EP 615 – Pivoting Your Business To Play And Win The New Game Of The Pandemic With Aaron Young

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your Business

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your Business

 

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to leave behind our old ways and adapt to the new environment. Those who fail at doing this may find themselves getting drowned out of the market. It is time to pivot your business. In this episode, Scott Carson talks with Aaron Young from Laughlin Associates about some of the items that business owners and entrepreneurs have to start doing to take advantage and win at the new game with the pandemic. So don’t miss the opportunity train. Join Scott and Aaron as they remind you that you have the power to thrive even in this uncertain time.

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Pivoting Your Business To Play And Win The New Game Of The Pandemic With Aaron Young

On this episode of the Note Closers Show, we’re going to talk about is 2020 going to be the watershed year of your business or are you going to drown? That’s what we’re going to be talking about. You’re going to get the answers here. Joining us is our good buddy, Aaron Young, from somewhere on the Washington Coast, the secret hideaway. What’s going on?

It’s a farm in Washington and beach house in Oregon. We come down for the month of July 2020 and stay here. We came down before 4th of July and then we’ll be here until August 2020.

It’s a Corona free environment for the most part.

If you have to be in some seclusion quarantine, solitary confinement, this is the place.

I would say so. I’m missing the beach. We’re getting ready to travel a little bit here. Our first trip is to go rescue a couple of cats that Steph is adopting. We’ll see how we react to the flights and stuff like that. You and I have talked for a little while here beforehand. For those who don’t know, Aaron Young is the CEO of Laughlin Associates. They sponsor the podcast. They do an amazing job with their Corporate Veil Protection. If you’ve ever been to our Note CAMP or heard him on one of our Note Night in America webinars, Aaron talks about the services that they provide in working with so many small business owners across the country. We have many audiences on the show on the radio network across the country that are small business owners.

A lot of people are struggling out there. It’s scary. The statistics that we’re talking about, 52% of small businesses are expected to fail. Forty million-plus people on unemployment. We could get into mortgage default rates, but we’ll save that for another day. Aaron and I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the small business and what you see. You’ve got your fingers in a bunch of different pies out there. You’re sitting on a couple of boards of companies but also helping and working with so many entrepreneurs and business owners across the country for many years. Where do you see things going here as some states are opening up and other things are closing? Do we need to chuck off 2020 as a loss and restart in January 1st, 2021? What do you see is going on and what would you say is your recommendation for business owners out there, Aaron?

First of all, it’s always good to be with you. 2020 is going to be one of those years where certain people are going to take off like a rocket. There’s going to be a huge transfer of wealth. There’s going to be huge fortunes made. The things that I’m involved in are all working. Everything is doing well. Our revenues haven’t slipped. We’re moving. The people who are going to struggle are going to fall into at least two categories. One is those that have the rug torn out from under them like they’re in a restaurant or travel business. It’s against the rules to be open or they can be open but with such limited occupancy that they can’t cashflow enough. At some point, the forbearance on leases, not only for the building but for equipment and so on, will catch up with them and there will be a lot of bankruptcies related to that.

As you’re reading, remember that bankruptcy is a remedy to protect you from creditors. It doesn’t mean you’re a loser. It means that you’re using laws that have been put in place that say if your business doesn’t work, if the ship is going to sink, you don’t have to go down with the ship. Don’t automatically assume that there’s something wrong with you. If you go back and look at the companies that have filed for bankruptcy, you’ve got some big companies like Hertz, Avis, Chuck E. Cheese, GNC, and JC Penney, and it goes on and on. These enormous publicly traded companies that are in bankruptcy protection, it’s a rule that’s there to give you space or to say, “It didn’t work. The ship is going to go down.”

Having said that, that’s one camp, the ones who by bad luck are in an industry that was very vulnerable in this COVID circumstance. The other one is people who because of the clamping down and slowing down of business and so on, it’s hard for them to do their service delivery. They might be scared. The dryer here at the house, the belt went out and I was back in the city for a minute. I called around and there were a couple of repair people who said, “I’m not going anywhere during COVID.” They’re choosing isolation. I said, “There’s no one at the house.” “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going.” That was a choice.

The third group is people that are just, “It’s got to come back. They’ve got to reopen.” They’re still looking backwards at what they were doing before and anticipated of going back to it. While there may be a slow return of normalization, the genie is out of the bottle now. There are things that have changed and two things happened there. One is businesses figured out that they can do without some of these employees, they don’t need all this office space, or whatever. I got obsessed for a while with collecting watches. This is an $18,000 watch. It’s my daily driver. If there’s something stupid about that, I’m not picking on myself, I’m wearing it.

I’m saying it’s a lot like a book or the movies, The Hunger Games, where the people in the Capitol, the ones who are striving for big stuff had to become ridiculously caught up in every little fad, hairdo, jewelry, or whatever. COVID made us go, “I don’t think I need that stuff. I’m going to wear my sweats every day or my shorts.” There’s been this mental reset as well. People that are sitting around on their thumbs waiting for life to return to the way it used to be are the ones who are going to crash and burn the hardest. The flipside to that is the people that are awake who are looking around. I’ll give you an example. You’re one of the mentors for my group, the Inner Circle. One of the guys in the Inner Circle has a chain of Thai restaurants mostly in the Greater Seattle Area.

He said at our last Inner Circle gathering, which we had one even in COVID, “I was worried because restaurants have been shut down. Seattle was the original outbreak and still a hotspot. I’m closing down a few of the restaurants that had larger dining areas and I’ve leased new spaces that’s just take out. I’ve gotten rid of all the seating. I’ve cut my footprint and my expense down. There’s a bigger demand now for takeout than sit down and dine in. By early appearances, it’s going to do well. I’ve reduced my expense and I can still be in business.” There’s the guy who’s not lost in the past. He’s adjusting to the future. I’m going to say this.

There are people who learn how to play the piano and then there are people who never even had a lesson and started figuring out because their brain worked a certain way. Billy Joel took lessons for eight years. He’s a great composer, an awesome guy. He had a brain for it. If you’re a real entrepreneur, a legit entrepreneur, you can’t help but see opportunity because instability, volatility creates opportunities. Will you wring your hands and weep and moan for the past or will you say, “I have a new set of ingredients that I have to deal with through a new environment. What am I going to do?” I went off on a big diatribe. I have lots more feelings and thoughts about that whole topic, where we’re going as a country, what we should be doing, and things we’re doing if you want to go through any of that.

We need to. We haven’t done an episode like that in some time and that could be good for people out there. What would you recommend? I’m opening it up. Take it wherever you want to go, Mr. Aaron Young.

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your Business

Pivoting Your Business: 2020 is going to be one of those years where certain people are going to take off like a rocket. There’s going to be a huge transfer of wealth.

 

The first thing is everything is up in the air and up for grabs. As I said, we can look backwards or we can say, “If I knew then what I know now, would I be in this business? Would I make these investments? How would I structure a deal? How could I reinvent my existing business or start something new based on everything I know?” From that perspective, we have a terrific opportunity. Lift our head up out of the trench, and look around at what the world looks like and say, “Am I tunneling the right direction or should I be changing course?” The way I describe it a lot of times in talks is I say, “You have all these ingredients on the countertop. You’ve been making a sandwich and know that it was working. If the sandwich isn’t selling anymore, what else can you make with this stuff?”

Quit worrying about the past and think about, “I have knowledge, database, intellectual property, a following, ability to do something whether that identifies good deals, give talks, provide deliveries, redecorate the houses.” There’s going to be a boom in inexpensive home decor or reorganizing with the stuff you already have because people are spending more time at home. They’re spending less money on restaurants, travel, superfluous stuff, watches. They’re going to want the place they have to sit around more often to be more desirable. The other thing is I’m very bullish on where we’re going. I’m excited. Everybody says the race problems, COVID problems, government problems, and you could make an argument that those three are all different than the way they’re presented to us in the media in any of those things.

If all we do is focus on the problems, all we’re going to find are problems. As you said, there are ways to pivot. There are ways to change. Look at what you have is intellectual property, your skills, and re-shifting them 90 degrees or 180 degrees in some cases to focus on the opportunities because if you focus on what I’ve lost, as you said a lot of this will pass. You’ve got to learn to pivot because life is full of change. Debt and taxes are the only two things in certainty is the only thing we know that’s going to change on a variety of basis.

As you said, many people, not everyone, are focused on the drama of the whole thing. They’re worried and nervous. My suggestion is if you notice the most captivating headlines in news are always playing up on something that’s going on. COVID death surge, this is why you should have more fruit juice for breakfast, race riots, the city out of control. They’re going to say something salacious. You’re great at this. You might be the best person in my circle of friends at doing this. You’ve taken movie premiers and other things in the Game of Thrones and Star Wars and all this stuff and made them into themes, T-shirts, tchotchkes, and stuff. You’ve done a great job of taking things that are topical in the moment and using them to lure people in to hear your message.

Everyone within the sound of my voice can do the same thing. There’s nothing crass about it. It’s a matter of saying, “We’re all in this thing. Here’s the world-class problem, COVID-19, race relations, out of control government bickering.” You can say, “Here’s this world-class problem and I have the world-class solution to help you feel better during this time.” You may not be able to solve the big problem, but I can help you as an individual feel better, do something, grow personally, whatever. We have that opportunity. If we quit whining, crying, wringing our hands, and going, “The media is giving us some kind of a present and we can use the present or we can ignore it,” there’s a tremendous opportunity.

I don’t think enough people will say this. In this world of backlash, a lot of people are scared to say the truth. They want to come back and shame people for voicing their opinions. If it doesn’t identify with the 100%, you’re offending somebody. Most people have such thin skins to make it. When you look at the government or the city officials are saying, “You can’t have more than ten people together for a meeting of something positive but you can have 100 people together to complain.” That makes me want to switch my networking events from a meeting to a protest.

Let’s go have a protest, the Magnify Your Wealth protest. We can get 10,000 people to show up. Remember, I live near Portland, Oregon. They’re in the news every day for all the crazy stuff going on in Portland whether you’re for or against what the administration is doing. All I know is that’s a wackadoo situation in the city. I used to have an office in the middle of where that stuff’s going on. Here’s the point. Those are some of the circumstances that exist. You’ve doubled down on the podcasting stuff but you’ve been so involved in the real estate industry and in particular, these last several years of your career, you’re very focused on nonperforming debt which means in boom times, when everybody is doing well, that’s not as good a time to buy nonperforming debt.

The ‘08 crash that affected so many people negatively was wealth gathering time for nonperforming debt. We’re in a situation like that now. A lot of people don’t know it. They suspect it. They feel that it’s coming, but there’s been enough government intervention for most people that even if they lost their job, they saw reasonably good unemployment. They got an extra $2,400 a month in addition to whatever the state gave them. They were able to get PPP. If you had employees, you could get PPP money. We’ve got a rental house over here. We got idle money for it. We got a loan to help us defer costs on keeping the rental going. There’s been a lot of help but at some point, that help is going to run out because contrary to popular belief, there is not endless free cheese for people. At some point, the government is going to say, “Get tough. Suck it up. You’ve got to figure something out to do, be grownups, don’t be part of the nanny state.”

I have two main things that I do. I have the incorporation corporate compliance, that part which we’ve been doing since ‘97 for me, then the private equity stuff where we’re buying businesses. For both of those, it’s great. For buying stuff, it’s like buying nonperforming debt. It’s fire sale time. People can say, “That’s not very nice. You’re taking advantage of someone else’s troubles.” It’s better if I buy it from them than if they close up. It’s much better if that happens. It’s much better for their customer and everybody concerned. If they’re not in a position to weather the storm, the thing they started doesn’t have to die. That’s one.

The other thing is on the incorporation corporate compliance side, the Laughlin side because there are so many jobs that are not going to come back, we’ve been in an age of giant consolidation and people believing this fantasy that they’re going to build a $500 million, $1 billion company. This doesn’t happen. The reason they call them unicorns is because they’re mythical. They’re almost never real. You could write them all on a yellow pad, not on your fingers, but there are not that many of them. Only 4% of companies ever break $1 million a year in revenue. Most of them are small companies where the owner is making $100,000, $150,000. They’re generating $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000 top line. They have a few employees. They have a dang good life. They live in a nice home. They’re in the top 5% of income.

Everybody thinks they have the world by the tail. I guarantee you, if you’re making $250,000 a year as a self-employed person, a business owner, all your friends are saying you’re a multimillionaire because your life is so much better than theirs financially. You have so much more money than them and more freedom than them. They automatically think that person must be very rich. It’s not true. I can’t tell you how many people say, “So-and-so, he’s a billionaire.” I’m like, “There are not that many billionaires on the whole planet.” You seem to know 5 or 6 of them.” That’s living in a dream. What’s going to happen is there’s all this unwinding of how companies are organized and they’re trying to figure out, “What do we do if we can’t all be under a roof?” I’ll tell you what, we went through in our management meeting for Laughlin, it’s time to renew our insurance. Our insurance was 30% increased and it’s not very good.

It’s heavy on health savings accounts. What you’d call those Cadillac plans were $5,000 a month for a family of three. This is post-Obamacare. I’m not knocking it because Obamacare did a few things to fix stuff, but they also made everything harder to do inside the industry. That’s why so many companies dumped, wouldn’t even participate in exchanges like UnitedHealthcare, the biggest one in the country. The point is that rates now have gone through the roof. If you’re a business owner with employees and you’re offering health insurance, I’m thinking, if we’re going to grow, do we want to grow by full-time employees or do we want to grow by contractors? Do we want to grow by getting more space to lease or have more virtual employees?

What are we going to do? That’s happening on a big level. Let’s go to some of them that got displaced. They’re furloughed but they’re done. Their job has gone. Not everybody but there are a bunch of jobs that are gone. Those people have 401(k). Let’s have the low end of the employees. If they’re the servers at the restaurants, they’re the admin, those kinds of settings. Restaurants will come back at some point. A lot of people that were working in factories, warehouses, things like bookkeeping, and so on is becoming more and more automated. A lot of those jobs are going to disappear. What you’re going to see is a whole new generation of cottage industry businesses, one person businesses. They’re going to incorporate or they’re going to be an LLC for a little business or starting business without predictable revenues.

One member LLC is great. If you get a little bit bigger, you’re up around $150,000, $100,000 in annual revenue, not monthly, a lot of them are going to become S Corps. I see that’s going to be the thing, S Corps and single-member LLCs. We’re going to have all these very specialized people, not trying to be everything to everybody. I’m good at this one thing. I can reach out to you, I can connect with you, I can pay you $1,000 or $20,000 to do something, and then we’re done. I didn’t have to have you on staff, getting sick leave, paid vacation and health insurance. I’m paying your FICA and FUTA. That all disappears. What you’re going to see is companies try to operate more efficiently, individuals pop up, have greater freedom and possibly better income than they had when they were working. It’s less guarantee.

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your Business

Pivoting Your Business: Bankruptcy is a remedy to protect you from creditors. It doesn’t mean you’re a loser. It means that you’re using laws that have been put in place that say, “if the ship is going to sink, you don’t have to go down with it.”

 

They’re going to have to be thinking instead of collecting a check. They’re going to have to be thinking about how do I keep stimulating new revenue, new leads, how do I engage with people, and what skills do I need to develop. You’re going to have like the podcast industry did to broadcast. You’re going to have very nichey, specific information, how to build a campfire, how to tell a joke, or how to play the harmonica. You’re going to have this very narrow but deep interest. It’s going to be an interesting time. What we’ll see over the next couple of years, organizations where people can gather like a Chamber of Commerce, EO, or YPO, those kinds of things. You’re going to see them for grassroots business owners who need to have a way to talk to other people.

I don’t think it will be the Chamber of Commerce. It will be some new cool groups show up that don’t exist. We’re going through a renaissance. We’re going through a reset in a market that was not based on a lot of need. When things are good and business is booming, you ignore the weak spots in your company. Now, those weak spots have been exposed. People’s weak financial situation has been exposed. There’s a chance. In COVID, it has been a boon to a bunch of people who are about ready to lose their shirts in their business because all of a sudden, they’ve got to pause. “I don’t have to make my house payment, rent payment or lease on my office.” “They’re going to send me some money.” There’s been this window where people weren’t sitting around and watching Netflix. They were thinking about what’s next. People that do that are going to come out of this like superstars and everybody else is going to go, “What happened? How did I miss the boat? How did I miss the opportunity?”

We’ve seen different revolutions. This is the virtual revolution. People having to work from home and get online in a variety of fashions we were talking before. I attended the world record virtual event with 30,000 plus people in 140 countries across the world. It was all live. We’ve been doing virtual event for five years. You’re planning to do a live event with Magnify Your Wealth but contingency for a virtual event just in case.

We did a virtual two-day event in May 2020. I’ve been doing the whole masterclass thing. We’re not getting enormous numbers but we’re getting a couple of hundred people that show up, 500, 800 people signing up and then people watching the replays. As a matter of fact, in this management call we had, it was interesting to see that we tried something because of the need, the live speaking opportunities have dwindled. We said, “Let’s try a masterclass. Everybody seems to be doing these masterclasses.” We did it. I’ll give you the real numbers. This was an experiment for us. We only advertised to a list that we consider our dead list. These are not clients. They’re not people that are engaging with us. If we get a bunch of unsubscribes from this list, it’s okay. We mailed to this list, by the way, it didn’t get a lot of unsubscribes, which was interesting.

We had about 500 and change people enroll in a free one-hour webinar. I gave them a ton of content. It was not a one-hour long sales pitch. I told them there would be an offer at the end in the beginning. I said, “I’m going to give you tons of great content. There’s going to be some of you who want more and there will be an easy way to get more.” We did that. We had 500 and some people sign up, 175 people show up, 39 people bought the $97 course. That was right away. What’s interesting is that we had two new enrollments for the old thing that’s already over with. They paid the $97 and now they’ll get the replay. I said, “What does that mean?”

We offered them something that we normally charge $399, $400 which was what we call our Snapshot or we used to call it Blueprint. Snapshot for free. If you sign up for $97, you’re going to get this four-day course, which was jam-packed with good stuff. It was 3 of the 4 hours of me teaching. From that, besides the enrollment money, we’ve collected in what people said, “I need that. I’m curious about that.” No big package or anything, “You said something about C Corp. I want to know more about that. Corporate Veil, I want to know about that. Unshackled, I want to know about that.” We concluded this thing. We’ve collected in addition to the $97 enrollment about $15,000 in sales.

Based on what’s in the pipeline of conversations, there’s another $25,000 at least from this experiment to our dead list. When you think about that, it was me doing it with Meghan, my VP of Marketing, set up a simple landing page, everything was easy, we brought in that much revenue in this very short time, and we didn’t try to pitch something that you need my special sauce. It was only, “What do you think would benefit you?” We didn’t do any sales pitch or any special offers but only, “I’m going to teach you about this stuff. If you have interest in learning more, raise your hand.” That was it. No obligation to buy anything, no pressure on anything. People are hungry for stuff.

If we offer something that they want, there are people that are still spending money. As a matter of fact, they have more money if they’re working or open for business than they did before because they’re not out spending it more frivolously on lifestyle stuff. The opportunities abound. We said, “This was an experiment. Let’s see what we can do with a different list. Let’s see what our results are, what our acquisition per client cost is, and what our value per client is.” We have no way of anticipating lifetime value yet from this because we don’t know. The point is this is not complicated stuff. You do more technologically challenging things than I do and you have tremendous engagement by the audience. I’m saying we would not have done that if it hadn’t been for COVID. My friend, Mary Morrissey, had her largest event. It was $999 to attend. She had over 2,000 people on the virtual event. Do the math. Don’t give up, feel good, feel great and just say, “What’s on the countertop and what else can I make with the ingredients that’s different than what I was doing before March 2020?”

You’ve got to get creative and sometimes bounce ideas off of people that aren’t in your immediate circle, that aren’t going to give in to that “it’s me” mentality. Some of the best things I’ve had, as far as ideas, have come from seeing other people do things, short challenges. We both know Roland Frasier. Roland is a great guy and a mentor of mine for years. I learned a lot of stuff from him in the marketing side. I saw him doing a five-day challenge, monetize from that, and other people up there. Russell Brunson with ClickFunnels where we’re redoing a lot of our stuff because of some of the challenges that we’ve seen.

Stephanie went through a seven-day challenge. Tony Robbins, seeing what he’s done virtually on stuff like that. The biggest thing besides getting beyond your head is level up, look at people that are in the same field or doing some things but reach out and see some of the things that they’re doing because there’s more than enough opportunity out there. If you’re confined to an area, there are a lot of people that aren’t in your background that are doing great things in their market, but are also, “Here’s what I did to get ahead and make a change. I’m not going back to the old way of doing business.”

I reiterate because the examples you gave were all kinds of people in the digital world. What Roland is doing, what Russell Brunson is doing, what Tony Robbins did. If you own a landscape maintenance business, if you’re investing in real estate, or fill in the blank of whatever you’re doing, there are different ways to engage your customer. The trick is how do you use and talk about the circumstances in a way that feels like a relief to the person that you’re talking to. It feels like they understand what’s going on, what I’m dealing with, and they’re trying to make my life easier, better, more comfortable, more exciting or whatever. Take away the pain. It works virtually. It works in knee-to-knee, toe-to-toe, belly-to-belly too.

The biggest thing is how do you present yourself? Do you present yourself as someone who looks like they’re in tune with the times or out of touch with the times? It’s up to the individual. I love seeing people who are doing things like this restaurant owner I talked about who was shrinking his footprint and doing more takeout. He was excited about what he was doing. He’s not a young guy, by the way. He’s got to be ten years older than me. A lot of people would be going, “I’m supposed to be retiring. Look what’s happening. It’s so bad.” I’m going to say, “Get excited about how to play the game.” I’ve started referring in my mind to things that I’m going to buy.

If I’m going to buy a pen, let’s say this pen was $250. When I look at things, I’m using the word credit instead of dollars in my mind, 250 credits. I’m winning them in a game. I’m playing pinball, Mario Kart, or whatever and I’m getting points. I have these many credits up on the board that I can use to do stuff that I want to do. This is a game I’m playing with myself. When I think credits and think of it as a game, I get a lot less worried about any of the specific outcomes. It all becomes fun because to me, it’s like, “How many credits can I get? How can I play off the bumpers and hit the little things so my credits go up?” I have a choice to go buy whatever, buy nothing, put it in the bank, invest in notes or any other real estate, or to go out and go to Disney World while there’s hardly anybody there. I can’t believe you guys haven’t gone there yet. I’m blown away by that.

It was reopened. We had a friend who’s working there and she got called back into work. It’s an interesting timeframe out there. It’s vacant. I was talking to our good buddy, Merrill Chandler, a little bit saying, “We’re going to have to do something to get the heck out of this bubble.” Getting down to Disney and getting everybody together to spend a little bit of time to some normality. If the lines are half as long, great, because everybody is scared. We’ll take a lot of vitamin C and go.

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your Business

Pivoting Your Business: Don’t miss the opportunity train because you’re so busy wishing it was the way it was. Get passionate about the reinvention of your life and have a great time with it.

 

I’ve seen the pictures. There are not many people there. This is another COVID benefit. People might go first-world issues, not problems, the issues. I had some horses that I purchased in the South and I live in Washington State. Michelle and I went, hooked the trailer up to the truck, drove 2,400 miles to Southern Alabama, almost to the panhandle of Florida and picked up two horses. We went up to Kentucky, picked up two more and drove back. We covered sixteen states. We ate mostly out of the trailer. We have a little camping trailer, living quarters as they call it.

We wore masks when we went inside a store, but you don’t have to hide. You have to be smart. I flew to Scottsdale for a board meeting. I went down to San Diego and did an Inner Circle Mastermind. People showed up. We want to be careful and wise, but we should be careful with our health. I believe that. We need to figure out a way to accept and acknowledge there is a virus going on. There are people who have died from it. It’s a lot of people if you were to put them in a room or put them in a stadium but compared to 325 million people, it’s a little teeny, tiny drip. Tell that to their family members or their friends, it sucks. It’s horrible but I’m saying, we need to keep some balance.

The other thing I read, a lot of the testing they’re doing for COVID-19, they’re finding people that have SARS, but we’re not hearing much about it. We haven’t been hearing about it for a few years ago because everybody found out that mostly you’d be okay. That’s what’s going to happen here. This has become a big issue. Everybody has jumped on the bandwagon of it. We should wear masks. People that are not wearing masks in public are thoughtless and a little mean. I don’t like wearing a mask. If I can make a tiny difference, I’m going to do it. I’ve seen this over and over. It’s the same reason we wear seat belts. I’ve heard people talk about that on TV, but a buddy of mine never wears a seatbelt. He’s disconnected the little ding, ding, ding in his trucks.

I hope he never has an accident. I hope it never happens to him, but I’m going to wear my seat belt. Not because I’m afraid but because I know I can’t control everything around me. I don’t want to smash my face into the windshield. If I have the virus, I don’t want to pass it on to them. I want to set an example that says, “I’m playing along.” I’m going to do all that, but I’m still going to get on an airplane, which I’ve done. I’m still going to drive across the country, which I’ve done. I’m still going to sit down with my clients, which I’ve done. I’m buying real estate. I’m not afraid of that. We’re doubling down on marketing. Have you talked on your show about posting Kellogg’s?

No, I have not.

In the Depression, and it started in 1929. Remember Post Toasties cereal and all these? It was the juggernaut leader in the cereal world. Kellogg’s was second. It was like McDonald’s and Wendy’s. There’s no comparison of McDonald’s and Wendy’s. In that Depression, Post started to accumulate cash, hunker down, slowed down on marketing in order to weather the storm. Kellogg’s doubled down, dramatically increased their advertising, went headlong into the depression, and exploded in the 1930s. Here we are, many years later, Post has never caught up with Kellogg’s.

You can stay home. If you don’t need to go, don’t go. If you have things to do, I say do them and use precautions, take your hand sanitizer, wash your hands, wear your mask. Don’t hug and kiss everybody. Do the elbow. We don’t need to be shaking hands and hugging everybody for a while until we understand what’s going on. Don’t let what’s on CNN and Fox stop you from doing things. Any more than believing that there are terrible race relations. I have all kinds of friends who are black and we have no problem with this. This is an issue that needs to be dealt with, the race stuff, but it’s been politicized and hijacked by other crazy people who want to create problems. I’m off on my soapbox again. Into the day as opportunities abound. Don’t miss the opportunity train.

Don’t miss it because you’re so busy wishing it was the way it was at Christmas time, it is not. It is not that way now so get over it, get on with it, make some money, have some life, and feel excited. Get passionate about the reinvention of your life and have a great time with it. This is one of the most exciting times of my career. I’ve been employing people for so many years since I was nineteen. I’ve had employees on the payroll. This is the most exciting opportunity of my career. Other people are saying, “It’s the end of everything we love.” I’m saying, “This is the time you buy stuff because believe me, it’s going to come back. It may be 18 months, 24 months, but it’s not over by a long shot.” It doesn’t matter who the president is, how many people are protesting in your city, or if we have to wear masks, none of that matters. Those are conditions to consider as you, with your entrepreneurial brain, figure out solutions to problems.

I believe 2020 can be a waterfall year for those that take advantage of the opportunities because there’s always an opportunity in an up or down market. You’ve just got to know where the cracks are, where to implement your strengths, and find the opportunities. Good stuff, Aaron.

It’s always good to be here with you.

You too. You guys be safe out there. Give our best to Michelle and the kids.

She’s doing a great job. The family is doing well. I’m happy to hear you and Steph are going to go out, go up there, and do some more feline rescue. It’s great. We rescued some ducks. I took a bunch of ducks to Audubon side. This lady was there and she said, “Where did you get these ducks?” I said, “They were walking through our pasture.” “What do you mean pasture?” I said, “We raised horses.” She’s like, “Where do you live?” I told her and she goes, “What do you do?” She’d been a high school counselor. She was returning a bird that fell down in her backyard. Next thing I knew, I was wrapped up in a conversation with somebody going, “You’ve got the most fascinating life I’ve ever heard about.” She stayed in high school. You and I, and the people reading this blog are doing stuff. We are lucky people. We’re the ones that make things happen in the world. Make sure you don’t lose sight of the goal because you’re in some muddy water.

It’s a great spot to wrap up this episode. Go out, take some opportunity, and learn what’s going on. If you need an idea or two, pick up the phone, give me a phone call or give somebody a phone call. I guarantee those that are taking action, it may not be the best thing. It’s going to be a little bit of ramp-up for you but still, doing something is better than sitting at home bingeing Netflix and Game of Thrones for the 30th time. They’re wallowing your fears. Go out, take some action, everybody. We’ll see you guys all at the top.

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About Aaron Young

NCS 615 | Pivoting Your BusinessAaron 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.

 


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