Next Level Pros - #2: My Story Pt. 2 - Business Failure, Overcoming Ego, The Day Impossible Became A Reality

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

Chris' story continued. Learn about his first big business failure, and what it took to go back and start working for someone else. 🚀 Join my community - Founder Acceleration https://www.founderacceleration.com 🤯 Apply for our next Mastermind https://www.thefoundermastermind.com ⛳️ Golf with Chris https://www.golfwithchris.com 🎤 Watch my latest Podcast Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-founder-podcast/id1687030281 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2vI1JAtQrojSOA7D2?si=dc252f8540ee4b05 YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@thefounderspodcast

Welcome to the Founder Podcast, where we explore the journeys of some of the most successful and inspiring entrepreneurs from around the world. I'm your host, Chris Lee, a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building and growing businesses. Throughout my career, I founded multiple nine-figure businesses and learned a thing or two about what it takes to succeed in the world of business. I want to share those lessons with you by searching out the coolest guests on planet Earth and have them share their own incredible stories. But this podcast, it's not just for entrepreneurs. It's for anyone that's looking to be inspired by these stories of people who have overcome incredible odds and create something truly remarkable. So join me on this journey as we explore the

fascinating world of entrepreneurship and meet the founders that are shaping it today. Let's dive in. Let's go. Welcome to episode number two. I'm your host, Chris Lee. And so we're going to be jiving into part two of my story. And so as you guys remember, so I kind of give you the background on the previous episode in which we talked about my upbringing and my schooling, just all the different things that ultimately led to me jumping full tilt into starting my first business. So in 2008, great year to start a business, might I add. Nah, I'm joking. But I was caught with the entrepreneur bug.

And I thought, man, I already know everything that I'm doing. This is the typical e-myth, right? The entrepreneur myth. They're like, I am a high functioning technician, really good at sales. I'm already doing everything that the owner is doing. Why don't I just go and do this on my own? And so I was smitten, decided to drop out of school. I felt like I had learned everything that school had to teach me. I was 24 years old on a pipe dream, just ready to go, ready to go and build my first business.

And so my first business was in the home security space in automation in which we would recruit door-to-door sales teams. We'd establish offices with different locations throughout the United States. We recruit technicians. We have a back office. We're located in Orem, Utah at that point. At that point, I had moved my family. Just so you know, throughout my career, I have moved my family because me and my wife have been married throughout my whole career, 14 different times. 14. We have moved from location to location, some of them within the same town, but 14 different times. And so it's been a crazy wild ride in pursuing the success that I ultimately wanted to experience. So at this moment, we were living in Orem, Utah.

I was attending BYU, decided to drop out of school and start my first business. But before I decided to do that, I went and I said, you know what? I want to go and compete with some of the big dogs, the guys that are doing it bigger than me, the Vivints, the Pinnacles. At this point, it was Apex Alarm instead of Vivint. And I was just going to go and compete. Everything was based on competition. And so in order to go and compete with them, I needed to be bigger, better, pay more, charge less, all the different things. And so this is where I really made a bunch of mistakes. Well, one, I went and I took on two partners that were working with me at then a company called Security One. We decided to up and

leave in the middle of the night and we ended up not getting paid our backend checks. For anybody that doesn't know what a backend check and summer sales, you go, you make a sale, you get paid some up front for the installs. As long as they retain for a certain amount of months, you get paid your full commission. Ended up losing out on like $100,000, which was a lot of money to me back then. And I mean, still is a lot of money now, but then it was significantly more than it is today. And I didn't get paid that. But like I said, I was just caught with this entrepreneur bug. I went and I talked with my father-in-law, who I knew had some money.

And I ended up raising a million dollars from him. And then I went to my dad, who was a school teacher, had saved his whole life and done all these different things to invest and never really taken much risk. It always been 401k, stock market, everything like that. During the 2008 crash as the market tanked, he decided, man, I can't handle this anymore. And he took out all of his money. He had cut his, it was about eight, $900,000 that he had in the stock market down to like $400,000. He decides to take it out of which he invests just over $200,000 into my business. Now, some of you guys thinking that $200,000, great, whatever. To my dad, this was a ton of money.

And so he had put, he was betting on me as the horse. And I had two business partners that have worked with me over at security. One didn't bet amount too much. It's like, hey, we sold together. We managed together. Let's go and build a business together. And initially we were all in, right? We were going, we were doing it, but we took this $1.2 million and we just started just being stupid. We built out this big, nice office space as our headquarters. We were paying signing bonuses to sales teams for them to come and work with us. And man, we recruited the

doors off that thing. I think we hired 150 to 200 sales reps. We thought we were just going to sail off into retirement, essentially. We were spreadsheet millionaires. And I think this is a common mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make. They calculate everything, they put it on a spreadsheet. They're like, you know, this should cost this. I should get this much revenue. We should be able to easily sell this amount. Let me just tell you one thing I've learned about becoming a spreadsheet millionaire. Take everything that you believe are going to be your expenses and at least double it, sometimes triple it, and take every dollar amount of revenue that you think you're going to get and usually cut that in half. And you're going to end up being somewhere,

somewhere close. And you got to be able to operate from that kind of level. I didn't know this at age 24. I was young, dumb, thought I knew the world of sales. I'd had a lot of success up until this point. And so, you know, what could I lose? You know? And so I go and I sell this big vision to my father and I, Hey, put your million bucks here. You're going to have $10 million in the next three to four years. Right. And we gave him 20% of our business. And then we gave a percentage to my father in exchange for $200,000. And, you know, essentially we were operating, we were pitching that this thing was worth 5 million bucks. Right.

And I remember sitting down with a guy named Alex Dunn. He didn't tell me exactly who he was. He was currently, he was at that point working for Apex Alarm as like their CFO. But we were trying to pitch this idea to somebody else and he starts like picking it apart. And I didn't know who this guy was. And he's like, so you're telling me this thing is valued at $5 million? And I'm like, yeah, of course it is. He's like, pre-launch, you know, all you have is an idea.

And he's just started picking it apart. And I just remember thinking, man, this guy's a jerk. Like, who does he think he is? Which is hilarious. Because I would probably be the exact same guy today in his seats asking the same questions, peppering the same answers. Needless to say, we didn't raise any money with that group. So end up raising money from my father, my father-in-law. Of course, I have the good credit. My name is on everything, the leases, everything like that.

And then as we know, we're in the middle of the hit and we were just flying blinded. I refused to take a look at the macro environment. I was so focused on the micro, like I've been successful. I've done this, that and the other. I can control my own destiny. Sales, right? Like sales can be up in good or bad economy, right? Like the typical mantra in the sales environment. So I was just so

totally self-deceived in the fact that I had these blinders on and I refused to look at the macro environment that was just crashing around me. Banks failing, credit scores dropping, just all the financing, everything was going on. So we go and we convince a company. So the way it works in the home security business is you go out and you sell a contract door to door. We install the equipment and then you sell them on a three-year or a five-year monitoring. So if you say, for example, three years times 40 bucks and a monitoring company would actually pay you for the full contract, right? So they pay you three years times $40 a month.

So you get like 12, 1500 bucks or whatever it was. And so, and they are in turn are hoping that after that contract customer stays on, they make money. That's essentially how the business works. They're backed by financing and banks that help float this upfront cost from us. We take that 12, 1300 bucks. We pay a commission to a sales rep. We pay for the equipment. We pay for the install. And then we pay for all of our back office fixed costs. And so essentially hoping for like $200 to $300 at the end of the day. Obviously, gross margin are bigger than that. But yeah, that's essentially what you're looking for in that business. And so first summer goes and we go and we do the summer sales model. We have six offices.

We're crushing it. Well, not really, right? Like we're up against this macro environment that's crashing around us. We ended up operating essentially at break even through September. But then we had back-end checks and different things like that. We realized, man, we are in overhead. We don't really understand accounting. We don't really understand finance.

The only way, like we saw what was in the bank account, what we had to be paying out, and that we didn't have sales coming in after the end of the summer. So immediately after our first summer of 2009, we launched this business fall of 2008. Paid signing bonuses, all these things. We go out 2009 in this depressed economy and we realized there's no way this thing's going to survive if this continues to be our model. So immediately after the summer of 2009, we're like, hey, we're now doing year round sales, year round offices. Don't go to school, sell year round, make this a lifestyle. And so we went from six summer sales offices down to three year round locations. And man, we were just really trying

to scrape by. Then comes the bad hit, right? Security networks who was buying our contracts at that time, knocks on our doors and said, Hey, your cancellation rate is a whole lot higher than what we expect. A lot of this was driven by the economy. And they said, and the banks are seizing up funds and not allowing us to come in. I remember talking with the CFO from security networks and just thinking he was a jerk. You're seeing the trend here, right? Like I think CFOs are jerks, but they're just the ones telling the reality and I'm just self-deceived. And so the CFO is just like, look, one, your cancellation sucks. Two, we can't afford to buy more than 100 contracts a month from you. Problem was is we need 120 just to break even. So I don't know if you understand that, but like if you're limited in a hundred and you need 120, that Delta is

negative money every single month. And I remember just panicking. And then on top of that, security networks is like, Oh, by the way, we have a UCC one filing on your business. And you can't sell these contracts to anybody else as long as you're trying to do it in our regions. And so we started searching the map. Security networks only buys in certain territories and whatnot. We're like, holy crap. The only way we survive is we have to go open another market, right? Because we are limited. We cannot break even under the current circumstance. The only way that we can get this

thing going is, is going elsewhere. And you know, the pact me and my two business partners always had was like, Hey, look, if crap hits the fan, we are going to be back on the doors, knocking doors and doing whatever it takes to make this happen. We will move away, open up our own offices, make this happen. We'll no longer be operating from this like grand dose headquarters. Like, look at me. I'm the CEO. Look at this, that and the other. Right. That we are going to go out and get our get our hands dirty again. When push came to shove, either of my business partners were

willing to do that. One stopped showing up to work. The other one's like, Hey, look, let me just run headquarters. Me and my wife will take care of the books. And so I was the only one willing to move. And at this time, me and my previous pest control manager, Daryl Kelly, who's now my business partner, we hadn't been talking for a while. And I apologize if there's a lot of details of the story, but this is the pinnacle of my career because of the way it collapsed. And so Daryl was going through a tough time. He was kind of transitioning, trying to figure out what he wanted to do. So I go to Daryl, I'm like, Daryl, let's a tough time. He was like kind of transitioning, trying to figure out what he wanted to do. So I go to Daryl.

I'm like, Daryl, let's make up, be friends again. We got over our first divorce. We've always talked about how we've had two divorces over our career. We decided to get through our first divorce and be back together. He's my work wife. And so I convinced him. I'm like, Daryl, Hey, let's move from Utah. Let's relocate back to home, Washington state. And let's open up this branch for my business. Kind of leaving out that dude, we're desperate. And the only way that this business is going to survive is if we go and we, uh, we make this happen in Washington state.

So we pick up, we move our families to Washington state, back where we're from. And I move into my parents' house. They had now moved down to St. George. They were renting this house. I convinced them to rent it to me. And me and Daryl, we start hitting the doors and we start recruiting a small office. And we start selling these contracts to a different monitoring station because it's outside of security networks territory. And we're selling these contracts and every single week, so we had to set up a different corporation. So at this point, my first name in my company was Five Diamond Protection. And this other branch of company, we called it Five Diamond Home Protection, right. So it was a little bit different. Different LLC, whatnot, set up with Monotronics. So Monotronics, we start crushing it and we're

doing well. There's a little bubble in Tri-Cities during the 2008 recession that just did not hit. And so we start selling lights out. We recruit a little team, start making money. Monotronix is depositing money in our bank account every week. And physically, I have to go the only way. We couldn't afford the wires and different things like that. And I can't remember why we weren't able to. Maybe computers weren't up to date where I could send wires without going into the branch or whatever. But I'm going and I'm getting physically $30,000 in cash every single week out of this one bank account and depositing it into my other bank account to be able to keep things afloat down in Utah, to pay the bills, pay the salaries of my then dead partners, like literally partners,

not doing anything and just pay those fixed costs. So we ended up doing this for like five months and you know, me and Daryl are living off of nothing. Like we, that this is literally, if we were running our own little business, our own little offices, we would have made 30 to 40 grand a week. Instead, it was going to float this other business. And me and Daryl, we're only taking home five to $6,000 a month. Like literally I was making 60 grand, uh, on an annualized basis. And we go and we do this for like five months straight. And this is summer of, uh, 2010. And Daryl becomes apprised of exactly what's going on. He sees that we're floating the other business. He sees that, you know, we're just, and then where it finally hit was we were, so my then partner who was running everything just stopped running everything else. And the other three offices just completely crumbled.

Right. And like, it's like, what? And you expect me to continue to pay your salary and everything like that? And one day we're on the phone, myself and this business partner and Daryl's listening in or no, Daryl was on the phone as well. And me and Daryl decided, like, dude, we've got to cut these off. Like, we've got to figure out what the next step is. And it can't be continue to float this business that's failing. And so Daryl tells him, he's like, dude, we're not going to be paying your salary. what the next step is. And it can't be continued to float this business that's failing.

And so Daryl tells him, he's like, dude, we're not going to be paying your salary. And also, boom, he starts threatening legal. Like, dude, I'm going to have my dad sue you. He's a lawyer, this, that, and the other. As soon as that happened, Daryl was like, whoa, I don't want to do with this any more to do with this. And so, you know, all of a sudden, man, I had a terrible choice to make. My name was on the line for all this stuff on the office leases, the line of credit, the different this, that and the other with the inventory company. Oh, come to find out, supposedly this inventory bill was getting paid. And then one day we get a letter like, hey, you owe us $450,000. Like what? $450,000? What? This has been getting paid. And then one day we get a letter like, Hey, you owe us $450,000. Like what? 450,000. What? This has been getting paid. I go to my business partner. I'm like, dude, I thought your wife was cutting. She's running the book. She was supposed to. Oh yeah. I'm not

sure what happened there. So I'm not sure if it's like embezzlement. And frankly, I was in such a panic, like at this point in my career and just misunderstood books and financials and stuff so much that like I don't even know how to like dive in and figure it out. And so that hits. We stopped paying the office lease and they're like, hey, we're hitting you for $600,000. I'm like, dude, this is all coming down, crashing down around me. And Amex stopped getting paid. It was $130,000 and this, that. I mean, dude, it all totaled up when it came to like, oh, my father, my father-in-law was like 2.2 to two and a half

million dollars somewhere in that range. And it was just devastating. And I was just like, dude, how am I going to survive? How am I going to get through this? There is no way I can keep this company afloat. And so at that point, I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. The only decision that I saw at that point was like, I got to file bankruptcy. Daryl was no longer going to be working with me. My business partners stopped showing up for work. One's threatening lawsuits, everything like that. And it's like, my credit is attached to everything.

At this point. Like I had never, ever missed a bill ever. My credit score was like seven 80. I was like, my parents taught me like you shake a hand, you pay somebody, you sign your name on the dot, you pay somebody, man. But at this point, like I was desperate. There was literally no way out. And for anybody, you guys that are listening to this, that's ever been in this position, like, you know, exactly what I'm feeling. We were talking like pressure on the chest. We're talking crying to sleep. We're talking stress, anxiety, not wanting to show up to work. Just putting one foot in front of the other blank stares at your spouse, blank stares at your kids, blank stares

at anybody that's trying to talk to you. You're just like, Oh my gosh, what is happening? Now, the sad part is, is at this point in my career, I figured out what worked right. What me and Daryl were doing was working, but we had no way out. And I had a business partner in Daryl that was unwilling to help me get through this because he wasn't a part of it. Like what motivation did he have not having equity in the business or whatnot? So that fall of summer or fall of 2010, I made the decision, man, I got to file chapter seven bankruptcy. So I started the process and immediately Daryl knew exactly what was going on and we knew exactly what we needed to be successful. Daryl opened up a home

security business, K2K Alarm, and which he was going to make me a limited partner on. But during my bankruptcy, he kind of kept me off the papers. So the next three or four months was me filing in January 26th, 2011, I completed my filing. And, uh, you know, when I had to go and appear before the judge, which anybody that's ever gone through this, it's humiliating. Like it's the worst experience and I would not recommend it to anybody. I think there was almost always a way out at the age of what what was I, 27 at that point, or almost 27. It was a month before my 27th birthday. I didn't see a way out. And I had no mentor. If I could talk to myself at that point right now, I would say, Chris, there's somebody else that's been through this. Go ask for help. Quit being prideful. Quit trying to struggle on your own. There are so many

people out there that are willing to lift up that have gone through similar things that have solutions. But instead I just, just held it in. And Daryl was the only person in the world that knew exactly what was going on besides my wife. And I just dealt with the stress on my own. And like I said, I wish I could go back and slap that kid and be like, Chris, there is a way out. Please go find a mentor. Go find somebody else that has been through this. They will get you through it. This is the same advice that I give to anybody that's going through a similar type of struggle right now. Like somebody out there has experienced it and they can help. Please talk. Do not be self-deceived. Do not be prideful to the point that you're unwilling to share the struggle with somebody else. We have all gone through struggles and everybody,

and there's a lot of great advice out there. Please. Oh, please. Oh, please do not do what I do and just gave up. So I gave up, filed bankruptcy, had less than a thousand dollars in my bank account, car repoed out of my driveway, Mercedes CLS 500. I had all my assets stripped. Everything at this point, I had been smart investor, all these things like that. Gone. stripped everything at this point I had been smart investor all these things like that gone and I forgot to mention that like in order to make the back-end check the previous year I had maxed out a personal credit card through a buddy who could process it he paid me back everything

less fees just so that I could make payroll so for any of you that are just thinking out there like Chris was a coward Chris was not willing to work hard. Chris was not willing to trade. Like I freaking did everything. Everything I knew in that moment, the only thing I didn't do, which I'm an idiot for is go and ask for help, go and find somebody else that was, that was going through it. I just chose to deal with it on my own between my wife, God, and Daryl. And I regret it. I regret it because, man, frankly, bankruptcy sticks with you for a long time. Literally, it wasn't until like last year that that sucker finally fell off my credit report. And my credit, like although I had recovered it, you know, probably three or four years prior to that falling off my credit,

it was forever there. It like, it was forever. There was a black mark and it's still a black mark today. Like every application that I ever file that ever fill out with a bank or whatnot, it's like, have you ever filed bankruptcy? And I have to have, yes. And I have to give a one page explanation of what it was. Like it's been a black eye for my whole career, and I do not recommend it to anybody. But it ended up being a great thing in the moment. Give me a fresh restart. There's a reason why the United States government allows for it. It got the monkey off my back. I changed my phone number from an 801 to a local 509 in the Tri-Cities.

And was able to finally start fresh with Daryl. And me and Daryl, we went and we started building a business different, right? No longer were we selling monitoring contracts to a monitoring company. We actually raised our own little fund and started in-housing things, which meant we paid a monitoring company a little bit every single month. But we started creating this residual. And we started building that. And, you know, it was a fun time in my life. I was building a small local business, K2K Alarm, me and Daryl. And like, I have so many fond memories of this, like trudging through the snow, making sales, getting referrals, doing what I was meant to do, getting my hands dirty, being a salesperson, enjoying the people, selling a great product. And over the next couple of years, we built a nice business

and we had an investor, someone who was actually willing to trust me with their money at this point. But then it got to a point, I didn I didn't know, like I wasn't passionate. Like we were building just like kind of good, steady business. We weren't growing rapidly. It was just kind of enough to pay the bills. We built up a nice residual. We were making $8,000 a month each residually, right? No longer had to go to work, but any work that we did would add to that. Um, and, uh, Daryl decided to go back to college to get his MBA. He went for a half a quarter and then dropped out. But the best thing that he took from that, he went to this night school, realized that these people are all here just to get degrees. There's nothing that I can

learn from this. But there was one person that brought up a book. It was called The Four Hour Work Week. And many of you guys have probably read it, Tim Ferriss. So it was brought up in his class and the teacher immediately was like, no, that is stupid. Nobody, you know, four hour work week, impossible, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Just totally dogged on it. We set a light bulb off and Daryl, and he's like, dude, we got to read this book. So end of 2011, early 2012, we both read this book and we catch a bug. It's like, dude, we got to stop knocking doors. We got to stop building this little business. We got to think different.

We got to think laptop lifestyle, like start leveraging, looking to build a team, to leverage out, to hire foreign work and everything like that. And so we started looking for our next path in life, during which I launched an SEO company, Search Engine Optimization. This was in 2012. All the while just having that business, making residual, having a couple of employees that maintained those accounts and stuff. And then Daryl decided to go completely revamp and he started bee farming with the hope and expectation that this guy was actually going to

turn his bee farm over to him. So I started an SEO company. Meanwhile, we're making this residual. And while I do it, I set it up. And within three months, I have a $6,000 residual in which I am getting paid every single month. And I'm sending one email a month. I land these clients. I have these Filipinos and Indians doing literally all the work and I'm just collecting a paycheck. Then I got bored. I'm like, that was cool. And so meanwhile, I've gotten two residual checks coming in, one for 8,000, one for 6,000. I make about $14,000 a month, which at this point in my career is the most money I've ever made. Because granted, when I ran my business, that was garbage, man. I lost money. And so, so this was, this was phenomenal. And, and, uh, my brother approaches me, my younger brother, Tony, he's like, Tony, he's like, Chris, dude, come hit the doors one more time. Come give it a shot. I'm just like, dude, no way. And this is Chris's pride and ego speaking at the moment. I'm just like, dude, I've already done that thing.

I've already, I've already, uh, first of all, I own my own businesses. I'm a CEO of a company of four or whatever. Uh, you know, I'm already a big dog and I am way above going back and working for somebody else. And like, this is all the things that were going through my mind. It was initially telling him, but then he kept at me, kept pestering, kept pestering. And, uh, ultimately, ultimately got me in a vulnerable state where I was bored and really looking for something else. And he's like, dude, just come to it. And ultimately I decided to get back on the doors and do summer sales for two different, two different reasons. One, I wanted to prove to myself that I could

compete, that I could compete with a big company. He was then working for a company called Pinnacle Security, which was one of the large companies out of Utah. I wanted to be able to go and prove to myself that I was a top performer in the industry and that I wasn't just me, this guy doing like the solopreneurs, small side hustles and whatnot, but that I could go and compete. The second thing was my brother at this point was, was struggling and just needed a good moral, uh, person to be able to be with him. Um, he had, um, gone through a divorce and just, just needed me by his side. And we hadn't spent very much time together. And I thought this was a great opportunity to be able to go and manage an office with him and spend a, spend a summer. So once again, pack up everything and move my family out to Arkansas summer of 2012.

And just with like swallowing my pride, thinking like, yeah, whatever. I no longer work for myself, but at the same time, I had my bills paid because I was making this residual. We end up selling off that residual of home security accounts. We sell it as a big package for a multiple to to monotronics. We pay off our investor. Me and Daryl each cash a little bit of money. But then I had my CEO company that was paying my bills. And so I decided I'm going to go out and knock doors. And prior to knocking doors that summer, I attended this sales seminar that changed my life in which it really started to open up my mind of like what was possible from a personal level of production.

There was a guy named Adam Webb. He had written this book called The Six Figure Summer. And at this point, the only six figures I had made was in my second summer. I made $105,000. I thought that was great. But not only did I want to do in my second summer. I made $105,000. I thought that was great. But not only did I want to do that, I want to go make like $300,000. And he went through like this mentality shift of what new. But more importantly, at that event, they had this Range Rover park there.

And they're like, hey, this summer, we're going to be giving away a Range Rover. Now, let's back up. Chris Lee, me and myself, I am not a Range Rover. Now let's back up. Chris Lee, me and myself, I am not a car guy. I grew up in a school teacher's home. We drove beaters. We had GeoMetros. We had an old Toyota pickup, a 15 passenger van. They were all ghetto, needed oil changes. I mean, dude, garbage, right? That's what we're used to. And I was fine with that. Always driving these type of just lower class vehicles. The only time I changed from that is when I got my Mercedes and then ended up getting repoed. I'm like, dude, I got to go back to myself.

But I see this Range Rover. It wasn't the Range Rover that appealed to me. It was the fact that it was a prize and it was going to be given away for the winner. And I freaking love to win. But more importantly, I hate to lose. It like every pain drives me way more than winning. And I think most entrepreneurs are that way. And once you find that out,

you start setting up your life to create punishments for anything that, and so I'll talk about this in later episodes, but essentially whenever I want to accomplish anything, I just set'll talk about this in later episodes, but, but essentially whenever I want to accomplish anything, I just set up levels of punishment, never levels of like, Hey, if I do this, I get this. It's if I don't do this, I have to pay this. I have to do this type of thing. And it really works for me, but man, I wanted to win and I really didn't want to lose. And so saw this thing and I immediately, immediately wrote this letter to

myself. And basically it was this letter that I knew that I was going to read to myself whenever I felt discouraged, whenever I was out knocking doors, doing sales. Because anybody that's ever done door-to-door sales, it's the most discouraging, unmotivating thing in the world, right? Like just to get out of your car, you're like, your mind plays all these games and whatnot. It's fun once you're out there and you make the sales, but just the motivation to get out every single day, dude, it is a mind blast. And for anybody that's young, that's looking at like building their career and doesn't know what they want to do and how to get an entrepreneurship, go do door-to-door sales or go do multi-level marketing. Like those two things will like thicken your skin and give you people skills and mental battles

beyond anything else. And so knowing that I was going to be going into this because I had done summer sales before, I wrote this letter in my notes that talked about like what I was going to be able to go and accomplish. And every time, and I referenced like, Hey, winning the Range Rover, all these different things to be able to motivate me, to be able to motivate me for the rest, uh, the rest of my life. And, you know, um, it, I, I'm, I'm looking up here on my phone to see if, if the, if I even have it still here, but you know, there was, I know I have an attachment of it somewhere, but, um, but anyways, like, this is a letter that I, that I wrote. And so like, whenever I felt discouraged, I pull it out and it would talk about like being faithful to my family, never doing

anything to disappoint them, like what I was capable of. It would just all these positive affirmations. And it talked about winning this Range Rover. So anyways, I go out that summer, Arkansas, and I work my butt off and I started applying these principles of like mental fortitude and like changing my level of satisfaction instead of being satisfied with one sale every day, it was shifting my satisfaction to three sales a day. You know, just like playing these little mental games. And August of that year comes around and I get into a bracket, 256-man bracket, top players, you're all seated. And I think at this point, like I'm doing pretty well. I had most sales I'd ever made in a day was eight, which is pretty awesome.

You know, you're making 600 bucks a deal. That's $4,800 a day. It's phenomenal. And so, you know, this is where I'm going into. And I purposely screw up the seating a little bit to be seated a little bit lower because the way I've always liked to compete, I like to smack somebody in the mouth without them realizing it. Um, when it, when it comes to, when it comes to competition, make them think that I'm a little bit weaker or whatnot than I am. And so the way that it was structured, it was a three and a half week competition. Every round was two to three days. And, uh, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 842.

Let's go. And it was double elimination. And so Range Rover on the line, might I remind you. And so it comes down to it. I'm in the championship and I've won every round up until this point. And, uh, you know, I always refer to this point in my career, my life as the day when impossible became a reality. And, uh, so I was competing against Adam Webb, the same guy that wrote that book that had motivated me, that got me to the championship.

So we're competing. He's come through the loser's bracket. We're, we're up against each other. And, uh, I think he had actually just beaten my brother like the round before, maybe the round before that, like us Lees were crazy competitive. Um, and so we get to the championship and I'm just like, I am going to just annihilate him. I'm going to make it where it just is so uncomfortable. Now, what they did is we had these dashboards on the computers where it would actually show where you're at for the day. What they decided for the championship was to black out the dashboard. No access, full blinders. You have no idea what your competitor.

And if anybody has ever seen Facing the Giants, the little clip where the guy gets blindfolded and he does a bear crawl. He thinks he can go like 20 or 30 yards, puts the blinders on, and ends up going the full 100 yards. It's just like a really motivating part of the movie. And in fact, it was part of Adam one's presentation. It's just like put on the blinders. It's you versus you.

It's not because whenever we compete against somebody else, right. Whether in business and weight loss or whatnot, we're either going to be overly satisfied or like underly motivated. And when it's us versus us, it's the only way that we can truly unlock what our potential is. And when we throw on those blindfolds. So that day I had the blindfolds on and I knew I was going to leave it all in the field. I got my first deal. So typical door-to-door sales would be, you get out on the doors between 12 and one o'clock and you work till 9 or 10 o'clock at night.

This day, I was like, I'm giving it a mile. My first sale happened at 7.45 a.m. And if you remember, Daryl at this point was farming bees. And I called Daryl up that day. I'm like, dude. And I was back in Washington selling. And I called Daryl and I said, dude, is there any way you can just accompany me for the day or at least a few hours? My mind, I'm just like racing.

It's just wild. It's going crazy. I'm like, can you just drive me around from, you know, door to door appointment to appointment? I had set up a few appointments the previous day and I said, can you just do that just to help me get right? So he helped me in these first few early morning appointments that I had set. And first deal happens at 745. And Daryl ends up leaving me about 1 p.m. Just like, all right, dude, I'm good.

I'm in the groove. I'm making sales. At 9 o'clock, I'd sent the company record. It was like, or it was 8 o'clock. It was like 12 or 13 in a day. And, uh, I walk out at nine 30, I think with my 14th deal thinking, man, I did it. It's awesome. And I remembered up until this point, literally nobody had told me no all day. Like I was just on this extreme manifestation high that like I was hoping for it. I was manifesting it and it was happening, right? Like all the stars aligned and

the stars do align when you really do manifest and when you really do believe. And so I go and I manifest this thing, right? 14 deals. Like then I remembered there is one person that told me no, but he told me earlier in the day that his church had some home security systems. So actually there was two people that told me no. This guy had told me no, but he said his church had home security systems. I said, is there any way you can make a decision today on those? He's like, well, any board approval? I'm like, when does the board meet? Well, we have a church meeting tonight. Anyway, you can make that work. He's like, come by at 945 or 10 o'clock. So I roll in there, just getting out of their church meeting. I'm like, Hey, can we have a board meeting? He's like, well, we've got three, three of the four. Yeah, let's do it. I take them in, give them a presentation. They have three security systems. I take it over,

drop, reduce it down to two. That's number deal 15 and 16. Meanwhile, I convinced one of the board members to get installed at their house. That's deal number 17. I walk out of this place. It's 11 o'clock at night, 11, 11, 15. I call my brother. I call Tony, my younger brother, my older brother, Dave. I'm in tears. I'm like, dude, I did it. 17 deals in a day. I'm going to win this Range Rover. It's a two-day competition. Mind you, this is day number one. I'm like, dude, there's just no way he's going to be able to get me. While I'm on the phone with my brother, so I'm driving home. It's about a 45 minute drive. While I'm on the phone, the one other person, like I said, there was two people. The other person that had told me no, text me and says, my husband just got home from work. I think we want to do it. What? Are you kidding me? I'm like, Dave, I got to call you back. So I call her up. I'm like, Hey,

can we get it done? Can we do the welcome call? I'll send over the digital paperwork. Let's get this done. 1145. She signs, we hang up, we do the welcome call. The technician shows up at midnight. We end up installing all these systems and 18 in a day. And I'll tell you what, like the best, the best thing that happened from this was the next day. They, they opened up the, the dashboard just for about an hour and it showed Chris Lee, 18, Adam Wed, seven. Now granted seven is phenomenal. My best day ever up to this point was eight, 18 to seven. And the best thing that anybody could ever do in this moment was call me a liar. And like, man, I had all these texts. There's no way. You must have cheated. The best flattery you could ever give me is something that I 100,000% know that I did. And it was amazing.

And I accomplished it. And you call me a liar. I'm just like, dude, that's the biggest form of flattery. That flatters me so much that you think what I did is so impossible that I had to have cheated. And I'll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, when you achieve something like that in your life, that seems so impossible to you, so impossible to others, but you experienced it and you found that outer limit of what you're capable of doing, dude, there's nothing.

There's nothing better. And that point in my life, from August 2012 until today when I'm recording this, the next 11 years, I've been able to accomplish the impossible because I realized what I was capable of doing. If I just put on the blinders and it was me versus me, and I got into my outer limits and I did everything that I was physically able to do and never be limited by my mind. Ignore the excuses. Ignore all the different thoughts that are going through your mind. Because guess what?

The one thing I've learned in my sales career is the better you get, the better the excuses get. And there will always be an excuse. You've already done enough. Nobody expects you to do anymore. Your wife's got a great meal on the table. You should be doing X. You've already done enough. Nobody expects you to do any more. Your wife's got a great meal on the table. You should be doing X. You should be doing leadership, sacrificing the great for the good. You will always have these excuses.

When you realize that you are more capable physically than what you are mentally, you will repeat this in your mind. This is what I always do. Do what you're physically able to do, not what you're mentally able to do. You have to realize that the mind is literally a outside abstraction that is trying to work on who you really are, which is your heart. Your heart is who you really are. And rarely do you get into the feelings of your heart. It's only when you're feeling motivated. It's only when you've gone through like a goal planning session. That is when you know your heart is speaking.

It's feeling. It's thinking. That is who you really are. These little mind things that go through your mind, it's the reason why thoughts are like, where did that come from? How in the world did that go through my mind about this woman or about this thing or about like, what? That is not me. What is going through your mind is not you. It's your heart. It's only when we start entertaining it, entertaining it in our mind that it sinks down and starts to become who we are, which is our heart.

And so realizing that, that when you're in the moment of weakness and you have these thoughts going through your mind that are tempting you to give up, to do less, to not perform, that is your mind thinking, not your heart. And that's where you have to remind yourself, do what you're physically able to do, not what you're mentally able to do. And if you master that one principle, I promise you, you will be able to do amazing things like selling 18 in a day and doing such amazing things that people will doubt that it's even possible. They will think it is, this is absolutely impossible, which is the biggest form of flattery. Let me tell you what what to this day, I'm pretty sure

Adam Webb thinks I cheated and everybody else, the best part about it. Okay. So let me finish up the, I'll wrap this story up and then we'll wrap this episode and we'll do one more of my story after this. But at the, at the end of this, so like I said, it was a two day competition. I sold 18. He sold seven. The biggest mic drop I did is I didn't go to work the next day. High school football was starting. I was coaching high school football at the moment.

I really wanted to be there with the boys, and I just wanted to be able to celebrate. My regional manager monitored how many Adam had sold that day just to make sure it wasn't going to be close. He was selling out in Washington, D.C. I was selling in Washington,. So I had a three hour time difference to be able to see where he was going to end. And so I think he ended up selling six that day. So he got up to 13, which was phenomenal. And dude, I applaud you, Adam. You're a freaking stud. I do love Adam Webb. And, uh, this, this, uh, man, Adam, you changed my life. You really did. And so he goes and he sells 13. I sell zero. I end up winning 1813 when the Range Rover, man, that was a phenomenal. Let me, let me see if I can find a picture of the Range Rover in my, in my photos. Um, let's see here. Range Rover. Oh yeah. This was it. And this was back.

Let's see here. This was back when this thing was brand new. There wasn't a range like Rover like this on the market in 2012. And man, I freaking loved that thing. Not because I loved cars, but because of what it represented because it represented the possibility coming true. And thank you, Adam. Thank you for motivating me. Thank you for changing my life. You really, that part of my, it just changed the trajectory of my career. And so I ended up selling the Range Rover two years later and bought some real estate that I still own today that still pays me residual. So it's something that will continue to pay me, continue to roll up. But guys, thank you for letting me share with you that business failure and me coming through my ego and being willing to roll up my sleeves,

get my hands dirty, get back in the grind. It was a life altering experience. On the next episode, we're going to be talking about how not only did I go back and work for Pinnacle, but I went and worked for two other companies strictly with the one reason to be educated, to learn everything I could, to get a paid education over the next few years. So that the next time I launched a full fledged business, I was ready to take this thing to the moon. And as you guys know, I've experienced some pretty awesome exits. And so join me on episode number three, which is the last section, the last chapter of my story. Appreciate you guys. Until next time, let's go.