In episode 32 of Wake Up to Wealth, Brandon Brittingham interviews Drew Carrell, CEO at LeadZolo, as he discusses the challenges he faced in the early days, including the importance of focus, the value of being in the right rooms, and the critical lessons learned along the way.
Tune in to gain insights into the intersection of retail management and investment strategies.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Brandon Brittingham
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mailboxmoneyb/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandon.brittingham.1/
Drew Carrell
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drew_carrell/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drewcarrell/
WEBSITES
Brandon Brittingham: https://www.brandonsbrain.org/home
LeadZolo: https://www.leadzolo.com/
This is Wake Up to Wealth, a podcast dedicated to helping you change the way you think about wealth. And now here's your host, Brandon Brittingham.
Hey, what's up, everybody? We are back with another episode of Wake Up to Wealth. And today I've got my good friend Drew Carrell with us, who also happens to be a sponsor of the show. We appreciate your support of the podcast and we appreciate the support of everybody out there. Uh, we are consistently in the top five in the United States in investing. Uh, we've hit one a few times and we usually are trending in that one to three spot. So we want to thank everybody out there for listening. Thank you to all the sponsors that have helped support the show and uh, 40 to 60,000 of you out there are listening to us every time we dropped an episode. So we really appreciate it. But Hey Drew, thank you for being here with us today.
Brandon Brittingham
Thanks for the opportunity, man. I really appreciate it. And, uh, it's absolutely my pleasure to sponsor such an awesome podcast. I've been listening to it a lot last couple of weeks. So cool. Appreciate that brother.
Drew Carrell
Hey, so, um, question for you. Uh, so just tell us like, if someone doesn't know, obviously I know who you are, I know what you do, but you know, give us kind of the 30,000 foot view of your background and then kind of what you do today. Cause it is pertinent to a lot of people that are listening, that are investors out there.
Yeah. Yeah. Not to get, just to give you the 30,000, not to get too much into the backstory right now. I come from retail, plain and simple. I used to run grocery stores. A large part of running grocery stores is logistics, like keeping shelves full. Believe it or not, it is a very complicated process, especially in like fresh foods. Like I was working in what would be the equivalent of Whole Foods up in Canada. So it was pretty intensive. And It wasn't long until I learned that what I love was the data and making data-driven decisions. And that kind of brought me into this media buying world, which at the time I was completely ignorant of. But once I started seeing ad accounts and seeing how companies were scaling with digital marketing and things like that, I just knew that that's where I needed to be. I was on fire. I remember watching the very first YouTube video. So I transitioned out of retail into media buying, and then we went through some different models and some struggles, ended up landing, discovering the real estate investing industry, which was funny to us because we thought that it was just a bunch of crooked realtors trying to sell people's deeds to their houses. But once we kind of learned what was going on there, it was very obvious to us the industry was kind of prehistoric in terms of how their marketing and how they were scaling their companies. So we knew there was this huge opportunity to marry digital marketing with investors. And so that's what we did. And we passionately dove into that. We cut off everything else. We had some other businesses at that time as well. We sold one. We shut down another. And we're like, this is where we got to go. We got to go deep. So we ended up, through some iterations, of course, landing on this paper lead model. So what we learned was real estate investors need to be real estate investors. And they need to be great at that and great at sales. And they kept getting lost in the world of marketing. So our resolve to that was, Don't worry about landing pages. Don't worry about accounts. Don't worry about anything. We'll just connect through CRM. We will run nationwide advertising and we'll only give you the leads that you want in your area. And it's really just kicked off 2,500 clients later. Um, we're, we're doing awesome. We're having a lot of fun nationwide advertising. Like I said, we're cracking into TV now, uh, looking at radio for 2025. It's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun.
So the company that you do now is focused on, what is that company called? And then that company is focused specifically on getting PPL for real estate investors, correct?
Correct. Yeah. So that company is called LeadZolo and we are a hundred percent focused on highly motivated off market leads for real estate investors. So all of our advertising is a hundred percent. Would you like a cash offer on your home to sell it quicker rather than listed on the market? So that's the angle that we drive for. Definitely. There's definitely more applications to these leads, but that's definitely our focus is for the investors.
So you kind of said that you kind of looked at the real estate investing landscape and you started to go down that path. Why do you think that of all the things you could have done, that this is the path that you went on?
Yeah, it was interesting. So prior to this, we had just a YouTube ad agency and it was the retainer model style agency. So you pay me five grand a month, I'll manage $10,000 of ad spend. And it was, we were doing it for people with webinar funnels. So basically people would coaching programs or product that they'd sell off a webinar. So we'd create the ads to opt into the free webinar. They would then host the webinars and then convert people off the back of it. And it was interesting, it's kind of a fad. I know people don't want to say that right now, but at the end of the day, like if you're following ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson, what he's doing is amazing and exciting, all these funnels and webinars and stuff, but it's super faddy. And when I say that, what I mean is, it's really kind of hard to model a company who does that, who has done that for a long time with a lot of success, right? Like you and I could name the two big ones off the top of our heads, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, they're doing very well with the model, but even them, they're both kind of new into it, right? So it's, it's not proven, but it's very exciting. So when we're running this agency for people with webinar funnels, what we found was there was a lot of longevity, there was a lot of people looking for a quick buck, they had products that really only kind of helped current trends. And there was no like sustainability to these businesses. So they're like coming and going and coming and going. And for us, it was like, we want an industry that is here, that's going to be around for a long time. I want to sit back like Bezos and go, I don't care what's going to change in the next 10 years, what is going to be true in the next 10 years? And so for us, real estate is going to be happening in 10 years. We know that. We know it's going to be happening in 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It might look dramatically different as we learned with what's happened to realtors recently, but it's still going to be there. So for us, it was this, how do we turn out of what's kind of fun, but we could kind of see it tailing off into something that we could just focus on and build a legacy through. And so we knew real estate was the option for that. So when we started looking over here, It was interesting for us to see, you know, we were talking to some people that we got introduced to that we're doing multiple six figures a month. We're asking like how are you doing that and they were like, I don't know we pull data, I got some kids in my basement that are cold calling people. I'm. I have my, I have three girls in the apartment. This is a true story. I have three girls in the apartment building. I put up like a sign and in the mail room of their apartment building saying anybody who wants to make some extra cash, call the number. So they had three girls who were handwriting letters. Hey, I want to buy your house for cash. And then there were mailing them and like, they were doing multiple six figures a month. And we were just like, holy shit. Sorry, I don't know if I can say that, but... No, you can listen.
You can cuss on here. They're used to hearing me talk, so you're good.
Cool. Yeah, so for us, it was just like, holy shit. If these guys are able to find gold in the Yukon with sticks and rocks, imagine if we walked in and showed them what a bulldozer was or an actual shovel was, right? What are they going to be able to do then? And we were really ratified in our very first case study of the whole thing when we had an investor come to us. Again, that was when I thought he was a crooked realtor, but that's besides the point. We ran a bunch of ads for him. We spent 20 grand. where it was coming to like the meeting with the client and we're just like, we're 20 grand in the hole. We'd only gotten like a hundred leads. So we were like, it was costing us 200 bucks a lead. And at the time was crazy to us. Cause we're getting like $4 leads for Tony Robbins webinar. Right? So we're just like, we sit down, like we figured this is the, you're getting your ass fired meeting. And the guy's just like, I made a quarter million dollars last month off the leads you guys sent me. Can we 10 exit this month? And we're just like, what is going on? So that's when we knew like that, that was literally the moment I looked at my partner and I was like, we're stopping consulting immediately. We're going to sell the YouTube ad agency and we're going all in, like we're going all in. And that, and that was it.
Yeah. So that's a, that's a, that's a pretty good point you just made there. Um, you know, that number one, that's a bold move of, Hey, we're going to stop doing other things and just focus on one thing. But that is, Do you think that part of your success has been that this has been like the maniacal focus of we stopped doing all the other shit and we're just going to focus on this one?
Yeah, I think to clarify, yeah, it's not, I, we certainly didn't sell ad like that day. It took us a year. Um, and, and honestly, our first like year with lead dollar, we didn't make a dollar. So like we're pulling salaries from this other agency. So it was like, it was this moment like where we knew we needed out of it, but it was kind of paying the bills and like the 15 hours a week that we're putting into it. It doesn't sound like a lot, but absolutely it was a lot of energy. Um, but it was that moment. I remember when we sold, um, Um, we sold and then I was immediately fired by the new owner, which of course was kind of the point. And I remember like sitting back and like deleting my, the meetings off my calendar. And I was just like, man, we, we got LeadZolo per month to what our last company was doing per year in a course of a year. Now imagine if I'm essentially doubling my focus on that opportunity. And it was just that was that was when deep not wide was kind of born in our vocabulary in our slack channel right we haven't even have an emote for it now right when everybody somebody's like kind of talking and proliferating and kind of ideas are getting we were like we have an emote that's just like boom deep not wide. right as in like you're getting you're getting out there again and we love it we love ideas but like stop getting out there like go deep not why there's not a single context that either one of us could dream up or somebody could call in and bring up that you and i both know that the answer is not going to be oh you should expand it'll be you need to go deeper than what you're already in So yeah, I totally agree. I think that people are missing that. There's too much YouTube shit out there. There's too many coaches trying to sell you on the next cool thing. Like you want to go, you know, mentally masturbate to YouTube, go watch some Hermosi shit and he'll just tell you you're not working hard enough. And that's all you need to hear. I think, I think that that's, that that's the key. And I think that that's, that's the era we're in right now is that there's so much distraction. Like I even, I have a personal coaching client right now and like I spent my entire last, call with him yesterday, literally telling him to stop, like, just focus on what we talked about in the last month. And that's what he needed. And he'll make an extra million bucks just from that conversation.
Yeah. So one of the things you talked about is, you know, entrepreneurs listen to the show, you know, people from all walks of life. But I want to go back to you said, Hey, we spent a year in Leeds, although we didn't make a dollar, you know, so just for people that are out there, people are like, oh, I want to be a business owner. I'm going to make a shit ton of money. I'm going to work less. Well, you're wrong. I mean, there's certainly light at the end of the tunnel, but kind of walk through that. Did you want to quit or did you just know this was going to work? I mean, how did you hold on for a year saying this is not profitable, which is very common in the business in the first year, but you stuck with it to get to that other side?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll paint it just a little picture quickly. And this is not to be braggadocious, right? Like you've had millions of people on this podcast who are way more successful than me. But in our first year of Lead Zolo, our revenue was $100,000. This year, which is our third year, this is only our third year, we'll do 18 million. So it's a game of delayed gratification. And you're asking the perfect question, in my opinion, is how do you know how long to hold on to before you think it's just not worth it? And again, luckily for us, we had another company footing the bill. But yeah, it was tough. I remember going out. When we were first kind of interested in this, we immediately bought VIP tickets to an event. It was in Milwaukee. I want to say, um, Tony Romero's event. And we went there and like, yeah, that was $7,500 for me. It was $7,500 for this new person we just hired. Right. We like, we haven't even really made any money yet. So I've hired him. I'm paying his salary. There's $1,500 between his ticket and mine. I had to fly from Toronto. So there's another two or three grand and say, no doubt. He lived up the street, so whatever. Right now, we basically made a $20,000 investment before we understood the industry. But to us, we knew that it was really important for us to understand. And we knew and we had an agreement that if at the end of this weekend, we didn't see any opportunity, we'd walk out. Um, but we went there and as luck may have it, and I say that tongue in cheek because there's no such thing as luck, right? We all manufacture our own environment and our own situations. So we went there. I luckily, cause we're VIP, we're sitting in the front row. The MC was kind of waiting to go on. He was just shooting the shit with me. Turns out we had a common friend. So the MC, and now again, we haven't made any money. We're 20 grand in on this very first event. The emcee walks up, his opening thing to the whole event was, guys, you don't know who you'll meet in these rooms. The point of coming to these events is for all the connections you will make. Like the one I just made with this guy up here named Drew Carrell , with his company Leadzolo, who generate the hottest off-market leads through YouTube. And it was just like, that was a 30-second conversation I have with this guy.
That made for a good conference, that's for sure.
Right, so we spent the rest of the weekend like fielding questions from people. Yeah, no question. And so, you know, that built a lot of momentum. So yeah, the next six months, we were taking on clients, we're filling out the model, we know how much charge per lead, because there's certain areas where our cost per lead was really low. So we're just trying to like make a few bucks, right. But then we go quote another area, like for 200 bucks was costing us 300 bucks. So we went through six months of like, I think we put up like 400 grand in ad spend, and we got back like 320. and plus payroll and plus all this other stuff, right? So we're underwater, but we had that moment at the beginning, right? We knew that the interest was there. The problem wasn't that we couldn't sell our product. The problem was we didn't know how to fucking price it. We didn't know how to price it and hand it to people in the way they fucking wanted it. So even when we did overcharge, which we thought we were overcharging, but we weren't, people for it. Then their next question is, okay, cool. Can you just put this into my CRM? Make sure my top closer gets the best leads. My worst closer gets the worst leads. And I was just like, can you like, what is the CRM? And so like, so, so, so now we have to like go through and we had to navigate all this, but we, we knew like, we're to the point where we're going to have to take a loan from Stripe because Stripe was offering us like 250 K or something at the moment. at that time. And so we're just like, do we pull the 250? With 250, how many more leads can we generate? Do you think we'll have the system cracked by then? But for us, it wasn't a if we'll crack it, it was a when. So we had that to hold on to. And we've been through the monotony of 10 years. My partner owned the company for 10 years. I was only part of it for three. But 10 years, he was working on that company to get it to a million dollars a year. and at 30 employees, right? It was like a net of 4%, right? So like, we knew that that's not what we wanted to do. But we knew that time and persistence would get us there. So we're willing to, I was willing to take a second mortgage on the house if I had to. We were so passionate about the possibility of what we could do.
Yeah, that's remarkable. This is the stuff that a lot of times when people look at, you're sitting at 18 million in revenue, And people just don't really know or understand or appreciate what it took to get there. You know, so I appreciate you breaking that down for us. Now, what do you think? So from going from a hundred thousand in your first year, 18 million in your third, there's probably all kinds of things you could say that got you there. But what do you think is one of the most important kind of lessons or things you did that you could say, Hey, this is, I can tie this to why I think we got here.
Sure. I'm going to just straight out be controversial. And that's fine. Bring on the haters in the comments. We were too focused on VAs and cheap labor. That was our problem with our other agency. It was, how do we get an $800 Filipino or whatever, right? Some cheap labor. And not that like I'm against it and totally, we definitely have VAs now, but what we weren't looking at and what we weren't concerned about was what is the culture of our company? Do people want to be in our company? Because if people don't want to work in your company, nobody wants to work with your fucking company. So, and we'd lost us. We had this team of VAs and Slack and we'd roll in at 10 a.m. and blow up, ah, this person didn't do this. And like, that one's fired and let's hire another one. And it was just like, we were managing through a spreadsheet and we're making some money. So we thought that we were the shit. But when we transitioned over this, we realized it was just all relationship. And so when we made that first hire, like we hired Adam before we were making money, but we knew it was just kind of perchance that Adam came in front of us, but Adam's like, he's, he's the wood archetype. If you're big on Tony, like he's, he's the people person. He's a community person. Like he was the best sales person in the world because he would go spend four hours with somebody in a hotel lobby. asking them about their company, asking about their family, asking them about their friends. And it was just like, wow, like, what an interesting shift from what we're used to, which is like a webinar sale or a hard sale, right? And so we asked Adam who the next hire should be. And then we brought that person on. And then we brought on another group of people. And they were all, mostly were North American and people that we could go see. I could fly out and visit and see and be with. And then the Slack grew organically. I don't know anybody who's listening. I'm sure most of you have Slack channels for your companies. It's amazing when my wife is also part of our company. I'll go upstairs to her office and I can see in her Slack, she's like six channels that I don't even know about, man. They have this right now. They have like this hollow or this Christmas bake off channel. And there's like there's got to be six people in the channel and they're like showing what they bake today and this and that. There's there's a support team of which I'm not even on calls in. They're all dressed up for Halloween on the 31st. And there's all these pictures going through. It's like my company has now grown bigger than me. and organically because people love to be in the company. And because of that, we just naturally attract more clients. Like it only takes a little while of you being in our ecosystem before the team rubs off on you. And you're just like, I gotta go call Danny again. Or like, I'm having a hard time converting these leads. It's not, oh, shitty leads, although let's go dispute them. It's, I need to jump on a call with Katie, our head of support and just kind of see what she's seeing. And we'll happily do that. So for us, it was people. And then when the,
Go ahead. I don't want to cut you off cause you're in a thought.
Go ahead. And when we kind of got to a critical mass where I was getting a little stressed and Kyle was getting stressed, you know, we didn't know what to do. Like we knew what to do, but we'd never done it, which was hire a C-suite employee. And we hired our first COO only six months ago, seven months ago. And that's astronomical, right? That's going to take us, he's, without him, we probably only would have done 12 million this year. Because of him, we'll do 50 million, no, we'll do 40 million next year. And quality of life is completely different, right? Like I now get to fly around to masterminds, I get to hang out with you and the guys in exotic locations, you know, once every six months and really get to build my mental game. Because that's where it's at, at this point, you know, it's grit and grind in the beginning, and it's just all mental at the end.
Yeah. So I don't think what you said was controversial. I think actually more people should be talking about that. Um, nothing wrong with VAs or cheap labor, but you know, if you're going to build a winning team, it's really going to come down to the people that you hire. And if you're looking at the long-term view of building a championship team, it's why, if you look at the sports, uh, professional analogy, uh, they go out and acquire a shit ton of talent and they pay them well, they pay the coaches well, they pay the staff well, uh, that's how they win championships. And then. The flip side of that is you could have all that, and if you don't have the culture, no one's going to gel together. I, I'm actually glad that you said that because, uh, I do, you know, I have a lot of coaching clients and talk to a lot of different people in the entrepreneur world. And, you know, the just stick a VA on it to fix the problem, I think sometimes is, um, not the smartest thing to do. And there's people that have mastered that don't get me wrong, but it's very hard to build a culture virtually. And it's also very hard to scale a company with just using VAs. You know what I mean? And I'm glad you brought that up because a lot of people will not admit that.
And I can check out, like I can check out for three months and when I come back, revenue will be up, conversions will be up, like everything will be up. And I couldn't do that. Even if I was talented enough to have a complete VA team, everything is systematized. I have to show up every morning to manage that. maybe I got to hire a manager, but the manager's a VA, and so I still got to manage that. It's like, no, I have people whose only filter is, is this in the company's best interest? If they can answer that question as a yes, they're allowed to make any decision. Our customer support team is allowed to make any decision up to $25,000, so long as they can answer a question yes to that. And so because of it, I don't need to have an SOP if somebody says this, SOP if somebody says this, SOP if somebody says this, we have SOPs. But most of our SOPs are about, here's your box, go operate in your box. And what I want is people who just love to have autonomy with some guidelines.
Yeah. Yeah. So, and then you, you, you obviously felt, um, which I think, uh, a lot of people make this mistake too. You felt probably a year ago or maybe even sooner that you had to get that C-suite employee and you, you went out and actually pulled the trigger where that's where a lot of people get, get, get stuck too, is that, um, they're afraid to hire, they hire for where they're at and not where they're going. And then they're afraid to pull the trigger to hire for where they're going. And it sounds like you guys did that right, probably at the right time of you saw where you were going, but you hired for where you were going.
In retrospect, I'd want to say I wanted to do it sooner, but I never, we never would have because of the P&L, right? Like we just never had space to do it where we just kind of, we had a bit of space enough that we were like, all right, let's do this. And, and, and like, to your point, I remember talking to my business partner. I was actually in San Diego with Kent when we like made the decision. So I'm like doing a consult with Kent, going back to the hotel room and talking to my business partner about this hire. And of course, what I'm learning from Kent, I remember saying to my business partner, because he was like, oh, he wants to talk tomorrow. I'm like, oh, shit, I'm with Kent. And he's like, well, I can take the call. But like, how do you feel about this? I'm like, plain and simple. If you think that dude's smarter than me, it's a hire. If you think I'm smarter than him, don't. Like, cause I don't need another one of me. I'm, I'm capped. Like I got us here. Like I need, I need the next iteration of me and let's bring him on and he can start telling me what to do.
Yeah. That's, that's brilliant. Um, you mentioned this a few times, obviously, you know, I believe in it. Uh, you know, I think one of the, the biggest things to be successful, and I just think people underestimate this is getting in powerful rooms. Um, you and I are in, in one of the same rooms together. That's how we ended up meeting. Uh, you mentioned this earlier, but God, I just think, um, people underestimate this, you know, I'd love for you to touch on, you know, getting in, getting in the right rooms, going to masterminds, go into seminars, go into conventions. Like what, what has that done for you mentally, but also for your business?
Yeah, I'll preface this with this concept that I think a lot of people miss miss as well. People like we've trained ourselves and we've trained people over the last, say, 10 or 15 years to think that value comes from content and that, like, if I'm going to spend 10 grand on something, it better have 60 hours of training and four handhold sessions. And like somebody's going to come brush my dog and like I get all this shit. And it's like when you when you get over that, You know, whether that be because you got successful or you got smart. When you come over that, what you realize is that it's never about volume. It's always that you just need to hear the right thing at the right time. I remember I had the privilege of speaking with one of my favorite authors a while ago. And he was like, and I asked him, like, how do you come out with so many books over and over again? He's just like, Drew, have you read my books? He's like, they're literally the same thing. He's like, I'm just rewriting the same book over and over again. I have three points that you need to understand. And I know it'll probably take you about 20 years to get all three of them. So I just need to keep coming up with content to keep reminding you that these are the points. So when I think of masterminds and being in the right room, what I like is that I'm paying to come above the bullshit. I'm paying to get into a room with people who have moved past the toys and the flashy and the shiny, and they're like, I have a problem. I will pay $100,000 if you in 30 seconds can solve it for me, right? Now people are at that level, when you ascend to that, you are now just looking at result. So the preceding lesson that I'm making here is that you need to, most people need to understand that you are not missing out on a whole bunch of stuff you need to learn. It's probably one little thing, it's one little tiny thing where you're just like slightly focused or you have a limiting belief about something, not like you have a limiting belief about money. It's probably you have a limiting belief about hiring somebody that's smarter than you because you're afraid they're going to take over your company. That was mine. And so I only needed one person to look me square in the eyes and go, is your Stripe password protected? I'm like, yeah, of course. Stripe being my payment processor. And he goes, So, so what the fuck are you worried about? What's he going to do? Screw up, fire him if he screws up and hire the next guy. And like, that's all I need here. And like, I would have paid my entire mastermind fee for that one moment. And so if that's your, if that's what you're thinking of when you go into these situations and into these masterminds and into these higher end groups, then like life is good, right? You're going there. I went there to make friends, right? Like I remember joining uh, boardroom. And then my first event after my first event, texting Kent and going, I need the next level, right? Because there's a level and I need there. Cause I could see you talking with Ken to Casey, talking with Kent and all these guys. And like, you guys were just like a different level of mindset than me. And I knew I needed in there. I knew I wasn't going to get a whole bunch of shit from you guys in terms of content, but I knew just being in your presence, going on trips with you guys, understanding how you guys got to certain points of your business that I'll find a thread. I'll find that one thing, even if it's literally one thing once a year, it's worth every membership you have ever paid just to have that. So I think it's profoundly impactful. I think there is absolutely nothing that could replace a community environment, like a paid mastermind. Also, I'm just not a fan of spammy Facebook groups. But to pay and get into the room with people who are bigger and better than you will grow you exponentially. At any level, if you've never started a business, go find a mastermind of entrepreneurs. Put your first 20 grand into that or 10 grand, whatever it is, because you will just spend three months absorbing how people think. And then you can go find a course if you need to understand the mechanics of how to run a Facebook ad or you need to get your realtor license or whatever it is. But like that shit's the secondary stuff. That's the mechanics. If your mind's not right and you're not with the right people and the people are surrounding you are not supporting you in your goals and they're only dragging you down like my family does, right? I need to make sure that I'm up leveling the people I spend the most time with. And that's, I do that through masterminds.
Yeah, I think, uh, one of the important things you said there that I think this is, man, so many people miss this is that, you know, you pay for a mastermind and you, you're measuring the ROI based on content when the simplest smallest things, which for me, which that's what it's always been. It's like, we might, we might sit in a mastermind for two days for 16 hours. And out of that 16 hours, there was five minutes that. I just got a profound idea or just a small shift from somebody and that five minutes literally will make me millions of dollars. And do you know what I mean? And, but so many people, I mean, I'm glad you mentioned that because so many people, and I've seen it in boardroom, um, they've come in and, you know, well, I'm going to leave and why I didn't get the value out of it. And I'm like, what do you mean to get the value out of it? Like, are you fucking stupid? Like, do you sit in here and listen? Do you ask questions? Um, but yeah, I mean, I think that, uh, I think that that's a huge point that so many people miss. I was at EXPCON last week. I spoke six times, a bunch of really, really smart speakers, Chris Voss, the former worldwide FBI negotiator. I've heard him speak probably 20 times. And I got stuff from him this time that I never heard. And maybe he did say before I didn't catch it. But the three minutes of the stuff that I did get was worth being there for five days. Right. And it was like just it was just like that small little idea and nugget is like, oh, my God, this is going to be so powerful and profound for us to implement in our own business. I'm glad you mentioned that because people are like, I want to pay and get an ROI on all this stuff. And they're looking and they're listening for the wrong things, where I think the point that you just made is where the real value is.
And I remember too, I remember talking with Billy Jean, and this is really early in my career. And so I was like looking up to this man as an idol in marketing at the time, and now of course. And he said, he wanted to tell us a story or whatever it was. He's like, I just paid 18 grand for a mastermind last weekend. It was 18 grand for the two days. And he goes, the one person on my team goes, well, what do you get for $18,000? And he goes, I looked at that person and go, it's not what they're going to give me for the $18,000. It's what am I going to take from that mastermind for the $18,000 I spend. And that was a shift for me right there. It was like, fucking right. It's not up to them to make you successful. It's up to you to make you successful. They're giving you a forum. You go pick the fruit, right? If you're just going to stand there and hope that apples are going to fall into your basket, you're fucked, right? Like go. So look for what's prime, spend your time, be detailed, be methodic, and just be there and take it in and understand that it's going to be one big shift. It's going to be one big shift. It's not going to be a notebook of fucking tactical, how to spam YouTube to make money idea. Yeah, a hundred percent.
So, um, well, a lot of great information. I'm glad that you came. You shared a lot of great, great insight. The last thing that I want to end with is what I always went with is we call the show Waking Up to Wealth. And what it really is about is teaching people about money, different, teach them how to think different to your, you know, to a lot of points that you made, actually letting them see behind the curtain of what it's really like to be an entrepreneur and these lessons that we learn and really what all this shit is about. So I ask everybody the same question. Uh, what is waking up to wealth mean to you? And it's what it can be, whatever you want it to be. It's what your version is.
Sure. I think I know for me personally, the definition of wealth has been the hardest thing for me. So the concept of waking up to wealth or the concept of being wealthy, um, and all of these things has just been, so cluttered in my life. I think of wealthy as $10 million in the bank. Literally, I have a notebook, and we can talk about it offline, but I have a notebook from 10 years ago, and I wrote that by the time I'm 40, I want to be on stages making $10 million a year. Now, I'm 38, and maybe that could be a reality by the time I'm 40, but I don't think that that's what wealth is anymore. For me, waking up to wealth means waking up to what wealth means. What wealth means to me absolutely includes financial security, which is whatever that number is, is very different. It used to be a number in a bank account. Now, for me, it's assets. What assets do I own that would make me secure if a I don't know, the world collapses tomorrow, the economy all fucks up, I lose my company, am I still going to be financially secure? But wealthy also means, do I get to make every dance recital for my four-year-old? That was not in the description 10 years ago when I didn't have a kid. Wealth also means, did I intentionally, intentionally show presence to my wife this week? That wasn't an inscription 10 years ago. Believe you me, it was something else I was more concerned about with the women 10 years ago. My definition of wealth enriches, I think, every single day. So to me, wake up to wealth really means wake up, internalize what is actually important to you in your life, and go live it today. I don't need $10 million to be financially secure in the bank account. I need to have a company that I trust, love, and I think is growing. That company could be 100 grand a year or 100 million a year, and my security level is the same. So that's an interesting shift for me. So I have that. I have the capacity to show presence to my wife today. Whether I will or not is another question. I have the ability to cancel my podcast tomorrow and go to a dance recital. I'll do the podcast tomorrow in this one case, but I get that choice. And to me, that's what being wealthy is, is to have choice in my day, have freedom of time, and just be able to choose the things and spend the time and focus on the things I want. So yeah, I think that's what I would say wake up to wealth means to me.
That's a great answer. Last question. So anybody that's out there, that's an investor that's listening to this, obviously we're running your stuff on our show. But if they didn't hear the ads or they haven't seen, if someone that's out there and they want to get with you guys to get leads, what's the easiest way?
Go to leadsolo.com. Very, very simple. You know, we do the highest motivated off-market leads. We are the only company in the United States that does our own internal media buying. Quite happy to talk to you about where our ads are and where they show and quite happy to compare that to anybody else you'd like. But very simply, go to leadsolo.com, book a call. You'll jump on a call with somebody on our team and they're literally just there to answer your questions. no interest in selling anybody anything they don't need. So yeah, jump on a call and our team will be happy to talk to you about where you're at in your journey, if leads are right for you at this time or not. And yeah, that'd be the best way to do it.
Awesome, brother. Hey, well, listen, I know you're a busy man and I know you got a lot of shit going on. So I really greatly appreciate you coming in here and pouring into my audience and giving us some really, really good insights. Thank you, man.
Absolutely. Pleasure is mine.
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