S2 EP 21 Change Your Environment, Change Your Income

WEBVTT - S2 EP 21 Change Your Environment, Change Your Income Welcome to Building Billions. Building a 10 million, 100 million, billion, or multibillion dollar business is actually based on three things consistency, velocity, and results. I built, scaled and exited and rebuilt many businesses in my career. If you're serious about creating something that has real enterprise value, stay tuned.

This is building billions with Brandon Dawson. If you want to become rich this year, you have to change your environment. Trust me on this. I left my hometown at 19 years old and I moved to a bigger city, Atlanta, Georgia, and I had to travel 11 different states trying to make money.

It was so challenging and uncomfortable. But that discomfort is the reason I'm actually a multi-millionaire today. But if you want to make more money than you've ever dreamed of, these are the four steps you've never heard of to change your environment. Starting with number one out of the marketplace you're operating in.

Most people aren't stuck because they lack talent. They're stuck because they literally are in the wrong place. If I would have stayed in Corvallis, Oregon, and I would have got a job at the paper mill like my uncle retired from, or I would have got a job at the Oregon State Police Department, where I was third on the list as a cadet, and they only hired two that year. My grandfather was my hero, by the way, and he was captain of the Oregon State Police.

That's all I wanted to do. Sometimes, to become a different person, you have to get out of the environment that allows you to be comfortable, and you have to have a bigger picture of what the people around you may have. So here's the deal. You have to audit your marketplace.

You have to have access to the right education, the right mentors, and the right opportunities, but they're not going to come to you, which requires you to leave where you're at and go to somewhere new. I'll give you an example of this. One of my good friends who started as a client, he was a custom home builder. What about 2008, nine, ten, 11, and 12 when the housing market collapsed?

I wasn't doing any homes. So what did he have to do? Well, he had to leave the marketplace he was comfortable in and go to a marketplace that he could expand into expansion is the thing you're actually looking for. So what he did is he moved built a business that operated without him, moved back to the place he loved, built himself an amazing, beautiful, huge home.

So what he did is moved to the larger market, started a new services business. He chose to leave where it was comfortable. Even though he was making money. He created a value prop around those services for other contractors, of which he could talk to him as one of them and then assure that he could solve for problems they had.

Here's what's really happening in your marketplace. 97% of all small businesses fail over ten years. And my favorite author on leadership, John Maxwell, talks about this. Your market has a cap.

I've never seen a business have more than 33% market share penetration in one market of any business. So that's a cap. And if you have a tiny market, then that tiny 33% is even smaller. But if you're in a big market with lots of opportunity, you can expand inside that market.

Here's the fact your business can only grow to the extent your environment and surroundings and influence grow. Smallness always keeps smallness. So here's what I'd recommend. Do a 360 degree view of your environment right now.

Where are you located? What kind of people are surrounding you? What opportunities are around you? Have I moved in the last 5 or 10 years to a bigger, better, more valuable market opportunity?

Have I changed my career to expand and do bigger, better, more valuable things? If the answer is no, make a plan to expand into something bigger. Next is the strategy number two. Reset your comfort.

Your current environment, honestly is probably destroying your chances of success because of one thing you're too comfortable. And I've always challenged myself. But at 26 years old, I was living in Minneapolis, Minnesota with a two and a half year old and a brand new newborn, and I was making a lot of money for my age, more than most the older people in the company I worked. I wanted to do better though, but I was told I was already tapping out because I was bumping up against what the older people were making.

Well, that didn't work for me because I had bigger dreams and bigger ambitions. So at 26, I quit my job. It was actually December 15th, 1995. I went home to my wife, who was born and raised on farmland in Minneapolis, and said, I just quit my job.

We need to sell our $300,000 house we just built, because I need to go find a way to provide better for our family. Fortunately for me, she said, if that's what you need to do, I'm backing you. I literally sold the house, threw all the kids everything in the car, and we moved to Portland, Oregon. Stand up for your family and your future self because if you don't do it, nobody else is gonna do it.

I was so uncomfortable. I gave up the beautiful home, the nice neighborhood, the fancy cars, because I wanted to conserve the capital that I needed to live on. I raised $38 million in Financing. I bought hundreds of businesses.

I was the youngest person to ring the opening bell of the American Stock Exchange. I was featured in Forbes, but I messed up. I made some mistakes. And I promise you, we're all gonna make mistakes.

And I had to restart. But I was okay restarting because I had already restarted multiple times. But here's the thing. Once I determined I was gonna go back, build better, I did, and I became a multi-millionaire.

And here's the fact if I hadn't removed my safety nets, I wouldn't have done half the things I've done. I hunkered down, I got better, I not only rebuilt my confidence, but I blew it through the roof. And now anything uncomfortable, I know something good is around the corner because when I'm comfortable, I get bored. When you intentionally remove the comfort from your life and decisions, you trigger action.

Jim Collins talks about this and how the mighty fall. So to reset your comfort, identify one major comfort anchor you have in your life right now. Just remove it and watch how destroying your current comfort actually propels you into action, success, and a new version of you. This brings us to number three learn through failures.

If you want financial success, it's much better to start and fail over and over, rather than just simply chasing perfection. If you chase perfection, you're probably never gonna find it because you're not doing anything. And it's in the doing this that you learn how to become perfect. I'll give you an example.

My first boss, when I moved to Atlanta, gave me a bunch of responsibilities. He trusted I would figure out how to do it and do it right, but I didn't want to let him down. I wanted to be my own person and impress my boss that I was going to be a good employee. So instead of deferring and deflecting and handing it off to somebody, I literally had to take the time to learn to do it myself and get better and better and better at it.

And that eventually got me promotions so I could become the boss of other people and learn how to lead. First you learn, then you do, then you improve and they become valuable, which is how you become wealthy. When my boss said, I want you to travel these 11 states and build a network of business owners in the hearing care space that you can go visit and sell hearing aids to as an outside sales rep. I'm like, that's cool, where's the list?

He's like, well, we just opened the office. We don't have a list. I know this is gonna sound crazy because now you just Google or literally ask chat to build it for you, right? But in 88, 89, how did I build my list of my future customers?

I would drive into a town, get in my car and go to Macon, Georgia. And that's how I built my route just by showing up. It took me to get out of Corvallis to figure out how to build relationships and create business. That's a skill set I'm very good at today, and this is where it all started.

By year two, I was crushing it and sailing through it because of those thousands relationships I bought of products from me, and I was able to innovate and become one of the top sales reps in the whole company as an outside sales rep, which got me a promotion to become in charge of inside and outside sales. Those were the things I learned that gave me confidence to become a multi-millionaire. And I just keep doing it. And here's what people don't understand.

Confidence is not a prerequisite for starting. It's a byproduct of starting executing and getting results. Over time. You act, fail, adjust, learn and grow.

Then it's figured out. I was sitting with one of my mentors back in 2002, and he introduced me to a good friend of his. Her name was Meg Whitman. She was the CEO of eBay.

And she said, perfection is the enemy of good enough. You learn faster by getting more people using it and giving feedback to you on what does and doesn't work. And then you modify, you innovate, and you keep that cycle going until everyone else says, this is amazing. So here's my advice.

Commit to a new environment for one full year. Write down what you try to do, what the result was and the mistake you made, and then write down what you've learned to do it differently to get a better result. Because all of us, in order to change our life from where it is to what we want it to be, we have to do something different tomorrow than we did today. And the last strategy is to master new territory.

This is the fastest way to become more confident than you could ever imagine in your life. For me, leaving Corvallis at 1819 years old and going out to the world and growing up and having multiple failures and then rebounding, creating multiple successes and then becoming unbelievably wealthy. All that is because I never stopped pursuing the change. I never stopped being willing to be uncomfortable.

The discomfort became an inspiration and motivation for me to know I'm actually growing because I'm doing something I've never done before. Look, I've got a reputation amongst my friends and coworkers. You could literally drop me anywhere in the world, and within a week, I'm going to be doing something great with great people. Having a good time, making a living, whatever that looks like.

I am not even the remotely least afraid to go anywhere in this world. I am going to flourish and prosper and become successful. When you prove to yourself that you can succeed in a new environment, new people, whatever, you unlock something most people never experience, only by your willingness to enter additional new environments, build new relationships, do new things, master new skills to change your life. So in order to master your new territory, when you're in a new place, spend the first 90 days.

Don't try to make sales or get big business deals. Don't tell big, long stories. Take an active interest in somebody else. And if you can build a bunch of new relationships in 90 days, I promise you you can thrive in any environment on this earth.

But let's face it, your current environment isn't the only thing holding you back if you're distracted, out of focus, scattered, well, that's going to slow everything down.