Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Darius Ross, Business Consultant, And Motivational Speaker

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Darius is a pro arbitrager, business consultant, and motivational speaker with 30+ years of entrepreneurial experience behind him. He recently co-authored Leadership DNA, an anthology in which experts share their extensive insights into the art of leadership and how to cultivate a thriving business culture, drive meaningful change, and build high-performing teams.Learn more: https://www.dariusaross.comInfluential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-darius-ross-business-consultant-and-motivational-speaker

Welcome to Influential Entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. Influential Entrepreneurs is sponsored by Marketing Huddle, where we build an authority positioning portfolio for entrepreneurs that sells for you using podcast and TV interviews and guaranteed. press coverage. For more information, go to Mike Saunders 360.com. Today we have with us Darius Ross, who's a business consultant, motivational speaker, and author. Darius, welcome to the program. Good afternoon. Mr. Sanders, how are you? Hey, doing awesome. I'm excited to talk with you. I know you've got a book and you talk about mindset and dealing with adversity. And before we dive into those topics, give us a little bit of your story and background and how did you come to these, the realization that these topics

need to be addressed? I actually came from an interesting background on the south side of Chicago, and from that experience, the whole mindset of surviving in what was the considered in 1980s when gang violence and the various gang organizations were flourishing, and just surviving that and going to a seminary at the time, clearly south, and just realizing that you have to have a pretty strong constitution to maintain and sustain within those environments. Because within probably a seven-year time period, I lost about 200 friends for gang violence. Wow. Boy, yeah.

I mean, how do you push through that without feeling like the waves just crush you? One of the biggest things was just dealing with finding out and discovering you have PTSD. It's not just soldiers. It's also in the inner city where inner city young people. a lot of reasons why they're acting out is based upon what they're experiencing. They've seen so much blood and violence, then they begin to act out what they've seen. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.

You know, I tell you, sometimes it is also just that glimmer of hope that you bring to someone and help them realize that there is hope. So talk a little bit about how you work with people on helping them navigate adversity. One of the number one things is just realizing where you are. You know, you have to realize where you are and what you've been through. And so often people hide behind the mystique. They call it imposter syndrome, whatever you would like to call it, take it until you make it. But a lot of times you spend so much time hiding behind who you want to be, the clothes, the allure of the fashion and the styling and so forth and striving for a certain position, that you lose sight of who you are and what you're going through.

And so all of a sudden this mental issue comes into the mental breakdown. because you've gone through so much to get there, but you miss out on what cause you want to go that far because you neglected your mental health. Yeah. Well, where do you start when you're talking with someone that you know that they've neglected that mental side of things? Where do you start without almost offending them to say it's a mental aspect?

One of the things that I've done is that I found out, not the coach for everyone and I was not the speaker for everyone. So sometimes I have to say the folks right up to bat, my language is going to get a little vulgar and I'm going to get a little intense because I say to you, stop BSing yourself. You've been the same place I've been in a lot of different ways. Now tell me your story. Let's get past all the titles you have, your background, and so forth. What's your story? Did you have a father in the house? Was there a drug addiction? Was there alcohol abuse? Was there violence? Tell me your story. I don't want to hear about your accolades, you know, get past your BS. That's a time.

keeps. And almost it sounds like you are saying you help them come to the realization themselves. Is that accurate? Absolutely. You know, it's that acknowledgement of accountability. Yeah. You know, and you know, you hear this so many times in self-help and personal development, but it's like when you stop believing other people and go, I am here where I'm at because of me decisions I've made, that begins the path in the right direction. Have you found that as well? I go even a step further. I tell them around the bad, you're your own worst enemy, because sometimes the things that

have happened to you, happening before you even got on this planet, it may be an generational curse. People want to say that I say that's a bad word, but there's sometimes things in your generation of DNA that have happened. And then when you coupled that with the decisions that you make, now you have the perfect recipe for a nightmare. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, that's a good, that's a really good point. And, and, you know, the old saying, you don't know what you don't know really seems to come into effect there because these people that are dealing with this, it might be in the past, they might not really correlate it.

But then once you from an outside perspective see it, bring it to their attention, now all of a sudden it's known and they can start working toward that. Oh, absolutely. Because one of the biggest things is basically getting. into a position where I asked questions about who and what was in your background. You know, what uncle did this, what aunt did this, how was grandpa, how was grandma? Give me some of those insightful stories as to what happened, what you heard over the kitchen table. What was being whispered. Yeah, they might not even, I mean, they might just be talking, telling a story, not even related to, ooh, this is an issue or an opportunity. This is something that is leading to something else, but you're listening through ears that are fine-tuned to watch for that, right?

Correct, because I found myself being in the same places. Like, there are certain things that you hear in your own story growing up as a little kid, and you're like, well, that was odd. He kept falling down the stairs, but he was falling down the stairs because they had alcohol abuse. But you didn't correlate to that when you were a kid. So what is it that you think is the reason why most individuals don't understand how to seize opportunities or blessings, meaning they might see it, but they're going in 100 miles an hour in 100 different directions. They might not even be aware that it's an opportunity.

Primarily because you're tripping over your own blessings. Most people have faith. And in that faith, sometimes they say faith is a must-be-see. So some opportunities are hidden. And I always say look up at the opportunity. Look up and see where you are. I give a good example that is a short story. I was a kid going to Bogan High School on the Southwest Side.

And I didn't want to go to the high school. My dad had got laid out from the job. So at the end of the day, I ended up at Bogan High School. And the council one day said to me, you know what? Why don't you come into this office? So he lays a big bag of money on the counter and he says, okay, this is the money they're giving you to go to school here for a day. They were desegregated, basically. So we were the first series of black students going there.

So all of a sudden he says, you want a job? And I'm thinking, I don't want to work at McDonald's. He says, are you actually doing a job? I'm like, certainly. So I ended up for Chicago. Now, had I turned down an opportunity thinking it was going to be a McDonald's, I would have never gotten to corporate America. But it was just interesting how it happened.

I hated to go to the school, but this school transition need to be able to go to where it was because I was so privileged and going to quickly, I'm thinking quickly it'd be all the end all. But it was not. There was another opportunity, but I hated it. But I didn't visualize that there would be another opportunity that would be better going along the way. You know, it's almost like one door of opportunity. opens so that another door of opportunity can open and you can only see the first door in front of you.

Correct. And it's like with stumbling over the essentials, it's like you don't really look at basically the moments when things change in your life. I mean, when we look at things like Home Depot, Home Depot got started because the guys there, blanks and marks, basically got tired of dealing with true value and how they were operating.

You know, Microsoft got started because Bill Gates saw what IBM had as a piece of software that was no good to them. Sometimes opportunity comes from the things that you look up and you don't see that it's a piece of chewing gum. That chewing gum might be your meal, but there's somebody else that's like a piece of chewing gum. Yeah. So how do you take advantage of opportunities

in without feeling overwhelmed? Meaning if you start looking, you could see opportunities all around you, you could potentially even interpret many things as an opportunity, which might not be an opportunity itself, and you could feel overwhelmed. So you could also take what you're talking about here, seizing opportunities to the extreme and be running around chasing your tail. So how do you assess? You evaluate your tool set. What do I really have to offer?

and if I don't have it, do I have the leadership capacity to bring people in the mix that can help make this possible? Sometimes that's what one of the greatest things about entrepreneurship is, is that you're getting somebody else to work for you because most of the time, most entrepreneurs do you really don't want to work hard? That's why you need to corporate America. So how can you turn on, take your tool set, and need a leadership? Do you have a certain skill set that maybe you're a welder, but you don't know how to get a welding shop? So is there somebody out there that has a full 1K or some money they want to put inside to help you? you open your 401 cage, I mean, your welding shop. So sometimes it's just that.

Looking at your tool set of what you have in your box of your background and how you can actually optimize what you have, sometimes we overlook the basics and you spend so much time as you said looking for everything else and we shouldn't be looking after. Yeah, that's a really good point. And also, I know that this might sound obvious, but sometimes it's just practice and taking advantage of something or noticing something and going, ooh, this made me feel. feel, you know, overwhelmed. So sometimes it's just getting your footing by experience. Correct. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about your book that you're working on TPS.

It's called mastering the TPS blueprint, transforming trauma into triumph. And what I'm dealing with there, the TPS symbols, right? Timing, it's at a particular point to take advantage of time. And synchronicity is occurring at the same time. where things just line up and ultimately seeking precision, meaning the exact accuracy of when you can actually precisely hit something right on target. So I'm talking about the blueprint of how often we miss out an opportunity because we don't look at timing, synchronicity, and precision. And a lot of it has to do with consistency. How do you consistently keep on looking at those three acronisms and find your way and find your path?

Because it comes down to just that. even when we look at something as simple as war, when we look at what happened in the militaries in World War II, if there had not been a situation of North Africa and the western front of the Soviet Union, the entire war would be different now. But they got bogged down in the snow and they got bogged down the sand. So it changed things.

That was a TPS and real practicality. So with these three pillars, I'll call them, timing, synchronization, precision. Is that the order that you teach that they should go in or are they just three topics that are really, really important? No, exactly that order. You have to, it's your timing and you have to look at being in sync. You have to be aligned.

That's the most important thing. The timing is the moment. And then ultimately speaking, that precision is the ability to operate a certain way. Like, for example, now there will be more millionaires made, billionaires, and they will ultimately be a trillionaire made over the next four or five years in this political environment. So people aren't really looking at how things are going haywire. But in that haywireness, it's like, do you see the opportunity of that TPS working to your advantage? You know, when things are bad, somebody's still making money regardless.

I wonder if you would find that TPS applies to personal affairs more frequently than business, or is it pretty even? It's both. Even in dating. I have another auxiliary book that's coming out later on with people. dating over 50. And it's the same thing. If you're in a situation, I said this kind of funny, I did an excerpt about after COVID. I said, gentlemen, you're going to find there going to be more women that are going to be looking at you after COVID. Sure enough it was because, guess what, they've been tied up for three or four years. So therefore, you're looking pretty good right about now.

You look like a morsel. Okay. So it is the same thing. It's like you have to look at, even in personal, it's the same thing. If you're off, everything is off. If you're right, it's there. I mean, we can look at something as simple as this whole political environment. It took four times to become president. He made it happen. But again, it was based upon the timing and precision and synchronicity. He did not stop until things lined up.

You know, when I see precision in that order, it makes me think of the saying how you do anything is how you do everything. And you might have the right timing and synchronization. but if you don't execute it precisely, you've blown all of the work in recognizing the timing and synchronization. So talk a little bit about that proper precision. Okay, I'll use it in the book. There's a piece of art that I'm using like a sniper, and it's a bad antidote, but I use the sniper as an example in the scope. And in the scope it says goals. Okay, so as a result, if you are precise, you are there at the exact time,

You are aimed, you are waiting, and you are completely organized with all of your toolbox and everything in place. Boom, there it is. But if one thing is off, one moment that it's supposed to be 1159 and you're there at 12-1-1, done. You missed it. So sometimes you have to be just that way. You have to look at everything as it has to be on point. You cannot be out, well, you know, traffic is there. No, no, no.

You have to plan for traffic. You have to plan for everything. You know, it makes me think, too, one of my daughters is an engineer and she was doing coding work. And I remember when she was in grad school watching some of the assignments she was doing and you would just look at this screen of gobbly gook. And, you know, she would stare at it for, you know, working at this one thing and find the problem of there was one, you know, like a period or a bracket that was off. and finding that and fixing that makes everything work. And it's that precision is that knowing what needs to be done, but just making sure that all the eyes are dotted,

all the T's are crossed. And even in your inner personal communications, if you're sending out an email and say, okay, here's the link to whatever the case is. Check that link first. Just make sure that all of the things you're doing is precise because it really is a reflection on you personally and professionally. Have you found that as well?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I look at it as something people can kind of focus their attention on. If you look at the implosion of buildings when they're actually taking buildings now and after demo work, if you, everything is calculated to the T when they do it, right? Explosive experts. But if one of those explosive devices is off one fraction, the building just stands there. And you've seen it on TV sometimes the building is still standing is like, wait a minute, we got it right, but you didn't. You're off a fraction. And that's how intense it has to be.

You cannot do it anything differently. And I know from a professional basis, if I miss a mark, I can't come back to the client and say, well, you know, I gave you perfect advice. I go, did you follow it exactly as I said? You go, well, not exactly. Well, there's a problem. You can follow it exactly. And the interesting revelation I would also submit is it doesn't have to be a massive offset in precision. It could be just that small, tiny bit.

And I've heard the example, and you probably have as well, like if an airplane. is just off course by just 1%, one percent, one-tenth of 1% over the course of, you know, hours and hours of flying, you're going to arrive in a whole different city. So it's not like a 90-degree, you know, deviation. It's small, tiny deviations that really add up. Absolutely. I agree with it. That's one of the reason why I wrote the book because so often in my own life it amounted to just

that, you know, it could be something as simple as going to be, I mean, I've had a funny thing, right? going to the gas station once in a part of time. And not having, you know, when you're financially just starting out, you don't have the right amount of money. And this one time I went there, right, went to all three gas pumps, stick the card in and then nothing happened. Got to the fourth one for whatever reason. Again, it's a blessing God, what if you want to call it,

put the gas card in there was no money on the card, and the pump worked. But again, off one fraction, I could have turned around and went around the back and wouldn't work. But that's how you meet sometimes things are. Yeah. And probably another word that starts with P, you know, like I'm looking at precision, but persistence and perseverance. You know, once you have that timing down and the precision down, it's not just one and done. It is just keep on, keeping on, and keep plugging away. That ties back into your point earlier you made about faith.

Oh, yeah. You have to be prayerful and basically focused on that precision and the persistency. Even to this thing of being dogmatic. I find you have to be almost dogmatic as an entrepreneur to achieve your goals. Sometimes people say that you're crazy, you're idiotic. This is insane. But you're not. But here's what I say to counter that point. Sometimes you have to know in all that dogmatics when you yourself are off and you have to make adjustments.

So that's the thing about entrepreneurs also. Some of them are so dogmatic, they don't realize they're failing. So the thing that I counter to that is know when you're failing. then understand that that dog-nattiness has to change to something else. Yep, exactly. Well, I tell you what, Darius has been really great chatting with you here. If someone is interested in learning more about your work, what you do and picking up a copy of your book,

what's the best way that they can do that? They can reach me through Darius A-R-R-R-A-R-S-A-R-S-A-R-S dot com. And then there is another site that's coming up now, which is darius writes.com. And also they can get all the books and all the book platforms from Barnes & Noble to Amazon and so forth. Excellent. Well, Darius, thank you so much for coming on today. It was a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Sanders. I appreciate it. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, Visit www. www. Influential EntrepreneursRadio.com.