Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - Prepare for Winter - 134

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

In this episode of Empire, Craig and Bedros talk about what it means to be prepared for winter. Winter is coming! It doesn’t matter what stage your business is in or what stage of life you’re in. Winter is guaranteed to come, and if you aren’t prepared, it’ll hit you like a ton of bricks.   “Winter is coming and you better be prepared for it.” “With winter, comes great opportunity.” “You’ve got to disconnect from the negativity.” “Discomfort has become comfortable to me.” - Bedros Keuilian   Here’s what you’ll discover: 03:20 - Why the 2008 recession was good for business 06:02 - What to do to be ready for winter 11:24 - As a leader you need to be emotionally resilient 12:09 - You have to prepare now 15:12 - Know how you deal with stress and how you can improve   “You turn winter into summer with the right mindset.” “You need to have ruthless self reflection.” - Craig Ballantyne   Follow us on Instagram: @realcraigballantyne / @bedroskeuilian   Buy Man Up and get Bedros’s High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/   Buy The Perfect Day Formula: https://www.craigballantyne.com/#books   Subscribe to My Channel for weekly videos: http://www.youtube.com/bedroskeuilian/?sub_confirmation=1   Make sure to review us on iTunes: http://bit.ly/theempireshow

The difference between the winners and losers in the entrepreneurial space are those that are able to survive and thrive in the winter versus those who fold and die. Ladies and gentlemen, winter is coming. Are you prepared for winter because if you're an entrepreneur, you ought to realize that it's just around the corner. Hey, I'm Badrus Kulian. Welcome to another episode of The Empire Show with our dear pal, Craigie Valentine. I'm from Canadian, dude. It is winter like 300. 150 days of the year up there. Dude, to that point. We are prepared. It's like sunny and 80 degrees here.

And on Friday, I'm leaving for Canada, Calgary specifically. Oh, yeah, it's a beautiful place. And it's scheduled to snow. Seriously? Yeah, yeah. So I'm gonna take my construction booths. September, man. What is one where?

Speedos? Yeah, well, obviously. That's what we do in Canada. Thermo-insulated. The polar bear plunges, which you have to be a real, real big person to do. Speaking of real big persons, Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins. Yeah.

So you got to do the voice. You got to do the voice when you tell the story here. So a couple years ago, Craig and I, we had a good fortune to share the stage with Tony Robbins at Joe Polish's event, the annual Genius Network event. So Craig and I are backstage getting miced up, and Tony's on stage rocking the house as he normally does. And at the end of his talk, he starts talking about how, as an entrepreneur, you better be prepared. You better be prepared because winter is coming. and if you're not prepared to deal with the winter,

if you're not made to survive and thrive in the winter, then you're going to be screwed. You didn't tell it with the big hands. And he says, winter is coming. He does have a big bellowing voice. And as Craig said, he takes these giant mittens that he has as he calls his hands, and he's just clapping his hands.

And he says, winter is coming, and you better be prepared for it. So we're just pumped up backstage, thinking like, holy shit, he's absolutely right. And so I realized very quickly that the difference between the winners and losers in the entrepreneurial space are those that are able to survive and thrive in the winter versus those who fold and die in the wintertime. And that's what we want to talk about here today on this episode. Yeah, and so you go way back and you hear all these stories, well, you know, look at all these companies that started in the Depression, like HP

started in the Depression. There's a couple other ones, very first. famous big company, so I think maybe 3M was another one or something like that. And it's because they found opportunity. While everyone else is running scared, they were looking for, oh, great, I'm going to take up market share. So there's another famous story that you have of back in 2009 when you started FitBody Boot Camp when everyone's hitting the panic button. Everybody's hitting the panic button. You know that's a great opportunity for you to look into it. I mean, dude, there it was, right? The economy crashed in 2008 here in the States. And at the same time, I'm starting Fit Body Boot Camp.

Gary Vaynerchuk is starting VaynerMedia. And I've heard him talk about this interviews, and we both had the same mindset, which was there was more employees now available because unemployment went through the roof up to 11. Yeah, compared to today where it's so hard. Yeah, right? So you have more employees who are going to work for less dollars,

and everyone started to contract. In other words, everyone's pulling back their marketing dollars, which means buying traffic online is dirt cheap. It was wholesale. I just felt that that was the right thing to do, to be able to hire more and to be able to spend more dollars in buying traffic. And in my business and FitBody Boot Camp,

well, we operate in commercial buildings in real estate space. And so all of a sudden there was all this real estate available and we were able to negotiate three months, five months, six months, up to eight months of free rent for our Fit Body Boot Camp locations because there was such a surplus in the market. So when winter comes, with winter, comes great opportunities like cheap employment, cheap traffic, and of course, cheap real estate.

And if you strike, you will actually build a war chest so that when summer comes, you are like on top of the world. Yeah, and I think, but the thing like that might have me the greatest factor is that you have all those cheap things, but then you have the scared competition. Yes. And if you have the right mindset that, hey, listen, man, the economy might be crashing out there, but it doesn't necessarily mean the economy in my county or in my city or my state is crashing. Or maybe I can just get up and go.

Or if you're an online person like me, hey, listen, if the economy of one country is down, it doesn't matter because I sell to 119 countries. And not all of their economies are down. And not every single group and so on and so forth is down. So stop getting so myopically focused that, oh, my gosh, oh, my gosh, you know, it's bad for one group. Well, it's not bad for everybody. And by the way, that's what happens when big media starts to really talk about it and gives society this whole mob mentality of the chicken little syndrome. Oh, yeah. The sky's falling.

Everyone's falling. Everyone starts panicking. Before you know what, every talk around the water cooler, every talk, everyone's like, well, I'm losing my house. I'm just going to abandon it. And before you know it, this guy who was like, you know what, I'm just going to weather the storm. Goes, you know what, if Craig's losing his house and he's going to abandon it, maybe I shouldn't try and weather the storm. Maybe I should just abandon my house too. I'll give up too.

And the give up to mentality starts to act like a brushfire and just catches on. You've got to disconnect from the negativity, from the fear-based mentality, from the media that's telling you to do the scariest things, which is to give up. The brave will actually take the risk and go all in. Yeah, so it's almost like you have to have that self-leadership that you talk about and man-up. So what's the thing that our leaders, who are listening right now, what do they have to have in place for themselves, mentally, physically, emotionally so that they can go out and be ready for it.

Yeah. So like anything else, you've got to do like a fire drill, right? If you remember in school, we used to practice fire drills. And as far as I know, my kids still practice fire drills. And since we live in California, they practice earthquake drills. So that when there's an earthquake, when there's a fire, it's not like, oh my gosh, what do I do? When the teacher yells fire and the alarm's going off, they know to all, you know, whatever,

run out the door, go to a safe area. and when there's an earthquake and the different alarm rings, they know to go under their desks and protect their head and neck, et cetera. There's a fire drill that you have to prepare for. So start preparing for winter now by going through a mental drill and then do it on a marker board. If the economy crashed, if the housing market crashed today, what would I need to do to come out on top five years from today?

Because that's usually it's a five-year cycle when the economy improves again. What would my business need? Well, do I have enough money? money to market harder, right? Can I drive more traffic? Do I have a way to create a product that's lower cost to get it to more people that have less income? If you don't, start thinking about what that product might be, right? So it might be that if you have a flagship product that costs $50,000, now you might want to consider creating a product and having it on the sidelines

that costs $5,000. So that, or maybe it's $50,000 paid in full, but now it's $5,000 paid over 12 months so that people can afford it. But go through the fire drill of what would need to happen, prepare for winter so that when winter comes, you go, that's right, I was going to spend more money on Facebook, drive traffic to this lower price product that has a continuity program to it, hire more employees at a cheaper price, and that's how I'm going to throw out. And oh, by the way, go and look at my competitors and go, hey, are you looking to give up if you are? I'm looking to buy you out. Because my mentor, Jim Franco, I just interviewed him. It's one of the episodes. Ash, do you know what episode it is?

The last episode. Okay, that really helped out. What? You're nuts. Episode, I think he thinks it's episode one. I don't think it's 115. No. All right, so there's an episode with Jim Franco.

Just go find it here on the Empire Show. And he talks about how every time, because the man is 76 years old, he's gone through a lot of economic crashes. And every time there was an economic dip, he bought out a company. He bought out a company. He was buying it for pennies on the dollar. And when we had Pat, but David here, I said, hey, Pat, winter's coming. What are I doing to prepare for it?

He goes, Bezos, I'm putting away a lot of cash. I go, what are you going to do with that cash? He goes, I'm going to buy my competitors for pennies on the dollar. And so when you do that, you come out on top very quickly when the cycle turns back around in five years. So if you start kind of preparing for what is my game plan when the earthquake happens or when, in this case, winter happens, and winter is going to come in many fashions. Your industry might experience the winter. Sure.

Right? Housing market is right now. Yeah, housing market is right now. So it might be just industry specific. It might be country specific. It might be global. It might be internet specific. But if you practice all the different fire drills on how would I survive and thrive instead of how would I recoil and die, then you can take action in that moment.

How do you prepare your team? Because they're going to be here in the news media and they're going to be, they might personally be hitting the panic button and they're wondering, well, what about the company here? You know, is the company going to be okay? because maybe if you're in a specific market where a competitor went out of business, like back in the Bear Stearns days, all the people at all these other banks must have been just like, oh my gosh,

I'm going to do my job? What's going to happen here? How do you, as a leader, prepare people, first of all, to weather the storm, but also to thrive and survive? Well, one, I already have a plan. And number two, I already have the conversation that I'm going to have with my team.

Soon as we feel that this is happening, a winter is coming, and a winter is going to come, I already have, we're going to have a meeting in the Learning Center downstairs, and I know exactly what I'm going to say, which is going to be we have them right where we want them. It's my, we have them right where we want them talk. And I know that because we're going to have our competition right where we want them, because they're going to start contracting and recoiling, and we're going to go to them and go, hey, we've got an offer that you can't refuse. And my mentor, Jim Franco has taught me how to buy failing businesses or these businesses that are recoiling with their own money. So in other words, instead of saying, hey, look, I'm going to give you $500,000 or $5 million for your business.

I'm going to take control of your business model, pay you out, let's say, 20%. I'm going to use the revenue, the incoming cash flow to buy back your business and put it into my fold. Got it. Right? And that's the model you want. But I'll be able to message that to my team so that they don't panic because if my team starts panicking, they go, oh, shit, the competitors are going out of business. we might be in the have the same fate. No, guys, we have them right where we want them.

This is our growth phase. The winter is going to be our growth phase. Yes, you actually turn winter into summer with the right mindset. Okay, what else do you have to do, whether it's preparing yourself, preparing, you know, like you went to mentors and you got the financial advice there because, like, that's not something that most people know, you know, and certainly not teaching that in school. So what else does somebody have to do to make the most out of any opportunity, not just, you know, I don't want people's business to go bankrupt or anything, but things are going to happen.

Things are going to happen. So another thing you need to do, that you as a leader, you must become emotionally resilient and mentally tough. Emotionally resilient and mentally tough. Like, be willing to risk it all and go all in. Because at the end of the day, if you're in business and you're worried about, well, I don't want to take big risks when winter comes, when the economy crashes or when my industry goes through a massive shift because I might go bankrupt. What if you actually, the fact that you took the risk, it was what saved you from going bankrupt. And that takes mental resilient or emotional resilience and mental toughness to do. Not enough people are willing to be that tough.

And so, again, it's about preparation. You can't go, well, I'm just going to stay soft right now. But once winter comes, I'm going to be emotionally resilient and mentally tough. Right. So it's going to switch it on overnight. Right. No one does that. So you have to start preparing now.

When I do these six-week challenges, right, I talk about these six-week challenges, I do the six-week challenges to put myself out of my comfort zone to do things that are scary so that I'm always mentally tough and emotionally resilient I'm constantly flying around speaking going to events like I spoke for six hours in Pennsylvania two days ago then yesterday Oh sorry Saturday I spoke for six hours in San Diego Yesterday I took a half a day of rest and here we are doing this and I got a half-day coaching client after this and tomorrow you and I are running the Empire Mastermind My point is constantly driving myself to push into the sides of my comfort zone. And by doing that, I'm, I've, discomfort has become comfortable for me.

Yeah, it's just another day, man. That's it. And so I am mentally and emotionally prepared, just like you are, to take on winter. Most people are constantly sitting in the middle of their comfort zone where it's the coziest, warmest, bubble wrapped. And they're thinking, but when winter comes, man, that's why I'm going to shine. Yeah, dude, shine now. Yeah, that's another reason why so many people should get to the modern day night project that you do, the 72 hours.

75 hours. 75 hours, the hell weekend that you guys have put together that takes somebody from that bubble wrap company zone and moves them to a position of mental strength and fortitude, which is just important not only in business, but in personal life. And so maybe we can even talk about like, hey, listen, sometimes we're all going to have a winter in our personal lives. You know, there might be a death in the family. There might be, you know, house burned down, something like that. Because if you don't have that mental strength now and you're not ready for any of that stuff, you know, I was going to say, well, if anything bad happens to me, I'll be totally fine. Listen, you got to start building that stuff right now, right?

What's funny is not enough people prepare for that, yet we know that death is imminent. Death is coming. For you or for the people around you. Disease is imminent. For you or the people around you, it's just going to happen. Over time, they say if all men live long enough, they're going to die of prostate cancer. Really? Yeah.

So if we know that as a fact, what am I doing? doing right now in preparation so that I can put that off as far as possible. It's what you're doing now to prepare. Again, the fire drill, the earthquake drill, right? So there's divorce, there's death, there's personal economic situations that could happen. Your house could burn down. Those are all different winters that may or may not come. But have you thought about what you would do if your house burns down, if your business burns down, if your 10 best employees quit and leave? That's a winter. If your 10 best employees quit and leave and go start a competing business, what are you going to do? Because if you you have a plan for all those things, then when it certainly happens, you'll be prepared.

And guess what? If the divorce doesn't happen, the home doesn't burn down, the employees don't leave, that's a plus. But there's still another winter coming. Yeah, because right now, most people's plan is to hit the panic button. To hit the panic button, they have no emotional resilience, they have no persistence, no perseverance. And it's just all of a sudden it's super drama about everything. And, you know, right now, their drama is about, oh, I stub my toe, and it's a major, major life event. Imagine what's going to happen. So you need to have some ruthless self-reflection to look at yourself and say, hey, listen, how am I dealing with stress right now? You go and ask your team members, hey, am I dealing well with the emergencies that come up?

Ask your friends. Ask your spouse. Ask your partner. Ask your parents. Hey, am I dealing with this well right now? And if not, where can I improve so that when anything comes around, whether it's personal winner or professional winner, you're better prepared for it. Yeah, because that winter is not always going to be a global economic crisis. No.

It could be very personal to you. And how you respond to it versus react to it could be the difference of surviving and thriving or going away and dying. And we know so many great people, like really talented people, we're not going to drop any names here, but we know really great talented people who have gone through personal winters

that weren't, on a scale of anything, weren't life-threatening, but they're no longer doing what they should be doing in life. Yeah, yeah, they get thrown off, they quit on their hopes and dreams because a little bit of a side track. Yeah. And you can't let that out.

Yeah. Like I'm thinking of one person who was a great copywriter who was married and all of a sudden because of the divorce, he reached out and it's like, hey, things are tough. And just there was a sob story. Like, dude, there's a 50% divorce rate. Yeah. That means there's 50% of society who's going through some kind of winter.

And you're a tremendous copywriter who just because you lack disciplined and emotional resilience, the divorce threw you off kilter. What a shame. And now he's not able to serve his community. He's not able to make the type of. of money he wants where he can cause impact with that money. Yeah, yeah, it is unfortunate. You know, actually, I spent the weekend with Tim Larkin up in Vegas.

Good old time. I went to Tim Larkin's self-defense seminar, and this is not a self-defense seminar where you put on, like, those bubble suits and fight. Within the first 10 minutes, we were taught how to gouge an eye out. And it was all about destroying the other person so that you could get away safely and protect yourself. It was about, hey, this is when your life is on the line. Here's how you're going to react. And he said, you know, sometimes. I was in a room full of people who were very unassuming.

It was all lay people. It wasn't cops or anything. I called it like the room of old white people. And I was like one of the youngest people in the room. And he said, you know, like this is what normally my audience is. And I might hear from somebody in two weeks. I might hear from somebody in two and a half years. You never know when this is going to happen.

You know, sometimes you might be getting gas in a neighborhood that, you know, late at night where it's just not the right neighborhood, but you gotta get gas, and all of a sudden, somebody starts walking up and it's a little weird, and you have to use this stuff to get yourself out of a tough situation. That's the type of thing. That's just life.

There's all these types of random events, and so I'm always looking to prepare myself, physically, financially, mentally, and emotionally for any of these things. I'm very much like Patrick Bet David. I got cash in the bank. My friend Simon Black calls keep some kindling, you know, because he's keeping

money in the bank because he knows that business are going to go out of business, they're going to go bankrupt in this winter, and he's going to look in and there's going to be great opportunity, and that's when the fortunes are made. So you can almost kind of look forward to the winter a little bit because when you're strong enough. And to that point, I do. And again, I can't go into great details because the final acquisition hasn't happened yet, but I'm in the process of acquiring a pretty big software company right now.

And it's because this person's experiencing winter in their life. The founder and CEO of the company is experiencing winter in their life that I'm able to acquire a large portion of the company for pennies on the dollar. And it was an opportunity that kind of fell into my lap, and I'm taking advantage of that because I've got the means and the resource to. If I didn't, then I would be like, oh, dang, here's a great opportunity. Yeah.

Right? And going back to that, so that's his personal situation. Let me give you an example of my personal situation and a small winter that I have to go through. And sometimes it's a very, what's the word, a very, it's not chronic, but it's a very temporary. Yeah, it's an acute winter, you know. It's a weekend snowstorm.

You know, it's like Calgary. It's going to be a weekend snowstorm this weekend. You're going to be okay with it. And that's what I'm talking about is years ago, you and Matt Smith gone into my head that, hey, man, you should always carry $10,000 cash, some kind of gold, like gold coins. And that's why, you know, Van Simmons there,

got me into gold with your recommendation, and then my passport. I carried everywhere when I'm traveling domestic, even when I'm domestic. And I think this was maybe six, seven years ago, whenever Hurricane Sandy happened in New York City. So New York is getting hit by Hurricane Sandy. I'm in Manhattan on a business trip, and all of a sudden, all power is dead, all the trains stopped running. I mean, water's gushing out of the great. that's literally on the sidewalk. It's not.

Every Starbucks is closed. Like the streets are empty. The wind is blowing. There's sheet metal flying around everywhere from all the construction. And everyone's going up and down the staircase because there's no power in the hotel. The hotel's putting out the best foods that they can. Like here's some grapes, here's some nuts, here's some whatever. By day two, like, excuse me, you can see anarchy.

We're starting to set in. Sure. Because most people are not prepared for anything to go out. off their routine. No one's taking credit cards anymore because there's no power electricity. There's no ATMs working. My $10,000 had dwindled down by day three had dwindled down to $7,000 because I used three grand to get a guy who was going to drive me. So LaGuardia opened up. JFK was closed, so I couldn't fly out. LaGuardia opened up, but no one was willing to go through the tunnels because the cars would get flooded.

Oh, wow. So I was able to call up a guy. He rented a high, a big truck was able to come and get me in Manhattan and drive through the tunnel in the high truck. It was high enough where it wasn't going to take on any water to get me to LaGuardia so I can be on the first plane out. He needed that. He needed your Fit Body Boot Camp truck. He did need it.

Yeah. And so to that point, I even had my passport, so if I needed him to drive me into Toronto so I could find him in Toronto. Canada! Right? Canadian would always welcome you with open arms. As it always does. Any, you know, country that ends in I-A, like Armenia and Canada,

we're like sister countries. Sister countries, indeed. Two foreigners running a podcast. Yes. In America. But that's the crazy thing about it, man. It's like all of a sudden this little liquor store was charging $37 for a wrapped sandwich. And I said, is this right?

He goes, yeah, this is right. It's supply and demand, baby. Supplying demand. We're running out of food, right? And people were going nuts. But thank God I had cash. I had my passport so that if things got really bad, I was going to have a different outcome. And those little winters do come in life.

And whether it's economic, whether it's personal. whether it's industry specific if you're not prepared you're gonna be fucked yeah yeah so you know first of all don't get in trouble if you don't have to but understand something's gonna happen and if you are mentally prepared if you are physically prepared if you're financially prepared it's gonna be turned into summer for you yes indeed and so to that point if you like this show if this show was able to change your life please do me a favor take a screenshot share it in your stories and tag a few people on it who can benefit from it and as

always leave us a five-star review and comments on iTunes and Stitcher and have an awesome day. We'll see you.