The Butler Project

Mark’s final question to Jim, multimillionaire pest control business owner was this: If you could only give me one piece of financial advice, what would that be?

Jim: Here it is: I’m worth many millions of dollars; I drive a 2004 four cylinder, white Toyota pickup that’s been used as a pest control truck a full summer in Dallas, Texas, and a full summer in Atlanta, Georgia. That’s my car. That’s it. So if you take that and extrapolate that to the rest of my life, then that’s my bit of financial advice: that it’s not just about making money; it’s about being smart with your money.

Stay away from consumption, especially depreciable [consumption]. If you start thinking about your life and your behaviors of how you spend and what you do with your wealth, making more money is only one part of the equation… spending less money–it totally changes the model.

If you’re going and buying a brand new Mustang, then there’s 20-30 thousand dollars that you could have turned around and put it into an investment vehicle that’s working for you. Whether that’s real estate, whether that’s business, or whether it’s just a bank account. There’s a difference between pissing your money away and putting it to work for you. And understanding the fundamental difference between the two and living it is my advice.

If you’ve read my past posts about Jim, his truck of choice probably is not very surprising to you, but I want to take a minute to compare Jim’s choice with my friend who is a doctor. He’s been in practice about two years now, and I think he’s been really smart about building his business.

Coming straight out of college, he didn’t have a lot of money to start up a medical practice. So, when he moved to town, he bought a modest home and leased an office in an older medical building. The rent was cheap, but the space was really outdated and needed a lot of cosmetic work.

My friend and his wife did that work themselves; with some paint, a little tile, a whole lot of elbow grease, and their fabulous taste, they transformed that old, dingy office into a beautiful place where he works happily and his patients feel comfortable.

**Before I get any farther in this story, let me acknowledge I’m relying solely on my occasionally faulty memory for a lot of these details, and I’ve made some assumptions about the situation.**

With his office ready, my friend began an advertising blitz on the area. He was featured in the newspaper as a new doctor in town; his ads appeared all the time in the newspaper and on the radio in times and places that would best reach his target patient population. Very soon, he secured space in medical offices in two nearby towns allowing him to see patients in each of those towns once a week and effectively doubling his pool of potential patients. He’s busy all the time now, making the most of his working hours.

All of this is great; like I said, I think my friend has done a great job building up his business. Not only that, he’s a nice guy with a big heart. He’s been my son’s doctor and I would recommend him to anyone. I believe he can afford his lifestyle; I don’t think he’s living beyond his means. But I bring up his story to contrast it with Jim, who told us his one piece of financial advice would be to limit consumption, and used his used 2004 Toyota as an example. My friend, the doctor, moved here two years ago driving an old sedan. Very soon after that, he bought his mother’s late model Audi. It was a really nice car, in impeccable condition. I thought it was a great move–he got a nice car for a good deal which I’m sure he can afford comfortably.

About eight months ago, my friend traded in the Audi for a brand new BMW and bought his wife (who had been driving a late model Honda Pilot) a brand new SUV much bigger than her Pilot. The cars are both very nice, and my friend is obviously very pleased with his purchases, but I wonder if he is really designing the life he wants to live. I wonder if his nice, new cars are really moving him toward his goals, or if he took a minute to think about it, if he couldn’t have kept his older cars, invested the money and been that much closer to his dreams.

Don’t think I’m against new cars; I bought one, and I loved driving it off the lot. Was it the best financial decision for me? Probably not. But it is what it is, and I’ll probably make a different choice next time. I’m not against BMWs either; if a fine German sports car is essential to your ideal life, find a way to pay for it and enjoy the sheer driving pleasure.

My point is, Jim thinks about what is important to him, and finds the most efficient way to get there. Driving a fast new car is obviously not one of his immediate concerns. He takes the money he saves on cars and invests it to achieve his life goals. I suspect my doctor friend has a lot of the same life goals as Jim, centered on family and enjoying life. I wonder though, if my friend will reach those goals with the efficiency Jim has, or if he will unknowingly exchange the really important stuff for the thrill of immediate gratification.

Since tomorrow is Father’s Day, I thought I’d take a minute to honor our dad for the sound financial principles he taught us as we were growing up.

1. Always save some money. My brothers and I got an allowance when we were young and then had paper routes when we were older; saving money from those sources was a family requirement. 20% minimum.

2. Interest is your friend. Our dad knew the power of interest, and taught us to look for the best possible rate. We never had our own savings accounts; instead, Dad put our savings in with his because his account, having a much higher balance, always earned more interest. To keep track of our individual savings, Dad would print out spreadsheets for us, showing our deposits, our balance, and total interest earned.

3. Buy smart, which is not necessarily the same as cheap. Dad did not believe that the best deal was always the cheapest deal. He knew to look for quality at a good price so that he wasn’t losing money replacing stuff all the time.

For example, we rode bikes a lot. My dad is into saving money and being in shape, so he often rode his to work. My brothers always rode theirs to do their paper routes. (Mark once rode his into the back of a car, a parked car.) After buying cheap bikes from a discount store and finding they only lasted a summer or two, my dad decided we would fork over the big bucks for quality bikes from the bike store. After saving for several months, we all had quality Specialized mountain bikes that lasted for years. In fact, I still ride the Specialized Hard Rock I got 19 years ago!

Thanks Dad, for laying a solid financial foundation for my brothers and me. Happy Father’s Day; we love you.

Make sure to check out our entry in The Thirteenth Edition of the Carnival of Improving Life!

Nate has been a sales manager and sales executive in the technology sector for over two decades and he’s seen a lot. Yesterday he talked about how he saw fast, easy money go to his friends’ and co-workers’ heads and ruin their lives.

In this part of the interview he talks about the sheep mentality that lead to the whole technology bubble in the first place. We got into the discussion when I talked to him about setbacks in his career that had taught him important lessons:

Nate: Anybody in their technology career had a real setback when the bubble burst – that was a really harrowing time for all of us. We were used to everything being ‘up and right’ (on the stock charts), but I think the lesson I learned from that was just the concept of using sound business principles.

Mark: Tell me what you mean by that. What were you seeing in the industry?

Neal: Well, fortunately the company that I worked for wasn’t caught up in doing a lot of vendor financing, basically paying for all these companies to buy your gear, that would then subsequently go out of business. So you’d lose twice because you had to pay for the raw materials to build the gear and then you had to give them the money to buy it.

Mark: I haven’t heard about this. What do you mean by vendor financing?

Nate: A lot of the technology companies would come to the technology vendors during the bubble and they’d say “Listen, I’d like to buy $10,000,000 worth of gear, can you lend me the money to buy it?” And a lot of the vendors were doing it – Cisco, Oracle. And it was called vendor financing. The customers’ credit wasn’t good so the vendor would finance the purchase themselves, and then of course that turned into massive write-offs when the bubble burst because all of those people went out of business.

Mark: Because most of those companies didn’t really even have earnings did they?

Nate: Right, right. Because some business analyst for Morgan Stanley wrote a paper that said all the traditional business models, and business fundamentals weren’t important. That it was all about eyeballs, and it was like a gold rush and whoever got their first was going to win – it didn’t matter if they had any revenues. Everybody bought into it, including the vendors. And that wasn’t the case. You had to have earnings to have a sustainable business.

Mark: And you were saying that your business chose not to buy into that [philosophy].

Nate: Yeah our business fortunately chose not to buy into a lot of that. Our CEO took a very simplistic look at how that [way of running a business] was going to pan out and just said you know I don’t do things like that. It really worked out for us because we were really able to come through the downturn a lot more unscathed than a lot of other people in the industry.

So how does this relate to you and me? Most of us don’t own technology companies, so we probably don’t have to worry about getting caught up in the exact scenario that Nate’s CEO faced almost a decade ago.

I think the principle here is avoiding the mob mentality, the lemming approach to running a business and running your financial situation. The Morgan Stanley analyst that Nate is referring to here is named Mary Meeker. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about her and apparently she was one of the pioneers of the “new business model” based on nothing but usage statistics for websites. I found this excerpt from an article about how ugly the tech bubble really was (referring to Ms. Meeker):

She often rated Internet stocks not just on traditional balance-sheet measurements, but also on something called “usage metrics,” like website page views and estimates on how many “eyeballs” viewed a particular website. Meeker believed such measurements were the best way to assess money-losing but promising Internet companies because they measured possible future performance, although most small investors had no clue what they meant.

Meeker has been blamed for the entire tech bubble and subsequent crash, but I’m not taking it that far. I just think she gave us an opportunity to see this aspect of human behavior on a huge scale.

People are intoxicated with the idea of a quick buck, a gold rush. I’ve fallen pray to it before - sometime I’ll have to post about how my real life education in smart investing cost me $10,000 and a justifiably irate wife.

Even normally rational people can abandon all reason if there are enough people doing it around them. I guess the mortgage mess we’re in now is a good example of that.

The other day a friend of mine was telling me how his friend was trying to get him involved in some racket where they take control of multi-million dollar homes with distressed sellers (through some mortgage and legal gymnastics) and then refinance out a big chunk of the equity, which they use for hard money lending. The guy pitching the idea to my friend actually said this: “Most of the companies doing this are total scams, but I actually found the one company that isn’t.”

Hmm - think so? Later that night I spoke to my best friend, a real estate attorney, about the whole thing. “Yeah, that one is going around right now. Total fraud, multiple felonies involved. I have a client who did a single deal like that and he is going to do time. I’ve had long conversations with both the FBI and the Criminal Division of the IRS about this. There is no “clean” way of doing that deal, so that guy better steer clear or he’s going to prison.”

For the record, the friend-of-a-friend in question doesn’t seem to be a total idiot from what I hear about him. He’s just caught up in the idea of a quick buck, and he seems ready to risk everything chasing it.

Of course, I’m not saying stick your head in the financial sand (as in putting all your money in a savings account earning 2%). I’m saying slow down and use common sense. If someone presents you with an opportunity for earning returns or income way above what’s reasonable for the market, be wary of them. Especially if they say it’s easy. If you’ve followed this site at all, you’ve heard multiple millionaires talk about how they achieved their success - which could be summed up as “work hard and don’t quit”. My advice would be to read their stories, and act like them.

We all remember the tech bubble, both the insane gains in the market before it burst and the massive losses when it all fell apart. I had the opportunity to interview a millionaire who participated directly in the whole thing, and he has some incredible stories.

“Nate” has spent 25 years or so in technology sales, and he’s been able to make a relative fortune doing it. Not everybody came out of the tech crash as unscathed as Nate. He made it through because of his conservative nature and the guidance of a friend and mentor who happens to be a multi-billionaire.

Some of the first experiences Nate told me about had to do with how his colleagues handled (or didn’t handle) the massive wealth created during the boom:

Nate: I saw the other side people burning through money like [crazy]. There was so much wealth created in the employee base in the [tech] bubble, and it was unbelievable to watch people self-destruct. I had a boss that netted about $40 Million, then bought a big house in Palisades, and then basically blew the $40 Million on coke parties. You would think nobody could go through that much money. After taxes, maybe it was $20 Million he wasted.

Basically he lost his family and then ended up in a shootout with police and then in prison. And it was all based on the fact that everybody in LA knew they could go to his house and get free coke. It was unbelievable. I saw people that were working for me that had a net worth of $50 to $60 Million that are now bankrupt.

Mark: Now why do you think that happens Nate? If we didn’t get anything else out of this interview I think that’s really an interesting thing. People have these massive windfalls - why do they end up in the shootout with the police? Why do they end up bankrupt?

Nate: Oh I think there are people in life that have destructive personalities, and I think there are people that are so greedy that if they have $50 Million they’re not happy until they get $60 Million. And they’re going to push that envelope and try and do everything they can to try and get a little more. You know instead of just recognizing “hey I won the lottery here, I’m going to sell some shares, I’m going to take some off the table and pay my taxes and put the rest away for a rainy day.” They just don’t have anything in their personality to do that.

Mark: And having a lot of money didn’t change them [for the better].

Nate: Nope. They’re gamblers by nature. I have two guys in particular that I can think of that worked for me during that time. And I was screaming at them. I’d say ‘Guys you’re crazy.’ Both of them – one lost his wife and the other’s wife stayed with him. But both of them went bankrupt after having all that money. Unbelievable.

Mark: Well – you’re not bankrupt, I don’t think. Having gone through a crazy time like the roaring ’90s, what were some of the guiding principles that kept you grounded so that whatever your net worth is or was – you’ve stayed solvent, where these other people decided not to be.

Nate: Well for me it was just more basic principles of money doesn’t make you happy. You just have to be conservative and cautious. I certainly didn’t make every decision 100% accurately, but I think my conservative nature saved me. While the whole bubble was going up and going down I continued to sell shares. And I think ultimately that’s what it is. You know that’s what most senior level executives do, they just get on stock programs where they sell a certain amount of shares every month. And I wasn’t a CEO or CFO but I just figured, ‘hey if it’s good enough for them it’s probably good enough for me. So I’m not going to worry about trying to cheat the tax man, I’m just going to sell shares, pay the tax man, and go on with my life and invest in other areas.

Mark: So you secured your gains.

Nate: Yeah and then the other thing is, [my billionaire friend] was actually very helpful to me during that time because when things really started to unravel he told me to just let everything go (sell all my shares). Which I did. You know I figured he’s a multi-billionaire. Why should I think I’m so smart? I’m fortunate enough to have a friend who’s made billions of dollars I think I ought to listen to him.

Nate did listen to him, and as a result he’s far from bankrupt. I had a hard time tracking him down for a while before we talked because he had been on a two-week heli-skiing trip.

Most people will never have the opportunity to waste a $50 Million net worth, but the principles Nate shared with me apply to everyone.

First of all, money is likely to only make you more of what you already are. If you’re a gambler, you’ll become even more reckless with a bunch of money in your pocket.

If you’re conservative, you’re likely to stay that way when you have more money.

The point is, develop good attributes and values, and then stick to them as you have financial success.

What’s on your to-do list today? I don’t care if it’s actually written down or just in your head, what things do you plan to accomplish today?

Right now, you’re reading this blog. Was that on your list? Is it helping you with your big picture? Is it moving you forward to the person and the place you really want to be?

If you’re related to Mark or me, and you’re reading today out of obligation; quit it. If you’re a friend, simply interested in what we’re up to; quit it. If you subscribed at one time, haven’t found any value, and now are just too lazy to unsubscribe; unsubscribe. It will probably cost you two or three mouse clicks. It’s worth it.

If the information you’re spending your time reading at The Butler Project is not inspiring you to make changes in your life, to move forward and really live the life you want to have, then stop spending precious parts of your life here, and find something else!

If there is one thing I’ve learned from listening to, transcribing, and blogging about Mark’s interview with our multimillionaire business owner, Jim, it’s that you’ve got to be efficient! You’ve got to know where you want to go and find the shortest path to getting there. For Jim, that meant flying in to visit the offices he managed on the early Monday morning red-eye so he could have more family time on Sunday. It meant sleeping on the couch or (gasp!) the floor of pest control offices so that he wasn’t wasting time or money on hotel rooms. It meant always looking for ways to be more productive, more efficient with his time.

So, if you haven’t learned one thing yet from this blog, if you haven’t taken some positive action in your life because of it; it’s time to find something else. Something that will help you move forward passionately, and, (for lack of a better phrase) Be ALL You Can Be. And, as long as I’m quoting slogans: Just Do It!

And I’m not just talking about money here; money is just one part of the overall equation. We interview financially successful people because when you have more money, you have more options. Because the path to creating wealth is paved with the principles of self development. Because we personally continue to learn and improve with each interview.

Since you haven’t quit reading yet, I’ll leave you with a little excerpt from Mark and Jim’s conversation:

Mark: you have used a word a lot as we’ve talked, which is “indolent.” And I think that’s a powerful word. It’s a strong word, so define it for me. What do you mean when you say indolent? What does that person look like?

Jim: You know, that’s a great question… I don’t know what the dictionary would say, but in my mind, when I say indolent… it’s the antithesis of productivity. It means you don’t get things done, it encompasses procrastination, excuses, sitting around, perhaps avoiding responsibility, and again, to me it’s just the antithesis of productivity and efficiency.

Mark: Wow. Makes me not want to be indolent.

Don’t be indolent today! Find one thing you can do today, one small thing, if that’s all you have time for, and move yourself forward. Start becoming your best self today.

Here’s another excerpt from an interview Mark did with Jim, who is a pest control company owner worth “many millions of dollars.” When I first listened to this interview, I thought Jim’s ideas were way too far out there in left field to apply to real life, but I finished this post with a new respect for the man and myself.

Jim’s actually brilliantly efficient because he sees the big picture and shoots straight to get his desired results. I’m not sure I could ever spend the night on the couch in a pest control office, but I’m definitely looking for ways to apply Jim’s methods in my life because I would really, really like to have similar results. Enjoy this story:

Jim: In my capacity as a regional manager [for a national pest control company], the job description was very vague; [it] was “Get your regions to perform well, and here’s where we expect sales to be, and here’s where we expect costs to be.”

And I looked at the sales training model that . . . the company had been following the last couple years, which had not been yielding very good results. So I spent the off season going and speaking with all of our competitors and just the top tier of people who had been successful. And I developed a totally different sales training paradigm, and that’s the paradigm that my company rejected (see Why I Quit My Job).

When I would get together with my associates who were the other regional managers, they seemed to be very excited that they now had this corporate account where: “Look at the nice rental car I can rent,” and, “I get to go stay in a nice hotel.” And it made them feel like executives, and so they were able to again rationalize how they could spend their time.

Their Sales Training Model

When they (the other regional managers) would go work with an office [it generally looked like this]: on Monday they’d fly in at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and maybe they’d go to a baseball game or out to a nice dinner. They’d meet up with their team at night. The next morning they would maybe do a sales training, and then go into an office with a manager.

[The] next day they’d take their manager out to dinner or breakfast and maybe they’d spend a couple of hours doing direct training with salesmen … Then they’d fly home, [after spending all their nights] in a hotel.

My Sales Training Model

Here’s how I planned the same trip: I would fly out Sunday night. I would get to where I was going at 1 o’clock in the morning Sunday night, so I could spend Sunday with my family. I would get up then at– if I was on the [west] coast, I’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning so I could contact my offices on the [east] coast and do phone interviews and congratulations based on sales training.

At 6 in the morning [local] time I would go in [to the main office] with [the] manager … and see what needed to be done [there]. At 9 [or 10] o’clock, I would show up with the salesmen … and conduct the sales training meeting and then be with them in the field all day long until literally 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night.

Then I’d sit down and do performance reviews, evaluations, [and] put together specific training action plans for each individual rep that I worked with, and I would stay in the office the three days until I finished those plans. I didn’t get a hotel; I got the cheapest rental car that you could possibly buy, and I slept on the floor or the couch in every instance for two years.

Comparing Results

So when we got together … to evaluate our efficiency as regional managers, here’s what it looked like: I was on the road three times more … I specifically spent [3 or 4 or 5 times more] time direct training reps than the next manager in my position. And my costs, even though I was on the road that much more, my costs were less than a third of what anyone else’s were. And that wasn’t MY company! That was me just being a responsible steward for the person I worked for.

And then people would have the gall to come to me … and say, “you made … the owner of the company probably in the neighborhood of 2, 3 million dollars, and you only got paid this, doesn’t that make you mad?” And I’d say, (laughing) “You gotta be kidding me! First of all, I made a lot of money. I mean, it certainly wasn’t what [the owner] was making, but I was under the assumption that this was [his] company, it was his contract and he paid me to do this, and that if I made him a lot of money, well, doesn’t that make him want to have me around and perhaps pay me more in the future?” I mean, isn’t that my job as his employee?

The whole mentality of the fact that you did well and so therefore the employer should be penalized or that he cheated you . . . [he] honored his agreement with me, he paid me what he was supposed to pay me! Of course, I didn’t feel cheated!

I Couldn’t Avoid Becoming a Millionaire

Not only that, it provided me an opportunity to work and grow… I think the other managers, the other leaders, were specifically trying to rationalize and take advantage of finding opportunities to be indolent instead of finding opportunities to improve, be productive and be efficient. I’m saying you do that over a period of time.

If one person’s consistent habit is finding a better way to do it, being more efficient with their time and other people are trying to figure out the newest kind of rental car to drive or the nicest hotel to stay in or how to be able to take in an Astros game while they’re in Houston. In one day, that doesn’t change things very much; over the course of two or three years, you have one person who’s stagnant and not improving, and some significant skills can be developed by someone else to where in my case, I couldn’t avoid becoming a millionaire. Honestly, that is the true reality of it.

Another excerpt from Mark’s interview with Jim, multi-millionaire pest control company owner:

Jim: So the first [pest control] company I was with before I was an entrepreneur, I rose up in that company because of my results which were specifically sales related and management related and human resource related . . . I didn’t even want to stay in the industry but I was successful, so they’d offer me a lot of money to come back, and so I did.

The turning point year for me was: I was a regional manager with this company and there [were] three other regional managers. We all had the same amount of employees; we all supervised three different offices. I had no experienced employees in my region, none, and everyone else did have experienced employees . . . I was specifically assigned to three offices who had failed the year before, the other people did not have such offices.

I came up with a new paradigm of “Hey, I think this is where we’re failing as a company. I think this should be done this way.” I did my own research to figure out how I thought things should be done. I don’t want to go off on a tangent and be specific as to what that was, but it was a lot of things.

When I told the owners of the company what my plan was [to improve my region], they said, we think that that’s really outlandish, and we’ll put you on a short string, but we don’t want anyone else doing that, so keep it to yourself.

Well, within a month of the summer I had . . . outproduced any other region by over 85%! And I had zero employees quit, everyone else had a minimum of 30% of their employees in their region quit. And by the middle of the summer, I was put in charge of the whole company!

But it’s because I was thinking outside the box . I would say that the behavior when you continually think outside the box and exceed what other people are going to do, that you just start going to fast and you end up being thrust into doing your own thing because you get ahead of the curve a little bit and you think, “I’m just going to go start my own thing because it’s inevitable.”

Mark: And if I’m not mistaken . . . I personally know the owner of the company you’re talking about, and are they not now pursuing your same business model?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, they are.

Mark: (laughing) So . . .

Jim: I presented to them 12 years ago, and said, “Either do this or I’m going to leave, resign next week.” And they rejected the model and I resigned the next week.

Then they came back and said, “Okay, we’ll give you all this equity and all this money to stay and we’ll do your business model.”

And I said, “I’ve already made an agreement with someone else; if you’d have said that a week ago, we would have done it, but I’ve already made an agreement.”

And they said, “Well, did you sign a contract?”

And I said, “Well, I did something more powerful than that, I gave my word, and had a meeting of the minds . . . So we’re going to stick with the commitments that we’ve made. And I gave YOU a commitment last week that if you didn’t do it, I was going to resign next week, and that week’s past, and I resigned.”

Jim was one of Mark’s longest interviews; he gave so much good stuff. Yesterday and today’s post give you just a little idea of the importance Jim places on commitment and discipline.

Think about your own level of commitment:

• Do you consider giving your word to be more powerful than signing a contract?
• Have you been assigned tasks where it seemed the odds were stacked against you?
• What was your reaction?
• What was your outcome?

Later this week I’ll tell you about how Jim took those three failing pest control offices and turned them into the best selling region in the United States; the guy is crazy!

Today’s post is an excerpt from an interview Mark did with Jim, successful owner of a pest control company. Jim is fanatical about commitment and discipline. This week you’ll read stories about how far he was willing to go to make his ventures succeed.

Mark: Was it a specific intention to become financially very successful, or did it just kind of happen?

Jim: That’s a good question. I personally did not foresee myself being an entrepreneur. So, I had a lot of my work associates when I began college who knew they were studying business, and they knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs. I, like probably most young people certainly thought, “Hey, one day I’m going to be financially independent.”I grew up very poor, and I always felt like I was running on the heels of bankruptcy and having the carpet pulled out . . . from the family I grew up in.

Mark: Really?

Jim: So I felt like I needed to establish a sense of security. I felt very motivated to establish some financial security, but I tended to think that would come from either getting a law degree or getting an MBA and being an executive and doing it through someone else’s business.

And I have many friends who’ve done that, and I think that would have been a great way to go because the principles are the same.

I moved to Texas to start my first pest control company, and we quickly met a group of seven or eight friends; there were three attorneys, there was me (the entrepreneur), and there were a couple of other CPAs.

One of the attorneys said to me, “Look, I didn’t go to as good of a law school as these other guys, but since I’ve gotten my first job as an attorney, I’ve really applied myself. I became the best attorney at the firm where I was, which was a mediocre firm, and I have advanced to now a really good firm, a firm that you almost, to get hired out of law school, you have to be from a first tier type of a law school.”

And he said, “Look at our friends in this group - see these other attorneys that complain that they don’t want to work more than 40 hours a week with their young families? See the accountants . . . all of them complaining, ‘I’m not going to work more than 40 hours a week, because I want to be there for my kids. I want to be there for my family; I want to be there to fulfill civic or church responsibilities.’”

He said, “Pay attention and you’ll see that really that’s the great lie that they’ve used to convince themselves to be indolent. For me, I work over 60 hours a week. In three years I’ll be a partner at the firm where I am, and In 5 years I’ll be making $800,000 a year at the firm where I am, and I will be there for my children and for my church and for my other responsibilities more than my friends.”

Well, what’s happened since then is all the other attorneys still make between, (they’ve now been out of law school 10 years), they make between 100 and 200 thousand dollars a year; the CPAs, the same. . . decent career jobs. I haven’t seen any of them coaching any of their children’s softball teams, basketball teams, or T-ball. I haven’t seen them get actively involved in their church, they’re just there. They’re going through the motions like zombies.

They’re living okay lives . . . they’re involved in all the fantasy sports leagues, they will play the x-box until 1 or 2 in the morning, regularly, and that’s all well and good. My friend, last year he made over a million dollars, he is a partner at the firm where he said he would become a partner. He has two children . . . he’s been the softball, soccer, and basketball coach for both of his kids’ teams every year. And he’s been very, very involved civicly, meaning he’s just become competent, he’s just become efficient. Instead of starting off with an excuse of “Why I’m going to be indolent,” he’s saying, “I reject that. It’s okay to say I’m going to work very, very hard; I’m going to have a fantastic career and It’s not going to be a substitute for the other roles that I want to do; it’s not going to be a substitute for my civic or church or work responsibilities. I’m going to make up the ground by being efficient, by being hard working, by being industrious, by developing better habits . ”

So, I think your original question that you asked me was did I see myself becoming financially independent. I saw myself more heading toward where my friend was as a corporate attorney or an MBA. I think that that would have been a good career path, I’m not here to tout that you should be an entrepreneur, I’m here to say that . . . the skill set is your behavior and your discipline, regardless of whether you’re an entrepreneur. I would say it’s easier for me to be successful as an entrepreneur than it is climbing the corporate ladder, but it’s the same skill set that gets you to where you want to be. It’s having the same vision and discipline of working hard, not just for a week, but always.

I had an interesting experience the other day with one of the millionaires I’d been pursuing for an interview. I’d left him two messages on his cell phone, and I was starting to wonder if I had the guts to really keep harassing this man until he spent some time with me.

Then on a Saturday at about 5 pm my cell phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.

Me: “Hello?”

Caller: “Hello Mark, this is Nathan, I was just returning your call.”

Me: (Stammering) “Uh, hello Nathan, thanks for the call back.”

Nathan: “No problem, I got your message and I thought it was interesting. Tell me more about what you’re doing.”

I explained my goal of interviewing as many financially successful people as possible, to which he replied:

“Well I have about ten minutes I can spend with you, go ahead and fire away.”

Now, normally I record the calls and then transcribe them basically word for word, so I asked him if I could drive to my office (which was just a minute or two away) where I was set up to record. His response was great:

“Well, like I said, I’ve got about ten minutes, so we should probably just go ahead.”

It doesn’t come across in a blog post, but his tone of voice said “You’ve got ten minutes, sport. Get on with it.” He wasn’t rude at all, just letting me know that he had other things to do on a Saturday night besides accommodate me.

I bring that part of the story up for two reasons: First, I’m glad I persisted in trying to get in touch with him, because the conversation we had was interesting.

Second, when you’re talking to somebody who is financially out of your league - whether it’s a sales prospect, a potential mentor, or your boss - you need to be both bold and flexible. I’m glad I asked him if I could record the call even though he said no. The request didn’t hurt, and I would have liked to have the recording. The flexibility came in when he said no, and I just had to take what I could get.

I think that’s true in any situation where you’re trying to get something you want. Very often things don’t pan out exactly as you’d like. Take what you can get, keep your bigger goal in mind, and keep working.

So we spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes together (another lesson: people often forget their ‘10 minutes’ when you get them telling stories about themselves) and he shared some great insights with me. The background information on Nathan is that he’s a 47 year-old commercial real estate developer who has made the majority of his money creating luxury resorts on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Here are a couple of his thoughts:

The most important attributes a person can have are a sense of humor, boldness, and integrity.

“When I was young I wasn’t afraid to call people older and more established than me. I knew I had to if I wanted to succeed in those circles.”

That statement made me think of my own time in sales and also of the interactions I’ve had with network marketers. People tend to do what I call “selling down” or in network marketing - “recruiting down” which means you only try to pursue and persuade people you feel are less successful than you.

This habit comes from the idea that “Who am I to ask that person for…” The reality is that success requires you to sell and associate “up” which means you need to seek relationships with people that are more established and more successful than you. If you are the most successful person in your peer group, you need to challenge yourself to expand, or replace, that peer group.

And as far as honesty and integrity go, he said this:

“No matter how smart or talented the person, if they lied to me I let them go. It’s just not worth it. On the other hand, if you’re always completely honest with people, they’ll sense it. You’ll start to get noticed. Inevitably you’ll move up the chain. Success will be inevitable.”

Nathan said this was the best financial advice he could offer:

“Take lots of risks and chance when you’re young. You have to take them if you want to get ahead, so you’re wise to get them out of the way early. When you get to be my age (47) you’ll have a lot further to fall if a deal goes wrong. I don’t risk money anymore. I’m ready to retire and move on to more important things than money.”

Some of you may say “I’m already way past ‘young’. What do I do with this advice?”

My opinion is you can change this quote to be “Take lots of risks at the beginning of your path to financial freedom. You have to take them if you want to get ahead whether you’re 25 or 55, so you might as well get them out of the way as soon as possible. Once you’re secure financially, don’t take risks that jeopardize what you’ve built.”

My favorite quote from my conversation with Nathan:

“At some point you have to decide how much is enough. You can go on making more money forever if you want to. At some point you have to stop and think about more important things you could be dedicating your life to.”

For Nathan that meant leaving his normal life to dedicate three years to a religious mission that will start this summer.

Hopefully a lot more of us will have the opportunity to decide enough is enough and move on to more important things.