Ep 152 – Creating Your Entity Fortress with Aaron Young

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Scott interviews Aaron Young from Laughlin Associates about creating your entity fortress, specifically about business structures, asset protection, and entrepreneurialism.

Listen to the podcast here


Creating Your Entity Fortress with Aaron Young

We’re very honored and excited to have our good buddy, Aaron Young join us this morning on the podcast show. Good morning, Aaron Young. How are you doing this morning, brother?

Good morning, brother Scott.

For those that are watching this on Facebook Live, we definitely want some questions from you, guys for Aaron here in a second. Aaron, tell everybody out there where home is and where you’re calling from today.

My home is in a little place called Amboy, Washington, which is not quite in the path of totality for the upcoming eclipse this coming Monday but we will have a 99% eclipse. This is a real estate show. I have a beach house that I own that’s right in the middle of the path of totality. Somebody said, “You can rent that thing.” We rented it for $1,000 a night, minimum four nights. We get 99% of it from our farm up here in Washington where we would have gotten 1% more for that four minutes that we get to see it. I thought $4,000 was better. I feel great about that. We live on a little 25-acre place, about 45 minutes out of Portland, Oregon. I travel all over the place and give talks and stuff all over the place. When I come home, I get to watch the little goats frolic and I get to go out and mess with my horses. It’s pitch black at night, the Perseid meteor shower has been going on. We’re watching it from our backyard, no light pollution. It’s great for a guy who spends what it feels like maybe half of his life in hotel rooms. It’s really fun to come back out to the farm and live in a quiet place.

Let’s talk about what you do during your other part-time stuff aspect of that, too real fast. For everybody that doesn’t know, Aaron is a regular on our virtual workshops. We have once a quarter, actually the next one being next Friday, Saturday, Sunday, along with being on a regular twice a year Note CAMP. Tell them a little bit what you do and what Laughlin Associates is all about real feast.

I’ve been starting or buying companies for my whole career, 34 years. Back in 2001, I had the opportunity to buy a company called Laughlin Associates, which is the original Nevada incorporation business. If you’ve ever heard that Nevada is a cool place to incorporate. Mr. Harley Laughlin started that whole industry back in 1972. I was already a competitor in that market to Laughlin and when Mr. Laughlin died, we bought the company and morphed all of our incorporation businesses together, which is now Laughlin Associates or Laughlin USA. We help just tens and tens of thousands of business owner form business entities like corporations, LLCs, limited partnerships, non-profits and help them build a fortress, build a wall around their personal and business assets so that they can avoid lawsuits. We make sure they’re following all the rules so they can defend their tax deductions and really use their business to the greatest extent to give them opportunities to create and protect their wealth.

It’s a fun business because we meet fascinating people, hear great stories and also because we get to work with great people like you and all of your followers, Scott that are out there building wealth in real estate. We have this great component that helps them hold it. We just have all these fun affiliations and our relationship with you, guys is one of our most cherished relationship, so we’re grateful for that.

Let’s talk a little about it. We get a lot of people that come up into our system, in our atmosphere, in our galaxy I guess you could say, looking to get in to investing and looking to leave their job for the first time. There’s always, “What do I need to do?” I love the fact that you come off, “Start with the end in mind.” If somebody is becoming a new entrepreneur or starting a business, what are probably the three biggest things that they need to do to begin with?

I had a great conversation with a young lady last night. Actually, I met her with you. She was a Duke graduate. She’s working as a buyer for Abercrombie & Fitch. She’s now working for Nordstrom as a buyer up in Seattle. She called me yesterday and said, “Can you help me? I think I have my entrepreneurial idea figured out now.” This goes right to your question. We’re talking last night and she said, “I want to do this and this and this and this.” She had these four things that she feels that she’s great at and she wanted to figure out a way to amalgamate those things together. I said, “First of all, what is it you want out of doing this? What’s the end result that you as an individual want?” Most people can’t answer that question. They say, “I want to make money. I want to be my own boss.”

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: What’s the outcome that you want? That’s first.

That’s the wrong answer. You can make money and be miserable. You could be your own boss and be working more hours than you ever would for anybody else and making less money. The question is: What do you want to have the outcome be? What do you want your life to look like? Do you want to be able to spend more time with your children? Do you want to become famous and a big captain of industry? Do you want to go out and do more service works? What’s the outcome that you want? That’s first.

Second thing is, does the product or service that you want to bring to the market, does anybody else want it? A lot of people have these ideas of this genius thing they have come up with and then they cannot understand why nobody’s buying it. The third thing is make sure that you get the right entities, the right education, the right mentors, the right coaches, the right team around you so that you can accomplish the goal. I teach all that in The Unshackled Owner class.

Let me go back to this deal about product or service. If you want to know the fastest way to get rich. It’s find out what people want, go out and get it and give it to them. That’s the way to get rich. People way too often try to bring their own idea to market and then they wonder why nobody buys it. You guys provide something with the note business. First of all, people don’t know it exists. Most people don’t know how little money it takes to get into the game and most people don’t have any clue the kind of returns they can make. If they have 50,000, 100,000, a quarter million dollars in their savings, they can build a whole wealth, a whole portfolio of real estate, but they don’t know it.

When you say, “What do you want?” “I want to get rich.” “Okay, here’s a way to get rich. Let me show you how to do it.” Find out what they want, go out and get it, give it to them. Yet, I run into people constantly who are just going to bloody their face against the pavement of the reality of life because they’re trying to force something on the market the market doesn’t want. When you say, “What’s the advice?” I’d say, “What do you want out of it? Does the world care about what you’re doing? Can you put the right team and capital together to do it?” That’s the way to do it.

I love that. We’re going to use the #fastestwaytogetrich. We see that. We have a lot of people come over either as existing real estate investors who have been doing things one way. you spent money on fixing flips or short sales or tired landlords that want to get away from that aspect. Because they started off with the idea, “I want to be a real estate investor,” and then it evolved to something they didn’t want to be a part of. Too much work, too much capital outlay, not enough returns and then figuring out that, “If I become a lien lord,” that they could have a lot more fun, a lot less money involved, higher returns and a lot higher quality of life because they’re not doing so much work themselves.

Let’s say you’re in high school and you’re going to go to college. I went to that one year college and then I didn’t go back to college and started businesses. What I see with young people all the time is they say, “I’m going to go to college.” I say, “What are you going to study?” “Business or advertising,” or something usually useless. Good for you for doing that, and I say, “Why?” There it goes back to begin with the end in mind. “What are you going to do?” “I’m going to be a fireman. I’m going to go to more school and be an MBA and then get a job in sales for some medium sized company.” Eighty percent of the world’s billionaires never graduated from college.

You have to ask yourself, “What are you going to college for?” You’re going to college to become an employee. That’s why you’re going to college. Then they go, “I’m going to be a lawyer because lawyers make a lot of money or doctors because doctors make a lot of money.” What they don’t understand is that the lawyers and doctors are coming to guys like you to say, “How do I get out of the doldrums of making $180,000 to $200,000 a year and starting to make real money? Or money where I’m not having to be up at weird hours of the night or getting called and dealing with everybody else’s troubles. I can just start building a portfolio that works for me.”

Henry Ford said, “Most people spend so much time working that there’s no time left to make money.” The point is people come to us because they’ve got big ideas. People stick with us because we help and make sure that the idea is safe. But it’s guys like you who are actually putting tactics and strategies in place showing people the path to follow to build real wealth. The very first time we me at an event down in San Diego, I pulled you to the back of the room. I’m like, “I make money and everything but I need to know more about what you’re doing.” I continue to be fascinated with what you guys are doing.

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: Most people spend so much time working that there’s no time left to make money.

We do great things but there are some basic things that any entrepreneur need to do besides the three things. Let’s dive into that a little bit here on asset protection. I see so many people and I’m sure you do too and your whole staff at Laughlin, who get busy going down that road of doing things and being in business or making money, and they’re not set up properly on an asset protection aspect of that. One of the biggest things we always get with people, “Do I need an entity or an LLC to be in business or an S Corp or things like that?” Do you want to give any recommendations on that?

If you think you’re going to be in business, if you say, “I’m going to be in business. I’m going to start a business. I don’t even know what the business is yet. I’m exploring. I’m going to a Scott Carson event. I’m going to a franchise expo. I’m going attend some things.” You’re spending money every time you go to those places. You’re buying your plane tickets. You’re buying admission. You’re sleeping in a hotel. You’re buying food at the hotel, which is expensive. Drinking water in the hotel which is $5 for a little bottle of Perrier. All the money you’re spending, if you’re doing that as a sole proprietor, in other words, that’s just you. You can write off some of that against profits that you might make. Most people when they first start aren’t making any profits. They’re only having losses. They’re only spending money.

If you’re set up as a proper corporation or a properly set up LLC, a lot of people goof this up on LLCs but let’s just stick to corporations for a minute. If you’re a properly organized corporation or a properly organized multimember LLC, all of those expenses can be gathered up into a basket. While you’re just in the process of figuring out what you want to do and investing money to learn about yourself and learn about business opportunities, put it together in a basket. When you get to the end of the year and you didn’t have profits but you had all these loses, in a properly organized company, then you can do what’s called a tax loss carryforward into 2018 or 2019. You can carry it forward for twenty years.

People say, “When is the right time to get a corporation or an LLC,” depending on if it’s two or more members. I say, “If you’re serious about exploring business, do it now.” Because you’re going to spend a few hundred dollars to form that entity, you don’t need to go to a big law firm and spend $5,000. You can do it through a company like us or you can find other companies online. For a few hundred dollars, you can set it up and start accumulating all your loses so that next year or the year after that, when you have profits, you can take all your old loses and push down your new profits and pay less tax.

“One of my accountants said I have to wait until I’ve got $50,000 yearend profits.” I’m like, “What? How long did it take you to get there?” Most people are not looking at how valuable it is to have a business entity. A guy named Sandy Botkin wrote a book and his quote in there says, “You would have to be brain dead to not start a business.” Even if it just getting involved in a multilevel marketing company as a corporation or an LLC because of all the write-offs you can take and all the way that you can have things that were coming out of your after-tax check can now come out of your pre-tax expenses of your business. It’s amazing how forming an entity will dramatically improve your life. When do you start? You start with that.

Make sure you’re using the right entity because a C Corp or an S Corp or an LLC, they’re all different. They’re not one’s old school and one’s more modern. A lot of people want LLCs because they think they’re cooler or more hip or more modern. That’s just wrong. What they are is they’re a very specific tool. It’s like saying, “I have a Formula 1 race car, I have a minivan and I have a dump truck.” All of them can get you from point A to point B, but they’re designed for very different purposes. We need to understand what the purpose is first, get you in the right entity because that’s going to give you the best tax deductions and it’s going to give you the most streamlined way of using the entity and it’s going to give you the protection, which is really the most important part. The asset protection, the lawsuit protection, the Kevlar vest around your business. If you have the right entity, you’re going to get the right protection. If you have the wrong entity, you might think you’re protected and then you get up into a hassle with some adversary and you find out, “I’ve been paying for this for four years and it’s not giving me any value. It’s not protecting me.”

Those are things that people need to know about at the beginning. There is no one-size-fits-all but I’ll tell you, after hundreds of thousands of customers over 45 years, we’ve heard pretty much every story. If people want help with that, it’s free. Consulting is free at Laughlin. We have people that have been with us for years and never bought anything. But they download every eBook, they attend every free webinar, they call and talk to our consultants. That’s okay because we know at some point, if we do a good job teaching them, when they have the right circumstances or they finally muster the courage to jump from their W2 job into something else, hopefully they’ll choose us because we’ve been educating them along the way. If anybody is wondering, “I don’t know if it’s time for me yet,” just know there are resources that are free that are there to help you get ready to be ready.

We have a question, do you have to have your LLC registered in every state to buy notes?

No, you don’t. There’s a famous case with Wrigley chewing gum. The government was trying to say they needed to be registered in all states because they’re selling chewing gum in all states. The court said, “No, they don’t have to be because they’re not actually doing business in that state.” They can own something or they can have transactions, they can make money, but as long as you’re not there operating. If you have an office there and you had employees that were going out and doing property management and that was all stuff that you owned, then you’d have to be registered in that state as a foreign corporation. But to just own stuff, the answer is no.

What are some of the resources? Like the phone number or the website for people to check out some more information real fast?

Go to LaughlinUSA.com. Just start pushing buttons, just look around. It looks like a nice, simple, clean website but there are hundreds of pages. You can get very, very detailed information there. You can call us 775-883-8484 and just tell them you want to talk to a consultant. Tell them you wanted to talk to somebody and you have some questions. They’ll be happy to answer your questions. Tell them you heard that we’re out here with Scott Carson on the podcast or on the Facebook Live. We have some special things we do with Scott anyway. Sometimes we offer special things to your people. If you guys call, that’s great. We’ll talk to you. If you really want to do something more, we’ve got an event coming up in November. There’s a lot of stuff where you can information to really learn: Where am I now? What are my options? How do I know when to implement different things? All that’s there.

It’s one of the best events that we go to, if not the best event. I’ve been going for a couple of years now. I went initially just to learn. Let’s dive in to a little bit more about what the power of Laughlin is and how an amazing Debbie and Scott and Brent, everybody over there is.

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: I work my butt off developing a culture and grow the business to where it can operate without me.

I build companies where I don’t have to go into the office. I start them, I work my butt off developing a certain culture and grow the business to a place where it can operate without me. I’ve done this for three decades. Now, the only thing I really do for Laughlin as a job is I go out and represent Laughlin on doing things like this, going out and giving speeches and so on. I spent three days in the office in 2016. It is today, August 17th of 2017, I have not yet been to my office in Reno. I use Zoom, video conference call to manage my people. I go out and I meet people all over the country. This happens at your events, but it happens everywhere I go, Scott. I’ll say, “Is there anybody in the audience who’s a Laughlin client?” Everywhere I go, it doesn’t matter where I go because we’ve got so many clients, we have so many clients, somebody raises there or some number of people raise their hand.

I never am afraid of those people. I’m never afraid when those hands go up. I never go, “Oh, my gosh. They’re going to say something bad about our company.” Never, never, and they never do. It’s because we have this phenomenal group of people that we’ve organized down there who are just regular, ordinary, salt of the earth people. But because of the culture that we’ve built, because of the safe place we’ve tried to create for them, and because they understand the vision, they know in their minds if you say, “What is your job? What do you do here at Laughlin?” This is the culture, they’ll say, “We’re fortress builders. We build the fortress around people’s personal and business assets.”

When they go to work, they’re not customer service agent. They’re not paper pusher. They’re not mailroom. “We’re fortress builders,” and they love the customers. You know this because you’ve introduced a lot of your tribe to us. I keep getting invited back, so I’m going to assume that’s a good sign. People love my employees and my employees love the customers and the employees and the customers stay for a long time. We have almost a 90% renewal rate of all our products. My average tenure for an employee is over thirteen years now. People come to us and they stay working for us for a long time. They wouldn’t that if their job sucked. They do it because they love the work and it comes through when a customer engages with them, and the customer always comes back and says, “You should meet Debbie Cooke. She’s amazing.”

That could have easily been Kesha or Galena or Rich or Scott or on and on, times nearly 40 people. Everybody gets the same reviews and it’s because, two things. One is we don’t try to be more than we are. We know what our job is. We know what our wheel house is, we stay within our wheelhouse. We also don’t undersell or oversell our customers. We say, “What do you want to do? Here’s what you need,” no more, no less. We’re not trying to shortchange people with less, then they go, “Why didn’t you tell me the rest?” We don’t oversell people and go, “Why did you sell me all this crap that I didn’t need for something that maybe would happen down the road?” When you give an honest appraisal to somebody of what they need and then you overperform in how you deliver on that product and you overperform in your ongoing conversations, fulfilment, customer service and so on, people like you and people stay.

The power of Laughlin over some of our digital competitors that advertise a lot on the radio and on television is that you get all the technology that would come along with a Rocket Lawyer or LegalZoom or something like that. But you get this boutique, very high touch interaction with our people. By using technology and a culture of customer first and empowerment of the employee so they can make a decision and solve a problem for a client, it’s a really good recipe for happy customers and renewing customers. Our business is really about relationships. We make probably three quarters of our revenue comes from renewals, not from new sales. Believe me, as people are thinking about their business and thinking about how to grow something, it’s much easier to keep a customer than to get new one.

One of the great things we love about Laughlin is the constant follow up. As entrepreneurs, we’re constantly doing things on a daily basis. Honestly, if you’re trying a DIY, do-it-yourself aspect, which most entrepreneurs are doing, “I started in LLC. I’ll file my quarterly stuff or renew once a year,” stuff like that. They do not realize that their business is not them. You have a great saying that you like to have everybody in the audience say when you’re teaching.

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: “I am not the corporation. The corporation is not me.”

“I am not the corporation. The corporation is not me.” We have them repeat it a few times because most people think when they start the business that it’s them. “This was my money. It’s my vehicle. I had to sign the lease. I have maxed out all my credit cards. It’s me.” What they need to learn is that if they form a corporation or LLC, that becomes a separate paper person, separate from them. It’s that separation between me, the shareholder and that entity, that project, that business. It’s that separation that gives us the opportunity to get the better tax treatment, to take all the tax deductions, to have lawsuit protection that keeps our personal estate separate from our business. If there’s a problem in the business, they can’t come and get my personal stuff and if there’s a problem in my personal stuff, they can’t take my business.

The only way to get that protection is through treating your business like a real, legit corporation or LLC, which fundamentally means having a board of directors even if it’s just you, holding regular board meetings, keeping minutes of those meetings, passing resolutions and so on. Doing the things that show that you’re treating this corporation or this LLC as something separate from just what’s going on between your ears. It’s that documenting that meets the standard of the law. It’s not just a good idea, it is the law. If you have a corporation or an LLC, you’re required by law to hold these board meetings as one. Most people don’t do it, and then they wonder why when they get sued or they get audited, they get their butt handed to them. They end up getting creamed. A lot of people come to us with the blood and scars of the last audit or lawsuit all still on them. I call those people event driven. Some event happened, it woke them up, it identified the problem and they say, “I can never let that happen again.”

The main thing that you’re referring to about all these follow up and all these ongoing stuff is our corporate veil protection service where we basically become your board secretary. We call you every month. We ask you what’s been going on in the business. We create the minutes and the resolutions so that those board meetings are taking place even if we’re the ones documenting them in this conversation with you, the one member of the board. Then, we send you back those documents in the proper orders so you can put them in your corporate record book. If you don’t have a corporate record book, we can provide one for you. The point is that one service is in my mind the most important thing we do. Probably half of the clients that we get every month come from law firms who know that their clients need to do this work but the law firm doesn’t really want to do it and they know the client doesn’t want to pay $300 to $400 an hour to create a document.

They send it to us because for basically $80 a month for the first year, $50 a month after that, we’ll do unlimited documents. We’ll take care of the client. We’re calling them. We’re not saying, “Here are some templates. Figure it out for yourself, fill it out.” All we’re saying is, “If you’re willing to get on the phone that for five minutes a month, we’ll make sure that you stay compliant.” It’s a tremendous service. I didn’t usually like to say stuff like that like, “It’s a tremendous. It’s a tremendous value. We do a freaking awesome job.” I didn’t like to say it. I thought that was overly promotional. But guess what? It’s a freaking awesome job. The older I get and the more stories that I hear from the tens of thousands of clients we’ve got on this program, the more I know this is a kick ass service. There’s a reason why 87% of the people renew it every year.

Think about how many companies go out of business. We’re actually exceeding the odds of corporate survival where almost 90% of the people that use the service stick with it year over year over year. It’s those people like Debbie, Kesha, Galena, Rich and so on that are in that corporate veil division, they are the ones that get all the Christmas cards, all the cookies and candies and all the love notes from clients because they’re talking to the client every month. They understand what’s going on with the client. It gets into more personal where, “I’m sorry I’m behind this month. My little boy got a bicycle accident and broke his leg. My dog’s in the hospital. I’ve been taking care of an ailing parent. We’re starting another business.” It opens up opportunities for us to support them in their life and also to find opportunities to help them in their business. It’s a tremendous service. It’s the most important thing we do.

I totally agree with that because literally people are making decisions on a daily, weekly basis that they don’t know that they’ve got a document or they’re going to buy an asset or sell an asset or raise capital or do a joint venture. It’s important to have that documented in case somebody ever comes back, files a lawsuit and you can actually show that, “It’s not me. It was the company.”

In your business, in your world of notes, what you just said is so right. Every time you take money in, every time you pay money out, every time you give yourself a raise, every time you sign a contract, there’s supposed to be a board resolution for that stuff at or near the time. People think, “I have my annual meeting, so I’m doing it.” That is wrong. Let me say it loudly, that is wrong. If you ever get caught, if you ever sucked into a lawsuit or an audit, you’re going to find out very quickly that you’ve eroded whatever protection was supposed to be there.

Remember on old Monopoly or the Game of Life? You take off the box top and there is all the rules. There are box top rules for your corporation or LLC, but almost nobody’s following them. They think because they’re a small company that somehow it doesn’t relate to them. “We don’t have to have a big Board of Directors meeting because I’m the only one.” That’s wrong. You’re breaking the law and when you get caught, the law will not be there to protect you. You will be left flapping in the wind. Then you will come to Scott Carson or Aaron Young and say, “That sucked, I can never have that happen again.

We had a couple of people actually commented online here. “Man, I wish I found Laughlin earlier.”

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: No matter how much you haven’t done before, just get this phrase into your mind – Up until now.

We’re still here. We’ve been here 45 years and we’ll be here tomorrow and we’d love to talk to you. No matter how far behind you are. No matter how much you haven’t done before, just get this phrase into your mind. People say, “I’m so screwed up. I’m so behind. I’m in such trouble.” Just get this phrase in mind. Up until now. “Up until now I haven’t kept my corporate records, but now I’m going to. Up until now, I haven’t taken advantage of buying distressed real estate notes. But now, I’ve learned how to do it, I’m going to do it. Up until now, I haven’t sought out a coach, like a Scott Carson or an Aaron Young or anybody else.”

The same girl that talked to me yesterday, the one that I met at Disney World, she’s working as buyer at Nordstrom. Last week, they had a meeting for new employees. It was a coffee meeting with the president of Nordstrom. Here are highly trained, highly educated kids with the president of Nordstrom, a big publicly traded company. One question was, what was the turning point in your career where you really shot into the stratosphere? The woman who’s the president of Nordstrom said, “I hired a coach. When I hired a coach, it helped me see things that I didn’t see in myself and that’s when my career took off.”

That’s a great attitude for what Laughlin does. They are your entity coaches.

That’s true. Yeah, we’ll coach you for sure. If you want to learn how to grow real successful companies, I’ll coach you. If you want to learn how to make a boat load of money in real estate, talk to Scott Carson. I’ve met your coaching clients. Now you’re on this podcast, you’re going to be in front of a lot of people who don’t know you. When I go to these events and I meet your Mastermind people, they freaking love you. They would take a bullet for you. You’ve shown them a light and you’ve shown them a world they didn’t know they could get into and all of a sudden their lives are changing. There are a lot of people out there that talk about stuff, they read it in a book and they’re full of, I’m going to start swearing. You’re in Texas. Those are the people they say “All hat, no cattle.” They’ve never really done it but they know how to talk about it.

Once in a while, you meet somebody who actually did it first, got good at it, so good that the people said, “Can you show me?” That’s you. You were already a super performer and you’ve stayed focused. You’re not developing land. You’re not doing commercial high rises. You’re not buying malls. You’re buying distressed notes and you’re buying them by the hundreds. You’re not just a teacher, you’re a practitioner. That’s valuable. We’re the same way. I’ve been a guy who’s been starting companies forever. I didn’t come up with the idea of Laughlin Associates. I bought the company and I took it from a one state company to 50 state company and from a one product company to a multiproduct company, and people wonder why we keep growing, we keep becoming more successful. It’s because you’ve got somebody who knows how to start businesses helping people who are starting businesses.

It’s not just something like, “I learned it in school. I heard you could take a 30-day course and get a certificate, and here I am.” Surround yourself with people who’ve actually been down the road and listen to those people. It’s like going to a marriage. “I’m going to go take marriage counseling from somebody who’s divorced six times. I’m going to go to a dating coach who’s never found real love. They’re really great at first dates.” Go to somebody who’s actually succeeded, and you’ve succeeded in that. People ask me all the time about marriage stuff. “How do you have this happy marriage?” It’s because I’ve been married for 30 years and we get happier every year. Go to somebody and ask advice from people who actually know what the hell they’re talking about and don’t just have this just read it in a book.

One of the things that we see a lot of, and I’m a big proponent of this saying. It’s not if you’re going to get sued, it’s when you’re going to get sued if you’re in business long enough.

We have 94% of the world’s litigation. It’s every 22 seconds, there’s a lawsuit filed against a business and 59% of those are companies of a million dollars or smaller. That’s main street USA, 59% of this thing that’s costing small business over $1,050,000,000 a year in defending frivolous litigation. That’s just small businesses. You’re going to get sued if you’re really in the game.

We have that happened. We had tenant sues that we weren’t even the landlords on stuff. I had this one lawsuit finally kicked out of federal court from a tenant that I had to evict on a property that we bought a note on, foreclosed. Offered them up to stay, didn’t want to pay and we evicted and it’s dragged on for almost a year now and finally done.

You win but you had to deal with it and pay a lawyer. It cost you money to win what should have never even gotten into court. The thing is in the United States, because we have lawyers that work on commission, and that’s a whole industry, contingency fee litigation. “You pay nothing now until you win.” We have that and we don’t have what’s called loser pays. In most countries, you can’t have commission based law suits and a loser pays. If somebody brings a frivolous lawsuit and they lose, they have to pay both sides’ legal bills. It really discourages for those litigation, but we don’t have that here. Small business owners are taken hostage or extorted out of money. Somebody brings a lawsuit against them, they have to keep defending themselves and finally they say, “What can we do to just settle this stupid thing?”

For us, it’s usually on things, we didn’t hire somebody because they were too old, too young, too black, too white, too fat, too skinny, too something. Something we did wrong and we didn’t respect them in our hiring or firing. It’s just insane, and you guys get it too. Somebody’s living in the house, not paying bills, won’t pay their bill, won’t renegotiate. You say, “Sorry, you have to move.” They’re like, “No, I’ll sue you.” That’s insanity, but it is the court system. A very small fraction of cases ever get to court. Most of them are settled and mostly it’s the business owner who’s paying a lawyer who’s saying, “I just have to end this nonsense.”

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: If you defend yourself properly and build the right entity around you, you have the right corporate veil protection.

If you defend yourself properly and build the right entity around you, you have the right corporate veil protection. The lawyer looks at that and says, “That’s going to be a hard nut to crack. I won’t take it on commission, I’ll have to get paid by the hour.” That stops lawsuits before they even start. Thankfully, that’s one of the things we pride ourselves on, is our clients, if they’re set up properly, most things that could go wrong against them will stop before they start because that commission based lawyer goes, “Not this one. There’s easier cases, I’m not going to take this one.”

One of the things I love that you guys had done in just recent last couple of years is putting the events together. Bringing a lot of those high level experts, attorneys, CPAs together. Why don’t you take a couple of minutes and talk about your event that’s upcoming here in November?

We’ve been doing events for years. Before the recession, we were putting on 80 to 90 live events a year. You know what that’s like because you used to put on lots of small events. Most of those were half day events in the a little hotel room and then four three-day long events, similar to what you’re doing. After the recession, between the recession and the dramatic increase in information you could get in the internet with the explosion of YouTube and so on, there was less reason for people to travel to an event. You had to be providing something really special, really unique in order to have people travel from around the country, around the world to come to an event.

As we came out of the recession, we thought, “How can we rethink our events?” We started this, what used to be called The Secrets of Using Your Corporation Workshop, we said, “We can do more. We can provide more value.” We said, “What do people really want? They want wealth. How can we help them either get wealth or grow their wealth?” That’s what we call it now, the Magnify Your Wealth Summit. We talk about the entity stuff. We talk about the compliance stuff. We talk about multijurisdictional, multi-entity strategies that are for people who have built up some more wealth or a bigger empire. There’s stuff for the beginner, for the person who’s got a company who’s growing, who now have some level of discretionary money and they want to start using different entities to do that.

We bring in people like Scott Carson and other lawyers, CPAs, financial strategies and so on, to talk about how do you really build a plan for your situation and to achieve the specific outcome? How do you get to that dream that you want? Begin with the end in mind. That’s what our conference is all about, the Magnify Your Wealth Summit. It’s all about where are you now, where do you want to be and what are some resources that you could bring to bare that maybe you don’t even know about yet, like distress notes, to just slingshot you much more quickly to your goal?

We do that down in San Diego, California. We used to do them all at Lake Tahoe and either Reno or Las Vegas because it was close to our offices. We found that people like to go to San Diego. We’re right there on Mission Bay. They’re in the northern part of San Diego. It’s a beautiful hotel. It’s a really cool big glass ballroom that people love being in, and you’re there on the Marina. It’s fantastic place to not only get great education but also to sit. This is one of the things that we love to provide, is that we ask presenters to all stay for the entire three days, and you can schedule a one-on-one time with that trust lawyer, with that CPA, with that bookkeeping company, with Scott Carson, with others so that you can start your custom tailor a plan.

You’ve got our employees there to say, “If that’s what you want to do, what’s the right structural stuff, entity stuff that we need to do to accomplish that? If the plan is a multiyear plan, what do we need to do today?” Let’s get drawn up on what we call blue print strategy. What’s the blue print of the growth? As we progress, we hit benchmarks, now it’s time to add the next entity, add the trust, add the limited partnership, whatever. It’s a tremendous value for people. I’d love it if people would want to come. Go to www.GrowIn2017.com.

If you decide that you want to join us at the Magnify Your Wealth Summit, the prices have gone up. We had early bird pricing that ended about a month ago. It’s $399, now I think it’s $699. It will go at the end of this month to $999 and then the last six weeks before the event it goes to $1499. There will be people standing at the table at the registration who decided at the last minute to come and will pay $1500 to sit in the room. Right now, the price is $699. If you decide to register, just put in there VIP. Put in there as a coupon code VIP and I will get you the early bird pricing of $399.

Here’s the deal. We limit it to 100 people, it sells out every single time. I don’t need to fill it with a bunch of low priced things. But for your tribe, buddy, especially as you’re going from just your Facebook Live to this new podcast format, those people that are ready, who know they want to do something better for their business and they want to make sure they’re safe, we’d love to have them there at Magnify Your Wealth. That should be a little $300 bonus for listening to your podcast today.

One of the best events to go to. I don’t know who you’re having as emcee.

Michelle Young.

Your lovely wife is emceeing.

Not my idea. Meghan Cole, our VP said, “You know who needs to be our emcee? Michelle.”

You’re a speaker, I’m a speaker. Guess who got the top ratings of all the speakers.

Your wife did, didn’t she?

Can you freaking believe that? She kicked all the professional people’s butts. She’s a phenomenal coach. She’s a great life coach. But the thing is with Michelle, she is all about the audience. It’s not about the presenter. One of my favorite quotes in the speaking world is, “Never let what you want to say get in the way of what the audience needs to hear.” Meghan saw that maybe the emcee this time will be super in tune with the audience. It will be fun to watch her. I couldn’t be more proud of her. I hate to say it, but I would have never thought to ask my wife to be the emcee.

That’s why you have great people around you. Behind every successful man is even a more powerful woman or women in a lot of cases.

It’s the best thing I ever did for my career, for my family. My entire life is just so much greater because at 22 years old, I married this 19-year-old girl and we figured it out. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Who knew she’d be running my events?

A lot of people evolve over time. That’s what happens, people grow, evolve and what’s great is when you’re going to have the same goals lined up. When you see people who have the same goals, the same mindset, the same passion from living in each other, that’s an unbreakable bond and it evolves. You’ve had your ups, you’ve had your downs. Every relationship has its ups and downs, it’s a matter of whether you come together and focus on, “How are we going to attack this together?” You get your back against each other in a fox hole and work it out and you get through those things and you’re much stronger. Then, you have these peaks and then the valleys now are even higher than the peaks twenty to 30 years ago.

You find this out in business, is that at some point, a lot of people are afraid. I know that a lot of people may be listening to the podcast now are nervous about, “Should I try this new thing? I have never heard of this distressed note thing. Should I start my own business or should I stay in my safe job?” If you’ve play the game you played for a long time, like I have and like you have, I’m 34 years now signing my own checks. What you learn after going through those peaks and valleys and tech bubbles and real estate bubbles and government battles and lawsuits and embezzlement and all kinds of stuff that happens over time. You go, “What else can they do to me? What else can come that I haven’t dealt with already?”

NCS 152 | Creating Your Entity

Creating Your Entity: When your eyes get opened up to the possibilities, your world will change for the better.

You gain a level of confidence, and it’s when you get that confidence, who cares? Maybe there’ll be a challenge, “Somebody is going to do it, why not me?” You start doing it and then all of a sudden, you get these tremendous results that mom and dad never told you you could get. Your college teacher, your middle school econ teacher never told you this stuff. I remember the first time I flipped a house. It was multi acre. We divided it into three lots, we sold the house.” Between this one project, I made close to $400,000. I’m like, “What the hell? How did I not know this existed before? It wasn’t even hard. How did I not know this?”

When your eyes get opened up to the possibilities of running your own business, of taking chances on things, on learning how to do something very niche like you do but it’s super valuable, your world will change for the better in a way that you can’t understand until you go ahead. Don’t just dip your little toe in the pool, you got to jump in the pool. People will sign up for MLM stuff all the time thinking, “I’m going to get rich working two hours a week.” They never do. Then, they get disillusioned with direct sales. That’s crap. The people who work direct sales like a real business get rich. It’s like anything else. You have to dive in. You have to drink the Kool-Aid and quit waiting for somebody to solve your problems and make you rich. You have to do it.

If you have the guts to do it, between you and me, Scott, we can help people get rich. We can help people not only get rich but live a life where you get to go do super awesome stuff and the stories you tell have to do with the cool resort you were at or the great vacation you just took or the people you met online in a private event. You’re doing good stuff and we’re here to put a chainmail and Kevlar and a suit of armor around people. But what happens within the context of that safety net of the corporation LLC is something that they can learn from you or other people like you. We’re going to be at this distress note thing. There are a lot of voices out there, you just happen to be one of the, maybe count them on two fingers, top people in the country teaching this stuff. Awesome to be with you.

Awesome to be with you, too. Thank you for those kind words, Aaron. That’s why we have you on here is because we think the same thing just about you, guys. The proof is in the pudding, number of clients, number of students that work with you guys. I have yet to hear anybody ever say bad things about you. We use you guys on a regular as well too for stuff. Once again, the best way to get a hold of Laughlin and Associates is go to www.LaughlinUSA.com or you can reach out to 1-800-648-0966. Pick their brains, ask them questions and they’ll definitely send you on the right road, right path to riches.

If they want to talk to me, if you want to write to support@AaronScottYoung.com, if I can do anything to help, I’d love to help too.

Aaron, thanks for joining us today.

Thanks, good to be on here. Congratulations on the new show.

Sounds good, brother. Make sure you go on to iTunes and leave a great comment. Give us a couple stars on it. Feel free to share this with people out there as well. What you hear you like, you want to share it with the people that surround you, your tribes, feel free to do that. We’d love to help out. You can always contact us at WeCloseNotes.com to answer any note questions. That will wrap it up for the day. Once again, Aaron, thank you so much. Honored as always to have you, brother.

Thanks, brother.

About Aaron Young

NCS 152 | Creating Your EntityAaron Young, is a lifelong entrepreneur, trusted advisor to CEOs and business owners and creator of The Unshackled Owner a program for entrepreneurs looking to build a business and not just a glorified job.

Aaron is Chairman/CEO of Laughlin Associates, a 44-year-old company that has helped over 100,000 entrepreneurs start, grow and profit from their business. This has given Aaron an ideal vantage point to observe common mistakes and successes in businesses from Main Street to America’s largest yacht broker from medical professionals to manufacturers to investors. For over 34 years, his experience founding, acquiring and directing multi-million dollar businesses as well as working as an officer for a publicly traded, multi-national, sets him apart from the crowd as a voice of real world knowledge and authority.

Aaron has made it his life’s work to arm other business owners with success formulas that immediately provide exponential growth and protection.

 

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