Baktari MD

How Mentorship Leads to Success w/ Preston Brown (2024)

• Jonathan Baktari MD • Season 2 • Episode 51

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Welcome to episode 51 of Season 2 of Baktari MD! In this episode we are with Preston Brown, a speaker, serial entrepreneur, and disruptive innovator! Listen in as we discuss how through mentorship and learning skills, he has built up 18 thriving businesses from nothing. All of the tips and tricks you need are right here! Find out all of this and more in the full episode!

Being an entrepreneur and going through that many years of issues, right? Like and any time you have a problem, there's generally an opportunity on the other side of the problem. I mean, a sale of a product or service is a solution to that customer's problem. Hi. Welcome to another episode of Baktari MD. As you know, this year we're going to be doing Crash CEO School, where we go over leadership skills to take your organization to the next level. And today, I have a amazing guest, Preston Brown, who is a serial entrepreneur and really a great innovator. He's led many, many companies, is up to, I think, 17 or 18 where he's innovated and really cultivated a a pattern and a model to grow businesses and take him to the next level. So I wanted to bring him onto the show, to have him share his ideas of how you make any organization grow by providing effective leadership. Preston, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me, Jonathan. I’m glad to be here. We're so excited to have you. first of all, let's just tell people a little bit about you. I know you've have run and started many businesses. Can you give us your backstory of how you got involved and what made you decide to get the entrepreneurial bug? Sure. Yeah. I'll give you the, 3 to 5 minute version to kind of keep it concise. Okay. I grew up poor, amazing family. All the love you can imagine. Great mom, great dad. And, we grew up in a little trailer park called Canutillo, Texas, which we have El Paso, Texas here. And over there is kind of nobody really thinks about it, right? And, one day my dad gets a kind of wild hair and he decides, I want that life I see on TV. Not the one that we have in this little mobile home. And he was a brilliant guy, okay? He was a member of Mensa. He was a hard working guy, metallurgical engineer by trade. Just never went and got the sheepskin. He didn't get the degree. And then he went to work. He actually started working in a little shed next to our house, started making things for people whether it was car parts for high end cars or anything that you could do metallurgical engineering wise, this guy had it all. It was it was incredible. But he didn't know some things. He didn't really understand billing. He didn't understand collecting. He didn't understand how he should price his products or the service he was providing. And and you know, when you're a poor family and one part of the family doesn't understand that. And, of course, you know, then Murphy's Law happens. Mom loses her job, money starts running slim and it runs out a lot faster if you don't have much of it anyway. And so I remember the day the fight happened, and I remember that year, you remember those big old cast iron frying pans, the ones that keep the flavor. One of those goes flying at the cardboard wall of the trailer, and everyone was paying attention. And, I don't remember all the words that were said or yell, but I remember my mom saying and she was tough as nails. A real man can feed his family, collect what you're owed, or don't come home. And and that was that was big words. I mean, this guy was like my hero, my stepdad, not my real dad. I didn't know that at the time, but six foot four broad shoulders member of Mensa, really a brilliant guy. Awesome. And so, of course, I'm scared and I got to be the charity piece. I went with him, I went up with him to a house not far from where I live now, and my six foot four dad met this guy all of about five foot nine, and he did what a man should do and he is owed money, demanded what he was owed demanding, went to asking, asking, went to something less than asking. And eventually my dad settled for a wad of cash in his pocket. Coming out of this guy's pocket, we drove to the local Albertsons or I guess was a Smith's back then, and and we went home and, I tried to talk to him the whole time, and I watched him, you know, I his eyes were watering. He did the right thing. He he protected his family, fed his family. He followed my mom's order and also gave up on his business dream and went and got a job the next day. And I think the unintended result that he got, was I learned something that day, and I learned hatred. Like the guy that was taking advantage of my dad, I could have killed him. I mean, I think I was seven, eight years old but if there had been a gun in the room. I would have had no problem pulling a trigger. And going from kind of that love is the meaning of life to, at this stage, 7 or 8 years old. Money's the meaning of life. I became an entrepreneur. That was my moment when my mom was going to school. She had a different strategy for wealth, and I started stealing lemon juice packets from Grandy’s. And, there's a little chicken place here. I would sell them at school for $0.10 each because I didn't care, hated or loved. I needed to find a way to get money. I got caught one day and the manager became my first mentor, made a deal with me. He became my distributor, started buying boxes of lemon juice packets. So I became the honest entrepreneur. And I mean, it grew from there. I became the, corporate A-hole, if you will, Jonathan. I mean, if you thought Donald Trump was rough, man, the people that thought you're fired from him was bad. Should have heard me. I, I, I made a lot of money. I this went on till 2019, got rich, got several companies, became a millionaire. But I was a shit father. I was not a good husband. I was focused on money, only money. And I ran nonstop. And one day I get the call. And the call was from my brother in law. And he said, hey, man, you need to come over here. Your dad's gone. And I out of my mouth comes where did he go? But my my my heart had sunk my stomach had sunk. I could feel it in my whole body. Something was wrong. And it been a weird day. And I broke. And I remember driving home across town to mom's house. I remember looking around the room and there was Dad on the floor wasn’t there. There's all the people that I loved. And I started thinking to myself, I'm like, wait a minute. I've spent my entire life with money is the meaning of life. This lesson I learned at seven years old and I built some big companies. I built some good formulas for how to get there. And and what I learned before that was love is the meaning of life. And here I am with every single person I have in life, and all I want is more time with them because I didn't realize how short it was. And so it was. That was my pivot moment. Maybe to take it to the entrepreneur I am today. and it shifted me. I stopped giving two shits about growth and I started really concerning myself with automation. How do I create a business that is an engine that is a machine, that is a vehicle that I can get in and drive, and it'll take me where I want to go faster and safer and in a way that I want to get there right. And go figure. Right. All these growth coaches all over Google and YouTube and everything else that are there, and they're all amazing. There's nothing wrong with them. But but they're only teaching one facet and automation turned out to be the key. Like as I started automating companies, growth was one key component in that automation, right? the companies started gaining more value. I mean, the less necessary you as the owner are to your business, the more you're going to get on an exit when you look at your EBITA. Right? So when it turned out that that was the juice and the squeeze, and that's my journey of entrepreneurship from then to now but. Preston I’m- By the way, I'm sorry about your loss, first of all. And, yeah, that's that's a tough, tough thing to go through. But having said that, many people, though, have these sort of life events. What is it about you that made you realize that it's time, you know, you weren't a spring chicken. You weren't a kid anymore, yet you still were able to go to a different direction. Yeah, I commend you a lot, but what made you use that event to go in a different direction? it's it's the right thing to do. But a lot of people don't learn from that, and they just only have one gear and they just keep going in that direction. And I commend you. And maybe it's a lesson for other people that it's not too late to, you know, turn, turn, turn over a new leaf and try to a more healthy, purposeful way of running their lives and business. Yeah, great. Great question. And and maybe I won’t give the smartest answer, but it's probably also the stupidest answer that that you're going to hear. But I think it's also the most true. Sometimes the simplest things are the most true. being an entrepreneur and going through that many years of issues. Right. Like and anytime you have a problem, there's generally an opportunity on the other side of the problem. I mean, a sale of a product or a service is a solution to that customer's problem. And so I kind of grew up inadvertently receiving this lesson that your problems are your gifts, or they can be your opportunity if you handle them right. And so normally, your greatest strength and your greatest weakness, they both come from the same moment, right? The single most important thing I think there is for any entrepreneur or leader, because from what I've seen from your content, you teach a lot of leadership is the ability to learn. And and learning is not something that happens in a comfort zone. I mean, you know, if you want to grow flowers, you take a seed and you shove it in a pile of shit. I don't think it's the most comfortable place for the seat. So what does it do? It grows out of that seed. Well, six weeks later. Eight weeks later, ladies lean down and smell the flower right above the pile of shit. So the problems are the gifts that grow in to something beautiful if you learn something from it. So I've got this. And maybe it's maybe I'm dumb enough to think that everything that goes wrong is a gift from God. If I can figure out how to make. Wow well, you know. But talking to you even before the show sure sounds like you learned a lot in a short amount of time. I want to kind of, go over some of the things that you might be able to help other leaders with, from what you've gleaned since then. let's talk about a couple of things I have down here, the four flows of capacity planning, because I want other leaders to learn from you about how they can channel your knowledge into growing their business and becoming better leaders. Do you want to talk about that? briefly. Sure. Yeah. So the four flows of capacity, it's honestly one of my favorite topics to talk about in business. And anytime I'm talking with a new entrepreneur that I just want new to me, that I just met, that I don't know that I want to know about, I'm asking questions that lead into these four flows, right? Like so anytime you're in business, you're dealing with a thing called throughput, okay? You're you're getting leads selling those leads on your product or service, which is a solution to their problem. Once you've sold them on it, you're in the delivery phase where you have to deliver on the product promises you made in the sales process. And then there's kind of that fulfillment phase, the the cash portion so leads, sales, delivery, cash. This is where you get paid, right. And any time that you have a machine that is generating any level of throughput, there's there's going to be stopgaps, there's going to be bottlenecks. Okay. Like I'll give you a a fun example, if you remember, Covid just happened, right? Like one of my businesses, a homebuilding business, okay? Framing was going through the roof in cost, okay? We were all having capacity issues for framing. It didn't matter if I sold 100 homes or ten homes, I could only frame ten homes a month. That was my production ability, 15 homes a month. If I got enough lumber and enough trades to put the lumber together. So I immediately went out and I made a collaborative relationship with a framing company, and I started doing trades on the secondary lumber market and buying truckloads of lumber. Okay. And luckily, I was capitalized enough to buy enough lumber that when it went further, which we thought it was going to do based on some of the economic policies around Canada and oil, which is a completely different story. But they decided to make money on their lumber instead. I made a good bet, and we wound up being a lumber distributor to many of my competitors and receiving lumber at a far lower price for ourselves, because we bought in at a previous price before it accelerated all the way. So we subordinated everything in our delivery process. So like you think progress equals happiness, right? Like leads, sales, delivery, cash. If progress equals happiness. And everything's going up. My anchor was delivery because I couldn't get enough lumber and enough trades to deliver there. So once I subordinated everything there, all of a sudden I could go and equalize the others to it. Does that make sense? You have to see where is your bottleneck in your throughput process? Are you having a lead problem getting business? Are you having a sales problem? Making a good product promise on the solution that you're providing for your consumer? Like are you afraid to talk about that consumer's problems? If you're afraid to talk about their problems, how the hell are you going to talk about your solutions? Right. So that's a huge part of the sales process is eloquently discussing their problems and how you solve them. Then a delivery where you're actually fulfilling upon their need. It's like there's going to be several steps in here. At least you're if you're in manufacturing and and at least one if you're in the service business and you have to make sure that you're delivering upon that. If you sell more than you can deliver, you better have the ability to outsource and increase your deliveries somehow. Otherwise, you're going to get a bad reputation later. So managing these four flows and creating an equalized throughput gives you the ability to balance your operation and and build a brand. And I guess the old adage you're only as good as your weakest link in that process is it's going to hurt you. 100%. I get that, I get that. so tell me about the six returns. We talked about that offline, but, You know what? Let me give you one more piece that that on the four flows that I almost forgot. Okay. And it's so good when I analyze companies, an owner of a company can work in leads, can work in sales, can work in delivery, can work in cash. And we as owners, we love believing in people because we obviously have believed in ourselves to get to the level we're at. We believe the same thing for our employees, employees generally, unless they're that C-suite level employee, cannot work in more than two consecutive flows. So an employee can work in leads and sales. An employee can work in sales and delivery, an employee can work in delivery and cash. But if you put an employee in leads and delivery, you will break the machine because the employee does not have the risk reward relationship to your business that you as the owner do you? The employee may have a good job, but they're not gonna get rich at the same pace you do. And if they go, if you go out of business, they're going to go find a new job. They're not going to go bankrupt and get divorced and everything else so they don't have the risk or the reward proposition. Never in more than two flows. And they must be consecutive. Every business I have ever analyzed has at least 1 or 2 employees in two non consecutive flows or all four flows, and their throughput is highly compromised. This is easily $1 million hack for most entrepreneurs. Wow. But what about senior leadership that oversee the whole thing? So I get that the employees that are in the trenches. But just like you, you're a senior leader and then you would it be okay for your senior leaders to have a more global view of all those four? 100%, but they're going to be niched? Okay. Like so you're you're the CEO training facility. And I love the way that you named your podcast because it's so important like Chief Executive Officer. So that is a high level that's beyond senior right. Like a senior leader, I think a senior leader in an organization, I call him a D.O., which stands for Do Right. So they need to have a team in each no more than two of those consecutive flows. And they're measuring and since they're a do. They're good enough that they can fit into any area that has the weakest link, because they're. I don't believe in hiring managers. I believe in hiring measurers. And the measurers is there to find the weakest link in any of the four flows and step in if they are to do they go step in and support here now going higher than the do the DO or the Director of operations, you get to your CFO, which is a senior leadership or your COO, your operations officer, your CMO marketing officer or CIO investment officer. Whichever one of these C-suite category leaders, these people obviously can think in all four flows specific to their niche. But like my CFO, may be able to identify that we need more marketing, but he's not going to be able to peg what my CMO will on identifying the target customer, knowing how to meet their needs. All of that does that. You follow me so, so, so the answer is yes and no. They can measure in all four. Yeah, depending on where they are in that leadership to senior senior leadership okay. So let's talk about the six returns. I really want to hear about that because I was intrigued by how you framed it originally. So I, I made the six returns because I kept hearing people talking about ROI. I went to a, an event with a lot of very high performance entrepreneurs. And a wildly successful guy. I won't mention his name because everyone’ll know it, but he's a billionaire. Kept saying return on investment. I had the opportunity to hang out with, Kevin Harrington in, like, a group zoom one day, and he would never stop talking about return on marketing. And so in my brain, I was like, okay, well, return on investment, return on marketing. Like, why is this billionaire guy? This like wildly successful guy. Everybody knows his name, okay? And he keeps talking about return on investment. But he's a billionaire. Obviously he's already received 100% of his investment back. So any time he's talking about the initial investment he's making, he's literally just stroking himself. It's all an ego feed. So return on investment once you've gotten your investment back, needs to be relooked at. You have to start looking at ROM and ROI translates to ROM when the investment has been received in full and ROM is cost of customer acquisition. It's measuring the lifetime value of your customer and you take okay, well, the cost of acquiring the customer is my ROM the lifetime value is here. How many times if, say, it's a high priced customer, like a home buyer or something, if I've got $150,000 lifetime value of a customer and it cost me four grand to get him, but it's going to take me six months to produce, how many times can I arbitrage this and get construction loan those customers into my products that you follow me. So ROI translates into ROM later, and then you have to start thinking, okay, well, once I dialed in ROI to ROM now I need to figure out how quick should I scale. So this is where all the scaling nuts get excited, okay? And I like to measure return on debt. Okay. We live in an arbitrage economy since the 1970s. We remove gold from the dollar. It's no longer an asset, meaning borrowing money is good. That is why the Federal Reserve could go to 18% back under Volcker, but now they go to five and a half. And what the economy's like struggling. Because back in the day the consumers borrowed. The consumers have always borrowed. So if you raise rates it raised their cost. But in those days the manufacturer the distributor and the retailer did not borrow. Now they do so you inflated their cost by inflating their debt. Manufacturer, retailer, distributor and consumer. You're getting a 400% hit to inflation by raising interest rates. It's why we're seeing discombobulation in the market. So when I looked at return on debt as a growth trajectory in an arbitrage economy, because every smart business that wants to grow should look at debt, okay, I balance it against return on balance sheet equity. So ROD to ROB if you have a $10 million equity company and you have $10 million in debt, your trajectory in returns is equal and you are growing at the perfect and safest metric for your particular industry. Okay. So that's that's your return on balance sheet, return on debt. The next one I take kind of as an owner because it's emotional. I think a lot of people, especially startups, they really screw this up. And the guys that are really successful in business, I love them. They're brilliant. Whether they knew this upfront or they figured it out over time, they measure ROT, return on time and ROE, return on emotions like, I like this. I like helping entrepreneurs make less stupid mistakes that I made because it makes me feel good. I like people having happy marriages and being great dads like I am now and not fucking it up like I did. So I get a great return on my time. I get a rise on it. I get a great return on my emotions. Otherwise I would not do these podcasts right. And so you have to look at all of these six returns return on investment, return on marketing, return on balance sheet equity, return on debt, return on emotions, return on time. These are the six returns, and your weakest one is generally the one holding your company. It's no different than those four flows. The weakest one is the one holding back your throughput in the four floats. The weakest return is the one holding back your company on the returns. If you're doing something you're not passionate about, that will eventually kill you. It's just an investment. If you're not passionate about it. Well, you know that that's a great point, because I think a lot of people pick and choose their businesses by what opportunity presented itself, not necessarily what they're excited about. And I know a lot of people who just literally, you know, go in the landscaping business because, you know, that they stumbled on to it. Their cousin had it. And so I always tell people, I have a whole thing on picking the right business. But part of what you said is involved in getting into the right business and having a passion for it. So whether it's your emotion and eventually your time, it becomes something that's more than just dollars and cents. I think earlier on you alluded just to, you know, just being in business for the sake of making money. But when you add those other things, I think it goes to your point that it's you're more likely to be successful long term if you have those intangibles. Would you agree with that? I 100%, and let me sprinkle this in. If you're an early entrepreneur and you're just starting out, you're going to get your return on a motion or return on time just by being successful in anything. But at some point. So so you might get into landscaping because, hey, there's a, there's, you know, there's an opportunity there that doesn't mean you should stay in landscaping. Okay. When I started as a home flipper, I mean, I was a realtor and I was like, man, these margins suck. I'm doing this for 3%. That's a shitty margin. And then I got into, okay, well, what if I flip the home? All right, I'm making 20%. And then I said, well, you know, but I have to peel back layers of this onion on every home I'm flipping. And so I have to go in, assess it, pull back layers. What if I built homes because then it's just all the same ground up, step by step process every single time. And I can do a 100 in a row. So. So it turned into a pivot. Where you start doesn't have to be where you finish. But at all points in your career, you should be looking at the six returns, because things do change over time. I felt great becoming a successful agent. Then I became, you know, kind of how this is, you know, there's a glass ceiling here. And I felt great as a home flipper and I felt great as a hard money lender. Then I felt great building homes. Right. But, you know, as I'm hearing you say this, you know, what comes to my mind is this whole idea that what you're not talking about is that every one of those pivots, there was theoretical risk. And I think when you look at people who don't become entrepreneurs, who settle into a 9 to 5 job, you know, sometimes even well-paying, it is. Those pivots require going into areas of uncertainty because, you know, let's be honest, you never built a home until you built one. So what was that going to look like? What happens if the house fell apart? What happens if you got sued the next day? But if it's if nobody bought that house, your first house that you built. So what's interesting is you you have to be hard wired on some level that you're comfortable with the risks because otherwise people have great ideas. People have ideas of pivoting all the time. But what what makes a person say, you know what I mean? You know, I'm not going to be a real estate agent. I'm actually going to go and, you know, flip houses and, well, I'm not going to flip houses, I'm going to build houses. And, you know, I'm not going to just build houses. I mean, you know, lend money for the houses. It there is something to be said when you meet people, when you coach people. What was that intangible that made people be able to cross those rivers and pivot and take those risks, calculated or not, their risks. So yeah, you're asking a bigger question and I'll probably dive in and we're going to go into maybe more of the leadership side because it's a really good topic. You know, I, I think the best moment in my life was when my dad got cheated. And the next best moment in my life was the day that my dad passed away. And those are also the worst moments in my life. They're both best and worst of the worst because of the amount of pain I had. They're the best because the amount of learning I got to receive. Does that make sense? And with with those situations and circumstances, I, I feared giving up on my dreams because I watched my dad do it and I watched my dad compromise. And if you think of comp promise, like if you comp a promise to yourself, like you just gave up on a promise to yourself, like, you know, people, the number one emotion that I think drives all of us is fear, right? And what you fear is probably going to be the number one thing that drives you. I fear living a mediocre life. I fear being a brilliant person that doesn't leave the world a better place. That scares the crap out of it. Above all else, I fear disappointing God. I wake up every morning. I'm like, you know, how can I make you proud of me today? God, what do I need to do to make you proud of me today? And you know what? Maybe some people are like, oh, he's a simpleton. Oh, he's a religious. Whatever you think what you want, it's working for me. But I'd rather be scared of that than scared of losing. You know, like the word problem in my world. And this is not my world. This is Latin. And Aramaic comes from the word emblem. Right? If you see a stop sign on the road and you blow past it, it's a problem. If you stop, it's just an emblem. You just stopped, measured, proceeded forward. It's an indicator that could be a problem. So I look at life and I kind of think, well, you know, I generally go into an industry and I try to find the stupidest person that's succeeding. And then I figure out what they're doing right. And if I feel like, hey, I may not be as stupid as that guy, I could probably do it better. Then I go find the smartest person in the industry. Okay? And if I find the stupidest person and the smartest person, and I look at what they're doing, right, like, like success leaves clues. You get what you measure. I mean, when I bought my home building company, I was I was a realtor that became a home builder. Right. Like and none of the builders in El Paso would talk to me. So I flew out to Lubbock and I met these guys that had this company called Betenbough, and they were really cool. And they start sharing all these secrets. They're doing like 1500 homes a year. There's no builder in El Paso doing 1500 homes a year. I fly out to Florida because I was part of a mastermind. There's a guy doing 900 homes here. You know, it was really interesting. Him and the guys at Betenbough had really similar processes. They had really similar ideologies. They think they were driven by different kinds of fear. So, you know, the way I talk to people about fear because there's always fear of failure, right? But if you have goals and your goals in life are to be better than where you are at now, you want to go further than where you are right now, like we all want the same thing, right? We want more. Well, to get more, you have to overcome something. And if what you're overcoming today scares you, then you're never going to get more. So you have to find something bigger to be scared of, or you're never going to achieve your goals. But I would rather be scared of something much bigger. Like, you know, we just passed 100 million in debt. I'm so excited because now I can go make the same jokes that Trump made where he's like, if you have $1 million in debt, it's your problem. A hundred million. It's banks problem. Like, you know, like like, I know I look at those numbers and I'm counting the commas on what I owe, and I look at the debt service coming out every single month. I think our, our debt service last month that we were committed debt like where we guarantee it with like 600 $700,000. That's before look at the non committed debt on the investments right and right. Holy smokes. Like you think about these numbers. And they're bigger than you ever looked at as a kid. Of course it's scary. But you know what's scarier. What's scarier to me today than than that is if I screw it up, I have to lay off all these people so I better find a way to do it better so I never have to lay off people. You know, find something better to be scared of. There's a good side of fear. eNational Testing makes getting a simple laboratory test as easy as ordering something online. With three simple steps, you can have your test sorted for STDs, general health, allergy testing, diabetes screening, blood titers, and more. You can simply go in for testing the same day and get your results quickly to your email. eNationalTesting.com’s complete health care panels come with easy to understand results at over 2700 locations nationwide. It's time to focus on yourself. eNationalTesting.com; easy, convenient, and tailored to your health needs. You know, the other thing, like as a segue to that is, you know, five reasons businesses fail. So we talk about risks and and being afraid of failure. But what are what are the things that make businesses fail then? Right? I mean, you're telling me the fear of failure is what's motivating you and a lot of other people, but what what are reasons then that businesses failed? Is it just not having enough fear? What is what goes into that? So I made this catchy content a while back and it was like the five reasons businesses fail. And the truth is, there's probably not five reasons. There's probably 5000 reasons. But you know what they all equate to? They all boil down to one thing. And so I don't even like that content. Like I made it a while back and you see it on Instagram or something. Please like it heart it and follow it. But there's better content that I put up. But but it all comes down to failure to learn. Okay? At every stage of your life, there is the reality of what you have around you. And then there is the ideology, okay? There's there's perception of what really is, and then there's perspective. And that's what really is through your filters. Okay. Now to to to give you an example, that's probably a politically incorrect example, but it'll get the point for because I can't think of anything else. if I see a woman walk by and I'm a person that's been divorced ten times and I'm like, oh, I hate women. Oh, what a bitch. That is- She may not be a bitch. I may not know her. She's probably a very nice lady, but my perspective filtered on what I saw. What? The only thing that really happened was a woman walked by. Right? A racist could not be a racist unless they were prospecting facts. Does that make sense? They're going to prospect their ideology and put that above their own reality. So if you have an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur's main job, in my opinion, is to put subordinate your ideology to your reality. You need to find out what is and what really is and get over what you think it should be like as a production homebuilder right now, my ideology is man, the fed should really have dropped the rates about 4 to 6 months ago, but the reality is they did not. And so if I'm living in my ideology, I'm going to be very poor. If I'm living in my reality, I can move past all of my competitors. Got it. So meaning really, you have to deal with reality, not what you want reality to be. So you have to be able to learn. You have to be willing to learn. And learning never comes from a comfort zone. Okay. So, so other than not learning, meaning staying rigid, are there other traits that contribute to failing that you’ve seen? Lack of curiosity, which leads to not learning. So. So probably the biggest one is, is people try to take their business and treat it as an island, and it's not okay. there, there's four flows to life and that are needs and there's one that's kind of a fifth. It's not a need, but you really should have it. And I think that's faith or bringing energy and family energy expressed fitness, your health or well-being and finance. Right. Like your money. We live in a resource driven world. And then the last one is fun, right? Well, so most of the entrepreneurs that I've seen that are failing, that are struggling, they have trouble mainly in faith and family. It has nothing to do with their finance, but it translates to their finance. If if you have no ability to believe in yourself and your capability and then you know whatever you believe that your God is made you in his image and you can do anything the faith, the mustard seed, you can move mountains, all that. Then. Then you're broken on faith. And and if you don't know how to show love and be loving and have fun and all that, like then you're broken on family. And if you bring that into your business, you're going to create a toxic culture. You're going to create an environment driven by fear. Like, you know, it's there's always truth in a paradox, right? Like your worst day and your best day are the same day. Oh, you know, can God create a rock so big that God cannot lift the rock? And the answer is Uh-Huh and Uh-Uh if he's God then, yeah, he could do that. But if he's God, then he would be able to. So when when you think about these paradoxes, I think the most important trait in any leader, the most important is being able to learn. But the second most important trait in a leader is you got to be dangerous. And we live in a world where after Covid, everybody wanted to talk about safety, safety, safety, safety. Well, if I'm a leader and you're on my team and you're not pulling your weight, I have to be dangerous enough to remove you or train you so that you do pull your weight. Otherwise, I'm going to let the entire team go down because you're the weakest link. I have to be dangerous enough. Like. Like a spear man. What's the most dangerous part of the spear? It's the tip. Everybody behind that spear is safer because that spear is out ahead protecting them from what's out there. I have to be dangerous enough to cut my way through that market, to take market share from my competitors who are less efficient, to keep my team safe. So I'm dangerous to create safety, if that makes sense. So. So you have to be able to learn. You have to be dangerous enough to step outside of maybe some of the taboos and the political correct ways of thinking about everything. And. I think if you fear being dangerous, you cannot run a business. If you are unwilling to learn, you cannot run a business. Those two. Yeah. Yeah. You know, as I'm hearing, you know, dangerous and learning basically we're talking about you have to be out there pivoting, taking risks, modulating, changing if need be. You have to adapt. You can't be the smartest guy in the room. You gotta learn and and just move your company ahead because you're protecting all your employees. You're protecting your family. There's a lot on the line. So I get that, I want to circle back and kind of talk more about, what you've learned in the last few years in terms of leadership skills. I have this philosophy that being a leader is not a soft skills. You know, just like, you wouldn't be able to land a plane just because you're a good guy and people like you, you know, I think you can't be a leader of a company just because people like you or it was your idea, your money, that you actually need skill sets to, you know, hire fire, enroll people in your vision to motivate, to discipline and to, give direction to mentor. Talk about those skill sets, because I don't think you can just know them by just hanging out that you actually have to find mentors. You mentioned you belong to groups and had other mentors talk about the importance of acquiring skill sets to manage a company in an organization. Yeah, I, I would say you have to have the right mindset, heart set and be able to develop the right skill sets. And the skill sets are going to change as you develop, like the skill sets of being a startup entrepreneur and the skill sets of being someone doing 50 million in revenue or 100 million in revenue, a wildly different skill set. Yes, they can be adapted and developed over time as you're getting there, right? And you have to have the mindset where you're open to it and the heart set to where you believe. I mean, if you think about the word belief, it comes from the roots of be love. But you have to believe that you're enough to be able to do that. But so skill sets. yeah. To to start with, if you don't have somebody that you're modeling, somebody that you're emulating, I mean, I, I emulate lots of people and you don't have to have a lot of money, like, I, I was I joined Tony Robbins Platinum Partnership and spent like, I don't know, 80 or 90 grand a year to be part of that, plus travel and everything. And that was that was amazing. I highly recommend that. I was a part of a group called Your Best Life. I actually launched that group, owned that group. Funny enough, Tony Robbins sued me when I owned that group, because they didn't like it. We settled. We all became friendly later, I guess. So that that turned out good. But, you know, like, I all these skill sets, all those groups that I was a part of, those were great. And you can pay a lot of money to go get a group like that. But, I'll be honest, I probably learned more when I was a broke entrepreneur. I read the book Titan by John D Rockefeller, and, you know, it was amazing. It was like, it's 30 hour book. And I say I had read it. It was on audible. So like, I listened to it while I was driving and everything else. I didn't read it. It’d be a lot of reading, but, in that 30 hours of listening, I found things about him that were like me. So I was like, oh, wait, what if I could do that? Like, this guy's a master of efficiency, like he was. It was brilliant. Like he wasn't always the the tycoon on oil, you know, he was doing trading and shipping and one time he cheated on, didn't get insurance. And luckily it came to anyway, like great stories around this guy, but wildly efficient guy. So he helped me understand things on efficiency. And then I read about Andrew Carnegie. And so these kind of became some of my first mentors. Then as I was kind of going around thinking, what I can do some of these things, taking the opportunities I had, which was real estate and Amway and anything I could get at that point because like when you're starting out, nobody's going to be like, hey, would you like to run Tesla? No, nobody's going to do that. Okay. But when you're starting out, somebody would be like, would you like to sell soap for Amway, start there if you after whatever start. But I started looking around at other guys that had the life I wanted, that had the marriage I wanted, that had other things that I wanted. And I would go purposefully spend time with them. I would go say, hey, you know, can I add value to you someway? Can I work for you for free for a month and just just learn something? And you know what? It's really funny. Like my dad used to say, if you're willing to work for free, you'll always be paid. And that's. That's how I got my first few jobs, too. So. Wow. It's funny because everybody I got around and did that with later, I was so valuable. They were like, what can I can I hire you? I'm like, no, I really want to own a business. Would you like to partner? Can I be your investor? And that's how I got like my first mentor is he was a real estate broker and I wanted to flip homes. And he became my lender and he became my broker. And then I was like, wow, I can flip homes better if I started teaching people how to flip homes. And so I started teaching all the realtors in El Paso how to flip homes, if they join his brokerage. And he was mentoring me and helping me, and later he gave me half the brokerage, we created a fund using his wealth and started loaning all that money. And and then we became the largest home flipper in El Paso. We started flipping over 100 homes a year. I got a call, this is ten years ago, so I hope I'm remembering it. Right. But it was the home vestors. We buy houses as these cave man guys, and they were like, would you like to buy a franchise? And I, I love system, so I was like, yeah, tell me more like, what can you teach me? They're like, we'll teach you how to do 30 deals a year. I was like, I don’t want a pay cut. I don't want to make less money, like 31 over 100 without paying fees. Like, why do I need you? And so mentors critical. But then you have to be able to find. My mentor and I are completely different people. I'm this like intense, high passion sales and spend money to make money type of guy. He was so tight it squeaked when he walked. He would print something and then he would turn the paper upside down and put it back in the printer and print it again. Not to waste paper as a deca millionaire. And I was like, geez, like it irritated the shit out of me. I was like, what are you doing? Such a waste of time to flip the paper over to him and but his counterbalance to my nature made me so much better like. And so then I started looking and I started looking for like different types of talent. And one of my favorite ways to assess talent. There's a lot of ways to do it. but, but, but it takes lots of ingredients to make a pie and a business is like a pie. You got to put all the ingredients in. I go out and I find people that are radically different than me, that if I was hanging out with them, having a beer would probably annoy, the shit out of me. And then I'm like, okay, how do I find something that I admire about them? And then I study them, study them, study them, and then if I can, I hire them and I build companies around them. I mean, you know, you go look at my bio, it's like 18 companies. Dude, I don't own 18 companies. I mean, of the seven that I'm actively involved in day to day, I mean, I coach all the people that I'm in business with. So I guess I'm a coach, but I own the companies that people are in that I coach, and some of them have a partnership or profit share with me. But but my my skill was really a talent scout and an economist and a social psychologist. Not just an entrepreneur. The entrepreneur was the skill sets I learned as I was growing, and we'd run into new walls, like we'd hit glass ceilings and we'd have to find a workaround, we'd have to innovate, we'd have to find a way around that. But if you find that people not like you and and there's this thing called disc, the disc test. D for direct, I for influencer, S for kind of the studies and C for the conscientious. Well, the D's and the I’s are radically task oriented people, and the S's and the C's, they're there. Or I'm sorry, the D's and the C's are task. And the S's in the I’s are heart centered people people. Right. And so what I kind of started finding was, okay, well, if you're a D and an I on your Disc then you’re heart centered and you’re task center, you're balanced. If you're a D and a C, which I realized kind of going through my story and money was the meaning of life. And I was very transactional and very toxic. I was a C for conscientious and a D for, maybe direct, but maybe dictator and maybe dickhead. Okay. And so all I cared about was tasks that was that I just wanted tasks. And so now if I go look at my Disc, people will tell you, oh, it can’t change. BS. Now I'm a D and I, I'm an influencer and a director. Right. And and the gal that runs my company is a C S she is a conscientious. She's a CEO for sure, but she's very process oriented, meticulous, like she's running all of our different businesses, working with our CTO, putting all these technologies, and we can pay more money than anybody else can pay. Yet we have half the staff of all of our competitor companies, and our margins are in most cases double and in some cases triple and in one 5x of our current competitors. And all because she's so process oriented. So I'll go sell and politic and inspire and teach share concepts. I've learned she'll implement them. I start the fire. She stokes it. You know. So so I'm going to stop there because I want to find out so about her who who helped her acquire those skills. Did you have an opportunity to mentor her or she came to you like that? And how about other people in your organization that you would like to get to her level? Do you have a process that you can help a young person become like her? So yes. that's that's a bigger question. I got to answer like four questions to get to the answer to that question. Yes, I mentored her, but she was the way she was, like, she was a a high C. That was her personality, a conscientious she really trusted no one but herself. So where I had to mentor her was to be able to trust others. So that she could scale her ability to use that C conscientious as a measurer to work with many people, both like me and like her, and put them in the right roles to make sure that they were handling and performing, you know, optimally and so that we could make the best revenue. But she's not she's not the only leader I've worked with, like so the DISC is a great way of looking at people from how they're motivated and what they're behaviors are going to be once they're motivated, like, I know, and she's going to dive in and handle it personally, right? Whereas me and stress, I'm going to put together a team delegate and influence. But but I'm also looking at some of the gender biases. Right? So I mean, so going into leadership we might nuance this a little bit, Jonathan. But I promise this if you're entrepreneurs, get this. This is a Deca-million net worth secret that people don't realize. But like if you look at men and women specifically in business kay, just take men and you study them for 40,000 years of human history. What do we do? We go hunt an animal that would kill us back 40,000 years ago. Right. So what do we have to do? We had to be quiet. We had to be thorough. We had to focus. Okay. Like every woman you ever talked to, if you're like, hey, if you if there's your husband or boyfriend, ever ignored you. 100% will say yes. We would never ignore somebody we love. So that's bullshit. They just don't understand that when we are wired into focusing on that thing that we are hunting for as a man, okay, we we tune out everything else. That's just part of our nature. Now she comes up, puts her hand on us. We're like, oh, hey babe, what's up? But we didn't hear it. We're wired to turn it off. Women are wired completely differently, kay? And they're they're they're fascinating. All of my companies, by the way, are run by women for this reason. Like, CEOs can be great as men, but they can also be great as women. But high level execs. I actually prefer women in those roles, believe it or not. And here's why. You take women over 40,000 years of human history. What did they do? They had to go gather nuts, roots, berries, fruits and things while the men are out hunting. Problem is, one set of berries nourishes your kids and another set of berries. They eat it. You have to watch them die a slow death poisoning. Imagine the toxic torture they're going to experience right? So now the women developed a very different type of focus and and challenge me on this, like, go home tonight and talk to to your wife, your spouse and ask her, hey, babe, I talked to this crazy, weird guest, okay? And he said that when you go home at night, you got, like, these voices in your head calling you to the unmade bed, calling you to the mess the dog made. Calling you to the mess the kids made calling you to what the wind blew down outside. Calling you to the dishes in the sink. Call you to this. And you can't stop. You can't go sit down. You have to go to the closest thing and go handle that crap. It's called diffused awareness. They are so radically environmentally aware. Whereas men have this extreme focus. Women have this balancing energy because the feminine is all about environments, maintenance and all of that. And so when you put a woman in a role where she's maintaining as a conscientious all of the personalities and the processes as a diffused awareness user, she's brilliant. And while men can generally I love men in my sales role, it's not that women can't do it. They can. They balance relationships well too. But men for like, if I'm taking somebody, I'm like, I need somebody to work in mergers and acquisitions. I'm going to try to get a guy. But if I'm going to try to get somebody to run a company, I'm going to try to get a girl. And if she's a high C, high S, I'm going to work with her one way. If she's a high D high I, I'm going to work with her another way. And the process that I'm going to work is I'm going to always promote a high C, high S with a high D high I underneath and a high C, high S underneath them, because they balance each other like a spring and create that flexibility. If you put a high D, high I on top of a high D high I, they'll kill each other. If you put a high C high S on top of a high C, high S they'll be very inefficient and they’ll both want to handle everything. So Preston where as I’m listening to this as you were evolving as a leader, how did you how did you acquire this information. Did it all come from mentors or how much of that was from the school of hard knocks? I'd say probably 50/50, but I mean a lot of mentors and maybe 70/30, but but mentors don't even have to be somebody, you know, like a lot of the information I just gave you on men and women, you can go buy all of Alison Armstrong's books, Keys to the Kingdom, The Queen's Code, any of that. She talks about the masculine, the feminine, male, female biochemistry, neural chemistry, which is not necessarily relevant to business until you put it into a business, which I don't think she ever intended. So if you're if you're hearing this Alison, Hi. But, but you put that into a business and you will compound your returns massively. Right? You know, again, everything you're saying, you've been educating yourself, you've been acquiring knowledge. You’ve been acquiring skills. And this is really the foundation where you and I are very simpatico. You. If you didn't read those books, if you didn't have those mentors, join those groups, I don't think you'd probably be where you are today for sure. For sure. No, no. So what is so the lesson there is you just can't, you know, become the leader and just wing it. You got to do what you've been doing, which is really working at it, acquiring knowledge, acquiring skills. Anyway, I, you know, I could go on forever, but it’s been really an amazing, amazing conversation. You have so much to offer. I see why you did coaching because it's endless amount of really valuable information that's actionable, you know, a lot of which a lot of the stuff I hear about this often is not very actionable. Almost everything we talked about today, literally tomorrow morning, you could actually put it into play. So listen, let me ask you this. So if people want to get a hold of you, learn more about you, can you share with people how they can learn more about you and maybe even be in contact with you? Sure. Yeah. all of my social media is ww- or dot Presotn Brown. Like if you go to Instagram, like @thePrestonBrown Facebook and stuff. Preston Brown. But I've got, like, a free gift for everyone. I created a masterclass and it would be a lot more to go into right now than than they need. But at www.automateyou.com, you can learn the seven stages of entrepreneurship and you can kind of figure out, okay, well which stage am I in? And every stage has different problems and different things you're going to learn that have been categorized into those. At every stage, there's this problem solving formula. It's a filter. You take your problems, you dump them into the top. The goal is efficiency. There's three parts alignment, simplicity, and foresight. Four things you measure culture, clarity, capacity, and cash. And only six things you can change price, product, people, place, promotion, and process. And so any problem you get, you dump it into this filter and it kind of like you remember that little ball that you put it in, it kind of bounce off all the pegs. Well, it comes out and tells you exactly what to do. So when you can figure out your stage and your problem solving formula, then you start making it very easy to make your reality, trump your ideology. And then and then everyone can get rich. Like making money, getting rich is really easy. You just have to follow simple steps and stop listening to all the noise. Go, go get the information from the people that have and are doing it. In today's society, right? Because there's a lot of white noise out there, and I love that. I'll provide a linked, in the notes below for people to go to that and, and your other contacts and really, really enjoyed it, hope to do this again. Thank you so much for your time. I hope everybody really enjoyed all the words of wisdom, the really actionable stuff. Preston, you're an amazing leader. Very inspirational. love your life stories and how that's blended into your success. And we wish you nothing but the best and we'll be in touch. All right. Thank you, everybody. If you, like this, interview, this podcast, please comment, like and subscribe and we will see you on the next episode. Take care. Bye bye.