EP 377 – Entrepreneurial Mistakes with Aaron Young

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

 

Humans as we are, we are bound to make mistakes. The great thing is that, every now and then, we can learn from each other’s downfalls and improve. Aaron Young from Laughlin and Associates talks about some of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make. He is an entrepreneur, trusted advisor to CEOs and business owners, and creator of the program, The Unshackled Owner. He takes up his experiences to give us nuggets about things entrepreneurs can do to avoid messing up, as well as the best ways and practices for them to make sure and protect their assets. Aaron highlights the importance to plan for the end game in mind.

Listen to the podcast here

 

Entrepreneurial Mistakes with Aaron Young

We are excited to have a guy who’s on episode number three when we first launched the podcast and is still kicking butt in the top ten of all downloads. It’s the man, the myth our good friend and brother from another mother, Aaron Young, joining us on the Note Closers Show. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Scott, how are you doing?

We are rocking and rolling out here as always, getting some stuff done. It’s exciting to have you back on. I know we talk a lot on a regular basis, but you’re busy as well. We’re big fans of what you’re doing with your podcast as well. As always, we love your energy. We love what you’re doing with Laughlin Associates and everything you’re doing with your Magnify Your Wealth Summit as well. I’m just excited to have you back. It’s been too long.

I love being with you. I love being with your people. You seem to attract the coolest people. It’s awesome to be here. I’m pretty excited to take a victory lap at being in the top ten all this time. Thanks for having me on the show but you need to step it up.

We’re honored that we’re not going to make this a regular occurrence going forward. Every second Monday in a month will be Aaron’s Monday. We’re excited because you’ll be coming on sharing nuggets of corporate veil protection and things people can do to avoid messing up and best ways, best practice for them to make sure and protect their assets. We’re excited about that. That’s why I was like, “We need to have Aaron on a regular basis.” We’re excited to have you here.

It’s going to be fun. It’s an honor to be part of your show. Your show’s doing well. It’s cool to be able to be a little part of it.

I was down in San Diego there. It’s hard to believe it’s been a month since the Magnify Your Wealth Summit.

More of that because it was like the first week. It’s been five or six weeks now.

When is the next one slated for? Do you have the next one slated for in April?

The Inner Circle is a mastermind that I do. It’s a Laughlin Associates-oriented mastermind. For the audience, if you don’t know what Laughlin Associates, we’re a corporation service, resident agent service. We’re going on 48 years old and we have lots of customers and have been around for a long time. Scott knows this, but we started doing this Inner Circle Mastermind thing in January. The next one is in January and then Magnify Your Wealth, the three-day flagship event is April 11th, 12th and 13th. I hope that’s on your calendar too, Scott.

We are adjusting our calendar to fit it together because when we had our mastermind weekend plans. We’re going to adjust it and make it work.

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Entrepreneurial Mistakes: When all you do is focus on making money, what you end up doing is being on a hamster wheel.

 

Thank you for doing that.

You are doing such a great job at Laughlin of helping clients and helping so many real estate entrepreneurs. I’ll give you an example. I had a couple of people in this in this weekend here going through some coaching and Fast Track training talking about their interviews, meeting to set up stuff. I was like, “Don’t go get an LLC for $300 or $800 or wherever you’re at. You need to spend some time and literally talk with somebody. Help get everything set up properly. Issue your corporate book and issue stock to you so you actually own the entity.”

I was in Indianapolis over the weekend speaking. An interesting and a nice group of people and one of the things that I try to impress upon those especially who had not yet incorporated or set up that LLC, there is this misunderstanding that LLC is the newer, cooler and better thing. I try to explain that a C corporation, S corporation, or LLC, one’s not cooler or hipper or makes you more popular with the opposite sex or whatever. It’s not like that. It’s like you have a Prius and a school bus and a dump truck and all three of them can drive you to get Chinese food but they’re all designed for a different purpose. You want to use the right structure for whatever your outcome is. From a note closer perspective, from holding real estate, LLC is ideal for holding real estate. There are going to be other things as you build up your portfolio. Once you’ve got a few a few properties, you’re probably going to want to set up some kind of a management company that’s overseeing all the stuff. In that situation, at least amongst people I’ve met, more often than not it may not be an LLC. It is the management company, although the LLCs are what’s going to hold the real estate. Then the management company is going to control the LLC. People don’t know this and they hear these initials LLC or INC and they go, “My friend set up an S Corp,” or “My dad had a C corp. The other investors got an LLC.” They do that and they never take time to figure out what’s right for their goals. They’re not all the same. There’s not a one size fits all.

I’m glad you brought that up. Everybody has different goals long-term. One of the big things that you’re a big fan of saying is, “Plan for the endgame in mind.”

Begin with the end in mind. Here’s the other deal, Scott and you know this. Most of the people that we run into, they don’t have an endgame. They’re seeing if they can make money there. When all you do is focus on making money, what you end up doing is being on a hamster wheel and you have to make any more, you have to run faster or for longer. Whereas if you have an endgame in mind, “I’m going to acquire this many. I’m going to have this revenue. I’m going to buy and hold this many places so I have rent,” or whatever it is. I don’t care what it is. If people will just define the goal. “How do we know when we get to success? What does it look like on that day?” If people would figure that part out, it would be a lot easier to get to the goal. Because you know, “I’ve got to acquire this many properties. That means I need to have this many conversations. I need to look over this many portfolios. I need to do certain things to then get to this specific outcome.” Unfortunately, most people are just freaked out by even having the first conversation, making the first bid. “What do I do with this thing now?” They can’t handle the fact that maybe it’ll take a little longer to see the fruit.

I got off the phone with the lady who’s invested all this money to build the infrastructure for her business. She’s writing a book. She’s paid for software. She’s got into coaching but she’s never asked one person for a sale. I said, “Forget all this other stuff you’re doing. What are you going to do to get some leads?” She was like, “I don’t know.” I walked her for an hour. “Here’s how you get a lead to a client.” If she’s freaked out about, “I don’t even know where to start,” how is she going to set a goal, “I’m going to talk to ten people now which is going to get me three conversations. It will give me one close.” If I’m going to talk to that many people, I better find some meet up groups or some REIA’s or somewhere to be so there’s somebody to talk to. If you don’t have the goal, you can’t get to a goal if you don’t have it. This is the pressure, begin with the end in mind means what the heck are you doing? Then let’s work backwards so you have something to do when you wake up in the morning instead of going, “I’m scared.” That was pretty harsh but I did say it.

That’s a good point. I’m telling people, “What are your goals? What do you want to accomplish? What’s the monetary number you want to hit? Let’s work those numbers backwards. How many bids do you need to offer? How many bids are those that you need to submit in on a weekly basis? How many emails do you get to send out to your potential asset manager?” It all comes back to the quicksand that is found on a soft foundation.

Like you, I’m speaking pretty much every week somewhere. In this case, I was with all these women entrepreneurs. This is actually a pretty fun group. I like it. It’s the 40th anniversary of Sisterpreneur. It’s all black women entrepreneurs. We’re like three guys in the room. I was the only white guy in the room. These women are brilliant and have such good ideas and are so dedicated. I love whenever they invite me to come back to speak. I said, “All the speakers here and all of you in the audience, everyone is saying learn more about the stock market. Learn more about marketing. Learn how to brand yourself. Write a book.” One lady there was teaching etiquette. She had a whole big round banquet table set up with all the forks and knives and spoons. I said, “This is all great. All of these things are good and find ones that you love, but none of it matters if you don’t build your dream on top of a solid foundation.” That foundation is the most basic thing of how do I protect myself? How do I get the best tax advantages? How do I figure out how I can pay myself the most of least taxes? That’s the foundation of the right entity, corporations or LLC, following the rules. Making sure your corporate veil, your corporate compliance is done so that you’re legal. You can then build any structure on top of that which you want whether it’s real estate or it’s manufacturing, it’s branding or marketing, it’s mowing lawns or selling ice cream, I don’t care.

You’ve got to get the foundation right or at the first sign of trouble, the whole thing could come crashing down. We try to teach and communicating that to people who have all kinds of dreams and goals is what’s kept Laughlin Associates in business for so long. I’m the third owner. Lee Morgan and I, we’re the third owners. It’s a stewardship. It’s something we take care of while it’s in our possession. I fully expect somebody else will own it down the road from here. The main thing is if we do the right thing for the customer, if we teach them the truth, we don’t lie to them, we don’t manipulate them like many other people, we do don’t undersell or oversell and then teach them what they need to do, the odds are they’re going to stay in business longer. They’re going to feel good like their CPA or their lawyer or their personal trainer or their housekeeper. They’re going to go, “I’m getting exactly what I need and maybe a touch more from these guys. Look at me, I’m still in business.” At our three-day event, the Magnify Your Wealth, we have clients who will show up there who have been our client for 30 years. That’s cool when somebody stays with you to the whole growth of their family and now they’re retired. It’s awesome. I don’t know why I went off on that but the foundation matters.

When you’re speaking to some of the entrepreneurs across the country, are there some things that you’re seeing happen? Whether it’s real estate or brick and mortar or whatever it is, what are the common mistakes that you see people are making and are struggling with?

There are several reasons why companies don’t make it. Let me review that first and I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll answer your question specifically. The reason people don’t make it is that sometimes your idea is a crappy idea. Nobody wants your thing. You may be passionate about it but nobody else wants it. If you’re one of those people who’s been beating their head against the wall for years, trying to force something down people’s throats, it may just be nobody wants to buy it. You could be ahead of the curve. Maybe what you’ve got is great but you’re out in front of the wave. People don’t know they need it or there isn’t technology organized to use it yet. It’s not that it’s never going to have its day, but maybe now is not the day.

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

The E Myth: Why Most Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

One reason is the thing you have to sell, the product or service may not have a demand. Two, you’re underfunded. You don’t have the money to survive long enough. That doesn’t mean you need to raise outside equity necessarily but you do need to have enough money so you can eat and so you can do some marketing. You can print up whatever or go to the thing or attend an event or whatever it is you need to do. There’s got to be at least enough money to do that. You can do like Mark Cuban and go steal little ketchup packets from McDonald’s and eat the ketchup. When you have money and sleep on your friend’s couches, you still need to have enough money to push the business forward. You can’t take anything out of it. It’s a lack of capital. The third thing is they don’t know how to do it. Almost everybody starts a business because they’re good at doing some task. They know how to do something. There’s a fabulous book that was written in the ‘90s called the E-Myth. It talks all about this. People are good technicians. They know how to fix a car, bake a cake, write a code, invest in real estate but they don’t know how to run a business.

A huge problem I see is people don’t know what to do to own a business. They only know what to do to be self-employed and there’s a big difference when owning a business and being self-employed. The self-employed person is trading their time for money. To make more money, they have to spend more time. They may get rich but they’ll be a total slave to their business. You can learn how to own a business, own something and put processes and people in place so the business can run. You can direct it. You can be the boss but it’s not all dependent on you. Virtually everyone that I meet and that’s a lot, never have gotten out of startup mode where they’re the most critical person in the business. It won’t work without them. People trust a lot of opinions. Their friend tells them something or they hear that they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Corporations aren’t paying taxes. “I must have the wrong CPA or something.”

Usually, it’s because you’re not taking the right deductions or you’re not set up in a way that the rich set themselves up. You don’t even know what you don’t know. That’s why you pay more in taxes. You get frustrated by regulations or errors because you’re a person playing on this low level and you’re thinking, “I should be getting these results. I should be getting these benefits but I’m down here in the dirt, sucking wind.” Usually, it’s because of a lack of knowledge. That’s why what you do Scott is so valuable because you’re teaching nuts and bolts. You’re saying, “In these states, this may take eighteen months. Don’t go freaked out if you’re not getting hundreds of thousand dollars in the first 90 days.” You teach reality. When somebody gets reality and if they have the wherewithal to wait it out because they’re still working a job or they’ve got some savings, if they can actually legitimately play the game, they can benefit. Most people are missing out on stuff out of ignorance, out of lack of knowledge. They don’t want a mentor. They want to get everything free they can get but they don’t want to plug into a group or a mentor somebody who knows what to do.

It’s true. I see people all the time, “I don’t want to pay for something like that.” Paying for something is going to save you months, if not years. It will help you to get to success faster but also help you avoid some mistakes.

Not everybody by the way because obviously both of us have lots of clients, but there are many people out there who wonder why they beat their head against the wall. They wonder why they’re not successful. They go, “I’m as smart as these other people. I’m as capable. Why am I not having these results?” The reason is because you don’t even know what you don’t know. You want to be discerning in who you engage, who you hire, who you follow. There’s a lot of shmucks out there, people that know how to talk about it but they’ve never done it. The thing about Scott Carson is he’s done it. I’ve done it for three decades. I’ve been in 36 years almost buying selling and starting companies. I know what I’m doing.

You went all around the country for years and did nothing but eat, drank and slept this. You don’t know about it, you know it. The people that don’t pay for their own education and then wonder why they’re unsuccessful, it’s because until you change, you can’t change your results. It was Jim Rohn who said, “Formal education will make you a living and self-education will make you a fortune.” You’ll find your education. Find your Yoda. Find your teacher. “I can lift this little pebble, but I can’t lift that out of the swamp. That’s too big for me.” It’s not too big. It’s the same skillset. You just don’t know how to do it. I encourage everybody. If you’re a leader or if you’re trying to go out and do something even if it’s out of your spare bedroom, you’re going to be a real estate investor. You’re going to do it on the side. You’re going to do it just by yourself for a while, while you get started. For heaven’s sake, plug into somebody and learn the nuts and bolts. You don’t have to make it all up yourself and get all the scars and bleed out all over the floor.

When you could have gone, “I could go through the crocodile infested swamp or I can get on this moving sidewalk right here that takes you right to the pot of gold.” It’s up to you. A big mistake I see entrepreneurs make is they’re too proud. Meaning, they know they don’t know but they’re unwilling to ask. They’re too proud and that’s why they fail. The most successful people I’ve ever met in my life are very teachable. They’re constantly trying to learn. They’re constantly talking to other people that are further down the road than them. They’re buying classes. They’re sitting in events and taking copious notes instead of worrying about the stupid stuff. Warren Buffett says he reads six hours a day. That’s what he does. He goes to a chair with a book, with a report, with whatever and he reads. “The Oracle from Omaha.” There’s a reason. It’s because he’s informed. It’ because he’s educated. That’s why he’s one of the richest people in the world and all everybody talks about how the richest people are all reading, studying, learning constantly, hanging out with people and investing in ways of being with people that lift them. That’s what your mastermind does.

It’s Mastermind, it’s you Inner Circle, it’s your Magnify Your Wealth. You bring people together and that’s the beautiful thing. That’s why we also love to have Aaron on as much as we can because the services you guys provide is a very big deal when it comes to somebody who’s investing in real estate or are going to be taking money from outside people for investing. You want to protect your assets of some sort. We’re always excited to have Aaron come on because you give such a great presentation. Year in and year out, your session is always one of the highest ranked sessions when I reach back out to those who have attended because they love it. They are like, “I get so much out of what you are doing. It’s eye-opening to get things rock and rolling.” People are looking at their lives. They’re looking at what they’re doing. They’re either looking back at their goals or what did I accomplish this year or what did I not accomplish this year and what do I want to accomplish in the New Year. I thought it might be a good idea. Are there a couple tips that you would give to those people that are looking to make some changes come January 1st? Things that they could put into place now and put into motion now so that when January rolls around, they’re taking bigger steps or more steps towards action and toward success?

This could be any time of the year but because this is the time of year that we spend time reflecting, it’s a great question. You’re here because of who you are now and to get here, you have to become a different person. There’s no way around it. You’re going to become better educated, more mature and more sophisticated and to get here, you have to change. The very first thing I’ve already alluded to it earlier is to decide. The way I have my students do it as I have them right almost like it’s a novel. If your life was perfect three years from now, write that down. “I wake up in the satin sheets and I feel so well-rested.  I spin up out of the bed. My feet touch that big beautiful rug that I picked up in Persia. I go to the office.” Write it out so it’s like a compelling story that when you read it, you go right into that spot. Keep one of the two pages but describe what your life is like if it was perfect and what you want. Not how you got there, just, “Here I am and I’m describing my day.”

Why? Because your conscious mind can only work on a very few things at a time. There’s very little space on the desk, but your file cabinets back here your subconscious have endless. Everything that’s ever happened to you, everything you’ve ever seen is there. The magic about subconscious is it doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined. It doesn’t know. That’s why you get freaked out when you go to a scary movie. That’s why when you watch all the Bigfoot stuff on TV and then go out for a picnic, you look around. “What was that noise? Maybe it was Bigfoot.” Because your subconscious doesn’t know the difference. What happens is when you write your vision out and describe it, your subconscious will go to work helping you figure out a pathway to get to that reality. That’s the truth. That’s not woo-woo. That’s science. That is how your mind works. Whatever the mind of man can conceive or believe can achieve. Begin with the end in mind.

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right. Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Napoleon Hill, all of these leaders have known that if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You have to imagine and you have to work. The problem is most of us don’t know the steps. If you put the big part of your brain to work for you, you’ll get ideas and go, “Why didn’t I think of that before?” It’s because you hadn’t ever given your brain a specific task to work on. The first thing is to get clear on what you want. Get happier and get excited about it and start thinking about it. Then the second step is to take tiny baby steps. We’ve all heard that. What’s the baby step? I asked a lady. I was talking to a client. She did all this work but she had zero sales. I said, “Tell me how you would introduce yourself to somebody.” She was like, “I would say this.” I said, “That’s terrible. What you’re saying is terrible. What you’re doing is trying to justify yourself to somebody else, try to feel worthy, to try to say big enough words that it sounds like you’re cool enough for their attention.” This woman had been a senior manager. That’s one step below partner first at IBM and then at Deloitte. She’s a business consultant the Fortune 100 companies and now she’s trying to do the same thing for smaller companies but she spent 25 years as a senior person working at the highest level of business.

Now, all of a sudden she’s terrified to open her mouth because she’s afraid. I said, “Quit trying to say something that’s not you. Just say, “I spent the first half of my life working for IBM and Deloitte as a senior manager working with these companies and now I’m going to bring those same skills to Main Street. That’s what I’m doing now. I help people have more time or freedom or sometimes owners get tired and I can help them with that. Are you a business owner? Do you ever feel tired?’” I said, “Do that and then say, ‘I’m going to get ten business cards a day.’” To do that, you have to show up in some places where there are more than ten people to talk to. Those are the baby steps. If you say, “I’m going to have a vision and then I’m going to take baby steps but I’m not going to define what the baby steps are,” then you will never move. As soon as you say, “I’m going to get ten business cards. I’m going to engage ten people a day in a conversation even if it’s at the grocery store in the line,” because when performance is measured, performance improves.

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Entrepreneurial Mistakes: You’re here because of who you are now. To get here, you needed to become a different person.

 

Then you want to have somebody like Scott Carson or me or whomever you want or your spouse or your best friend who’s your accountability partner. You text them and say, “Now, I got nine business cards. I got nineteen business cards.” When performance is measured, performance improves but when performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates. The reason people struggle is that they don’t get explicit about where they’re going to go and what they’re going to do every day and then have some way, somebody to be accountable to. Otherwise, we spend all of our time trying to build a perfect ship and put all the provisions in it and get the perfect sales and paint it and get a name for it and swab the deck and polish but we never actually get in the water. That’s why people struggle is because they don’t start. My tip is if you’re feeling frustrated in 2018, set a specific goal and set some dumbbell easy thing to do. It may be not easy specifically because it may be hard to engage people in conversations. That may be challenging. Scott, do you agree that the first few are hard but when you get the first yes or the first good experience, the second one gets easier and pretty soon most of the engagements, most of the conversations are positive?

It gets easier with practice no matter what you’re doing, whether you’re talking to a borrower or talking to investors. You have to go out there and actually do it to get better. You can go screw up to understand how you get better at it. You get to learn like, “It was horrible. What can I do better?” Having somebody take the time to critique you or give me some pointers. “No, that’s not what you should be saying. Here’s what you should say. It’s going to resonate more or help you.” Instead of trying to justify, you get to come from a power position and be a lot more comfortable and people are going to gravitate versus running the other direction because their ears are bleeding.

Any time we meet somebody who seems like they have a vision and they know where they’re going, it’s attractive. I don’t care what it is. Even if you don’t want to work specifically with them or do their thing, you still are turned on by the fact that they seem to have a goal and there’s almost like a fear of missing out. If I don’t jump on the bandwagon with them, I may miss out because they seem to know where they’re going and I’m floundering. Is that true?

It’s totally true. We want to surround ourselves with people who are taking action versus who are floundering. That’s a natural Law of Attraction. “I don’t k now. I might do that.” They’re not positive to anybody out there. I like to surround myself with people who are doing things. I like being around people that are busy and active. It doesn’t mean they’re not failing. We all fail. Those that fail learn how to fail faster because they have been down that road before. They go, “We need to make a pivot. This is not working. We need to go a different direction.” To be truly successful, you’ve got to embrace failure, not run from it.

We only learn through our struggles. When things are easy, when everything’s working, we’re not learning. Even if you want to say, “I’m financially successful. I have time. I want to go learn how to speak French.” You’re going to screw up speaking French a lot. It’s through the failure and through the effort that you finally are able to get the result. You will always be failing forward. It’s how it is. You fail forward. That’s how successful people live their lives. It’s failing forward.

Are there any common mistakes you see people make this time of year as well that they should look to maybe avoid?

The first thing is most people are not planning very far ahead. They may have a goal like, “I want to lose some weight,” or “I want to learn how to do some skill.” From a business standpoint, we should be planning through 2019 already. Not for we want to increase revenue by 17% but are we going to need a certain amount of money? Do we have money now? Is there anything we can do to give us a tax advantage before the end of the year? Do we have a surplus? Should we be buying stuff now? Spending this money, writing it off rather than giving it to the government even though we may not need the stuff we’re going to buy for five or six months? There’s a lot of things that if we’re planning. You can say, “I’m going to buy office supplies,” but I’m thinking, are there events you want to go to next year that you could pay for now if you have profits? Are you big enough now and is there enough money, should you set up a second corporation that has a different calendar year than January 1st through December 31st? Set up a C corporation that can be handling elements of the business as long as whatever you’re doing now.

Maybe you could move some of the profits to the other company for whatever purpose and you can delay. You’re not going to get out of paying tax but you may be able to defer it and keep the money in motion. You’re still making money with that money before you finally pay the tax collector. There are a lot of things as you evolve and you get bigger. If you’ve gotten bigger and you aren’t plugged into somebody like us who is thinking about that thing or you don’t have a gifted accountant who knows enough about corporate strategy. Most accountants are great by the way but most accountants just know how to be a reporting agency for the IRS. That’s what they do there. They’re going to get the money. They may come up with some ways for you to reduce your taxes and that’s great. Most accountants are not strategically thinking about how to organize your business, multiple corporate structures, how do you pull money out before you have to pay tax on it to do other things. If you’re intentional about where you’re going and you’re thinking far enough ahead and instead of, “I better start ordering Christmas gifts now.”

Maybe you’re going in the right direction but you’re losing money, should you be a C corp where you can have a tax loss carry forward where that loss doesn’t get lost at the end of the year? You have to be a C corp or you have to be a multimember LLC that’s being taxed like a C corp in order to qualify for a tax loss carry forward. That means you lost money this year. Next year when you make profits, you can push those profits down with old losses and pay a lower tax or no tax. These are thoughts that people as their businesses grow and evolve, take some time to talk to somebody that’s a professional who can help you evaluate where you are now. Where you are now may be much more advanced than where you were when you started. Those are the kinds of mistakes I see people making. They’re not thinking about how they’ve evolved and is there a better way now.

You said something very important. Most people aren’t thinking far enough in advance. If you come up with a far enough advanced plan, you can’t wait until December 29th to be planning all 2019. You got to start looking at things and planning your events. You look at your calendar on a regular basis and are planning things that way ahead like I am. We have basically through June already booked for the most part. We already know where our numbers at for the last two years and looking at how to adjust our numbers or how to adjust our opportunities so that we’re seeing growth year over year and making sure that we’re doing some things. It also takes planning and figuring out what did we screw up in last year, what did we screw up earlier this year? How can we adjust that with our experts? Not on our advice givers but our counselors to make things. You say, “Don’t take advice from anybody, seek counsel.”

A lot of people go because they’re insecure and they want somebody to tell them what to do. Often the advice they receive is bad advice, uninformed advice. Counsel is like saying, “I’m going to accumulate a whole bunch of information. Nobody’s telling me to do this. I’ve got this information. I’ve got all these ingredients on the kitchen counter. Which ones do I want to choose from to achieve what I want?” Most people I meet desperately want somebody to sprinkle pixie dust on them and make all their problems go away. The fact is that doesn’t work. If you’re thinking and reading and seeking good counsel from somebody who’s already achieved success in whatever area you’re quizzing them on, then instead of saying, “I must follow their program,” you say, “Now I understand their program and this one over here and these facts over here, this trend. What does my mind think of all that and what do I want to do to achieve my goals?” Don’t abdicate the control of what you’re doing to some guru. Use the guru for education but education is only so you can make good choices based on your whole life experience. What matters is what you want to do.

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Entrepreneurial Mistakes: When things are easy and when everything’s working, we’re not really learning.

 

What’s a big thing you’re looking forward to in 2019? What’s something new that you’re looking forward to in the New Year? What’s something that you’re jacked up about?

I’m excited about doing more international speaking. I’ve got several gigs next year already booked. I’m very excited about that. I’ve got some young horses that I’m training and they’ll get a lot of further advances next year and I’m enjoying that. I like to play cowboy when I’m not doing business stuff.

I like your post about “One day you’re out on the trail and the next day you’re on an airplane somewhere.”

I said, “Yesterday versus now.” I was deep in the backcountry. The picture I showed, if anybody goes to Aaron Young on Facebook, I have these two photos that Scott mentioned. I’ve been on this trail before but I got there and this is up right on Mount St. Helens, the volcano. Apparently, we must have had a quick thaw or something because this thing that used to go down into a creek and then come back up was now this enormous gigantic washed out gully that dropped about 30 feet down through all of these boulders and then across the sand. Then we had to figure out a way to get back up the other side. It was actually freaking dangerous what we did. The cool rides are always the dangerous rides and we get into some good spots. That is a metaphor. The easy ride is not going to get you much of an experience. When you take a real risk, you get to the places almost nobody else ever gets to visit or see.

I have a book that’s almost done called Unshackled. That will come out in 2019 and that’s a whole other thing that I’ve been working on and developing. The whole Unshackled Owner which has now developed into Unshackled Leadership, Unshackled Real Estate, Unshackled Life. I’ve got a new mastermind starting next year. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff starting next year. You know the old saying, “I never want to be a member of a club that would have me.” Every time we get close to the goal that we thought was unattainable, we go, “That’s not that big a deal. I can do something more than that. I thought it was hard but it’s not. I’m almost at the goal. I’m going to set the goal much higher.” What a fun way to live, to always be learning and stretching.

Amen to that. Big risks equal bigger rewards in business and in life. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you.

Thank you so much for having me on.

Anytime. Thanks for being on. As you heard from Aaron Young, big risks equals big rewards in business and life. You got to start with the end in mind and work your way through the problems, through the ups and downs, through the washed-out gullies or the cliffs that we climb or work our way through on a day in and day out basis. If it was the same thing every day, you’re not growing. Go out. Take some action. We look forward to seeing you at the top.

 

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About Aaron Young

NCS 377 | Entrepreneurial Mistakes

Aaron 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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