Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Everybody is missing something in life. I felt prisoner to my own success. Change is hard. Change is hard. I get it. Change or die.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: I'm going to change things.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: So what the hell can we change? If we can see things differently, we can have some different results.
[00:00:14] Speaker C: Only on now media, television networks.
[00:00:21] Speaker D: And only when you become an entrepreneur, only when you become a business owner, only when you have to hunt and kill and eat, do you really realize that you're in control of your own destiny, not someone else.
That's all we had.
And the good news is I still like mayonnaise.
And the better news is that I had two things that I developed during that period of time. One, a hungry, burning desire to be filthy, stinking rich. I had no idea what that meant. I just heard about millionaires. I thought, I've seen it on Beverly Hillbillies. It must be doable.
And the second is I wanted to be a great dad, not a biological father. My parents were like my John Wayne and Greta Garbo. I mean, they were like the big dogs for me. And even though they were very humble by other people's standards, they injected in me four things that I never lost. One, my dad, his integrity and his work ethic. And my mom, her love and her passion for more.
And those four things just kind of guided me through life. And I got to a point one day where all of a sudden I'm sitting in a cubicle and I'm completely overwhelmed in corporate America. And I wrote down four words that changed my life.
Grateful, but not content.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: Say that again.
[00:01:44] Speaker D: Comfortable is where dreams go to die.
So the more comfortable you are, the more likely it is that you're dying a slow death.
And unless you break free, unless you embrace being uncomfortable, you can never outsize your own mind. You can never get to the point where you become more than you ever expected.
And the truth is, all you really need are two things in addition to mindset. You either need to meet the right person or learn the one right thing.
And either of those things can take you somewhere you never dreamed possible. But when they both happen together, it is life changing. It takes you somewhere that in retrospect, you look at. And that's happened to our family a couple of times. It's rare, but when it happens, it literally catapults you somewhere you didn't expect to be. You're in an orbit that you never expected to be in.
You have to start your kids young.
And I happened to sit down at the kitchen table when my boys were five and seven. Josh and Blake and I said, look, boys, we're going to learn some things that are really important that you're not going to fully understand yet, but we're going to talk about it every year until you get it.
And it starts with two triangles.
The first triangle is what I call the happiness triangle. And in order to be happy in life, you've got to want to make money, do good, and have fun. If you can do those three things every day, it's going to be a great day.
And which of those is the most important?
Well, when I survey already successful people who all make six or seven figures a year, who have seven or eight figures of net worth, but they've got one or two zeros less than we do, and they're looking for direction. And I always tell them, there's one of those that's more important than the others, which is it? And they always guess, do good, because they've been programmed into thinking that that's the right answer. And I say, well, if it's not that, what would it be? And they say, to have fun.
And I say, you just don't get it. It's all about making money. And you shouldn't be apologetic for that, because the more money you make, the more good you can do. The more fun you can have, by the way, the more money you can make to do more good and have more fun. So if I had been in my trailer park trying to do good, I would have had a very limited capacity to be able to do that. But now I can do enormous good. I can support enormous numbers of people and causes, because at the end of the day, I felt as though to optimize your family, you really wanted to start with yourself first, then your family second, then your causes third. And ultimately, that will lead to a legacy that you can live today and plant seeds in a garden that you'll never see.
And that was important. So we created a family office when we had enough wealth to be able to do that. And so we treat our family now like a business.
It's no less loving. In fact, it's so much more loving and intentional because we have a mission, vision, values, strategies, objectives, key results, and priority initiatives. And people say, what the hell are you thinking? Well, if you're as intentional with your family as you are with your business, how can you not be successful?
If you've been able to operate and build successful businesses, which we've been able to, ultimately, it allows you to have your kids outgrow you.
And that's what you and I Want.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: For the young people. Your iPhone dies. There is no icloud. You have no Snapchat, no text, no phone, no website passwords. You have nothing. It's just.
It's as if your life has been a you. The universe has just blocked you. Like, that's essentially what happened.
[00:05:44] Speaker D: That's exactly right. And you can imagine how angry you would be. And I was in the middle of the night, and I woke up, and as I was writing, I was realizing, my God, it doesn't even matter, because those people aren't out of my universe. They're just out of my contact list.
But here was the big thing. I realized that everything I'd ever been taught was wrong around networking.
It's not about a lot of people in your life. It's about less people and deeper relationships. It's about quality people, not quantity people. All those things kind of started surfacing as I was typing this thing, and I realized we are going to change our family's future by doing fewer, bigger things with fewer better people through fewer deeper relationships and avoiding at all cost the masses of asses eliminating those that we had in our life.
Because all of us are dragging around people in our life that we don't have the courage to get out of our life, and those become dilutive.
And I wanted to have people who are accretive in my life. I wanted people who could help me get to where I was trying to go quicker while I helped them.
And all of a sudden, I realized, how many people do I really need to do that? How many Chris Jarvis's do I need in my life?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: So the converse of the power of six, of finding the six great people to inspire you, motivate you, support you, is the rest of the masses of asses that hold us back. So you had a story, and I think since it led to so much wealth creation, I think it's worth sharing.
[00:07:25] Speaker D: Yeah, it was in 2002. I had just exited my third company that I had built and sold, and I was looking at what do I want to do next? And now, now I'd finally gotten a little bit of a war chest. So what was I going to do from an investing standpoint?
And I did a lot of research, but not on what to do or how to do it or even who to do it with, but I was looking from a timing standpoint at the right time to do anything.
Because timing is the most important word in investing.
Timing is the most important wood in life. You and I met at the right time. We didn't Meet a long time ago. We didn't meet in the future. We met now.
And so at the end of the day, I was invited to do the first ever State of the Union for real estate investors, because that's what I was studying, real estate, how to be successful in real estate.
So I was invited to do the first ever State of the Union at Harvard.
And this was very impressive.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:32] Speaker D: And In March of 2005, I stood up and I showed all my research and I said, the market's going to collapse.
Now, for those who don't know, the market began its collapse in May of 2007.
So in 2005, it was the height of the market. It was on a tear. You could never possibly lose money in real estate until you did.
And so at that time, I'm projecting that the market is not going to go well.
And I pretty much got thrown out of the room because that's not what.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: People thought or what they wanted to.
[00:09:11] Speaker D: Hear or they wanted to hear because they were making money in their sleep, basically, because the market was doing all the heavy lifting for them.
And so I got thrown out of the room pretty much. And three years later, I got invited back, hey, here's the guy that told us to get out. Who many who got out. No one raises their hand. Out of 2,000 people, what are you going to do next? I'm going to go all in in Las Vegas. Well, for those that don't know, 68% of all homes had dropped in price, 65% in Vegas in 21 months. It was a slaughterhouse.
And so when I said, I'm going all in there, no one bought it. And in 2011, I'm going all in every. No one bought it. The point of it all was I realized that the way to be successful in life is to always be contrarian, to basically do the opposite of what everybody else said. And it made me think back to when I was at an event and someone shared some Social Security statistics on people in America. Out of every hundred people who are born 65 years ago that would reach retirement age, the Social Security administration reported that 38 had died, 53 were dead broke. And I thought, that's 91%. Here's an idea. Don't do what they do, because you're not going to get to where you're trying to go quicker.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: So back to earlier when you talked about living for retirement, this idea that 91% of people will never get there or will get there with no money and they've given up their whole Life, their everything for.
[00:10:49] Speaker D: And you know that better than anyone because you've studied it so much. And how to make sure that people don't find themselves in that situ situation.
Well, it turned out that maybe 5% were financially stable and a few percent were financially secure and only 1% were wealthy. And I said, well, that's the group I want to be in. So here's an idea. I won't do what the other 99% do. I'll do this.
Well, one of the things I realized about being a contrarian is that when you're a contrarian and you're right, you're a genius. And when you're a contrarian and you're wrong, you're an idiot.
Well, you're not always going to be right, but your goal is to be.
So you really have to embrace the notion of courage.
If you don't have courage around your conviction, then you'll never be comfortable being publicly wrong.
But if you put yourself out in the public with something that's completely the opposite of what everybody else thinks, you better be as confident conviction as you can.
And you got to be willing to have the courage to do it and to say it and to act it, because as we talked before, what you don't learn, your kids will inherit, and what you don't become, your kids will inherit. So you got to be willing to put yourself out there.
Spend is one of the worst words you can have in your vocabulary.
Spend is like expense.
And if you spend time, you're basically expensing it. You're not investing it.
So our only word in our family that we use is investing. We invest in relationships.
If I go to Costco and buy strawberries, that's an investment in my fulfillment because I love them and it turns out my health.
So everything that I do, whether it's time or money, has to be an investment.
So I will fly here. I will. I will invest the time with you in order to help people get to where you're going quicker.
And by extension, I hope those that you serve will benefit from it. Because I'm serving you.
I'm not looking for anything in return because I'm good. But it's all. It's so important for all of us to focus on investing and only use the word investing. Because when you catch yourself using the word spend, you need to stop and say, is this what I should be doing? And you're going to find out it's not.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: There are many twists and turns along the better path, and this is one of Them. We'll be right back with more Be the Giraffe.
Welcome back to the only show where standing out is the standard. Be the Giraffe.
When did you first ask that question? The question of what are we doing and why are we doing it? And how old were you?
[00:14:05] Speaker C: I think I was 23 or 24, and I was sitting with a mentor. So the towers I know was something we talked about. And so my towers, I had a mentor in. I was holding onto my business. And what I found is I was in love with my business, not in love with business. And because I was in love with the business, I was so, like, focused on basically choking it out. Right. Like, everything I wanted to do was for the business, and I didn't pay attention to anything else. And I was expressing this to that mentor, and he said, well, why don't you just sell it? Why don't you just get rid of it?
And I never thought of that, because to me, I was building an empire and a brand, and it was my ego. It was my identity.
And when he said that, something broke.
And I think it was about 15 days later when I signed the papers to sell the company, and it was probably 45 days after that, the divorce hit, and 18 months of chaos ensued. But the backside of that is beautiful.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: So it seems Devin's a little ahead of me. He had success earlier than I did, went through the divorce earlier than I did. Lots of things that we talk about in the book.
So we found that we're relating on a lot of things probably happening in exactly the same time just because of our age difference. So we probably were going through them.
So when you have good news, tell me. When you have bad news, don't warn me.
Okay, so you mentioned the tower, the idea that you had mentors.
For me, I struggled sharing my fears, my concerns, my setbacks. That was hard for me. Somewhere you learned, and you found people early on. Tell me about that.
[00:15:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I think.
Did I listen early on? That's debatable.
Did I find people early on? Yes. And so we can go to network marketing, which is something that is such a taboo topic. But I was in Amway when I was 18, and it was actually a blessing because it taught me how to take mentorship, how to seek advice and education, read the books, listen to the audiobooks, which was great.
And it humbled me because you can only get rejected so many times and have these problems and go to your mentor and hear the same thing again and again. And at some point, you start to realize, like, oh, wait a second. Like maybe this person knows something I don't and the ego starts to be receptive to feedback. And so I'm blessed that I had that at 18 and was stubborn for till 23 or 24.
[00:16:25] Speaker E: But.
[00:16:26] Speaker C: But I was had this notion that you needed mentors in all your areas of your life. So. Right. Health, finance, business relationships, you need people further ahead of you doing better things.
And now that's all I lean on. I don't try to conquer or do anything myself. I just pick up the phone and have a conversation because I don't know what I don't know. And I need to know people. And so again, blessed that I had it, that I receive it early. Maybe not. I think that's a learned skill. But always was surrounded by amazing people doing amazing, amazing thing.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: So we didn't have Devin on the show to talk about how horrible his life has been so that you can make a donation to his GoFundMe. We had him on here because the story has fantastic ending and continuation. But if you are running a business, you want to run a business, or you're stuck in your job and you don't have your business going the way you want, you don't have the life that you want, you're sacrificing things that are important to you, then it's really important for you to think about the next step of sticking your neck out and being the giraffe so you can elevate that perspective and see a better path in your life.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: What happened is the draft showed up. Right. And the people that I knew were going to support me no matter what, were there for the right reasons, were the right people. And then everyone else kind of fell away.
And I don't really miss any of it because the new circle of people is so much better.
But I did lose some friendships. We did lose some relationships. Some of those things went away because they were one sided relationships that wanted us for the marketing agency or they wanted us for the thing. And when all that stuff goes away, all of a sudden you realize, well, there was actually no relationship. There was no connection. It was very one sided. And so it shook out all those relationships too. And now like my inner circle is brilliant. The people around me are great because they're all real people. Yeah. No one falls up a mountain. Right. So no one ends up on the top of Mount Everest on accident. Right. You have to do the work, you have to go through the struggles. And it's the same with this. Right. So if you're Heading into the valley. You gotta walk through the valley, right? And so in that moment, it was just stumbling forward and, yeah, bad business decisions, other things came up. Testing boundaries, all the things that push back on you to go like, hey, are you really gonna step into what you were trying to say you're stepping into? Are you gonna have those boundaries? Are you gonna withhold em? Are you going to stand on your values? Are you gonna do the principles? Are you gonna enforce the always in every list? Or was that just a thought experiment exercise? And so as you come out with that, you start to realize, like, no, this is who I am and this is how I'm going to build it. And my superpower is this. I'm going to lean into it. I'm going to surround myself with people I love. That's the world we're going to live in, and that's where we live today. Yeah. So I wake up every day and I'm super comfortable, super content, and never worried about anything.
That's crazy. Like, that. Everything I just said is a crazy statement when you think about the chaos and the darkness that was there.
But it's because I know what's important to me. And I've surrounded myself with amazing people like yourself.
And because of that, I can thrive. And I've reprioritized health. I've reprioritized my family. Right. I get to pick my daughter up from the bus and walk home with her and do homework, and we have dinner as a family. I wake her up every morning and hug her. My wife and I travel and go on trips together. Like, there's balance, and balance is seasonal. Right. But balance in the right way, where the right things are prioritized. And so I think the message I want for people to hear is that you can have that, but you've got to reprioritize yourself, your health and your wealth is.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Devin realized that the most valuable thing with his clients was their time.
The time was something that they didn't have. And so you wonder how someone in his 30s gets an audience with people in their 50s and 60s and 70s who are super successful. It doesn't make sense. It's not. You weren't born into a rich family with lots of confidence, contacts, but you've made your way into these rooms because you create value in places that other people don't want.
And so talk a little bit about that. And even the way that you charge, it's an important lesson for people on how to solve problems differently, give people what they're not getting.
I have another follow up question, but share that one because I want to use that for myself.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: I said this is where I started to geek out. So it's great. But in the book I talk about it as the referral dilemma.
So I think a truth is everybody wants more referrals, but they have no clue how to get them right. So they ask clients for referrals. Or maybe they have like one or two referral partners. Well, what if you had 200 referral partners? Right. What if you had all these people advocating and opening doors for you?
That's what we solved. Right. And so what I did is I took a problem and solved it with a system that's duplicatable and scalable. And so, yeah, I may be able to do these things. The good news is so can everyone listening, college kid, business owner, billionaire, can all use the system because the system is just a system. And so if you follow the five core principles and you implement the system without changing anything, you don't need to change the templates, you don't need to innovate, you don't need to do anything different.
You can find yourself recording a TV series and flying in and doing crazy stuff because you're adding value the right way and you're positioning your value the right way. Right. So it's got to be both sides. Are you making connections and adding value? And then are you positioning your ask properly so that your network can elevate you into the rooms that you want to play in?
That can all be done. And six months from now, you might open a door that unlocks something for your business or your life.
Yeah. So when we do first meetings with someone, it's called a connection meeting, not a discovery meeting. Because we're not positioning to sell. Now if they raise their hand and want to buy your product or service, please, by all means, move them down a discovery process and sell to them. But when we're talking about a connection meeting, there is a formula. And the connection meeting is, where are you today? Who do you serve? How do you serve them? How'd you get here? So you want to go historical and understand their background.
Where are you going? So you want to anchor on the future. You want them to start dreaming with you and then you want to advocate for that. Like, that's amazing, Chris, I love what you're doing. Yes, love that. That's a huge impact. That's great.
If you do that part of the meeting correct, when you ask the next question, which is what's your biggest challenge?
They're getting. They're going to answer with some superficial answer. If you haven't built a real relationship yet or what happens in my meetings is they bear, all right, they say, here's what's wrong. Matter of fact, this, this, this. And all of a sudden they realize and they go, dang, I just shared everything with you. And then we ask, great, who can I connect you with and how can I help you? And what happens is, you probably don't know much about me. You probably don't know much about my service offering, but what you do know is I listened. And I'm positioned to solve problems. I'm positioned to provide resources to help you, connections that can accelerate your growth or open up rooms for you. That's what we've done. And so whether it's networking, there's questions for that. The connection meetings, there's questions for that. And there's that indicator moment of, hey, Chris, what's your biggest challenge? And if you don't lean into that, I. I have to sit in that moment and figure out how to deepen the relationship, then otherwise the rest of the process is not worth my time.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Very helpful. So if you're stuck and you want to make more money, there is a solution. You can do the same thing to more people, but you're losing the game against time if you do that. Or you can solve bigger problems. And so I don't have any problem with people who want to make go from making $100,000 to a million or from a million to 10 million.
I don't have a problem with young people who say they want to become billionaires. I have a problem with the math. Since I was a mathematician, they don't do the math Right. And so the thing is, you can be worth a billion dollars if you can create $10 billion of value for other people. And you can either do that 10 billion times for a dollar or you can do it 10 times for a billion dollars. Whatever the number, whatever the math might be, but you have to create value. So the key is creating value for people and figuring out what's most valuable to them. And the only way you're going to know what's valuable to them is to ask the questions. So Devin has done a fantastic job at doing that in his career and into some segments.
[00:24:21] Speaker C: But let me start with the five core principles. So the five core principles are critical. So first is always add value. That's something that I've talked about the whole segment, right? You want to be others focused. We don't want to sell, we don't want to put position.
The second core principle is you have to control what you can control. So often in sales and marketing, you push stuff out and then you don't have control over it. And so I want you to only benchmark your success, your emotions and your output based on the things you can control.
Three and four principles go together, so it's never judge a connection or anyone. And there's value in every relationship. And so I need you to be open minded to taking every meeting and having every conversation.
And the fifth principle is the one we'll start leaning into as we talk about and unpack. The system is you have to train by doing so. If you want more connections, if you want to find yourself in the rooms, in the, in the areas, you have to open those doors for other people. You have to provide resources and make connections. And so if anything we talk about, you're going to implement, but you don't go back to the five core principles. The system will not work because you're going to switch to sales mode. Commission breath will kick in and you're going to erode the system. And then if you're judging or making assumptions about other people, again, it's not going to work. So we have to ground on the five core principles and then we can move through the rest of the process. It's the same strategy for each one of these buckets, right? And the strategy is, if everyone's submitting one way, how do I do it different? If everyone's going to apply this way, how do I do it different? If everyone's on social media doing this way, how do I do it different? Well, how we do it different is we get invited to rooms and we work our way through it. So for the internship, have you gone out and met all your professors? Have you had conversations with them? Did you ask them questions? Do you know their backstory? Do you know where they're going? Do you know who they know? Probably not. Have you gone out to the community and found people in the industry that you want to work in and said, hey, can I buy you a cup of coffee at lunch or dinner? I'd love to just pick your brain and understand it. Have you gone out and built relationships? Now, what's great is with the book and the systems, I can tell you how to follow up, provide resources and make connections for them which will wow them, especially as a student.
That's how you get invited to the internships that don't exist or you didn't know exist. And that's what we did, and that's what we help people do. And so it's the same with the job, it's the same with the business partner, it's the same with the stages, same with the podcast. And so when you answer, ask, who is it for? It's for anyone that wants to strategically grow a network that produces whatever they need whenever they need it. And so, yes, usually that's growth and revenue generated, but it could be redefining your inner circle or your towers.
It could be finding strategic partners. It could be affiliates, referrals, joint ventures. It doesn't matter.
Because with a thriving network of people who know, like and trust you and are willing to act when asked, anything's possible.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: We're just taking a quick detour through the savannah. Don't wander off. We'll be back with more Be the Giraffe.
We're back with Be the Giraffe. And the view from up here just keeps getting better.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: One of the questions I knew they would ask is, when. What makes you unique?
What makes you the giraffe? Essentially, right? What makes you different?
And I had no idea because I had had zero experience. What was I going to say?
And something randomly popped into my head because I started thinking about my story. What was different? What could I bring to the table? And I have no idea how this came to me. And I walked in, and I was prepared for that one question.
And so I'm in this room, I walk in. These VPs had never seen me. It's a panel interview with four VPs.
I walk in, I sit down, we go halfway through the interview, and the question pops up. Now I'm nervous because I'm telling you, this answer that I'm about to give you, it could have gone either way. And they go, what makes you different? Why should we hire you?
And I go, well, and mind you, at this time, they had never seen me. They had only heard my voice. Because this was at a time when we weren't doing zoom or teams interviews. I go, I can almost guarantee you that before I walked in this room, either subtly or subconsciously, you envisioned a white male.
Yeah, that. That little dead silence is exactly what happened. And I go, I. I promise you, I'm not going to call hr. That's not the point of this. I actually have a point.
I go, I am the world's best chameleon. And here's what I mean by that. Because of the sound of my voice, I sound like. Because I, I. My background was actually in broadcasting, and I Should probably tell you the origin story is my parents were immigrants coming into this country. So I'm not like, I'm a first generation American.
And I looked at them and I said, but by the color of my skin and also by the way I had been treated my entire life, you probably assumed I was an African American male.
And I go, but my actual nationality and heritage is from India.
And it was all these things. And I explained to them that based on my upbringing, based on how I've been treated my entire life, because no one knew what I was, I didn't have a tribe to belong to. I had to learn to assimilate to almost every different culture on the planet. Because at the end of the day, if you belong nowhere, you try to belong everywhere. There's two spaces, right? And a lot of it has to do with fitting in and what happens. And what I realized is that especially when I got into my career, you can't just be superficial on the top. And what I realized is I looked back at my life and I go, I don't actually have any deep friendships. What I have is a lot of surface level, and I can get accepted. But if you don't let people pass that exterior, what they think they know about you, it's very difficult to go from the whole know like and trust. You can go to the no, you can go to the like, but you have to shave off that veneer if you want people to trust you. So as I learned how to.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: So you were so focused on. You were so focused on surviving to say or do whatever people wanted on the end, but very protective at the same time.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: A hundred percent, 100%. And so when I started to do well in my career was when I heard either. I think it was both Zig Ziglar who said, help enough people get what they want, you know, you'll have everything you want. And when Dave Blanchard, who's the CEO of the OG Mandino Group, I read the scrolls, I read that book, and he goes, step into other people's worlds. It's not about my world. And that's why this idea of even the chameleon is I wanted to change the way that I looked at my life. And I didn't want it to be a defense mechanism. I wanted to not only help others, but when my income changed and I went from, you know, six figures to seven figures, that sort of movement was when I stopped making it about me, my product, my service, and truly about others, right? And so I think I was late 20s when I actually figured this out.
And there the pivotal moment was when my own. There was two pivotal moments, but I'll give you one.
When your own race. It goes back to who I was because I was a first generation American.
A lot of immigrants that came over here also didn't accept me because they didn't understand me. And there is a term in our world called abcd, American born confused Daisy, for any, you know, somebody from that culture.
And I realized because they're seeing, they're not seeing me, and to not be accepted by your own people, it drove me to say, you know what? I need to stop being the shield and really open up. And it actually, that personal experience helped me in the professional life. And finally I got to this place of vulnerability, which is why one of my favorite chapters in your book is about the heart. It's about just how are we going to be compassionate and be there for others.
[00:32:54] Speaker E: Right?
[00:32:55] Speaker B: And I wish somebody would have explained this to me tactically when I was a kid. When people say, follow your passions, there is truth to that, but what it really means and what I would tell people is figure out what you're ridiculously good at and monetize it. So what I realized, I was really good at communicating. I was really good at public speaking.
So I took all of these different things that I learned about myself through trying to assimilate. And I said, even as I was mentoring, what am I so good at that somebody would pay me to do?
And boom, like, when I figured that out, my income started to rise.
Being able to understand that, yes, I wanted to be accepted, but what it helped me understand is the reason I wanted to be accepted is because I loved people.
But if you love people, you want to help solve their problems. A great example is when I went into the investment world.
It was a time of heavy, heavy foreclosures. And most people out there were teaching, oh, you can make all this money in real estate. You can, you know, make fifty, sixty, hundred, you know, millions of dollars, you know, off of a flip or something of that nature. And I'm thinking to myself, these are people losing their homes. It's a struggle.
How do we go out? And so we created this community where it was about serving people. And when you serve people, you deserve the value in terms of monetary compensation, right? So if you think about things like seller finance notes, whether it's short sales, like, these are very specific real estate terms. How do you turn that into. When you're sitting across from someone who's losing their home, these skills Taught me to be empathetic.
It. And so how does that translate into business?
That empathy and me truly understanding what they're going in their world helped my close rate go up and I was able to buy more homes, transition that to back to tech sales, transition that to mortgages. Anything that I've done in my career, close rates go up.
The ability for someone to trust because they know that, one, I'm not going to screw them over because it's against my ethos. But two, I truly understand and empathize what they're going with, and I want to help them past the close.
I'm going to say that one more time, help people past the close.
So this is going to sound counterintuitive and almost sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, but I promise you, I'm not. One of the first things I do with companies, with clients, with anyone, is help them map out their own story.
Be curious about why you are the way you are. We forget sometimes what happened when we were 3, 5, 10, whatnot. But what happens is when you have these stories of your own life, what ends up happening is I say that you might not be able to be all things to all people, but you can be something to anyone. And when you walk into any sort of room, you can resonate with them because you now understand yourself. You're confident in your uniqueness, you know your own story.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: But.
[00:36:09] Speaker B: But you start getting curious about, huh, I know my story, but it makes you curious about other people's stories. How similar, how different, what can I learn, Right? But sometimes it starts with doing the reflection and the work on yourself. And now all of a sudden, because story, there's a. There's another quote. I'm full of quotes, right? Stories sell, facts tell. And so becoming a great storyteller inside an organization, outside an organization, it actually drives more curiosity to see, huh?
If I went through that, I wonder, did you go through that as well?
[00:36:45] Speaker A: So, so you. So when you said, did I go through that first? When you think of stories in this world of social media, you think of everybody's showing the private jet, or they're showing the fancy party, or they're showing the Instagrammable restaurant thing.
But when you're saying, I went through that too, it sounds like you're talking about, these stories aren't highlight reels. These stories are something different.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: Yeah. It's the deepest, darkest places that actually impact and shape. Whether it's sandpaper, whether it's a chisel, those are the stories where you're like, oh, that really made me who I am. And guess what? Now I can empathize. This is why it's important to understand your own self. Because that word empathy, it really, really helps with that relationship building, right?
And so this is why many times when I talk about there, there's something that I always say is principles, scale, tactics don't. And I just share this with, you know, my organization again as well.
These principles in life that we learn from our own stories, resilience, adaptability, all these different things.
That's the thing that's across all humanity. The tactics are mine. And what's really cool is that's what creates that curiosity. And what I mean by that is this, Chris, you can't do what I do because you're not me.
And I can't do what you do because I'm not you. So I need to stop trying to be who you are, or vice versa, and learn and understand who you are, because then we can both bring our wholesales to the table. And that's when one plus one equals three.
[00:38:26] Speaker A: Love that. Okay, so if you want to elevate your perspective, see a better path in your corporate job or in your new career where you're working with companies, Stephen has had great success. I love everything that you're sharing.
Try to find that thing that seemed like misfortune that really developed your superpower.
Network with people, mentor, connect with them. Be curious and see if you can't use the human connection when everybody else is so focused on data technology, likes impersonal things.
You're saying, let's go and get more personal so you can actually be more of a human by being more of a giraffe. Stephen, thank you for coming on.
Come back, watch this again. Share it with your friends. We'll see you next week.
Be bold, be curious, but most importantly, be patient. We'll be right back with more Be the Giraffe.
This is Be the Giraffe with Chris Jarvis. It's time to evolve and elevate.
Dad gets sick, you're working. College doesn't work for you. You start working to make ends meet and help the family and do what you do.
And then your buddy says, I've heard about this thing called the Internet.
And imagine that. So all of you living on the Internet, watching this on the Internet, and he's doing a business when.
So tell us about that story, because I know there's some really funny stories about you having to convince people of what the future is going to look like, which the Audience will find very funny. But Mike calls you, he has an idea.
You don't have money, don't have a formal business education by any stretch. And you guys decide to do what? Like what happened there? Because I think this is fascinating.
[00:40:31] Speaker E: I think it started with the idea of the Internet, knowing that.
So he explained. What is the Internet? Well, it's this D1 that's coming through the university there. And this is what it will enable people to do one day. And we'll have connected computers that can speak to each other, meaning people will have personal computers and, and be able to talk to now to the other computers. And so the thought was that commerce would eventually get there. What, what happened is my buddy and I got together at, at a diner in New Jersey. It's. And we sat there for a handful of hours thinking through how could we monetize that, right. Knowing this, we thought we knew something that the future had in store that the world didn't quite comprehend or understand.
Maybe today that might be kind of similar to AI and we can talk about that if that comes up. But it's, it's this new evolution of. We saw the Internet kind of changing the way the world lives.
And then we wanted to be a part of that. So we brainstormed on the different things we could do using that sort of model or that backdrop of the Internet. And that's, and that's how that started.
[00:41:36] Speaker A: Future. You had a life that wasn't enough. You wanted. You had a vision of something more for yourself. You said you wanted to build something that came from imagination and wonder, not from seeing it. Then you had, you noticed there was change in the world coming, but you weren't sure where it was going to go. You had a vision of something you wanted to try. You asked people for money and they said no.
And with all these stages of uncertainty, you kept going forward.
You guys kept moving in the. We're going to keep pushing, even though we don't know.
Important lesson.
[00:42:10] Speaker E: We certainly thought about quitting a lot and we debated it because we had lack of signs initially showing the results that were coming from. At the same time, there were continued convictions happening around us in other businesses that we saw, wait, the Internet is starting to infiltrate that area or we're seeing it happen there. So in those ways, it would give us more confidence that somebody will build what we're doing and what we're thinking about.
So we persisted, right. And continued to press on, saying, hey, listen, if we can just make it another day, another week, another month, how can we get to this spot, to that spot. Right. So we, you know, we continue to push forward. I was fortunate to have a business partner that was fantastic and. And that also worked his tail off and to make things happen and to do his part and maybe more than his fair share.
And we ended up getting to subtraction, which then now you start proving things out. Someone's bought something. Right. Look at that. And, oh, no more people are buying and that sort of thing. So you kind of work through it.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: So check this out. You're living in a life where you may want something more you would like to get to. There's some uncertainty on what that looks like. Josh did this when people didn't know what the Internet was. There's a lot going on in technology, in the economy, with AI it's going to be really exciting with Fundify on some projects that there's a. We got to get something out. It doesn't need to be perfect. We've got to get the first thing going.
Talk about that of, like, getting your foot out there and how important that is for people who are either investing in startups or people who are or want to run a startup, start a company. How important that is to just get out there and not worry too far.
[00:43:53] Speaker E: Yeah, it's.
There's a. There's a story that was told or some. A college class that went on, and you may have heard this before about a thing. It was a pottery class and. And. And they had, you know, one. The teacher split the class into two groups and said, this first group, I want you to create the best piece of pottery. You're going to create one piece of pottery, and at the end of the semester, you're going to submit that one piece of pottery and you'll be judged on how beautiful it is. That's what you'll be judged on. And so go off for the semester and do that. And then the other half, they.
The professor told them, you're going to also make pottery, but you are going to be judged on how many pieces of pottery you create.
Right. So all you have to do is create another one, as many as you possibly can the entire semester.
And however many you create, that's how you'll be judged, not on the quality. Well, at the end of the semester, the.
You had one piece that was okay, that came from the one group, and then the other group created thousands of pieces of pottery. And their. Their pieces were. Almost all of them were better than the other piece that was created with the goal of creating something quality so really what that talks to is the speed of getting out there and executing and delivering something to the world and getting it, you know, and then learning from that process and iteration, right? So it's this continuous iteration, continuous, evolving, learning from your own experiences. And so we had some of the same thing. Right. We've done that. I'm a big believer in running that way, trying to run as fast as possible. I also struggle with kind of the. The challenge of trying to make things perfect because you're judged on this or something like that now that people are going to think, oh, what a piece of, you know, that's a terrible product that you've just built and that's who you are. Right. And the reality is, if you launch a perfect product, you probably launched it too late. And. And that's the challenge that I think many entrepreneurs struggle with. I think we always envisioned a bigger business. We always tried to, you know, we knew we were building something that could be very large, and we thought the Internet gave the possibility for real scale.
But I think we envisioned it actually happening faster than it did. And then it became more challenging.
It was always a struggle. It was always difficult.
There were very few years that just continued to grow and continued to grow all on its own. There was always work involved in making that happen. So I think the fallacy of thinking you're just going to do this one thing. Thing, and then print money. Yeah, print the money and.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: And then frame it.
[00:46:26] Speaker E: We used to joke. Yeah, frame it. We used to joke. We'd sit on the beach and just refresh how much money we had in our bank account. Right. And. And that never happens. We never did that. We just, you know, we're always on to the next thing.
[00:46:37] Speaker A: So that's great. So, so many great lessons about. About growth and repetition and trying and adjusting and evolving before you elevate that. This. It is an iterative process that goes on and on with the feedback loop that happens that's actually running the business. Then there's some other challenges that you have. So I know we'll talk about it in the next segment. Once you get this figured out and you have the business going, it's like having kids. You get them through the hard part of little kids, then they become teenagers and they get even harder.
[00:47:02] Speaker E: So different levels of people, meaning now levels of organization, right. That you have where you have, man, you have people who are reporting to you, who have people reporting to them. Them who maybe eventually have people reporting.
[00:47:16] Speaker A: To them who you may not know.
[00:47:17] Speaker E: Who you may not know Exactly. And I, I remember the first time walking around our warehouse and, and meeting someone who I had, who had told me has been with us for almost a year. And I had just met him for the first time and I thought to myself, you know, I'm a terrible boss because how did I not meet this person? We, I think we had about two or three hundred people at the time.
So it's harder to meet everybody that comes through the system. But anyhow, that was.
Those are some of the challenges. And you have to. It's totally different than when you're a small company with a few people. You know everybody, of course, and you're in touch with everybody. It's a very flat organization. And you not only know them, you know exactly what they're working on, what they're doing.
You're able to have lunch with them if, if you have, you know, if that kind of works itself out, obviously bigger the company gets. Now you're doing group lunches, which is different and different, you know, like you said, different types of challenges as the company grows and certainly, certainly different learning experiences and growth and that you have to go through over a thousand for sure.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: Over a thousand no's, 80 yes's, which goes to your don't. Just because you got one no doesn't mean you're not going to get a yes.
What have you learned from that process of meeting, of meeting founders? Like when you pick a company for these 80 companies, I know they're all different, but there's gotta be some thread of things that you look for that make for a good investment from your experience.
[00:48:41] Speaker E: Yeah, there are a handful of things that are more important than everything else.
And in my eyes, they come down to the people that are running the company.
And you don't have to have them all. So because you can show stories, you can find history that shows many different instances where you can have a college kid that builds something extremely valuable. Right. So that means he didn't have a tremendous amount. He or she didn't have a tremendous amount of experience, for example.
But ideally you're looking for founders that have done things before. That would be one of the things you're looking at the founder side. You're also looking at the idea itself and what it could become. And you have to have your own gut and instinct on whether that's going to happen. Right. It's kind of like the Internet coming of age. We saw this happening. We knew that that was, that we were building that about four years, five years prior to the Internet boom. In 99. And so if you can see things a few years ahead of time, hopefully we can do that in the future and see things that are growing, then we can reap the benefits of making investments in those best companies.
I find that the best founders will find ways to modify their ideas if the ideas aren't good enough along the way.
Whereas the vice versa, if you have a great idea and you have a B team that's running that, they usually find ways to ruin the idea and not execute that A plus idea. Right. So really you want great, great people at the helm, but you do want ideally big ideas that have scale and optionality to them. Meaning where you can make the risk rewards that you. Early stage investing is a lot about risk reward.
You're making investments with lots of risk. There's lots of reasons that something could go to zero.
And, and yet you take that in the context of well, how big could this be? Is this the type of thing I could make 10 times my money? This is not a. I'm trying to make a 10% return this year. That's not the investment types that we're looking at. How are we making, you know, the small ones that we're trying to. How we're making 5x, how are we looking to make 50 or 200x?
[00:50:40] Speaker C: Right?
[00:50:40] Speaker E: And if you have some optionality that, and I haven't had these yet, but this 1000 or thousand X returns, right, those are also ones that you're looking for, right? How do you, how might you get into something that could be really large? Because then that outweighs the risk that you're taking.
You know, at the beginning stages you're getting significantly better returns in the private markets. Again, this is why the wealthy individuals of the world are moving there. Yet there's not a method in which you can actually put small amounts of money to work. So maybe if you had $1,000 even there it's really difficult to find companies that will take your thousand dollars. What if you had $100? What if you had $10? Right?
That's the kind of the, the, the genesis of this sort of thought that said why couldn't we help everyday average people that wanted or even maybe we have some people who are very wealthy are saying, hey I want to invest a dollar. That's our minimum. You can come in for a dollar. And people are coming in and saying I'd like to put a dollar in. Maybe, maybe some are because the dollar is what they want to do, others want to do it, to try it out. And see what kind of investments they get and maybe eventually move to a dollar amount that, that matches their kind of life and where they are. But the idea being build a product in a way, in a method that everyday people could invest into this asset class and reap the rewards that the ultra wealthy are reaping.
