Episode 112 – Lucas Root

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Automated Transcription

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Lucas Root 0:00
You just reverse engineered one of my personal mottos, which is be-do-have. Most people think about the have, I want to have the car or they’ll see somebody driving down in the Ferrari and they’ll be like, Oh my god, that guy is so lucky. He has a Ferrari. You ask him and he will set you straight instantly. He’s not lucky. He worked his freaking a** off to get that car. But doesn’t tell you the whole story that’s still 100% focused on the have and even if he sets you straight in the right way he’s going to talk about doing he’s going to say, I did these things that got me this car. I traded in the stock market. And one big I worked my b*** off in corporate management for 25 years and this was my bonus to myself when I hit 45. It’s all do have and you just hit right on the nail that there’s no have, there’s no do-have without the be.

Richard Matthews 1:01
…3-2-1.

Richard Matthews 1:56
Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And I have today on the line Lucas Root. Lucas, are you there?

Lucas Root 2:02
I’m here. Thanks for having me.

Richard Matthews 2:04
Awesome. Glad to have you here. And I know you’re – you said you were calling in from San Diego which is another warm part of the country. For those of you who are following us, we’re still stuck in Florida for the whole COVID crisis thing. And how have you guys been doing with all that stuff down in San Diego?

Lucas Root 2:07
You know, I’m not sure. Believe it or not, I mean, you know, I know that we’re still under some sort of restrictions, but COVID hasn’t affected me, except my social life at all.

Richard Matthews 2:34
I work from home and our kids are homeschooled. So it hasn’t affected us too much other than we can’t go out to restaurants anymore. And because we travel where we’ve been in one spot for 3 months, which is unusual. We usually travel and we move to a new spot every couple of weeks. So that’s all that’s changed for us, but we’re in a cool spot. So anyway, what I want to do real quick for our listeners is give them an introduction to who you are, and then we’ll get into start talking a little bit your story. So, Lucas has led a number of operations teams for various corporations on Wall Street for mergers and acquisitions for over 17 years. And after establishing a consistent track record of success, he started his own consulting business and left his corporate job. Since then, you’ve worked with some of the world’s strongest brands, including Wells Fargo, AIG, Bird, and The Pokemon Company, which I don’t know if you can hear it in the background, but my kids are currently listening to the Pokemon Company or the Pokemon show in the background there. And you still work with them. So that’s cool. And you work with strong brands and well funded great ideas who don’t quite know how to execute. So I guess to start with, why don’t you tell me what it is that you’re known for now? So what is it that you do? Who do you serve? And what do you do for them?

Lucas Root 3:47
More or less I’m an executioner, in the modern good version of that. I’m not a headsman.

Richard Matthews 3:53
You’re not to be a guillotine.

Lucas Root 3:55
I’m not a guillotine. Although I mean, while I’m not chopping off heads, that is a reasonable way to look at things in terms of, they needed a thing done, they had a tool to do it, they used that tool and it got the thing done. And that’s pretty much what I do. Strong brands will come to me and they’ll say, Hey, listen, we have this thing that we want to be done. Pokemon is one of my favorite brands. I’ve been working with them for 4 years, and they’ve done this with 2 different projects with me. We’ve got this thing we want to be done. We don’t have any expertise in this. We know that you’re a guy who can execute ideas. We’re ready. Let’s go. And I come in and I execute them.

Richard Matthews 4:38
So if you’re allowed to say what kind of things do you do for the Pokemon Company mostly because we’re quite involved with it with a bunch of young kids in my household.

Lucas Root 4:46
This is a first, plenty of the different people that I’ve talked to have been either brand fans or love the Pokemon Company. But it’s the first that somebody has been playing a cartoon, of the Pokemon one, when they interviewed me, this is pretty cool.

Richard Matthews 5:03
I can literally, I can hear it in the background.

Lucas Root 5:06
That’s very cool. I am allowed to say. I typically don’t talk about it much, just because most people like to look at the overview more than the details. What we’re working on right now is we’re building a Pokemon vending network nationwide. With 100%, Pokemon branded vending machines that will be available in grocery stores.

Richard Matthews 5:28
Nice. What kind of things will you be able to pick up for them because I can almost guarantee my children are going to beg me for whatever is in them.

Lucas Root 5:34
Right now the grocery store ones will only have TCG, trading card game products. So booster packs and ETBs, the elite trainer boxes, and the range of TCG products, and then we’re also working on –

Richard Matthews 5:57
That’s cool because my son just started getting into the card game. Right before the whole COVID crisis, we went to the regional championships and where was it in Central Missouri, or Illinois. And so we went to that. And we competed for the first thing like I competed when I was his age – when it first came out 20 years ago, I was 10 and 11-12 years old and going to the first competitions when they were in a little hole in the wall in the Toys”R” Us. And the regional competition had 5000 people there, it was insane. And I was like, this is way bigger than it was when I was a kid. And so we’ve got a couple of decks going and we’ve been playing the game and we play the switch game together. And I’ve been teaching them all the strategy behind – building the trading card game decks and everything. So anyway, it’s very relevant to my life.

Lucas Root 6:47
That’s awesome. So the TCG will be available in grocery stores and we will go nationwide, probably over the next probably 2 years. And then we’re also working on another concept for more premium retail locations like malls or airports and those are going to have a much more expanded variety of products. So it will still have TCG but it’ll also have plush and key chains and coins and –

Richard Matthews 7:17
The Pokemon Company I think is one of the unsung heroes in the brand world for having a solid brand that’s been going for 20 years. And the way that they take each generation of their stuff and build on the last one, and they do the things where it’s like, they have a TV show that ties into the video game that ties into the card game that ties into the plush dolls and ties into the movies that they produce. And they’re just doing a good job with it. Especially to have the sustainability that they’ve had for their brand, which I think is fascinating. And even down into their strategy for the trading card game is cool too because they have the online version of the trading card game that’s completely free to play. You can’t even spend money on it if you tried. And all it does is just is encourages you to – you build these decks and you get into the brand and it’s fun because my son and I are like we’re building these decks that are in this online thing. They don’t cost us any money. And as soon as you get it the way that you want and playing and testing against people all over the country and all over the world, then you go out and you buy money on the cards to get them so you can – cause you can’t play the online version at the tournaments. You have to play the real one. And I was like, Oh, it’s so brilliant.

Lucas Root 7:54
They’re one of my favorite companies that I’ve ever worked with. And apparently, the feeling is mutual because I’ve been working with them for 4 years.

Richard Matthews 8:44
They’re very cool. It’s interesting to know that they bring people like you in to do things like that. So you help companies like that just execute on stuff. Do you only work here in the US or are you going to help them execute those strategies worldwide?

Lucas Root 9:02
Worldwide? I have some – I have 2 companies that I’m working with that are in Europe. And one of those 2 companies is also in several different countries in Asia.

Richard Matthews 9:15
Interesting. So just my curiosity with this stuff is I would imagine that in your repertoire is not specifically – we’ve helped these 15 companies build vending machines. It’s more like, Hey, we have an idea. And you’re going to figure out how to connect the dots to get to vending machines. And that’s where your role comes in.

Lucas Root 9:34
Yep.

Richard Matthews 9:36
Awesome. So you’re a facilitator?

Lucas Root 9:39
Yeah. And I’ll also do it if that’s what they want. And the Pokemon Company does want me to do it. They want me to show them how to get there. And then when they’ve had their say, and they’re satisfied with what that roadmap’s gonna look like, they want me to also facilitate the execution of it.

Richard Matthews 9:57
Awesome, and just out of curiosity, do you work deals like that, where you get a percentage of the stuff that you do when you’re doing execution as well?

Lucas Root 10:05
In some. Not with the Pokemon Company.

Richard Matthews 10:08
That’s too bad. That’d be very very profitable. I could imagine.

Lucas Root 10:14
When when we’re done, I’ve done the business projections for this. When we’re done, I believe it’ll be more than a billion-dollar business unit all by itself.

Richard Matthews 10:23
Wow. That is insane. It’s one of those things that – I’ve had a couple of clients that you do something with and you turn around whatever your fee was, and then they make 100 times more than that, and you’re like, oh, it would have been nice to have a percentage of profits instead of just a fee for work done. So anyway, that’s cool. So I want to find out how you got into this line of work. And on our show, we talk about the origin story. Every good comic book hero has an origin story, it’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today. And we want to hear your story. Were you born a hero, or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to do this kind of work? So where did you start in a job and then eventually move in to become an entrepreneur? So how did you get started doing which is it that you do now?

Lucas Root 11:13
Fun story. Weirdly, this has always been my plan. So my origin story starts with lunch with a buddy of mine. He and I are still friends. When we were 17, out at a ski hill, skiing together. I don’t remember if it was December or January, but let’s just say it’s mid-January, we’re skiing, we come in for lunch, we sit down over lunch, and we start just chatting like what do you want to do with your life? Oh, I don’t know. I want to be an astronaut or whatever. We spent the whole hour and a half or whatever it was, talking and when it came around to me, I had this lightning bolt of inspiration. I don’t know where it came from, honest to God. It’s not something I had been working up in my mind. But what fell out of my mouth was a life plan that I have since followed. And that was: go to school, get a science degree, graduate, move into mergers and acquisitions on Wall Street, on the operations management side so that I would have access to and the capacity to work with some of the best operations minds in the world, which is exactly what happened. These guys are amazing. Work there for 10 years, I ended up being there for 17. So not everything happened exactly as planned but work on Wall Street for 10 years, quit, start my own consulting company, and start bringing these top of the world ideas and strategies and playbooks into middle market and startup world so that the rest of the world can start to implement the way that the real pros do.

Richard Matthews 12:54
That’s fascinating. So that’s not a normal thing for a 17-year-old to think.

Lucas Root 13:03
Like I said, it wasn’t something I’d been working on. I didn’t sit down at 12 and say, I think I want to be a consultant. How do I want to get there? It was just this stroke of inspiration and it fell out of my mouth. I was probably as surprised then when I heard myself saying it as you are now.

Richard Matthews 13:22
So I had it, I was always – similar kind of thing. I didn’t have an exact idea of what I wanted to do. But I knew the life I wanted to have if that makes sense. I didn’t know how I was going to make that happen. But I had a couple of things that I knew when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was like, I’m gonna be the kind of guy who’s – I want to be at home with my kids all the time and take them out and do all sorts of adventures. Because my favorite thing in the world when I was a kid was adventuring with my dad. And we went out fishing and kayaking and all the crazy stuff my dad did with us when he was off work and now, you fast forward 20 years, and my wife and family and I have been traveling for 3 full years now on the road, adventuring full time. And my average workday is 4 hours; 4 hours a day, 4 days a week, and I spend the rest of the time playing with my kids, doing all sorts of cool things. And it took a number of years. It took a number of years to figure out a business model that would let me do that. But I knew when I was a kid that’s what I was gonna do. And then everything after that was like, is this going to get me closer or further away from that goal?

Lucas Root 14:36
Strangely, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. This is not my area of expertise. But strangely, I think most people are capable of living the lifestyle that they want. If they put their mind to it.

Richard Matthews 14:47
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s true that you can if you just set out to do what you’re doing then you can make that happen. So my next question for you then is your superpowers. So every iconic hero has their superpower whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by genius intellect or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. Heroes have what I call a zone of genius, a skill, or a set of skills that you’re either born with or that you developed over time that energizes all of your other skills. The superpower’s what sets you apart and allows you to help other people slay their villains and come out on top of their journeys. So what is your superpower?

Lucas Root 15:34
Connecting the dots. At the very basic level connecting the dots. And the way that I use that in the corporate world was strategy, which is a very big word, but a lot of people don’t have really good answers to what it means. But to me, it just means we know where we want to be. We know where we are. There are a number of different ways to arrive there. And for whatever reason I can see them all, I just can see them all. And when things are developing that are going to make one or the other, a better choice, I see those things developing, I see the dots as they start to, let’s say light up. And that puts me in a position because I can see it happening. That puts me in a position to be able to change course a little bit to make better decisions, as those dots are lighting up, move this way, move this way. In high school that made me an amazing soccer player. Because I could see the play as it was building, maybe even before the players themselves who were executing that play, maybe even before they knew that was the play that they were going to execute. I could see it building so it made me great as an offense player because I could be in the right place to receive the ball. I could make sure that I had the right pass lined up or execute the shot or I could see that somebody was about to shoot and the goalie was actually going to be there to defend and I could be there to catch the ball if he didn’t get his hands on if he deflected it, I was there. I had more garbage goals, every goal was a good goal, but I had more garbage goals than any other person on our team. … Being there when the ball deflected. And then defense, I knew where they were going to pass. I knew when they were going to shoot. And so I could – the people on my team that was listening to me and I’m going to sports because it’s very similar to a business. In this respect, the people that are on my team that was listening to me would, they would queue up. I’d be like, he’s shooting. They get on it. He didn’t get a shot off.

Richard Matthews 17:52
It reminds me a little bit of, I have a similar superpower. In my world, the thing that I’m good at is I see systems and processes. I see that’s the way I see the world. So when I watch someone draw something like one of those drawing videos on YouTube, I see all the things that are that they’re doing, and I see all the little processes that other people don’t see. And it allows me to pick up skills quickly. And allows me to see the connections between other things and it p***** my wife off, because I sat down with a piano last year, and I couldn’t read music. I couldn’t do anything. I sat down with a piano and went through some training, it was using a training thing. And 4 weeks in from no music to being able to play melody lines, on one hand, reading music raw and she was like, that’s retarded. How can you do that?

Lucas Root 18:50
That’ awesome.

Richard Matthews 18:51
It’s a cool skill because you can see the systems and you can just pick up on them and it gives you that idea where you can almost predict the future a little bit cause you see where the system is building, and you start to see the commonalities and all the systems and you’re like, Okay if they’re doing this then I pretty much know what’s gonna happen in the next thing. So it’s a similar type of thing. I don’t think it’s the same, but it’s a very similar type of skill set that you see things that other people don’t see. And I remember, it was probably a year and a half, 2 years ago, when I realized that was a skill I had. And because you look through your life, and people tell you all the time. And I had, it was a friend of mine who was like, you need to sit down and think about what is the one thing you’re good at. And I was like, my problem was I can pick up skills easily. So I have all these things that I’m good at. And so I was like, Well, I’m good at all these things. And she was like, that’s a problem. Because you’re that, there’s something that’s backing that up, and that’s really where the skill is. And so it was realizing what that was. And starting to redirect my business and everything that I do to focus on how can I leverage that skill to the highest degree that started changing my business for me?

Lucas Root 20:10
And that’s when you launched The Hero Show?

Richard Matthews 20:14
A little bit earlier than that. I launched The Hero Show about 3 years ago to – I recorded 8 episodes in a couple of weeks and got 3 episodes out and realized that I was never going to be able to get the show going with all the work that goes in on the backside of running a podcast. And so it languished on the vine for a good 3 years and sat there with those. I never even got the other 8 episodes done. And it was just after. Or just before that whole discussion about where my superpowers were. I started realizing that I needed to start building systems and focus on building systems and one of the first things that I did in my business was built the whole system around podcasting for my business. And then in the next year, we’ve just recorded our hundredth episode for this podcast in less than a year and published them all the way through and built a whole service called Push Button Podcast. And we now do it. We have 3 other shows that we’re doing the whole thing for. And we’re looking to grow that into probably a million-dollar a year business within the next 2 years. Because we started focusing on where my superpower was.

Lucas Root 21:33
That’s so cool.

Richard Matthews 21:36
It’s super cool. I think it’s it’s the reason I asked the question too, is because not everyone knows as quickly and readily what their superpower is. And so for you, when did you come to that realization that that was the thing that you were good at?

Lucas Root 21:54
It was about 4 years ago. One of my current employees so I’m still with her or she’s still with me. She said to me, you know what makes you special Lucas? And I had ideas in my mind at the time and she goes, there are people that can walk and talk. And then some people can walk down the sidewalk, and make sure that they speed up a little bit if they’re gonna miss the light. She’s like, but you can see 5 lights ahead and make sure that your speed is just right so that you don’t have to stop at any of the blocks between now and those 5 lights. I was like, oh my god, that’s great.

Richard Matthews 22:41
It’s almost like you can see the future. And so did that change any of the direction of your business and your consultancy or at least give you more clarity on what you were doing and how you speak about it to your clients.

Lucas Root 22:56
It gave me a lot more clarity about how I speak about it to my clients. It didn’t overtly change the direction but I’m sure that it changed it significantly and that I was able to be more clear.

Richard Matthews 23:09
That’s one of the things that I noticed too is now that I know where that’s coming from, that’s how I go through my sales messages with my clients when we’re actually on the phone before we close a deal or something. I’ll walk them through hey, here’s where my skill set is. And when we start working together, they start to see that and they’re like, I need to have more people like you on my team right who do things like that and see things like that because apparently, it’s not a common skill.

Lucas Root 23:39
… Just Richard is enough.

Richard Matthews 23:42
Just Richard, just one person at a time. The flip side then of the superpower is the fatal flaw. And every Superman has his Kryptonite, and Wonder Woman can’t remove her Bracelets of Victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you’ve struggled with? Maybe like me, it was perfectionism. The whole thing with being in systems is I like to have systems that are tight. And it keeps me from shipping. So I had to build some systems that got the last portion of the thing where it shifts to the market off onto other people on my team. So I wouldn’t hold it back forever, just tweaking little minor things. But more important than what the flaw is, is also how have you dealt with it so people who suffer from the same thing might learn from your experience?

Lucas Root 24:32
Cool. I gotta say, and you’ll probably get this well. One of my biggest challenges has always been, I can see what’s going to happen, but I’m not necessarily in a position of authority. And the person who is doesn’t agree that that’s what’s going to happen.

Richard Matthews 24:59
How does that affect what you do?

Lucas Root 25:03
It makes it challenging for me to build a strong relationship with people in positions of authority because I will strenuously disagree with a course of action that they’ve decided to take. And they don’t like being strenuously disagreed with. And honestly, I don’t blame them. You have to rebuild your mindset a little bit to accept that people on your team have a valid opinion. The classic corporate hierarchy doesn’t include the notion that everybody on the team needs to have an opinion, not just may have but needs to have an opinion.

Richard Matthews 25:45
It’s an interesting juxtaposition too because I know – I worked in the corporate world for a couple of years. When I shut down my consultancy and went and took a C-level marketing director position for a solar company for a number of years. And one of the interesting things that they did was they put all the C level execs every couple of weeks in the room to talk about any big movements that we were doing in the company, and they wanted everyone’s opinion on it for that exact reason. And so there were benefits to that, and that you had outside people who didn’t know what was going on that could say things, and then you have the detriment of that. And then I have this plan we’re going to do for marketing. And the financial executive is I don’t agree with the thing on there. I don’t agree with what you’re doing, and you’re like, but that’s how persuasive psychology works. It needs to be that way because that’s what we’re doing. And they’re like, I don’t agree. I don’t want to do it. I’m like, it’s not relevant what you feel about that. You have something specific that has to go with we can’t financially afford to do that, or things like those things are important. So it’s a double-edged sword to get opinions from everyone.

Lucas Root 26:57
But, as you pointed out, you’re like if you have some relevant opinion, then we should take that into account. Well, my opinions are, if I share an opinion, it’s always relevant. And people are just not habituated to listening to someone who’s not a “colleague.” It has to be a fellow manager or someone senior to them. Otherwise, your opinion is irrelevant, whatever it is, even if it is relevant, it’s not relevant. And that that was tough –

Richard Matthews 27:27
I’ve run into that a couple of times, even with clients where they’re like, they hire you to do something. And they’re like, they want to do these things. And I’m like, that’s a bad idea. And you shouldn’t do that for these reasons. This is what’s gonna happen if you do that. And they’re like, I disagree with that. And then they go and do it anyways. And then they come back and they’re like, yeah, that was dumb. And you’re like, I don’t like to be the I told you so person.

Lucas Root 27:27
But what do you say to that?

Richard Matthews 27:52
I had a client who did that for a number – we worked together for a number of years. And it was funny to me because he asked me to help him redo some of his brand stuff. And I built a brand for him based on who I thought his target market was, and everything we talked about. And we built a whole look and feel. And I put it all together. And he was like, I don’t like it. I want it to be more edgy. And so I was like, well, we can do that. And I made a couple of changes. And now it was edgy. And I was like, but I think you would be better served with a more corporate feel because of who your audience is. And we went and he was like, nope, I want to do this. This is what I want it to be. I’m paying you. Do it that way. And I was like, fine. I’m doing it under duress, just so you know. So we did it and he went for it for a couple of years. And finally, he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted. He hired an ad firm for some other things, and the ad firm came in and was like, your brand is too edgy. We need to have a more corporate-like feel for who your audience is and he comes back to me and he’s like, can we go with a more corporate look and I was like lucky for you, I kept all those other brand designs and I flipped them all over for him, and I was like, remember when we had this discussion 3 years ago? He’s like, yeah, shut up.

Lucas Root 29:08
That right there. That’s my weakness.

Richard Matthews 29:11
That’s your weakness. So how do you handle that?

Lucas Root 29:15
Well, I’m getting much better at it. But it’s been a process for me. The answer used to be I handled that poorly. I might decide that I don’t want to work with you anymore. You don’t like my opinion. And it’s my opinion, and I’m not going to go do something that I think is stupid. I’ve gotten to be more grassroots about trying to get my opinion heard. And that’s developing, and we’ll see how that plays out in my life. The Pokemon Company seems to be pretty appreciative of me and I disagree with some of the things that they do and they say thank you for sharing. We’re open to your feedback. We appreciate that you’re sharing this and Sometimes it seems like they listened and sometimes it seems like they didn’t. But it’s the fact that there is a sometimes it seems like they listen, that works.

Richard Matthews 30:09
You’re making an impact on the opinions you share. I think one of the ways that I’ve started to deal with that, it doesn’t happen as often to me, but when I am working with someone, I’ll tell them ahead of time. Because I do the same things a lot for clients because they come to me for specific reasons. So I have specific things that ahead of time that before we even take the call, I’m like, Hey, I have a couple of rules. And we’re going to do this first and we’re going to do this second and some of these things you need to hire this other person to do this service for you before you come to me cause we don’t have it done. I can’t help you until you’re like at a certain place. And that helps curb a lot of that in my business because they’re like, Oh, you know exactly what it is that you want to get done and how you want to get there. Where years ago, it was we would come to a place of like, Hey, we need to get this thing done. They’re like that wasn’t originally part of our discussion or whatever. And then you’re gonna be like, but I know you need to do this. And it’s a struggle. So for me, it’s always been learning how to pre-frame expectations on where they’re going to be, and like, Hey, I’m going to make recommendations in these areas. And if you don’t want to take those recommendations, I won’t be able to work with you. And setting it up ahead of time has been helpful for me.

Lucas Root 31:38
That’s cool. I should try more of that. The grassroots approach seems to be working get other people to be on your side, get other people to pay attention to the ideas. And then if it comes at the decision-maker from multiple different directions. They’re less likely to just brush it aside.

Richard Matthews 31:54
And so also framing things – you hired me for this particular thing and here’s the skill set that I have that you hired me for. So in light of that, I’m going to make recommendations like this. And you don’t have to take all of my recommendations. But the reason people pay me and the reason I get good results is that they take my recommendations and act on them. And I use that as part of the initial sales conversation. So it’s a pre-frame setup. And when I get pushed back, I’ll remember like, remember back when we were talking on the phone, you hired me for this reason. This is one of those things. If it wasn’t one of those things, I wouldn’t push back on it. But this is one of those things. So I feel you should know, I think this is important.

Lucas Root 32:44
I do some pre-framing like that. But I do it for different things. And I think I need to add to the pre-framing that I do. One of the things I do is I don’t work for any idea that’s not already funded. Don’t call me while you’re still in pre-seed, you’re trying to put together your pitch deck, and you want to get funded. I’m not your guy. I don’t like working on funding. It’s not that I’m not good at it, I just don’t like it.

Richard Matthews 33:16
We do the same thing because a lot of the stuff that we work with, we work with brands, we’re doing education, and they’re like, we’ll have people that want to come in and they’re like, I want to sell this skill that I have. And I’m like, have you ever helped anyone else with it before? Do you have results with helping someone else? And they’re like, No. I’m like, then I’m not your guy. You need to prove it. Because if you know that works for other people, I can blow it up for you. But testing it out. That’s not my thing. So it’s cool to know what your rules are and be able to push them forward that way. My next question for you then is your common enemy. And this is every superhero has their arch-nemesis, it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes on a lot of forms. But generally speaking, in the context of your clients, it’s a mindset or a flaw that you constantly have to fight to overcome, so that you can actually get your job done, get your clients better, cheaper, faster, a higher degree of results that you see commonly with all the clients that you’ve worked with, you’re always beating your head against the wall. What’s that common enemy for you?

Lucas Root 34:32
I have 3 common enemies. The first one is funding. And that’s part of the reason why I’ve made it a hard rule because I’ve had a lot of people come to me with really cool projects. And said we’re a company, we’re already running, we have revenue, we want to take a look at this. And I’ll get halfway down the path of having a finished plan done and then find out that they have, maybe they have revenue, maybe they have money, but they haven’t funded this project yet. I’m like, we’re done. Call me when you’ve funded the project. It’s not even about me getting paid. I don’t want to work on things that are gonna sit on the shelf for 2 years.

Richard Matthews 35:13
You want to ship.

Lucas Root 35:16
I want to ship. That’s exactly right. It’s kind of like you. I love testing actually, I’m very much a fan of testing, make sure it’s funded. I love testing and I love being a part of it. But I’m just not interested in working on something where you don’t know that this is where you want to put your effort. That this is where you want to put your attention. This has to be a strategic priority to the company, otherwise, I’m not your guy.

Richard Matthews 35:46
That’s one of them. You said you had 3 of them.

Lucas Root 35:49
I have 3. Two, people who think that they know how to execute. And I say it that way intentionally. I’m not talking about people who do know how to execute. I’m talking about people who think that they know how to execute. Let me put it out like this. If you have been a middle manager for most of your career, you probably don’t know how to execute. I don’t want to be angry. I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to ring your bell a little bit so that you can hear the sound of truth. Middle managers don’t know how to execute. And if you’re working with me, we will work very well together. If you don’t come to the relationship thinking that you know how to execute.

Richard Matthews 36:32
In a corporate company that I worked for. At one point they bought another company and my marketing department got put under the marketing department from the company they bought. And the guy who was in charge was a middle manager guy who didn’t know how to execute. And that ended my relationship with the company. It took about 11 months, but I was like, I can’t get anything done. Before that the president of the company had told me on a number of occasions, he was like, I don’t understand you as a person. He’s like it because I asked for something. And then it’s like, 11 people go to work on it. And I know it’s just you, I don’t know what the hell you’re doing. But he’s like you work like a team of people all by yourself. And then once we had the other person who was not an executor over it like everything ground to a halt, and I couldn’t get anything done because it all had to go through his approval for all these things. And I ended up – I gave him like 3 months notice and help hire and train my replacement and whatnot, but walked away. And they hired me back, I don’t know 2 years later. When they got rid of that company, they realized that was a bad choice on their part. And they were in bankruptcy. And they hired me back as a consultant that’s twice the rate they were paying me as an employee. And then they took all of my recommendations and we got them out of chapter 11 within 4 months.

Lucas Root 38:16
There you go. … I’d high five you right now. That’s fantastic.

Richard Matthews 38:21
It’s such a frustrating thing to work with someone who thinks they’re an executor. There’s not a word for it, but I know what you’re talking about.

Lucas Root 38:36
There should be a word.

Richard Matthews 38:39
So what’s your third one then?

Lucas Root 38:41
Distractions. It is. And it’s a weakness for me. And it’s a common enemy for me. Marketing is a really good example. For instance, the way that I see the world, the way that I see things unfold, the way that I understand, but like I said, connecting the dots, it would make me very good at marketing. And in fact, I happen to be very good at marketing, but it is not my expertise. And it’s not something I want to be focused on from a general perspective. I have a really good partner who I’m working with, and they come to me with marketing questions, I’ll start diving down that hole. And 2 days later, I’m like, how much of what they need me to be doing did I not get done because I was going down the hole of marketing and they have a marketing team.

Richard Matthews 39:42
I totally can see that. I have that own problem in my own business. It comes from I have the ability to pick up skills readily. It’s like I can get good at design and I got good at design. But I’m never going to be great at it. It’s not something that I’m going to be – I’m not going to be fantastic. Because it’s not my passion, it’s not the thing that I love doing. And it took a lot of effort to hire someone. It’s like, you’re a creative. And all I’ve done is I’ve just I saw the systems that you put in place, and I can see the rules that people are using. And I can get 80% of the way there pretty quickly. But it’ll never have that sparkle that comes from someone who’s got the real creativity in that space. And that’s so I have that in a lot of areas and I’m having to cut out of my life the things that don’t have the sparkle if that makes sense.

Lucas Root 40:42
Yep. That’s perfectly stated.

Richard Matthews 40:45
Because you know exactly what I mean. So it’s like I have things that I’m good at. And I know which ones were – if I work on the things like the systems and the processes if I work on those things, if I work on the marketing and the psychology and the wording of things, that’s where the sparkle happens for me. And that’s where the magic happens. To learn, I understand that the distractions and for me, it’s been learning how to hire other people to take those over my business and then let go of them which was a hard thing to do.

Lucas Root 41:19
Especially when you can be good at something. It’s really hard to hand off a thing that you can be good at. But they’re either that internal process that you and I both have to create and have to use is that yes, I can be good at it. But am I ever going to be great at it? If I’m not going to be great … –

Richard Matthews 41:43
That’s one of my favorite things. My first employee who’s probably gonna is the one editing this video when we’re done with it. So he’ll see this, he’s ridiculously good at video editing. It’s retarded how good he is. And I got to this point in my life, I was like I was actively pursuing learning how to get good at video editing. Because I just wanted to like to learn it as a hobby. And I was a photographer for a number of years, and I just wanted to learn it. And I was actively pursuing that. And then I hired him and started seeing the stuff that he was putting, returning to me, and I was like, well that’s sad, I’m never gonna get that good. And I’ve even sent him stuff from my own personal – like our travels. I’m like, Hey, you want to do some edits on these videos? Because even if I do learn it, it’ll never be as cool as what you could do in an afternoon. I feel you on that. So the flip side then of your common enemy is your driving force. A common enemy is something you fight against, your driving force is what you fight for. So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google who fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you fight for in your business?

Lucas Root 43:00
Honest to God, it sounds weird, I fight for great execution. And there’s a reason for that. Every year the CDI analysis comes out and it shows the top, whatever however many 17-19-35 reasons for … And every year I look at it, and I say, I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that. And I’ll go down the list. And let’s call it 20 reasons out of those 20 reasons, 2 of them I will agree with and the other 18 I’ll be like, No, it wasn’t this other thing. It was poor execution. It was poor execution. It was poor execution, the whole way down the list. And I’ll be like, the only reason why anybody came up with a reason other than poor execution is that they’re not taking personal responsibility for their actions in their business. And … great execution.

Richard Matthews 43:56
I have a personal mantra that is along those same lines. I tell people all the time is you can’t compete with me. And the reason you can’t compete with me is that I will work you under a table. It’s like they talk about drinking shots, you could drink some under a table, I will work you under a table. And I have a confidence level in that because I just know that’s the thing that I do. I will find a way to execute and get it done. And the things that have stopped any of my businesses have been running into the learning the lifestyle result of what you’ve chosen to do if that makes sense. So I’ll start something with an idea of this is the thing I want to do. Because I think it’s a cool idea and then you get into actually doing it you realize that that doesn’t let me live the life I want to live because it takes a lot of effort here or there or doing things I don’t want to do. And so it’s the anything that I’ve stopped doing and I’ve shut down a number of businesses, a number of operations over the years, have always been because of lifestyle and not because of execution. And I see that being a problem for a lot of people, they don’t see the difference between execution and like whether or not they’re actually willing to do the work that they put in. And so I think that’s one of the things people lie to themselves about is they get into building something. And then they realize I don’t actually like this work. I don’t like the outcome, or I don’t like the thing that I’m building. So it dies and it fails, and then it gets blamed on something other than I didn’t want to execute on that.

Lucas Root 45:33
100% agree. You hit that nail right on the head. That’s exactly it. You’ll look at founder burnout and founder burnout is nothing other than they decided they didn’t want to execute.

Richard Matthews 45:45
I don’t want to do that. And so if you can just be honest about that and be like, you know what, I don’t want to do that. I need to change what I’m doing so I’m doing what I want to do. And for me, it’s been a process over a number of years, but getting my business to a point where I’m like, I love everything that I do, it allows me to execute well. And we deliver really well for our clients and we get stuff going and I live the life I want to live. I travel with my wife and kids and it’s a cool place to be. But it’s also I’m never gonna have a humongous business. I’m not gonna be a Pokemon Company. That’s not where I’m gonna end up. But that’s a personal choice based on what I know I want to do.

Lucas Root 46:24
I mean, look, most people, they don’t see the inside of the beast, so to speak. … got the Pokemon Company. Let me tell you, their greatest strength is their willingness and ability to stay super, super focused on what they’re good at, and what they want to be good at. And that’s building this brand, through the story that they create. And exactly what you have recognized and built into your understanding of the brand and the way that you interact with it. That’s the thing that they’re great at. That’s the reason why they keep bringing me back because they’re like, we recognize we want to do this thing. But we need to stay focused on this. We want you to do that.

Richard Matthews 47:06
We need you to do these other things for us.

Lucas Root 47:09
They recognize they need it done. They don’t ever want to be good at executing those things. They just want it done. And they bring in experts to do that. They don’t do their manufacturing. They work with contract manufacturing companies. They don’t do any of their logistics. They work with logistics companies. Their singular focus on their brand is their greatest strength.

Richard Matthews 47:35
It’s funny because that’s the process we’re currently going through right now with our Push Button Podcast business, is I’m putting the marketing together for that. And the marketing that we’re doing for it is I’m teaching people how our systems are built and what they look like. Because the people who want to build their own aren’t my clients. The people who are my clients are going to look at all of that, and go. I don’t need that in house, he’s already got it done. He needs to do it. Those are my clients. And so our marketing is going to be very transparent and like, Hey, here’s what our systems look like, here’s how you can build them into your own business. And there are businesses, that it makes sense to bring that skill in house and focus on it. But there’s a lot more businesses and I think this is where our business is gonna be big that they have their core service, they have the thing that they’re good at, and they want to have their podcast and their message and all the content marketing, they can come out of it: done. They just don’t want to have to be the ones that bring in the skill and dilute the focus of their business to make it happen.

Lucas Root 48:46
I was on a group coaching call. I, by the way, pay coaches. I have coaches to coach me. Anyone who’s listening, listen to me right now. You need coaches. Every single personal life, if you want to be great, you have to have coaches. That’s not what we’re talking about today. But I just want to throw that out there.

Richard Matthews 49:06
Yeah, that’s 100% true.

Lucas Root 49:08
If you want to be great, if good enough, is good enough, then you don’t need coaching. But if you want to be great, you have to have coaches. So I was on a coaching call earlier this week, where I was saying, I’m in the process of getting my book ready. I want to stick it on Kindle. And my coach has put a book on Kindle. So she was like, listen, here’s what I did. I paid Amazon to do all of the editing, all of the formatting, and then they posted on Kindle for you. She’s like, but you’re a smart guy. You can figure it out. I was like, yeah, I can figure it out. Do you know how I’m gonna figure it out? I’m gonna take out my credit card.

Richard Matthews 49:45
I’m gonna give it off to Amazon and they’re gonna do it for me.

Lucas Root 49:47
I mean, give me that service. I almost don’t even care what it costs. I don’t want to be great at that. Someone else could do it.

Richard Matthews 49:56
And it’s something that I’m still in the process. I know it in my head, but I don’t always know what in my heart. If that makes sense. I’ll come up with something I’d be like, I could do that. And then I’ll get 10-20-30 minutes into it, I’d be like, d**** it. I’m doing that thing again where I’m trying to learn something because I enjoy that process so much.

Lucas Root 50:18
I do get it. As I said, that’s my common enemy number 3: distraction. It’s so easy.

Richard Matthews 50:24
And it’s particularly dangerous for someone who’s good at learning skills and enjoys the process of learning things. I know how to publish all the things on Kindle and do all those things because I went down that rabbit hole, and I published a book on it and so I’ve done that and now I’ve helped other clients do it as well, but like it’s not a thing I should be good at. And yet, it’s a thing that I’ve done. So I’ve done it a number of times, and I’m getting better at recognizing earlier in the process that I’m doing something I shouldn’t be … I’m not there yet, I will be at some point.

Lucas Root 51:03
This is a milestone moment for me because if she had not said something about how they have a done for you service that you can just pay for, I would have gone down that rabbit hole. And in fact, this shows huge progress for me in that as soon as she was like, and you’re a smart guy, you can figure it out. And that bell went off in my head and I was like, No, you know how I figure it out? Pull out my credit card. Done for you, done for me.

Richard Matthews 51:29
Done for you, done for me. And it’s a scary thing to build your business on too because I feel like that’s what we’re doing with the Push Button Podcast. Cause in my head I think everyone else is like me. So they’re gonna want to do it all on their own and the question I keep asking myself is why would someone pay me to do this for them? I could build all these systems; they could too. And you realize it’s because the businesses who are good at what they do, the ones that I want to work with don’t want to be doing this work, but they need to have done it. So anyway, it’s an interesting thing. It’s a game of play in your head and push forward and execute on those things. For me, it’s been executing on actually getting the marketing done. And in my head, it’s been a little bit of a struggle to get to a point where I’m ready to ship this. I need to start putting the marketing together and go out to the market. Because we’ve got several successful client case studies now. But when you’re doing client case studies on what you’re doing. They have discounted rates and other things that are going on to it and you got to play around with their brand a lot. And you get to break your systems on them because you’ve got a close relationship. And then you’re like, Okay, I have to go to the real market. And that’s where you get that little bit of twinge of like, oh, man, are people going to want to pay for a service that they could do themselves if they wanted to build it all in house. And they will. And the companies that you want to work with, will.

Lucas Root 53:06
100%, if I wanted to be in a podcast, I’d be calling you tomorrow. I do not want to be great at publishing my podcast. Done for you, done for me. I’m happy. But again, that’s such an eye-opener for me. Being able to do that, being able to be satisfied with that, having that bell go off in my head, and being like, Nope, I’m not doing it. I’m getting it done.

Richard Matthews 53:39
That’s exactly the messaging we’re going with too. Because we … like, Hey, you can just show up and do the part that you love to do, which is to deliver your content. For me, it’s showing up and doing the interviews. I love doing these interviews. I love meeting people like you and talking through the stories and doing this kind of stuff. But everything else. I hate all of it. I hate the video editing and the audio editing and the graphics, the writing and the transcriptions and the publishing and the announcing and all the creating all the derivative content pieces and publishing on social media. Hate all of it. But I could build all the systems for it. And we have team members that handle all that stuff now and my podcast, I don’t do anything for this podcast I do nothing. I show up and do these interviews, which is my favorite part. My team books all the guests, they research all the guests, they get you here, and then as soon as I hit the stop record button, they take over and do everything else. And that’s what we offer to our clients with Push Button Podcasting. It’s like, Hey, you can be like me, and just show up and do the part that you like doing.

Lucas Root 54:37
Sign me up. Sign me up. That’s exactly –

Richard Matthews 54:42
If you wanted to be a podcaster. So my next question for you is more practical. I call this the Hero’s Toolbelt. And it’s just like every superhero has their toolbelt with awesome gadgets like batarangs or web slingers or laser eyes or a big metal hammer that they swing about and fly around with. Top one or two tools that you couldn’t live without actually deliver what you deliver for your clients. Whether that’s your calendar, your notepad, or your marketing tools, your product delivery stuff, just a couple of things that you’re like I use these every day, and I couldn’t do what I do for my clients without them.

Lucas Root 55:17
I mean, at its basic level of cellphone and email. That’s the question that you’re asking. I use OneNote, Microsoft OneNote. I use it at a deeper level than anyone else I’ve ever seen. That’s not to say there aren’t other people that use it better or deeper than I do, but I’ve never seen anyone who even comes close. I use OneNote to write books. I use OneNote to manage communication back and forth between me and all of my teams. And my teams are spread out across not just the country but the world. Even the people who work directly for me inside my consulting company like, I don’t have an office, nobody goes to the office, they all work wherever they want, for the most part whenever they want, most of what I set out, except for meetings, most of what I send out is 24 hour SLA to my team. So they get to it when they feel like it. And OneNote is an amazing tool for managing wide SLA, but very detailed communication – far better than email. It doesn’t matter what email client you’re using. Email does not do a good job of this stuff. Microsoft OneNote –

Richard Matthews 56:35
It sounds like the way that we use a combination of Slack and Trello to do a lot of the same things for our staff all over the world. And it’s funny because I’ll get on the phone with a client and be like, hey, let me show you the process we set up for your business and I’ll show them the things that are going on. And they’re like, I didn’t even know you could do that with those tools. We use those tools in our business every day. And I didn’t know you could do that. So it’s taking something and using it at a higher level than other people do. That’s a thing we do quite frequently. I haven’t ever used OneNote, but it’s also we’re not in that ecosystem. We’re in the GSuite ecosystem, so we use a lot of Google Drive and then we hook it all into Slack and Trello and stuff. But I’ve looked at OneNote and I see a lot of the things that we do in a couple of different tools you do all in one in OneNote.

Lucas Root 57:31
I love it. Truly I could not exist without it. … I manage timelines, dates, I have dashboards built into OneNote. So I know exactly where to go to look for information about this or that or the other thing. My project managers report to me on OneNote. All my team called notes, they all go into OneNote and then action items that come out of them go into my action item dashboard. My OneNote toolkit is absolute without a doubt, that’s the thing that makes it possible to be me.

Richard Matthews 58:07
That’s awesome. So just out of curiosity, how many people do you have working in your consultancy?

Lucas Root 58:16
Six.

Richard Matthews 58:18
Six people? Six people to make happen all the things that you make happen?

Lucas Root 58:22
Yep.

Richard Matthews 58:25
We just hit 4, including myself. So it’s a cool place to be. And I had the coolest moment of my tax life this year. When we fill all of our taxes out, I realized I paid my employees more money, salary-wise, than I had made in my first year of business. Which was cool. I was like, that’s a cool place to be in were like, hey, my expenditure on employees, the cost of labor, was larger than my entire revenue for my first year of business.

Lucas Root 59:07
That’s so cool. Typically when I work with a client, they hire an execution team that works with. I always advocate for them to keep at least some of the knowledge of the execution in the house. And the only way to do that is to hire people that support the execution of the project. So, for example, Pokemon has a small team, not not a very big team, they have a small team of 8 right now that supports the execution of what we’re doing. And they’ll grow that team probably to somewhere between 10 and 20 before we’re done.

Richard Matthews 59:41
Speaking of heroic tools, I want to take a few minutes to tell you about a tool we built that powers The Hero Show and is now this show’s primary sponsor. Hey there, fellow podcaster. Having weekly audio and video shows on all the major online networks that build your brand creates fame and drives sales for your business doesn’t have to be hard. I know it feels that way. Because you’ve tried managing your show internally and realize how resource and intensive it can be. You felt the pain of pouring 8 to 10 hours of work into just getting 1 hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyway because you know how powerful it is. You’ve probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap. That’s not helping grow your business. Don’t give up though. The struggle ends now. Introducing Push Button Podcast a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you’ve pushed that stop record button. We handle everything else uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research, graphics, publication, and promotion, all done by real humans who know, understand, and care about your brand, almost as much as you do. Empowered by our proprietary technology. Our team will let you get back to doing what you love while we handle the rest. Check us out at pushbuttonpodcast.com/hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro-celebrity status and business in your niche without you having to lift more than a finger to push that stop record button. Again, that’s pushbuttonpodcast.com/hero. See you there. Now back to The Hero Show.

Richard Matthews 1:01:17
Just out of curiosity, because something that I tell all my clients to do is I tell them to document everything. And I spent a lot of effort getting my clients to document their processes, their recipes, and putting them into a place that they’re useful and usable and organized well, and the team has access to and I constantly – I’m like, if you ever want to sell your company, you can sell your company for more money and you can sell it faster if all of your all your processes are documented. How much of the execution stuff do you work on documenting and putting out that kind of stuff?

Lucas Root 1:01:50
All of it, just like you, it all has to be documented. I will keep it in the house if they’re not interested in keeping it and they’ll be calling me back when I do that. But we document everything.

Richard Matthews 1:02:07
We have a process that we put together that we’re using pretty regularly now, where we’ll have clients that when they’re done with something we’re like what I want you to do is just get on a video and we’re talking sometimes literally. I got a client’s got a manufacturing facility, go to the manufacturing facility with your cell phone. And here’s the bottle machine, here’s where the labels are. Here’s how you put the labels and label machine and just walk someone through the process on video. And then our staff, we have a whole process where we can take those videos, whether they’re screen recordings or videos of stuff in the real world, and we turn them into process documents for them with step one, here’s a screenshot. Here’s the thing that shows them; what to do. And so we’ve turned that into a service we offer to our clients, we charge on a per-document basis, but I’m like you should be doing this for everything that’s going on in your business.

Lucas Root 1:03:01
Except that I’m typically doing it before the process is built out because I’m telling them how to do it.

Richard Matthews 1:03:08
So a lot of times we’re coming in as – we come and do marketing work. And I’m like, so it helps to grow their business. And when they’re trying to grow the business, one of the struggles that we always run into, is they need to bring on new people, or they need to expand. And it’s hard to do if existing processes aren’t documented. So it’s a necessity for us to go back and look at existing processes and help them document those things. Otherwise, we can’t scale their marketing. Because if we make them bigger, and they collapse under the weight of that because they can’t scale, they turn around like it’s your fault.

Lucas Root 1:03:45
The funny thing is, nobody even thinks about that. What happens if I double my sales, triple my sales, 10x my sales? Can I actually – I’ve had a client that ended up becoming my client because they pitched me and I said, you can’t do that; you’re not ready. And they went and did it anyway. And then they fell apart. And they called me back. And they were like, We need you to help us fix it. It was, ironically, this is funny, it was a diaper manufacturing company that wanted to go to grocery stores. And I was like, you’re not ready to go to grocery stores. This will sink you.

Richard Matthews 1:04:21
That’s actually one of the things that for our podcasting business, I’ve limited the number of new clients we can take at a time. Because I was like, I know we could grow really fast. If we weren’t careful about it. I was like, we could take on three clients right now. If we took on 10, we’d implode. It just wouldn’t work out. And so I was like, but if we take on 3, the next time, we could probably take on 6, because we’ll have the staff to support it. We’re going to have to do it in rounds. And so so thinking about how can we grow, but grow slowly enough that we don’t blow ourselves up.

Lucas Root 1:04:53
And I limit clients that are knocking on my door and I’m like, sorry, I can’t take you. And they’re like, just hire. I’m like, I can’t hire me. So you have to wait.

Richard Matthews 1:05:09
That’s funny. So, next question for you then is your own personal heroes. So every hero has their mentors Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi-Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad. Who were some of your heroes? Were they real-life mentors, speakers or authors, maybe peers who were a couple years ahead of you, and how important were they to what you have accomplished so far in your business?

Lucas Root 1:05:30
I did have a couple of heroes. So a guy named Paul Irons, don’t bother looking him up. He doesn’t have books out. You probably won’t find him. He was a real estate entrepreneur in the town that I lived in where I grew up in northern Vermont. And he was just a nice guy that was willing to let me come in and ask him questions and just learn from him. And by the time I graduated high school, I probably knew enough to be able to start a successful business just coming out of high school I didn’t I went to college instead, but I probably could have. And it’s all because of just him letting me take his time. I mean, take his time. Paul Irons, and I still think about him regularly.

Richard Matthews 1:06:18
That’s such a fascinating thing. Because you don’t ever realize as the person who’s doing that. He probably doesn’t even remember or know that you consider him a hero. And so I always try to think about that in my own life is am I acting in such a way that I actually deserve to be someone’s hero. If that’s gonna happen. And I had a mentor growing up that he used to say, your kids are going to have a hero. And he’s like, and it had d**** well better be you. And the implication was that they’re going to pick someone and if you’re not worthy, they’re not going to pick you. And they’re gonna pick someone else and you’re not going to get to have that influence. And so it was always I knew I wanted to be a dad when I was like 17. Took me a few years after that, but I was like, I’m gonna be a dad, I’m gonna have kids. That’s one of the things that I want to do. And I remember thinking to myself, I want to live life and run the business and be the community leader in my space that my kids can look at me and get in those arguments with the neighborhood’s – my dad’s a superhero. No, my dad could totally beat up your dad, kind of thing, but actually deserve it. If that makes sense.

Lucas Root 1:07:38
I get it. You just reverse engineered one of my mottos, which is be-do-have. Most people … about the have. I want to have the car or they’ll see somebody driving down in the Ferrari and they’ll be like, Oh my god, that guy is so lucky. He has a Ferrari. You ask him and he will set you straight instantly. He’s not Lucky. He worked his freakin’ a** off to get that car. But doesn’t tell you the whole story that’s still 100% focused on the have and even if he sets you straight in the right way he’s going to talk about do-have. He’s going to say, I did these things that got me this car. I traded in the stock market. And one big I worked my b*** off in corporate management for 25 years. And this was my bonus to myself when I hit 45. It’s all do-have. You just hit right on the nail that there’s no have; there’s no do-have without the be.

Richard Matthews 1:08:44
You have to be the kind of person that’s going to do those things. Otherwise, you’re not going to do them.

Lucas Root 1:08:52
That’s right.

Richard Matthews 1:08:55
And what’s fascinating about that is we use the same be-do-have. I have a little mind map we do because I take our clients that we do the education for, and we help them design their education, design the training materials that they use. And we do it specifically with persuasion in mind, because we’re not teaching elementary Math and English. We’re just like, you just have to learn this. We’re teaching things, you want to learn how to do real estate investing. And if someones gonna learn that, they have to change their actions in their life. They have to make actual changes to get the results from what they learned. So it’s more than just teaching someone how to, you have to teach someone how to in the context of why to and in the context of who they have to change their character to be the person who’s doing those things. And most educators don’t know how to teach that way. So we frame the education with the be-do-have. We start we start there. We start with here’s who your students need to be to do these things to have these results. And then we teach that way. So we teach through the be-do-have. And what’s fascinating is some several of the clients that we’ve worked with so that I’ve worked with over the years, have had, 86 plus percent, not just completion rates, but success rates with their training, because we’re changing it. Most people teach how to. That’s just the that’s just the do. And you have to go through and you actually have to teach someone how to be and how to change who they are. And then you have to give them the motivation to change those things. And do that in the context of here’s the thing that you want to learn how to do. So anyway, I call it persuasive teaching, but it’s the same concept.

Lucas Root 1:10:53
Yeah, that’s so cool.

Richard Matthews 1:10:56
I love doing that kind of stuff. Awesome. So one of the last things we talked about on the show is your guiding principles. So one of the things that make heroes heroic, is that they live by a code. So for instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up this interview, let’s talk about what top 1 or maybe 2 principles that you use regularly in your life. Maybe your principle that you wish you known when you first started out on your hero’s journey?

Lucas Root 1:11:26
You already heard about be-do-have and I approach everything in my life from that perspective. But a different way to frame that that that other people probably have heard a lot more and may even resonate more easily is the Gandhi quote: Be the change that you want to see in the world. And so for me, the question is, in this email, do I need to be 100% honest? Well, be the change that you want to see in the world. Do you want to receive an email where information is being held back? No. Do you want to make decisions where you don’t necessarily know everything that you think you need to know, in order to be able to make that decision? No. So I approach all of my interactions and all of the things that I do from the perspective of be-do-have. Be the change that you want to see in the world. And that means, be honest with integrity. Tell people the information that they really need to have in order to make a good decision for them. And trust the world to be reciprocal. Trust that the world will come back to you with the right clients and the right employees who want to be a part of that same world that you’re building around yourself.

Richard Matthews 1:12:45
It really works too. Because I follow the same line of thinking with what we do and even my sales messages, I’ll lay everything out for them. And come to the end. I recently came to the end of a sales call with a client and I basically I think told them I was like, you’re not a good fit for these reasons. And I was like walk them through and help them build a whole plan that would work for them. And I was like, hire this person, this person is your gold. And they went, and they did, and they got really good results with them. And what’s interesting is they immediately – the person that they recommend to everyone is not the person that got them the results. It’s me. Which is funny because they’re like, it tells it like it is. And it’s a really good way to handle just like living your life. I mean, a lot of situations, but definitely in business. So I agree with you on that one that basically wraps our interview got a couple of last things we do here at the end. The last one is is something I call the Hero’s Challenge. And I do this because it helps us get access to new stories, and that’s my selfish reason for it. So things that we might not find on our own, but the question is pretty simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story, who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come to share their story with our audience here?

Lucas Root 1:14:08
Good question. That’s a fun one. I have a couple. There’s a bada** woman named Alessandra that I’ve been communicating back and forth with on some thought leader stuff that isn’t really ready to come to the market yet. I definitely could see her coming on this show and talking to you about what’s going on in her world and what her story looks like.

Richard Matthews 1:14:33
Awesome. So we’ll reach out later and see if we can get connected with Alessandra and have her on the show. And that basically wraps. Thank you very much for that. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd who walks up on the side and claps for the acts of heroism. So as we close, I want to know where people can find you if they want your help in the future. Where can they light up the Bat Signals so to speak, and more important than where they can find you is who are the right types of people to reach out and say, Hey, you know what I really should reach out to Lucas.

Lucas Root 1:15:08
If you have a well funded great idea and you’re a strong brand, I’m the right guy for you. I can help you figure out how to execute it. I can help you figure out whether or not I’m the right partner to be executing with you. And if I’m not; I will help you find the right partner best place to find me my website http://lucasroot.com/ or LinkedIn. I’m easily found, just search for Lucas Root on LinkedIn, you’ll find me. I’m typically the top one.

Richard Matthews 1:15:37
Okay, so the first question that popped in my head when you said that is how would I know if my idea is well funded? Like I’ve got $100 in my pocket and I think I can – that’s what it’s going to take. How do you know if your idea is well funded? Is my question.

Lucas Root 1:15:51
That might be well funded for you, but you’re not going to hire me with that hundred dollars.

Richard Matthews 1:15:59
So … you’ve already gone through a seed round funding and you actually have the venture capital-backed type firms that you’re talking about or they’re self-funded at a certain level or they’ve got the budget in their company to put towards this and it’s already been allocated that kind of stuff?

Lucas Root 1:16:15
Yes. That’s exactly right.

Richard Matthews 1:16:18
Okay, I just wanted to make sure I was clear for our audience who might be listening that are asking that question themselves. So thank you very much, Lucas, for coming on and sharing your story here on The Hero Show, really appreciate it. And it’s been a good conversation, at least I think so. So as we say goodbye. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

Lucas Root 1:16:45
We had a couple of really good ones. Be-do-have. Be the change that you want to see in the world. If you want to be great, you have to have a coach. I think those are worth reiterating.

Richard Matthews 1:16:56
Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more. Thank you again, Lucas, for coming on.

Lucas Root 1:16:59
Thank you.