In this episode of the Dropout Multi- Millionaire Podcast, I’m joined by my friend, fellow entrepreneur, and author, Steve Beecham. Steve has 40 years of experience in sales and entrepreneurship across various industries and is the current president and founder of Home Town Mortgage in Alpharetta, Georgia, where he has been thriving for 25 years.
Tune is as we delve into Steve's rich business journey, sharing anecdotes and lessons learned along the way. We’ll touch on topics like the importance of building a referral-based business, managing the ebb and flow of industries, creating a solid exit strategy, and the power of changing the conversation about your brand in the community. Steve also shares details on his incredible books, including his upcoming book, "A Few Big Ideas," where he shares valuable insights and actionable tips for success in business. You don’t want to miss this conversation!
Connect with Steve: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-beecham-1958733/
Check out Steve’s books!
Bass-Ackward Business - https://www.amazon.com/Bass-Ackward-Business-Helping-Without-Hustling/dp/B081CVB3X7/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1AY6G6AJU1T93&keywords=steve+beecham&qid=1703778263&sprefix=steve+beecham%2Caps%2C145&sr=8-1
What’s Your Buzz? - https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Your-Buzz-Creating-Business/dp/B0823JPYS8/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=Steve+Beecham&qid=1703778297&s=audible&sr=1-2
The Tapes We Play in Our Head - https://www.amazon.com/Tapes-Play-Our-Head-Conversations-ebook/dp/B08H3TRVRK/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Steve+Beecham&qid=1703778320&s=audible&sr=1-1-catcorr
We are back with the Dropout Multi-Millionaire Podcast. My name is Brian Will and today I have a special guest, Steve Beecham on the, on the, on the line with me here. Uh, and we are going to be talking about business today. So real quick, I want to tell you about Steve. Not only is my, is he my friend, lives in my hometown, but Steve has a list of accomplishments here that I can't even read all the way through.
So I'm going to have to hit the highlights. And if there's anything I miss good, Steve, you're going to have to jump in and say, Hey, what about the time I rescued the queen from drowning in the Nile river? Uh, and so here's Steve, 40 years of sales and entrepreneurship in various industries. I didn't know you were that old, Steve.
He's got three business books. So do I. So we were kind of tracking there. What's Your Buzz? I got that one off my bookshelf here. Bass Ackward Business, The Power of Helping Without Hustling. I like that. And The Tapes We Play in Our Head. Great title. I actually have Steven Tyler's book downstairs called Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?
I love that title. He's the president and founder of Hometown Mortgage in Alpharetta, Georgia. I've been doing that for 25 years. Past president of the Georgia Association of Mortgage Brokers, Who's Who in Finance, Atlanta Business Chronicle, Top Five Loan Officers. Let's see what else here. I got to skip like three or four paragraphs.
Used to own a clothing store. Let's see. He's an engaging speaker, storyteller, has spoken to sales and marketing organizations for Edward Jones, Merrill Lynch, Traverters, Prudential, John Hancock, Mass Mutual, Wells Fargo. And the list goes on and on and on and on. Steve, you make me look like a chump over here.
How are you doing today? I'm fantastic, man. It's a, it's a great day to be alive and alpha damn red of Georgia. You always know Steve's coming. Cause he's got this bright red, old pickup truck that he drives around town. What's in a truck? Is that Steve? Well, that's a 66 Chevy. So. Yeah, there's a whole story behind that.
I used to, when I, when I had my, um, first got into mortgage business, I bought a, um, H2 Hummer and I logoed it up and I'd get at the ballpark with my kids and all the kids would run over there and then I get to meet their mom and dads, you know, and then I wore that darn thing out and then I didn't do anything for a while and then I bought a truck.
And now the old guys come see me instead of the young guys. I used to have an H2. I love that truck. I absolutely loved it. I can remember when I bought it, I was hauling my boat one day. And I hooked the boat up to the back of it. I was going to pull it from Tennessee back down here to Georgia. When we pulled up out of the marina and I was, I was driving away.
I looked down at the little gauge. It gives you your miles per gallon. And it was like 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. I was getting two miles to the gallon. I can a 20 gallon tank. I'm thinking I got to stop for gas every 20 minutes. This is going to be crazy, but it was fun to drive. Wasn't it? I, it was comfortable. I, I, I actually love that thing.
My, my, my ex wife got that in a divorce, unfortunately. So I lost, she liked it better than I did. So I lost the Hummer. So, so real quick, Steve, you have a huge business background. You do a lot of speaking. Tell me about, tell me about some of the businesses you've owned. What have you done in the past? Well, you know, I guess the main thing is what's interesting and you probably, and anybody else that's been in several businesses, the cool thing is when you're doing a business, you know, and then you leave that business to go to the next business, it's amazing how much of the stuff from the previous one you can bring to the next one, you know, so more businesses actually, I think, make you a little better business guy, but, you know, I remember the first job I took was selling cars and after about three months I realized they did lie And so I said I can't do this.
It lasted a week when I tried it, you know, so three months You were better than three months. I think that was maybe when my little base salary ran out, you know, but I, uh, I got into clothing business and, um, wait, wait, wait. I gotta, I gotta tell you a story. I go to sell cars. This is my funny car story.
And I, it was Nissan. I was selling for Nissan cars. My buddy got me this job and I'm probably 20 years old at the time. One of the many jobs I got fired from. And I go in there and, and I get this person, he wants to buy a 300 Z. If you remember the old 300 Zs, that was like the, And the guy came in, I talked to him for probably 34 minutes and guys like, all right, sounds good.
I need, I'm going to take off. I'll get back with you later. And the guy walks out the door and I walk over to my office and I hear on the intercom system, Mr. Will, please come to the manager's office. When I walk into the manager's office, he goes. What happened to your client? I said, Oh, he's going to think about it.
He's going to go home. He goes, why didn't you to him? I'm like, T O M I don't even know what that means. It means turnover, by the way. I said, T O M guy wasn't ready to buy. He's going to, you know, think about he's coming back and he goes, I love this. This is the first time I've ever heard this. And I've used it so many times since he goes, pack your shit, Skippy and get out.
Yeah, that was the theory. Right? If you walk out, you're never coming back. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the longer they can keep it. I mean, that's so stupid when you think about it. It's just absolutely insane. Yeah. But I didn't I didn't like that car business. And so then I got in the clothing business and um, And then I thought I was smart after 2 years and I convinced my dad to go in business with me and we opened a clothing store and we ran that for 8 years.
And then I wasn't making any money and I was working 6 days a week and now we had sort of, it was a men's and ladies traditional. clothing store. So we had, that was back when suits and sport coats and dress slacks and ties wasn't much sportswear like they do today. They had a lot of, you know, that inventory on suits is, you know, about the most expensive clothing inventory you can get.
But anyway, so we, we messed around with that for a while and it just, you know, it didn't lose any money, but it didn't really make any money. Just kind of paid me a manager salary and I decided it was time to move I was about to get married and I said, I got to get a real job and Anyway, um, I closed that down and, and, um, when I decided to close down, I met this, uh, admit this guy previously.
And I called him and said, Hey, I'm gonna do it. He's like, Oh man, let's do the going out of business sale. He said, you'll make a lot of money. Anyway, I made more money in three months going out of business that I made the previous eight years that I was in the clothing business. And I learned, I learned more about the clothing business in three months than I did the whole time.
And then I got in the business of doing, going out of business sales. And that was a trip because that's where I really learned that most people are in a hobby business. They're mostly doing a business because they like it. They think it's fine. And I realized that people buy stuff for their business because they like it.
They've never done a market survey or anything to determine if anybody else likes it. They like it, everybody must like it. So that was a big lesson in that. And then the going out business business helped me realize that you can't eat your inventory. If you get, you know, you got to get your turns, you got to make it happen.
It also showed me that if you buy right, you can sell right. Never. I never really thought about that concept before. So there was some lessons there. And then I got into the recycling business. Because nobody was doing recycling and I had read a couple articles that it was coming. So I started, I was the first guy in North Fulton and Forsyth to pick up recycling and then I realized that you couldn't make any money on recycling when I took a whole tractor trailer load of glass down there and the guy gave me 40 bucks and I had to pay the guy like 140 to deliver it.
So then I started charging people for recycling and nobody wanted to pay. So then I got into garbage business and then I brought in a partner and then I sold that and that was the first business I'd ever sold and I made a little money. I go, okay, well, that's kind of cool. And then I got into shutter business, the plantation shutter business.
My best friend was had a manufacturing facility and he wanted to open up location. So, since I knew something about retail, we got into that and I learned about expanding and, and more salespeople and. Doing all that and then by accident, I got in the mortgage business and I've been doing that 30 years and that's really been fun, but I was able to take all those previous lessons and apply those to the mortgage business.
So the mortgage business has been been a good run for me. And, um. And now my son's in the business with me. And so he's taking what I'm doing and he's taking it to another level. And so he's doing really well. So that's kind of, well, how is the mortgage business these days? You know, rates shot up now they're coming down a little bit.
What's going on in the business. Yeah. And that's, that's to me, that's the weirdest thing about our businesses is that. You can be doing everything you need to do, but you're really not in control. It's not like you've got this business that just goes on this projectile, right? You know, we go like this.
Right. You know, and it has nothing to do with if you're, you know, marketing or if you've got good relations or good staff. Just, it's all about what's going on. It's like being a builder, right? You're either rich or you're poor. If you're rich, you're headed to poor. If you're poor, you're headed to rich.
It's just whatever the cycle hits. So. You learn to try to skim, skim some money off the top during the good times to make it through the low times and you learn how to set your business up to, to be able to do that. So that's been the big lesson for me on that. And your son enjoys being in the business with you?
He does. And we're both very social people. So we have a marketing, uh, sort of presence as a very social presence. It's about being out in the community. It's about social media. And, uh, he's like me, he's not scared to do that. And that's kind of how we've, you know, really how we've grown our business and it's, it's, it's working for us.
Talk a little bit about that 10 a little bit. I basically he and I are the two sales guys. We have a, we have another sales person that sort of part time person. But then we've got 3 staff people that support us. So we've learned how to set it up to where we can focus and spend our time on selling.
Because it's like, I just had lunch with a guy and I was telling him, I was like, if I owned your insurance company, what do you, what do I want you doing every day? Or if you own my mortgage company, what do you want me doing every day? Okay. And this, uh, this was a, a, a thing that I learned that was really helpful to me.
It's like, I, I decided that if, if you call me, Brian, and you want me to do your loan, I thought about, I said, how much time do I spend with you on that loan or working on that loan from the time you call me to the time you close? And my personal time is about an hour. So I said, okay, how many, if I, if I spent an hour a day doing a loan, And I did one a day and I did 30 loans a month.
I would be probably the biggest loan producer in the state of Georgia. If I did 30 loans a month. So all I need is that one hour every day. So what do I do with the other seven hours? And so if Brian will loans, hometown mortgage, what do you want me doing? If I'm your sales guy, you want me selling. And so I had to come to this thought process that says, if I'm not marketing those seven hours to see when that one hour opportunity is going to present itself, Then I'm really not spending my time wisely.
And so that's, that's, that's been a big aha moment for me. And I teach a lot of people that, you know, like this insurance agent, I'm like, you know, that's what you need to be doing. If you wrote 1 deal a day and you wrote 30 deals a month, I mean, isn't that pretty good? He goes, yeah, I'd be doing really well.
And I'm like, well, then the other 7 hours, if I own your company, I want your butt out there meeting people. Right? Right. So that's kind of now the books you've written, are they kind of, are any of the books you've written centered around that concept? You got three books out there, I think, or two, three.
And you got one of the works. The first one I wrote, Bass Aquid Business, what, what, uh, what that book was about is I decided, you know, I read a lot of marketing stuff like, like a lot of people have, and the thing that stuck with me, I think it was Zig Ziglar, if you help enough people get what they want, that some of them will help you get what you want.
And I said, you know what, I hate cold calling. How can I just go whole hog into that to build a referral based business? I don't, you know, I don't want to. Do a lot of stuff in the mail and TV and radio and all that kind of stuff. I just want people to call me and say, say, Steve. So Brian told me to call you.
What do I need to do? And that and that's what my whole focus on all my marketing is. Is somebody to call me and not question my rate, not question my closing costs. They just like, do my deals right? And because they know I'm going to take care of them. I'm going to do that. So the mass accurate business book was about.
Hey. This is different than what most salespeople teach you to do. This is not about going in there, making, beating the prospect, getting the prospect list, hammering, um, you know, trying to close the deal, blah, blah, blah. This is about giving first and, and hoping that some of those people will send it back.
And so reciprocity kicks in when you give to other people. And so that book is predominantly about how do you do that in your village, your village, meaning your sphere of influence of the people that you know, that you're in contact with. And so I, uh, I developed this thing I call be the mayor of your village.
So you want to be the go to guy for what you, you know, for your, your area of expertise within your people. So that when somebody, in my case, thanks to mortgage call beach, you know, so that's, that's what that whole book's about. And then the second book that I wrote was Buzz and what. I realized was there were there's a conversation going on about you in the community, and you may or may not be aware of that conversation.
So I remember I went down I was talking to these real estate agents, and I was, I finally asked him I'm like, you know, Miss. Miss Turner, you know, I've known you my whole life. I went to high school with your daughter. I'm pretty good mortgage guy. Why have you never sent me any business? You know? And she's like, well, I've never, I've never gotten over the fact that you trenched my yard in high school, you know, and I'm like, how old 20 years ago, you know, or another lady was mad at me because I didn't invite her daughter to the prom and another lady was mad at me because.
You know, she wanted me to, um, room with her son in college, and I said, you know, now I'm rooming with another guy. So people hold these grudges sometimes in local communities, and, but then I realized, so there's a buzz about me, but there's also a buzz about my company, you know, like if I work for IBM, they might like me as a salesperson, but they might dislike IBM, or they might like, you know, my, or the opposite, and so people need to understand there's a conversation going on, and then how can you change that conversation?
How can you, How can you, uh, address the bad buzz and make it good buzz? And then there's the thing I call dripping the buzz. What we don't do is when we're in a conversation with people, we don't drip in our greatness. Because if I don't tell you about things that I've done, then there's no way that, you know, in order to go out and tell other people about me.
So, I have to learn to, um. Slowly drip that in and conversations with other people about things that I think are important because I've got to give you that information for you to be able to repeat that information. Right. The 3rd book I wrote was called the tapes you play in your head and I realized that the game changer for most of us is the internal conversation we're having.
Are we having a positive conversation or a negative conversation and most of us are having more negative talk than we're having positive talk. So how do you. How do you change that conversation and what are some steps to do that? And so that's what the 3rd books about. That's actually a pretty powerful one.
You know that, I mean, that's publicly based. I mean, there's been all kinds of books about what you say to yourself and affirm personal affirmations and self image, self worth and how it's affected by that, that that's, that's a really powerful, uh, Proverbs 23, seven, how a man thinketh in his heart. So he will be, yeah, that's a powerful one.
Most people don't get it from. Yeah. Yeah. If you ever read a guy, a book by a guy named James Allen, it was written like in 1890 and a lot of people hadn't read it. It's online books, like 40 pages in old English, but it's, that's his whole, that's his whole thing. As a man thinketh. Yeah. That's a great book.
One of the first books my kid, my daughter pulled off my bookshelf when she was probably 14, cause I had this giant bookshelf of books and she said, what's a good book I can read daddy. And so I pulled off the little book and gave her that. I said, this is one you need to read first. You can do it in 10 minutes.
And she was like, Like that was the best book. She's probably read it, I don't know, 20 times in the last 10 years. That's fantastic. Great book. More people need to get their kids to read that book. And don't you have a fourth book here in the middle of writing right now? Yeah, so I just, I kind of finished it.
It's in proof mode. It's called A Few Big Ideas. So what I, what I realized is, you know, when I go out and I speak and stuff, you know, usually the guy that's hiring you to speak, he's got a message, a certain thing he's trying to get over a theme for the year, stuff like that. But I always, I'm always thinking, but if I'm in the audience.
I just need some nuggets to take home, man. If you give me at least one nugget that I can help me change my business. So I started writing down those nuggets and most of those nuggets can come from coaching or mentoring other people. What are some things that you can do that might get you? Well, do share, Steve.
Give us some of the nuggets. So. The first one is I came up with this idea called the top 100. So make a list of the top 100 people that you don't know that you want to meet next year. And these people have nothing to do with your tip or your, uh, your typical person like for me, a typical person would be to meet a real estate agent.
So I'm not trying to meet, you know, uh, 1 on 1 prospects. I'm just trying to meet people in the community and the more of an influencer they are in the community, the better it is for me. So, like, maybe you don't know your mayor or your city council person. Maybe you don't know your kid's principal. Maybe you have, you go to the same dry cleaners and you've never met the person that owns the dry cleaners.
Maybe you have a restaurant you go to and you really don't know the owner of the restaurant. How, those are people in the community. that you need to meet Maybe it's a policeman. Maybe it's a fireman. Maybe it's a business you drive by and you go, man, that looks cool. And that guy's business is hopping. There's a lot of cars.
I'd like to know about that. So I started doing that every year and it's been fabulous. And I just go to people and I go, Hey, man, I'm just wondering about your business. I love it. It's great. Or I patronize it or whatever. I'd love to, Know about it. And so one of my concepts is is don't go to people with your agenda go to go to people with your Assets and so i'm going to people and saying hey, I'd love to meet you.
I've got a mortgage company You know I do a couple hundred loans a year and some of those people might need what you do or might have Might want to know about this school. Can I have them call you blah blah blah So i'm never i'm never leading with hey i'm here to meet you because I want to You know, I want you to do a mortgage with me and so then regards always down there's down So top 100 is one of my favorite other thing is uh, I call it a to g And so in the old days when I first got into mortgage business, it was slow I went in and talked to one of my mentors Guy named Ed Wheeler.
And I said, Ed, I said, what, what are you doing in a slow time? He said, well, I used to be in this business. And the guy used to say. If you, if you slow, get your Rolodex out. That was back when we had those Rolodex. Yeah, I remember my Rolodex. Get your Rolodex out. He said, start at A and just start calling everybody.
He said, you'll never get to G before you'll have a deal. And I've done that a billion times and it worked. If you just start calling people, and none of the people that you called will call you about a deal, but if you just start, it's like we used to say the mortgage gods will smile on you if you just do that simple task.
And I do that all the time I'm having a slow day. I'm like, all right, I just pull out my phone. I just look at hold on a 2nd. What about. 8 through Z, you never call these people. They think you forgot about them. Sometimes. Yeah, what I do is like, I go, okay, I stopped it. You know, I don't know, H, or something, you know, I'm going to start at H, and I'll go that way.
And, you know, sometimes I'll start at Z and work backwards. But, but, yeah, you're right. I've changed that now what I've done is I put everybody I know. Oh, my calendar. With the time to call them. So everybody I know gets typically at least one call a year for me. So now I'm doing a through G on a daily basis.
And it takes some of that, that roughness out of it. But anyway, it's a great little thing to do. And then the other thing I tell people about is GoPro in your sport. So. It's like I was reading a book and the guy was talking about, hey, you know, how many high school kids go to college and play football, and then how many of those go to pro?
And then if you go to, how many of those go to the pro ball, right? That's the ultimate. And are the people going to the pro ball doing the same things that the people that didn't go to the pro ball go to and they quit? And the answer is no, they're doing extra stuff, right? You take a guy like Jerry Rice, right?
He's training, running up and down sand hills. He's the first guy to start flipping those big tractor tires. Anyway, he's taking ballet lessons. They're doing all this extracurricular stuff, watching more film. They're just trying to get better. They're trying to be the best they can at their sport. And I think enough people out there are just going through the, uh, the motions and they're not saying, hey, I need to be the best guy in my sphere, in my village.
At what I do, what are the things, what are, where am I deficient? You know? And so one of the things I do is I talk about being 360 around you. So like, if I'm a mortgage guy, do I know a lot about surveys? Do I know a lot about appraisals? Do I know a lot about real estate closings? Do I know a lot about being a real estate agent?
And if I don't, then I need to call my appraiser and say, Hey, dude, I want to ride with you a day. I want to spend time learning what you're seeing, how the water comes in. How you, you know, how you decide what are, what's a good comp, what's not. So that way I'm smarter when I'm talking to my customer, because I know that side of the business and most people don't do that.
So like when my son, when he came on, the first thing I did is I said, you're going to go spend a day with appraiser. You're going to go spend a day with a closing attorney, you're going to go spend a day with a surveyor. So that's a really good thing. And you get to be. If you're growing in your, in your business at trying to be the best, most smartest guy you can, you're gonna, you're gonna feel more confident.
Therefore, you're going to get more business. Let me ask you this. You're talking about this. Well, hold on. Let me touch. You're talking about this A to G and reaching out. Um, I mean, We don't use Rolodexes anymore. Today we use social media, right? So has that changed? Are you still like physically going back into your contact list or do you rely on social media to, to push that message out to bigger audiences?
So I call them developing marketing habits. So you develop a habit. Once you, once you start something to make it a habit, once it becomes a habit, you add another marketing thing. One of the first things I did is I said, I'm gonna start a habit of doing a newsletter. And every time I meet somebody, they're going on that newsletter.
Then I'm going to start a habit of trying to call everybody I know on a regular basis. So I put them in my calendar. I took the 5, 000 people that were in my phone and I put them one or two on every day of the year. So that, uh, they, you were, Brian Will is going to show up at some time on my calendar and I'm going to say, yeah, I want to talk to Brian today, or no, maybe I'll move him off and talk to him next week.
But once a year, you're going to get a phone call from me because you're one of my contacts. So that, once that became a habit, I moved on to the next one. The next one was, alright, I'm going to post it on social Facebook once a week, and then once a day. Now, what we do is we do, we have a video day. So I have a guy that I hired that comes in.
And a half a day, once a month, we sit down, my son and I, and we knock out mortgage videos just as fast as we can. And we've gotten to where we do them so much. It's like one takers, right? And we will knock out 10 or 15 a piece. And then that guy will post those. Through the month, and then we do it again, and then we learn to do them as education.
We started just doing them. Then we said, no, the key is to educate your customer because then if you can teach them something, then they think you're smarter. And then, in addition to that, there's always something new to talk about going on in your industry, or, or, yeah, in your industry. So now what we do is we're conscious about when somebody calls us and they ask us a question, you know.
Hey, what's the rate? If I get that like two times this week, then I'm making no to that. And then on video day, I'm going to talk about rates or hey, you know, how much should I pay in closing costs or how much earnest money should I put in? Whatever the question is, I'm writing that down. And then that's a minute or less video.
So that's another habit is to sit down and do that. So. I have like 10 or 15 of these marketing habits that just occur all the time because it's just like brushing my teeth. I just do it. So that's how I do it. Do you think, and I talk a lot about the difference between self employed and business owners and scaling and building intrinsic value.
Do you think that your business has the ability to move on if you personally stop doing it? I understand your son's doing it as well, but it's hard. It would be very hard. So I had at 1 time. I had probably the 2nd largest mortgage brokerage firm in the state and then the crash happened in 09. everybody left.
They couldn't make money. It came down to just me. My wife become became my processor and that's when I made a change. I was reading some stuff and it's like either, you know, either, either you're growing a business to sell it or it's a lifestyle business. There's only so many exit strategies. Right. And so I decided that time to be like the local family doctor in the community or the local CPA is the lifestyle kind of business.
I want to. I don't need a big business anymore because in the mortgage business, you can only sell a mortgage company at a peak and it's hard to want to get out at the peak because things are really trucking and you're making money and people, the multiples aren't there unless you've got a tremendous amount of people, a real ingrained marketing system that's not dependent upon the loan officers.
Because that's really what you're buying as a loan officer. So, um, there aren't many of those that are real valuable, um, in my world. So I just decided to do that and said, my hope was that one of my kids wanted to get into business and then I could transition to them picking up where kind of where I left off and that's happened, so that's my exit strategy is each year I'm selling my son 10 percent of my business so that in the next 10 years it'll be his and I'll work for him if I'm, you know, still want to work.
Interesting. So this is the last business you're going to do. No, no, it's funny because he and I were sitting here talking last week and he's like that we got all this data. We got all this social media. We got all these people that we know. Why aren't we doing a side hustle? And I go, you know, that's a damn good question.
We need to do a side hustle. So we've been scheming for the last couple of weeks and actually had a friend of mine showed up yesterday and goes, I've had this idea and I went, oh, my God, I've had a similar idea. We could put these two ideas together. So I'm working that now in my mind, Hey, is this a viable business?
That I could do, that I wouldn't have to be there, but I can lend my expertise to. And I think it is, I think I've got two or three I'm looking at, so. Typical entrepreneur, your brain never stops, right? Yeah, yeah. So let me ask you something. All this experience, 30, 40 years of experience, I understand you also go out and you do speeches, you teach classes or something like that.
Talk to me about what you do there. Well, you know, what's fun for me is to go talk to people. My purpose in life is to help other people get from where they are to where they want to go. So, if I can go somewhere and speak to some people and give them some of my stories and my experience and it can help somebody in the audience, I'm all in.
So, it's fun for me to go speak. So, I get a lot of people that are really professional service people that I do a lot of speaking for. So, it'd be like financial advisors, bankers. real estate groups, uh, insurance, PNC or commercial insurance. So people that are calling on people in their community, small business people.
I do a lot of coaching and mentoring. I don't really, most of those are free. I just do it because they're friends of mine in the community. But, um, but I do, I do do some outside coaching, but I love going someplace and speaking because I'm in a weird situation. I'm like, I'm right here in Alpha, damn right of Georgia.
And my office is behind my house and I don't get to go. Right? So when somebody calls me and says, Hey man, can you be in Chicago next week? I'm like, I'm coming now, baby. I'm ready to go. So for me, that's fun to get out and go do that. And so I do a good bit of that. So. And so I got two questions as we wrap this up.
So I ask these questions a lot to folks. So best piece of advice you can give somebody who wants to start a business. And the second one is best piece of advice you would give somebody who's trying to scale their business. Two different people, someone who wants to start and someone who is scaling.
What's the best piece of advice you can give them? I sprung this on you. I know I got you on the spot here. So if you're going to start a business, you got to figure out where. In the box, you fit like the E Myth kind of box, right? And you might, and you got to say, I'm about to start a business. And if it gets, if it gets to the level that I want, I'm going to start a restaurant.
And right now I might be the chef and the bottle washer. And the waiter and blah, blah, blah. But where, which box do I fit in the best? And so I'm going to circle that box. And my objective is I'm going to do all these boxes right now, but my objective is to just focus on that box and hire these other people as soon as I can to do that job for me.
So that's, that's, that was, I call this the four personalities in my book. And I stole some of that from the email, but yes, who are you in your business and who are you not too many people try to be someone they're not, and that's why they fail. And like I was telling you about when we were talking with this guy I just had lunch with, it's like, I told him, I said, so.
You got it. You know, if I owned your business, which box do I think you belong in and where you bring the most value to the company and that's where you need to be. That might be the chef. It might be the guy that's ordering the food. I don't know, but that's where you need to end up as quickly as possible.
And then, um Scaling the business, I think, I think the best advice I've gotten on that is the rule, what I call the rules of the game. And I read this somewhere, and I can't find this anywhere where I read it, but the guy was talking about in professional sports, you never see a coach complain when he gets fired.
You hardly ever see a player complain when he gets, when he, when he gets, uh, you know, they put him on the bench. And he said the reason why is everybody's extremely clear what the rules of the game are. If you're the offensive coordinator and you're not scoring more points than the other team, you can't stay.
If you're the defensive guy and you're getting worn out, if you're a lineman, if you're an offensive lineman, your offensive line coach is going through the film and saying, if you didn't do what you were supposed to, 95 percent of the plays. You can't stay. We got to bring somebody else in because we can't have a successful thing.
The coach knows when he's hired by the rich owner. Hey, we went, you know, five and five last year. If you can't get me seven or eight wins this year, you can't stay. And so nobody complains. And so I think the biggest problem we have is when we hire people. We don't lay out the rules of the game clearly enough to them to where they know if you can't, you know, if you do this, you get to stay.
If you do this, if you step out of bounds or you can't score, you can't stay. If you do these things and you're really successful here, here's how you get paid more. Here's how you move up the ladder more. And so people don't really know. And I think entrepreneurs. They, they know that they know what that looks like, but the person that's working for them doesn't know what that looks like.
It's not really, really clear. And so, as I've gone through all these businesses and hired all these people, that's the biggest takeaway for me is if I'm going to really make my business work, And today I have that with my employees. They're real clear on how they're, how they get to keep their job and how they lose it and how they get paid more.
And so nobody's having that conversation. And if they're not up to speed, I never have to fire them. They come to me and say, Hey, I can't make, I can't do what you want me to do. I need to go find another job. And they quit. So I don't have crystal clarity, crystal clarity on communication and what the job takes.
Yes. And that's how we succeed and, or that's going to be how we fail. That was awesome. Good note to end on. Steve, any last words? Yeah, here's the biggest, one of the biggest lessons I'm learning in business is when, when the ship's going down, when things are going slow or your business is not successful, the number one thing you got to do is shuck your shit as fast as possible.
Cause I've been there. Four or five times and you want to hold on to that house and you want to hold on to that car and you want to hold on to that lake house and you want to hold on to that boat, those four wheelers and motorcycles or whatever your crap is big anchors. You got things are going south, sell that crap and the faster you sell everything you have, even if you got to move in a realm, the faster you do that, the faster you recover.
That is an absolute fact. Those anchors will take you down. Listen, Steve, I appreciate you being on the show today. It was a good show. Uh, everybody, I appreciate you listening to the dropout multi millionaire come back next week. And as I always say at the end of every episode, remember you have to be in the game to win the game.
So let's get in the game.
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