Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Have an Empire State of Mind - 019

Episode Date: November 1, 2017

At some point in your entrepreneurship, you need to ask yourself - “Am I thinking big, or EMPIRE big? In this episode, Craig Ballantyne and Bedros Keuilian talk about how you need to restructure your thinking so that you can scale even bigger in your business. Playing it safe may keep food on the table and a nicely sized roof over your head, but taking risks and thinking different will build an empire. Here’s what you’ll discover: 1:50 - How thinking bigger will take you from business to empire. 3:50 - Why you need to take risks as an entrepreneur and tune out the critics. 6:00 - How you can start outsourcing work to scale a team and build your empire. 8:20 - How you can use environmental exposure to find other people who share your vision to bring on board. 10:40 - How you’ve been conditioned to think small and avoid risks, and why you need to break out of average thinking. Think bigger!

You are unemployable. You can't just go clock in and clock out and have a nine to five job and a secure paycheck. You are out there with a mission and a purpose to make more money, to make a bigger impact, and it ultimately becomes a game. If you own a business, then you might pride yourself on thinking big, but are you thinking empire big? Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the Empire podcast. I'm here with Craig Ballantyne. We just got done with our Empire Mastermind, and man, we really had an awesome turnout to the mastermind. We had some really big names, which we're going to talk about a little bit later.

But one of the big takeaways that I got was the dudes in the group. While they're doing amazingly well, all seven-figure earners, we really had to force them to go from thinking big to empire. What were some of your big takeaways where that's concerned? Yeah, so I'm going to call this empire state of mind. And it's very similar to the e-myth. It's actually, I guess you call it the new e-myth. Because the old e-myth, if you've read that book, It was about working in your business versus working on your business. And the first step to becoming a seven-figure earner is to stop working in and start working on the business. But then when you go and try and build an empire where you're going from a million to $10 million,

where you're really starting to get multiple locations or just really blow it out of the water, you have to, like you said, think not just big, but different, very, very different. And I know that you can talk about this in a second here because you were really trying to get these guys out of that little bit of, you know, they were focused in the weeds on some of the stuff. They were focused on funnels, but funnels don't make an empire. What does? Yeah. Yeah, and so that's the truth. Funnels don't make an empire. Instead, you can hire funnel experts. You can hire sales experts. What does build an empire is to think much bigger than you're currently thinking. And so I'll give an example here. For example, Grant Cardone, I'm sure he started off

buying homes. Today, you follow Grant Cardone on social media. He's buying apartments. You know, He's buying a lot more home for his dollar. He's buying apartments. He's thinking big. At the end of the day, if you're in real estate and the economy turns bad and there's a risk of you going bankrupt, well, you're going to go bankrupt whether you buy three or four homes or three or four apartments. And if I'm going to go bankrupt or there's a risk of it, I might as well go all

in and take a big risk of going bankrupt all in, right? But if I don't go bankrupt, then the odds are the upside of buying apartments versus homes is far more greater. So you look at Grant Cardone, the man is in the empire state of mind. One of our members in that group, Matt Wilbur, he owns five fit-body boot camps, and his goal is to scale it to 10 fit-body boot camps and beyond. And one thing we had to do is get them to focus on not just find the right location to lease out a fit-body boot camp location, but what can we do to help you find dirt that you can build a shopping center on?

One of those locations will be a fit-body boot camp, and you can rent out the other three, four, five stores to symbiotic businesses that would add value to your fitbody boot camp and your fit body would add there. So it really becomes the McDonald's model, doesn't it? Where you're not just, you know, renting out space to run a McDonald's or a fit body boot camp or whatever, you're actually owning the dirt that it's on. And I like to go one better. Can you get tenants in there who can pay you money? And once you start thinking that level of empire big, it really is easy. It's just, then it's how many zeros do you want to add to their revenue that you're generating.

Right, so you go from thinking, how can I afford the rent to how can I get people to rent from me? It's a total mindset shift. And I guess people have to be okay with not just thinking differently, but what other people are gonna think about how they are thinking differently. So you're the type of guy who is thinking of owning the entire block. You're thinking of having your own stakeholders in town here,

the BK stakehouse because that's thinking B because of all the big things that you do, why pay somebody else $500,000 a year, when you can just own the steakhouse and take your people to it. So you probably then run into people that say, oh, you don't want to do that. You don't want to do this. It's going to be too much work. Why don't you just be happy with your little slice of the pie? What do you say?

Yeah, and that's the thing, right? You're always going to have people who are going to be naysayers who are going to be possibly negative people. And some of those people are going to be friends and family who just want the best for you and don't want you to take risks. What they don't realize is that you were born to take risks. Listen, if you're an entrepreneur, you were born. to take risks. You are not whole. You are not happy. You are not satisfied unless you are living on the edge. Does that make sense? And so guys like you and me and everyone probably watching this

have no choice but to take risks because you are unemployable. You can't just go clock in and clock out and have a nine to five job and a secure paycheck. You are out there with a mission and a purpose to make more money, to make a bigger impact, and it ultimately becomes a game. At this point in my life and I'm very grateful and I'm thankful. We make enough money. We have many properties out here, you know, rental properties and I'm opening up a private gym, right? So the guys from the empire can come and work out. And I'm opening up my own steakhouse, right, BK steak here in town. But what's really cool is it at some point becomes a game. And when you start gamifying entrepreneurship, you start looking at it as a point system. Money becomes points to me. And so I

enjoy the game. I enjoy the process. I enjoy the risk. I get a high off of it. And And so when you have friends, family, people telling you you can't do it, it's too high of a risk, it's not right for you, what do you know about a steakhouse, what about rental properties, what did I know about franchises? What did I know about franchises just six years ago? And today we're one of the top 15 fastest growing franchise on the planet, right? And so my challenge to everybody watching this is how can you stop thinking funnels and start thinking owning the land that you are on? For example, how can you stop taking customer service questions and emails and phone calls

and outsource that to people who you can pay $15 an hour or two so you can start really thinking at an empire level? Remember, it doesn't take any more mental horsepower to open up one business as it does 100 businesses. The difference is, can you scale a team, can you get the money? Well, you can go borrow the money. You can bring investors on board. you can go hire the team, find the team. And one day somebody asked me, how exactly do I find my empire team?

I said, well, Jason Capital and I started a business, and within a few months, we scaled that business to seven figures. And the way we did that was not hiring green people and then teaching them skills. We went on LinkedIn, and everyone watching this can do the same thing. You go on LinkedIn, and you pay for the account, like the highest level of their account. Yeah, the premium account is like $99 a month or something. and you can literally recruit people.

That's how I found our HR manager here. That's how we found our social media buyers for our Jason Capital brand. And you can recruit people who are already superstars and what they do. And when you're thinking Empire, you don't have the time to build someone up from scratch. You have to literally recruit someone, plug them in and say go. And if you're able to- You're buying speed. You're buying speed.

Building an empire is buying speed. Building an empire is letting other people handle the trivial stuff. so that you can focus on the big thinking stuff. And as Craig said, get out of the weeds and look at your business from the 30,000 foot level view where you become the chess master. That's empire thinking. Yeah, and I think you said something there

that was really, really important. It doesn't take more mental horsepower to open one small business versus opening multiple small businesses with the idea of having the empire. If you're going to think, you may as well think big, right? Sure, yeah. If you're going to think, you may as well think big.

Yeah, and so it means having speed, doing things differently and not listening to the critics on another level because you're going to get critics at every level but this is going to be next level like imagine if Elon Musk listened to the critics oh you can't go to Mars you can't do this I mean people just aren't going to understand you at all and so well I guess the next phase is how do you find other people who do understand you and can support you how do you find those empire builder level well then it's time to start finding groups like our empire mastermind I mean I suppose this could be a very soft pitch for our empire mastermind. Look, there's networking groups, there's get-together groups, there is social events for people who want to think big and think

empire like, hell, there's events of Grant Cardone and Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk and all types of Empire Warren Buffett are speaking at. Go to these events because odds are you're going to be around other empire builders because you may not be an empire builder, but I can tell you this through environmental exposure, you hang out with enough empire builders. And so you start you start thinking like them. You know, one of the biggest compliments I get from my coaching clients is when they've been coaching with me for a length of time and we got a new client on board and a mastermind, the client will ask me a question and my coaching client who's been with me for a while

will go, hey, you know what? I knew you're exactly going to, how you were going to answer that question exactly to the word because I've been around you so much. They start thinking like you. So if I want to be like Warren Buffett, I'm going to go to Warren Buffett events. If I want to be like Gary Vaynerchuk or Grant Cardone or Elon Musk, I'm going to go to events and places they hang out and speak at, and through environmental exposure, you start thinking at their level. Great example you gave about Elon Musk was the guy didn't

just go, huh, all right, already automotive companies are making an electric car, so let me go and compete. He's not only making a different kind of electric car, the way he sells it. He sells it through what looks like an Apple store, number one. And he decided that he's going to think so empire-like that he's going to go into the electric automotive industry at the same time. compete in against NASA and Boeing and all the big companies with SpaceX right explore not only exploring space but now his his company SpaceX tech takes more gear to the International Space Station than any other company out there for less cost right the government's always paying him now instead of these other

organizations and he's got Solar City going so he could have done this with three you know three lifetimes or by thinking empire and hiring teams who are capable to scale his vision for him and so the other thing that I do want to touch on here before we wrap this particular episode up is, you know, you said you have to think big, you have to think empire, and you've got to think bigger than the people around you who are, you know, negative and maybe kind of hating on your ideas or just trying to alleviate your risk. The truth of the matter is you've also been conditioned to think small. You know, mom and dad always want to keep you safe. The school system

says, you know, what if school system said we can take you from first grade to sixth grade in one year. Like, why not? Why not? That's empire thinking. But instead, we're taught incremental steps to be safe, baby steps so much that when we grow up and we have this grand vision, we go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, I can't do it. Mom and Dad told me I can't. School system told me I can't. My challenge to you is break out of average thinking and start empire thinking. And you know what? That starts with hanging around people who are going to allow you to think that way. Absolutely. All right. So make sure that you do watch the video that talks more about the Empire group and then just fill out the application because not only will we get a chance to

see it, you will get a chance to express your thoughts and even start the big thinking process, right? Yes, sir. All right. We'll see you soon. Thanks for listening to the Empire Podcast Show. Remember to subscribe on iTunes, share it with your friends, and give us a rating. We'd really appreciate that. And make sure to go to Empire Podcast Show.com to watch the videos as they come out.