Obstacles are part and parcel of growth. As such, getting past them offers great insights on building long-term success. In this episode, Scott Carson sits down with Aaron Young from Laughlin & Associates to discuss some of the business obstacles that entrepreneurs face and the best ways to overcome them and avoid problems in the future. In a world where there are more complaints than praises, Aaron gives some tips on how to counter negativities people typically have about your business. If you’re a budding business owner, tune in to this episode and learn how you can thrive in this daunting business environment.
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Overcoming Business Obstacles with Aaron Young
It’s great to have my good friend and somebody whose friendship and brotherhood I appreciate. My good friend Mr. Aaron Young from Laughlin Associates joins us in this episode.
It’s great to be here. I look forward to these episodes every month. You and I talk regularly, but it’s great to be here with this group because I love what the show is doing and the milestones you guys have been hitting. What did you post up? How many episodes?
We exceeded episode 500. This is episode 502. Since November 1st of 2016, we did the first 149 as pure Facebook Lives and the other 350 are true episodes. We hit that number. July was a big month for us, over 35,000 downloads and 1.8 million website hits to our AM/FM radio stations across the country too. I’m excited at the growth and the number we’re hitting.
It’s interesting because as a guy who’s also had a podcast for a number of years, for me it’s difficult because with my travel schedule and my selfish schedule. I get up and I go horseback riding for five days in the country, so there will be no podcast interviews. The point is to hit 500 is a real demonstration of your commitment to educating people, your commitment to teaching people how to gain more wealth. Also, you bring me on to talk about some of the challenges that come along with growing, dealing with battles and building long-term success that can be protected. We can spend some time on that. I saw the announcement on social media that said 500 and I thought, “That’s great.”
For me, if I can get one a week out, that’s amazing and you’re doing them pretty much every day, in fact business days. Congratulations and much success on that. The stick-to-itiveness is what gets me. It’s cool that you’ve seen enough reason to do it. What gets me is the commitment. You know that I’ve been B2B, business to business since the ‘90s. You could even go back to the ‘80s because my cellular phone business started back in ‘86 when it was still new technology. Pretty much only business owners or business leaders, CEOs, very successful lawyers, stockbrokers, those were the people that bought stuff. I’ve been working with business owners forever and ever.
What I’ve noticed over decades is one of the things that keeps people alive in the industry forever is their willingness to keep showing up. Not casually or not like I’m sitting here waiting for my phone to ring, but who keeps showing up and doing something that separates them from the rest of the market. I know I’m doing a big plug for The Note Closers Show for Scott Carson instead of talking about whatever you want to talk about. I see that the people that are successful, no matter what happens to them are the ones who keep showing up. They keep showing up even when the economy is down or the bubble bursts or the interest rates go up or buy non-performing debt is probably more difficult because it’s a seller’s market, not a buyer’s market now.
You have to be finding unusual things to do. Back when I was making money in real estate was before the ‘08 crash. Coming from ’01 to ‘07, anybody with a brain and $10 could invest in real estate. You didn’t even have to have any money down. Anybody could lock up land, buy something for this price and then make $25,000 on it a couple of weeks from now. Now it takes somebody who’s willing to dig in, roll their sleeves up, know about the industry, deal with the ups and downs. Anybody that makes money in an investment thinks that they’re the most brilliant person in the world. Anybody that loses money in an investment thinks the other person is the biggest jerk in the world. Those are the people who are the fair-weather investors, fair-weather business owners, people who will not make it over the long haul.
It’s those that stay in the course, deal with things, whatever’s going on in the industry and the economy, they’re the ones that end up being the long-term successes. I think that’s why you stand out in your industry because you’ve been successful over the long haul. You do things. You stay with things. Even when the things get tougher to do and it’s harder to make a lot of money, you’re still there. You’re still talking about how can we make things better. I admire you for that and I appreciate you for being that leader.
Thank you, I appreciate that greatly. The note business has its ups and downs. The market has rebounded. We’ve made money. It’s gotten a little tighter out there as far as you’ve got to go prospect more. You go to different sources out there. You have to work a little bit. For those that don’t know, Aaron has a podcast, The Unshackled Owner. It’s a very good podcast with awesome content and guests on there. He has the amazing mastermind as well for people to come. It’s the Magnify Your Wealth Summit, which is upcoming on November 7th, 8th and 9th in San Diego. You can go to MagnifyYourWealth.com for more details on that.
You’ve had ups and downs. I think everybody has ups and downs. The more you do well, the more you separate yourself from the audience and the more you’re willing to do things that others aren’t willing to do. When you have a hiccup, people love to say, “This doesn’t work. This guy’s a crook,” and things like that. That’s one of the most important things why the Corporate Veil Protection that you talk about or that you provide to many of our clients and students is so valuable for those issues. The funny thing is it’s not if you’re going to be sued, it’s when you’re going to be sued.
A lot of people will say they’re in business because they’ve done something besides their 9 to 5 job or 8 to 5 here in the United States. Everywhere but in New York it’s 8 to 5. People may do things as a hobby to make money and that’s fine. If you’re in business and you’re engaging with the public on a regular basis, at some point, somebody will become unhappy with you. Our effort is always to exceed expectations. Our goal is always to over-deliver, but sometimes there’s just dissonance in the relationship. Even if both parties are trying, sometimes things don’t mesh. Sometimes like with us, because we do hundreds of transactions a day. Something somewhere when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of people, sometimes things don’t work.
I’m going to throw this back and maybe somebody will tell me that I’m being unfair, but I’m going to do it anyway. We are living in a time and I think everybody knows this and feels this with the explosion of multiple 24-hour news cycles, endless media sources whether they vet their information or not, there are tons of information coming at us. People like to jump on. There’s this jump on or choose sides mentality in the world. Things that used to be able to be worked out fairly amicably and easily between humans having a conversation, now people’s default because talking to somebody and negotiating or working out something that hasn’t gone the way everybody wanted it to.
Many people have lost that skill, plus people are afraid of confrontation. What’s super easy to do is go on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. Our President’s favorite outlet is Twitter. Everybody faulted Trump for being this Twitter dude. Now all of his enemies are on Twitter too, fighting him on Twitter. It’s like the battle of the Twitter gods or Twitter wars. People would prefer to get on and beat somebody up in a public forum rather than having the business acumen, intelligence and confidence in themselves to try to sort things out as grownups. They’d rather just jump on and it’s a terrible thing. This whole red and blue political thing of the Democrats and this faction of Democrats trying to go super left.
Overcoming Business Obstacles: It’s not the lightning in the storm that hurts us, but the little drops of rain.
Those that say they’re super right and now there’s this polarization instead of going, “We can have differing opinions, but we can still work things out. We’re just going to fight for our ideology,” instead of going, “We’re not going to do anything. We’re going to dig our heels in.” This is what we see happening in the world. In a world of confrontation and in a country like the United States, which is 94% of the world’s litigation, the default way of solving a problem is to file a lawsuit. It is stupid and expensive for everybody, but it is how it is in this country. I love this country, but we’re sue-happy here and almost every other country has something called a “loser pays” system. It means if I filed a suit against you and I lose, I pay both of our legal fees. I can sue you and have no repercussion because I’ll keep dumping on you until you pay me off. It’s like legal extortion.
This is the tendency that we have. Having some kind of a big fortress built around you and a moat with alligators, great white sharks, piranhas and stuff. Something bad you don’t want to go to the moat. Whatever it is, it’s building something around yourself to insulate you from the insanity of the market. It’s using the law not as a tool to go bash other people but using the law as a way to buffer yourself against the haters, the posers, the dreamers and the people that are incapable of fighting their own wealth. They want to redistribute yours. It’s the outliers. This is not most people.
They always talk about the squeaky wheel gets the grease or the little yappy dog is the one that is the distraction. As a friend of mine said, it’s not the lightning in the storm that hurts us, but it’s the little drops of rain. Each one of these little drops of rain that fritter away our attention and pulls us off of what matters. These little yippy dogs start to bug us, start to bring a little lawsuit or nip at our heels while we’re trying to go out there and make a real difference in the world. A little yippy dog ends up holding our focus as business owners and what we need to do is have a great way of putting a muzzle on that little dog. They can yip and they can bark, but they can’t do anything to hurt us.
While we do have to deal with the dog, we can’t hurt the dog and we have to find somehow a way to deal with that little irritation. We don’t have to let it become the thing that stops our progress because we’re organized with the right business entity, the right corporate compliance. We’re following the rules. If we follow the rules, the rules will protect us. I’m going to say to our audience, if you’re already truly successful, you already know what I’m talking about. If you are not truly successful yet, you don’t understand what I’m talking about. I want to promise you that the more success you have, the more people will take shots at you. The more wealth you have, the more people will try to steal it away from you and they’ll try to find a way to justify it. Your elevated lifestyle, wealth and success, the only way to deal with that is to begin to build protection around it because it happens. It’s why you see certain people get so much attention in the media.
It’s why you see everybody wants to compare themselves to Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Disneyland or anything that has separated itself from everybody else. Everybody will take shots at the leader. That’s why so many leaders I know have to have legal teams. If you don’t have anything to protect and you don’t have a reputation to let people try to tear down, you don’t understand it. However, I know if you’re reading this blog, your desire is to have more than what you have now. Your desire is to find a way to create greater amounts of wealth. Your desire is to get out of that job that’s sucking your will to live and do something that’s more interesting, meaningful, challenging and a puzzle to put together. All of a sudden, there’s a payday and there are multiple paydays. If you’re here, I have to assume you want more. If you want more, then you want to build that new empire on a solid foundation and with solid walls around you, not to hide anything, but to protect you from the little yippy irritants that will come after you as you have greater success. That was a big speech, but I think it’s true.
People will come after you, especially in nowadays society, it’s easier than ever for them to come and post inflammatory remarks to fan the flames or to lynch.
People will defame you. How many restaurant owners do I know that say Yelp is a real problem? You could serve 500 meals in the restaurant now and one person can get on there and write a negative review. If you look at those people, usually they have all negative reviews. They’re not balanced. They only write when they want to complain. People will go and they’ll want to see what the negative is and that may keep people from coming into the restaurant, even though 499 of the meals came out flawlessly, one came out badly or one just came out different than what that person wanted. They have a very powerful bully pulpit to make their complaint. It can impact a lot of people. User reviews are helpful and are also usually going to lean to the negative because people mostly want to write when things aren’t going well, not when they are going well.
All the vast majority of what’s working doesn’t get recognized as much as the one unhappy or the half-dozen unhappy customers out of hundreds or thousands. Maintaining a Better Business Bureau rating is a challenge in nowadays world because it’s very easy for people to take potshots. It’ll hurt your business and people know that, that’s why they take shots. The good news is if you keep doing good work, if you keep performing, your legitimate customers and clients will stay with you. That handful of people who want to find fault, they’ll get recognized for the bullies or the idiots that they are. If you do something wrong repeatedly and you have a poor reputation, then clean up your camp. That’s true.
If somebody’s calling you out for things that you are doing, then you can make a choice, “Am I going to be a bad business person or am I going to try to identify and solve problems?” You can’t solve everybody’s cripes. You can’t be everything to everybody. You’re always going to have a third of the people that love you, a third that hate you and a third that couldn’t care less. They don’t know who you are and they don’t ever want to know you. All we can do is focus on the people that we can serve. Focus on the people that we can help. That’s how we grow our companies. That’s how we grow wealth.
My company, Laughlin, I feel like I’m the steward of this company. My partner, Lee Morgan and I were the third owners of this company. It‘s coming on 49 years old and you don’t last that long in an ever-changing market. Believe me we’ve had our potshots taken at us. We’ve had people sue us. We’ve had all kinds of challenges. It doesn’t mean that what we are doing is bad. It means that we couldn’t be everything to everybody and 200,000–plus customers and only a handful of problems. That’s a good reputation. It’s why we have the A+ Better Business Bureau rating. It’s why we’re still in business. It’s why we have great clients. Some of them have been with us for many years. It’s weird when you have a client who started when they were in their prime doing stuff and they pass away from old age and they’ve been your client all these decades. Good companies will always survive the potshots as long as they keep doing good work, but you’ve got to protect yourself so you don’t lose sleep and money over being exposed and being able to lose what you’ve built. Making wealth is the easier part than keeping and magnifying your wealth.
MagnifyYourWealth.com, I made up the name for the event because I believe that making money is fine, but keeping the money is the challenge. That’s why you see people who are wealthy who say being wealthy is a full-time job. Dealing with money that’s coming in from places and the government compliance around it and not getting creamed on taxes and being able to reinvest the money, it becomes a full-time gig. Wealthy people have family offices. They have professional investors who do nothing but manage just one family’s wealth. Wouldn’t it be fun to get there? Come to MagnifyYourWealth.com.
Overcoming Business Obstacles: When things are good, you reap the reward. When things are bad, you take care of business.
That’s the thing, we’ve got quite a few friends that are working with family offices. They’re growing their wealth. They’re doing a variety of things. I had a great conversation with my buddy Robby Woods. We talked and visited some other things. We’re working on some stuff together. He talks a little about that aspect too of consistency for a while, then he’s going in a different route and move into a different aspect of things, and then removing a lot of stuff from the public eye. He’s focused more on his stuff versus driving stuff. He was talking about having potshots sent at him and deals taking place, stuff like that too that drag out longer. He was talking about a couple of deals he was working through finally. It’s a two-year deal where he needed some corrective paperwork on. We sent it over to him. You try to set realistic expectations a lot of times for your clients and you work your butt off to meet those most of the time, but sometimes that meal comes out from the kitchen either a little too hot, a little cold or not what you expected what it was supposed to happen. You have to do your best to fix it.
Scott, just as an example to people reading, I loaned another company a significant amount of money a couple of years ago. It was a four-month loan. It was due middle of December 2017. The money has not been repaid yet. It was due a long time ago. It’ll be a couple of years this December 2019 since it was due. Even though I’d love to get the money back, I know that the people that we’ve made the loan to are not doing anything against me regardless of the fact that they haven’t performed on the debt. I have an understanding of what they’re trying to do and why everything is taking longer to get to the liquidity of that. We haven’t gotten there yet. I know sometimes people want to get their money back, but the deal is if I’d got my money back on time and I’d gotten the interest that I’d expected to get, I would have been, “I’m so cool. I made a great investment. I got a nice chunk of interest back. That’s awesome. I’m a clever fellow.”
If I do something now to come after them, sue them. If I go after them now for the money, which is probably in the scheme of things a relatively small amount of money for them and for me truthfully, all I’m going to do is make it more difficult to get my money. I’m going to cost them legal fees, I’m going to cost some time, we become adversarial. All it does is make it harder to get the thing I want, which is just to get my money back. I want people to think about that too. What decisions are you making with your money when things don’t go as smoothly as you hoped? What decisions will you make?
I’ll give you an idea. When the recession finally caught up to our company, the recession started in the fall of ’08. It didn’t catch up to Laughlin until 2010. It took a while for these business owners to finally throw in the towel and close up. We lost millions a year in revenue. My partner and I decided rather than fire all of our employees, we thought, “We’re the highest-paid people in the company. We’ll take a hit.” We took significant pay cuts, way more than 50%. I’m not going to tell you how much, but it was deep enough that we both end up having to short sell our homes and move into rentals.
Our team, nobody got fired. Nobody got a pay cut. We quit doing the match on the 401(k), stuff like that, but we didn’t quit paying health insurance. We didn’t close up. We didn’t fire people. Did that suck for my partner and I to lose our homes, to move? We both had beautiful homes that our families had become accustomed to living there and we had to both moves into much more modest homes and suck it up and figure out how to survive on a fraction of what we’re living on before. This is what you do when you’re in business. When things are good, you reap the reward. When things are bad, you take care of business and you figure out, “Even though I don’t have everything I want now, how do I make sure that I am doing the smartest thing to make sure I end up with the result I’m hoping for?”
It’s why I don’t sue this other company over what would for be a lot of people, over half of the United States, this would be more than an annual income. For me, it’s still a lot of money, but it’s a manageable amount of money. I’m not going without because this money is stuck out there in the ether, in no man’s land, we can call it purgatory. Everybody would be happier. They’d be happier and I’d be happier if the money came back. It’s not going to solve anything by suing them or causing problems. I hope that our audience that wants to be legitimately in business will think about the fact that lawsuits can be a big hammer.
One of the reasons people don’t like our President is because he’s perceived as a bully. He’s perceived as punk by a lot of people. I personally like a lot of things he’s doing as President, but I don’t like his way of pushing people around and calling names. He’s a big lawsuit guy. He’s a big file lawsuit. If you don’t like our President, consider not acting like him. That doesn’t mean give away the store like some other former President might have done. People do their own thing but be wise about building relationships that last over time because we can weather the few things that don’t work out as a business owner. We don’t want to be that jerk that nobody wants to work with you. If you can be civil, you can be logical, you can be reasonable.
Most of the time you can get through almost any change in the market, change in a deal that doesn’t work, a meal that didn’t come out right. If you’re a jerk to the server, they may take the meal off your bill, but you may be the one that nobody wants to take your table going forward. Heaven forbid, they’ll spit in your food. I’ve never been a server. I’ve heard of these horror stories. If you come back and say, “It’s totally my thing. I made this choice. I asked for this stuff and it’s not what I was hoping for. It’s too spicy for me.” I bet you see this with investors, Scott. A lot of people want to be served cherry pie ala mode. They want everything to be perfect, yummy and easy. “Aren’t I special to be? Let me access you every day by phone. I want you to be super-responsive with me because I’ve invested money in a deal.” If it comes out where the cherries are a little too tart or the ice cream is a little bit melted, maybe it took a little longer for you to get it than you wanted it, then everybody says, “You guys suck.”
In my opinion, those are people who may get their way now, but they won’t make it long-term. Be the business owner who gives great service, is responsive to your customers, doesn’t go out there sloppy. Don’t give slipshod products or services, but understand you’re going to have haters. Sometimes you’re going to have people that are unsatisfied. They may not be haters. They may have a legitimate beef but figure out ways to get ahead of those problems or learn the problems. Turn those into learning lessons, but also not judge yourself based on that individual or those two or three or four people versus the hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands that you can help and you can serve. That’s going to be your legacy, not the few little distractions.
You’re exactly right. A lot of people who don’t do, they will write a check. They want you to do it for them. That’s totally fine in a variety of different ways, but you also have to realize it is not always the rose’s color. That’s the thing too you get to realize too is people will always try to think the best is going to happen. When it doesn’t come back the best, they get upset. You have to set realistic expectations. There are specific things when you are raising capital or working with things, you want to make sure that not everybody is your client. Not everybody should be a client, how you set and carry yourself on that aspect of things and how you screen your potential clients and things like that is also important too.
I taught a group of mine, I talked to them about don’t trade your integrity for quick money. A lot of times we’ll work with somebody that either pulls our reputation down or we’ll grab money from people because we need the money to come and we need the cashflow. We shouldn’t have engaged with them. They’re not an ideal client. They’re not ready for what we’re doing. Some people I see will over sell. If we let our lifestyle get to a place where we have to take money that we should never take or work with somebody we never should work with because we’re not in harmony with each other, then we’re opening ourselves up to problems. That’s another thing to make sure that you’ve always got enough.
Don’t live up to your abundance. Live comfortably with lots of overflows because the overflow is what’s going to save your neck when market conditions change. When there’s a tornado, a flood, an earthquake. When the power grid goes down, when there’s a terrible snowstorm, when you get sick and you’re stuck in the hospital for a month, whatever. You get laryngitis and you can’t give a speech that you’re supposed to get, so you’ve already spent the $25,000 speaking fee. The point is sometimes you want to make sure you have enough surpluses that you can deal with the obstacles that will inevitably show up in your path. Too many people are living right at the edge of their money and then they cannot tolerate any bump in the road, any challenge, any expectation they have isn’t met because now they’ve extended themselves further than they ought. Now, they feel fear and risk.
It can’t be their fault. It’s got to be somebody else’s fault. You look at all the great billionaires that we hear their stories. The one I love to talk about is Mark Cuban. When he was building his business, he was trying to hire the right people, pay his bills and do his market, but he couldn’t eat. A lot of these guys are couch surfing and stuff because they don’t have money for an apartment. He’d say he’d go into McDonald’s. He couldn’t buy a hamburger, but he could grab a handful of ketchup packets, which he’d squeeze into his mouth so he could have some sustenance when he was hungry. A lot of people are eating ramen noodles. My employees didn’t feel a hit in the recession, but the owners took an enormous hit.
Overcoming Business Obstacles: The people who succeed in the world are the ones doing it against all the odds.
That’s legitimacy in operating a business where the business is separate from you. You and the business are not one. You know that goose that traditionally lays golden eggs for you must be kept healthy and alive. If that means you move out of the big house and into a tent, that’s what you do. That’s what real business people do. Who gets a bad rap? It’s the CEOs of big public companies. Do you know why? Because most of them are punks who will fire hundreds of people and even lose hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Even if they get fired, they get a $400 million golden parachute. Those people are a bunch of freaking jerks. They will dump their people and preserve their whatever. Those people ought to be despised.
Small business owners who suck it up, those are the freaking heroes. Contrary to those few exceptions of people that we can look at and go, “That sucks how they behave.” 86.3% of the gross domestic product comes from companies of 50 employees or less. Small companies are saving the day constantly and the leaders of those small companies that figure out a way, who don’t burn bridges, they build long-term relationships and they find ways of resetting their sales no matter which way the wind blows. They’re the ones who are the heroes of this country. My dad was in the trucking industry. He was a sales guy. He would sell their service and get freight on their trucks. He used to always say to me, “Aaron, those big rigs, those two or three-trailer big rigs, those are long. They’re heavy and they’re moving down the freeway. Give those people some space. Give them a little space. They’re doing the best they can with that huge responsibility. Don’t jump in front of them. Don’t cut them off. If they’re signaling, let them in because the responsibility they have, the weight they’re carrying is significant and it’s hard to make an adjustment quickly.”
That’s a great analogy for running your own business. The people that think that you can do something on a dime and that they’re your only customer, you’re going to have them. Those are the ones that are cutting off the big rig saying, “There’s no way I’m going to let that big truck in front of me.” They might cause an accident because the truck can’t stop fast enough or has to get out of that right lane. Those are the people that end up hurting things that were carrying maybe the very food that was going to feed their family, the return on investment that could have gotten their house paid off or could have gotten the trip to Disney World or the whatever it was that’s going to float their boat. What’s the old expression? We cut off our nose just to spite our face. That’s unfortunately too many people, which to bring it all the way around is why we want to have a business entity around us, a corporation or LLC. It’s why we need to be treating it like a real business. We need to have separation. The only thing that shows the separation is the board meetings, the minutes, the resolutions, the issuing of stock, the management of the stock ledger, the ongoing meetings that need to happen at least every month.
It’s all the things that make you a real business, not just a glorified alter ego. It’s still just you doing business as something LLC. That’s what we do for almost 50,000 customers. I’ve said all these things and it always comes back to building the foundation right, even though I’m talking about much bigger issues that we face as business owners. I don’t think the market is going to get less litigious, less argumentative, less polarized. I think we’re going to have more and more challenges, but it doesn’t matter because the rewards are so great. The challenges are few and far between versus all the wonderful people you get to work with. The money you can make, the difference you can make for your customers, for your community, the way you can donate money, the way you can hire more. These are all advantages. These are wonderful benefits we can provide as business owners. Don’t let the fear of a few little yippy dogs nipping at your heels keep you from the abundance of this whole big world that we get to enjoy in a unique way. When you own your own business and you follow the rules, it can protect you and you can nurture it.
It’s good stuff. It’s great things. We’ve not talked about that in the past episodes. Little things here and there and stuff like that, but it’s the truth that you as a business owner, I don’t think anybody ever gets in business to take advantage of anybody or they get into it to do business and run a solid business. Hiccups happen all the time. Every person I know that I look up to has had a hiccup here and there and had issues here and there. They’ve always worked to overcome it and keep rocking forward and keep moving in the direction. Not everybody wants to do that. Not everybody wants to put their business and their good standing out there in public to go out and make some things happen. When you don’t know what’s going on in the company or going on with the deal and things like that, it’s easy to throw darts or hate.
In a vacuum of information, with the lack of information, our natural tendency as humans is to go to the most negative, the scariest reason why. If we can’t reach somebody on the phone and we always can, have they been in an accident? Are they okay? It’s not, “Maybe they turned off the phone because they’re playing with their children. Maybe they turned off their phone because they’re having a nice date with their significant other or they’re out for a walk in the woods contemplating the beauty of the earth.” We go, “It’s got to be true. It’s got to be bad.”
When people say negative things about someone who is regarded as a significant leader in anything, the tendency is to go, “You don’t get that successful. You don’t get that rich. You don’t get that famous without stepping on people.” That’s what people believe that have never achieved a lot. It takes a lot of work. People who’ve never achieved it believe that somehow the successful person had some advantage, had some silver spoon, had some friend slept their way to the top. You’ve heard all these things over the years.
I remember Taylor Swift a couple of years ago when her concert tour was the number one touring show in the world. Here’s this young woman, 26 years old or something on one of these late-night talk shows and they said with a big smile saying, “You’re breaking these numbers. You’re having these records. You’re only this old.” I remember they asked the question, “Do you ever feel like you need to pinch yourself?” She looked at him completely, not condescendingly, she goes, “Do you think all of this happened by accident?” She’s been doing this since she’s fourteen years old professionally with a recording contract. “Do you think all of this happened by accident? That I lucked into this? No, this was done by work.” There are a million other singers better than Taylor Swift. This is working your butt off and doing everything that nobody else will do. Taking the risks, dealing with the disappointments, dealing with the successes, pouring out to others, doing things 502 shows that everybody gets for free.
Everybody’s getting this training for free, but I can’t say for Scott’s years. This is 37 years of me making payroll for other people. Whatever I’ve got, I’ve earned it and I keep earning it every day because I’ve been doing this for years. We’ve never missed a payroll. Nobody has ever not been able to clear their check that worked for me. I’m telling you that is hard to do. I’m no Taylor Swift. I’m not the biggest in the world. Anybody that thinks it’s easy to be an Aaron Young or Scott Carson or any of these other guests that come on and thinks that somehow there was a silver spoon, you’re missing the point. The people who succeed in the world do it against all the odds. Henry Ford was the 9th wealthiest person ever to walk this planet. He had seven failed companies including several bankruptcies before Ford Motor Company. Richard Branson, who everyone reveres, has had hundreds of failed business attempts that said Virgin at the beginning of the name. 10,000 different filaments tried before Edison figured out tungsten would work to make the light bulb.
Walt Disney turned down by over 200 banks who said he was freaking out of his mind before he got the funding for Disneyland. It goes on and on. There’s always going to be that yip. Those of us that stick with it, and I’m counting myself with you, are the ones who get to have a week of horseback riding. It was preceded by two-and-a-half weeks at my beach house. It sounds braggy but it’s not braggy because we went bankrupt when we had a business that failed and we couldn’t get credit. I fought the government and went to prison. I’ve had an illness. I’ve had heart surgery. I’ve had all this stuff.
If I said, “The world beat me up. Somebody wasn’t fair. Somebody took a shot at me,” I had wasted my time. What I do is go, “That was hard. That sucked. What did I learn from that? I wonder if I can make a speech about things I wish I knew before I went to prison that people will pay me $25,000 to hear.” The answer is maybe it was a huge blessing to go through the challenge. Those people that keep showing up are the ones that are the long-term successes. Remember that there’s a price to be paid for success. It’s totally worth it.
Amen to that. I think that’s a good stopping point here, Aaron. Thank you so much. This is a great episode, great knowledge, great nuggets out there. As always, you can get more of Aaron on The Unshackled Owner podcast. You can also go to MagnifyYourWealth.com. If people want to magnify their wealth, definitely check it out. As always, you can check out Laughlin Associates. You can go to CorpVeilProtection.com. The service set a huge percentage of our students use to help make sure their assets are up to date, the books are taken care of and all the different files to make sure that your LLC entity stays compliant out there. Aaron, thanks for being not only a regular here on the show, but also a very close and dear friend. We appreciate everything you do for us.
I’m glad to be here, Scott. I look forward to the next time.
That sounds good. Have a great day. That’s going to wrap it up for this episode. Check it out. Thank you for sharing. If you love it, check it out on iTunes or any place that podcasts are at. Feel free to leave a review and feel free to share with anybody else out there. Otherwise, have a great day and we’ll see you at the top.
Important Links:
- Laughlin Associates
- The Unshackled Owner
- MagnifyYourWealth.com
- Better Business Bureau
- CorpVeilProtection.com
- https://youtu.be/9wEeMzWRZV0
- http://www.CorpVeilProtection.com
- http://www.MagnifyYourWealth.com
- Http://www.LaughlinUSA.com
About Aaron Young
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.