Digital Social Hour - Keala Kanae Built a $100M Company Lost Everything | Digital Social Hour #133

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

On today's episode of the Digital Social Hour, we sit down with Keala Kanae and discuss his battles with anxiety and depression, scaling his company to over $100M in revenue and how he turned his life... around. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: Jenna@DigitalSocialHour.com APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh AG1: https://www.drinkAG1.com/DSH Hostage Tape: https://hostagetape.com/DSH LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I call the CFO on the phone and I'm like he's saying that you took about two hundred thousand dollars of cash out of his account put it in the company account so he's like oh yeah I just had to put some cash in there you know just to keep the book to hit payroll for the month please help me understand how the we just did 1.8 million dollars last month and we got a borrowed 200 grand from a founder have a hard time taking an entrepreneur seriously unless they've been through their first war like if they haven't been through war they're not battle tested yet and when everything is good and easy and the markets are all up everything everybody's winning
Starting point is 00:00:34 it's easy to feel like you got the Midas touch right but when it all comes crashing down um how do you rise up out of the ashes that's the real entrepreneur welcome back to the digital social hour i'm your host Sean Kelly. I'm here with my co-host, Wayne Lewis. What up, what up? And our guest today, K. Ala Kanai. Hey, hey. How's it going, man? Pretty good. Nice little Las Vegas day. Yeah. You know, we're enjoying this mid-June-ish, and we're still not, you know, hotter than the devil's ass crack. Yeah, I wonder why that is. Have we hit a hunter yet? No, not yet. That's a record. Yeah. I'm sitting outside on the deck every morning having a cigar, just enjoying these last few days that you can do that it's so nice outside it has been nice summers here are brutal so what'd you pull up in today
Starting point is 00:01:32 where'd you drive here we going there yeah i uh i took my fiance's cullinan yep wow so your fiance be balling too something like that okay i gotta buy her some some nice stuff too you know that's big that's more than big that's big you feel that when i pull up they definitely ain't no damn escalate yeah well so i have a lambo right that's like that's like my 2022 hurrican evo oh okay so i wanted to i wanted to have something i mean it's my daily yeah but so then we had she had a range the hurricane is daily yeah the hurricanes are daily wow but she had a range and like i really wanted a cullinan so it took a long time to convince her that cullinan's amazing then i got her in the car and then she loved it and then i'm
Starting point is 00:02:19 like babe i just really feel like i have to get this for you and so now i have to borrow her car when i want to take the Cullinan. I like Cullinans. They're sexy. Let's dive into how you made all this money. So where did you get started and walk me through it? Yeah, I started out in my industry now. 2012, I got into affiliate marketing.
Starting point is 00:02:44 By within about seven or eight months or so, I had quit my job. I was working in a coffee shop at the time for like minimum wage basically in Hawaii so quit the job had my first five-figure month that was April 2013 and then kind of the rest is history and over the next couple of years made my first million as an affiliate marketer and then most of the time I was hit up like most conversations I was having at the time where people asking me like to show them what I was doing and how I was doing it and so I had like released some smaller courses on like Facebook advertising copywriting email marketing things like this and eventually that kind of just grew into a coaching business which is what it is now nice so right now we sell
Starting point is 00:03:24 training on affiliate marketing to like very very beginner level people people that are just really just just starting to get their feet wet right in the industry and you've scaled out and done over 100 million dollars in revenue yeah we've done 100 million dollars in the coaching business um two millionaires back to back i know right yeah so that's since 20 we launched in november of 2016 and uh we scaled that up pretty quickly i wouldn't recommend this to anybody but we got that scaled up to a million a month within four months of launching yeah how did you do that what's what's that is it a secret or paid ads i wouldn't say it's a secret i think it's just a matter of like well one you gotta
Starting point is 00:04:03 consider that i cut my teeth at like the hardest part that a business deals with right so as an affiliate marketer i'm generating customers for somebody else's offers right whatever their products or services are and then i get paid a commission and that's where most businesses struggle is in the customer acquisition component of the business so because i knew that once we had our own products to roll out i knew how to get customers much better than I knew how to fulfill for customers, quite honestly. And so for me, it was just a matter of doing the numbers. We just knew the numbers really well. So I knew exactly what I can afford to pay on customer acquisition. And I know when I'm going to get a return on that, like when I'm
Starting point is 00:04:41 going to get liquid on that. And so we just start to scale up the advertising, you know, basically, basically as quickly as we could. So we got to about a $30,000 a day of ad spend within about four months. That's crazy. What is that a month? That's a million a month, right?
Starting point is 00:04:56 We're spending a million a month on ads. Shout out to today's sponsor. Hello, fresh America's number one meal kit. They do all the shopping and meal planning for you. Ingredients arrive at your doorstep pre-portioned, ready to cook, along with step-by-step recipe cards that are pictured. I used to suck at cooking, but HelloFresh makes it very easy to cook.
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Starting point is 00:05:55 Let me know what you guys order in the comments below. Can't wait to see it. Peace by the end of Actually that didn't take four months. So we got to a million a month in ad spend i think may or june of 2017. wow yeah so and we were paying at the time we were paying a 500 acquisition for a 99 buyer so we're paying 500 to get somebody to spend 99 bucks with us but we knew on the back end within about about 60 to 90 days, on average, we were getting about 1000 to 1500. Wow, in return, right? So yeah, we scaled it up pretty quick. Now, in hindsight, I was paying too much on customer acquisition, because being an affiliate marketer, I had never really taken into account like, the whole fulfillment costs, but all these other things, right? It was just literally dollar in dollar out out because i don't have any fulfillment expenses and as an affiliate but as the team started to grow and um fulfillment costs started
Starting point is 00:06:49 to grow and all these sorts of things then you know that was no longer really like sustainable right um long term so what was your roi the first month that you uh spent a million on advertisers that first month we did a million on at all a million on ads yeah so when you your first month of spending a million on ads what was your ROI that that first month well he lost money well no no not yet about he's 2018 yeah man you yeah you looked up some stuff yeah 2018 we started like losing money but um 2017 we were spending a million dollars on ads doing about 1.8 to maybe 2 million dollars a month high end um so again really not taking into account all the other expenses in the business 2017 was like really profitable for us i want to say we did about 19 we did just shy of 20 million
Starting point is 00:07:40 dollars 2017 i'm trying to recall all the numbers in my head and i think profit that year was like somewhere around five million dollars that's a lot not too bad not bad that's not bad i mean the months it just i mean spend a million dollars a month i mean he's in on average he said he was you know kind of breaking yeah solid five to eight hundred so you're kind of breaking even certain months too right later on yeah later on we started to break even as like the company got more bloated yeah and there was more overhead then so how did you no longer that cpa yeah uh was gonna work for us yeah how did you pivot in 2018 when the returns started getting lower so this is an interesting story man this is like the dark side of uh entrepreneurship i love it a lot of people don't want to talk about this ago okay so November of 2017 so October of
Starting point is 00:08:30 2017 we had run a promotion that month so that was our first three million dollar month in revenue November of 2017 I'm looking at the bank accounts and I'm like how is cash sliding backwards over these last couple of months and especially when we just had the biggest month that we had in terms of uh revenue so i reach out to the cfo and i'm like hey you need to like help me understand how this cash is sliding backwards because you're showing me these profits on all these on your presentations every week but it's not i'm not seeing cash in bank account grow um the cfo and by the way that's using the term CFO. Oh my God, I have some funny stories that I've probably never shared publicly. But let's just say that that title was being used loosely
Starting point is 00:09:12 on this person. And my business partner at the time had brought him in because for whatever reason, he really liked the guy. So he, having a background in finance and me not, really, he just started kind of like making excuses, talking over my head, putting together PowerPoint presentations and kind of showing stuff. And I'm like, that all is cool, bro, but I'm just looking at cash in the bank. Like, I just want to know where the cash is going. He began to kind of hide behind my business partner at the time, which made it hard for me because we were kind of sharing the CEO role in the organization. So, you know, when two people are in charge, really nobody's in charge.
Starting point is 00:09:52 So he began to hide behind my business partner. I didn't really have a way to nail him down as a result of that. So what I started doing is like negotiating the CEO contract for myself going into 2018. So by March of 2018, I had secured my contract as CEO. And immediately the first thing that I did was start going to that guy and trying to find out what was happening with the finances in the business. What ends up happening is I get on a call. This is early April of 2018. I get on a call with my partner at the time and he goes, Hey, so, so-and-so the CFO, uh, I think he took like $200,000 out of my bank account and put it in the company account. I'm like, what, why would he do that? I didn't know anything
Starting point is 00:10:35 about that. Nobody told me about this. And he's like, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. So I call the CFO. I'm on zoom with my partner. I call the CFO on the phone and I'm like, yo, so-and-so, uh, I'm on with my partner. And, uh, he's saying that you took about $200,000 of cash out of his account, put it in the company account. Cause he had access to all our bank accounts. He also had like power of attorney. I mean, we're scaling up really, really quickly. Right. So there's a lot of loose ends in the business. So he's like, Oh yeah yeah i just had to put some cash in there you know just to keep the book to hit payroll for the month and i'm like so please help me understand how the we just did 1.8 million dollars last month and we gotta borrow 200 grand from a founder
Starting point is 00:11:20 i'm like yelling at this dude pause and he says this is hilarious kiala it's not my job to make sure the company is profitable that's the cfo i'm like bro google your title dude that's like that is exactly your job that's only that's your only job actually right uh so i hang up with him and i'm looking at my partner i'm like i don't know what happened but i'm gonna get to a bottom to the bottom of it I called my HR manager at the time and I said hey I gotta fire this guy the only question is when um and how soon and so we began formulating a plan to like get him out um that conversation so as as I take as I rip him out of the business and everything and then I had to go in so about a week later i fire him i finally get better optics into the finances now because in the meantime i
Starting point is 00:12:10 brought on another team i'd already been kind of talking to to start auditing the books yeah when they came in and started auditing things i got better look at the finances so i had to go in fire this dude and then go to my office a few days later, about a week later, and I had to let go of 16 people in the office. Then I had to have a meeting in the office with everybody gathered around and reassure them that everything was going to be okay after they just watched 16 of their friends walk out, some of them in tears. So I had to tell them that everything was going to be okay. And then around that time, i had had a conversation with my business partner and i had basically said to him that like listen this this this partnership's no longer fair and equitable you know i mean you're
Starting point is 00:12:56 on vacation eight months of the year out of the year i'm on the ground uh you know i so come to find out in that process too from the auditing, we know there was no stealing. So the guy was just so incompetent. He was just writing. I mean, I guess he thought his job was to just sign the front of checks. Cause he was just handing out checks, giving away the money in all the different departments. He was just grossly overspending everywhere. Oh, so, uh, and, and, uh, we were overpaying,
Starting point is 00:13:23 like we couldn't afford the CPA that we had originally gotten used to, the $500 for $100 buyer, but we were still at around those numbers. But with the excess expenses in the business with all the overhead now, that was no longer a profitable move. You were overspending, overcompensating. But what happened is, so check this out.
Starting point is 00:13:40 So the auditing team goes in, they start trying to uncover whether there was any malicious activity. There wasn't. But they found that my name was the guarantor on all of our merchant accounts. So in other words, like I'm personally guaranteeing the business. So if anything goes sideways, they can the banks can all come after me. And then on top of that, they found documents showing that there was a million dollars loan taken out in my name by the CFO from three different lenders. So I had a $500,000 loan and two $250,000 loans that I was unaware of at the time because he had power of attorney.
Starting point is 00:14:15 So he was able to sign off on that stuff. So he was just basically trying to cover up his mistakes as far as we can tell. You would think he would have calculated at some point. I'm like, OK, I ought to stop doing this. This is where I'm messing up. tell yeah you would think he would have calculated at some point I'm like okay I gotta stop doing this that's where I'm messing up well you would think your money you would probably do that you know versus getting the loans like bro you messed up that month so so the operator that he had brought that guy had referred us the operator at the time who was the second in command behind me and when i had gone to that guy and finally said like yo i gotta let this guy go then he confesses that that cfo had previously bankrupted another business that he
Starting point is 00:14:52 had worked inside of and nobody had ever bothered to tell us that right so of course he left that out of his resume and then the guy that he referred over obviously wasn't going to tell us hey by the way the guy that just referred me into your company bankrupted the last company I was working with. So yeah, it was just, he was just in over his head, but that starts the conversation between my business partner and I have like, listen, I got this million dollar loan. So I got, I have all I'm the financial, I'm the guarantor on every financial risk that we have right now. I'm on the ground eight months out of the year that you're on vacation doing everything. When you come in for your four months, you just kind of cause chaos and pandemonium. And then I got to clean it up when you leave. Right. So this is no longer fair
Starting point is 00:15:33 and equitable. So I need to have 85 percent of the shares of the company. So because he was an overseas partner, 85. So I was like, I need to have 50 percent. So I was like, I need to have 85 percent shares of the company so that i can try to re you know get a consolidation loan on this and pair a fair pay a fair interest rate because the average interest rate between those three loans is about 18 so you're talking about like a credit card now basically right and then to make matters worse the merchants at that time they had a hold back on our accounts um because we're considered high risk i mean there's no credit card i mean there's no id at the time
Starting point is 00:16:09 of purchase and all this it's a digital product blah blah blah so they they had a rolling reserve on here so they would close the percentage of your phone funds up and release them every 30 or 40 60 days or whatever yeah every every 90 days so what happened is we had about $1.6 million held in reserves, but now I couldn't get it because the CFO, uh, who, when he took out the loan, he signed the reserves over as the collateral. So in other words, instead of him getting the money out of the merchants, he took a loan against the money in the merchants. And so to put it differently, I borrowed a million dollars from myself at 18% interest. And he blew it. And he blew it.
Starting point is 00:16:51 He blew it. So he was at even. Exactly. But technically, you didn't have to pay that million dollars back. It was already paid. It was just locked up. It was locked up. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:17:00 So we had to start paying. I had to keep paying on the notes while we tried to get the money to be released from the merchants. And then as we were releasing the money from the merchants, we were using that to pay down the loans because I couldn't take the money out without paying down the loans. Make sense? Yeah. Yeah. So where were you mentally during all this? Were you super depressed or were you just fighting through it?
Starting point is 00:17:21 He **** four people. What do you mean? That's why he's here. So what happened that night? or were you just fighting through it? He four people. You know what I mean, bro? That's why he's here. So what happened that night? Where were you on April 30th, 2017? You probably wanted to come back on. So the 16 people, were they all in cahoots
Starting point is 00:17:38 or were they one, like, why fire 60 people? Yeah, because they were just excess overhead. I got you, I got you. Because I was trying to turn the company around. I got you. So then, so here's even more of the story. A lot of this stuff I've never said publicly, so we'll see how this goes. But so me and the business partner, I have the meeting with him and I tell him, so listen, I need 85% of the company.
Starting point is 00:18:00 The question is not if we get there. The question is only how we get there. Right. That's it. He obviously didn't like that so then we started to talk about like the negotiations to break up blah blah blah blah eventually he got to a point where he was like if you're gonna do that then you know you need to buy me out completely I don't want to be a minority shareholder so then it became which one of us was going to buy the other one out that that whole thing well as that information gets out that me and the co-founder are having fallout that i had a dev team at the time that was eight developers
Starting point is 00:18:29 one project manager who was project management slash qa because we were also trying to build our own software at the time uh and a cto so i had about 130 000 a month of burn rate on this like software business the cto finds out that we're having a problem and he like resigns doesn't even give me the two weeks he gives me like eight days whatever the number was and i was like bro why are you gonna resign he's like i've been here i've been through this kind of stuff before with founders i don't want to be here for what's gonna happen next i'm out so i then had 130 000 of of burn on the software business with nobody to run that business. So all the developers now have no boss.
Starting point is 00:19:11 Wow. Right. So then I got to figure out what they have their hands on that we still need in order for us to survive and how to basically chop them out without them cutting, chopping our legs out from under us because they have access to all the servers and everything that you know we're running the business how was those nights and you go home and lay in a bed that's why i asked like where were you like how was those nights going home like that's just a lot that is uh and there's my my op my ceo at the time uh i didn't know he was in cahoots with my business partner at the time so he was feeding my business partner all the information about like how i was maneuvering on my side of the equation so i was always wondering like how did he know that i was
Starting point is 00:19:56 gonna do that how do you know i was at the gym so so then i talked to one of my other buddies that was working with me in the business uh the director of media at the time and he said well why don't you like there's only so many people that are gonna be talking to that guy why don't you just feed everybody a different lie and see which one comes back yeah so that's what i did and that's how i found out that my coo was stabbing me in the back wow yeah so you fired him he resigned because my partner had already given him a position in another entity that he was spitting up. Yeah. So at this point, the business is technically imploding on you.
Starting point is 00:20:31 Yeah. Right. So now what? Now, now. So now what's the strategy now? So over the next few months, it was a lot of like cutting spend and cutting like wasted overhead I got rid of the office that we have you know like a 15,000 or 12,000 square foot office was costing us I don't know 15,000 something a month or something like this got rid of that cut a lot of heads started looking at our ad spend started cutting down the ad spend quite a bit to like bring down the cost per acquisition so we bring in less
Starting point is 00:21:02 customers but we did be more profitable for us that whole thing it takes about three months or so for me to turn that thing back around and get us back into the black where we're like profitable again yeah now remember that's not bad though it's not too bad it gets better though yeah so then remember the dev team has no oversight right now yeah at some point they decided to change servers on us so they migrate everything from one set of servers to another set of servers for whatever reason in that migration they missed one of the ips that was connected to our email marketing so none of our emails were delivering but we didn't know this all of a sudden our customer acquisition starts dropping just get the thing turned around and all of a sudden customer acquisition starts dropping the conversion rates in our funnel start dropping tremendously. It takes us three weeks to identify what happened.
Starting point is 00:21:47 We figure out what happened. That mistake costs another $600,000 in lost revenue. Just as I get us back to the black, the very next month, back to the red again. Yeah. And in a way, we had other businesses on the side my partner had um basically removed me from the payment structure in another business so he took about ten thousand dollars a month out of my pocket because he had he we were an affiliate for an offer that was sending us checks in the mail so he had the checks redirected to him and so that took 10k a month out of my
Starting point is 00:22:23 pocket then uh we were consulting with another company that was doing about a half a million a month at this time quite profitably he got on with them and kind of convinced them that i was like some evil madman that was trying to force him out of the company so they turned their backs on me and cut me out of that business also not quite legally but it wasn't worth my time at the time to like fight that battle right like you only fight a war on so many fronts absolutely so um the bright side of that is that because all of those challenges were happening in the company it was making the buyout uh it was drowning the value of the business so it was making the buyout of my partner cheaper and cheaper essentially right um he had a very unrealistic initially you know unrealistic expectation of what he thought that
Starting point is 00:23:11 the value was of the business versus what we ran it through three different companies for them to come with the value of the business and let's just say they were light years apart right so by us going through all those challenges and this thing dragging out his number that he's asking for keeps coming down and then by december of that year we finally get he sends over a contract an agreement that's a bit more feasible and we are we have two weeks of cash left in the business wow so i end up signing the agreement i take all the money that I have left to my name and give him the initial payment on that buyout agreement with the additional payment being due six months later and I ran a promo at the end of December of that year that brought in 2.2 million dollars of cash wow by January so it got us flush again got us back into the black. And then I just started
Starting point is 00:24:05 basically 2019. I spent that whole year cutting all I went from 60 plus person team ish to a 12 person team in 2019. I got rid of the software company, I got rid of everything that was not the core of the business. And we just got my my mantra to the team was like, we got to get back to basics. So we're going to keep the main thing, the main thing. So I went down to a 12 person team. We got focused on SOPs and building a stronger foundation, you know, building out hiring processes, getting clear on the direction of the business, revisiting all the finances, what can we afford to pay per customer, all these things. And over the course of 2019, so 2019, we went from 21 million in 2018, we afford to pay per customer, all these things. And over the course of twenty nine.
Starting point is 00:24:48 So twenty nineteen, we went from twenty one million in twenty eighteen. We went to ten million in twenty nineteen and then seven million in twenty twenty as a result of me just continuing to cut back and try to stay focused on keeping the main thing, the main thing since then. So it took us a couple of years to turn that thing around after it was all most people gave up for sure. Most people. That's a crazy story. And that happened within six months, a six month span. All that. Yeah. turn that thing around after it was all most people would have done gave up for sure most people that's a crazy story and it happened within six months a six-month span all that yeah that's insane geez so you got major major trust issues with business partners now no man i did a lot of
Starting point is 00:25:15 work on that stuff yeah because i'm not gonna i don't want to let the world change me yeah you just change the people that's in it well that you're around well yeah a lot of it like don't get me wrong there's a ton of stress i mean like i had to drink every night to go to bed like like now only you were supposed to know this was vodka so it's not um yeah i mean it was stressful but basically at the time what i was doing was like a lot of thankfully i've done a lot of personal development work i've done a lot of mindset work i had a coach um that was working with me on that stuff during that time and so a lot of what I was doing was just trying to make was just trying to balance my perspectives on everything that was happening and see all the blessings and the curses
Starting point is 00:25:58 that were taking place like seeing the benefits to the drawbacks that I was experiencing you know what I mean because Because everything in the universe is really both. There's nothing that's there's for every benefit, there's an equal drawback for every drawback. There's an equal benefit because everything in the universe is based on equanimity. But because we have perception, we perceive more negative than positive or more positive than negative in our human perception, which is really just imbalanced perspectives of the mind. So like if we say something is positive, which is really just imbalanced perspectives of the mind. So like if we say something is positive,
Starting point is 00:26:27 that's really just we're conscious of the benefits, unconscious of the drawbacks. If we label something negative, we're conscious of the drawbacks, unconscious of the benefits. But to bring the mind back into balance is to make the unconscious conscious and see both. And that both are happening at the same time.
Starting point is 00:26:43 So a lot of what I was doing was like, all the emotional charges that I had about my partner. I would sit with my coach and I would list like all my judgments of him. Like, so let's say I was perceiving him as being selfish. Then I want to look at my life. OK, where in my life have I been selfish? And I want to own all the traits so that I can see that I'm not better than him or greater than him. He's not less than he's not greater than but that you know I'm the everything that I'm judging is also what I am Wow that's a crazy way to look at it well yeah that's because
Starting point is 00:27:18 he saw himself projecting on others and then he realized oh what am I doing in my life that's causing me to think that way right well yeah so what we judge about others is really what we disown about ourselves he's he stopped being a victim and started to be uh understand that he was a participant yeah yeah so he removed himself from my oh this happened to me to where it's like how did i miss these things and how how what was my involvement in in all this right because technically you know the birds of a feather is a true thing you know so you basically kind of hang around mere images of yourself right or where you lack right all right the other part of it like to your point about like having trust issues is some of the stuff that i've learned over the years is like whatever we judge we attract creator become so if i were to go through that
Starting point is 00:28:06 whole experience and at the end of it be judging that it was negative that it was bad that you know partnerships are evil that you know nobody can be trusted if I were to live with those judgments I'm gonna attract more of those experiences into my life to wake me up to that illusion right right. Right. So in other words, when we don't learn the lesson that's to be learned, we repeat the lesson over and over and over again until we learn it. And I don't want to live my life learning the same lessons over and over and over again. I want to evolve to new lessons, right? Because as we evolve to new challenges, that's basically what evolution is. And so I want it to be able to walk away from that experience without having all of the additional baggage.
Starting point is 00:28:48 I'm not going to say that that was easy. I mean, initially I was like, I don't know if I'll ever have a partnership again. But today I have six. Nice. You know, all profitable. Right. So I was able to walk away with that without it becoming baggage that I carried into my future. Plus, what it did, too, on a positive note was one keeps you on your toes to you start to pay attention to signs.
Starting point is 00:29:12 You kind of know something's not right, you know, versus like allowing the ship to sink and then underwater. Like who who sunk the ship? Kind of, you know, you kind of see it before it's coming in a sense. And you're able to read people better. So your partners are actually probably way better than right your last ones my partnership agreements are a lot stronger as a result of that like what i learned about like we didn't have to go back and forth in lawsuits we could have had other things in our operating agreement that would have prevented that so my partnerships are based on like stronger contracts that prevent a lot of that drama and And yes, you know, picking better characters to work with all of those things being. And really, at the end of the day, I would say as challenging as that experience was, if I had it all to do over again, I would want it to play out exactly the way that it played out.
Starting point is 00:30:00 Like I'm grateful for exactly how it happened. I mean, people go to school for years to learn what i learned over the course of you know an eight month catastrophe so that was my master's degree in business i would say that's the true triumph of a definition of an entrepreneur exactly what he just broke down and experienced is what entrepreneurship is it's adapting it's learning right it's pivoting also. And then it's maneuvering through the bullshit. You've got to re-strategize, re-business the business model.
Starting point is 00:30:32 You have to change that. You have to. Entrepreneurship is such an intricate thing when it comes to the person who's actually the actual entrepreneur. And most people only see the Ferraris and the Lambs and the Cullinans but they don't actually see like yeah it's what I had to go through they see the fantasy side of it yeah the dark side of it that's what that's all the selling entrepreneurship is a lot dark this is not more dark days in there are there's a balance people see the glamour but there's that's yeah and that's all that she's sleepless nights with there a lot
Starting point is 00:31:02 of times these days to be honest like you know you'll see people on the come up yeah you know um and some fairly popular characters in the industry but i really have a hard time taking an entrepreneur seriously unless they've been through their first war like if they haven't been through war they're not battle tested yet and when everything is good and easy and the markets are all up and everybody's winning it's easy to feel like you got the Midas touch right but when it all comes crashing down um how do you rise up out of the ashes that's the real entrepreneur how do you pivot easily yeah man what's next for you these days I mean we're most so right now um we still have the coaching business that's probably like
Starting point is 00:31:41 the primary business um oh my even get really get into that story. We didn't even hear his offer. So tell us about the coaching business part right quick before. Yeah. So we're teaching people affiliate marketing. That's the primary business right now. Yeah. And we do that through online courses.
Starting point is 00:32:00 And then there's like a mentorship program. So we actually just revamped that. So now it's a 60 week, six zero. It's a 60 week program with 12 week modules. So it's five 12 week modules. First is a tutoring module where we get their whole business set up. And then they work with my master trainers
Starting point is 00:32:16 for 12 week segments on four core components of building the business. And then as an aside to that, so my philosophy is that like success is the marriage of skill set and mindset right so if you have if you're greatly skilled but you don't have the confidence the clarity the vision all the different things that go into like truly being successful it feels like a nightmare you wake up every day knowing that you could do better than the person out there actually accomplishing but you're actually not getting the result. And then mindset, a lot of the kumbaya stuff out there, lighting candles, you know, um,
Starting point is 00:32:52 making vision boards and a lot of this stuff, like that's all cool. But if you don't have a valuable skillset to offer to the marketplace, no money's going to show up, you know? So we also have a personal development business, um, that we've been building on the side. Uh know so we also have a personal development business um that we've been building on the side uh so we take our clients and we also we also promote our personal development classes their live event classes uh so we also promote those and then uh just la no march of this year no what month is this bro that's a common entrepreneur what day is it bro june it's june 23rd so last month may i closed on a 322 acre ranch wow that will be using for the where texas east texas yeah nice it's in a little town called pittsburgh texas about two hours east of
Starting point is 00:33:41 dfw sounds sick um but we close on that and that's like for us to do the the higher level retreats for those classes that's where we'll be able to do that now so we should hopefully be breaking ground on that in the next like three months nice and be able to have our first class on that property hopefully in 12 months from today so that's exciting next june and where can they find the course at that there's like really not much information about that online i mean inspirionx.com okay um is i n s i n s i p i r e n x.com but um there's not really much information there because we're not like even opening it up to uh cold traffic yet just all of our existing customers going through those classes as well but when you ask like what's next my more my more passion project is that so uh i really want to build that i'll probably never sell that
Starting point is 00:34:33 company that's like my legacy play uh and so i want to build something that will be around 100 years after i'm gone that's hard to do yeah, man. Okay, all it's been a pleasure. I'm speechless. Oh, that story. Yeah, that story was easy. I was locked in. I don't even know what to say. Wayne, you got anything? No, I want you guys continue on, continue to believe in yourself and always know that the best investment is yourself. I agree. I've never gotten a better investment than that. Actually, right. Yeah. Can't be yourself. Thanks for watching, guys. I'll see you next time. Peace.

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