E46 | Buying Back Your Time with Justin Lund

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What if the biggest thing holding your business back… is you?

In this episode, Justin Lund joins us to break down the real reason founders get stuck, overworked, and secretly trapped—even after hitting 7 figures.

The problem isn’t lack of effort.

It’s hiring in the wrong order.

Justin explains why hiring isn’t about scaling your business—it’s about buying back your time so you can pull bigger levers.

We unpack:

• The biggest lie entrepreneurs believe about scaling
• Why founders avoid hiring at the core
• How to calculate your true hourly value
• The cost of inaction vs. the cost of hiring
• Why your business collapses when you take a vacation
• The 2 types of problems in life and business
• The most expensive hiring mistake founders make
• How to build rhythms and routines around finances
• Balancing ambition with marriage and young kids

Justin also shares a powerful personal story about losing millions due to poor financial oversight—and the systems he now uses to protect himself and his clients.

If you’re rebuilding, scaling, or feel like your business can’t survive without you… this episode will shift your perspective.

Key Takeaway:
Hiring the right way gives you time back.
Time back lets you pull bigger revenue levers.
Bigger levers create freedom and enterprise value.

Books Mentioned:

• Buy Back Your Time – Dan Martell
• How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie
• Getting Things Done – David Allen

Connect with Justin on Instagram to learn more about buying back your time and building a business that works without you.

Instagram: instagram.com/itsjustinlund

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

It's not hiring people to grow your business. It's hiring people to get your time back so that you can grow your business. And that's a big fundamental shift that nobody is going to ever take growing your business as seriously as you are. And that's the the mindset shift that I think founders need to make. Investors need to make, like everybody needs to make. They are the ones on the front lines. They are going to be bleed sweat their business. Everybody else is gonna relatively go home the five kind of a thing. You know, there's some that have different kind of takes for sure, but nothing is gonna compare to that founder. So if you focus on hiring to get your time back, and then the other side of that sort of pancake, I would say, is with the time that you get, how can you put it back quick? What's the highest leverage lever that you can pull with maybe get five hours back in a week because you offload X, Y, or Z. Now what are you gonna do with that five hours?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Welcome back to The Broke Billionaires, where we document our daily struggles and building wealth while raising a young family. Join us as we talk creative wealth building for everyday people and couples that are struggling in a down economy. I'm Lauren.

SPEAKER_03 1:05

And I'm Joshua Masari, and we'll be your host.

SPEAKER_02 1:09

All right, welcome to the show, Justin. We're so excited to have you today.

SPEAKER_04 1:12

Yeah, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 1:15

Awesome. Well, we're we're excited to learn uh what you have to offer. I I've seen your stuff on social media, and we're in you know, Dan Martel's elite group together. And, you know, just learning for me, buying back my time is is new. So I'm I'm really excited to get you know your take on this, and you've got a lot of experience in this area. So we're excited to see what you have to say today. All right.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Very excited. Let's jump right into it. What is the biggest lie entrepreneurs believe about scaling their business?

SPEAKER_04 1:42

The biggest lie. I often run into people that they just get sequencing wrong. And, you know, where my mind goes is kind of deep psychological stuff in that to that question. We create a big edifice, like a big wall to protect our ego and really avoid getting into anything that's gonna be like that that elicits fear, our self-worth. Uh, I was just chatting with a guy yesterday in my DMs, and he was talking about young guys, 26, 7, 8 years old, bringing in $60,000, $70,000 a month with a business. He's only been running in for about a year. So he's doing really well. He's about to hit that $1 million mark. But the biggest lie that he's telling himself is really to keep himself safe. He's thinking, I got to open a second location. I need to scale. I'm gonna bring in a general manager. So he's not following any kind of a buyback ladder. He's not hiring in the right sequence. He's jumping into an area that he'll delegate and really just offload so much of the success of the business to somebody else because it's to me, it just looks like he's setting himself up for a scapegoat so that he can have somebody to point to and say, that's why it didn't work because I hired that guy. Instead of staying in the business and bringing somebody in, that's why Dan does what he does. You know, that that ladder is you start with admin, and there's a reason for that. You get a lot of good time back, but you also learn things. You have to face yourself, right? And that's one of the big lies, I think. Instead of facing those things like, where am I short that I need the deficiencies that I need to build? I'm just gonna like stay busy over here somewhat with something else.

SPEAKER_03 3:31

Yeah, that's that's so good. I think most people when they think about, you know, hiring, and I I had the same problem. You know, you think of admin as just pushing papers and things like that, but it instead, you know, instead of hiring out on the fingers here, you need to hire at the core, like what you need help, what's taking all your time. And for me, that was email. Just just managing my inbox all day. I couldn't get anything done because I just had getting bombarded by emails. Yeah. And so I did hire an assistant and she just handles my inbox. And I am so much more productive just making that one move and getting that off my plate. It was hard to let go, but once I let go and kind of let that pride down, like, no, I like I don't need to answer my email. Somebody else can do it for me. Once I let that go, it was just eye-opening on on how much more productive I can be now.

SPEAKER_04 4:14

So, what did you what else did you learn, Josh, when you were doing that? Like you you learned that, letting go. What else was that part of that process when you brought an assistant in?

SPEAKER_03 4:24

I think just for me, hiring the wrong people, I've always hired, you know, for shipping and for running around and doing, doing these, all these different things that were added on. So as more busy work was coming on, I was hiring that busy work, but I was keeping what was taking my time, I was keeping all that for myself, just thinking that I'm the one that needs to handle this. I'm the I'm the one that needs to be the person to be, you know, processing these orders and interfacing with these clients and you know, answering my own emails. That was a the email was a big one. Just learning to let go of that and realizing somebody else could do that for me and make me so much more productive.

SPEAKER_02 4:57

That was huge when you gave up that control. Like I've seen such a change in you and the business of how just like it's taken alleviated a lot of stress for sure.

SPEAKER_04 5:08

What would you say that if I could follow up on that one more time? For somebody that is, I'm thinking of a few clients right now that just it's a non-starter where it's like, oh no, not that. Because my clients expect my answers. How would you like where do they start? What's the first step?

SPEAKER_03 5:28

Well, I think I hit a point with my business where I had, you know, gone past the million, the million mark, got about 1.5, and then everything just kind of imploded. I was working, you know, 60, 80 hours a week and just trying to keep up everything, trying to hire people doing running and shipping and some of that stuff. But like I didn't hire what was actually taking all my time. And I think that just realizing now that I'm rebuilding the business, I'm starting at the nucleus of the business. What can I take off my plate? Not all the extra stuff I don't have time for. What can I take off my plate that I don't really need to be doing? Um, I just have this, I had this mindset that I'm the only one that can do this and I do it better. But, you know, like like Dan says, somebody else that can do it 80% as good as you is way better than you trying to take everything on yourself. And just getting that, like reading his book and getting that into my mind, like, okay, what I'm doing is not working. I've got to do something. And it was humbling, but I'm like, I gotta do something and make a change because I I know I can't scale back up with what I was doing, the the way I was managing it.

SPEAKER_04 6:29

Yeah, that's great. That's good. Good stuff for sure.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

I have a question. So for those that don't know, what is the ladder that Dan talks about?

SPEAKER_04 6:36

The replacement ladder. Go ahead. Yeah, that's the the replacement ladder. I call, I have something that I've been talking about similar, that's the delegation priority pyramid. And it's uh so similar concepts, and it's just starting and it's very much the same flow, you know, where you start with basic back office stuff and admin, and it's the sequencing of how to get things off your plate. But it's important to note, and Josh was just talking about this, the paradigm that you need to look at it through is what's key. And I think Dan does a great job of setting it up in his book and in his all of his coaching and training and things that he does and speaking. And it's not about hiring people to grow your business, it's hiring people to get your time back so that you can grow your business. And that's a big fundamental shift that nobody is going to ever take growing your business as seriously as you are. And that's the the mindset shift that I think founders need to make, investors need to make, like everybody needs to make that if they recognize their they are the ones on the front lines, they are going to eat, sleep, bleed, sweat their business, and everybody else is gonna relatively go home at five kind of a thing. You know, there's some that have different kind of stakes for sure, but nothing is gonna compare to that founder. So if you focus on hiring to get your time back, and then the other side of that sort of pancake, I would say, is with the time that you get, how can you put it back? Like, what's the highest leverage lever that you can pull with if you get five hours back in a week because you offload X, Y, or Z. Now what are you gonna do with that five hours? And so my my personal thoughts are I think you should put maybe one of them into some self-care. You know, get a massage. Like do something. Kind of, especially if you're feeling like you're burned out or kind of at the end of your rope and you're just like, ah, that's a lot of the people I talk to. They're they come to me at that point. So I say, okay, let's take one of those hours and go do some self-care, uh, a mani petty, a massage, uh, you know, baseball practice with the kids, whatever it is that you kind of feel like you're missing. And then you got four more hours. Can we average a thousand bucks an hour with those four hours? Because if we can, we'll definitely pay for a VA or an executive assistant or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Yeah, that's uh you just hit on a the nail on the head. So you just said, what can you do with a thousand bucks an hour? My one of my big problems was I wasn't valuing my own time or I didn't know, I'd never taken the time to understand what my worth was. What am I bringing into the business? What am I generating revenue-wise with the hours that I'm spending? Yeah. And so now I'm being intentional as I'm building back up, like, okay, I need to get to $1,000 an hour, is what I've got my marker at. Once I get to that point, okay, then we'll go to $1,500 in 2000. But just learning to spend my time on what's bringing money into the business, not all these other tasks that I can train anybody to do or even AI. I'm implementing AI to do a lot of the order processing stuff that I was doing or that I that I would need to hire somebody to do, we're implementing AI, but just getting all these little tasks that don't need to have me touching them because doing that task is not generating a thousand dollars an hour. It's just back end stuff that somebody has to do.

SPEAKER_04 9:45

Yep. Yep, exactly. I love that.

SPEAKER_02 9:47

At what point did you realize that working harder was actually holding you back?

SPEAKER_04 9:52

It was about 20 years ago. And I almost exactly 20 years ago, actually, uh, I had just gone through some personal life challenges and I was committed, like I was I was hell-bent and determined to show the world that I had some value and that I could build something. So I was really working hard at building a business. And after about a year, I had seen at that point, I thought, a crazy good level of success. I had paid off some debts. I was, you know, I was I was proud of myself. But the business was starting to grow, and I was kind of forced into situation where I I couldn't tread water or stay the same because clients outright told me if I wasn't gonna help them grow continually faster, that they were gonna leave me for somebody else. So I was kind of scared, I didn't know what to do. I was still a solopreneur at that time, and I went to somebody else that, you know, I've always believed in if you if you need a problem solved, look up the mountain ahead of you and see who's climbed further, faster and gone farther than you have, and see if you can get a hold of them. Talk to them, follow them, get them to come and talk to you, whatever it takes. So I called somebody and asked to have lunch, and that turned into kind of a mentorship, and that turned into a partnership. But they sat me down, and then there's an individual that sat me down, and he showed me exactly what Josh just said, what my time was worth. And he took me through a few simple calculations at lunch on the back of a napkin, literally. And he wrote down what I was doing, the revenue that I was creating, and he kind of walked me through in seven, eight minutes, kind of what my time ballpark was valued at, and then started asking me questions about where I was spending my time. And that began to open and unlock my mind. Like, wow, why am I doing that stuff? Why am I processing this? Well, and simple things like could I have a bookkeeper or an outside accounting firm run my payroll or, you know, do things like that that would just save me two or three hours on the weekend that I was currently sacrificing time away from my kids to go into the office and fight with QuickBooks, where I was taking six hours to try to do things in QuickBooks that somebody else could probably do in 45 minutes because I am not a QuickBooks guy. That's has never been, it never will be my strong suit. That's just the way it is. And I began to realize, what in the hell am I doing? And I knew that I wasn't efficient at it, but I didn't think I could afford, I wasn't, I wasn't there yet. You know, I couldn't really afford that next step until he began to show me what my time truly was worth with a formula and what I was generating, and then showing me how I could delegate some of that to get a faster ROI and all it was going to cost me is a little bit of money. And he actually taught me one principle that was really good that I still use today that there's only two types of problems in the world. And those every problem that you ever experience can be boiled down to either a problem that you can solve with money or a problem that you cannot solve with money. And he taught me that we spend all of our time focused on the problems that we can solve with money. They they give us anxiety, they tie us up in knots on the inside. And he said, that is just stupid because you can always go out and earn more money. And at that time, he pointed out like, and you're getting pretty good at it. Like your income is going up, up, up, up, up, up. Yet everything you've talked to me about is about how they're all problems you can solve with a little bit of money, relatively small amounts, usually. And what's really important that should take your time, attention, and energy are these problems that you cannot solve with money. Because if they present themselves, you're like, you're really screwed. You can't buy your way out of it. You can't, you know, that that's where you need to put more of your time and attention. And I thought that was really eye-opening. That combination of showing me my value with my time, and then the paradigm shift of what, you know, and I'm thinking I've got two little kids at the time, a third, maybe I just had my third child actually. Um, and or was close to having a third child. So, you know, I've got all these things racing through my mind, like I want to be a good family guy, but I got these money problems and growing the business. And he was like, You're focusing on the wrong stuff. Like, oh, go have somebody do your freaking payroll and your books and pay 200 bucks a month, you tight wad, and then go spend more time with your family for hell's sakes. I was like, oh, well, when you put it that way, I guess it's kind of a no-brainer, you know.

SPEAKER_03 14:22

Yeah, that's so good. Uh say that say that again. The two, there's two problems. Say that say that one more time for the listeners.

SPEAKER_04 14:29

Yeah, every problem that you ever face, it's only one of two things. It boils down to a problem that you can either solve with money. So you have money and you can pay money to solve that problem. You get a ticket, you can pay money, you don't have a ticket anymore. You've got you've got no time, but you hire somebody and you can pay some of your money to get you need your taxes done, you pay a CPU, whatever, right? There's there's money problems. But then the other type of problem is the problem you cannot solve with money. And if you start processing your world and your inputs and your stressors through that filter, it takes a big load off. And you just get real clear on, oh, wait, that's a money problem. Can I afford to solve it right now? No, that's another kind of instead of saying you say I can't afford it instead of that's too expensive. Because if if you're saying that I can't afford to hire an assistant right now, you're empowering yourself with language that is I can do something about it. But when you say things like an assistant is too expensive, now you've lost all your control. Like you've put that out there. So when you filter through these two problem lenses, right? If you, if it's a money problem or not a money problem, and or not a problem that can be solved with money rather. And then can I afford it? If I can't yet, then I need to generate a little more revenue so I can go afford to get rid of that problem.

SPEAKER_02 15:54

I love that you said that about the just the mindset behind affording it. That's something we you started saying that so long ago. Never to say I can't afford something. It's just not in the budget right now, is kind of like how we have framed things.

SPEAKER_03 16:09

And how can we afford it?

SPEAKER_02 16:10

And how can we what's the plan to get us there? Like it's never just, you know, we talk about so many people would, you know, see a house and be like, oh, wow, I can never afford that. And it's like you just see that there's no determination, there's no kind of motivation to try to get there. But we like to try to put a plan in place if there's something we no matter what it is. I mean, it doesn't have to be a house, it's really anything. But if it's not working in the budget now, it's like, how do we get there? What do we need to do? What steps do we need to take to be able to get to that point?

SPEAKER_04 16:38

That's a mindset shift and it's it makes such a big difference. Big time. Have you guys ever heard of a guy named Myron Golden? You never familiar with him? I have not. I've heard him speak a couple of times and he does this beautifully. Like he would he would go nuts on this topic. Uh, I've heard him speak a couple of times, and he always talks about the offer for what he's doing. So one story I heard him say is that he wanted to go to, I think he said Italy or somewhere with a vacation for his family. When he looks at something like that, he looks at it through the lens like of what's the offer? Because he doesn't want to spend money. He wants to do the so he thinks, like, okay, do I have followers, fans, people that could come and work with me? Okay, I'm gonna do a mastermind in Italy. How much is it gonna be? Because he refuses to fly commercial. So he's like, I need to fly private. So how much is that gonna cost? And he just kind of figures out some quick calculations. All right, if I do a 15-seat mastermind with a $10,000 buy-in, that's $150,000. And our trip for us and the family is gonna be at $120. So there we go. I'm doing an offer of mastermind in Italy. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Yeah, he didn't. That is amazing. Okay, we're looking him up right afterwards.

SPEAKER_04 17:51

There's there's goals. We need to start like, yeah, that's that's so true. Here's another one I got to tell you this one because I just heard him say this one just recently. He said he just bought a house and it was two and a half million dollars or something, and he was gonna do some renovations to it. Some of the renovation is putting in a golf simulator, like top of the line, you know, where you can go practice your swing and you hit into the screen and it tells you if you're hooking or slicing or whatever. And he is going to start. So again, because he does this with everything. Like he'll figure out I'm just gonna write a book. I'll write like he does these little short books and they turn into 200 grand a year for 10 years. Like he's he's a master at this stuff. So even in buying a new home for himself, he renovates, he puts in a golf simulator, he starts a YouTube channel on golf. He's like, within one year, my revenue from YouTube will pay the mortgage for that house in one year. And all I gotta do is go film a video like two, three times a week and post it on golfing. I love it.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

His brain is spinning right now. I can see your spirit.

SPEAKER_03 18:53

We need like we need a wave pool, a wave pool in our next house, and we'll start doing surfing videos with the kids, and then there we go. Oh, I love it. I love it. Um, all right, let's shift gears a little bit. Let me ask you if someone's business like collapses or implodes the minute they step away for vacation or whatever, what does that say about that person's business?

SPEAKER_04 19:15

Uh, that it's just a one-person operation. Like it's a, it's there is no real structure to it whatsoever. And it's always going like there's no there's no real enterprise value to the business. Nobody's gonna buy it. So what's your accent plan? Um and so many people that I talk to that end up kind of seeking me out are in that exact spot, Josh. It's it's you know, they're 60 years old, 55 years old. They've been doing it for 20 years and they've been the glue that's kind of held it together. But now they're thinking, I don't want, I can't do this forever. And I want to start thinking about selling it. But this there's kind of this cognitive dissonance. They know that if they step away, everything starts to collapse. They don't see themselves staying there for another 10 years, and that's kind of like, what do I do? So that's where they haven't that's back to that question that uh that we were talking about when we opened here. It's bringing in like build yeah, I think you said it like this. You kind of pointed to your your chest and your torso, like I needed to start building from the core. When you hire the right way and you follow the right sequence, yes, you get some of your time back and you can use that time for self-care, for growing the business, for pulling bigger levers that bring you more money, but it teaches you things. It teaches you how to let go. It teaches you how to inspect what you expect from other people. And when you hire in the wrong order, when you put people out in the field in the delivery area, in the marketing or sales, you kind of stay in this seagull leadership sort of lane where you come in, you swoop down, you shit all over everybody, and then you swoop out of there, and everybody's like, Well, that sucked. That didn't feel very good. You know, you're not you're not really building the people up, and then you're always you have good ex reasons and and blaming, you know, you can always throw somebody under the bus, somebody that works for you. Well, if they would have just shown up if they would have just done their job, this would have worked out better. But that doesn't give you enterprise value. It doesn't allow you to take vacations. It doesn't help you really grow your business in a way that gives you any freedom. Yeah, that's that's so true. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah. Kind of following up on that, what would you say the most expensive mistake you see founders make over and over again?

SPEAKER_04 21:37

Trying to shortcut well, it's really hiring the wrong person at the wrong time. And I think the cause of that is we all okay, entrepreneurs. Did you know that show MacGyver? Did you ever see that show? Television show this guy could fix anything, get out of any jam, and all he needed was a piece of. Gum, a toothpick, and a paperclip, right? And maybe some duct tape. And that's what I think entrepreneurs are. I thought it was just normal. I thought everybody was kind of like this, but my wife pointed this out because she doesn't really have the entrepreneurial gene that I do. You know, she she thinks it's amazing that I get up and drive myself forward with such intensity, like my life depends on it. She's like, man, if that was me, I'd get up and go sit on the couch and watch TV. Like, I don't know how you do it because nobody's telling you what to do. There's no boss to report to. But entrepreneurs have that drive and it's a problem-solving like foundation. We do that when we look at problems in our business, though, too. And if we don't develop some self-awareness with that or follow like a delegation stack, you know, a buyback ladder kind of thing. If we don't have that, we will get ourselves in trouble with the very same skills that created that level one success in our business in the first place. We solve problems, so we look at the problem. Hey, I can't take off for vacation. I can't do anything. If this, if I leave, the whole business starts to fall apart. So what do we do? We start to solve problems. The problem is we are romantics and we think that there's a unicorn out there that's going to come in and just ride in and solve every problem that we have. So we don't start thinking of EA, executive assistant. We start thinking CEO, general manager. And we haven't developed any of the soft skills. We haven't started our core, like you said, Josh, we haven't built anything up. And we jump right ahead to, I was talking to this guy last night, and he wants to hire a GM. He wants to pay 120 grand a year. So what's going to happen when this 27-year-old doesn't have the skills to work with the general manager? He's never developed any of that. He's been in the field making sales, hustling, getting things done, creating a lot of success. But then he's going to bring in a general manager, pay him 10 grand a month. It'll probably last four to six months. So now he's out 60 grand. And he'll probably lose some customer, like there'll be customer attrition because there's going to be some chaos that will take place. So the actual cost of that will probably be well north of six figures. The man or woman will probably be either leave or get fired after this doesn't work, and they'll be right back to where they are and have lost that six months period of time. And that's the most expensive problem that I see people make again and again and again and again and again. And they'll do it once and do it again three months later. They just don't get it.

SPEAKER_03 24:38

Yeah, I I've I've had businesses that failed and looking back with what I know now, I know why they failed. And that what you're explaining is exactly what we did. It's like things were getting chaotic. So we hired a GM and things didn't get less chaotic and it didn't work out. And then and then they just, you know, they like they were there for maybe six months and didn't work out. And it's that's so true. Yeah. Um, and and what you're saying, I think is why you see so many like successful entrepreneurs that that have done really well are bringing in a lot of revenue, but they secret feel they secretly feel trapped because they just they can't step away. They're they are the core holding everything together and they just aren't able to step away from the business. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 25:15

And it's that letting go. Like you described, you you've gone through a process that was probably a little painful. Like it it wasn't simple, but I think now based on what I'm picking up, your vibe is you would say that it's worth it, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 25:29

I I can see I'm still rebuilding, right? So I'm still kind of like rebuilding it, but I've structured, I'm I've got more structure now. And now it's like, okay, I've got more time, and the business is still operating at the same level without me having to be so involved in everything. So that's what it's doing is free up my time. I'm rolling out a whole new program. I'm I'm you know, completely new line. I'm able to actually have time to do that, which I didn't have that before because I was just running around getting pulled in so many different directions.

SPEAKER_04 25:53

And it sounds like your wife is appreciating it too, right, Laura? Like you can see some positive signs with this.

SPEAKER_02 25:59

Oh, absolutely. I can. And just, I mean, just you physically being at the office. I mean, that's you're out and about so much you've been able to go be out and about without having to come back and be at the office as late and having to go in as early. And yeah.

SPEAKER_03 26:14

In 2021 was when I kind of hit the height of of my revenue, but I was I was working 20 hours a day. I was literally sleeping four hours a night. And and I started hiring and delegating and stuff, but I was doing it wrong. So I was getting stuff off my plate, but it wasn't the right stuff. So now and now that I've now that I see that, you know, we there's been some pullback and and now as I'm rebuilding, I'm like, okay, I need to build this so I can scale without it taking more of my time. So I definitely see that. Uh okay, so let me ask you this what's what's something that you've had to unlearn in order to grow?

SPEAKER_04 26:47

Harder or more doesn't equal better. Like to stay with the same topic that we're we've been on, that was a big thing. I like you, there were days, two, three days a week that I was truly, literally hitting 20 hours at work. And I mean, there's that's what forced my hand. That's why I looked up that mountainside and found somebody ahead of me because I I was at that point and I kept pushing a little more, a little more, a little more. And then I'm pretty sure it was when my wife told me that we're expecting our third child that I thought, okay, I'm killing myself at work. I'm proud of what I've done, but this isn't what I had in mind. And so I had to really, I had to go through that same process that you're describing. I had to begin letting go. And I had somebody there to help guide me through that process, but it didn't happen naturally. It was very unnatural. And I had to let go of working harder and just working more hours, is not how it was beginning to keep me lower. It's when I learned how to let go and then grab, and it's really about these levers, right? I use this analogy. I was pulling a hundred percent of the levers in that first company, all of them, because it was just me. There was only one person. And when I began to bring other people in, I put some people on some levers, and then I was shown how to just focus on these three or four that were bigger. Every time you pulled one, $100,000 came out, you know, or it was a trip across the world with somebody to land a new account for a week and it took all this time. And I spent $50,000 like whining and dining, but I got a new account and it brought in $5 million that year. I mean, that that's a lever that actually didn't suck pulling. It was kind of fun. It's kind of nice to do that. But then I came home and there was a team that could now take all the smaller levers of you know delivery and execution and fulfillment and bring those things to pass while I was going to the next lever to pull or going to coach little league baseball, you know, which I wouldn't have had the opportunity to do two years before that.

SPEAKER_03 28:57

Not a chance, not even a chance. And you wouldn't have had an opportunity to go wine and dying if you were still pulling all those levers. 100%. Letting go gave you that opportunity that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

SPEAKER_04 29:06

Bingo. And see, that's the thing that a lot of people miss. I can't afford to bring that person in. I'm so busy with all this other stuff. What? So I heard it, I heard it said really great the other day. And I can't remember where I heard it. If that was a podcast I was listening to, but we calculate the cost of action all the time. Oh, if I do this, it's gonna cost this. If I hire an assistant, that's gonna be 30,000, 50,000 a year. I don't know if I can afford it. What we rarely do is calculate the cost of inaction. And that's exactly what you just described, Josh. It's a perfect illustration. If I don't hire an assistant so that I can pull more of these million dollar levers, how much money will I have left out there that should be flowing through my company this year? And if you begin to calculate that, then you can start to see where your time is really best spent.

SPEAKER_03 29:56

Yeah, the opportunity cost is 10 times what the actual cost is. For sure. Could be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

If you had to rebuild from scratch, what is one thing that you would stop doing immediately?

SPEAKER_04 30:09

Probably anything that well, I guess it depends on what scratch is. I think I've learned the lesson of having an assistant and doing one of the best examples of an assistant that we talk about the money part of it. We've talked a lot about it so far. But I had an assistant that scheduled a day for me. This was only like a year ago, I think, maybe a year or two. And I had an appointment that I was supposed to go to to get my blood drawn. I'd been putting that off because who wants to go do that? That wasn't fun. There was a guy that had been asking me to go to lunch for months, and I've been blowing him off. And then there was three or four other things, one or two that I kind of wanted to do. And when I had, I was in between assistance as this was kind of coming together, and then I onboarded a new assistant, and I just turned it all over to them. The cool part was they didn't bring any of that emotional baggage to all those tasks. They didn't care if I got my blood drawn, right? It's not a needle going into them, it's more into me. The same with the guy that I've been trying to just like, I'm not, no, I'm busy this week. So one day, as this assistant was just getting up to speed, she hands me a post-it note, just a simple, like tiny, right? Two, three inches squared. And she said, This is your day today. You've got some errands and things to take care of. And I looked at it and she just bullet pointed, I got this, this, this, this, and this. She said, It's all on your calendar, so you can just hit directions and like you'll know where to go. And then I noticed at the end of that cycle that I had hit, it was like a circle. If you took a map, I left my office and I just did this like around town, and then I came back, and the last appointment was there, and then I was back in my office, and I was gone for like three hours of the day. I got it all done. I had lunch with the guy. It was a great guy. I it was I had all this stuff in my head. It was totally stupid that I'd been putting it off for two months. I got my blood drawn. I did the all the stuff the doctors wanted. I ran some errands, I signed some tax documents, all these things that had been put off, I got done in three hours, had a good time, and had lunch. And I would have done none of that. So, to your question, Lauren, I think there's so much of a benefit that comes when somebody handles that stuff that doesn't bring the baggage to the situation like we do personally, that as long as I can justify the cost, it is, and I'm pretty good at justifying costs, I'll be honest. But if I could justify the cost, that's what I would definitely let go of right out of the gate, because I know if I can keep my eye on the prize more and not let these emotional things get caught up. I'm just a master at creating these stories of like, well, you know, I can't really do that right now because I'm busy. And that that arm's length away, it just keeps me productive, it keeps me engaged, it keeps me taking care of what I need to. And I don't get to tell myself the story, I just grab the post-it note and I go check it off the list. I'm done.

SPEAKER_03 33:11

I like that. That makes sense. Um what systems do people obsess over that don't actually help early on?

SPEAKER_04 33:21

I see a lot of people getting hung up on perfection and plans and anything that there's so many, but there's a there's an underlying cause or there's kind of a route beneath whatever the the facade is that that seems to be on the surface. And that route is to avoid the action. So if it's sales, for instance, like I'm not I'm not spending time in sales, you'll see that people are trying to create systems on how to keep track of their CRM better, how to get better leads, how to interview and screen marketing agencies so that they can get better leads, when in reality, the amount of time they spend on sales is like 10 minutes a week.

SPEAKER_03 34:05

And so I'm not even sure what to call that, you know, but it's they're spending paralysis that you're referring to. We see that a lot. And I need to have the perfect system or do something perfect, but never actually taking action because you don't have the perfect thing set up.

SPEAKER_04 34:20

And yeah, it does. It does. Like that, that perfectionism to but sometimes it's not even that. It's really just I'm going to avoid this thing that I think it comes down to rejection. Is that that's why I think we do that. Like is a psychology, like a trait in our human psychology, is that anything that has this risk of rejection or being seen as a fraud or as uh just failure, you know, that we we will do a lot of things to put distance between that outcome and us. And if we peel back the layers of that onion, we'll see that, oh, really all I needed to do was allocate two hours every day to make sales. I mean, that's the first system that they need to put in place. But it could be with accounting. I see a lot of it with accounting because I I've been running a bookkeeping business and helping people with their finances because of some of my background, which is ironic because it's not my strong suit. But because I I did that in my first go at it, I just I totally turned a blind eye to all those things. And it cost me everything. Tens of millions of dollars, five years in litigation, tax returns that had to all be redone, like just crazy, crazy stories. Um, and I see so many people doing that because they're not good with numbers. It's like, well, nobody's asking you to be a CPA or to have a master's level degree in accounting to simply review how much money you spend this week, right? Like, so again, it's putting the distance between the outcome and the person so that there's like this buffer of insulation and the analysis paralysis or lack of action. And I just try to to combat that in myself. I I just try to pound it in my head default to action. You know, we got to do this stuff to make sales. We need to come up with scorecards, we need to come up with uh a system and a playbook and all these things. Like, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. I'm just gonna spend two hours every day on sales, and then I'll see if any of that's bullshit or actually holds water. And usually I find that, oh, it was just the time. It's the number of swings in the batter's box, so to speak. Like if I'm not taking swings and sales opportunities, uh no CRM is gonna do that for me. Yeah, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

I want to go back to what you were saying when you mentioned kind of back when you were starting, you had young kids. What would you say? Because we're in this phase where we're kind of rebuilding and we have four young kids, what would you say the hardest part is about doing this with a young family?

SPEAKER_04 36:58

The first thing that popped into my mind, I remember the challenge of because I had a home office, and then I had an office that I would go to. And so there was this little exercise that we'd go through, and I would like walk up the stairs and act like I was going outside. No, I'd go to the garage door, but there were stairs by that, and I would come up the stairs, come around, and then come downstairs the other staircase, which would be right by my office door. And so we'd go through this exercise, like dad's going to work. And the kids were like, I'm pretty sure I hear him in that room. What's going on? But it was like when I go to work. That was that was one thing that was kind of hard. It's like when dad goes to work, he goes to work. Like it's not just there has to be a boundary there. It's not, can you come help me with this diaper change? Nope. If I'm in there, it's that's just where I am. Um that was a tough one. That was a tough one on our marriage. It was a tough one. There was another time that uh just preceded that, where I recall my wife being very pregnant, and I felt the pressure of everything coming down on me. And I told her that I needed to get away for a little while just to try to think clearly and think straight because I was just feeling like I was getting stretched really thin. And I remember her standing there with an enormous belly, you know, very, very pregnant, little kids running around, and she goes, You're gonna leave now? And you're gonna go where? I was like, I don't actually know. I'm just gonna find a hotel and uh and you'll be back when? And that was the hardest thing for me because I knew I'd known enough about myself having come from just uh not very many years before that, a rehab for drug addiction. And I knew that I wasn't going to continue to cope well. And I didn't know if this was the answer, but it was so hard in that moment to leave. But I came back and I was better. I was a better person. Now she will tell you, and this is 20 years ago, almost 18 years ago. Now she tells me all the time, like, you know what, you should probably just go. You should just leave. Now it pisses me off. I'm like, wait, what? I'm not leaving. So I think that's a challenge. So just being able to communicate with that and be on the same page as a partnership with marriage, uh, having those boundaries that we respect each other, what they are, but also prioritizing it. You know, now I meet with my wife every week. In fact, we just we had our meeting this morning, we meet every Tuesday morning. Um, that's where we get in sync with our week, with our household. We have some businesses that we run together now in real estate. And she's a big help with those. But we we have our rhythms, you know. Quarterly we get away, we we do a deeper dive, and annually we go away for seven to ten days and really get our goals and priorities straight so that we have time now that our kids are a little older, but we couldn't do that as easily when they were small. Um so I think really just you gotta have a lot of communication and you gotta make it a priority to plan. And that's probably gonna be, unfortunately, at nine or 10 o'clock at night when kids are in bed. She was a master at routine for the kids too, which I would not have been. You know, she had them in the bathtub every night at six o'clock, in bed at 7:30. And in the summer, the kids are like, why are we going to bed and it's still so much daylight out there? I ask your mom, I don't know. So she was really good at that, and that's what kept us sane. That's what gave us time to connect, time to communicate, and it was really healthy for the kids too. Um and then just knowing I'd say the last bit, your kids aren't talking fall on the sword and say it's for your kids and never be there for them. You know, that that's not what they want. They didn't ask you to do that, and so often. I know as a man at least, I don't know if this is the same with women, but I know I use that shit all the time. I was like, well, I'm doing this for the kids. And then I realized my wife wasn't asking for the things that I was trying to provide. So having those boundaries, yeah, I remember I got an assistant and then I got a a home manager, a home assistant that helped her that came in for like 35 to 40 hours a week. And it was very inexpensive, relatively, you know, and it just took a lot of things off of her plate so that she didn't have to run all of that on her own. So we had some balance there. And that gave us time to connect and stay. So if you can afford that, like that was the next thing financially on that ladder going up. It was get some of my time back, get rid of some of those tasks. Okay, can I get rid of some of the laundry, some of the, some of the grinding stuff that that she's experiencing too? That was a big benefit for us.

SPEAKER_03 41:50

That's okay. We're we're actually at that point where we're starting to talk about that. Uh uh, you know, bringing a house manager in to help with all the daily tasks.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

I was gonna say, I feel like you and your wife have had the exact same conversations that we are currently having right now.

SPEAKER_03 42:03

Just 15 years ahead of us.

SPEAKER_02 42:04

Yeah. Very deja right now.

SPEAKER_04 42:07

That's funny. So you can always start, you know, call me anytime. I'm happy to share with like what worked and what didn't, because there was a few things that didn't work, but you can always start with even like a mother. I think the first ad that I ran was titled Mother's Helper. And it was a college girl that came in. It was very inexpensive, was totally flexible around her class schedule. And she would come in. Sometimes it was just helping with babysitting, but there was always like a little to-do list. And and I have a a girl that comes into my house and does that now. Even though our kids are older, we don't need that kind of help. It's like she makes my protein shakes for me at night, and it saves me 10 minutes in the morning, and she gets my vitamins out, and she does. I got a Yeti cooler right here with all my meal prep done because that's it's important to me, and it's not something I really, you know, it's it takes a it sucks. Like it totally sucks. But for her to get paid 15 bucks an hour and to come in two or three hours a day for maybe two or three days a week, and then she tidies up the kitchen, maybe mops every other time she's in there and cleans the whole bathroom every once a week when she's there. I could just keep adding little things to her playbook, to her checklist. Like, can you do this too? And she's like, Yeah, sure. That's great. So that's not a big I mean, that doesn't cost tons of money. And the return on that investment, like my wife came home and was like, Did you mop the floor? I said, Yeah. I mean, kinda, basically.

SPEAKER_03 43:35

I love it. Um, I want to go back to something that you said a little bit ago about um making mistakes uh with the counting and bookkeeping. You said something that there was a a loss that you experienced. Can you touch back on that?

SPEAKER_04 43:49

Yeah, for sure. Um, as I started to grow, that you know, I was over here pulling levers and trying to focus on the levers that I could pull that I knew had the highest return. And one thing that I never liked to do ever was accounting. Was you know, when I was just a solopreneur and I'd spend hours just trying to balance the books at the end of the month. And I know an accountant would have done that in like 30 minutes. I'd spend six, seven, eight, nine hours sometimes. So when I had people that could help me with that, I just reveled in that. I loved it. You didn't catch me over there trying to figure it out. In fact, I never even looked at PLs. I never looked at things. And that ended up burning me because I took it too far. And that's what I help a lot of founders with now. And it's how I kind of started this version of my business that I'd been in for the last 10 years, is in the middle of, well, the short version is, and you can unpack, we can dive in as deep as you want to go. But there was, I don't actually know how much, guys, was taken because after five years of litigation and a team of forensic accountants, attorneys, tax specialists, like the we we dove deep into all the details as much as possible. Um, but we couldn't track everything. We found over 225, I believe, um, like shell corporations that these guys had set up, and we're just shuffling money, like payments here, here, here, here that looked like vendors, right? They just kind of blended in to everybody that was getting paid. And it was, we were doing a lot of revenue. We were 80, 90 million dollars at some points with all the entities. And there were multiple six or seven entities that were active and all creating a lot of cash flow. So to peel off 5,000 bucks here and to pay that entity, just sort of blend to dry it in. And we came up with what I remember, I think 16, 15 million dollars that we had tracked. But knowing I mean that we would need another 10 years. And, you know, there's a diminishing returns on continuing to try to find everything. Um, because even if you win a lawsuit in a case like that, you don't get your money back. You just get a judgment that says, oh, yeah, you were right and he was wrong. And now what do you do? So I probably wouldn't even have pursued any of those things except for these same people who were also responsible to file tax returns for all these businesses that were my businesses. And turns out it doesn't matter if somebody takes your money and files fake tax returns, if you own the business, it was your responsibility. And the IRS says that it's your job to pay back taxes, and you failed to do your duty during the time the revenue was coming in. So in order to try to figure out how to get a grasp on that, um I had to go back through and try to piece. That's the ironic part. For five, six years, I never looked at any of the financials, just was like, oh, okay, that sounds good. I'm sure that's right. I'm okay, fantastic. Just kind of yes, yes, yes. But then the next five years, I spent putting the pieces together from the previous six years, like every day for eight hours. That's pretty much all I did was review tax returns, profit and loss, spreadsheets, email correspondence, like just trying to figure out what the finances of the previous five years actually looked like.

SPEAKER_02 47:21

So not only did you lose that income essentially just stolen from you, but then you owed taxes on it too, because those were never paid.

SPEAKER_04 47:28

Yeah. And gosh, it was millions of dollars. And it was millions of dollars. It was now six, seven, eight years past due. So there were penalties, there was interest accruing every day. It was I it was crazy. It's the hardest thing I've ever faced outside of, I mean, man. It was just a constant white knuckle fight through day-to-day. What am I gonna do today? How am I gonna choose? I gotta start the day and be like, okay, I've got a thousand pages of depositions to go through today and just try to underline and say, nope, that wasn't true, and then find a reference to an email that pointed out how it wasn't or where it was, or it was crazy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:14

How did you mentally handle that? That's a lot.

SPEAKER_04 48:18

It was. I actually moved to Vermont at the beginning of that. I moved into a town of 3,000 people, and it's, I mean, it looked like a postcard, you know, there's bears wander, literally wandering around in the yard, like there's trees. It's just a beautiful, natural scene. I think if I wouldn't have been there, and then I picked up, like I learned how to meditate. I had a really rigid morning routine where I'd get up, I'd meditate, I would pray, I would, I got just these, this process. I learned early on that I needed to forgive what had happened because I could feel myself ruminating. Like every thought all day long was about how could he? How did they? How could they bring them? You know, all these things. And I I realized after about just a few months of that that it was truly poisoning me. And I knew I had to figure out some way to forgive. And that's kind of got me into meditation. I've always kind of liked that stuff, but this got me religiously practicing. I never missed a day, uh, every single day, 20 minutes every day. I did weird shit too, guys. I I mean, I would try to learn how to focus my mind. I remember there was a period of like six months where I would drop matches into a hundred. I counted out a hundred matches, and every day my exercise after meditation was to try to just drop the match into a box and watch it fall. And the only thing that sounds crazy. But my goal was to not let my thoughts wander off and just be like, the match is dropping into the box. The match is dropping into the and I'd start with the box that was full of matches, and I'd drop them into the empty box until I was done. And just to try to get through that exercise without thinking about squirrels and purple elephants and wa suits and the IRS that wanted to crucify me and uh the whole the whole bit.

SPEAKER_03 50:10

Yeah, I didn't realize what I was unpacking when I asked that question there. Well, what's what's the one thing that you would recommend anybody else, like kind of getting to that point, you know, how outsourcing that, all the accounting, like how do you prevent this from happening? What's the one thing you need to have in place so that doesn't happen to you?

SPEAKER_04 50:26

I would say if you're trying to bring in a partner's taking, take things off like that, be very, very careful because what you're probably doing is avoiding something. We've talked a lot about that today. We hire a GM to avoid dealing with, I'm not really good at delegation, right? So just know that you I guess under the current underneath all these things, whether it's in accounting, hiring a GM, is it's a progressive process. You do not need to be, well, in this case, the numbers, you don't need to have a master's degree in accounting to just start. You know, look, look at it. And we we do some of this in Dan's group where it's like, look, look at your scorecard, right? Like spend time every week, but it just needs to be some time. So put 30 minutes a week on your calendar to look at your financial scorecard. And I remember doing this with some guys that I had met. I moved to Hawaii after the lawsuit was all done. I was like, okay, I'm done. Kids, we're going to Hawaii. I'm I just need them, I need a minute. It turned into nine months. Uh it was fun, good nine months. But while I was there, I met a couple of guys that were looking to buy a boat that took tours out. And they were wanting to buy this business. They were young guys, younger than me. And it seemed like a good business that was established, but they just had so much apprehension around we don't know if we're paying the right amount. We don't know how to review the financials. The owner said they'd give us the books, but we don't know how to read the books. And then they gave us the books and then said, oh, wait, not that copy. You need this copy, because she was keeping out a deference out of books, which was a little bit more suspect. I think trying to avoid some taxes, maybe. I don't know. Um, but just there's it's like the Emperor's New Clothes sort of routine, right? When you don't know something, we try to stand a little taller and act like we do know what we're talking about. When in reality, I think if you just spend a little time knowing and saying, I'm not an expert with the numbers, but you know what? This over the next quarter, I have a goal to learn how to read a profit loss statement. Or I want to learn what liabilities accounts means on a balance sheet. Or, you know, whatever. And having these regular, one of the hacks that I give, I put it in the content in my content once in a while, and I mention it in my coaching clients, is just set up a call once a quarter with your CPA. I do that. I do that still to this day. If I would have done that in those years, guaranteed there would not have been that outcome that I just shared with you guys. That's all it took. That's good. And people will say to me again, day over, day, every day, I don't think I mean that's expensive, man. They charge like 250 bucks an hour. Dude, I lost tens of millions of dollars because I wouldn't wouldn't spend 250 bucks an hour once a quarter, four times a year. And so I do that, I do it now. I I'll tell a story of one of, and this is a true story, my wife drove, slid off the road, the first snowstorm of the year we were out in Vermont, and it was like October, and there was a little teeny bit of snow. Didn't put snow tires on, and we had an expedition that we were gonna turn in from a lease that we had a two-year lease, and it was turning in like the next day or the day or two after that. So she slides into a mailbox. She's fine, just a little off the road, and then she's back, everything's cool. But it hits the front, the side, the side, the door, door, and somehow the back. I'm like, how did you hit almost everything? There's a dent, a little dent, a little scratch, and everything. It was like $18,000, $15,000 of damage. I'm telling so two days later, I have my quarterly call with my CPA. Because I don't do it before October 15th, because that's a deadline for him. So I'm doing it like November 2nd. And I'm like, Paw, dude. My wife did that. You wouldn't believe this. It was the day before. He doesn't hear any of the story the way I'm trying to tell the story. He goes, wait a minute, is that the one that this entity is leasing? I said, Yeah, that's the one, man. It's a freaking $90,000 truck. You know, and it's like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Are you gonna get a new truck this year? Like, I don't know. I I, you know, I just was bummed that that happened the day. Like, no, no, no. The depreciation is the thing is good, it's sunsetting this year. And if you do this, he's looking at it through his lens, right? Anyway, long story short, I buy a new truck, I take delivery on the 31st of December, accelerate the depreciation over the whole year. I get this huge tax deduction, ends up saving me tens of thousands of dollars just because my wife hit the mailbox and I happen to have a call with my CPA that same month. So that's great. That's a good example that you don't have to be, you know, don't try to be a CPA and you don't have to have the emperor's new clothes either. You don't need to be a professional. You just need to talk to them. And you need to have rhythms and routines that keep you in a good place so that that happens regularly. Because if it's accounting, like I'm not gonna, you'll never see me jumping into a spreadsheet and be like, hey, you guys want to have a good time? Let's open Excel. You know, it's gonna be fun. Never will that be the case. So I put them in my calendar, I schedule those calls with my CPA at the beginning of the year. They're there for the whole year, and they just pop up. It's like, oh yeah, I'm calling Paul today. Now that's what I do.

SPEAKER_03 55:49

And because of that, you still could lean on the people that that know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_04 55:52

Yeah, now he has context, you know. And I could tell you a lot of stories on the opposite side of that, where people don't show up because they don't like it, just like me. They don't like the numbers, they don't like the accounting, they don't like taxes. So they show up on April 13th and they think they're gonna get good tax advice. And it's the first time they've talked to their tax professional in a year. And they're like, okay, here's all my receipts. What can you do? And they're like, well, you know, like $100,000 in taxes. Like, what? You suck. Well, they have no idea what you're dealing with. They have no context. They don't know what you're up to. It's like you've given them all this stuff and they have 32 hours to get it all filed. You're gonna get shitty results that way. Yep.

SPEAKER_03 56:31

Yeah, so true. So true. Uh all right, Justin, tell us about your coaching program and what you help business owners do and accomplish.

SPEAKER_04 56:40

I focus with founders and getting on stuck. And it's usually moving out of this level one area where it's getting some of their time back. Uh, and it's a lot of what we've just been talking about. It's getting getting some time back, focusing on things to help pull bigger levers, and then slowly and systematically putting rhythms and routines in place that will help their business and themselves as a founder continue to grow. Not all at once, but over time. So that if it's numbers, you know, I'm not looking for somebody to get a degree in accounting, but if that's the area they've been avoiding, let's just put a monthly rhythm in place to start looking at those numbers. Let's put a quarterly call with your CPA. Let's optimize for tax issues as well as a scorecard system that can actually help, just like the guys with the Torboat company. You know, I started working with them 10 years ago when I moved to Hawaii, and I'm still working with them today. And it's they're successful with their company, they're doing a great job, and we just check in once a quarter for what do I need to know? What should I be aware of? What, what are things that we're doing? How can we diversify? Where do we it's just it's a constant, it's never-ending process of growth when you're running a business. The tax code always changes, like the landscape and the economy always change, the interest rates are always changing. So looking for opportunities to continue to grow and grow yourself is what I try to instill in people and then get them on their way.

SPEAKER_03 58:13

Yeah, that's that's great. And if somebody is interested in working with you or they want to reach out, what's the best way to get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_04 58:19

Probably on Instagram. Um, that's where we're really making a focus. I'm trying to reach 50,000 followers in the next year because I'd really like to share some of these. We didn't go deep into this, some of the crazy stories, but you kind of saw the surface level of some of those experiences that I've had. And I just feel like if I can help share my story in a way that keeps somebody else from having $10 million stolen or fake tax return, like I hope that my story can at least help and create that sort of an outcome. So come over to Instagram and follow us there. It's at It's Justin Lund, and I'm happy to answer any questions that I can, or hopefully you get value out of the content that's there, and that can just keep you learning a few different ideas and help you think of things to get some of your time back and to keep growing.

SPEAKER_03 59:07

That's so good. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Anything else to add?

SPEAKER_02 59:11

We always like to ask do you have a favorite book or podcast that you have either learned a lot from or something that you just really has was kind of like an aha moment for you?

SPEAKER_04 59:21

Oh man, so many. I really love I love to read. I've I've connected reading with exercise. So now I'm made me better at exercising too, because I'll only read when I'm exercising on a treadmill. So I at least get steps in. Um I there's so much really good stuff. And I just, I'm such a big believer in taking, you know, you can read a book, even if you're a slow reader and it's not your thing. You can still distill a lifetime into hours and you can pull some lessons out of there. I have so many favorites from getting things done with David Allen to work the system, Sam Carpenter. Um, some of my most like the ones that I go back to again and again and again are probably how to win friends and influence people, the Dell Carnegie. Yeah. And that just, it's such an easy, fun read. I've read it, I don't know how many times. And it helps with sales, it helps with business, it helps with mindset, it helps. So there's there's definitely some that I really like to revisit and come back to again and again. Um, I got into Wayne Dyer in Hawaii. I lived in the same building as he did, and so I got to meet him and I read a bunch of his books and and I got to go swimming with him every day in the ocean. That was quite kind of cool uh while he was still alive. So and he's got some good stuff that get a little bit into the more spiritual manifesting things, but I'm into that. I kind of like it too. Um so yeah, I think that's how I'd answer the question.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:48

Love that. Awesome. All right. Well, hey, we really appreciate you coming on the show. This has been eye opening, a lot of good, a lot of good tidbits in here for people to take. So good. Thanks for having me, guys.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:57

It was great chatting with you.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:58

All right, guys, get out there and make it happen.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:01

Thanks for listening. This has been a production of Rebuilding the Dream Studios.