Start With A Win - From Hoops to High Performance, The Winning Formula: Ex-Pro Baller Reveals the Success Roadmap

Starting point is 00:00:00 welcome to start with a win where we unpack franchising leadership and business growth let's go and coming back to you from start with a win headquarters at area 15 ventures it's adam cantos here with dre baldwin dre has done four tedx talks he's written 33 books and he impacts millions of people online through his YouTube channels, his daily podcast. Dre is one of the highest performance people that I know, ex-professional basketball player turned businessman. Dre, we've been digging into a lot of the concepts behind why people do things and why people just want to do things,

Starting point is 00:00:40 as well as taking action versus planning and establishing goals. Everybody go back and listen to episode one because it connects really well to this. We're going to unpack even more of your mindset and how to actually GSD get stuff done on this part two. Dre, help me understand, we've talked about consistency and working on your game and things like that. You talk a lot about professional mindset. You defined professional last time on part one, but talk to me about this roadmap that you discuss. How do we put this roadmap in reverse in order to get some things done?

Starting point is 00:01:18 Well, it's actually a really simple thing. Roadmap in reverse just means we're going to deconstruct from your goal back to where we are right now. So let's just say somebody said, Dre, I want to make it to the NBA. But right now they're on the JV high school team. So I'll say, OK, in order for you to be an NBA, what would need to be true? And they say, well, I'll have to sign a contract. Some team had to want me on their roster.

Starting point is 00:01:38 And what would have to be true for that to happen? Well, I have to go to training camp and I got to outplay the other guys trying out for a roster spot. What would have to be true for that? Well, I got to probably play a summer league. And then before that, you got to get drafted or invited. And before that, you probably need to play in college so you can be on somebody's radar. So for that to happen, you got to actually be on the college scene. For that to happen, you got to be in college. You got to be on the club. So we would just deconstruct, working all the way back until we get to where you are today, where you stand today. And now we have our map in reverse.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Now all we had to do is execute on all the steps of that plan and that's how we get to the outcome. So that's the roadmap in reverse process. Wow. I mean, it sounds simple. I guess the execution part is the heavy lifting, right? Right. And we got to factor in contingencies, Adam, because just because we made it out like that that simple doesn't mean it always works that way that's the way you play as a mice and men yeah exactly right yeah all right so you've you've sat down with somebody who wants to get into the nba as a professional basketball player um and you've deconstructed that what comes next how do you how do you start okay i know what, I know what needs to be true, but how do I make that true?

Starting point is 00:02:48 So once we work all the way back to where you are today, you keep working backwards until you get to an action step that you can take right now. So let's just say we're talking about someone who wants to start a business. We do the same thing. You want to start a business that earns this much per year, let's say $100,000 a year to keep it simple. We work it back and you haven't started the business yet. You're still in your full-time employment. We work it backwards until we get to some step that you can take right now. And now we got to take that first step. And then we take the next step. Then we take the next step because we have the whole plan laid out, but we also, again, have to have contingency. So in case this step, step number three, doesn't go the way you expect

Starting point is 00:03:21 it, okay, what are some other ways we can get to step four without doing it the way we first planned? So, and these are the steps that had to be taken along the way. And when I'm working with somebody, if someone, if I'm coaching somebody, we're going through all these steps. I said, okay, all right, you see this map, right? Now you see what we have to do, right? And you see that there's some things on this map that you've never done before. And you're going to be challenged here. You're going to need courage, not confidence. I'm going to be there with you, but you're going to have to, I call it the 51-49 rule, Adam. 51% is majority ownership stake. All right. You got to take 51% ownership of this. I'm the coach, but I can't do it for you. You have to take ownership of this. As long as you're willing to take ownership, and coach you along the way, mentally support you emotionally, all of those things, but you have to be willing to take the steps. So as long as they're on board with that, then we can make it happen. Wow. I mean, you, you hit the nail on the head here with, you have to take 51% ownership. It seems like people want to take less ownership

Starting point is 00:04:17 in this day and age and throw some excuses in there or some, you know, the use the word, but, and for, and kind of talk around things. Do you see that happening and how do you deal with that as a performance coach? I do see it happening and I keep those people out of my world. I love it. If they don't want to, somebody doesn't want to take ownership, I can't help you because that will require me having more ownership of your success than you have. And that's probably

Starting point is 00:04:45 not going to work out too well. So I want to filter those people out and don't even want them coming in in the first place. And this goes back to that 80-20 principle that when you think about anybody running a business, you look at your business and the top 20% people who you work with, whether that's in revenue or the top 20% revenue that they generate that you make from them, or the top 20%, is this who you like working with the most, who are the easiest to deal with, your ideal clients? If you focus on those people, you're going to find some commonalities amongst them. And you want to focus doing as much work with them as possible and eliminate everybody else. So you want to filter the rest of those people out, but that's hard

Starting point is 00:05:24 for people to do because 80% of your clients sell. And you're to filter the rest of those people out, but that's hard for people to do because 80% of your clientele and you're really comfortable with that 80% of the clientele that you have to kick out. And that courage to kick them out is what allows somebody to go to the next level. But since a lot of people don't want to kick them out, they don't go to the next level.

Starting point is 00:05:38 This is what happens. Wow. It takes courage to get rid of those B's and C's and keep the A's in your world. And I've heard it put so many times, and I truly believe in this, A players hire A players, B players hire C players. Why is it that somebody, in your opinion, why is it that somebody that is trying to be mediocre

Starting point is 00:05:56 likes people that are less mediocre than them? I mean, wouldn't they want to get better? No, no. Most people want to get better in theory, but they don't want to get better in action. When they find out what it actually takes, the saying goes, everybody's a beast, so it's time to do what a beast does. Oh, yeah. do you want to be in a better position five years from now than you are right now? Everybody would say yes. But when it comes to the actions they would need to take to get into a better position, they usually are not doing it. They're kind of going through the motions and saying that they want to get better, but not actually doing anything to do it. And I tell people this all the time, Adam, that involuntary growth ends at puberty. So after you turn about, let's say,

Starting point is 00:06:44 21, 22 years old, you don't grow by accident anymore. You got to grow on purpose. You got to be conscious and intentional about your growth, which means you have to invest in your growth. You got to invest in their five forms of investment, time, money, attention, energy and focus. You got to put all of these into anything you're going to be successful at, which means are you hiring coaches? Are you going to seminars? Are you buying books? Do you have or you have a mentor? Are you held accountable in any way? What are you doing that's actually moving you forward? What are you doing every day? At the end of the day, can you look at your list of accomplishments and activities from that day and say, I did this today and this moved me forward and made me better at who I am and better at what I do or more valuable in the marketplace, most people could not point to even one thing. And it's not because they can't do it. It's simply because they're not

Starting point is 00:07:29 conscious and intentional about doing it. So most people don't fail due to a lack of ability or lack of resources or lack of information. That's all nonsense excuses simply because they're not conscious about actually doing something that will make them better in fact. Nice. I truly believe that. I mean, you and I are on the same wavelength here. In order to get something done, people, you have to take the actions that are required to get that done instead of just doing things throughout the day. It's interesting. I've seen so many salespeople, let's take sales for instance, in this manner, where you say, all right, what are you doing? Then they go, oh, I'm prospecting, but all they're doing is surfing social media. I go, what are you prospecting? Well, I'm checking on everybody that

Starting point is 00:08:16 I know and liking their stuff and staying in connection. I'm like, are you? That's a bunch of BS. I mean, let's put some hard, heavy lifting into our sales process. And I know you coach businesses and business leaders. What does hard, heavy lifting look like in business to you in order to get things done? Firing yourself. This is the most important thing. This is something that I myself have had to deal with because you gotta understand where i come from i come from i was on i was creating content in 2005 before we call it a content yeah right and this i didn't hire my first assistant until 2016. so for 11 years i was just creating content i was doing the blog post i was managing my list i was dealing with customer

Starting point is 00:09:02 service i was doing all of that stuff and it finally dawned on me at some point, I don't know if it was any specific thing, but it was one day. I just got to the end of the day. I've been working hard all day and I felt I was tired. I was fatigued from working, but I'm like, I didn't really make any progress today. I kept the ship afloat, but we didn't go anywhere. And it was like, you're running on a treadmill, right? You worked out, you're tired, but you're still in the same spot. And that's how I felt. I said, I can't keep doing this. I have to get some other people on doing tasks that I do.

Starting point is 00:09:34 They could be at least 80% as good as I am. That's the good enough point. And I remember Tim Ferriss talked about that. What are you okay with being good enough so that you can focus on the things that you do best? And this all led to something that I now can articulate very well. And I tell my audiences all the time is that most people are really great. I'm talking like money skills. I call them your million dollar skills and no more than three things.

Starting point is 00:09:58 Some people's only one. Some people have two. And if you're exceptional, you got three. That's it. And everything else you want to offload as quickly as you can. You may not be able to do it right now, but you should be strategizing. How do I fire myself from these other jobs so that somebody else can do it? So like how we ended up here on the show, my assistant reached out to you. All right. So I

Starting point is 00:10:19 fired myself from that job because I hate doing that. I hate managing email. I don't want to do that. I had somebody else do it. You got a producer right over there that we can't see, right? And you fired yourself from that job. I don't know if you ever did it on your own. You fired yourself even before you got it, right? So the whole point is you got no one to fire yourself from a job. So there are certain things that I know I hate doing. I hate managing, I'm not email, but advertising campaigns. I don't want to open Facebook ads. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to see it. I want somebody else to manage it. Just give me the report. How much did we spend? How much did we make? I don't want to touch it. I don't want to manage a CRM. I don't want to manage KDP when books come out. I don't want to do any of

Starting point is 00:10:56 that. I don't want to build another sales funnel. I'm never building another sales funnel. All my books, I built the funnel. I'm not building any more funnels. I will hire somebody else to do those things. Not that I can't do them. And this is the challenge. I can do all of those things. I'm good at doing all of those things. I could do it better. Probably my assistant can do it if I wanted to, but I don't want to do it. So you have to have the courage to fire yourself from jobs that number one, you either don't need to be doing number two, or not in your wheelhouse, the zone of genius, or number three, you suck at. And I tell my, I tell people, my audiences all the time, if I, cause I get people all the time who say, well, Dre, maybe

Starting point is 00:11:33 I don't need to do, maybe I don't need to join a program or hire a coach. Maybe I can just do it on my own. I'll say you've been doing it on your own for the last five years and we're here. So clearly somebody needs to get fired. You're in charge of the process of making you money and you're not making the money you want to make. You're fired from the job of making you money. Now, I've even told people in one of my mastermind groups, he made a website, right? So we had a call every Saturday, right? So we had a group call every Saturday. So Saturday, he says, I'm going to go make a website for some of my thing. I said, all right, next week, show us the site. He shows us the site next Saturday. I said, who made the site?

Starting point is 00:12:03 He said, I did. I said, you're fired. All right. You are banned from ever making another sales page again because you don't know what you're doing. This is not your skill. It's not your wheelhouse. You got to fire yourself from that job and put somebody else on the job who's better than you because if you present yourself this way, who's going to give you money? Not anybody who's worth anything, right? So we got to be honest with ourselves about when to fire ourselves from a job, either because you're not good at it, it's not in your zone of genius, or you simply don't need to be doing it because it's a drain on your energy. I know what I should be doing. I should be speaking to an audience or I should be writing. I shouldn't be doing anything

Starting point is 00:12:36 else. Those are two things that I'm great at. Speaking one-on-one or an audience, if you want to split those up into two things, then I should be writing. Those are my million dollar skills. If I'm doing anything other than that, I'm thinking, all right, how do I get myself off this job as quickly as possible? Smart. I'll tell you, I learned this lesson early on. One of my mentors had asked me, hey, what are you doing tomorrow? I said, I'm going to mow the lawn. He goes, why are you going to mow the lawn? He goes, how much money does that make you? I said, I don't know. I feel like I'm good at it. He goes, why don money does that make you? I said, I don't know. I, I feel like I'm good

Starting point is 00:13:06 at it. He goes, why don't you hire somebody to mow your lawn and go make money while they're mowing your lawn? And I thought, Oh, okay. I got rid of my lawnmower that day. Right. So, you know, we call that Adam, we call that using your money to buy time. And I tell my audience about that often is that because the person who you hire simply you gotta know how much your time is worth right so you familiar with dan kennedy yeah yeah okay so most people marketers who know their stuff know dan kennedy now he's he isn't big on the internet so a lot of internet babies don't know him but i know you would know him so then kennedy talks about this and his uh no bs time management but you got to know exactly

Starting point is 00:13:43 how much an hour of your time is worth so So then you can easily make value judgments. So knowing what an hour of your time is worth, I'm sure it's less than what you had to pay a lawnmower, right? So then you use that money, pay the lawnmower. Now you got an hour of time back or however big your lawn is, I don't know how big your lawn is. And now you can go do things to make money. And it's value-wise, it's absolutely making you more money. So that's, and I tell people that as well, if you know how much an hour of your time is worth as a writer or a speaker or a coach or a prospector or a marketer or whatever, you pay someone to do the minutiae tasks that you don't need to be doing. And now you bought time. And the other thing is the other piece of this is that if you're not

Starting point is 00:14:23 good at something, let's say someone's thinking about hiring you as their coach or joining your program or buying your book or hiring you as a mentor, and they're kind of apprehensive about parting with their money because they're like, this is a big investment. I don't know if I want to do this. Well, here's the thing. And what I tell people, if you keep doing everything on your own, you might figure this all out, but it's going to take you five years. If you work with me, or if you work with Adam, you're going to get it figured out. It's going to take you five months. Now, the price of that difference is we're talking four and a half years, right?

Starting point is 00:14:54 So would you pay, let's say your investment is $30,000. Would you pay $30,000 to buy four and a half years of time and add it onto your life? Because that's literally what we're talking about here. If somebody is on their deathbed and you're about to die and the doctor said, look, you're going to die in five minutes, but you come up with $30,000, you can live another four and a half years. Would you take the deal? Almost everybody would say yes. All right. That's what using your money to buy time means. So it's not just about delegating. It's also about how do I condense timeframes and achieve my outcomes faster by investing in getting to a solution faster than I would get to it by doing things by myself. Nice. Otherwise known as scale

Starting point is 00:15:32 and leverage people. Let's, let's take advantage of the, uh, the leverage that we can have because of the expertise out there. I mean, it's yes, it, it, it has a dollar sign assigned to it, but ultimately, it means more than that. It means substantial time. It means substantial future. And a lot of people, they come into this life and they're going, all right, I got a new job. I want to get promoted. Okay, well, hire a promotion coach if you want to get promoted. Why? Because the money you spend on the promotion coach is actually going to be paid for by the promotion that you get out of doing that relatively quickly. And then you've got additional runway. And instead of becoming a VP in a company, if you're in the corporate world, maybe you become a senior executive VP or a C-suite officer

Starting point is 00:16:17 because you started accelerating that growth through expertise. I mean, Dre's got a lot of gold here. Dre, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about balancing ambition because we are in a get it done type mindset here. We're about taking action, things like that. But let's talk about happiness and how that plays into it because we can be overwhelmed in our happiness if all we're trying to do is get the boxes checked and move on with our career. How did you balance happiness and all of this progress that you had? I know you have a wonderful family and you're really happy here, but people go, do I have to have one or the other? You always hear, oh, money can't buy you happiness. Well, I got to tell you, you're in charge of creating your happiness and having money with it is great. So take us through that a little bit.

Starting point is 00:17:07 What can you tell our listeners as far as your advice about finding that happiness? It's a good question, Adam. Nobody's ever asked me that. And honestly, I don't really think about happiness over the course of a day. I really don't. I just think about doing what it is that I want to do because the business that I have is something that I want to do. This is not something that was forced upon me. It didn't fall on my lap.

Starting point is 00:17:29 This is something that I intentionally and consciously created, which was it started with the athletes because I was just trying to figure out how can I stay connected to basketball and make money from it. And that's how I got on the internet. And then I knew I had to transition because I wasn't going to play forever. And I realized there are people who wanted a piece of what I was doing. And it morphed into what working your game became, but I'm not doing things that I don't want to do. So I'm happy doing this. This is fun for me. It's fun for me to get on here and have this conversation with you. This is not a drag for me. Like, oh man, I got to do another interview. I don't look at it like that. I'm excited to do this because I know there are

Starting point is 00:18:02 people who had never heard of me before and otherwise never would have heard of me if not for this collaboration. So I look forward to doing stuff like this and getting my message out there and hoping as many people as possible can actually catch it. I got ideas. I got three ideas for articles I want to write today that I'm going to schedule to go out to my email list. They're on the tip of my fingers. I just want to write them because I want to make sure I get that message out there because I know it's impacting people. So as far as happiness goes, it kind of just comes as a package deal with me doing what I want to do and living the way that I want to live and the win. I'm a competitor. So the win for me is serving more people. Of course, we want to make money. We're in business to make money, all of that stuff. That's all part of the

Starting point is 00:18:42 happiness package for me, but I never look at it like, what do I have to do to be happy? I'm happy right now. In this exact moment, I'm happy right now doing this, having this conversation. Right on. That's awesome. I mean, I guess if you're doing what you want to do, not what you have to do, then you get some intrinsic outcome from that in your level of happiness. And you get to share that with your family and your friends and really the people that you serve every day. But you're right. I mean, the service is a revenue generating model as well, which is okay. We're not all working at a charity here. We're working for the betterment of other people and they're willing to pay for that. Dre, you're online in a lot of places.

Starting point is 00:19:25 Where can everybody on Start With A Win find you on YouTube, your podcast, as well as your website? Sure, so my podcast is called Work On Your Game. So it's on all the audio streaming platforms. Pretty easy to find. You just look that up or look up my name. As far as social media,

Starting point is 00:19:41 I'm on every social media platform. So just name one, look my name up. I'm very easy to find on all of those as well. Probably most active on Instagram. My Instagram is just my name, at Dre Baldwin, because I use the Instagram stories function. But I publish on every platform at least once a day. At least my assistant does.

Starting point is 00:19:56 I don't like doing that either. So I make sure I get published on all the platforms every day. And what was the other thing? Oh, yeah. Work When You Game University. That's the place we're most focused on. That's the place where I do all my masterminds, coaching, et cetera. It's just work on your game university.com. But other than that,

Starting point is 00:20:12 then once you come into my world, we'll, we'll let you know about everything else. So awesome. Make sure you check out Dre online and work on your game. Dre is the CEO and founder of work on your game Inc. Dre. I have a question. I ask all of our amazing guests on this show, and that's how do you, as a professional athlete, as a motivational speaker, as somebody who coaches super high performers, how do you start your day with a win? Oh, great question. Morning routine.

Starting point is 00:20:41 Yes. Morning routine. So every day I wake up about 345 a.m. And between 345 and eight o'clock, that's the time when I'm doing, I guess what they call now self-care. So that's when I'm yoga, exercise, meditation, water, workout, get dressed. And by eight o'clock, I'm in work mode at the latest. The jacuzzi also. So those are all the things that I do to start my day, but there's a routine for that. And I try to get all of that stuff out of the way by eight o'clock

Starting point is 00:21:10 every single morning, but it is routine. I know exactly what I'm doing every day with my eyes closed. Awesome, man. There's a lot of value in this podcast as well as the one before this part one. Make sure you check that one out. Also, Dre, you've got a lot of great books out there. I love what you're writing. I love the content you're putting out in your videos. Everybody make sure you check out Dre Baldwin all over the interweb, as well as what he's written in his TED Talks. Dre, thanks for being on Start With A Win. Thanks for having me on, Adam. I appreciate you sharing your platform.

Start With A Win - From Hoops to High Performance, The Winning Formula: Ex-Pro Baller Reveals the Success Roadmap

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