm pilots where these guys can go into buildings and it pulls up the previous inspection and then they do this and it makes purchase orders stupid right can we do it and we're like i mean i guess yeah we're just going to generate some money we'll do it

everything shifted into that business. And it's just so funny. We let this, we worked so hard to get this relationship with Marimba. We ended up letting it go very quickly and went all in on these inspection softwares that turned into like fire inspection and private jet inspection, all this stuff. That's great. So as a tribute to your ability to pivot. Well, the,

So the question becomes with this, because I think there's a lot of your story that you're gifted with that. So I'm curious. The reason I tell that story is not for any self-indulgence, but it's because I want to hear like, what was your core mission of your original tech firm and where did you land? So I pivoted. I went to go raise venture capital and they said that my business model was unscalable. It was hard. And I was devastated. You know, I took these meetings with very esteemed venture capitalists.

And they looked at me and they said, this isn't going to work. Not going to happen. Not going to happen. So there was a broadband wireless services company. And this was when prior to broadband being ubiquitous, I was doing about 15,000 a month of revenue. I bought the company and then scaled it up and sold it in a $24 million transaction when I was $25 million transaction, I was 24.

Well, let's talk about that. Let's not, don't run over that. How'd you, how'd you buy a company? How'd you do it at 24? I leveraged my credit cards. You know, I bought it 21. I sold it 24. So no seller financing, nothing. You just. Yeah, I just. What'd you pay for it? $15,000. All in for this company. Well, then I raised some venture capital because I'd had, I'd met some VCs.

I raised about 3 million in venture capital about 21 years old, leveraged that to then scale the business and then sold it at 24. - Well, let's talk about this, man, because obviously such a big part of your history, and I don't wanna just jump over Vysalis, I wanna talk about that. Well, let's talk about that first, and then we'll talk about the overall concepts of how you do turnarounds.

How did you come into Vysalis? Two entrepreneurs that were struggling with a vitamin company came to me at Sky Pipeline. The company that I was operating was VC funded. I took an interest in them. They told me about their business model. It was highly scalable, external sales force. I had a friend, one of my investors at Sky Pipeline owned a company called Party Light Candles.

And they had a 60,000 person home party business. It was doing, you know, billions in sales. So I thought to myself that I could get them involved and I could help these two young entrepreneurs. That's what I did. You can put that together. Yeah. So.

My first question about, I mean, obviously when you got involved, I mean, the place was negative and you left it $150 million. No, well, I bought it. I organized the buyout at about 20,000 a month, scaled it to 65 million a month and then sold it. Yeah. I mean, so, okay. So where did you learn how to do this?

you learn everything as you go. That's the secret. Everybody that we see like Elon Musk and everybody, they just learn it as they go. Every day you wake up and you learn it as you go. None of these people had any of this stuff figured out that they have figured out now when they started. It's just every day you have to have principles and a philosophy to figure it out as you go. - Dude, that is such the right answer. - That's it. - That's such a great answer. - And you meet these people that are doing remarkable things and you go to tour Elon's facility now and you say, how could I ever get to this level?

He figured it out as he went. Every day, he made mistakes. He made errors. He took risks that were absurd and dumb. He figured it out as he went, and he just got better every day to now. He's the Elon Musk that we know. I find the biggest thing holding people back and success in so many different businesses, they feel that they're lacking in something they don't have, be it knowledge, information, capital, whatever. And they just see it as an insurmountable thing that they can't go get this stuff. And the answer is all...

all high performers just figured out. Yeah. And every, every problem you didn't look, you didn't learn how to approach a VC in a classroom, correct? No, no, not at all. I didn't learn very much in a classroom at all, even though I did go to computer sciences and then eventually they're not teaching about VC capital raising. I took some business classes and some marketing classes that were very valuable as part of my, um,

you know, my program, but no, it was all self-learning for the most part. And then mentorship, mentorship, you know, I called in great people onto my board. I had great people in my corner. I had people around me that held me accountable, drove me and were impatient with me. You know, they, they, they did not like that I was underperforming. And as a result of having people that were way outside of my league on my board and as advisors, you know,

I had to constantly raise my level of competency and my level of character nonstop throughout my career. Okay. So how do you get that? How do you get those, that level of player to believe in you at an early age? How do you do? One, you know, one, you have to have the belief that, that, you know, you're worthy of, of their mentorship too. And what people don't understand every great leader, entrepreneurs and so forth has a mentor in their corner.

The VCs act as a good VC is a good mentor. A good private equity group is a good mentor. So when you hear about these massively funded companies that have these huge exits, there's mentors involved in that entrepreneur's life. They're keeping them accountable and helping them from stopping self-sabotaging behaviors and helping them scale in their leadership

Otherwise the companies fall or go backward. Well, yeah, they're not just going to write you a check and walk away. No such thing as a silent partner in the VC world. No. And in fact, they're going to write a check and then they're going to beat the crap out of you until you perform. Be very involved in all of those things. Well, let's talk about your system for turning companies around. Yeah. Like when you first walk in, let's, let's walk me through this. Let's say you just took over widget company X and walk in. What are we doing? Um,

Well, if I buy the company. Yeah. You just bought a company. So walk me through it. Let's walk. Let's turn a fictional company around. You and I right here. I would immediately score every person on the team A, B, or C, and I would eliminate all the Cs. And I'd tell the Bs, you better upgrade to A. I would have a recruiting group that I have on staff right now, which I have on staff.

start backfilling the roles prior to me showing up. So that way I have talent lined up that wants to be a part of the opportunity. I'd move in, I'd cut people as fast as I possibly could. And I'd cut all the fat out of the business. All right, stop for a second. How do you ascertain who's talented, who's not? 50% of every company is operating, I'm sorry, 100% of every company is operating at some number under 100% productivity. Mm-hmm.

If they need a turnaround, they're probably at less than 50% productivity. So I'm going to get in there and I'm going to cut 50% of the staff out right away, essentialize the business, prioritize it, and drive it as hard as I possibly can. Are you looking for aptitude? Are you looking for attitude? Are you looking for, is the right person in the right seat or some combination of the three? I'm looking for work ethic, first and foremost. And a turnaround is,

We all need to work 10 hours a day, six days a week, you know, minimum, right? So it's, you know, it's really a turnaround. It's nine by nine by six, right?

And so who's willing to join me? Nine by nine by six. I'm willing to incent them to do this though. So I'm willing to pay overtime. I'm willing to carve them in on equity. I'm willing to put bonuses on the table, but we got to be all hands on deck because we have to stop the bleeding. And that's what we're doing day one is we're stopping the bleeding and it's going to take tough decisions. We're going to have to get rid of people we love, but we got to stop the bleeding. That's the first step that you do in a turnaround. Okay, perfect. So we got our people scored away. Nice. I like that. Yeah. People, programs, products,

you know, you're cutting everything you possibly can. Anything doesn't matter. You're looking at everything. I'm looking at- You're cutting like crazy. Elon Musk made that comment a couple of weeks ago. He said the reason that most companies fail is they don't cut enough. Yeah. When you're in the middle of a turnaround, the mistakes that I have made is that the entrenched people will fight to keep the resources, to keep the team members, to keep, you know, their spend high.

People love spending money. No one loves saving money, right? It's not fun to save money. It's fun to spend it. So you have to take it from a spend money culture to a save money culture and not everybody's going to be along for the ride. So, you know, for example, there's a company that, you know, I've been very close to that raised over $500 million and they were a spend money culture. Now they have to turn into a save money culture. That is a very hard shift for a company to do. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, we made a shift in the last year with COO at one of our companies and he went and just cut everything without sacrificing any service to our employees or our end use. It just...

The company over years, you just, well, why do we use that vendor? Because you just always have. When's the last time we priced this? We just haven't. And you start pricing everything in your business. And the amount of money he was able to put back in our pockets in that first six months was really incredible. That's an exceptional operator. Most people are not brave enough and smart enough to make those tough decisions, but

We use a zero-based budgeting method where we just look at what are a couple known factors in the business. Let's say we have 100 leads coming in. We have 100 leads. Now we need software for the leads. What do we need next? Well, we have to spend money to buy those leads. What do we need next? We need somebody to call those leads. What do we need next? So we start from one particular...

influx, whether it be on the revenue side or one known, we have X many customers to serve. And then you take a blank canvas and you just add back each expense one by one until you've essentialized the business. So that you're trimming the fat that way. You're saying what's the bare minimum of we can do to maintain our level of service? Yeah. And maintain the level of service to your point. Yes. Where the customer doesn't feel it. Yeah. I have a thousand customers. So if you and I have a thousand customers that we have to serve,

All right, how many people do we need to serve those 1,000 customers? Great. We need 10 people to serve those 1,000 customers. We need one manager for those 10 people. Now you and I can run a business with one manager and 10 people. That's all we need in the software, of course, to track and manage and run some analytics.

And so, you know, essentializing it to the bare minimum and then everything else that you keep should have an ROI attached to it. What is the return on investment of this expense or this employee that I'm keeping? And then we have to drive that return on investment per expense

per program, per product, per employee to make sure that we're actualizing the ROI that we've identified. Now, that's how we would go about the additional spend is that it should be ROI generative spend outside of the essential spend. I think a lot of the people listening to this show would be considered solopreneurs. I mean, they're not running scaled businesses. They're everyday work. They're still hustling.

in the business. They haven't made that graduation to CEO yet. And I would say the hardest thing to do when you're doing that process in your own business is buying your own time. And I find that a lot of people struggle with that. Like,

You know, yes. Everybody says, oh, if you, you know, if you don't have a good assistant, you are the assistant. And I understand that you can't get it out of your own way. But I also, I also see a lot of solopreneurs that I work with that tend to throw money away at dumb things in the name of time. Like what saves me time? Yeah. But does it, that expense, like what is your time really worth at this? I think you may have overvalued your time. How do you have those conversations? Well, one, if it could be done in two minutes, do it now.

Right? A lot of times we're adding up a bunch of stuff on our list and we're creating a ton of tasks. You only need three or four things per quarter to move the needle that are significant initiatives.

So what I've learned is to really focus on just a few objectives per quarter, knock them out and then add to it. So if I get them done earlier than 90 days, I might add three more. So three at a time, what are the things going to move the needle? Everything else is nonsense, right? So that's one. Two is...

Uh, you know, I, I don't like, uh, I, I, I value my time at a high rate. So I tend to outsource everything that is not at that rate. Um, but you've, but you've earned the right to do that. There's so many people that are here, you know, they're early in that process, not running a scaled business, not re you know, especially in real estate, which is what we do. So many people love to call themselves the CEO of their own little two man shop, right? Like to stop just

stop. Right. If you're not answering to a handful of investors of your business, please stop calling yourself a CEO. You've earned that. Right. Yeah. Right. But I would say that to those people, you have to master each process and you have, there's two things. You have to design the process, you have to run the process, and then you have to hand that process off to someone else.

And so once you've designed the process and you've optimized it and it runs effectively and you've documented it, then you can hand it off to someone else. That's the critical thing. So if I were starting a real estate firm and I know very little about it, you know, in terms of to the extent that you do, the first thing I would do is I would go knock on the doors or do whatever you told me to do. I would, I designed the process, I'd optimize it and I'd hire somebody to fill that role. And I'd move on to another process or another problem that I was looking to solve on my way to scaling the business one process at a time. Because you're backfilling yourself. Yeah.

And I think what people don't do is what you just said. The key to what you just said was documenting. So many people do not, like if you walk, I could walk into just, I could walk out this front door, walk into six different businesses and say, let me see your SOPs. And they would look at me like I was speaking Greek. Yeah. Yeah. And documentation is easy. You know, get a note file, step one, step two, step three, step four, step five, and just have a simple documentation. And then, you know, it's a good process when you can hand it to someone else based on your documentation. And then ask any questions. And yeah. Yeah.

Well, dude, there's so, I mean, Scribe, there's so many programs now that will help you build great SOPs. And if you don't even, if you don't want to go that route, just tell Chad GBT, ask me a hundred questions about this process and help me build an SOP and watch what happens. Yeah. There's a book called The E-Myth that changed my life early on in my career by Michael Gerber. I read it and I said, I have to, you know, learn how to properly document process. I learned that in the tech field.

But the, and now, but I will tell you very few people can both create a process and run one. It's rare. That's really the entrepreneur's job. Once I, I don't expect people to, I don't hire people to create process and run them. I generally lead from the front. I create the process and then I bring someone else in to run it. One mistake I see many entrepreneurs doing when they scale is they hire people to create and run process. And oftentimes you just don't get optimal process. Because they don't truly understand your business.

and they don't understand the business. And it's a special talent for someone who can show up to no process whatsoever, no structure, no organization, and create order out of chaos. That's a rare talent. Well, I mean, just even sitting here with you now for 27 minutes, right? I've kind of got your personality pattern pretty much. You tell me. No, you're very high D, very high C. You're very analytical thinker. You're very mathematically based. Everything is in the math with you. Yeah, I'm a math guy. You're a math guy. Everything's in the math.

So what traits do you think? Obviously, you've done it at extremely high level. So what traits do you think someone has to have to make them a very effective CEO? Well, everyone has a different stack. And using a software term, I've just built a stack, right? So you have your character and your competency, and you have a stack of character traits, and you have a stack of competencies that are necessary. On the competency side, as you can tell, I'm a math guy, so I'm going to break this engineer of the stack.

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I tried to reverse engineer everything. But on the competency side, you know, you have to have sales. You have to have marketing. You have to have supply chain, depending on the product. You have to have finance. You have to have technology. You might have to have international. You might have to have treasury. Like, you know, there's a lot of competencies that you have to learn to scale a big business. And those are skills. And you have to have the capacity to learn those skills. You have to have the desire to learn the skills. You have to have a life where you say, and a belief that you believe you can learn any skill. Mm-hmm.

right? Which is on the character side. So beliefs is on the character side. That's, that's, that's my, uh, that's my bad habit. I sit in there, watch somebody talk about business and I'll go, I

I could do that. Yeah, right. That's who you have belief. I could spend that up in like a week. You go to some black hole and you're like, oh God, what am I doing? What am I doing? Stop, stop. What are you doing? Yeah, it's terrible. It's my toxic trait, if you will. Yeah, I think I have that belief, but I also hire people that are really brilliant at that particular area quickly. That's my next question is, do you try to overcompensate your own inadequacies or do you backfill with other people? I get people very smart to teach me.

So the best mentors I've had are team members that I've hired from, you know, into my company that knew finance or that knew software engineering. You know, these are the people that educated me. You know, I've had the privilege of serving alongside, you know, the former heads of major companies that I've been able to recruit into my company. And so that they educated me.

tremendously. So, and you know, so I'm always, and I'm also interviewing people that are in roles constantly to gain Intel. So if I, if I want to start a business, I'll hire, I'll interview the product manager for X company or Y company. So I can better understand what they're doing and how they're doing it. And then apply those best practices to what I'm building. See, it's interesting because you just kind of answered both and what I just said, which is, you

you know, a it's what's best for the business is to backfill with people to fill your inadequacies. Don't, don't try to just say I can overcome and be everything. Cause nobody can be everything, but it's also advised to try to overcome by soaking up knowledge from the people that you backfill with. Yeah. You have to get to a level where you're not, um,

incompetent, right? If I'm incompetent- A level of competence. Yeah, if I'm incompetent on finances, you would not want to partner with me. So I have to have a degree of competency on this, which means I got to learn. I got to read books. I got to go to seminars. I got to hire people until I increase my competency. But I'm never going to be the guy-

organizing every transaction and figuring out the FASB rules, you know, and the gap rules and this, that, and the other for each and everything. I'm not going to figure out Sarbanes-Oxley to every degree to go public. I have to hire people that know that, but I have to be competent enough to know, you know, how that stuff works and be able to speak finance with the finance people and lead those finance people to be effective and productive in finance, for example. What makes a great leader in folks?

What makes you a great leader? All the adversity that I've overcome. Yeah. You know, I got to tell you, I got to tell you, we're coming up on our annual awards thing. This is the first time I'm going to talk about this. We're coming up on our annual awards deal. And every year for, we, you know, this is, this,

Just so you know, I don't think you know anything about me or my company. A little bit. A little bit, right? So yeah, this is the number one real estate brokerage in Vegas or somewhere almost anybody else as far as volume. And you said you have 300 something, 400? 585. 585. Our biggest competitor has like 1,500. So we're battling out with somebody who's got a thousand more foot soldiers than we do and we're still winning. Good job. Or close. We shouldn't be winning. I don't know if we'll still be winning by the time this comes out, but

We normally, we normally, we like to be second, which is good because it means I can still have quality people here and it doesn't matter. But you know, this year we do our little state of the union where we hand our awards to everybody. And I always talk about the new tech we're going to add and the new stuff we're going to add and we're going to do this. And I had a situation happen.

where recently we lost our family pet. We lost our dog, had to put him down at two hours before a party I was having at my house. So talk about a tough, tough night having a, you know, literally, you know, we put him down and then 200 people showed up. My house was interesting, but a week and a half later, we're sitting there and we're,

A box shows up at our house and it's from chewy.com because my wife gets all the dog's meds and all the bus up in my, I was like, Oh God, I forgot to cancel his stuff. And so she, you know, she calls him up and she goes, Hey, you know, our dog passed away. Is there any way I can return this? And immediately got an email from our account rep. And he said, look, you know, go donate it to a shelter. We're immediately going to, you know, immediately going to refund you. And we're so sorry about Barkley. You know, it's narrow, it just heartfelt kind of email to my wife about how hard it was to lose. But,

Five minutes later, she got another email from our old account rep. Oh my gosh, I just heard about Barkley. That's so terrible. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. And my wife's like, look at this. Like, this is crazy. And I'm like, this is like the greatest customer service I've ever seen. I'm already thinking I would never do anything with any pet company ever again other than Chewy. And then later that night, they send flowers to the house. Like, bro. So, you know, I thought about as you get bigger and you scale in business and business and business, you know,

The thing that moves the needle the most with all of the things that we do here and all the effort and all of the customer service, it's those magic moments like that that make your company shine.

really part of the fabric of the community with not just your clients, but also your employees. So I tasked all of our people here. I said, dude, this is all we are doing this year. I'm not adding anything else. I'm not adding anything else. Every single person that works for me in management or whatever else, they are tasked now with finding a magic moment for one of our people every week, every, I don't care. And we're going to compete every week and I want to hear what they were and I want to hear what we did. And it just has to be something that we did for some of our people every week, every single week in all of our companies.

And that's all I'm focused on. And I think it's so hard when you think the way that both, because I'm very, the truth is in the math. I say that. Every time somebody asks me a question, that's my standard answer. Well, the truth is in the math. I need to look at the math. That's my standard answer. I like that. And it's so hard to,

When you think that way, that you get away from some of that stuff. So what do you do to instill that type of culture? And obviously you do with a success. What do you do to install that type of culture? We've had programs like that. And in fact, I own a health dog food company. I'm an owner in it that does similar things that you just described. So that math adds up.

When you create connection with people, you know, and you create a relationship with people, that adds up. I had a good friend that was Vegas-based named Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, who's an author with us. And he did things like that too. And he was a highly analytical, brilliant Harvard guy. And, you know, and he pioneered a lot of those things. Yeah, his book, the Zappos book was phenomenal. Yeah, Delivering Happiness. And he would deliver flowers and, you know, and he taught me a lot about that subject. And this was one of the smartest entrepreneurs I had known.

And so I've implemented a lot of those programs because they add up. The math adds up to it. You're creating belief in people. What is belief worth? If people are filled with belief, they will do anything for you. If they have no belief, they will do nothing for you.

So we need to constantly fill that belief tank in people. And then with regard to customers, knowing that you care, every other company out there doesn't care. So when they, your customers know that you care, that's what your competitive advantage is that you have empathy, right? So all these other companies don't care. You care. That's your, that's your winning formula.

We're going to care more. Yeah. That's, that's, that is our objective amongst all of our brands this year is we're going to care more than anybody else does. Yeah. And that's an evolution that you've come to based on the fact that, you know, you've gotten to the level that you're at and now, you know, this is going to separate you from the pack. But in order to get to where you were, you first had to be ruthless with the numbers. You had to, you know, you had to process everything, analyze everything, do everything in a very, uh,

a numbers driven way. And then now you're at this place where the machine is working and now you can add gasoline to the fire in ways that you couldn't before. So you can't do that day one, you know, to the same degree that you can today. Well, I think too, I think if you're going to be a very effective CEO, you got to love, you got to love what you do every day. And there's a lot of days in those number days that you're just like,

another day, another day, another dollar, just, you know, looking at PNLs, looking at balance sheets, looking at this, looking at that. And it's just, it's just another day. Yeah. You, I, I have a technique that I utilize where I look for love in every meeting. Oh, I love that. So like, you know, I'm, if I, if I'm thinking to myself, this is going to be work,

right? This is going to be hard or this is going to be a long day. I go, okay, I have 16 opportunities to find love today in these meetings. I have 16 opportunities to connect to a human being. Today's not going to be a hard day. Today's going to be a day that tests my endurance. So I'm turning it around every moment to try to optimize for happiness and to optimize to have fun as I'm working and

And so that's the technique that I've utilized as opposed to saying, it's going to be rough. I got to talk to 10 people today that have this. I say, oh no, I have an opportunity to find love in 10 meetings today. And I'm on a scavenger hunt in each of those meetings to find it. Right. Yeah. I try to look at everything as I get to do it. Yeah. I get to it as, as you probably can attest to this, we are gentlemen of a certain age when you reach a certain age.

your friends start to die. When they start to die, it's like, and there's no candlelight vigil for them around the lake. It's just like, yeah, dude didn't really eat that good and didn't take care of himself. And unfortunately, I just lost my seventh, what I would consider,

At one point of my life, either a best friend or in that tight circle of three. I just lost my seventh one. So I said I was going to honor those guys. So I actually went and got my Memento Mori dog tags with all their initials on the back of it. And every time something comes up that I don't want to do, I'm like...

These dudes would give anything to be doing this right now. Anything to be doing this right now. So yeah, finding that why, and so many people have to do things. I don't have to do anything. I get to do everything I do. That's beautiful. I'm going to, I'm going to use it. I also have had lots of friends go and I pay tribute to my mentors that are no longer with us.

Tony Shea being one of them, John Wooden, the UCLA famed coach. So I'm often thinking about the shoulder, the shoulders that I stand upon and the great ones that have poured into me that are no longer with us and dear friends as well. So I love that. I think I'm going to get something engraved on there and they're on. I love that. Best practice. Yeah. Dude, let me ask you this because you're coming from like, not weed for snakes,

Weird trade, by the way. But you're trading weed for snakes and you're in a room with like John Wooden and all these guys. So was there ever a time in your life when you suffered through imposter syndrome or was that, have you always had this innate level of confidence in yourself? Either answer is fair. Yeah.

In retrospect, I was an imposter. I just didn't know it. Ignorance is bliss sometimes, kids. Looking back, that guy that showed up to that room to raise money from VCs, I'm like, I can't believe he did that. But I didn't walk in. It was a mission. But I think because I was a fighter and I was a tough kid growing up,

I had some, I had a thought in my head that I could beat these guys in pretty much every sport. I could beat these guys in a fight. You beat these guys in nine out of 10 things, maybe not in finance, maybe not in business, but I'm going to learn everything I can from them in those subjects. So I showed up very, uh, aggressive, you know, I was intense. I, I was there to get the information out of them to extract what I possibly could so that I could achieve my objectives. Just an

unapologetic about it. Unapologetic. Like, you know, because I showed up to a person, it's like I sized the person up and I'd say, you know, if we were in a street fight, you would not, you know, be disrespecting me right now. So I'm, I'm showing up to you with respect. I want the information that you have. I need the help that you have. But I was man to man in those meetings. I wasn't afraid of those people. Yeah. Love that. No, that's good. I want to talk a little bit now, because obviously, you know, you run now,

Your faith-based entrepreneurial coaching, you run that. So let's talk a little bit about your faith because obviously it's very important to you. At what point did you find that? So I was raised by a grandmother that was very faith-driven. She taught me the foundational values. But when my family got addicted to drugs, I strayed from it. I also was partying and living like a rock star. Then when I started making tens of millions a year, I was really living like a rock star, you know, decadent life.

I got completely away from it. Then my mom died. And as she was dying, I made a commitment to her. I confessed to her. She died tragically. She fell down a flight of stairs. She was in a coma for two years. I couldn't see her all the time. And I was partying like a rock star. And so sometimes I wouldn't go see her and I was out partying in Vegas and doing crazy stuff.

And I felt bad about that. I had guilt about that. And so as she was dying, I told her, the reason why I haven't been able to see you is because I've been living this double life. I'm not the son you think I am. And on the other side, you're going to see everything. And I'm going to change. I'm going to honor you. I'm going to do things differently. And that then broke me wide open. When she passed away, I broke, hit the rock bottom of all rock bottoms from an emotional and mental and spiritual level to

took two years off of work, went and rebuilt myself, prayed, meditated every day, nonstop until I was ready to go back out there and reenter the world of entrepreneurship. And I did so through mentorship. I decided day one, I was just going to start mentoring people. I didn't have a good business idea. I was pretty weak coming out of the cave, so to speak. And I said, you know, I'm just going to mentor people and see where that takes me. Let's see what happens.

and now I'm building an AI tech platform and, uh, doing autonomous coaching and deploying software in many different companies. Uh,

Uh, and I have a movement of, of, uh, coaches that are serving companies all around the world right now. How important. So when you say, look, obviously faith-based is God belief. We get that. But are there elements of purpose driven this that there's, there's giving back into the community for this stuff? I mean, is there elements of that involved in these things? I only want to work with people that, um, I, I like at this stage of my life, you know, if I don't like you, if we don't have a, uh,

We don't have a shared sense of humor. If I don't have, if I don't admire the entrepreneur. Life is too short. Right? I just, I don't want to take calls from people on a Sunday that I don't believe in and care about and want to help. Like I have to feel a noble duty to serve this human being and that I know in my way of giving them what I know and helping them through whatever problems they're up against, whether personally or professionally, they're going to tithe more. They're going to give back more. They're going to do good in the world. And I get to participate in the legacy that they create.

or indirectly. I'm not trying to make money on, you know, I'm not trying to optimize for money at this stage of my life. I'm trying to optimize for, you know, the good that I can create. And knowing that I'm helping a young man like I just did this morning has got, you know. But when you think about

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the same checkout Skins uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash westwood1, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash westwood1 to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash westwood1.

500 people on his team and he's serving a bunch of individuals and I help him with just a small practice that is going to help him in the season. And he's a young CEO. And I told him, look, if I were in your situation, I go do this. He goes and does it. He gets results. He moves on to the next challenge. It's life-giving to me. It doesn't take anything from me. It actually fuels me up. It makes me excited about my life because I can serve. Let me ask you this. So maybe, maybe you are, I'm not right there. There are, there are days when I'm just off, right? When I'm just like, man, I'm

I'm just not at a place to like, I pray my phone doesn't ring today. Like, I mean, we have a lot of people that work for us and I'm just like, please don't call me today. Cause I don't want to snap at somebody and I want to be like, why aren't you just figuring this out? Why are you calling me? Like there are days, not a lot of them. I mean, I'm, I'm pretty, pretty even keel, but I have those days, man. So how do you get up to serve for others when you just don't feel like getting up at

We all have those days. So, you know, anybody who says they don't have those days, it's a myth, right? You look at the Tony Robbins and people like that, that we, that I love and adore. They have those days too. I know them personally. Everybody has them. It's being able to recognize that you're having that day. I like to look at it as an input output ratio.

If I'm drained, I need to put more into me. That means I need to spend more time in nature with family or I need to optimize around my health and my wellbeing that I'm putting too much out. Out is action. So I'm looking at input output ratios every day. And if I'm drained,

today's an input day. If I'm inspired and I'm ready, today's an output day. And every day I'm looking at my input output ratio. How much am I putting in the tank versus how much am I taking out? And then when I don't have any more to give at the end of the day and I'm exhausted, well, I know I haven't optimized my input output ratio correctly. So during the day I'm putting things in the tank

It might be a quick meditation. I might go do a boxing lesson, you know, things like that that are going to fuel me up. Are you a TM guy? Yeah. Me too. Yeah. I love it. So, you know, so if, but if I miss my midday meditation, I'm going to be cranky, I'm going to be triggered. And if I'm triggered, that's an indicator as to where I need to do the work and where I need to do the optimization. I get triggered all the time. I get frustrated all the time. You know, my team feels that I feel bad about that when that happens.

And I just take responsibility for it and say, I still got work to do. Let me go back and do some work and I'll come back, you know, refreshed and energized. But sleep is everything. And I've learned, I found a device, it changed my life. I'm not affiliated with it. It's not a plug for anything that I own. It's called the Pulsetto.

Put it on your neck. The Pulsetto. Yeah, it stimulates your vagus nerve. And I sleep like a baby. It's like 300 bucks. The Pulsetto. Pulsetto. And I have no affiliation with this company. Really? I was sleeping like four or five hours a night. Now I'm sleeping eight hours a night on this thing.

Really? Yeah. No, no medication, no sleeping pills. I track my sleep. We were talking about biohacking before I track my, I mean, I track everything. It just, you put it on your device 10 minutes before sleep. It's there's a sleep program on it. It like sends electric shock waves into your vagus nerve. And I sleep like a baby because of it. Dude, I'm in.

Yeah. Yeah. Cause like 300 bucks. Yeah. I do the, I do the ground. Like I try to get off the blue screens two hours before I get on the grounding mat. I'll run it down to about eight megahertz. So it's that low megahertz to kind of chill you out.

And it's been, you know, it's a good, but I was going to actually, my next one was going to be the eight sleep because a buddy of mine just said that thing is magic. That's my next one too. He said it's just magic. But I'm going to try that, which is great. It's so interesting that you were talking about the input output, you know, variables for yourself. Cause I was talking about, I look at,

marriage that way. People ask me, like, what's the secret of good marriage? I'm like, dude, it's like bank account. You make deposits and withdraws. And you better not ever be overdrawing your wife. That's how you do it. You know, sometimes, you know, why does your wife let you stay out after the fight till late sometimes with the boys? It's because...

I show up for her all the time. And so I always make way more deposits with draws, but it's interesting. I never thought about that with myself. Like, am I feeding myself enough of what I need? Yeah. One of the things that I do, by the way, uh, I'm a newlywed, so I'm taking congratulations. I'm taking your advice on marriage. Um,

So one of the things I do is I write up a list of all of the activities that give me life, the sunset, the sunrise, watering the plants, walking the dog. And I have that long list of activities. And in the event that I have a gap or I'm a little exhausted or I get triggered, I just go do one of them. Some are less time than others. So I might pick one that's more optimized for whatever the window is.

you know i got a speed bag in my house it gives me joy i get into a flow state i hit that thing for 10 15 minutes and then i'm pumped i got a little trampoline i'll go bounce up and down on uh you know i'll go dance on the thing play some good music and it's just a way to get my state shifting and to put something in to shift that you know frustration energy or that negative energy dude what a great exercise like you should have a note in your apple notes that says like like what like

all of just a list of all those things you can do quick, how long they, how long they take. So you don't have to think about it. When you hit that spot, you're just like, yeah, I get 20 minutes. Yeah. Just pick, draw one, draw one from a hat real quick. The other thing though, if you want to shift the energy into you, there's two things you can do is one you pour into you. The other is you pour out to someone else,

Um, uh, tithe, uh, give to a friend, do something good, anonymous. Don't take credit for it. Try to help a friend. Uh, and they don't even know you're trying to help them. So, you know, take on a project where you do some good that will shift energy heading in your direction as well. Yeah. I, you know, it's so, it's so hard to balance out the social media aspect of everybody's got to do everything you do. And, um,

Let me go give to the homeless. I'm like, well, I just want other people to be inspired by what I'm doing. Yeah, I agree. It's better if you leave the camera off. Yeah. I think there's only one thing we do all year where we turn the cameras on. It's when we go pay off the layaways for Christmas. That's like the only thing that we ever say this is what we're doing because we want more people to come next year, right? Yeah. You should be doing things in secret.

as well as things publicly. That's why they call it Secret Santa. It's not Public Santa, Secret Santa. The greatest, the most pure gift that we can give is one where we have no intention of anything in return whatsoever. So I don't want it on social. That's the most pure gift. But it's okay if we're...

We're giving with some intention. There's nothing wrong with that. We just want to be public about that. You know, yes, I have an intention. I want to drive traffic to my firm for these gifts because I believe every firm should do that. Nothing wrong with that. We want to give with pure intention and we don't want to be honest about the intention that we're giving the gift with. What's your fit? Because obviously we're not publicizing. I'm just curious what your favorite thing is you do. Do you have one little thing that you do consistently?

Is your favorite thing to do, just giving? I like to involve people in the conspiracy of giving and they don't know it. So I might tell you, hey, let's give a gift to someone that we both mutually know, let's say. And then I ask you, hey, I'll send you a hundred bucks. You give it to them. They don't know that I've given it to them. You are now involved in the gift. I'm involved in the gift. So we're unlocking multiple blessings. So it's a conspiracy of giving and they have no idea that I was...

uh, you know, the person that was a catalyst there. So I say to you, don't tell them, you know, that I'm involved. I'll send you a hundred bucks. You give it to them. You say, okay, let's do it. And then you involve me in a conspiracy to give. And so together we're conspiring to give more and we're, we're, you know, involving multiple people in the gift. I do it with my son all the time. I love that. That's great, dude. It's so important to teach the kids that. Yeah. They know probably my favorite thing I do all year is around Christmas for the 23 days.

24 days. Sometimes I get to 24, it depends how busy we are, but it's always the 23 days. Every day, we'll give away a hundred bucks. Just randomly. And I always want to do it with my kids as much as possible, just so they can just see, just hear, which is great. I love doing that. A leader like yourself, by the way, there's somebody that needs you, you could call up and just pour life into? Yeah.

You call up and not on your team. No. That's different. There's people outside your team that you know in the industry. You could just call up and say, hey, I just want to tell you, I think what you're doing is great. And just keep at it. That will shift the energy because we give to our team all the time. But when we take time to give outside of our team, that also shifts the energy heading in our direction. Well, it's so funny. I had something happen the other day that's never happened. Unless I was speaking somewhere and obviously in an obvious place, right?

because then people always come up and talk to you after. But I bought kind of an audacious car, and I'll say it's audacious, but I've always wanted the car, so I bought the car. I can afford the car. I bought the damn car, right? And it's for me. It's not for anyone else. But there's a benefit to the car because it's now happened twice. I've had two younger age kids, young adults, kids, whatever, blah, blah, come up to me and ask me, what do you do? Yeah.

And how do I do it? Like, what advice would you give for me? At your age, you can do that. I love that. I don't recommend, a lot of young people will do that and they'll buy the Lambo because- No, no, no, it's dumb. Well, they'll buy it because they try to justify it that it's going to be a lead engine. Generally speaking, you're not going to pay for the Lambo through leads. No, you're not. No, I am saying I appreciate the start of the last minute give back, not because it's generating me anything different. I used to have a classic car that people wanted to take pictures with.

And it was always a privilege. Like people would just say, it's a life dream of mine to take a picture with this car. And I'd say, please, get in it, get in it. Do it, do your thing. So I agree. And it's important for us to share in our wealth in different ways. And so congratulations that you're doing that. I love that.

Honestly, it's my favorite part of the car. I love the car, but it's my favorite part of it so far. Yeah, that's awesome. Because it just, you don't, I'm at the sandwich place, right? And it happens there. And it's an inspiration. It's great. And it's good to share that inspiration. And, you know, I've had a...

a lot of rockstar moments, right? And I'm very careful now and I measure my intention very closely, but I like nice things as well. And I like to share those nice things with others. Yeah. No, I dig that. What advice would you give if somebody was that 18 to 24 year old struggling, trying to figure it out? What advice would you give them? Get a mentor, pursue multiple mentors, keep going until you find somebody, extract information from every individual.

and acquire skills. Your life is about skills. Skills pay the bills. So acquire skills at all costs. Yeah. And I'll say this about that too, right? Because I had somebody say to me not too long ago that works for me. And the kid said, he's a great kid. He's doing a great job. And he said to me, he goes, well, I don't know if you know this or not, but you're my mentor. That's what he said. And I got to tell you, if you want somebody to take an interest in you, I don't know how you can hear that

is a, is a, someone that has achieved relative success and not feel an instant responsibility. Cause whole man, I felt this instant responsibility for this kid's success in a different way that I did just cause he works for us. Right. I was like immediately like, Oh my God, like I gotta make sure this kid wins. Yeah.

If I'm his mentor, now I'm responsible for what happens to him. Yeah, being a mentor is a role. It's an assignment. There's something spiritual there. And whether you're spiritual or not, there's something there. It's a part of our tradition and humanity and in teaching and in passing on to the next generation. So it's hardwired into our DNA to mentor. So when that young man invoked

mentorship and told you that you had that coveted role in his life, that then activated you at a new level in your relationship. So it's important for us to carry the mentorship tradition on and to be good mentors to people. But I think the reason I said that was to young people listening, like, look, it's kind of like signing the girlfriend, boyfriend label, maybe a little bit. Don't be, not on the first date. Don't be too aggressive with it. But once somebody's helped you a little bit,

feel free to tell them, Hey man, just so you know, you're my mentor or Hey ma'am, whatever it is, you're my mentor, whatever it is. And I think you're getting the response that you're going to get from that person is, is,

man, it was a lot. It was like, whoa. It does create a sense. It has to be authentic. Yeah, and it was. Yeah, it has to be authentic. And the first job when you're pursuing a mentor is figure out what you can give to them. He was giving to you. He's giving you his time, his energy, his desire to help build your firm, right? So there's an economic connection there.

Most of the time, we don't figure out what to give to the mentor first. So I was always saying, what can I do for you? Can I donate to your charity? Can I donate time to your charity if I don't have money to donate to your charity? How can I serve you first and foremost? Because I know what you're going to give me. I understand clearly what I want from you. So I don't understand clearly what I can give to you. So help me clean up your yard, your garage. You want me to talk to your son? What can I do for you? And then once I get that, you know, that...

relationship established that it's going to be reciprocal, then we have a mentorship relationship. It has to be reciprocal. He's giving to you. But I think it's, I think it to a certain extent though, if, if somebody shows me enough gumption,

The fact that they just want to learn and then they're, and then you can't be an asshole. Anytime somebody is an asshole with me, I'm out. Right. If you start, what should I do? And I tell them and they do the polar opposite. I'm like, okay, you don't need me. Well, they have to want to learn. They have to take action on what you taught them. And then they have to at least give you some gratitude in the process. Right. So what you receive back is gratitude and that gives you fuel. Right. Yeah. When somebody, sometimes that's enough for me. That,

Hey, if somebody gives me gratitude, that adds to my life. That gives me good energy. I feel that I'm thankful for that, you know, but I, I, there's a, there's a concept spiritually called bread of shame. We don't, we want people to know how they can earn your time. So I will make people, they say, I want you to mentor me. I'll say, I need some help in my garden.

Right? I do. Just show up. Yeah, you always need some help. I need some help. I'm like, show up. I need some help. Why? Because I'll resent you if I don't feel like you are showing up to contribute. Now, what can you give me? You can't give me money. If you're broke, you want to help me? Help me with my trash. Help me with my garden. Help me with organizing my garage. Give me time back. And then I'll give you $10,000 worth of my time, which is an hour. Yeah. Right? So just give me a couple hundred dollars worth of your time. I'll give you 10 of mine and I'll be happy with that trade.

Well, dude, that is a trade that anybody should be willing to make. Oftentimes people want though. They ask, they ask, they ask, and they're not willing to give in return. That's the question. It's like, would you, okay. Would you work in somebody's garden for $10,000 an hour? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. Well, this dude's going to give you $10,000 worth of knowledge. Go help him pull some weeds. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the litmus test that I have for people that want my help. I have a, I have a property. That's Mr. Miyagi stuff right there. I do it. Yeah. I have a property in Northern Arizona and, and, uh, off the grid, uh, 80 acres. Yeah. And I got work to do there at all times. So if somebody wants my mentorship, I'll put your hands to work. Yeah. Let's go work up there. All right. Well, dude, Brian, thank you so much for coming in, bro. I want to keep you on schedule. I know you got a flight. Thank you. Uh,

If they want to find you, how do they find you? On Instagram, I'm at RealRyanBlair. Or you can go to AlterCall.com. A-L-T-E-R-C-A-L-L dot C-O-M. Cool. Brother, it was good to have you through. You're welcome back anytime you want to come back. And we'll see you again. I mean, look.

I think if you listen to this today, as with so many of the high-level people we come through, the key to your future success normally lies on the other side of your ability to, number one, ask for help, but, number two, be worthy of it. See you next week.

What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it, or at least as much as I did out of it. Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escapingthedrift.com. You can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five-star review, give us a share, do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully, you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.