The School of Greatness - 161 How to Lead a Team and Scale Your Business with Than Merrill

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

"The moment you think you know it all is the moment your business starts to decline." - Than Merrill If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes and more at www.lewishowes.com/161

This is episode number 161 with Fan Merrill. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. Welcome everyone to this very special episode with my dear friend, Mr. Than Merrill,

who is not only a stud on the football field, but also a stud in the boardroom. And a quick note about Than. He is one of the foremost real estate investors and educators in the country, a nationally recognized expert in real estate investing, real estate education, and entrepreneurship, and a sought-after speaker who shared the stage with speakers like former lady Laura Bush, Tony Robbins, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki, and the list goes on. Thanh is one of the coolest dudes you'll ever meet. And I met him a number of years ago through social media, really,

where he was helping me and my business partner at the time grow our business. And we were helping him with some LinkedIn and social media stuff to help him grow his business. him with some LinkedIn and social media stuff to help him grow his business. Now, Than is a former NFL football player turned mega successful entrepreneur, business owner, and has an incredible story journey, but also he's just so cool and down to earth and in my mind, egoless. He is very competitive, but he's so warm and open. He's all about team. He's all about we. He's not about me, which is really cool to see and how successful he is while living that type of lifestyle and that type of philosophy. We talk a lot about the keys of success from what he's done to translate his playing day success coming from Yale and then going to the NFL and then translating those key disciplines

into being a first-time entrepreneur, business owner, and building it into the mega business that he has today. It's incredible what he's doing. Everywhere I travel, I hear his commercials on the radio, and he's just blowing up in business. And I feel like he's one of the guys who's doing it the right way, and he's really serving a lot of people along the way. So without further ado, guys, I want to dive into this because we've got a lot of great content. This is one of my favorite ones just because we got to hang out in his house in San Diego and kind of do this in one of his rooms in his house. I hope you guys enjoyed this relaxed feel, the conversation. But really, I like to dive in deep every time so i know you guys are gonna get a lot

of good go the nuggets out of this one with the one the only fan merrill welcome back everyone to the school of greatest podcast very excited today i've got my man fan merrill in his house in in San Diego on the podcast. What's up, brother? Doing great. We're sitting here in the spare bedroom talking into two microphones. Awesome. I'm really excited to be with you today and share some insights.

Yeah, man. When did we meet? Like five years ago, maybe? Yeah. We met through a friend of ours, mutual friend of ours and uh you've spoken at a couple of our events over the years and done a great job presenting and teaching so yeah that's how we kicked it off then you joined our flag football team and we really formed a deep relationship at that point so and we played ping pong and we're still like even right now we need

to play a rubber match soon if you ask lewis who won it's it's lewis but if you ask me who won well i'll probably see it myself so we're not sure you've got a like a serious setup ping pong table with what's it called like the robo pong or something oh man so it's a robotic arm that shoots ping pong balls at you and so i figured if i got a table and at the time i wasn't very good so i figured well if i want to get good and I don't have anybody to play with, I got to get this robotic arm that just fires balls at me. It goes so fast. I have a video of you somewhere of just rapid fire hitting it back. Yeah.

A lot of good times. And the reason I wanted to bring you on, Dan, is because you've built this incredible business. And I don't know how much you're actually allowed to talk about, but you've got, how many employees do you have right now? Close to 300, of course, across a couple of different businesses. Wow. And you do mostly real estate investing education. Yeah. So we do kind of, we have a real estate development company, which has been my core business for the past 11 years. And we also have a real estate brokerage. So we have, we do the traditional side as well with real estate agents, so we both do the investment side.

We also have a lending company, so we do a lot of lending across the country. And then we have fortunebuilders.com, which is our real estate educational company where we teach people what we've done in our development company over the past 11 years. Right, because there's so many people that want to get into real estate as another form of income and building a side business or make it full-time for themselves all around the country, right? Yeah, exactly. A lot of our clientele is everyone from a casual investor who wants to pick up a couple of passive income rental properties to people that want to build an office and do 50, 60, 70 deals a year. So you have a wide variety of different people that want to utilize real estate,

either part-time or full-time to increase their income and really just create a better lifestyle for themselves. And it's been fascinating. Five years ago when we first connected, you were already crushing it and you've been doing business for about 10 years now, I believe. when we first connected, you were already crushing it. And you've been doing business for about 10 years now, I believe. But before that, you were playing in the NFL, right? And you went to Yale. And then you got drafted.

Did you get drafted? I did. I snuck in in the last round. Really? You went seventh round? Snuck in. Wow. Seventh round, yeah. You weren't Mr. Irrelevant.

They must have been recruiting somebody else, and somehow they found me. And you went to the Bears for two years, correct? Yeah, I got drafted by the Buccaneers, and then I played with the Bears, and I loved it, loved every minute of it. It didn't last long in the NFL, but I really enjoyed my experience there. And why didn't you last long? Was it injury-based? I did get injured, but then when I came back, I got cut after I was injured.

So the reality is, you know, it's a short career, but learned a lot of valuable lessons from it for sure. Do you, looking back, do you wish you could stay in there longer? Do you wish you would have had like a 10-year run if you could have stayed healthy? I would absolutely say, you know, I would have loved to have five, six, seven years. That was my goal starting out, but it didn't work out that way. But I think it definitely prepared me for what I do now. I think there's a lot of lessons that you take away from athletics that you can apply to business. And so it's something that I will always miss and always appreciate and realize that a lot of the lessons I've learned over the year, I'm very thankful for that opportunity. What would you say are some of the biggest lessons that translated directly from sports in general, but maybe the NFL, into what you're doing now? That you would say if you did not have those principles or that foundation or those lessons really understood that you probably wouldn't be as successful as you are now? You know, the one thing about the NFL is the discipline.

I really didn't understand discipline until I got to that level. And I realized if you want to stick around in that business every day, you have to wake up and you have to study, you have to focus on your body, you have to focus on the way you eat, you have to wake up and you have to study. You have to focus on your body. You have to focus on the way you eat. You have to. And so it really instilled in me a great discipline. I look at, you know, the military, for example, and a lot of very successful business owners, you know, come from a military background or they come from some sort of background where you've learned to be disciplined at that level.

And so, you know, I approach my life the same way every day now is, Hey, in the NFL, you're not there the next day. If you're not on time, if you're not doing what you say, if you're not following orders and so you're cut. Yeah, you are. And so although it is a very ruthless life's business and it doesn't last long, it teaches you a lot of very valuable lessons because in business, you know, there's always competitors, things are always changing. You're always adapting and you're having to deal with loss. You know, as an athlete, you deal with losses, you deal with getting beat, you deal, have to learn to deal with that and come back the next day or come back the next play and, uh, uh, and really adapt. And so I think it's very applicable to what we do.

What do you think, uh, what's another lesson that maybe a lot of entrepreneurs don't have and really adapt. And so I think it's very applicable to what we do. What do you think, what's another lesson that maybe a lot of entrepreneurs don't have? The entrepreneurs that fail, they don't have these certain attributes that you've learned. What's another lesson besides being committed and consistent every day, waking up and doing the work was number one.

A lot of people just want to start making money or building a business on the side, let alone getting to the level you have with 300 employees. What's something else that they miss out on that you really learned? I think one of the most important things I learned very early on was to build a systems dependent business. And what do you mean by that?

You know, when I started with my real estate investing business, every time I did something new within that business, I would document it. And then I would say, okay, I don't want to do that activity again. How can I replace myself? And so a lot of entrepreneurs start out and their business is them. If you take them out of the business, there's no income that's produced, right? Most small businesses out there have a few employees and, and the main person driving the business is literally working in it day in and day out. And so. And they have it all in their head. They have it all in their head. The intellectual capital is all in their head. So it's a very difficult business to sell because if you are your business, what are they buying?

You know, what you need to develop and what I always share with other entrepreneurs and everything that you do, think about how can I do this one to 10 times myself and then create a process to plug somebody else in that wants an opportunity. So it might be an employee. It might be you develop a technology that helps you do that process more efficiently. So it's all about how you use your time. And so from the very first time I did a direct mail campaign, I was licking and sticking envelopes trying to generate leads. And I realized, OK, I don't need to do that again. I know how long it takes, how much it costs.

I'm going to plug somebody else in to replace myself. And then I'm going to I'm going to work on another marketing and lead gen campaign. I'm going to figure that out. If it's, you know, making if you're calling clients, you know, we did a lot of for sale by owner prospecting very early on. And I realized, wait a second, it's just a process. You got to ask these questions. You got to gather this information. So I created a script and we hired someone to do acquisitions.

And I replaced myself. So you're doing it first to learn that process. Then you created the process, wrote it down or recorded it on a video and then said, okay, now you train someone else to do it. Exactly. Where did you learn that from? There's a great book called The E-Myth, which I'm sure a lot of you have probably heard of or read over the years and kind of talks about the philosophy. And I've read a lot of,

uh, another, you know, a lot of books on selling companies, you know, how do you actually sell a company? So I said, if, if that's, you know, the end goal, let's say 30 years from now or 10 years from now selling a company, what, what does it actually take to sell a company? What do they buy? Well, they buy systems, processes, and then they buy a management team. And so I said that's what you have to do is you have to first – you are your management team. You have to build systems, processes. And then once you're to that level where you're producing enough income, then you start hiring and you start hiring management staff to replace yourself in different areas.

And so every business that we've had, we've taken that same approach and it's worked very well. And so you basically go from being a technician working in the business to a manager to a true entrepreneur running the business. And so it's kind of like I call it the three levels. You graduate up the chart as you go. What do you think are some of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make right now who are trying to scale? I think the biggest mistake is thinking that somebody can't do it as well as you. And it's interesting because initially when you hire somebody, you're right. But eventually,

especially if they're more focused in their activities, as an entrepreneur, you might be doing accounting one day, you might be doing sales the next day, you might be designing something from a marketing standpoint the next and cleaning the bathroom. Yeah, you're doing, you're literally doing everything. And so if you bring somebody in to just work on one aspect, let's say it's marketing. Eventually, after a few months, if you hire the right person, they're going to do it better than you. And a lot of people have a fear of either A, someone doing it better. There's a lot of people in my company that do things that are a lot better than I do. And it's just a matter of assembling the right people on the bus at the right time.

And the thing is, you know, maybe if you were going head to head and you were only focusing on that one thing like sales, then maybe you could be better than that person. But if you want to really scale it right, you need to put people in place who are just as good, if not better, or almost as good as you would do it, you know, at your top game. Because you could probably be the best at everything you decided you wanted to do in your business. Sure. If you put the time and the energy to focus just on that every day, but you don't want to do that. You're right. I feel like I have in my business, a really good understanding of every department. I know there's a lot of people in every department that work in my office that know things at a higher level than I do. In fact, are more skilled in that department. But I have a good understanding of just how all the pieces come together. And then really just the person driving the business

has to have the vision for where they want it to go. And then you find the people to come in who can really buy into that vision and then do a lot of the day-to-day work. Right. What's your personal vision and what's the end game for this business? Yeah. Number one is right now I'm having fun working with our team and our clients. I love what I do. I work with some of my closest friends that I grew up with. Um, so the, the end game is just to continue to grow our business, to deliver value to our clients and, and, uh, you know, make it, uh, make it more enjoyable for them, make the experience better. So I don't have like a two-year plan or a three-year plan. Are you trying to sell it or no, not right now. You want to be,

have the systems in place and be able to scale it so that you could sell it if you want to. You know, one of my goals is I have a young son, and I want to coach him if he chooses to play football. It looks like he will, though. He had a firm grip, man. He caught my hand, and he was like gripping that thing. He's a great kid. And so one of my goals is to scale back on the number of hours. But I love what I do.

I love the people I work with. But, you know, the people I work with, but, you know, I've always wanted to coach football actually, but on my own terms and my own terms means I'm not having to fly, you know, from college to college to college or high school to another job, you know, coaching is a rough life for a lot of people, but I think it's a great way to give back to people and kids. And it was a big part of my life. So ultimately down the road, I'll transition into that a little bit more, but we'll still have the business for sure. And you mostly work from home. Is that right? I do. My office is right down the street. A couple blocks away. How do you structure that and set it up a good, I guess, environment for your employees to feel comfortable that you're at home working from home? Obviously, I know how hard you work and you're probably the hardest worker there because you're constantly executing.

But how does someone, if they want to work from home and they have 300 employees and the employees never see the boss, let's say, or the CEO or the leader, how do you structure an environment so that they feel empowered, inspired, and not like you're just off at home, you know, riding on their efforts and just taking money or whatever, you know, whatever they think? Yeah, it's a great question. Number one is I'm definitely present every day at the office. So I have multiple meetings a day where I'll go to the office. So a lot of times, you know, I might go to the office twice a day to have a meeting. I found it's a good balance to work from home and be at the office because when you work at the office,

sometimes people become dependent on you making decisions. And you want your team members who work in your office to be empowered and to think like business owners, to think like, I call it an intrapreneur. They're entrepreneurs within a business. And they may be starting a new division of the business, a new income stream. But in order to do that, they have to be very skilled at making decisions. And the only way to really learn to be a good decision maker is to make those decisions. So a lot of times when the entrepreneur is too present, everyone within the office is dependent on their skills as a decision maker. And it's not that I say I have a better skills. I've just made more decisions over the number of years. So it can be very easy where someone becomes dependent. So being at home

has actually empowered our employees to make decisions has empowered them um at the same time i i'm definitely present people see my face it you can't be absent right there has to be a balance between the two uh but it works well for me because at home i can focus and i'm not getting you know people knocking on my door like when i used to work in because i did work in the office for years and they just come and ask you questions all the time. Yeah. And that was holding them back and holding us back. And so I realized if they want to get better, they want to be empowered, they want to make better decisions and it's forced them to do that. And now they're much better at what they do and they create more opportunity for themselves too. Sometimes I hear people,

they say who have like a small business, maybe a few employees, they feel like they're making so many decisions throughout the day that they have zero energy at night because they, I don't know if it's decision fatigue or whatever, where they're constantly making decisions. And at the end of the night and their personal life, they're like, I have no clue. You just make a decision what they're like their spouse or whatever. Right? Like, I don't know what I want to eat. Just make a decision. Yeah. Uh, how do you manage all the decisions you make and how would how would you recommend an entrepreneur managing that you know that's so they have energy it's a really good insightful question i i i absolutely for years had decision fatigue and it wasn't until i started

empowering our team members to make decisions without me. And even when I knew sometimes, as long as it wasn't a major decision that was going to cost the company, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, if it was a decision that might cost a couple thousand or even a couple hundred dollars, I would let them make the decision, even if I knew it was wrong. Cause the only time they would learn is when they've made a mistake and they've owned the mistake because it was their decision. And so it's definitely a growing process. And I, you find that with a lot of entrepreneurs, they're afraid to let smart team members make this. If you hire right, they're, they're going to learn the business. They're going to be, uh, they're going to want

to make decisions. They're going to want to grow. And so I don't think there's any way to solve decision fatigue that I know. Maybe there's some mental hypnosis tricks or meditation, but for me, it was empowering our managers underneath within our organization. As soon as we did that, wow, what a difference in the day-to-day lifestyle. And speaking of hiring the right people, I hear it all the time from people saying, there are no good people out there to hire. Or I hire someone and invest all this time and energy in training them, and then they leave in six months and it doesn't work out. And I repeat that cycle. First, what's your turnover rate like? Do people stay for long periods of times in your company? And then how do you find key people?

How do you know when they're the right person or not? And how do you keep them inspired to stay long for a long time in your company? Yeah. First thing I'd recommend is a great resource. There's a great book called Top Grading. It's written by Brad smart. It's literally, you think your textbooks in college are thick. This one's thick. I mean, I probably won't read it. I'll have someone else read it for me, but it's a, it's a great book because it talks about how to find a level talent, a hires. And it talks about

a hiring process. And so so for example when you interview at our company we have a four-hour hiring process that you go through what i mean whereas before we we developed this process when we were just starting out it might be half an hour and we'd be chit-chatting in a coffee shop yeah and that was how i was making a decision feeling yeah and i was going off a feeling and my gut was wrong. I wouldn't say the majority of the time, a lot of the time. And so it was costly. You would have someone turn over and you'd have to replace them. But once we put this process into place, it really, it upgraded the talent of individual who was working at our office. What's the process? Can you share? Yeah. You know, the, the top grading process is, is really an extensive application and then it's divided into two, two hour interviews.

So you sit down and you look at their work history and then you look at their competencies, which is divided into different categories. There's like 13 different competencies. We look for everything from ethics and integrity to, uh, communication skills, to organization skills, to manager, managerial skills. And so we ask very detailed questions in a very set order. And then we give them real business problems that we've had. Almost like if you've ever interviewed for a consultant job at a consultant, you know, if high level stuff, high level stuff, they're going to give you real business problems that you've encountered just to see how you think. And so that's how we

conduct our interview process. And it's very, it's been very good because we get people to really respect the opportunity that they're given. And when they come in and they respect, you know, it's, it's, if I, this is a bad analogy because interviewing at our company has nothing to do with, you know, the military, but when you're, you know, a Navy SEAL, why do they are, why are they, they, why did they buy into the process so much? And I'm not a Navy SEAL, so I shouldn't be speaking on their behalf, but, uh, you know, they go through hell week together. I mean, rigorous training where they earn a position and they now are a brotherhood. Right. And if you can implement a good interview process, people really respect you as a company, as an owner of the business more.

Right. And so they come in with a totally different mindset. Gotcha. That's interesting. in with a totally different mindset. Gotcha. That's interesting. How important is it to focus on your body and your health in order to run a successful business? I know there's a lot of out of shape and overweight people who have businesses, but it seems like they're miserable or they're missing the point of living a good life. So how important is health for you and your employees? And what do you do to maintain an elite athlete type of lifestyle

while running a business? I think it's vitally important that you as the business owner embrace a healthy lifestyle. I think, first of all, your diet and nutrition. I mean, energy levels differ greatly. If you're not eating well, you'll probably be two thirds as productive as you could be just by changing your diet. And the, as far as working out, you know, I work out six days a week. So I go, um, and I, I prefer CrossFit cause they're very short 30 minute workouts most of the time. So most of the time when I work out four days a week, I'm doing that. Two days, I'll do just a run because it's all I could get in that day.

Down to the beach? Yeah. If I'm local, right down to the beach. Or if I'm traveling or wherever, then I'll try to get in some sort of physical activity because it's very important. It's also important, I think, as a leader of your company, if you embrace that lifestyle, your team members and employees will do the same thing and they'll follow suit and they'll be more productive. Absolutely. And it's, it's a cult,

you know, you create a culture and the culture really the, the founder and the, the, the CEO, CFO, you know, the heads of whoever created the organization, whoever the founders are, create the culture. And so that's something we've tried to do. You know, once a quarter we get together, our company, and we do what we call an inspire event. So everybody in the company gets together. If people work virtually, we'll have somebody come in and just share for, you know, 90 minutes to three hours, depending on the topic. And, you know, the last inuary we had somebody come in and talk about nutrition and different types of uh so the whole company's on a water a salad and no sugar and no

bread challenge i can't say the whole company but the majority of people sign up for yeah and so things like that um are you doing that right now yeah so i'm on the i'm on no bread i'm on the no bread no sugar is next week no sugar is next week no gluten or bread or is it just no it's just no bread it's it's one thing at a time it's a simple challenge right actually a really good idea by one of the team members who works with us he started off with you know a water challenge because everyone can have success drinking a certain amount of water each day and then you go you kind of progress up to the salad challenge and but i think it all starts with whoever's running the company i think that's important and so you know our one of the local um gyms there's probably 40 50 individuals at

our company that all go to the same gym crossfit gym yeah yeah so it's uh yeah that's cool yeah it's uh it's your local how many employees local uh probably about 120 wow man you guys have grown a lot so i think a couple years ago you only had like 30 or 40 yeah it was just a couple of us in the office stacked up on top of each other did you guys take another floor now or something we have a couple buildings all right around here yeah a couple buildings so it's not just the one down the street yeah where we live is right near the beach so there's not a lot of office space so we we picked up a couple office buildings and that are right across street from each other so what are some of the other rituals besides working out like what's your morning look like both physically you know going through the motions but also the mental preparation you have for each day. Yeah. Well, one thing, now that I'm married and have a young son, I definitely had to transition

some of my hours to morning time before they woke up because I do work from the house. So one of the things that I like to do right off the bat is every morning I get to, I walk down to my office and for about five minutes, I just organize my day and I prioritize my day. And I think a lot of people don't do this and it's so small, but sometimes the most productive things are simple. And so I look at, you know, the 15 activities that I have to do for that day and I put them in order and I say, okay, what's the hardest one that I've been putting off? I'm going to get that one done first. And then I just prioritize my time and I time it. So I put down, okay, I'm going to spend 15 minutes on this.

I'm going to spend an hour on this and I'm not going to spend more time because a lot of times we end up spending three hours when we were supposed to write, maybe we're designing a presentation that we're going to give to whoever we spend forever on. Yeah. So you, you spend four hours. I saw, I'm going to give myself a limit. Yeah. I give myself a limit. And you, you put a time measurement against each one of these priorities first. Yeah.

Really? So I always say done is better than perfect. Of course. Because you can good and done is better than perfect and never done. Yeah. Cause that's, and that's the way I've always been. Cause there's always going to be things that interrupt your day,

you know, as a business owner. And so I always, you know, make sure there's a little bit of time allocated for that and then just put a limit on how long I'm going to work on that. And so I actually plan out the, the, however long I'm spending working that day into those blocks. And it's very, been very effective for me because it keeps me on track. And, you know, it also keeps a mind that can sometimes get really excited about, you know, I get very excited about new ideas and new things. It's helped me say no to a lot of opportunities that they would really would have been more distraction than actually a good

opportunity for the company. Do you feel like you say no a lot, a lot more? Uh, when I started out, I said yes to everything and now it's transitioned to no to almost everything. I'm pretty lucky I'm here, man. You said yes to me. I said yes to you. I knew you were going to come here, and I knew I had to refresh your memory about how many actual ping pong games you won. As long as we're even.

That's right. We are even. You got that mean forehand. I couldn't figure it out. It's been, man. Yeah, I couldn't figure it out. I'm sure you whoop me right now. I couldn't figure it out. The spin, man. Yeah, I couldn't figure it out. I'm sure you whooped me right now.

I haven't played in a while. I'm always curious about the way people think. Top performers, great athletes, and how they visualize the results they want to create. You know, for me, before every game, I would go on the field and actually visualize myself catching the ball and seeing the ball come to the air, running through the plays, thinking about what happens if there's an interception

and going through every possibility. Do you visualize anything in business right now like that? Do you think about, here's the result I want to create. Is there a process to achieving those goals? I think there definitely is. I think visualization is very important for the growth of your company. I can't say I'm the master of this. This is not, you know, I still study this, uh, to this day. Um,

I was big on visualization when I was an athlete. Um, I visualize opportunities and then I, I try to somehow study, is that a good opportunity or not? So I'll look at, I look at a lot of other businesses. I'm always studying other businesses, not just in our, not just direct competitors of what we do, but I'm looking at other companies, how do they market, how do they lead gen? And, and then what it does is that, that curiosity really helps me visualize something new for our business. So I'll, I'll see a way a company does something, you know, maybe I'm, I'm studying Zappos or Google and I'll have an opportunity where it helps me develop a vision. So I'm curious. I'm always asking questions.

How does that company run? How does that company lead gen? How do they pay their customer service? How do they pay their salespeople? What is their commission bracket? So I'm very curious. And then once I have a basic understanding of something that works, I say, okay, well, how can I apply this to my business? And then I really start to visualize, okay, we need this person. And when we generate this much revenue, we can hire someone to manage that department. And so a lot of my original ideas come from other companies, right? And just like people listen to your podcast to get ideas for their business, it's so different,

right? It helps them visualize what they should be doing, how they should be running their company. You know, I might say something about how we hire and they take that idea and run with it, right? So same thing. What would you say is your greatest asset that is better than everyone else in most businesses? Like your greatest asset that no one else has that you have? Myself or the company? Yourself. I would say competitiveness. You know, one of the things... That's true. I'm an extremely competitive person, so I'm always

pushing everyone within our company to be better. Yeah., one of my favorite saying is, you know, don't tell me how we can't do something or don't tell me how we don't have time for something. Tell me how we can do it. How can we get this done this week and be more strategic? So I really think, you know, if I had to say my competitiveness and my, my passion, I guess would be, you know, I'm very passionate. I get very excited about ideas and I like to see them work. And that's something that I think inspires other people within the company. Yeah. You talked about you want to be a football coach someday and because it inspired you

to become the man you are because of the coaches you had as well as, you know, how important coaches were for me. Do you feel like it's important for every entrepreneur to have their own entrepreneur or business type of coach or even just a moral compass coach throughout their entire journey? Or is that irrelevant in business? Absolutely relevant. I think all throughout your career, you need coaches. And it's like, I call it having a board of advisors. You know, there's people that have advised us over the years. And some of those people have started, you know, from day one, some people have changed over the years. But I think if you look at any big company, the CEO,

the top management, CFO, COO, CTO, they generally will have a board of advisors. They have five or six or seven trusted individuals with different expertise, accounting expertise, business management expertise, leadership, marketing. And so I think you have to find those contacts, trusted advisors who have done something great in their careers. A lot of times they might be later on in their career and their way of giving back is through sharing. And so I've always believed strongly, you know, when I started in real estate, I didn't know anything about the real estate development business. So I found

coaches and mentors. When we started building an educational company, when we started lending money, I've said, who's great in this area that I could talk to network with? And really it's, you know, it's kind of the mastermind effect. But it's an even closer group. And so a couple of weeks ago, we were working with a consultant. We'll always, I said, the moment you think you know it all is the moment your business starts to decline. The moment you think your stuff doesn't stink anymore,

that's when things start to decline. So I'm always open-minded, listening to other consultants. The reason I love consultants and I believe in consultants is a lot of times, even the answers they give you, you might have already known, but you might not have been focusing on them. Or just sitting down and having somebody else look at it helps you be more aware of what you're doing and not doing in a business. And then that outside perspective, it can't be replaced. I mean, it's so valuable. That's a big asset for a leader or a CEO like yourself to just be open to saying, Hey, I want to learn from everyone. It doesn't matter if you run a $10,000 a month business, like teach me something

that you do that I could apply to my, however many millions you have, you know, in your business. Absolutely. I could sit here and pick your brain and you would tell me a hundred things I didn't know about how to run our business. And, and we could probably go vice versa, you know, just being open-minded and receptive as opposed to saying, Oh, I didn't know all this stuff. That's a huge asset alone. It you've got to drop your ego. You do. You do. And that's not always easy to do.

Wow. Because you'll – it's like you might walk into a conference and you've been to a similar conference before and the person's saying something you know and all of a sudden you start tuning them out. Well, 10 minutes later they're saying something you don't know and you've tuned them out and you're thinking about something else. You're checking your email, and you missed valuable insights.

So I think you can learn from people within your company. I think they've all worked at other companies or had other careers or experiences. So just keep asking questions and keep being curious. That's cool. Two questions here, or two responses I'm looking for you. questions here or two responses I'm looking for you. One is who is the most influential coach in your sports career from five to 27 or whatever? And what was the biggest lesson you learned from them? And then who has been the most influential coach since then in your business career? And what's the biggest lesson you learned from that person? You know, that's, those are

great questions. I would say, even though I only had a short time uh to play with him tony dungy uh was one heck of a leader and so even though i was only there a short time from the moment i met him he was such uh an ins he really inspired me because every coach until that time was i wouldn't say uh a typical coach but football coaches have a certain type of personality right and he was soft-spoken yeah um you know a very religious man and he could control the entire room being so you know the entire team being soft-spoken and uh and not cursing you know like a lot of the coach, everyone else does. Yeah. And he was, and he led his, he was a great man because he led his position coaches coach at a high level. And so he was a great manager. Like if he was working in a fortune 500 company, he'd be a

tremendous CEO because people really, he didn't, uh, you know, there's a lot of coaches that, you know, they try to get involved in everyone else he let his coaches go there and if you look at man there's so many head coaches who worked underneath him over the years and uh just a tremendous leader very detail orientated and that's one thing that i i definitely uh learned from him so yeah i think and then in the business side of things who's you know interestingly enough I'd have to give my number one entrepreneur would be, you know, my mother actually, believe it or not, would, she ran a dancing school. She coaches you? Well, she does.

Sometimes I want coaching and sometimes I don't want coaching. But I learned a lot from her over the years. Just, I think a lot of the discipline that she had she ran a dancing school so tap ballet jazz you know things like this and she had customers and she dealt with parents and kids and and so i learned a lot from her over the years just about every day what it takes to to wake up and work hard you know what does work working hard look like and what does staying focused look like and so she still gives me advice over the years although what gets hard to take sometimes but uh and then and my second coach i would add now is now my wife my wife gives me a lot of

perspective on what i'm doing wrong because she can she can hear you know when I'm on the phone or if I'm you know being uh you know in situations overly competitive or too abrupt or to focus on the numbers yeah or to exactly not hearing what people are trying to tell me and so she gives me really good perspective so those are probably the the two most current and i always bounce ideas off her constantly you know where she gives me really good feedback i like that hopefully she's listening to this podcast she's a she's a force she's a former you know was she olympic uh hopeful or she make the uh she uh she played on professional beach volleyball for for like eight years and uh played college basketball so she's uh and now she has a beach volleyball club that she coaches kids in different parts

of the country. Yeah. I want to ask a few more questions to wrap it up here. This is a question I started asking people about the three truths they know. So if you, you know, if today was your last day or it was the last day of your life in 50, 80 years, and you were able to leave three truths behind to your son, your family, the world about life. What would those three truths about life be? I think it's a great question. I think if I were to pass on words of advice to my son and anybody, you know,

listening to this podcast, I'd say number one is live with passion. And I think, uh, I think it's interesting because people always say, you know, I'd say my second truth is do what you love, but I'd, I'd put my first truth above that live with passion because in life, you know, and always have the blessing of doing exactly what you love. Uh, but if you live with passion and you find excitement in what you do, it changes your entire perspective. You might be working at a job right now, and there's probably ways that you could find to build more passion into what you do. And I think that's the number one thing I like to see in our company. I like to see people that are inspired about whatever it is that they're doing that day. They just read something. They just put something in emotion.

And seeing ideas work is something that gets me excited. And so I would tell my son, you know, live with passion. Second thing I would say is do what you love or do as close to what you love as you can. It doesn't have to be, you know, exact, exactly. For example, I would probably love coaching football more than I would love what I do right now. But it's pretty darn close. It's a second to probably my truest love of all, but I love it beyond the benefit of a doubt, right? So do something that you love or close to it, something you get enjoyment out of, whether that's work at a company, whether that's

start your own business. It's just got just gotta be in a field that, that inspires you. Yeah. And then I think the third thing is challenge yourself. If I were to say to my son or anybody for that matter, you know, when you get it, find ways to constantly challenge yourself. So I'm always coming up with things that challenge me on a weekly basis. All right, I'm going to run X number of miles this week, or I'm going to, I'm going to read, you know, every day this week. And so I'm trying to constantly coming up with challenges that create discipline. You know, I realized a lot of, you know, a lot of times myself and everybody included, we procrastinate or we lack discipline. So I

constantly harp on that and I would, life's too short to not try to be good at what you do. Yeah. So challenge yourself constantly. I like that. And if there were three books that you could leave behind, what would those three books be that you, you know, leave behind your family and your friends that represent? That is a good question. That is a good question. Maybe a couple, you know.

Can we throw in a couple of magazines in there? I didn't prep that before. The E-Myth is a great book. I think that's a – if you're starting a business, it probably is going to have nothing to do with your specific field, but it has everything to do with building a company and building a systems-dependent company. And that was really where the first idea popped into my head.

Now, the book, I can't say was enough to help propel a career, but it inspires an idea. The Art of Happiness is a great book I would recommend to everybody to read. And a great book that I read years ago with my wife and just something that I've always that I've always loved. And then man, a third book, Lewis, you got sports illustrated. No, there's a lot, there's a lot of good, uh, Tony Robbins has a great book, uh, awaken the giant within. It's great. I've read that book twice. Oh, I, one of my fundamental books would be thinking grow rich by Napoleon Hill. Most people have probably read it that are listening to this. I've read that book a couple times over my career. I've read a lot of books.

Have you read The Alchemist? I don't believe I've read The Alchemist. Oh, man, it's a game changer. Is it? I'll have to look at it. It's a quick read. Very cool. Okay, a couple questions left.

What are you most grateful for recently? What am I most grateful for? My son, by far. It puts perspective on life, and it really gives you something to think about beyond just you and your you know making sure that it's it's just fun to watch somebody model you know kind of what you do and you realize everything you say both good and bad he's he's gonna take from it so uh definitely you know my son tice is somebody who who is uh you know a great blessing in our lives what's something about you that most people don't know that would shock them? Well, one thing, I have a hyperbaric chamber sitting right here in this room.

I didn't even see that. I don't know if that's going to shock many people, but I believe strongly in health and wellness. And it's funny because years ago we got this hyperbaric chamber and most people don't know that you can actually sit in this thing and it makes you feel really good. You gotta be disciplined to do it. Sometimes I have a couple minutes, right? Yeah. An hour. An hour.

Oh man. Yeah. Yeah. Does it work? Uh, it, it definitely works. We can put you right in there if you want. We can do the whole podcast lying in the hyperbaric chamber. Maybe I'll take a photo in there and put it up on the show notes.

I don't know if that's as interesting as what you're looking for, but since we're sitting in here next to the hyperbaric chamber, it's all good. Um, cool. Well, before I ask the final question, I want to direct people where they can go to learn more about you or should they, um, check out fortunebuilders.com or is there, yeah, I'll have everything linked up. Yeah. Fortunebuilders.com is our main website and uh if people are specifically looking for for uh you know educational coaching when it comes to real estate investing fortunebuildersmastery.com is another website where you can find out even more information about our coaching so yeah those are our two sites and are you still on twitter and i don't do much on twitter anymore i'm still on Facebook yeah so I've embraced Facebook

I'm still there so you can find me a page there uh thanmerrill.com I got a personal page there and then uh uh yeah so they can check me out there we'll have that plus all the books and the things linked up on the show notes uh before I ask the final question I want to acknowledge you than for so much that I've learned over the years. And I really want to acknowledge you for your willingness to serve others. Because you've been of service to me in such a big way over the last five years without even knowing it probably. When you've had a bigger company, you've been so giving and open to coaching and mentoring

and just being friends with everyone that I see you interact with, you're constantly being in service to them. And I think it's really cool to see someone who is a CEO, who's a leader, who's focusing outward and being in service to rise others upward. And so I want to acknowledge you for constantly living a great life and showing others that they can live a great life as well. Well, I appreciate that. I really do. And I have, you know, I had the same thing for you. I've learned a ton from you over the years and, uh, I'm always, always interested in connecting with

other folks. If you're listening to the podcast, uh, you know, and you see me at a conference, definitely come introduce yourself to me and, uh, maybe we get a ping pong game, you know, exactly. Or beach volleyball game. Yeah. Yeah. Final question is, what's your definition of greatness? Oh, man, that's a good question. I'd say consistency in your actions that match your beliefs. I think you have to have an internal, you know, moral and ethical compass that drives you. And I think your actions have to match that. And so I really like working and being around people that are consistent, that do what they say,

that follow through. And it requires a certain level of discipline. It requires a certain level of, you know, it's not easy. You have to challenge yourself to always be consistent in your actions. So I'd say that, you know, if you look at a lot of great leaders, that's, that probably would be a good definition that they, they live by. And so I think that'd be something good to leave with everyone out there. Awesome to sit here and talking to two microphones in my spare bedroom. No, it's great, Lewis. You do a great job. And folks, I know if you're listening, definitely tune into Lewis's podcast. He puts a lot of time, energy, and heart into this for sure.

There you have it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please go back to the show notes at lewishouse.com slash 161. Leave a comment about the biggest thing you learned from this episode. We'll also have a question on that page right there we want you to answer. So make sure to go to that page, lewishouse.com slash 161 and answer the question for the comment section in the blog. Also, make sure to check out Than. We'll have all of his links there. We can connect with him on social media and also his websites and check out his business and kind of just see behind the scenes how he's doing it.

Even if you're not really into real estate or real estate investing right now, you're going to want to follow this guy because he is just a master at marketing. He's a master at building a business. He's a master at building a team and creating an incredible culture with that team. And there's not too many people I've seen do it at a level that he does it with the intensity and the warmth and the care and the discipline that he does it with. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. Again, make sure to check out lewishouse.com slash 161. Check out all of

Merrill's information and get connected with him. Also, make sure to subscribe to our free newsletter if you want to be on Team Greatness and you want to get all the best information from behind the scenes. Make sure to subscribe to the free newsletter over at lewishouse.com. You can opt

in anywhere you see an opt-in form for that newsletter. And we're going to be sending you goodies every single week after you deal. So I hope you guys enjoy this one. Again, big thank you to Than Merrill for coming on. Love that guy. And I'm a big fan of his. Hope you got a lot out of it. You guys know what time it is.

It's time to go out there and do something great. Thank you.