Start With A Win - How to UNLEASH your POTENTIAL with Jeff Lerner part 1 of 2

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's the best way to unlock your potential and actually find a better self, a better business, and greater results? We talk about that today on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we talk franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, this is Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. I'm really excited about today's guests. This is a fascinating story

Starting point is 00:00:30 and someone you can learn a lot from. So let's dive right in. Let me take you back to 2008. Jeff Lerner was a pianist facing eviction, divorce, depression. He was almost, almost a half million dollars in debt due to a wrist injury. Imagine being a pianist and having a wrist injury. Over the next decade, he founded three eight-figure businesses, remarried happily, got in great shape, and had four children. What does he attribute this

Starting point is 00:01:00 to? He attributes it to his entrepreneurial life operating system that he developed based on the three P's framework. We're going to dig into that today. In 2019, he founded the Entree Institute, a whole life transformation platform that combines his life operating system with entrepreneurship training, something we all could use. In 2021, he launched his podcast, Unlock Your Potential, and he's also enrolled over 250,000 students in his entrepreneurial education company. Huge success. He's doing great, and we're happy to have him on the show today. Jeff, welcome to Start With a Win. So grateful to be here, Adam. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Hey, this sounds like a little bit of a roller coaster ride in life. Can

Starting point is 00:01:49 you take us back to 08 when you started struggling? And you were a jazz musician, right? And how did you, you know, you crashed from an injury, you know, professional sports injury, stuff like that, and you started coming out of it. Take us there. Yeah. So, I mean, I guess the first question is how much time you got because it was quite the ordeal. But I will actually, I guess, to set the record straight or make the record worse, perhaps. My struggles extend way beyond 2008 or way back past 2008. I dropped out of high school to become a musician and, and I really never didn't struggle, uh, from, from that choice. And I, it was a choice I willingly made. So, you know, we, we, we make our bed, we sleep in it, but I was a working

Starting point is 00:02:38 musician all through my twenties, uh, even, and I actually ended up putting myself through college, even without a high school diploma, because I, I got good enough at music. I was able to get a music scholarship. And I did learn that, uh, if you're, if you're good at something that's, that's in demand for a particular purpose, they will change the rules for you. You know, the, the pesky, the whole, you got to graduate from high school before you go to college thing. Yeah. They, they, they actually ended up waving that for me because I was a pretty good piano player and they needed a pianist in the jazz orchestra. So, um, but anyway, uh, yeah, you know, I think the reality is the life of a jazz musician is a hard life. So I was always struggling, but I was all, I had a very unique experience where I was exposed to almost, it's like playing gigs on Mars,

Starting point is 00:03:27 only I was playing gigs in the mansions of wealthy multimillionaires and billionaire entrepreneurs. I got in with this one booking agency that they liked me because I was young. They liked me because I didn't smoke. They liked me because I was articulate and I could connect with the guests, but I didn't over-talk the guests. And so it was this one agency that booked a lot of the really, really high-end private parties in Houston, where I'm from. And so they started booking me in my early twenties. I'm this broke musician, working gigs, going to school. And I start getting booked to play piano in these big mans you know, big mansions on these, you know, quarter million dollar pianos. And it'll just be like a dinner party with like

Starting point is 00:04:09 a billionaire and 10 of his friends, right? They just wanted to have a live piano player. And I started getting exposed to all these really successful people. And I can, eventually I connected to the Dots and I was like, these, they're all entrepreneurs. These aren't like middle managers at Home Depot or they aren't even like get to create for a living. I create music. They create value. I'm broke. They're not. Maybe there's a way to be creative in this world because the whole reason I dropped out to become a musician is because I just didn't see myself grinding away at a job every day. And so I was inspired to become an entrepreneur in my twenties, even though I was broke. And I started starting every business I could think of. And I outline all this in my book. I failed literally a dozen times. But ultimately, in my late 20s, I did end up, as you pointed out, 2008, I was $495,000 in debt.

Starting point is 00:05:18 I had gotten a couple SBA guaranteed loans to open franchises. I know you have some franchise owners in your audience, and I'm glad that that's hopefully working really well for them. It did not work very well for me. I picked a hell of a time to open two franchise restaurants, which was 2007, right when the world crashed. And so 2008, I was, like I said, $495,000 in debt. Most of that was personally guaranteed SBA loans. And I'm sure some of your franchise know this. When you default on an SBA loan, it's bad because bank. The bank exercises their guarantee with the U.S. Treasury, and the U.S. Treasury comes after you for their money. So 2008, I was basically hiding from the government, trying to figure out, not that I had much for them to take anyways, but trying to figure out how am I going to rebuild my life?

Starting point is 00:06:18 I'm a musician. As you mentioned, I had a wrist injury, so I couldn't even really play that many gigs. And I discovered the world of online business, internet marketing, digital entrepreneurship, whatever you want to call it. And I spent my last few hundred dollars on a course, kind of a Hail Mary, a course on affiliate marketing and was able to pay off $495,000 in debt. I settled some of it. I had landlords and attorneys and all this stuff, but paid off

Starting point is 00:06:46 a good chunk of that and worked out the rest in 18 months with affiliate marketing. And that was so... So 2010, I was out of debt. I was free. And I've just been doing online business, various iterations of online business. I really... you know, having tried the brick and mortar franchises and failed miserably and then dug myself out with digital business. I'm understandably, I think, partial to these kind of new economy creator business models. And I've been doing them ever since. And then in 2018, I actually, I had a digital marketing agency that I sold and decided to start teaching people how a broke jazz musician was able to completely turn his life around in 10 years. Not just, as you pointed out, not just make money, make enough money to dig out of debt and have a good life, but get remarried, get happy, deal with

Starting point is 00:07:37 my trauma, deal with my junk, get in shape. And that became what's now Entre Institute and yeah, quarter million students later, it's, it's the most successful business I've ever had. Right on. Well, first of all, congratulations. I mean, you, you know, you're, you paid off your debts. Congratulations to you for that. You know, you, that was the, the largest economic downturn that happened has happened in our lifetime. And, you know, second to the Great Depression, I guess. So it's fascinating, you know, and you're one of millions of small businesses that went under during that time. So, you know, it was a difficult time for sure. I want to dig into your, you know, entrepreneurial life operating system, though, because that is really the foundation that not just propelled you, but also this other quarter million people. Now, granted, you've got to put this stuff into play in order to make it work.

Starting point is 00:08:37 And you and I both know it's, you can give somebody a system, but if they're not accountable for the system and operating the system, they might as well have not even had it. So I want to talk to you about, I guess, the foundation of this, which I guess is the three Ps. Is that correct? So get into that for us, please. Yeah. So I mean, this life operating system is basically something I developed sort of organically. It's not like I woke up one day and said, okay, I've been a dozen time failure as an entrepreneur. Maybe I should create an operating system and then that will unlock success. It wasn't like that.

Starting point is 00:09:15 It was more of like, I fumbled and stumbled my way through even my successes. I was making it up as I went and kind of figuring it out, right? But eventually in 2018, when I decided, okay, I'm going to start sharing my story and my journey and teaching people, I sort of can, you know, my goal, even when I started Entra, my initial email signature, I wasn't like founder, CEO, Jeff Lerner. I was valedictorian is how I signed my emails. I wanted to be the best student of what I was teaching. And so I, I know because I've been an affiliate, you know, I started in affiliate marketing and

Starting point is 00:10:02 when I was an affiliate, I had thousands I was an affiliate, I was an affiliate for online courses back then, kind of in the early days of online education. And I sold all these courses. And frankly, I dealt with a lot of people who, to your point, they bought the course, but they didn't implement. And so they would come back to me and be like, this didn't work. I want a refund. And I'm like, well, you didn't buy it for me. I was just an affiliate. Go talk to the guy you bought it from, but also why didn't it work? And they're like, well, you know, once you dig into it, they're like, well, I only watched the first video and I never really put it into practice. And it's like, well, of course. And so what I realized, and those courses were, were, were online marketing courses.

Starting point is 00:10:40 Some of them were financial education courses. Some of them were online business courses. And what I realized is there's a giant implementation gap on the internet. There's like so much like education has become a commodity now on the internet. But implementation, which produces transformation, which is what people actually want, is in shorter supply than ever. Because when you sit at home and you consume online education, there's like no accountability. There's no teacher making sure you don't cheat and you actually take the test and, you know, presumably move there's, there's constant progression. So I said, okay, if I'm going to T you know, basically, if I'm going to start helping people transition from, let's call it the employee life to the entrepreneurial life,

Starting point is 00:11:22 I need to do more than just teach them the mechanics of business or marketing or sales or whatever. I need to help them actually live the life that overcomes all these limiting beliefs, overcomes all this doubt and uncertainty, overcomes fear of sales or fear of putting themselves out there, overcomes procrastination, overcome. I mean, you know, if you have an entrepreneurial audience, everybody knows that the, the battles that we fight every day. Right. And we're entrepreneurs when people have never been an entrepreneur before and they go, Oh, I want to do that because I want the perks. I want the lifestyle that I see on Instagram. They are signing up for a brutal fight. You know that,

Starting point is 00:12:06 right? We know that. And so I wanted to take everything that I had learned and package it into an operating system so that I could say to people on day one, look, you are signing up for the hardest thing you've ever done. And I don't want to have to BS you about that like everybody else on the internet does. I'd rather equip you to deal with it and be successful still. And so I created this operating system that, by the way, I started living myself. Again, I was trying to be the valedictorian. And I attribute a lot of the success of Entra to the fact that its founder has been living this operating system now for five years. And as much as I had been successful before that, I have done more in the last five years than I did in the previous

Starting point is 00:12:51 lifetime, right? And it's because of this operating system. So yeah, at the core of it is what we call the three by three success matrix. I'll give you just like the really high level version. And the three by three success matrix is founded on three pillars. And so it's three by three, because there's three pillars that each have three components. And the first one, as you pointed out, is the three P's physical, personal, and professional, the three P's of success, we call it. And we can double click on that if you want. The second pillar is what we call the three legs of successful action, which are knowledge, environment, and resources. These are the things. So, so the first three physical, personal, and professional, that's how you orient your time. It's kind of like

Starting point is 00:13:33 every second of every day, I should be able to concretely define what I'm doing to improve myself physically, personally, or professionally. And if it doesn't fit into one of those buckets, I don't know, I might be wasting time, right? The second, the three legs, knowledge, environment, and resources, these are the three legs upon which all greatness stands. A lot of people think, oh, if I just knew how to do the thing, then I would do the thing. And then they go learn how to do the thing, or they buy a course to teach them how to do the thing, and then they don't do the thing, and then they wonder why they didn't do the thing. It's because of environment and resources. It's not because of the knowledge, right? Knowledge is a commodity. And so we have, you know, and there's, again,

Starting point is 00:14:12 we can double click on any of these and go deep. Like I've built out almost like a, almost like a religion. I mean, I hate to say it with that term, but like there's, there's deep theology to all of this now. It's like frameworks and application mechanisms and assessment tools. And this is like so much of what we geek out on here at Entre now. But anyway, then the third pillar is what we call the three phases of legacy. And this is income, growth, and wealth. And this is like one of the hardest but most important kind of tough love pieces of this framework or this philosophy? Is it like, if you want to build real wealth, which by the way, a priori, I suggest

Starting point is 00:14:55 you really do want to build real wealth. Don't listen to the knuckleheads that tell you that money doesn't buy happiness. Money solves every single problem that money can solve, which is the majority of problems. And it unlocks or it amplifies the joy of a lot of other things because now you can afford to include other people. You can afford to do it without stress. You can afford to send little Johnny to rehab that insurance won't pay for so that he doesn't die from Oxycontin. There's a lot of awesome things that become possible when you have money. Right? And so the three phases, income, growth, and wealth is like, this is how every, unless you win the lottery or inherit a bunch of money, this is how every

Starting point is 00:15:34 successful wealth journey goes is through these three phases. And so when you go on the internet and you start learning about how to, you know, you, you look up Warren Buffett and you're like, I want to, you know, 10 great Warren Buffett talks. You're learning from a guy that's in the third phase you you've skipped too far ahead of the line you need to learn how to get through the income phase to create surplus to hit what we call your awesome life number then you can grow you know you can anchor it to what we call the growth phase then you can move to the wealth phase and play Monopoly for the rest of your life. And so, so much wealth education on the internet is people, is coming from people in the wealth phase, talking to people in the income phase,

Starting point is 00:16:12 and they don't realize there's different phases. And so then they can never make it work. And literally most people die in their income phase. They never get out of it. And so we actually give them an orientation, kind of an arc to understand. Anyway, like I said, we can go deeper than any of this, but those are the three pillars, the three P's, the three legs and the three phases. And ultimately, the one thing I'll add is, why are we doing all this? Just so we can feel good and look good and be cool and be an Instagram lifestyle influencer and get hot girls or whatever? No, we're doing this because of what we call the fourth P and the fourth P is our purpose. There is some reason that you are on

Starting point is 00:16:52 this earth, some service, some impact, something you're here to do. I believe this to my core and the, and the three by three success matrix, that is your battle readiness training. So that as your fourth P, so that first of all, you can stabilize your life and figure out what it is that you're here to do other than just hang on and survive. And then as that purpose emerges and that clarity emerges, now you're in shape physically, personally, and professionally to go crush it and achieve your purpose. So that's the framework. And that's a fascinating framework when you look at it. For a lot of people, obviously, it's overwhelming. But I think you kind of, you know, you look at people that are trying to endeavor upon this and you're telling them, do it in a good order.

Starting point is 00:17:39 Don't jump ahead because then you're going to be overwhelmed. You know, the whole Warren Buffett reference, things like that. I mean, we always seek out, oh, that person has done it. I'm going to go ask them, well, wait a sec, find somebody who's done it and is doing it because you can be darn right. Warren Buffett is not out making sales right now. And the guy reads it. He sits at home and reads books six hours a day. That's literally what people talk about. Like, oh, Warren Buffett reads like 200 books a year. Great. Good luck making a living reading 200 books a year. Exactly. Exactly. So let's jump to the rubber meets the road here. And, you know, the biggest challenge that people have is generating income by generating clients,

Starting point is 00:18:17 I would say. I mean, it's, or maybe that maybe step 0.5 of what should I be doing to begin with? Where are you seeing the breakdown begin here in this process? Because for everybody listening, this is not easy, first of all. But if it was easy, everybody would be multimillionaires out there. Becoming wealthy is difficult, but it's extraordinarily rewarding. What you're doing is you're balancing three things, time, money, and freedom, which they all play together and they all result from what Jeff is talking about here. So Jeff, tell us, where are people breaking down the most in this process? And what is that boot to the rear that gets them going and keeps them moving to start seeing results here? I think there's a, let's call it a psychological and a tactical answer to that question.

Starting point is 00:19:14 And I don't think I would be doing right by your audience to ignore the psychological. The reality is most people are broken at the starting line. And that sounds harsh. Let me explain what I mean. If, if I sat, you know, bring me your average one-year-old and I'm going to sit, I'm going to, I'm going to get down so that I'm on their level. And I'm going to say, listen, listen here, Mr. One-year-old, I'm going to teach you, uh, there's 26 letters and I'm going to teach you to assemble them into tens of thousands of what are called words

Starting point is 00:19:49 and then we're going to form together sentences that have what's called syntax and dialectical structure and then you're going to learn to form sentences into paragraphs that ultimately become arguments or logical chains or like the one

Starting point is 00:20:06 year old's just trying to like eat his thumb. And he's like, I don't, I don't, like, he can't even tell you, he doesn't understand what you're saying. Right. But the reality is if you don't learn language in this world, you die, right? You have no life. You have no chance. You have no future. You have no potential. So you never have to tell the baby, Hey, keep working on this. I, you're going to need it. The baby just knows if I can't communicate, I can't survive. So, and I promise learning the English language is a lot harder than anything we're talking about. So why were we willing to do that? But then like three weeks into our online course, when we're struggling with like the Facebook ad platform, we quit. Because we haven't actually associated it with our survival.

Starting point is 00:21:00 We haven't connected it to the same level of drive and desire and, and fundamental belief for our life that we had those earlier things that we learned. Swimming is incredibly hard. Reading is incredibly hard. Math is incredibly hard. Language is incredibly hard. Certainly brain surgery is incredibly hard and people do this stuff every day. And so the reason I say that is I think the great denier of human potential or the great restrictor or the great imprisoner of human potential is this lie that we'll be okay if we just follow somebody else's playbook. And that playbook that was designed for all of us says, go to school, get a job, go into debt, get a 30-year mortgage, pay into a system, and basically trade all your time and most of the best years of your life.

Starting point is 00:22:03 And at the end, we'll give you this little thing called retirement and it'll be okay. And if you believe that is life, you probably won't do the work. You probably wouldn't even, if I had told you, you know, if you, you would have actually foregone learning the language itself. If they had told you at one years old, don't worry about this English stuff. All you got to do is goo goo gaga your way through. But as long as you do it for 60 years, you get to retire and play golf. Babies wouldn't have even bothered to learn English if they bought into that. Right? So you've got to believe that that life is as unfulfilling and unrewarding as a life without the basic ability to communicate with

Starting point is 00:22:46 your fellow man. And here's the thing. I do. I did. At 16 years old, I dropped out of high school because I looked at that life and I saw it as the bogus bankrupt promise that it was. And so it was as distasteful to me as a life with no communication, right? And so I have, since that time, I have done whatever the hell I had to do to forge my life, my path, my way as an entrepreneur, not as an employee. And I'm not denigrating employees. I'm not saying that there's not a time in our life where sometimes we have to trade time for money. But fundamentally, I believe, you know, Ayn Rand said, and I made the worst mistake of my life.

Starting point is 00:23:27 I read a bunch of Ayn Rand in my early teens. And so I was forever untethered from society. She said, civilization is the process of setting man free from men. You know, that when you're in the village, when you're in the tribe, when you're in the prehistoric, you know, society, your entire life is this dependency on your social network, right? And we know from Jung and Fromm and Adler and all the progenitors of modern psychology that the number one producer of hostility is dependency. This is why most, like when you go to Al-Anon or you go to like the enabler or supporter therapy work

Starting point is 00:24:12 for people that have addicts in their life, it's basically anger treatment because you're so pissed off because you're dependent on this person because you love them and you have a need to enable them even though they're toxic and it's destroying you, right? Why is America so pissed off these days? Because we're dependent on these large form institutional structures, whether it's big agriculture, whether it's big healthcare,

Starting point is 00:24:37 whether it's a government that tells us to put on a mask and we're not allowed to go into the local laundromat. We're dependent on these structures that are simultaneously letting us down. But because we're dependent, we have so much anger. And that's why dependency breeds hostility because you don't have autonomy. Right. And so I just, again, I picked up on this at an early age and I was like, I think I have to make a choice about what I'm going to value more freedom or money. And the big lie is that they're the same thing. Freedom isn't about how much money you have. It's about what you're having to do to get your money. Right. And so I, you know, again, most people are broken at the starting line because they, they're not showing up willing to do whatever it takes to win the race.

Starting point is 00:25:20 They're showing up looking for something easier than the thing that they're currently doing not realizing the thing that they're currently doing Is built around a bribe that's based on a false perception of ease because the gratification is all delayed They're like, oh this you show up you clock in you trade your time you get your paycheck You get your 401k your taxes get taken out We've automated everything for you and and it's all worth it because you're going to have this pot of gold at the end. And it's not until the end you realize, holy crap, I can't retire. I have $400,000 in my 401k and I live in the city of Chicago. Well, when I invest that conservatively and don't take undue risk, I'm now going to what? Live on $22,000 a year in a major US city. And that's, and by the way, the average person trying to retire doesn't have

Starting point is 00:26:06 400,000, they have 95,000. And we're supposed to live on like five grand a year in passive income, or no, we just live off of our savings. And hopefully we don't live too long because it's going to be gone in five years. And if you understand the origins of the lie, how the Federal Reserve created the system, how the United States higher education system was created, how the social security and entitlement system was created. This is all like a plan. It's about a hundred years old and I'm not sitting here going, there's like these diabolical Illuminati masters that did all this. They had a problem. They had hundreds of millions of people and they tried to set up a system that could reasonably manage people, but they did not set it up for our benefit in terms of thriving. They just set it up for our benefit in terms of basic

Starting point is 00:26:56 survival. So if that's all you're going to aspire to, don't become an entrepreneur because it's harder. It's harder this way. Sorry. I know I got on my soapbox. What a great, great statement, Jeff. Jeff Lerner. We're going to make this a two-part series. We will see you back on the next part to talk about going from minimum necessary to maximum possible and using that A word in your life to make it happen. We'll see you on the next episode of Start With a Win. Thanks for joining us on Start With a Win. Be sure to like and subscribe to this episode and share it with your friends. Also, be sure to check out Adam on YouTube at Adam Canto CEO, as well as on all the social media platforms. And don't forget, Start With a Win.

Your Ad Here

Start With A Win - How to UNLEASH your POTENTIAL with Jeff Lerner part 1 of 2

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.