Next Level Pros - #76: How To Perservere in Business: Ben Harris and Chris Cameron from ClickFunnels

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

In this episode of The Founder Podcast, Chris Cameron and Ben Harris share their incredible journey from overcoming adversity to achieving success in the entrepreneurial world. With candid insights, practical advice, and heartwarming stories, they explore what it takes to build a resilient mindset and a thriving business. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or looking for a motivational boost, this episode is packed with valuable lessons on perseverance, innovation, and the power of a positive culture. Highlights: "Transparency is the golden thread that ties our team efforts together and builds unshakable trust." "Our overnight success was years in the making, laying down a foundation of failures and learning." "The true value of integrity, symbolized by a cherished Michael Jordan jersey, transcends personal and professional life." Timestamps:00:00 - The Role of Transparency in Business05:00 - Resilience in Door-to-Door Sales08:27 - Pivoting to Digital Marketing12:17 - Foundations of Success15:00 - Cultivating Positive Company Culture20:00 - Designing an Intentional Work Environment25:00 - Strategic Planning for Business Growth30:54 - The Art of Selling a Business31:12 - Finding Fulfillment Beyond Retirement38:24 - The Lifelong Value of Integrity Live Links: 🚀 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... Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1e0cL2v... YouTube - / @thefounderspodcast

The transparency is nothing but truth, right? Like this is what is really happening in the business. And when you actually broadcast what's really happening in a business, people buy into it and they get behind it and they paddle in the same direction. Welcome back to ClickFunnels Radio. My name is Chris Cameron and joined with me is my co-host Ben Harris. What is up, man? My man. Glad to be here. Oh, it's good to have you. Good to have you. I'm so excited for today's guest. This is so weird. I'm just telling you, for some weird reason, the universe, God, like puts you in front of people, like, and your paths cross. Like you've ever heard,

Lana, that old adage of like, you know, these two boats passing and you spend some time together. Well, this happened with our guest here today. Chris Lee is an entrepreneur who started in sales, has the Founders Podcast. This guy has built a huge solar company that actually just didn't exit for nine figures. And we're just excited to have you. But the reason that I bring some of this up is we're just talking before we hit record. And Chris, Chris was my neighbor. Chris Lee was my neighbor. We lived like six doors away. Back in what year was this, Chris?

2013. That's wild, man. So tell me this. Everything you've done now, it's now 2024. If you could get in that DeLorean, like at the time machine, go back and like, tell young scrappy, you know, Chris Lee, you were selling what alarms at that point. So I had just, yeah, I was in the middle of selling alarms. Yep. So I, I had moved down from Washington state back to Utah. I had lived in Utah one other time and I'm originally from Washington. I had gone back and then decided back and forth between the two states.

And yeah, dude, I was, I was selling, I was selling for a divot at the time. And I had, I moved to Utah cause I wanted to be around an area that I could recruit more salespeople. And so that, that's kind of what put us in our paths crossing. And, and so, yeah, that, that was kind of what I was caught you in like the foyer and I'm like, dude, you're a funnel hacker. Like this was absolutely crazy. And even the growth from then to now with Solgen, maybe even just give us like a CliffsNotes version. Like how did this all happen, man, to a nine figure exit? Yeah. So it's, it's interesting when we ran into each other,

you weren't even working with ClickFunnels at the time. I think it wasn't full time. Yeah. Yeah. Russell had like invited you out because you guys were friends or whatever. But yeah, so I've always been somewhat of an entrepreneur. I always say that a salesperson is like a pre-entrepreneur. They are the people that understand entrepreneurship the most without actually owning a business because they're out generating business. They're working with clients. They see how the whole process works, whether it's customer service or product delivery or whatever it may be. And so I was involved in door-to-door sales.

It was my background. I started that in 2005 while I was a college student. Oh, gee. And so I was always intrigued with that. But I started my first business in 2008 before we met. And I tried going too big, too fast, did a lot of things according to ego, wanted to impress other people. There was three people that I wanted to impress, which were ultimately a great mistake. I wanted to impress other people. There was three people that I wanted to impress, which were ultimately a great mistake. I wanted to impress my friends by being a successful business owner. I wanted to impress my customers by offering them the cheapest product out there.

And I wanted to impress my employees by paying them the most. And ultimately, that was a recipe for failure. And in 2010, at the end of 2010, two and a half years after launching my business, I found myself in bankruptcy or filing for bankruptcy. And beginning of 2011 is when that actually took place. And I filed bankruptcy for $2.2 million, lost everything. Wow. Cars re-put out of my driveway and so when we when our paths crossed you were actually seeing recovering addict chris right like you yeah you you were seeing up you know on on the up and i was just like coming to grips with the mistakes that i made like in fact

in 2013 i wasn't even telling people that I had filed bankruptcy. Even though it had happened two years prior, I still could not come to grips that that was me and that was reality. I was taking action that was getting me back on my feet. I was making really good money doing sales in 2013. I was making $350 making 350, $400,000 a summer doing this door to door program. Um, but at that point I was, like I said, still in denial. Dude, but hold on that amount right there too, goes to show the powerhouse sales guy that you are, Chris, like, you know, some guys that go out, Oh, I make 80 grand or whatever, 350, 400 grand. And you're talking working three four months a year that's right yeah and uh you

you actually i think met me um right after i had won a range rover in a in a sales competition yeah so i don't know if you remember that i had a range rover parked in my parking lot but that was that was uh that was something that i had won in a sales competition, 256-man bracket. So I was on the recovery, but I was still very much living a lie from the standpoint of I was not accepting... People did not know the damage that I had been through the previous couple of years prior to that. And it actually wasn't until 2014 that I decided to start sharing with the world what I had been through. And it was actually a point of power for entrepreneurs, for myself, for letting people know that, man, I've been through this and I'm recovering from it and education time of my career. There was a four and a half years that I actually went back to work. So right after I filed bankruptcy, I actually stayed as an entrepreneur. I continued to build businesses because I knew mistakes that I had made, but they were very

small businesses. And I did not know how to grow and I was scared of growth and all these different things. And so I finally decided to go back and work for somebody else. And when I went to go work for somebody else, it was specifically with the reason of studying what they were doing to grow these businesses. And so when I was working for Vivint at that time, it wasn't to knock doors or make money or anything like that. It was literally just to study from Todd Peterson. Like, what is Todd doing to build this, this crazy culture? Why are people so like bought in and drinking the Kool-Aid? What principles is he operating this business off of? And like, so I'm sitting there just literally taking notes. And meanwhile, I was making good money, but like the money was just a derivative. Um, and so over a four and a half year period,

I worked for three different businesses because I, once I learned everything I needed from one mentor, I went to the next, right? Cause it wasn't for the money. And, and I, and I did that. And over, over a four and a half period time, I experienced two different IPOs, initial public offerings, and just saw like craziness happening. And so when I finally stepped away, I knew I was ready. Like I had all the tools that I needed to go and build a business. And so a lot of people, they look at like the success that I built with Solgen. And they're like, oh, this was kind of overnight. But it was like there was many, many years of roots and failures and studying and everything that kind of went into it.

And so, uh, 2017, uh, and it was interesting, but when I left in 2016, um, I actually had one more failure before I finally launched this business.

And it was, it was going, I was pursuing international energy, uh, contracts and did all kinds of craziness. We'll talk about that on a different episode. But I launched this business out of my garage in 2017 based on the fact that I never wanted to knock another door in my life again. And I was always intrigued with digital marketing.

And so the whole internet marketing realm, like I really loved one of those small companies I launched in 2012 was a search engine optimization business, which was, you know, in the whole internet marketing space. So I was always intrigued and I loved the four hour work week and, you know, just kind of this whole leveraging and all that stuff. So right before I launched my business, I take a Facebook marketing course and this Facebook marketing course. Do you know who you bought it from? Yeah, I do. Trevor, man, I can't think of Trevor's name, but he did drop shipping. All right. So he taught, he taught drop shipping and it was like right when Facebook ads were really starting to take off. And so I take this course, I spend 14 hours a day for six weeks straight, like understanding the insides and outs of it. And I'm like, because

for me, the thing I know, and I know Russell shares this a lot is like marketing is the baby maker of your business. Right. And like you, as the, as the business owner, you've got to understand the inside and out, regardless of if you're outsourced it or not, you got to be able to control what's going on in the marketing realm. And so I studied the heck out of that. And by the end of six weeks, I was drop shipping flashlights all over the world and teeth whitener in the UK. And I was making $10,000 a month. And I'm like, Oh, this is cool. But what, instead of selling $50 products, why don't I go and apply it to something that's like what I know, which was the solar industry. And so, man, that's what I did. And so then we kind of owned the phrase digital door knocking. And because the biggest issue with door knocking is like, I knew I was freaking phenomenal. If I can get in front of one person, I could sell every single time, right?

The problem is replication and getting other people to be able to duplicate myself across many doors. And so the thing that always intrigued me about internet marketing, it was like, I can knock on the 10,000 screens at one time. And so that's where we really started approaching the whole funnel aspect and the education side. And so, well, before us, the only type of internet marketing that was taking place in the solar industry was simply inquiry-based stuff. Pay-per-click, Google, right? Like SEO. Nobody was on Facebook. Nobody was on Instagram. Nobody was on YouTube. The educational approach, which in my mind was the exact thing that why door knocking works, right? You don't knock on somebody's door thinking that they're actually looking for you.

The person on the other side of the door isn't inquiring about your product. Otherwise, they would have already had it. They would have Googled it or whatever else. You are literally stopping them in the middle of watching TV, looking at porn, whatever they're doing behind that closed door. And they're coming in. You have to break their preoccupation, educate them about what you're doing and close them. And so that's what I saw happening in the Facebook world that really at that point, I don't think anybody really understood what it was like,

this is door knocking. And so, and like the ability to knock doors at 10,000 screens at a time was so intriguing. So that's what we launched our business off of in, in fall of 2010. And five months later, I run into you. We've already at that point closed $3.2 million in business. That's crazy. And we were just even still getting it figured out, right? Our first full year in business, we do $16.5 million in business, four million dollars in ebita this is not normal people like i mean chris is over here acting casually oh first year we did 60 million i don't want anybody to get discouraged

like you have to understand the failures to pay attention to that first part of the story this overnight success took 10 years right absolutely and Absolutely. And even then some, right? But I love this too. Would you say that sales, if somebody wants to be good at being an entrepreneur, I hear so many people that start in the door-to-door industry. Absolutely. Is that one of the biggest things that they've got to learn is sales? Absolutely, man. I'll echo Robert Kiyosaki, a rich dad, poor dad.

He says, if you want to be good at business, a rich dad, poor dad. He says, if you want to be good at business, you either need to do cold called sales or you need to be in network marketing. Those are the two foundations of being able to go and convince somebody that your point of view is actually the way that they need to be looking at the world. And, and so, you know, there, there's power in that because yeah, it, it, nobody there, there's not many people that struggle with quality of product, right? There's a lot of great writers out there. There's a lot of great people that know how to go and be great technicians and deliver a great product, but very few people are best selling, right? And best selling-selling is essentially what makes any type of company survive.

It's, you're really hitting the nail on the head of the, and actually our last guest, Keala Kanai, talked about this a little bit, but the quantitative approach to being a business owner and the path is math, right? And learning everything you need to go, it's a sales funnel, right? From how many cold calls, door knocks you need to go,

appointments that you can set, et cetera. And I sort of echo your past a little bit. We've had similar pastimes, but even in college, I sold timeshares. So I'm still waiting for someone to come find me and just shoot me in the parking lot for selling them something 10 years ago. But my first job was door knocking. I sold payroll for ADP. So it's very, very similar, but I wanted to kind of, I guess, transition a little bit. That has taught you everything you need to know in terms of knowing your numbers. And you mentioned you studied a lot of Todd Peterson, maybe even teaching you a little

bit of the qualitative approach to being a business owner from a culture building standpoint. And I know just speaking personally from a lot of the content I've studied from you has been a lot of that, the culture building. Can you address that side of it and what you learned that you applied, maybe your top three or something like that? Yeah. I mean, really the main things that most business owners are missing is building culture, developing leadership and building teams, right? Those are the really distinguishing factors of an entrepreneur besides the sales and marketing, which we've talked about. You have to have sales, obviously, otherwise you can't do anything. But yeah, the culture aspect is really what I studied from Todd. And I saw so many just

amazing things. One of the core things of any culture should be transparency. And it's interesting. I learned from Todd where I'd previously worked for another business where there was very much so like a lack of transparency. Like what they were paying people or the different incentive systems or how the company was doing, was it profitable? Was it struggling? Whatever else, like those things were very untransparent. Where with Todd, they've always been very transparent. And man, I saw a lot of power in just, because the transparency is nothing but truth, right? Like this is what is really happening in the business. And when you actually broadcast what's really happening in a business,

people buy into it and they get behind it and they paddle in the same direction. Todd taught me a lesson before I worked with him. It was actually during the 2008 crisis. And I've shared this a few times before, but they were struggling. There was a point that they could not make. In door-to-door sales, there's this big thing called a back-end paycheck, where it's a large portion of commissions that has to be paid. And they were at a point where essentially they could not make that payroll because a lack of financing that was coming in from the markets, right? They would go and they would raise bonds to be able to fund their business because they were selling these long customer contracts and those got paid out over time. And in previous Chris, Chris of failure and bankruptcy

would run from that truth and try to figure it out on the backend and not let anybody know what's going on. But what Todd taught me was he actually went to his sales force. He said, look, we're in trouble. We potentially are going out of business and there's only a few routes that get us away from going out of business. And he was completely transparent, open with the whole group. And he says, we're going to give you guys an opportunity to actually invest your backend check. We don't pay you out. You actually invest it. We're going to give you some equity in the business so that we can make it through it. If we don't, we might not make it through. We'll still pay you, but we might not

make it through. Guess what? It was like a huge portion. It was like some 90 plus percent of people took the money that they were supposed to get paid, invested it into the business, ended up helping the company survive through this downside. And every single person that participated made like 10 to 20 X on their money. Oh, they're totally invested in the entire direction and purpose. Yeah. It was such a cool experience. I wasn't directly a part of it, but I heard about this going on and like, wow, what balls that guy has to like be that transparent, you know, because once again, previous Chris would have never done stuff like that. Um, where,

so like, that's the, that's the type of culture I've always tried to foster with my people. Like this is what's going, this is what's going on. This is how profitable we are. This is why it's okay to be this profitable. We're actually able to invest more in the customer experience and we took the risk and all the other thing versus trying to hide numbers. So my management team, we would literally be open and be like, hey, we have this much margin. For every deal above break, even it's worth $20,000 in gross profit to us. Like everybody across the organization knew exactly what that was and they were okay with it because they were bought in. It was transparent. Like, like people,

people are a lot smarter. Employees are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. And too often business owners, they, they create this weird culture of like, you know, behind the scenes of, you know, what's behind the curtain and whatnot. And so like, that was one of the things I learned from Todd. You know, I learned from other mentors as far as like having core values that like you really base everything off of from a hiring, firing, promotion, advancement, recognition. Those are what you do everything off of. Your mission statement is your guiding factor that everybody gets. It's not just something on the wall. It's literally something that you talk about and recognize people for. And you constantly ask yourself, does this align with where our mission and what we're building with, you know, and those,

those are just a few of the things. In fact, like I actually have a, I, I build out an ebook. It's just a real short ebook of like 10 steps of building an incredible culture because most people, they know what culture feels like, but they have no idea how to design it. Right. And, and, and so most, so most culture is by default rather than by design. And once you actually know the, the levers that you have to pull and the exact things that you have to do to design it, then it actually, it becomes a real thing rather than just like

something that I feel like, I know I want this. We've all been part of a good culture. We've all been part of a bad culture, but we don't necessarily know what led to it. And so like, that's where I've dedicated my life is like understanding what drives a culture. And I really believe like that is the number one thing that you can do as, as a CEO, when you're running an organization is, is understanding how to build culture and how to develop it throughout your organization. This, this is crazy. Cause I feel like that's what February is like about. We did this with Rudy Moore, Keala we just had,

and we spent so much time on like culture, which is funny because what was it? A year and a half ago when we did the bootstrapped awards. That was so fun. I almost had to get between you and Keala because you guys were both just talking so much smack to each other.

And I know you guys are good buddies, but it was awesome, man. Like I love an entrepreneur who has this swagger though. And then this confidence, but that's not always something that inherently is there, but it takes reps. It takes practice. And, uh, and I think you've done that. I love this culture thing too. But another question I have to build on that is listen, I'm in Utah, right? Anybody who's here like knows solar companies or door-to-door companies are a dime a dozen and everybody started one. But tell me the biggest difference between all these others that are starting up there doing a million, 2 million, 5 million a year

versus a nine-figure exit. What's the difference? What did Solgen and Chris Lee do that's different than maybe some of these smaller ones? Yeah. And this, this isn't just, this isn't just for the solar industry, but any industry is building enterprise value. Most, most entrepreneurs, when they get in, especially I would say in the ClickFunnels community, I know a lot of people like they get into just make money, right? Like they, they look at like, what is my, what is my cost to acquire? What is my cost to fulfill this much money? I'm going to take that. I'm going to put it in my pockets. And what they start doing is they rob the business rather than reinvesting in the business. And I say that's probably the number one reason that most entrepreneurs, is they want to experience success before they've actually earned it. And so, you know, for running before the catch.

Yeah, for sure. And that's, that's where I failed initially. But you know, the, the big thing for us is like building on enterprise value is like more than a sales organization.

There's a lot of pop-ups, solar companies and stuff like that, that they just sell product. For me, I knew that owning all the verticals in that space was absolutely necessary in order to build something that somebody would want to buy from me. And so, you know, not only was it the sales and marketing, but we, well, a lot of times they just own the sales. They don't even own the marketing, right outsource the marketing so i knew i wanted to in-house my marketing because that's my baby maker and i and i'm not going to outsource that um and so and then my my sales is as well my installs so we we did all of our own construction uh when when we sold the business 18 locations

uh you know operating huge warehouses in fact uh, when I stepped down as the CEO, we had $40 million in inventory sitting in our warehouses. I mean, it was real business, right? So you got the install side. The other thing is we did the distribution side, which was very unique. We went directly to manufacturers. I met with people in China, in different areas where we sourced, we actually owned that whole vertical importing equipment, dealing with tariffs and taxes and everything else. So that was the distribution side. And then a year and a half into the business, we bought a loan processing company, a bank, to be able to actually do our in-house financing. And so we owned everything besides the manufacturing of the product. Um, and,

and then part of owning all that was, was actually developing out standard operating procedures and processes that were not people dependent, right? And really the difference between enterprise value and just something that makes money is do I manage the people or do I manage the processes? Because if those people get hit by a bus or quit or whatever else, will the business go on? The same thing goes for the business owner and so on and so forth. And so from day one, launching this thing out of my garage, that was where our focus is on. One, how are we building culture? Two, are we building processes and creating true enterprise value that somebody one day will want to step in and buy this thing? And so we launched in 2017, 2018, we do 16 million. 2019, we do 32 million. 2020 was an interesting year. We do, I think,

35 million. 2021, we do 89 million. And 2022, we do $233 million in revenue. And so at one point, Financial Times had us logged as the sixth fastest growing privately held company in the nation, any industry. Inc. 5000 had us logged as the 12th fastest. I think the only reason why there was a few more higher on Inc. was because these were like roll-ups and consolidations of companies where ours was purely organic growth. And the crazy thing is we got real lucky along the way, man. We presented, like we were always taking action and looking for opportunity. And fall of 2019, I get the itch that, hey, instead of generating leads and putting a salesperson in a home, we should generate leads and sell them remotely over Zoom. And we launched that November

2019. And everybody knows that five months later, the whole world shuts down. You're looking like a prophet. I'm looking like a prophet then. And by the time it shuts down, we got a 25 person sales floor already built out and we're ready to ramp. And once again, there's a lot of luck, but luck is typically just because you're looking for it, right? You know, I don't know if it's anything, but there's this, there's this sickness going on over in China. Like, and I'm like, wait, what? And he's like, yeah, man, they're saying it could be something. It could potentially throw a kink in the actual importing of equipment. I think we really need to take everything that's in the

savings in the checking account and invest into investing equipment and get ahead of this just in case it does. And I'm just like, dude, I trust you. Let's go. We make this huge order. We get it all. By the time that stuff hits port and we get it in, literally the shutdown of the world is happening but more crazy is like the shutdown of these ports i don't know if you remember oh yeah nobody could get equipment for anything no one's around the ocean for weeks at a time we can just come like doc right yes yes and meanwhile meanwhile we're sitting on almost eight months worth of of inventory purely because this guy literally caught covid december of 2019 three months before anybody was even talking about it it was wild that is crazy you're like

forrest gump with the uh bubba gump shrimp boat exactly that is exactly what happened there that's awesome dude we had kind of a side conversation when we ran into each other a couple weeks ago down at Traffic and Conversion, which, by the way, hey, did you win that gambling night? I know you had stacks of chips, man. Dude, we got second place. We went all in on the last one because we knew we had to go all in in order to win it. And dude, freaking dealer showed a 16 and got a five or something. Oh my God. It was ridiculous.

Big shout out to Eddie and Ashton. That was quite a party. That was awesome. But hey, one thing, one conversation we had in the hall, we're talking about this exit, right? Yep. And you're like, dude, if I knew what I know now, we could have totally multiplied that. Like, what are a couple of the key things that maybe, you know, now that you're willing to share that could have multiplied that,

that exit? Well, well, first off is like knowing what value you actually have in the marketplace. Like we had, we had built an incredible business and, you know, we were told by a lot of people that you're only worth so much of a multiple. And frankly, like, you know, we hired a good banker and we had good representatives, but like we did not get in front of necessarily the right buyer. Right. And, and knowing what, knowing what we wouldn't know now, we could have gotten in front of more potential buyers that would have paid significantly more from a

multiple standpoint. And for those that are listening, when you go to sell your business, it's not that these PE firms just knock on your door and say, Hey, you're willing to sell like that occasionally happens. That's like 2% of the transactions. The other 98%, you actually go through what's called a process where you hire a banker, you do a quality of earnings, you put together a marketing book, you send it out, you send out a teaser. People say, Hey, I'm interested in getting the book. They look at the book. They say, oh, I'm interested in this range. That's called an IOI. And then you take your IOIs and you whittle it down to a few people that you want to do management interviews with. From management interviews, they come in and they submit LOIs and a letter of intent

is actually exactly detailed of what they want or willing to pay for the transaction and how they're going to fund it and all that stuff. Then you sign the LOI. You go through 60 days of rubber gloving and then them doing all their own due diligence and everything like that. And then you sign a final operating agreement and a big check hits your account. That's the process that literally nobody will ever tell you about. In fact, I've, I've yet to find anybody that even tells you that stuff. And so, and so like, had, had I known, so I knew that's what the process was, but had I known like what multiples I could actually demand, like it would have been,

it would just been a different game and, and we could have had a better banker and those types of things, but you know, no regrets. It was a great experience. Yeah. Wow. Super cool. Hey, so one last question too. So here you are a business owner, like you got five kids and a wife, right? That you guys have been together forever. Now what? Like, what are you going to do from here? Yeah. So I tried the, I tried the retirement thing for like six weeks. It's not your style. Dude, it sucks. You know, society sells you a freaking lie, right? Like get rich, stop working and travel the world. That's bull crap. Like getting rich is cool. Like, don't get me wrong. Like I love having money and gives me freedom to do different things and whatnot. But real joy, passion and purpose comes from creation. I'm a big believer in the word create. And I believe that that's what God put me on this world to do on this earth. And whenever we're actively creating, it's when we feel fulfilled, we feel joy, we feel happiness. Creation can come in a

lot of different ways. And sometimes creation comes in a way that doesn't produce money but most of the time creation does have a money derivative because create when when you create value value money is a natural derivative of value right like there there could be things like you want to compose music and you never sell it to the world or you know you you do things that are very hoppy driven but they actually have a purpose and you never sell it to the world or you do things that are very hobby driven, but they actually have a purpose and you create like, there's those things, but those are very few. Most of them have money aspects to it. And so for me, the thing that pushes me every single day is to build stuff and create things and improve lives of other individuals. Like I'm on a mission right now to change the world through entrepreneurship. So I run a company called the Founder Project. Our whole purpose

is to educate business owners on how to build a proper organization that focuses on employee development outside of receiving a paycheck. Because a paycheck is only one aspect that an employee's there. If you can show them that you can help them eat their peas daily is what I call it. So it's physical economic associations and spirituality, that you can help them be that well-rounded individual, they will be the best paycheck maker for you ever. And you will be able to create incredible value. And so I'm on a mission to share that with the world. We do all kinds of really cool things now. I got my podcast, I'm building a course, but the whole really back end thing is so that I can go and partner with

and acquire incredible businesses that buy in to what I am pushing. And like, cause like for me, my purpose is like, how many, how many billions of lives can I touch and, and really change the culture of the world? That is, that's a great vision. Very cool. Yeah. So, okay. Final wrap up. I know I just asked another question, but you, you said at the beginning you were trying to impress like three or four people. All right. And you said that was wrong. Who are you trying to impress now? Dude, myself and God, man. That's, that's. You got to try to impress Andrea too, man. Come on. Dude, if I impress myself and God, I'll naturally like, like the, the other derivatives will happen, right? Like there will be people that are, that are impressed with the way I live. There will be

customers that are impressed with the business I run, but like that, that really can't, that really can't be my, my focus. Like, because, um, you know, whenever we think outside of like being the best version of ourselves, like that's the definition of pride, right? Like compare comparison. And so like, dude, I, like, I'm really just not trying to compare it. Like I want to cheer everybody on. I want every, the law of abundance. I want everybody to win. And so like, I know if, if I go and I am the best version of Chrisley possible, dude, there's no way that my wife won't be impressed. Right. Right. I love it, man. Anything else, Ben? What else you got?

A little bit. So behind you, for those listening and not watching on YouTube or streaming the video right now, we've got a Michael Jordan jersey behind us. So clearly a student of the game, Chris has been studying leaders for decades now. You've got to build your Mount Rushmore of favorite leaders that you have followed. Could be inside and outside of business, who you pick? Yeah. So in my office, there are three signed, uh, what you'd be like ancient documents, um, from American history or different history. And, and, uh, there's the three things that I, that I claim that I stand for. So one, I have a, a, a George Washington signed document. And George Washington, in my mind, was the freedom fighter. I fight for freedom, the ability to choose, the ability to think for oneself. So like being a freedom fighter.

The second one is I have a document of Thomas Edison, handwritten letter signed by Thomas Edison. And he was the entrepreneur that never gave up. And I, and I tried to, uh, live my life after that manner that like, I may fail, but I just keep going regardless of what happens. And then the other document is a, is a signed document by Nikola Tesla. And he was the great dreamer, the one that, that really thought that he was going to change the world. And so like that, those are, those are who I try to pattern my, my leadership and who I am as far as, um, if, if you don't mind, do you want me to tell a quick story about this Jersey? Please do. Absolutely. All right. So this Jersey,

this Jersey means so much more than Michael Jordan's signature on a, on a rookie, uh, on a, on a rookie, uh, Jersey. Uh, what it is is, uh, is is, so I love Jordan. I got all the shoes and I think he's, yeah, a student of the game and all those things. But this jersey means more than all those things combined. So I was in a, it was actually when I was neighbors with Chris. The summer of 2013, I was in a sales competition. It was the year after I had won a Range Rover.

And I was coming back through another big bracket. And I was in the championship of this particular bracket. And I had an opportunity to win that essentially required me to lose my integrity. But the interesting thing was, what it was is I could have had these security systems installed and then they could have canceled within three days. And technically it was within the rules of the game, right? You could have certain amount of cancellations. And I had people that were willing to do it for me. Right. And, and ultimately I decided that it wasn't like no amount of money, no prize or whatnot was worth sacrifice my integrity, even though it was within the rules of the game. And, uh, and so I walked away and I ended up getting second place and the prize for that second place was this Jersey. so oh yeah super cool and so yeah just when i when i when i think when i look at this jersey it just it reminds me to to never to never sacrifice my integrity for any amount of money or success and so yeah that's that's that's why that jersey hangs

behind me that you can you can tell man too and i i see you getting emotional our listeners can hear it too it's like if you don't have that what do you have and how cool is that that a second place trophy that you now have like a symbol that represents that integrity congratulations man on everything you've done listen and from a long time friend i see you man like this is super cool and you are a champion to other people you're you don't get um any joy or anything out of having more than anybody i can i can tell that you're champion for everybody but with that in mind how do people find out more about you where do they go like for the

founder project we're going to be able to send some people your way. Yeah, you bet. So, I mean, follow me on Instagram at Chris Lee QB, like quarterback. You can listen to my podcast, lots of free nuggets out there for running businesses. It's the founder pro podcast. It's a singular, the founder podcast. So yeah, those, those would be the two best ways. If you DM me on Instagram, as long as you're not giving me a generic DM that's like, hey, I like what you're doing. Tell me about yourself. You trade crypto question mark? Yeah. As long as you're not trying to push crypto on me or anything else, I'll probably respond. Awesome. Well, thanks, man. You've

been a great guest. Anything else, man? No, Chris, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate it. See ya.