When it comes to business, growth is something that you should always allow yourself to be open to when you have the opportunity. Growing your business is a crucial part of making sure your business doesn’t stagnate and fall by the wayside, so you’ve got to keep it moving. Aaron Young is from Laughlin Associates and the Unshackled Owner Podcast. He converses with Scott Carson about the different ways that a business can grow. Make sure you keep growing, and you don’t fall behind!

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Playing With Big Rocks With Aaron Young

There’s not a better way than starting with somebody who is helping not only on us, but so many entrepreneurs kick butt and take names in the new year. It’s the man, the myth, the legend, the one, the only, my brother from another mother, Mr. Aaron Young, joining us from Laughlin Associates.

How are you, Scott? It’s so good to be here. We’re adding two more grandbabies too. It’ll be six grandkids. It’s wonderful. It’s interesting, isn’t it? For us, it’s a very organic, big start with these new babies, but every year it’s like that. It’s always fun to do these conversations and talk about what have we learned up until now, what do we want to do differently and what new crazy entrepreneurial risks will we take.

We looked back at our top ten episodes for 2018 and 2019. When you look at a couple of years, you’re in the top ten. Also, we go back from where we started the show, which is in the top ten of all the episodes downloaded. It’s because of a couple of things. One, you add a lot of great stuff. We love having you on here on a regular basis, but entrepreneurship is ever-evolving. You mentioned something about some of the changes that Laughlin has got in-store and the things that you’re doing. That’s why I thought it’d be great to talk about some of the cool things that Laughlin Associates have up your sleeves for 2020.

There’s a lot there. Let me give you a couple of the things that are going on and maybe we can riff off of that. When you get caught up in your stuff, it seems like, “I’m doing this.” To those people that hear it for the first time and are trying to go, “What does that exactly mean?” There could be some pretty good stuff we could teach to people here. Maybe I’m not even sure where to go with it, so let me tell you. Laughlin in 2020 is now in its 49th year. We have lots of clients and a great team. We were thinking about what’s going on? What can we do to accelerate the growth to go down a path that we had chosen not to go down?

What you may or may not remember about me is that Laughlin Associates, which I’m highly connected to and people think of me in connection to that is a company that we purchased back in 2001 because I have a history of buying companies. I’ve done it many times. This was one we happen to buy and keep. Because it had such a great history because of its role as the first big Nevada incorporation service and so on, we decided to put other stuff into Laughlin that we already owned and doubled down on that company.

We went from one state to 50 States and so on. We’ve been going along, creating new products, new events and new things over these years. Let me say one last thing because this is a huge thing. Close to being done, but I don’t want to jinx anything. I’m going to tell you because nobody’s told me I can’t talk about this. Lee Morgan and I are the third owners of Laughlin. Mr. Laughlin, the founder, then his son, and then us. I’ve always felt that it was stewardship. It was a responsibility. The company existed way before I got there. I didn’t want to screw it up and I wanted to take it to new places under my leadership.

In 2020, we should be, before the end of the first quarter, publicly traded. We’re taking the company public. We have a number of companies in the queue that we’re in discussions with that we’re interested in acquiring. Our goal is to take Laughlin over the next two years to $50 million in revenue and within five years to be north of $100 million. That’s a big deal going public. I’ve done this twice before. I’ve been an officer, including the chairman and CEO of two public companies in my past.

Many people know about the legal situation, the IRS thing, the prison, and all that stuff, which I thought would be the end of my career, but it turned out that it didn’t end my career. For several years now, since the prison experience, I’ve been hunkered down, trying to steam along, be with the kids, do the horse stuff, the farm stuff, all my hobby stuff. It became clear that it was time to quit, be done licking those wounds and get on with doing the business that we know how to do. To that end, we’re taking the company public. It’s very close to being done to where it will start trading. I said into the first quarter and it will probably be closer to the middle of the quarter.

I’m very excited about that. If you want to ask questions about that or about acquisitions and things. Even though your audience has more or less heard me talk about entities, corporate veil protection, Rockefeller strategies and Magnify Your Wealth Summit, which is all critically important stuff. It’s wildly important. The thing I’m good at is finding companies, getting them, fixing them and turning them over to another team to manage them. I stay as an owner but not an employee. What I’ve done is I’ve shackled myself for a little while because now I’m going to be deeply involved, not in the day-to-day operations of the businesses, but in the day-to-day operation of the public company doing all the outreach you have to do as a public company, but also negotiating with other companies, acquiring companies, assimilating companies and so on. That’s a huge thing as the header. There are a million things underneath it. If you want to ask me a question about that or if you think your audience would have an interest in any of those things, we can certainly talk about that.

 

You’ve always said this, start with the end in mind. When you acquired Laughlin, was this a goal eventually or is this something that’s popped up in the last few years?

If I’m being fully transparent, the goal when we bought Laughlin, was we already had other companies competing with Laughlin. Laughlin had a bad reputation. The original owners were a little tough on employees. There were a lot of turnovers. The guy was a trucker. He’s a teamster. Harley Laughlin was a bad cat, tough dude, and a very old school. He ruled with an iron fist. He did good things, but he also created a lot of havoc in a small town of Carson City, Nevada. Outside of the government, Laughlin was the largest white-collar employer in Carson City with about 80 employees. It was tough to keep up 80 employees with a 300% turnover, which is what they had. It was a crazy circumstance. When we bought Laughlin, the original idea was to keep the name, keep the database, get rid of the employees and layer those things on top of the good teams that we already had. We got in there and we found there are all these good people working for the company and we realized we could do something with it.

Our goal was back then was to start to do more of a roll-up of other resident agent companies. Going public was not in our minds at that time, mostly because I had been public. I had been private and private is easier than the public. You don’t have anybody looking over your shoulder. You don’t have somebody with one share who’s calling you up complaining all the time. The reality is if you’re the CEO of a public company, it’s no longer your company. It’s everybody that owns its company and you have to be willing to listen to people. I made money. I was successful at that point. I thought there’s no reason to do another public company because this is so much easier. We got into the battle with the government the next year. We got out of prison and went right into the 2008 recession one year after prison. It’s been some pretty big challenges. After prison, as we came out of the recession, these last several years, we’ve been on a pretty good trajectory, but we did reach equilibrium. In other words, for being absentee owners, we had grown as much as we could grow.

I didn’t love being in that position of static. We could get rid of one product and create a new one. We kept our clients. The clients are happy. We’ve got a very high renewal rate. It’s almost a 90% renewal rate amongst our clients, which is amazing. That’s all credit to the team. All I do is help set the direction. The team does the work. I want to never misrepresent or give the illusion that this is Aaron. This is a whole bunch of people. Most of them in Reno, Nevada who are phenomenal at their jobs. However, I knew that there was a lot of bigger impact we could make. Did I begin with the public in mind? No, but I did begin with a much larger company in mind.

I finally decided it’s time to get off the bench and get back in the bigger game because I do know how to grow companies into that $20 million, $50 million. I’ve never done $100 million company, I’m talking about revenue, not a market cap, which would $100 million would give us about $1 billion valuations as a public company with the renewals we have that it’s like a subscription business almost from the outside looking in. There’s so much you can do. I’m on a soapbox here, Scott. I decided in 2018 that my goal was to help more companies stay in business for more years and make more money. Those were my goals. I figured I could do the most for local communities, the United States and the national economic situation by doing whatever I could to help more companies stay in business for more years and do it more successfully and make more money. Those companies hire people, buy health insurance, donate to charities and match 401(k)s. They do all that stuff. If I could make a little ripple along with other people making ripples, we can make a real difference.

In order to make the bigger ripple and be a bigger rock going into the proverbial pond, make a splash and a big ripple, I had to have a bigger podium, a bigger platform. Going public was the logical way to do that. It’s not even because we need to raise so much money. I believe that as we do go into the recession, that will happen sometime in the next couple of years. If we have both discretionary cash over here and public shares over here, that gives us another currency to go out and take advantage of helping companies that would otherwise fail to bring them in, give them some stability, give the owner either a job or an exit. It’s having multiple forms of currency so public stock, reputation, cashflow, discretionary cash, all these things, and a plan. We’re well poised to go through an economic downturn successfully and come out of it much bigger and stronger.

You’ve hit a couple of points there, big rocks, thinking bigger. When you were talking there, I got bells going off in my head like, “Where can we go with that?” That’s the thing is that everybody goes through ups and downs. You went through a major down with everything with the government, the IRS and having to go away for eighteen months but come out. A lot of people do wonder, “I’m not worthy of success because of this something that happened to me.” We’re all worthy of success, no matter what has happened to us. We’re all worthy of things. That’s why I think a lot of people play at the small ball without thinking they never take it to the next level by adding another comma or adding another zero to their bottom line by doing some things.

That’s where it comes down to a couple of things. You said something very important here that most solopreneur struggle with is you delegate better than anybody else that I know. In delegating duties that you don’t need to be spending time with, that you let somebody else handle that because your best bang for your buck, your hourly aspect of things is your focus on the things that you need to focus on that nobody else can handle. Let your staff, your employees, assistants take care of that. That’s one of the biggest things that I talk with entrepreneurs and note investors all the time is they want to go from like, “I’m going to buy ten notes myself and I want to buy 100.” You can’t do the same activities at 100 notes that you were doing at the ten-note aspect of things. That’s the same thing. You’re not doing the same activities you were doing twelve years ago. You’re doing different activities.

I’ll give you a prime example. I interviewed someone to come into this newly public company. This is somebody who’s a lawyer or attorney or law school MBA joint program. It was a four-year program. They come out as an attorney and an MBA. Over the years, he’s also become a CPA and spent several years with Arthur Andersen and his legal accounting and business degrees, doctorates into and CPA. He’s worked for a bunch of public companies as CFO or COO or CEO. The guy is a little older than me, has done mergers from $1 million to $40 million. Here’s the point. I was interviewing my replacement for the job that I know I’m capable of putting it together, but I’m the wrong guy to be running it day-to-day.

I just know that and it’s not because I’m not competent to do it, it’s not my skill set. People play small ball and also people do what all of us do. They run into their ceiling and they go, “I guess that’s it.” I look at it and go, “I’m approaching my ceiling. I need to get somebody else who can breakthrough. I don’t need to be the big man on campus. I don’t need to have the title. I’m the owner. I’m the guy that owns the most shares.” In our case, Lee and I are together. The point is when we look at our businesses like most small business owners look at their business like a job. That means they need to be there working to get their paycheck because it’s their job.

They say they own the company, but they’re a glorified employee. I for a long time looked at the businesses as an asset, in your real estate world, like something that I own. I own that rental house. It’s not my house where I live. It’s something that I own. I have two beach houses that are next door to each other, which I have a deep affection for. It’s the first one we built. We’ve spent lots of important events there since December of ’02. The house next door to it that I also built, I’ve never slept one night in that house. I don’t care anything about that house. It’s an asset. It’s something we have.

If we need it, we can use it. Most of the time, it’s a vacation rental and it pays for itself. There isn’t positive cashflow, but it doesn’t negative cashflow. It’s not like there’s a lot of equity in it because we’re already top of the market as it is but I’m not getting a lot of equity growth. We have a lot of equity in it. The point is you can own stuff including your company and not be the most important employee in the business. If small business owners would learn that being a shareholder is different than being the president. If you start looking at things from the owner or the chairman of the board, the visionary perspective and not from the president, “I have so much work to do.”

If you start to reimagine your place inside the company, you don’t care about delegating because all you want is for the value to grow. It has nothing at all to do with being safe in your job. It has everything to do with saying, “If I put a new deck on this house, if I put a new roof on this house, if we upgrade the tile in the kitchen in this house, the value goes up.” It’s the same thing in your business. Going public gives an additional opportunity to monetize something that in a private company is pretty tough to put a value on. Owning shares, especially minority shares in a private company is worthless. There’s no way to determine the true value and there’s probably not a buyer.

In a public company, if you’re doing smart things, you’re growing, you’re telling the honest truth about what’s going on and people begin to count on you and believing the leadership team, they can go buy one share or they can buy a share for $1 and sell it for $1.50 and they’re happy. To me, the obvious thing to do next was to say, “What can we do to stop playing small and to take the company under our watch to a whole other level so that it can be something that endures way beyond us as the primary shareholders?” That was my goal. I know a lot of people play small ball. I will say one of the things that have plagued my life is that I look at something and I go, “Somebody’s going to do it. Why shouldn’t it be me? Why am I not getting involved?”

We’ve got involved in lots of businesses and we’ve lost a lot of money on some things and made a ton of money on other things. If you think because you try and fail that’s it, either you’re new and you don’t know or you’re not an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are going to get a lot of scraped up knees, a lot of black eyes. It’s that trying harder, staying in the game and pushing to create something that is not adequately being provided in the market right now is how you become successful. After a while, I teach a class on the system that has worked well for me. When you learned that there’s a formula that works in any industry and you follow the formula, you get less black eyes and less scraped knees. You can go fast. A big part of that is by building a team and getting you out of the way because usually, the visionary is not a good manager.

 

Usually, it’s the biggest blockage. I would agree to that 100% in different things. Are you doing this on raising capital? Are you doing a reverse merger or you can’t go into that?

We’re going to do something similar to a reverse merger. You should know that I’ve got another business separate from Laughlin where the goal is to take 50 companies public over the next five years using the same basket of tools and organizing them or let me say the same countertop of ingredients and putting them together in whatever the best way is to make a successful launch. We’re only looking for companies that are in the $5 million to $15 million range in revenue, who have a good management team, who have the spine, the backbone to go public because it’s not easy and it’s extra work, but who want to grow and build something.

I told you Laughlin is going public. This other business of mine, we have six companies, including Laughlin that we’ll be trading by the end of the first quarter. All of which we keep a percentage of the company for our portfolio. We’ve set it all up. We infused money. We help make the market. We do all those things, help those companies do acquisitions by helping them with due diligence and so on. The people that I’m working with on there, including me, have done this a whole bunch of times. It’s cool. The next several years are going to be significant as we set out to help a bunch of companies that have the people we want to work and desire to work with.

We don’t need to work with any jerks. We don’t need to work with anybody that’s timid either. We need to work with people who want to do something, who want to charge forward, who have the right set of ingredients that we want to work with. It’s a fun place to be in life, to be able to pick and choose who you’re going to work with, who you’re going to make, who are you’re going to help become more successful. I was going to say it in a much broader way, who are you going to make rich. It’s a lot of fun and it gets me back to my roots of what I’ve done most of the time when I’m not. I felt derailed and somewhat constricted only talking about C-Corp, S-Corp, LLC, corporate veil, Rockefeller. All of those are the foundation, but they’re the foundation. They’re not all the walls. They’re not everything you build in the building. They’re the foundation. They’re the people. That’s what you build upon. I’m getting back to doing the work that I’ve always loved doing. I’m super excited about it.

That’s the only big thing we talk about. I’ve been talking about 2020 should be a year of foresight, not hindsight. We’ve got so many friends like, “I can’t wait for the year to be over.” I’m like, “If you’re not changing the things that you’re doing on a daily day basis, the next year is not going to be any better than this year.”

That’s the problem is most people live the same year over and over again. That’s their choice but mostly it’s because people doubt themselves. You mentioned it. They think, “This is all I’m worthy of.” There’s nothing magical about hitting different financial levels of success. Somebody who’s worth is close to $1 billion, I said, “You’re much wealthier than I am.” He said, “Aaron, I may be wealthier in dollars, but you’re so much wealthier in relationships. I’m not married. I have one child and one grandchild that I don’t even see that much. I love them. We have a good relationship, but I don’t see them much.”

How we measure success is very personal. I’ve never thought money was the measure of my success as you compare it to my relationship with my wife. We’re going to have our wedding anniversary in February and it gets better almost every day. It keeps always better. Every time I think we’ve maxed out, it gets better. You can have whatever it is that floats your boat, whatever makes you feel good, do that. Don’t do what other people define as success. At the same time, I suggest that you consider not saying, “I should be grateful for what I have and not worry about all this other stuff.” If you feel the tug in your chest that there’s more that you could be doing when you feel that pull, I suggest that people respond to it because that’s yearning.

That yearning is something that’s inside of you that wants to find expression in some way. If that’s in business, in relationships, in exercise, in charitable work, in how many bowling pins you can juggle, I don’t care what it is, but whatever it is that you feel in here, don’t go, “Tamp it down, I should be grateful for what I have,” or this other thing people say, “That’s not God’s plan for me.” I’m like, “Why are you putting your lack of accomplishment on God?” Believe me, God doesn’t want to limit anybody. Look at the universe, it’s still expanding. Whatever your vision of God is, God’s not done.

If we go back to the scripture, to the Parable of the Talents, who was the one that was rewarded, when the master was gone, not telling them what to do. They went out and they multiplied their talents. Don’t dish off your lack of interest in going further in life on to God because I promise you God is not telling you to chill out and stay in your mediocrity. If you believe in that, I don’t care if you’re a Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindi, in all of those faiths or if you’re new age or you’re agnostic to that, but you believe the universe or whatever you want to call it, the Higher Intelligence, there’s nothing there that suggests you should constrict. That’s called damnation, to get biblical. There’s no reason to stop your growth. Continue to expand for as long as you can because someday, you’ll get to a day where you don’t have a choice to expand anymore.

I have a friend this day on hospice. She’s holding on for all of her family to be together and so on. She’s not expanding anymore. She’s waiting out her last breath. We’re all going to get there in some way, shape or form at some point. To squander any day or squander opportunities are usually like, “I should be grateful. I should stay here. Who am I to think I can do these big things,” is doing not yourself a disservice but the world? I’m trying to play big, not so I can get rich. I’m saying, “I already have what everybody wants. I have money, relationships, love, and health. I live on a farm. I have a beach house. I travel all over the world and get paid all this money to give talks.” Many people I meet would love to have what I already have. I don’t need to do more of that. I need to do more of how do I help other people get what they want. My stuff will keep flowing in. When we work on trying to get rich, we usually don’t get rich. We usually struggle.

When we try to provide some good service that is needed, people will pay for that service. The more effort we make to do a great job at delivering good value to people, the more money will naturally come to us. If you don’t have $20 right now in your pocket, that might sound like pie in the sky. I understand that because as my dad famously said to me years ago, “$20 is not a lot of money unless you don’t have it.” Where do you get it? My dad never made a lot of money. What would you do? To me, I would figure out something to sell. A matter of fact, it’s another thing. I’ll throw my dad under the bus. I adore my dad. He’s one of the best guys I ever know and lived a great life but utterly unfulfilled from a business or financial perspective. The pieces didn’t ever come together for him and a lot of that was because he was averse to risk.

My dad said to me, “Could you sit and talk to me? If I could make another a couple of $100 a month, that would make an enormous difference in my life.” I said, “I don’t know, Dad. I honestly don’t know how to make a couple of $100 a month. I don’t know how to do that. I can show you how to make a couple of $1,000 a month with what you’ve already got. Leveraging what’s in your brain and your ability to communicate on a number of topics. I can show you how to make several $1,000 a month.” When I said several $1,000 a month, he got this big smile, “Wouldn’t that be cool? I don’t think I could do that.” It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As we go into 2020, don’t self-sabotage. Don’t decide, “It’s not in the cards for me.” Don’t do that. Playing big and playing small takes just as much effort. You may as well add that extra comma that Scott was talking about to your intention because people fall behind. They jump in, lockstep behind somebody who seems to know where they’re going. If you don’t know where you’re going, that instills no confidence. No one will be with you. If you go, “Here’s where we’re going, let’s go. Follow me.” People will come.

 

Many people get bogged down in their own limiting beliefs. They can’t see the way out. They don’t think they’re worthy of it. We all go through that at some point, but when life knocks us, gives the black eyes or scrapes your shin and maybe it’s not the right time, but we know that “Let me find the right time and keep plotting borders.” People like to say keep failing forward. It’s impossible not to advance if you fail forward.

Every little child starts to walk with very awkward steps and they fall a lot, but they keep trying. We always celebrate it. We celebrate every little step. It’s a great attitude to adopt that when you make any progress at all, you celebrate it. You go, “Look at what I did.” Sometimes I celebrate it by buying myself stuff. If I have a little thing and I’m feeling, “All right, I did something,” I might buy a pair of socks. I see a pair of socks by some brand or they’re all wool or something and they’re $24. I know I could get six for $12 at Walmart. That’s not a celebration.

You don’t want the black socks that only last for a while?

That’s maintenance. I’m going to buy myself something nice. When I hit a certain number of sales, enough companies had gone through Unshackled Owner, the class, I bought this Rolex watch, but $13,500, that’s not something you do for a small accomplishment. Once we’d sold $1 million in Unshackled Owner, and every day I put this on, it reminds me to push for the next goal. It’s the same reason this wedding ring, which is made out of the head of a bolt in federal prison, reminds me every day to never get too cocky. Don’t ever forget to dot all your I’s and cross all your T’s. It’s good to celebrate sometimes and I happen to celebrate with things. Some people celebrate with experience and some people would celebrate with the conversation. Whatever it is for you, reward yourself in the way that is your love language so that you feel like, “I feel good that I hit that next step.”

If you shoot for the moon, what do they say? Les Brown, I’d probably quoted on here before, he said, “Not that people aim too high and miss, it’s they aim too low and hit.” When you aim for the moon and you miss, maybe you’ll only end up in the stars. That’s still better than staying down here in the mud. Celebrate all your faltering little steps through 2020 and you can never tell your success by looking forward. It’s always by looking back. Instead of saying, “Most people that are unsuccessful look forward,” say, “I have so much more to do.” Those are unsuccessful. People that are a successful look back and say, “Look how far I’ve come.”

While you’re doing your New Year’s resolutions, look and say, “What’s this challenging, difficult to attain the goal that I’m going to probably give up on in two weeks,” but look back and say, “Look how far I’ve come. What if I could do this and this in the next twelve months? What if I could do that?” Make it a stretch, so it’s exciting, but not so big that you go, “Screw it. I can’t do it. It’s too big.” Do something that makes you a new person, makes you become a slightly different person than you are. We’d still want to be able to recognize you. I’ve gotten off onto a personal development.

People love it. When I get feedback from the basic stuff and nuts and bolts, but they also love the tossing of business, entrepreneurship, and mindset. Sometimes people run around and set way too many goals, so they’re never going to accomplish because they’re not focused on it. If you can focus on 1, 2, maybe 3 big goals, look at what you’ve done. If your goal is to make $1 million and you haven’t made $100,000, you set your goal to make $100,000 first, then $250,000 or $500,000 and build up from there.

How many people do we meet, Scott, in our world that says, “My intention is to have an income of $1 million a year and I’m going to do that over the next eighteen months, I’m working with my coach?” and all that. You say, “How much are you making now?” “$27,000 a year.” I’m making a couple grand a month and you’re telling me you’re going to be at $80,000 a month in a year and a half? That’s a big gap to fill. This is what I always ask when people tell me that. When people say, “I’ve got this huge goal, but I’m way down here,” I always say, “Keep that goal. Put it up on a wall. Have it on your dream board.” If you’re making $2,000 a month, how would it feel to be making $6,000 a month?

“It would feel great. I’d be able to make my payments. I’d be able to buy a few things and be able to go out to dinner a little more often. I’d go on a trip with my sweetheart.” “Let’s get you from $2,000 to $6,000. Let’s do that. Once you’re at $6,000, let’s look at $10,000 or $15,000. Once you’re there, we can look at $25,000, $30,000. Tell you what, $30,000 a month, you’re in the top 1% of income earners in the world, maybe $40,000 a month. You’re there. Now you’re amongst the wealthiest, not wealth and assets, but wealth, cashflow and income. You’re now way ahead of almost everybody. One million dollars a year, great. That’s a wonderful goal. Do it but it’s done in phases and stages. Let’s get you out of hanging on by your fingernails, survival mode first.”

People say, “I’m going to make all this money in a short time.” What if this much smaller goal but triple what you’re doing now? They get this grin like, “That would be great.” Given away this fantasy thing and they’ve brought it back down into some of that they can understand. All of a sudden, you can make a plan of how to get from $2,000 a month to $6,000 a month. You can do that. Once you learn how to do that, you can accelerate it or you can magnify it or you can delegate elements of it, so you stay doing what you’re great at and let some other people who are a much lower value per hour do clean your house, mow your lawn, run your errands, do your grocery shopping or whatever.

You stay in your genius. That’s how it works. There is no pixie dust. There is no fairy godmother. There is no magic wand. There is a logical progression from here to there. The better you get at it, the faster you can do it and the bigger you can do it. I was with a guy and he’s worth $800 million and almost no debt. He may have some real estate debt, but his net worth in actual liquid or semi-liquid is $800 million and change. He’s very depressed. He’s bummed out because he’s been struggling to become a billionaire and he can’t make it. It’s driving him out of his mind. He’s pissed off at the planet that he can’t figure out what he is doing wrong. We said, “We’ll take a breath. We have all this to work with. Let’s see what we can do.”

Here’s the deal. We hit a ceiling. We don’t know what to do next. That’s when you go get other people who do know how to do it. Somebody who’s made $2 billion can often help the person at $800 million to bridge that gap because they’ve played in a different role. No matter where you are, understand you will hit a ceiling. You will have exhausted your competence and you have to either become more competent or you have to dish off to somebody else who already knows how to do what you are unable to do. That’s the delegation piece. I don’t care if it’s at $5 million or $10 million level or the $100,000-level to go to $250,000 or it’s $1 million to $5 million, the 5 million to $15 million. It’s the same deal.

It’s why I was interviewing to already find my replacement because I know to do the work that I want to do. I have to get out of the way of running day-to-day, a publicly-traded company and get focused on who I am looking to acquire. I’ll stay as the chairman. I need somebody great to be the president. Who knows? I’ve talked a lot about this stuff. Wealth is not easy, but it is pretty simple. The steps are pretty simple. If you know the steps and you have the confidence to step out knowing you might get your hat handed to you, you will likely eventually get that first big jump and the next big jump. They don’t have to be enormous successes, but some success. Other people will notice your success and they’re like, “Let me invest some money. Let me introduce you to somebody. Please, could you do this for me?” That’s how the rocket fires.

 

It’s what all people want. We want people to do things. We want people to take action. We want people to grow their business no matter what it is. As I always said, it doesn’t matter if it’s tiddlywinks or notes or entities or whatever it is, there are ways to get things done. You have to get out of your way. We all need coaches. We all need mentors to help us get out of our heads or pull our heads out of our asses at some points to do big things. We’re all capable of amazing things. Sometimes we need a good kick in the butt and somebody to tell us, “Go do this and do it.” Fear is false evidence appearing real. Don’t fall into that trap and get rocking and rolling.

There are many things that are easy to be terrified of. It’s always worse before you get to the thing. The danger is almost always much scarier than the actual situation. We had to go in. I don’t know if I’ve ever done this before. We set up a new little texting thing. For the last few years, I’ve been doing something called The Freedom Call. Twice a month, I come on and teach a lesson for 30 minutes or so and do Q&A. We know a lot of people. My travels, I meet a lot of interesting people. I pick up little tidbits, little gold nuggets, and I want to share them with people who are trying to the plugin. They may not get access to some of these people. I want to share what I’m learning. I decided to start the same few years ago called the Freedom Call. Whatever is on my mind based on what’s been happening and people seem to like it. We charged $500 for it.

If you go to the website, the Laughlin website, and you want to subscribe, you can and they’ll charge you $500. Lots of people, hundreds of people have paid $500. I would love to as an experiment do this. I set up a thing that I could use occasionally and I’m testing it right now, which is a year-free of the Freedom Call. What you do is one of these texting things, you type two words, Freedom Call, and the number is 797979. You’ll come in and you’ll be guided through how to get in there. You’ll get the link to come in. Plus, you’ll be able to get into the Facebook group that has archives and tons of these things in there.

I’m pretty excited about it. I’m always hesitant to give away free stuff because people don’t value free stuff very well. The people I want to work with are people that are not wanna-preneurs, but they’re people that are striving to accomplish something. My team has convinced me that maybe the Freedom Call is a good way to get people into different energy. Understand what we’re doing over with our businesses and do that. We’ll be able to tell pretty quick if people that are reading this would like to avail themselves of that. You don’t have to give a credit card or anything. If you get to the end of the year and you don’t want to continue, that’s fine.

Truthfully, I haven’t gotten to the end of the year. I’m at the beginning of the year so I don’t even know what I’ll end up doing for 2021 if we will do renewals or not. I don’t know. For heaven’s sake, it’s worth it to come in. It’ll be something close to 24 shows. Sometimes my schedule precludes me from doing one and we’ll do a replay, but 24 coaching sessions with me. You don’t know me necessarily, but a phone call with me is $2,000 an hour. This is pretty good stuff and I’m giving my good stuff. I hope they’ll come and check it out. Look at the archives and see if that’ll help you grow your business. That would be fabulous. It would make me happy to provide that.

The phone number is 797979 and the message is Freedom Call. That’s good stuff.

It’s amazing how that stuff works. Thanks for always being a good example to me. I watch a lot of the marketing things you do. You do a terrific job. I’m excited about all the things we’re going to get to do together in this next year.

Thank you so much, Aaron, for delivering as always and looking forward to what the rest of 2020 has to offer for everybody. Once again, thanks so much for joining us in 2020 and for making 2019 an amazing year. We look forward to all the success.

Important Links:

• Laughlin Associates
• Magnify Your Wealth Summit
• https://Youtu.be/u1B_SxEZFSA
• http://www.CorpveilProtection.com/
• http://www.Growin2020.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.

---

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• WeCloseNotes.com
• The Note Closers Show Facebook
• The Note Closers Show Twitter
• Scott Carson LinkedIn
• The Note Closers Show YouTube
• The Note Closers Show Vimeo
• The Note Closers Show Instagram
• We Close Notes Pinterest