Episode 206 – Jackson Millan

 

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[00:00:00] Heroes are an inspiring group of people. Every one of them from the larger than life comic book heroes, you see on the big silver screen, the everyday heroes that let us live the privileged lives we do. Every hero has a story to tell. From the doctor saving lives at your local hospital to the war veteran down the street, who risked his life for our freedom to the police officers and the firefighters who risk their safety to ensure ours.

 

[00:00:18] Every hero is special and every story is worth telling. But there was one class of heroes that I think is often ignored the entrepreneur, the creator, a producer, the ones who look at the problems in this world and think to themselves, you know what? I can fix that, I can help people. I can make a difference.

 

[00:00:31] Then they go out and do exactly that by creating a new product or introducing a new service, some go on to change the world. Others make a world of difference to their customers. Welcome to The Hero Show. Join us as we pull back the masks on the world’s finest hero preneurs and learn the secrets to their powers, their success, and their influence.

 

[00:00:47] So you can use those secrets to attract more sales, make more money, and experience more freedom in your business. I’m your host, Richard Matthews, and we are on in 3…2…1…

 

[00:00:55] Hello and Welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today I have a live on the line at Jackson Millan. Jackson, are you there?

 

[00:01:02] Yes, I am. Thanks for having me.

 

[00:01:04] Awesome. So I know you said you’re calling in from Australia, right?

 

[00:01:08] Yes. We’re in far north Queensland, which is on the east coast towards the pointy end. And we’re in the tropics at about 30 degrees here today celsius. So I think that’s what about 85, 86 Fahrenheit.

 

[00:01:20] It’s very nice.

 

[00:01:23] It’s warm. It’s nice. A little bit warmer than where you’re at.

 

[00:01:26] Yeah. And so for my audience has been following around my wife and I’s travels we’re up in Bryce Canyon right now with the kids. And we got to check off a bucket list item the other day and see Bryce Canyon covered in snow. So I’m wearing long sleeves and freezing to death completely opposite of what you’re doing.

 

[00:01:39] What I want to do to just start is just do a brief introduction. I’m here for your bio and then we’ll get into your story. So you are the director and chief dreamer at Aureus Financial. Did I say that right?

 

[00:01:49] That’s awesome.

 

[00:01:50] Okay. And you are the wealth mentor and you’ve spent the last 14 years helping service businesses understand the language of money and manufacturer financial freedom for themselves and their families, successfully helped over a thousand clients build an excess of 1.5 billion in combined wealth.

 

[00:02:04] That’s B billion with a B as scaled, multiple seven figure businesses, master of helping business owners make money, work for them and turn their business profit into personal wealth, which I run a service-based business called Push Button Podcasts. So I am definitely interested in probably everything you have to say today, but why don’t we start off with what it is that you’re known for? What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What you do for them?

 

[00:02:29] Yeah, I’m probably known for making what often perceived as being extremely complex and very confusing and very, very simple, because I’m a big believer that we’ve been sold this narrative that finance needs to be complicated. And to be fair, a lot of that has come from creating a reliance on the financial services industry in order to get certain financial outcomes.

 

[00:02:51] And so many people have been conditioned that they need to hand over their money to a money manager and just expect that they’re going to be able to manage it effectively for them, which could be their entire life savings, their retirement could depend on it. And I’m a big believer of shifting control back into the hands of everyday people, particularly business owners to help them become great financial stewards and play an active role being in the driver’s seat as they work towards financial freedom for themselves and their families.

 

[00:03:15] So I’ve been doing that for a decade and a half now and have loved every minute of it.

 

[00:03:20] So what you do is you’re helping people to take the revenue that they generate from their service business and turn that into. Essentially into wealth.

 

[00:03:29] Exactly. Yeah. There’s really three things that we work through, Richard. The first thing is about helping business owners redefine their business as a vehicle instead of just being the destination, because here’s the thing when we’re entrepreneurs and we’re running a business, our business is the be-all and end-all, it’s like another child, right? And for that reason, it becomes reliant on us.

 

[00:03:47] We end up turning this thing into a cash trading monster. We ended up reinvesting all of the profits. And in many cases that’s often a poor excuse for money mismanagement. And what we need to realize is that business is the best wealth creation vehicle that we can have, but that’s only as good as our ability to define the destination of what financial freedom actually means because let’s face it, most people do not.

 

[00:04:09] So what we do is we work out what financial freedom means. We reverse engineer that into an action plan, and then we repositioned the business as a vehicle to supercharge our trajectory, to creating that financial freedom and systematically turning business profit into personal wealth.

 

[00:04:23] Okay. So let me give you in my head definition of financial freedom and see how it lines up with what you teach. Mine personally is the number of days that I can go without working on or in my business while still maintaining my current lifestyle. Like right now, I’m working on making those number of days longer and longer.

 

[00:04:45] We’re about like two and a half, three weeks right now where I can step aside and just like, go have fun with my family. And like, everything keeps going before stuff starts falling apart. Trying to get that to like six months to a year where if I could leave for a year, come back to a bigger business. That’s where I want to be.

 

[00:04:59] I love that. I think that’s great. And I think that’s a really great philosophy. So my definition of financial freedom, because if you ask 10 different people, you get 10 different answers. I’m not trying to keep it really simple. The first thing is that we should own our home and have it paid off in full.

 

[00:05:14] Now, obviously when we’re living say a nomadic lifestyle, that’s owning a home is very attainable, right? But if you’re living in say a blue-chip area where property prices are a million dollars or more, it’s a little bit harder to attain. So that obviously depends on your measure of success and your yardstick there, but it’s really important to own your home outright because then you have the freedom and flexibility to do what you want to and you don’t have to answer to a landlord.

 

[00:05:38] And it also drastically reduces your actual cost of living. So provides us more surplus to do final stuff. The second part is that we need to have enough passive income outside of our business, where we have the freedom and flexibility to choose what we do with that time.

 

[00:05:54] The main important point here is that for most entrepreneurs and business owners who love what they do. They don’t want to retire. Like the idea of retirement is quitting something that you hate, that you can’t sustain. And the idea here is that it’s either going to come because you’ve spent your life doing a career that you’d love, or you burnt the candle at both ends for long enough that you’re so fed up with what you do, or you’re physically not able to do it anymore.

 

[00:06:21] And we don’t want to get to any of those outcomes. So if we can have passive income and have the freedom to choose how we spend our time, then that’s a really empowering position to be.

 

[00:06:30] Yeah, I think you’ve probably like one of my other philosophies too. You probably know more about this than I do, but you know, you have the name of your business, but it’s not the name that you publicly use.

 

[00:06:39] So mine is called five freedoms. So that’s the LLC name and five freedoms is the five freedoms that I’m working on having, so it’s financial freedom. Actually that’s actually number three. So the first one is spiritual freedom, political freedom. And then you have financial freedom, time freedom and location freedom.

 

[00:06:59] And so those are the five that we look at. And then there’s a sixth one. That’s like a bonus. If you want to talk about it’s health freedom. And essentially, in each of those categories, it’s the freedom to choose what you want to do without that particular category being restriction.

 

[00:07:14] I love that.

 

[00:07:15] So political freedom. We have the first amendment rights here in the U.S, so you can say what you want without the government coming and telling you what you can’t do. So that’s a measure of political freedom and financial freedom is being able to choose what you spend your money on.

 

[00:07:29] Like not having finances be the thing that’s restricting you from making choices. And the time freedom is being able to choose what to do with your time and location freedom is being able to choose where you spend that time. So anyways, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly like I’ve got a friend of mine who runs a much larger and much more successful business than I do, who tells me regularly.

 

[00:07:51] He envies me and my lifestyle because he built himself a monster he can’t get out of. He’s like I chased financial freedom without any thought about the time freedom or the location freedom. And now my business has me tied in both on time and location.

 

[00:08:05] And it’s not common, isn’t it. And I was listening to a podcast the other day, and the fellow said, the killer of dreams and ambition is responsibility and the burden of responsibility. And this is the problem that when we are ambitious, we typically have a one dimensional view of success. It is typically a financial measure. Hey, I need to create a seven figure business or an eight figure business, or I need a hundred staff, or I need to list on the stock market.

 

[00:08:34] I need to do all of these things. And when we actually peel that back, a lot of that is ego based ambition. It is the pursuit of perceived extract. And then by the time you actually get there, because you haven’t done the work in the first instance to kick the tires on it and look at it holistically and work out what we refer to as your triple bottom line.

 

[00:08:53] Or I have a framework that I use it’s called the F4 and I use it for my measure of success, of everything that I do to ensure that I don’t have this one dimensional view that ends up leading me to a position where I have to compromise or dilute my values as a result of chasing that one thing.

 

[00:09:09] And for me, I’m a firmbeliever that everyone should create a lifestyle business, but let’s face it. Most of us don’t want to list on the stock market. We don’t want hundreds of thousands of staff. We want freedom, right? We want the freedom to choose, to do what we want with our time, not to be a slave to our business.

 

[00:09:23] And the only way we do that is I use four measures of success, which aligns very closely with what you’re talking about. My first one is that as a proper lifestyle business, you should be aiming to be produced $400,000 or more a year in profit. Because I’ve been able to work out working with thousands of clients that $400,000 a year on average allows you to be able to live an abundant lifestyle with having basically no limitations and have a really healthy surplus where you can create wealth.

 

[00:09:55] Like there are very few people who earn more than $400,000 a year in income that have a better quality of life. Or maybe you go from drinking a $50 bottle of wine to a hundred dollar bottle of wine, or you go from flying in business to flying at the pointy end. Right. It doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t make you any more happy.

 

[00:10:12] Second thing, you should create a business that allows you to work four days a week. Because if you can take a three day weekend every single week, then you have enough time out of your business to recharge the batteries and come back in with a fresh set of eyes. Third thing you should be able to take eight weeks off a year.

 

[00:10:31] So 44 weeks a year, you should be able to work. So I take two weeks off a quarter. And that allows me once again, it’s take time out, recharge the batteries, see what breaks in my business, be able to come back and fix it and also be able to run the marathon. Right? And then the fourth one is that we should be working towards $4 million in net wealth because conservatively, if we have $4 million in net wealth, outside of our business, in investment assets, that should produce us around $200,000 a year in passive income.

 

[00:11:01] So that gives you a choice. If you’ve got your home paid off and you’ve got $200,000 a year in passive income, and you’re not producing any profit from your business, let’s say you exit your business. Then you can live a really great existence. Or if you’re still in your business, you’ve now got $600,000 a year that you can do some really cool stuff with.

 

[00:11:18] And so if we can achieve those four things, then I think we’ve got a pretty good existence. And we’ve epitomoze the idea of a lifestyle business.

 

[00:11:26] So let me just make sure I’ve got that down because that was really cool. $400,000 in profit. So that’s after expenses like money that goes in the profit account.

 

[00:11:36] That’s real cash, yes.

 

[00:11:38] Four days a week, instead of seven or nine days a week that most people did and the entrepreneurs do eight weeks off a year and then 4 million in assets.

 

[00:11:48] eXactly.

 

[00:11:48] So you call it your ,four what?

 

[00:11:51] I call it F4.

 

[00:11:52] F4, how did the eight weeks a year fit into the F4?

 

[00:11:56] Because it was 44 weeks a year that you’re working.

 

[00:11:58] 44 weeks. There we go.

 

[00:12:01] Yeah. And the idea there is like, if you’re a business owner, let’s say, if you go and get a job, then that’s the benchmark, right?

 

[00:12:08] I’m a big believer in creating benchmarks that we would refer to as our risk-free rate of return benchmark. Right? If you got to get a salary job. You’re going to get and in Australia, you get four weeks holidays. I started to rub it in. Now those of you in the U.S who don’t, but here we get four weeks as a celebrate employee and you get two weeks sick leave.

 

[00:12:26] So there’s basically six weeks a year that you can access the paid time out of your work. So as a business owner, if you’ve got into business to create more freedom, why aren’t you able to take more time than if you were an employee. That’s why we really need to have more off time.

 

[00:12:46] So first off I think that is probably one of the more brilliant things I’ve heard in a long time on my podcast, just cause I’m building a lifestyle business and I have like ideas of what I want it to look like, but those are really concrete numbers.

 

[00:13:02] And I can tell you of those four, I have one of them down already. So I’m working on the other three and that’s the four days a week. And I remember and this is a topic I’ve talked about a lot on this podcast before is earlier in my entrepreneurial career, I was doing the whole, like, obviously if I want to make more money, I should just work more because if I work more, I’ll make more. And I found out that there’s a significantly diminishing returns after about four days a week. And I tried the whole, you know, let’s work 120 hours a week and seven days a week.

 

[00:13:32] And what happens if you skip sleeping a few days a week just to put in more work. For those of you are wondering that makes you sick. You shouldn’t do it. And so you also miss out on the things that you actually want to live your life for which is your wife and your kids and the things that you’re actually interested in.

 

[00:13:48] One of the first things that I started doing was experimenting with limits, right? Cause creativity thrives with limits. So I was like, what if instead of 120 hours a week, I worked 80 hours a week or 60 or 40 hours a week. And moved it all the way down. And then it was like, it gets to the point where like, okay, well, what if instead of working six days a week, I worked five, what if I work five instead of four, instead of eight hours a day, I worked six.

 

[00:14:09] And so I go back five years ago, I was working like two full-time jobs just to make my business barely survive. And now I work on average four hours a day, four days a week. And I run two different organizations on that time and both of them are significantly more profitable than anything I was doing five years ago.

 

[00:14:29] It’s an interesting paradigm shift, isn’t it? Richard. And you talk in my language, like to give you guys a little bit of backstory, I’ve always had the benefit of being able to observe what not to do. And I observed that from my parents. My parents were incredibly hard workers. They were both business owners.

 

[00:14:46] My mum was a hairdresser and my dad was a trades person. And he jumped around from lots of different trade businesses, but never really stuck to anything long enough. But what both of them had in common is they worked incredibly hard. Like I watched them work 16 hours a day, seven days a week for as long as I could remember.

 

[00:15:00] And they always kept repeating Jackson, if you want to be successful in this world, you need to work hard for it. Like those very traditional, hardworking working class values. Right. But as a curious kid, I always had this thought like, there’s something wrong here because they were working for money as opposed to money working for them.

 

[00:15:17] Yeah.

 

[00:15:18] And my old man got caught up in this 40/20 trap. Like, he’d always say, hey, I’m working really hard now. And I’m going to retire at 65 and then I’m going to enjoy my golden years. And if you work 40 years, you retire at 65 and you enjoy 20 if you’re lucky and then you’re dead. It just doesn’t sound like a good trade-off to me in terms of risk versus return.

 

[00:15:37] But that was his choice. Now we fast forward to 2017. My old man was 66, so it should have been one year after living the dream after working his entire life, seven days a week, 16 hours a day, but he was diagnosed with late stage pancreatic cancer and he was given weeks to live. Now, as he laid there in hospital frail, fragile, clinging to life, and he looked back on his life and he regretted a lot of things and he gave me one last piece of advice.

 

[00:16:04] He said, Jackson, every person in this world has two lives. And your second life that’s when you realize that you only have one.

 

[00:16:15] And he died shortly thereafter. Now that allowed me the opportunity for my second life to start on that day. And since then, I’ve been focusing on the principle of Parkinson’s law because as human beings, we use the means that we have available, I think, back to school. Right. You had an eight week project.

 

[00:16:33] When did you start it?

 

[00:16:34] So for like when I started projects yeah.

 

[00:16:37] Yeah. Did you start it the night before or the week before? Did you start it on the first week or the eight weeks?

 

[00:16:43] Generally, the way I approached school, because I was kind of crazy. And we were in an advanced preparatory school was, they give you the whole curriculum at the beginning. Like, here’s what we’re going to be doing. And here’s all the point things. And I was like that one, that one, and that one make up 80% of the grade. I’ll do those three. I’ll do them right now, and take the whole rest of the year off and do nothing.

 

[00:17:04] And my friends were mad at me because they were like we work our asses of.

 

[00:17:08] That’s very smart. I wish I was like that, but I’ve come to realize that I’ve had ADHD. So I leave everything’s the last minute right. I’d be the person who does it all-night or the night before to finish the assignment. But what I realized that if my teacher told me to do that in two weeks, I still would’ve got it done.

 

[00:17:25] I just would have started it the night before the two weeks gap. So I’ve applied that principle to everything that I do, how I run my business. And it’s about limiting the resources that are available both time and money and making the most of those needs. And what’s allowed me to get my business to a point where at age 33, I’ve got a multi-million dollar business.

 

[00:17:46] I’ve got a team of 25 and last year we spent a year traveling around Australia with a team that’s basically running the business for me. And I’ve got the ability to do the things that I want to do. And further to that, we’ve been able to buy our dream home, which would now turn into an animal sanctuary.

 

[00:18:02] And because my big passion is animals and helping animals. And the idea is that you can create financial freedom now it’s not something we need to defer 20, 30, 40 years into the future.

 

[00:18:13] Yeah, absolutely. And I love where you’re going here. I want to talk a little bit more about your origin story, how you actually got your financial company started here.

 

[00:18:21] 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 that story were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to become an entrepreneur, or did you start in a job and eventually start your second life later?

 

[00:18:35] Basically where did you come from?

 

[00:18:37] I’ll tell yo what’s really interesting. When I look back on my life, I’ve always been an entrepreneur. but like many stages of my life. I’ve always been the last person to realize it. And I remember that when I was four years old, I was in the front yard of one of my mom’s friend’s places playing with with these two daughters.

 

[00:18:56] And I had this brilliant idea and I filled all of this little pool cart with all of my toys. We picked some flowers and then we started going door to door selling at four years old. I don’t know how long it go on for, but all I remember is that hours later we’re starting to get dark. And then a police squad car rocked up as I’d just finished closing a sale.

 

[00:19:15] And my mum jumps out of the back and this long white flowing maxi dress in hysterics thinking that I’d been kidnapped and abducted and something bad had happened to me. And I couldn’t even fathom that I’d done anything wrong because I’m like, Hey, look at all this money that I’ve made. And that was my first entrepreneurial moment looking back.

 

[00:19:33] But it was actually quite late into my career that I actually started my own business because one of the biggest challenges that I had throughout a lot of my life was self limiting beliefs. When I started my career in finance, I was training to be a financial advisor because I wanted to help people like my parents. I wanted to teach them how to make better money decisions because no one makes bad decisions on purpose.

 

[00:19:56] You choose the best option on life’s menu. The problem is they just didn’t have enough good options on their menu. So they chose the best they had. So as I started training to become a financial advisor, I very quickly became disheartened because I realized that financial advisors typically only wanted to do two things.

 

[00:20:15] They wanted to manage people’s money, who are already wealthy to make them wealthier. And they wanted to sell commission-based products to people like my parents who didn’t need them.

 

[00:20:24] Yeah.

 

[00:20:25] And I’m like, this is not what I want to be. So I asked myself the question, well, if I was going to being the term financial advisor and create a role that I would be passionate about that would align with my values that would allow me to fulfill my purpose.

 

[00:20:41] What would that look like? And I started calling myself a wealth coach and I started focusing on teaching people the language of money, helping them understand how to design their own roadmap, teaching them the strategies, the tactics, the mindset, helping them build what we call money muscle memory through a repetitive, ongoing iterative financial action plan that allowed them to take action, review, optimize, improve, and course correct on their time, focusing on progress over perfection.

 

[00:21:12] And then I very quickly realized that it was actually business owners who needed this the most because I personally believe that small business is the savior of our financial economy for the future and has hold the most opportunity to make a meaningful change in this world.

 

[00:21:30] It’s very on the spot.

 

[00:21:31] Let’s talk about it. Exactly. Yeah.

 

[00:21:34] Like we’ve got this amazing platform. We’re at the ability to be nimble. We’ve got the ability to create impact. We’ve got the ability to create jobs, to create freedom, to create opportunity. And the problem is that when business owners don’t understand the language of money, the opportunity costs that they are losing as a result of not capitalizing on all those great opportunities is far too significant to leave unresolved.

 

[00:22:00] So it’s my mission to change the way that business owners globally understand how to use their business as a vehicle to create freedom for themselves and all of the people around them.

 

[00:22:10] Absolutely. I love that. So over the course of building this career as a wealth coach I want to find out how you found your superpowers so to speak.

 

[00:22:21] Every iconic hero has a super power, whether that’s their fancy flying suit made by genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength. In the real world heroes what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you’ve developed over your career that allow you to slay the villains in your client’s life and help them come out on top of their own journeys. And the way I like to frame that is if you look at all the skills that you’ve developed, there’s probably a common thread that ties all those skills together.

 

[00:22:47] And that common thread is where your super power is found. So over the course of building the career, you’ve built as a wealth coach, what do you think your power is?

 

[00:22:56] I think the biggest superpower that I have is helping people define that real financial north star and creating this three-dimensional wealth plan.

 

[00:23:06] Because this is the problem, the vast majority of people, when it comes to creating wealth, chase the vehicle, instead of the destination, the question that I still get asked the most is Jackson, should I be buying property? Should I be buying shares? Should I be getting into crypto? What should I be doing with my money?

 

[00:23:24] And it’s like going to a travel agent and saying, huh, Hey I want to go traveling. Should I fly? Or I’ve heard it’s nice to catch a boat this time of year, or maybe I should drive around the countryside. Like, what’s the travel agent going to ask you, where are you trying to go? And the problem is that most people have never been taught how to goal set and create a financial game plan properly.

 

[00:23:47] And that’s because most of their goals are actually not goals, they’re dreams because they’re superficial, they’re unquantified, they’re wishy washy, they’re gray, and you can’t plan with an unclarified plan. So we help them clarify that north star and reverse engineer it backwards. And that’s my superpower.

 

[00:24:07] Yeah, that’s really cool. I think you probably have this far more developed than I do, but I know going back 10 years ago, everything that my wife and I put down on what we wanted to do we’ve accomplished and we’ve had to start redoing things. And I realized along the way like one of those things was like I had a financial goal.

 

[00:24:24] I want to make this much money. And about 60% of the way to that goal, I realized I didn’t care about that money because it was other things that I had more interested in. And when I started focusing more on those other values, I actually surpassed that income goal. Which is interesting because I was focused on like I need to create this much money, but you don’t really have like a heart reason for that, if that makes sense.

 

[00:24:49] And so I’m curious, what are the three dimensions in a three-dimensional wealth plan?

 

[00:24:56] Yeah. So I’ve had a very similar discovery. So earlier on in my career, obviously being in the financial space, you’re kind of expected to get your financial shit in order. And a lot of my colleagues and friends were really motivated by achieving their financial goals, buying investment properties, trading the share market, doing all of these things.

 

[00:25:14] And like they were super excited, super passionate about it. And I tried to run their race, but it never worked for me. And I could always felt like I was pushing my wealth journey up a hill. And it was only when I discovered that I wasn’t financially motivated, which might come as a surprise.

 

[00:25:32] Like, Hey, you’re a finance guy. You’ve built 1.5 billion in wealth for your clients. How are you not financially motivated? Well, it’s not the currency that I choose to pursue. My measure of success is lifestyle and the quality of my existence. So, what that required for me to do is to actually define what I wanted my lifestyle to look like all of the key milestones, and then work out what is the financial means that I need to have available in order to create that lifestyle for myself.

 

[00:26:00] And when I was able to do that, it was like a light bulb moment. It just clicked. So I good three-dimensional plan requires you to do a couple of things. One, it requires you to define the difference between your lifestyle goals, qualitative goals, holidays, experiences, free time, hobbies, interests, cars, boats, anything else that brings quality to your existence is a lifestyle goals and your financial goals.

 

[00:26:27] What are the quantitative goals, the house you want to live in, when you want your home to be paid off, the property portfolio you want to build the passive income that you want to produce, setting your kids up to get into the property market. All these things.

 

[00:26:41] Second part is we need to map this out over 20 years. Because the important thing here is that it’s been proven from behavioral finance principles, that the fear of loss is twice as significant as the potential of gain. And if we understand that for all people, when it comes to making a decision, taking action on something, we need to consider the significance of your motivation and your perceived difficulty of that action, when you’re highly motivated and you see something as low difficulty, it is presupposed that you will go through with the action.

 

[00:27:20] However, if the opposite is true, you say something that a low motivation and you see it as high difficulty, you’re never gonna do it.

 

[00:27:28] Yeah.

 

[00:27:29] So what we need to do is we need to map out your goals and aspirations, lifestyle and financial far enough into the future, that you can understand the repercussions of the compounding of your seemingly insignificant short-term decisions. Because one decision today you’ve compounded over 20 years could have huge magnitudes of impact.

 

[00:27:51] And then the third thing we need to reverse engineer all of those goals, dreams, and aspirations, lifestyle, and financial, over 20 years into a tangible action plan of metrics and milestones that you can actually influence.

 

[00:28:04] You can not control what the property market or the share market does. You can cannot control inflation. You can not control unemployment. What you can control is your activity in your business. And turn the profit that you can create. It’s probably the most tangible thing that you can control.

 

[00:28:22] You can control how income you take from your business and what you choose to do with it. And you can choose how much you are prepared to allocate to your future planning. And those are the things that we focused on, understand the things that you can not influence and focus your time and attention on the things that you can.

 

[00:28:42] Yeah. I love that. I know I have never done the 20 year part of that, which is probably where my biggest mistakes are. But I know the difference between the lifestyle goals and the financial goals is really in reverse engineering are the things that have allowed me to achieve so much of what I’ve wanted to do in my life.

 

[00:28:58] And I was like, I know we’re traveling the country right now, which I mentioned earlier. We’ll be five years in May, which is a couple of weeks from now, depending on when this airs and at the end of the summer, we’ll have seen all of the lower 48 of the U.S in five years, which is cool.

 

[00:29:12] And so our next plan is like, well, what do we wanna do next? Like we want to sail a port to port around the world. And so we’re looking at the sailboat that we want to purchase and how we’re going to learn to sail and doing the retrofit and all of that. And so I’ve got the, like how much it’s going to cost for that and how long it’s going to take do these things.

 

[00:29:30] And some lifestyle things that we could do, like learn some of the sailing stuff. All that stuff and just sort of reversed engineered it and then put it down into I know how much money we make per client on profit and how many clients I need to put into my business between now and then and what my close ratio needs to be on a monthly basis in order to hit that goal in like a two year plan.

 

[00:29:51] So like I’ve got that part down, but what I don’t have, and what I think is really interesting is like, how can you push that forward into 20 years? And I think part of that is I never really thought about the four things you talked about earlier the 400K, four days a week, 44 weeks, a year, 4 million in assets.

 

[00:30:08] Cause that’s further along and we’ve been more focused on the shorter five-year goals of like, Hey, let’s travel the country for five years and maybe let’s sail the world. And those kinds of things, like really living life. So it’s just fascinating to sort of see how you’re putting those together.

 

[00:30:24] Yeah. And it’s about the constant evolution. Right? And look, I think what you’ve done is fantastic. And it’s just about having those optics of that longer-term because it just helps us look at things from a broader standpoint and make sure that we don’t ever find ourselves in a position where we’ve achieved something.

 

[00:30:37] But because we’ve overlooked something that comes out of the periphery, we then are forced to make a scarcity based decision because we just don’t have enough financial means to do everything. And I’m a big believer that as a business owner, we should be able to have our cake and eat it too.

 

[00:30:53] Yeah.

 

[00:30:53] And there is a reason why all of the people on the rich list are all entrepreneurs and the vast majority of them anyway, because we’re in an elite club of people who have the ability to control their own destiny, that seize control of it, get in the bloody driver’s seat, learn how to drive and learn how to sail and go where you want to go.

 

[00:31:14] Yeah, absolutely. And I was like, I only have one caveat to that. Cause you mentioned a lot of people won’t always get in the driver’s seat and actually take what they want to take. Cause they’ll make a scarcity based decision.

 

[00:31:27] And I have found that sometimes the abundant decision, like I’ll just give a real practical example. We bought this RV and when we first started, we bought, let me back it up. We bought a really inexpensive RV that we can just pay cash for. And that had some issues and other things.

 

[00:31:43] Cause I was like, let’s just test it out and see how it fits before we go and put in the money and the resources and other things into something that’s like long-term useful. And I think that’s something that I think more people should do is take action and test the lifestyle things that you want to do.

 

[00:32:02] And if you like them go for it. Instead of like waiting until I can afford the in this case, a million dollar RV or whatever, right? Like don’t wait for it. Just do something and take action and move forward with your goals. Cause you might find you don’t actually like it or you don’t actually want those things.

 

[00:32:19] And sometimes it’s just the desire to. What do you call it? The journey to get something is more exciting than actually having it.

 

[00:32:25] 100%. And I think that’s a good philosophy. My old man taught me about this because there’s many people in the trade space, and this was in the context of tools.

 

[00:32:33] But I think this is universally applicable is that if you want to build like a toolset, you always buy your best tools. And because if you buy good tools, they last forever. But my old man said to me, he said, well, there’s no point spending all your money. And only having a small amount of tools.

 

[00:32:47] If you’re going to buy a new tool, buy the cheapest one. And if you’re using it enough for it to break, then you buy the really good quality one. And it’s a very similar example. You buy the budget RV, you try it out and actually choose that you can enjoy the lifestyle. And then once you realize that it’s going to be a cachet monster, you then upgrade to the upper echelon of mine and you get the good one.

 

[00:33:08] Because you’re right. There’s so many people that the idea, the romanticized view of what it is they want is far more gratifying than actually buying the thing. And the last thing we want to do is commit these excessive financial means to things that actually don’t get us any closer to what we want. And so I’d say I love that.

 

[00:33:29] Yeah. It’s such an interesting thing. Cause just because of the lifestyle we live, we get a lot of questions. I get a comment, a lot about people like, oh, I wish I could do what you’re doing. And I used to earlier in our traveling career be like, so why aren’t you doing it?

 

[00:33:44] And then I’ve realized over the longterm that they’re not actually saying they wish they could do what I do. What they’re saying is I appreciate that you have grabbed life by the horns and are doing what you want to do. And I wish I could do that as well. Which is interesting because I think a lot of that comes down to like, people aren’t doing this work, they don’t actually know what they want out of life, so they don’t know how to get to it.

 

[00:34:07] You’re exactly right. And I had the same thing, like when we were traveling around Australia in a four wheel drive and going to some of the remotest parts of Australia and like, how are you doing this whilst you’re running a business at the same time?

 

[00:34:18] And it was famously said by Confucius. He who said he can, and he who said he can’t are both right. Your life will become a self-fulfilling prophecy to reinforce your own narrative of the world. If you can say to yourself, Hey, I can get my business to a point where it gives me the freedom and flexibility to live in an RV and travel around for five years with my family, or, Hey, I can create a business that allows me to earn 400 K a year in profit or work four days a week or 44 weeks a year, or produce enough surplus means that I can build $4 million in net wealth in the next seven years.

 

[00:34:52] Right. And then you will already set your focus on the direction of where you want to go, but if you start telling us I can’t do that little old me, I could never get tthat level. I’ll never be as free or as fulfilled as that person. My circumstances is different and that’s gotta be the reality of your situation. I’ve seen it time and time again.

 

[00:35:12] Absolutely. I want to flip the flip the coin here. We talked a little about superpowers and the idea of using your super powers to help people develop these three-dimensional wealth plans. The flip side of your superpower is of course the fatal flaw. And just like every Superman has their kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

 

[00:35:31] You probably something that’s held you back in your business. Something that you struggled with. For me, I struggled with a couple of things. I’ve talked about a few of them already, but I struggled with perfectionism for a long time, which essentially means that I wouldn’t ship product because I can always speak a little bit more and then you’ll make any money, which is, you know, perfection is a really low standard when you learn how that actually works.

 

[00:35:49] And the other one was like the lack of self-care, which I talked about. And I had really poor boundaries with my time with work. And I had poor boundaries with my clients, which means I let them walk all over me and that kind of stuff. And learning how to really take care of myself with something that I had to change for my business to grow. So I think more important than whatever your flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so that you can continue to grow your business.

 

[00:36:11] Yeah, my real superpower is having ADHD, like being neurodivergent allows me to fulfill that superpower and look at things in different ways, which has allowed us to build our philosophy, but the kind of Achilles heel to that, the kryptonite to that is that being neurodivergent and having ADHD is that I hate getting bulked down in details.

 

[00:36:32] And there is like this physical feeling in my chest when I come up against the details or the things that I don’t enjoy, or the things that I find repetitive and boring that essentially holds me back from pushing through with that activity or that action. And I’ve done a lot of personal development around this to get a deep understanding of what makes me tick, what goes with the grain of what goes against the grain and what are the most powerful things that helped me discover that with a tool called Kolbe-A.

 

[00:36:59] I’m not sure if you’ve come across it before. The Kolbe-A, it’s like a psychometric test, but it gives you four numbers. And the first number is fact-find. How good are you at extracting information from people? Second thing is follow through how good are you at following through with things that you start and getting them finished?

 

[00:37:20] The third thing is quick stat. How quick are you to pick up new ideas and just run with them? And then the fourth one is implementation. When you’ve got an idea and you build it out, how good are you at being able to implement it or get other people to implement it? So I’m a 3, 3, 9, 5 low fact-find, low follow-through, high quick start and intermediate implementer.

 

[00:37:43] Now what I needed to do to compliment my superpowers and counteract my kryptonite is my business partner is the exact opposite to me. And he is the yin to my yang. And he’s basically very operationally driven. He hates starting new things. He’s got really, really high follow through. And basically I’m the crazy guy who comes up with the ideas, that’s why I’m the chief dreamer.

 

[00:38:06] And he’s the one that basically cleans up after my mess. And we’re lucky. We’ve also got a team of 25 binders that also cleans up after my mess once I start things. So you’ve got to surround yourself with bright people.

 

[00:38:19] Yeah. And it’s interesting, you mentioned that you’re neurodivergent, ADHD gives you superpowers.

 

[00:38:26] And my super power is figuring out the systems behind things. And what’s interesting to me is I have low follow-through because of that. And just based on the way you were describing that test, because what I really like to do is to figure out the systems and solve the problem and then develop the thing.

 

[00:38:45] And then once I’ve solved it. Then I don’t care anymore at all. Even if It’s like, I figured out what the problem is, I don’t even care to help you solve that anymore. Like I figured it out. It’s done. I don’t care anymore.

 

[00:39:01] So I have to have people on the other side are like, okay, here’s the solution. Can you go and do the implementation of this and make it actually happen? Because that’s just not where I’m at, I’m over here, this is where I need to be as like looking at the problems and figuring out the systems and solving the things.

 

[00:39:18] That’s so important. You’ve got to like, there’s so many people that go through life and goes through their business without understanding their intrinsic strengths and weaknesses.

 

[00:39:27] And it’s like, you’re flying blind because everyone has these superpowers and everyone has kryptonite and you shouldn’t have to feel like you’re pushing things up a hill against the grain to do things that you couldn’t. Sure there’s certain points in time in your business where you just need a sack up and then do the bloody work.

 

[00:39:43] But when you get to a certain point of scale, you trade time for money that you have enough money, so you can buy back your time. And then you get to a point where you can start trading money for money and really creating generational wealth. And it’s so empowering to be in a position where you’ve got enough money, where you can buy back your time and outsource what I call the shit jobs.

 

[00:40:03] So other people who see them as their zone of genius can do them justice. Do them well.

 

[00:40:09] Yeah, and I think one of the things that I struggled with early on, and I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with is how you make those transitions from trading your time for money to using the money, to buy back your time, to using money, to buy money.

 

[00:40:23] And for me, it was a really hard transition to actually start taking the money I was making and hiring other people. Right. Cause It’s interesting, like you, you make money and your income gets up to here. And you’re like, if I hire someone else, my income drops right down to over here.

 

[00:40:40] But it also you’re using that to buybacks of your time. And I remember a very pointed conversation with a business mentor of mine, who we were at an event together and we were going over a whole bunch of stuff in our business and he pulled me aside and he was like, Hey, the thing that I want you to do when you leave here is go back home and hire this person in your company to do these things.

 

[00:40:57] And I remember looking at him and being like, I can’t do that. I can’t afford that. And essentially, he was like, shut up and do that shit? And he’s like, just do it. And he was like, you won’t understand it or understand how you can afford that person until you commit to it and actually hire them.

 

[00:41:11] And I’ve vacillated on that for like three months. And then I finally fit the bullet and hired that person. And within the first month they paid for their whole salary. And then I was like, because of your perspective shifts. And I couldn’t see it from his perspective until I was on the other side.

 

[00:41:23] And so it’s really interesting to learn. Like when are you supposed to make those decisions in your business?

 

[00:41:28] I look at it with a couple of things. So the first problem that business owners make is they’re probably not charging enough to be able to hire people to outsource their time.

 

[00:41:38] They’re devaluing themselves because of self limiting beliefs of what they feel they’re worth. So the number one lever that business owners need to pull is charge more, charge what you worth, create enough margin in your business, where you can comfortably afford to hire people.

 

[00:41:52] Because the reality is even, let’s say you’re a superstar, you’re a 100% there all of the time, but if you’ve got two people that are at 80%, they’re still better than you. So this is the important thing.

 

[00:42:04] And next thing is that you need to put a real value on your time. So we created a tool that we use with our clients because we believe time is the most valuable currency. It’s the only one that we can’t get back once it’s gone. So we go through an exercise called the time sucking monster, where we basically work out based on how much you want to earn or how much you’re paying yourself from your business, the amount of hours you work a week, the weeks you work per year, what is every hour of your working day worth and what does every hour of your life worth?

 

[00:42:31] And this allows us to create a lens where we can decide to delete, to get rid of tasks that are not worth doing an audit through automations and systems delegate, outsource them to a lower cost resource that allows you to buy back your time or dominate, identify the activity that is actually going to push the needle forward in your business.

 

[00:42:52] Because most people are only spending 20% of their time there to get 80% of the outcome. Right. Imagine if you were able to take that 20% time investment to 40%, then you’re going to almost double your results.

 

[00:43:04] So, if I heard you correctly delete, delegate or dominate?

 

[00:43:08] Correct.

 

[00:43:09] That’s good. The three D’s of what you’re spending your time on. That’s a really interesting way to sort to think through what you have to do. And I know for me, it was really learning how to do the delegation process and figuring out like for me, I mentioned earlier, once I figured out sort of what my superpower was, which was in the system of spilled and design, it’s like, let me just dominate that and build really, really good systems that delegate all of the tasks to the right people.

 

[00:43:40] And that’s allowed us to really streamline my business.

 

[00:43:42] Yeah. And I think the most important part here is that as a business owner, you’re often always the biggest bottleneck. And I can’t say that I’m not a bottleneck at all. But I try and improve it every day. And the reality is you cannot scale if everything is in your head and I’m not great at building systems, right?

 

[00:43:59] Once again, it’s in the details. I find it boring. My business partner is very good at it, but what I got into the habit of doing is unpacking one piece of intellectual property a day. If you’re doing something record a Loom video, and if you’re not in front of a computer or let’s say you run a trade business or whatever, and it’s on site set up a tripod and put your phone there and just record yourself doing it, like just capture the IP.

 

[00:44:24] Even if you don’t have staff go and create a catalog of videos and trainings. Cause it’s not gonna take you any longer. In actual fact, talking through what you’re doing is probably going to get you better at doing it. You’re going to say, oh, actually I could probably do that piece better. And then it’s going to create this catalog of this great intellectual property that when you do hire somebody, you can say, hey, cool, go watch these 20, 30, 40, 50 videos. And if you’ve got any questions, come back to me.

 

[00:44:49] Yeah, absolutely. I have a whole course process that, I call it push button process on how to build systems, because like I said, that’s my super power, but my one caveat to that on recording your Looms is take the time at the beginning of the process to explain why you’re doing it the way you do it.

 

[00:45:04] Because if you put that in there, when you start actually hiring people and they’re not just learning what to do, but they’re learning why it’s being done. It helps them to be able to ask and answer smarter questions about your processes. And I’ve noticed the more I do that, the more my staff will get really take ownership of the processes because they understand why it’s being done.

 

[00:45:29] They can see the inefficiencies when they’re doing it on a daily basis and come back to me or to other people on the team, be like, hey, we can improve it this way. Because they understand the why. So that’s my one caveat to that.

 

[00:45:40] I love that. Yeah. And then just got to show, we need to work with an expert on this stuff.

 

[00:45:44] The way I look at it is that we talk to our clients about this, but we don’t teach them about it because it’s not inside our wheelhouse. But the aim here is that this is how we build a truly valuable it’s saleable business because not every business can be solved, but the vast majority of business owners, they do want to sell their business.

 

[00:46:02] Like if you had the choice between just walking away from your business with $0 or selling it at a multiple of profit, what would you choose? You’d want to try and sell it, right.

 

[00:46:12] Obviously sell it.

 

[00:46:13] Yeah. We’ve got to put those in the shoes of a buyer, what does a buyer want? A buyer doesn’t want to buy a job for themselves. They want to buy profits.

 

[00:46:21] They want passive income. Sure. They also want to be able to have strategic upside potentially, but they’re not going to pay you for that. And that’s going to be what they’re going to manufacture after the sale. What they will pay you for is typically a multiple of EBITDA earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization.

 

[00:46:37] So it’s about understanding what your real, tangible earnings are in your business and reducing key person risk, because if you can remove yourself from your business. So for example, in your case, which if you could spend a year out of your business and the business continues to grow, that’s an immensely, valuable business, particularly if it’s profitable at the same time, and that’s going to demand a much higher, multiple of earnings than say a business that’s a one man or one woman band that they’re just trading time for money. Which is probably worth nothing.

 

[00:47:09] Yeah. Absolutely. I just went through the process of trying to buy other business from a friend of mine. And so we looked at the whole EBITDA thing and then the other one we looked at was a seller’s discretionary income, which is the lighter value business on one or the other.

 

[00:47:24] And so it was just interesting cause I didn’t know any of that. And I also learned that like, if you don’t do your accounting properly for your business, there’s accounting for, I want to pull money out of my business and use it as lifestyle and there’s accounting for, I want to have value in the business so I can sell it.

 

[00:47:39] And those are two very different things, which I didn’t know before I actually went through the process with someone.

 

[00:47:45] Yeah, we’ve seen so many people cook the value of their business just because they’re running their business like it’s an ATM. And the thing that we do, another lens that I view my business is when making a decision, I ask myself if I was the CEO of a publicly listed company, would I get away with this or would shareholders be, would they uproar and they’d be really pissed off. And one of the things that we do is that every single month we do an intrinsic business valuation and we review the numbers and we look at what’s happened in terms of how have our decisions played out and impacted the rolling value of the business.

 

[00:48:24] So the business is always ready for sale because we have no intention to sell it. But for those business owners, you don’t want to sell your business until one day you do. And for the vast majority of people, it’s not ready to sell.

 

[00:48:33] Yeah. And come to find out the business is not ready for sale and it won’t be for about three years.

 

[00:48:39] Exactly.

 

[00:48:40] Right. Because of where they’ve been at with the accounting and that means they have to push the retirement off three more years, but they’ll be able to put the business in a financial position where they want it to be to sell it at that point. But again, it’s because they didn’t know. Right. And it’s like at the knowledge gap.

 

[00:48:58] Exactly. And that’s assuming that you have the choice of when you want to fill your business and that’s not always the case. That God forbid if there’s a health event for you or your significant other, sometimes you’re forced to have to sell the business for fire sale, or sometimes you’re going to walk away.

 

[00:49:11] So start working on building value into your business now.

 

[00:49:15] I have a very dark metaphor in my head for that. I call that the bus incident, like, is your business ready for you to get hit by a bus? And whatif you survive? And I was like, I know my business isn’t at that point and I know what I need to do in my business to get it to that point.

 

[00:49:36] But that’s sort of like the thing in my head is like, what happens if I get hit by a bus? I’m like I use that metaphor a lot with my clients when we do specific setups in their business for specific things. They’re like, why are you doing it that way? I’m like, because if I do it this way and I get hit by a bus tomorrow, you haven’t lost anything.

 

[00:49:51] And they’re like, oh, I never would’ve thought about it that way. But it’s just a thing that I think about all the time. And it was like, I can’t have what we’re doing, be dependent on me. Like it just, it sits wrong with me if I do something in my business for you, like as a service that if I’m not here tomorrow, it hurts your business.

 

[00:50:11] So anyways, that’s just one of my like internal philosophies, this a similar kind of thing. It’s just making trips ready to go.

 

[00:50:17] That’s it, love it.

 

[00:50:20] So I want to flip gears and talk a little about your common enemy. And I want to put in the context of your clients that you actually work with.

 

[00:50:26] And every superhero has an arch-nemes. It’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business. It takes them a lot of forms, but generally we’re looking at a mindset or a flaw that your clients have that you constantly have to fight with in order to actually get them the result that they came to you for.

 

[00:50:43] Right. And if you had your magic wand, and as soon as they sign on the dotted line, you can just bop them on the head and not have to deal with that common enemy anymore. What is that for you?

 

[00:50:50] Yeah, the common enemy is the traditional financial services industry. And for decades, really, since modern financial systems have existed, the banking and financial services industry has taught consumers that they should be abdicating financial responsibility to so-called fiduciaries who can manage their money professionally better than they ever could, which is complete.

 

[00:51:14] This is the reason why so many people have been caught by sharks on wall street and have lost huge amounts of money. And I’ve got caught up in financial fraud matters is because one, they didn’t understand their money before they abdicated responsibility. Two, they put blind faith and trust into somebody, just because of the way they present it, not on their real true underlying merit and three, that they believe that somebody else was going to love and care for their money more than they ever would, which is never going to happen.

 

[00:51:45] So what my mission is is to shift this mindset, to get people out of abdicating responsibility for their financial future. Helping them learn the language of money so they can make decisions for themselves. And then if they then so choose to outsource certain parts of their money management, they’re doing so from a position of abundance themselves, they understand how it works.

 

[00:52:05] Then they had to hold somebody to a higher standard. They can sniff out a rat when they see one in the majority of cases and to be fair nine out of 10 of our clients just ended up managing their money for themselves and not needing fiduciaries your financial advisor or money managers because they know what they’re doing.

 

[00:52:20] Yeah. And what’s interesting is I had an experience with a financial manager when I was working for a big company. I was like director of marketing over there and they’d be pulling everyone and was like, Hey, we’re bringing in new financial manager and then we’re going to offer some new services. And I remember very distinctly he was like, we’re offering, I’m not gonna get into the products or whatever, but he was like, we’re gonna offer these products.

 

[00:52:40] And they’re good for you for this reason. And I remember looking at him, cause he said something that just sat really poorly with me. He was like, you’re going to get to a point in your life, where you’re going to earn less than you do now. So you want to plan for that.

 

[00:52:53] And I was like, why would I want to plan on being poorer? And then set up financial things that are literally like planning my life to be poorer. And I remember raising my hand and asking him that question, like point blank. And he was like, well, because that’s what most people do. And I was like, why would you do that?

 

[00:53:11] And essentially, and then I brought up to him and I was like, so what you’re doing is you’re selling everyone in this room saying, hey, you should not pay taxes now on your seed money so that you can pay taxes later on your harvest. When there are options to pay your taxes now and grow your harvest tax-free and pull out of it, tax free, why would you not take that second option?

 

[00:53:32] And he looked at me and he was like, I don’t know if I can help you. And I was like, probably not. So I didn’t do anything with them, but that came to me like, to your point. He’s like a shark preying on all these people who don’t actually understand how finances work.

 

[00:53:44] Exactly. And it’s not that hard guys, like understand your 401k, understand your IRA and Roth IRA structures, understand other tax vehicles that you can use to build wealth tax effectively, understand the property markets, understand lending and finance, understand the share market, not necessarily stock-picking, but how to create.

 

[00:54:04] Low cost asset allocated portfolios, using index funds and ETFs, and understand your surplus in your cashflow and how you allocate that surplus into the right assets that aren’t being eroded by excessive fees and charges, and are being locked away for many years that are going to have implications for you down the track.

 

[00:54:24] And it’s all of these fundamental principles that once you understand, and we teach our clients this in less than 90 days, that we then start working on building the money muscle memory, which is the hard part. The problem is here that most people like when we go to the gym, right? If you want to get fit and you go to the gym and you go up to the squat rack and you put 500 pounds of plates under the bar and you try and lift it, what’s gonna happen?

 

[00:54:48] You’re going to hurt yourself.

 

[00:54:50] You’re going to hurt yourself, right? And this is what most people do with their finances because of this fear of missing out, they’re feeling like they’re falling behind. They go and they try and make up for lost time. Instead, when we’re going to go, we go and maybe just work with the bar first, get your form right.

 

[00:55:05] Maybe put 10 pounds or 20 pounds on and then cool, get comfortable and then start adding weight progressively over time. And then it’s this momentum and also the regular action that allows us to build this compounding and this magnification effect. And it’s all about just getting on track for the right trajectory, because there’s never going to be one decision that you make that will skyrocket yourself to financial freedom. But the vast majority of people, it is regular repeated, consistent decisions that will get you there.

 

[00:55:34] Yeah. And your example about the workout thing this over the last year and a half, I put on 15 pounds of muscle and I’ve always been like a scrawny kid and never been able to do that. But I finally started working with the health coach and I remember we were doing resistance training and we had four bands for the resistance training for the chest press.

 

[00:55:54] And the first band is like, 30 pounds. And it goes like 30 to like a hundred. And it goes from like a hundred to 200, like 200 to like 350 or something like that. They’re pretty big jumps or whatever. But I remember when I first started, I was like, I can barely move the thing.

 

[00:56:07] And I was like, how am I ever going to get to the point where I could move that big one? Cause like the big one was super fat, like a huge resistance band. Like I couldn’t even do anything if I tried, I would break something. And I remember just like going through progressively, every day you’re doing for a week.

 

[00:56:23] And like, you’re significantly stronger at the end of the week. With some of those things. I remember like 12 weeks in to working with him and doing the workouts, I was able to move the biggest band on the thing. And I’m like, how could you ever imagine that that’s how that would go down. But it is, it’s the small, consistent effort.

 

[00:56:42] And it’s the same kind of process with your finances, your business, or anything else you want to grow.

 

[00:56:46] It’s exactly right.

 

[00:56:47] It’s the small, consistent effort grows muscle really quickly. Whether that’s your money muscles or your real muscles.

 

[00:56:54] I couldn’t agree more.

 

[00:56:56] Yeah. So I want to talk then a little bit about the flip side of your common enemy. So if your common enemy is what you fight against your driving force is what you fight for, right? So just like a Spiderman fights to save New York or, Batman fights to save Gotham or, Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What does it you fight for, with your company?

 

[00:57:15] My true purpose and my legacy that I want to leave behind in this world is changing the landscape of financial education globally for entrepreneurs, because it’s really talking about before. I believe that entrepreneurs and small business owners hold the keys to the future. And the problem is that for so many people, they are forced to have to dilute their values or pursue a career path just to put food on the table.

 

[00:57:38] And I personally believe that if we can empower business owners to create truly profitable businesses, that allows them to amass enough wealth that creates true generational impact. And then they’re able to create a system that they can pass on these values. So then future generations can become financial stewards.

 

[00:57:55] Then those future generations can actually pursue their passions and solve some of the real problems that we’re facing in this world, but it could be the difference between the continuation of their race, the thousands of years to come. So if we can help people understand these things, create true generational wealth and pass up for those values, not just the money, then that’s the solution to us sticking around for the foreseeable future on this planet.

 

[00:58:20] I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s sort of my goal in life and people ask me all the time, you know, we’ve got four kids. And people are like, why do you have four kids? And I always tell people, the reason you have four kids is because the greatest impact you can have on the world is raising your children up to be better than you were.

 

[00:58:37] And that comes down to your finances and how the values and everything that you pass on to them. And I know that I’m in a better financial position than my dad was because he had the same sort of philosophy. And I’m hoping that I can do the same thing for my kids going forward.

 

[00:58:53] And because of that, I serve more people in my business than my dad was able to serve as an employee in his job, serving just the one employer. And I’m hoping my kids can take that to the next level. And provide more value. You get paid commiserate to the value that you produce.

 

[00:59:11] Exactly. Yeah. I really respect that, Mate.

 

[00:59:13] Yeah.

 

[00:59:13] And now a quick word from our show sponsor.

 

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[01:00:42] Now back to the hero show.

 

[01:00:45] So I want to talk a little bit about your own personal heroes. Every hero has their mentors, just like Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi Wan Kenobi, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad, even Spiderman had his Uncle Ben. If you watch the newest movie then it’s Aunt May.

 

[01:00:57] But who are some of your real life heroes where they speakers, mentors authors, maybe peers were a couple years ahead of you and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in your career?

 

[01:01:07] Yeah, my first mentor, my first hero was my father. My father enjoyed a lot.

 

[01:01:11] He survived one of the biggest earthquakes in history in Chile and the early fifties. He survived the Pinochet, fascist uprising in south America. He escaped to Australia as a political refugee. He worked incredibly hard and battled and fought for every opportunity he was given.

 

[01:01:28] And even though he had enjoyed so much hardship, he always approached the mentorship with me from a position of love and a position of caring to enable me to equip me with the best possible lessons that would allow me to create what I’ve created now. And these approach was very much do what I say, not what I do that was very sacrificial.

 

[01:01:45] But I really respect him for that. And he sat provided me with all of the tools that have turned me into the man that I am today. So I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t with my Dad.

 

[01:01:53] That’s awesome. I always love hearing people’s answers to that question because they vary so wildly from everything from parents to mentors, to authors and stuff.

 

[01:02:03] And you realize that like not everyone that you consider a hero would look at their own life and think, yeah, I’m a hero to other people. And so I always liked that reminder just for myself to be the kind of person who’s worthy of being someone else’s hero, because you may not know who on a podcast, someone, and they’re going to answer it with your name, right?

 

[01:02:24] Yeah. I’d hope that I have the privilege of that one day. But yeah, I try and humble myself just to do what I can.

 

[01:02:30] Yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk then about you know, as we sort of get to the end of this interview, your guiding principles. One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.

 

[01:02:38] For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever puts them in Arkham asylum. So as we wrap up, I want to talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, maybe something that you wish you’d known when you started out in your own entrepreneurial career.

 

[01:02:51] Yeah. My big one is live for today and plan for tomorrow.

 

[01:02:54] I think that embodies everything that I do. If it having 360 degree view on life and business we shouldn’t have to live with compromise. So if we can consider what we need to live for today and also have access means to plan for tomorrow, then that is a great thing to strive for.

 

[01:03:12] And I coupled that with enjoy the journey. It’s the title of my first best-selling book. And I think many of us are so focused on achieving the next thing, the constant pursuit of extra that we realized that we have enough now and we don’t take the time to be grateful for everything that we have and the opportunities that we have because so many of us are blessed in so many ways.

 

[01:03:34] So I learned to enjoy the journey because it’s the best part.

 

[01:03:37] Yeah. I really resonate with both of those. The enjoy the journey. One particularly is something that I want more and more people to understand, because you realize, especially when you’ve done as much as like you and I have done, you realize that it’s not actually the accomplishing of the things that gives you the joy, like getting the stuff or hitting the goal. It’s who you become along the way. And it’s not just the good stuff either. Right? Like for me, crying on the side of the road with a broken down RV because of something that went wrong you know, coupled with also, jumping off of waterfalls with your kids.

 

[01:04:16] And be like, we’ve done both like sometimes in the same week. And I call that the texture and contrast of life. And you realize that like a lot of people are striving for keeping their life median. And if you actually strive for things, you get the ups and the downs and you have a far more enjoyable life and it’s the journey that’s more exciting than the goal.

 

[01:04:39] I love that so much. Yeah. It’s that contrast of experience that makes life so beautiful.

 

[01:04:44] Yeah. And then the other thing, the whole live for today, plan for tomorrow, you said something earlier that I didn’t pick up on, but I wanted to mention, you said, the surplus, right.

 

[01:04:54] You have to have surplus in your business. And it was interesting to hear you talking about planning for surplus. And I think a lot of people don’t actually, because they don’t have a plan. And I had the same problem is like you make more money. You don’t look at it as surplus.

 

[01:05:09] You’re just like, oh, I’ve got money. I can take that and put it into things, right? Like sometimes you just grow your lifestyle to fit whatever the income you have is. So you don’t ever actually have surplus because you didn’t plan to have it. So, you’re not actually ever taking your surplus and putting it into the plans that we’re talking about, the planning for the future.

 

[01:05:28] And so anyways, I thought it was a really fascinating way to look at that having that as is planning to have surplus.

 

[01:05:33] It’s so important. And it’s that phenomena, the cashflow creep. It’s good old Parkinson’s law, applying it again, which is why in the book, Richest Man in Babylon, they say, you’ve got to pay yourself first.

 

[01:05:44] We presuppose surplus and we live and function on what is left. That’s the way to go.

 

[01:05:50] Yeah, absolutely. That’s the same concept they teach in the Profits First books as well. Yeah. Which is something I’m about halfway through getting implemented in my business. Hopefully it will make a big, big impact. I had a friend of mine was running a pool company and they just sold it for a couple million bucks.

 

[01:06:05] And going through and like just listening to them on the growing their business. They implemented that profit first strategy. And within three months doubled the profitability of their business. Which is insane because they’re like, we didn’t change anything else. They changed nothing else in their business.

 

[01:06:22] They didn’t have any more customers. They didn’t change any of their marketing. They didn’t change any of their service delivery. They just changed to a profit first model and doubled the profitability of their business.

 

[01:06:32] Yeah. We love the methodology. If your business is a cash monster is not necessarily going to be your saving grace.

 

[01:06:39] So we couple it with understanding the seven levers of how do we actually drive top line revenue whilst having a financial operating system that controls that cashflow creep. And if we can do those two things together, those two things married is a match made in heaven. So I’m sure we could talk about that in a separate compensation. Will leave the listeners hanging.

 

[01:06:59] So I think that’s a good place to wrap our interview. Maybe we’ll have to come back to talk about that, but I finish every interview with something I call it hero’s challenge. And I do this to really find access to stories that I might not otherwise find because not everyone is out trying to do the podcast rounds like you and I do.

 

[01:07:14] So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life on your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine finding why do you think they should come share their story here with us on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.

 

[01:07:26] I’ve got a good friend of mine. His name is Dan Henderson. He’s an absolute expert in the fitness professional space in the gym space, helping gym owners really understand the framework that they need to be able to grow and scale at Phenomenal Human Being, a really lovely guy. And I think you’d be able to add a lot of value through his hero story to your podcast.

 

[01:07:45] Awesome. Thank you for that. We’ll reach out later to see if we can get introduction to him. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism at the end. So our analogous to that is where can people find you? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, hey, you know, I’d love to have your help growing my company.

 

[01:08:02] So I think, and more importantly than where can they reach you, is who are the right types of people to raise their hand and actually light the bat signal?

 

[01:08:09] Yes. So our ideal client who we can add the most value to a multi six figure and seven figure service businesses. We’ve got to a point where they realize that they’ve spent so much time bringing, investing back in their business, that they want to start taking chips off the table and getting financially fit.

 

[01:08:22] And so if that sounds like you then feel free to reach out, feel free to search me on social media. Facebook is the place to find me Jackson Millan, and you’ll find me there. We’ve also got a resource that we want to share. So if you go to the URL WealthHealthCheck.com.au. That’s weWealthHealthCheck.com.au, and we’ve got a 40 point financial performance scorecard that we’ve worked out the top 40 things that get in the way for service businesses, creating true financial freedom.

 

[01:08:47] The average score is about 18 out of 40, which means that most business owners are below average financial, which is probably no surprise. It’ll take you about five minutes to do, but what it will do is it’ll help you turn the lights on financially for the opportunities and the low hanging fruit that you are leaving on the table that you can use to improve your financial outlook very, very quickly.

 

[01:09:05] And that will also help you get connected with us and have a conversation if we can help you in a high capacity.

 

[01:09:11] Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on today, Jackson, I have very much enjoyed our conversation and I learned a bunch from it myself. So thank you very much for coming on today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

 

[01:09:23] Just remember that a good idea in theory remains exactly that just a good idea until you put it into practice. So take fierce action and I look foerward to seeing the results.

 

[01:09:32] Thank you very much, Jackson. I appreciate you being here.

 

[01:09:35] A pleasure.