Financial Freedom, Fitness, and Focus | Chad Hufford, Author of "Forging Financial Freedom"

Meet the Founder of Veritas Wealth Management and the Author of "Forging Financial Freedom", Chad Hufford.

Get Chad's Book Here: www.forgingfinancialfreedom.com

Chad Hufford is leader in the business and entrepreneurship space, as well as the fitness and personal development space. Chad is known for his time spent working for Dave Ramsey as a SmartVestor Pro, and Financial Planner. He is also managing over half a billion dollars as a certified entrusted financial professional today in 2024! Chad gives us deeper insight on how to achieve health, wealth, love, and happiness.

Hufford also works closely with Oilfield Professionals to overcome uncertainties about their financial future by creating a tailored path to the financial independence of a Work Optional Lifestyle with the Veritas Financial Blueprint Process. If you're trying to boost your net worth in today's economy, then this interview is for you.

Chad's Website:
www.veritasalaska.com (main website)

What You'll Get from This Episode:
We'll talk a lot about money, investing, life, and what it takes to reach success in all areas of focus throughout 2024, 2025, 2026, 2027, and so on. Learn to become more effective by staying physically fit, mentally sharp, and financially educated. It starts (or continues) right here.

We talk about the "fake it til you make it" gurus, the illusions to wealth, and the pros and cons to investing with record inflation rates, today's second Great Depression, and what seems to be today's third world war.

We will talk about how to master money and how to get rich the right way, by investing in proven methods to wealth - mutual funds, real estate, gold, Roth IRAs, 401ks, pensions, the S&P 500, and putting money aside for retirement. This episode is to teach you how to be smart with your money, and take calculated risks along the way to financial freedom when necessary too.

In this episode, Chad Hufford and I will even break down the riskier, but proven modern wealth strategies you can use to build generational wealth and escape the 9 to 5. We talk about SMMA, e-commerce, crypto, the creator economy, social media influencing, starting businesses, and SO MUCH MORE.

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.

Follow Chad on Social Media!:
Linked-In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chad-hufford-066208100/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veritas.alaska/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VeritasWealthManagement/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@veritaswealthmanagement

Like the Show? Engage With Us:

Get Brendan Ecker's Book(s):
https://amzn.to/3LAnKbO

Support the Podcast:
https://bit.ly/TheBrendanEckerInfluence

Want to Grow Your Business? Book a Free Consultation:
https://www.b2bgrowthtodayllc.com/lead-collection

Gold Shark Media Website:
https://goldshark.media

Sign Up for PodMatch:
https://www.podmatch.com/?ref=1698948...

The Brendan Ecker Influence YouTube Channel:
https://bit.ly/3ZB50OT

Listen on Spotify:
https://spoti.fi/3LEf2ct

Follow:  Brendan Ecker on Social Media:
Insta: @goldsharkmedia or @eck3r17
Facebook: @GoldSharkMedia or @eck3r17
Linked-In: @Bre

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All those things that aren't sexy. They don't sell ads. It's not fun to market discipline, patience, hardship, perseverance, persistence but that's what's necessary.

Speaker 2: 0:09

Do you like money? Do you like being rich? Do you like investing? If you like money, then you need to watch this interview. Today we're gonna be interviewing Chad Huffer, handling over half a billion dollars. Dave Ramsey, smartvestorpro. We're gonna learn about today's financial market. We're gonna learn about where we're going in the future and how to maneuver your portfolio. Let's get started. Can you hear me? Okay, absolutely. Can you hear me?

Speaker 1: 0:31

Yes, yes, I can.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Awesome. So thank you for coming on to the Brandon Eckhart Influence Show. We like to teach people how to become wealthier, but also how to become more effective as human beings, how to live better lives. So, ladies and gentlemen, chad grew up in Anchorage, alaska, and was raised in the finance world, but he also had a solid background in athletics, nutrition and performance psychology. Chad approaches financial planning and investing with a coaching mindset, in the heart of a teacher, aiming to motivate and educate his audience, and not only to become better investors, but also to live more consciously and abundantly. He is a perfect man for our audience and a perfect man for our show. Also, a asset manager for over a half billion dollars. Is that correct, chad?

Speaker 1: 1:10

That's correct, yep. My team and my firm we manage got close to half a billion dollars for families all across the US comprises about a thousand individual client households and just to help them use money as a tool to create a life of more abundance and freedom.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Awesome, and before we get into the more nitty gritty stuff, tell us a bit about yourself, anything that I didn't mention how to invest properly If you haven't invested before, how to start give us some insight on kind of your expertise and where you started and a little bit of your story.

Speaker 1: 1:45

Well, my background actually was in fitness. My initial goal, my initial plan was medicine, got a degree in biochemistry and decided that I probably wasn't going to be able to produce that work-life balance that I wanted. So I shifted gears and wanted to start a business. I could scale very quickly while I figured out what I was gonna do with myself and started training the athletes. Started training some soldiers, worked with a lot of law enforcement, and then that kind of it blossomed into a lot of other things, got to train some Olympic athletes, some MMA fighters. But I realized this wasn't what I wanted to do and at that point I enjoyed doing it, but it wasn't what I wanted to do for the next 30 years and at that point in my life I did not have an understanding of how to scale that type of business. So I was only being paid for the hours that I was working.

Speaker 1: 2:43

And what I saw in this industry, in the finance industry, is I could take that same coaching background that I had, and really that's what's missing in finance is a lot of times people out there they're trying to find a better investment, realizing that that won't make them a better investor, like buying somebody a better treadmill won't make them a better runner, won't make them in better shape. Buying somebody a bar that holds more weight won't make them a better squatter. It's doing the hard work. It's actually becoming a different human being. That's what makes you more fit, that's what makes you a better investor, that's what makes you a better business person. Not to say that you don't want better tools, but you have to be a better operator of those tools.

Speaker 1: 3:26

And I think seeing that coaching background in the light of finance really helped me kind of turn the corner on that and I realized, yes, we need to help people optimize their investment strategy. Yes, we need to make sure that they have a financial plan based on their financial goals, their own personal long-term trajectory. It's meaningful to them. But the biggest thing that we can do is actually coach people to execute that plan, to stick with that strategy for years and years and years, because that's what it takes. This isn't get rich quick overnight. It is build well, slowly and sustainably. And I think that's what's missing from the financial world is people aren't being proactively coached. They're being sold a lot of products, they're being told about a lot of things that they can't control, and what's happening is they are missing what they can control.

Speaker 2: 4:16

Absolutely. Yeah, I definitely agree. I've never seen more advertisements on Instagram and I love that. I have nothing against marketing and whatnot.

Speaker 2: 4:24

I think that's you gotta do it, I love it, but it definitely is a big thing we're seeing today, in today's time, and it comes when it comes to get rich quick schemes, especially when there's a lack thereof. Everybody wants it. So, therefore, everybody's starting businesses today or trying to, and I think a lot of people are not taking that route of education and that route of actually listening to again the smart Vesta pros the day of Ramses, taking those baby steps before they jump into the more riskier bets, which is, I always like to say, more of the Robert Kiyosaki thinking, which is that investor's mindset. What would you say about that? I would definitely agree that today, with all the different things going on, I was actually just listening to Jordan Belfort's podcast and he was talking about his book and how they'll just have you believing you need to invest in crypto, you need to invest in gold, you need to invest in real estate, you need to invest in carbon emissions, all of these things. So what is the best way to really narrow down on the best investment?

Speaker 1: 5:22

The best investment is the right tool for what you're trying to build, and that might sound too simple, but a lot of people don't have a clear objective for what their goals actually are. They want success, they want wealth, they want freedom. Well, those are all kind of a burial type concepts Like what does that mean to you? What does financial freedom look like to you as individual? How much income would you need to replace to be financially independent? Those are the questions people need to answer.

Speaker 1: 5:49

They have to have a clear objective, but I think one of the reasons that people are so susceptible to being pulled off that path some of those things that you talked about is they want a shortcut. People have to be willing to do the difficult things. They have to be willing to have patience, discipline, all those things that aren't sexy. They don't sell ads. It's not fun to market discipline, patience, hardship, perseverance, persistence, but that's what's necessary and what's happening. When people are looking for a shortcut, when they're looking for the fastest, least effort way to build wealth, they're very susceptible to gimmicks, to hacks, to strategies that really aren't designed to build sustainable wealth. They're designed to sell in the short term.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Yes, I definitely agree with that. Yeah, it's crazy time we're living in there. Everybody's being sold, everybody's in the jungle, and you know I love it at the same time. But you know it's scary to see a lot of people losing a lot of money right now just because of all the get rich grid schemes and things like that. But at the same time, I think there's a lot of good things out there that people should be paid attention to.

Speaker 2: 6:52

But I definitely like what you said about making sure it's the right investment for you. So a lot of what I've experienced in my life was the best investments were what correlated with what I wanted to do in the near term future and the long term future, and I think that's a really great approach. But also being conservative with your spending, saving and actually making sure that you have like an actual agenda of what you're doing with your money. So that definitely helps. So what do you think will happen with the USD? There's a lot of talk of the US dollar that's going to die and the US dollar is going to crash. What do you think about that? Or do you think we're going to go into an integrated system or, like I said, is it going to be more of that universal basic income.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Well, one of the things that we always try to remind ourselves, remind our clients as well, is a focus again on what we can control, and it's not that we ignore what we can't control, but that's always a lower priority. So I can't control what's going to happen with the US dollar and I've no idea what's going to happen in the next six months, the next year. Nobody does, anybody that does think that they know or say that they know they're aligned to you or aligned to themselves. However, what we do know is the average age of a retiree in 2024 is estimated at 62. So if we go back to 1962, if we look at the value of a dollar then and the value of a dollar today, it takes about $1,000 today to buy what $100 would have in the year that that retiree was born. I think it's a safe bet to assume that the dollar will continue to lose value due to inflation, and that's what people need to plan for.

Speaker 1: 8:35

And unfortunately, as people get closer and closer to retirement, to leaving their jobs riding off into the sunset, they often take a fixed income into a rising cost retirement and it is a recipe for disaster.

Speaker 1: 8:48

Brendan, just think about it like when you signed on with your department, if they were to tell you Brendan, you can work here for 30 years, we will never give you a raise and expect you to be excited about that.

Speaker 1: 8:59

But that's exactly what retirees sign up for every day they go into retirement. Sometimes these retirees are going to be 25, 30 years and they go in with a fixed income and they're locking in that income stream without the chance to get a raise. And when you're in a rising cost world with a fixed income, it's completely constructive. So that's what people need to worry about is not what the dollar is going to do in the next year or two years, but what it's going to do over the next 20 and 30 years. And if history is any guide and it's probably the best guide we have the dollar will continue to lose value. And again, going back to the birth year of the average retiree, their dollar today is buying about 10 cents compared to the dollar when they were born. So, looking at somebody who's maybe getting closer to retirement, they need to figure on being able to double or triple their income over their lifetime, over their retirement, over that 20, 30 years, in order to keep up with living costs.

Speaker 2: 10:01

Hey guys, just a quick interruption Be sure to like, share, comment, subscribe and if you have a business that you're trying to grow to the next level, if you want social media management monthly, if you want to have some ads run for your business quality ads, that is if you want to have more appointments set, if you want to have PR shop five store built for you, youtube, all of this stuff, we do it all for you. So be sure to like, share, comment, subscribe, of course, but also be sure to book a consultation and you can also buy my books beyond the B and how I made my door in my office on Amazon, barnes and Noble and anywhere you can get books. All right, guys, thank you, got nothing else for you. Let's get back to the show. So if you had to pick three or four investments just three or four, I think everybody should add, at a baseline, have three or four.

Speaker 2: 10:40

They say the average millionaire has seven streams of income. But what kind of streams of income? Or, better said, what kind of assets should people kind of hold? So, should it be like gold real estate with some cash and then with a little bit of, or should it be a little bit of everything? Or should you go deep on one thing, dave Ramsey? Let's just say don't keep your aides in one basket. Same with Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater. If anybody didn't know, he said the same thing. So what do you think?

Speaker 1: 11:06

So I'm going to break that into two parts. So one of the things that you said is the average millionaire has seven streams of income. That might be true for the average billionaire or multi-millionaire, but that isn't what got them there. People sometimes confuse what the wealthy do because they are wealthy with what the wealthy did to make them wealthy, and very few people had all these multiple streams of income to build wealth. Typically, people double down on one or two things and then build their wealth and then diversify out and to say you don't want all your eggs in one basket. There's a lot of ways to deal with that and I wanna touch on that in just a moment to answer the second part of your question. But there's a tendency for people to chase too many different things and there's a quote that gets misread it's misquote all the time from Benjamin Franklin, dabbler and many master of none and this idea that you're good at a lot of things but you're not a master at anything, and that's not actually what he said. What he said is master of one and his idea was he was proficient in many things, but he was excellent. He was an expert in at least one thing, and people need to. Typically, they're going to have one thing that builds the foundation of wealth. It could be a business, it could be their job, it could be a real estate portfolio they inherited from their family, I don't know, but when people start spreading out too much, they actually lose the ability to be an expert in any one of those things. So, while you are right, people that are worth $100 million or a billion dollars usually have tons of different income streams. That's not what got them there originally. That's what helped them grow their wealth to a certain point. It's kind of like watching somebody who is a professional athlete watching them work out. They know that you're into the gym, you're into all that stuff too. Like watching a professional athlete saying, okay, they're doing these hill sprints, they're doing these box jumps, they're doing these snatches, all these different things. That's what I need to be doing. They never worked out in 20 years. They go out in the gym and they tear a hamstring. They're gonna hurt themselves because they haven't built that foundation. People need to build their foundation. One of the things that you said is super important is just living within your means, having a plan for where your money goes every single month so you actually have the money to invest. You're not being saddled by debt. So I just wanna clarify that.

Speaker 1: 13:42

Sometimes, what the wealthy do, they do now because they're wealthy Just like buying expensive cars, flying first class. That's not what you do to become wealthy. Those are terrible financial ideas. But and don't get me wrong, I like to fight first class, I like nice cars, but it's something you do because you've built wealth. It's actually a bad financial decision. We have too many people out there trying to pretend like they're rich, copying what the rich are in their broke, and it's actually gonna slow their pathway to financial independence down. It's actually gonna keep them from building wealth. So how do you actually build wealth? My favorite tool is mutual funds, cause, like you said, dave Ramsey says don't probably eggs in one basket. You can own hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of different companies with a single mutual fund.

Speaker 2: 14:31

S&P 500,. Yeah, that's a lot of what Jordan Velfort was talking about. Sorry to interrupt, but that made me think of that right away.

Speaker 1: 14:37

So you can just a simple 401K or whatever your police department provides you can have in some departments. Some 401Ks have better choices than others, but you can have a very mediocre lineup and still have the chance to own hundreds or thousands of different companies inside just one account. So some people like I said, one account, you're not diversified. Well, if you own thousands of different companies in one account, that's a nice start on diversification and the beauty of it is you can be a billionaire and own thousands of companies. You can be just starting out, somebody in their 20s, your first job, your first 401K, and diversify like that billionaire. And so mutual funds is a great tool for people to take a relatively modest amount of money and to spread it out very strategically. Now, it's not easy and it's not quick, but it's a relatively simple way to diversify.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Yes, I'm definitely a fan of the S&P 500. I've been in the S&P 500 forever because it's the best companies. You know you're investing in the best companies and it's pretty much everything of what you have to offer in terms of what, like it's all the best tech companies. It'll be like the best wholesale companies and retail companies just Amazon, walmart, apple, the biggest stocks. So I actually want to circle back on what you said about how so many people are faking it to be rich today and I've noticed it more than ever. So obviously we see like a lot of the Andrew Tates and kind of the leaders at the current moment in the thought space Alex Hermosi, kylo Pez going pretty viral, gary Vaynerchuk those are some guys that are really in that space.

Speaker 2: 16:16

I always like to think like if I was that kind of wealthy, I still don't think I would put money on a. I don't think I'm going to lease a Lamborghini for 25K to 90K. So I've seen that happen with friends of mine and it's just. It can be dark and it can be sad because, like you said, it does strap your opportunities, because you're kind of lying to yourself and others. You're saying I have this certain net worth, I have this certain lifestyle when really you don't, and so now you can't go ask people for help, now you can't reach out to others and ask, hey, what's the best template for if I want to go get a real estate deal? What's the best template for if I want to go invest in this business or buy this business?

Speaker 2: 16:58

A lot of people they won't take that humility and they will completely fake who they are, and I've seen this with so many young entrepreneurs. Today. There's a definitely an echo chamber, and I definitely recommend most entrepreneurs just try to slow down and educate yourself. Be a learning machine, read like crazy and just talk to people who are ahead of you, people who have been there, like Chad here, Chad's way ahead of me, way more experienced in business, and I'm learning from him, and so is other people now. So that's what's important. I think most entrepreneurs should really follow that path.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Well, there's a lot that you just brought up there and I agree with you, and whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you're just building wealth through your 9-5 job and you can do that too I mean, most of the people that we work with have regular 9-5 jobs. A lot of them are blue collar. We work with a lot of firefighters and law enforcement, work with a lot of oil field people. We work with truck drivers and teachers. They work with some physicians and attorneys and business owners as well, but the point is what you do as an individual and I'm speaking to your audience now, brendan, not you in particular, but what you do like your choices. That's what is the determining factor to your success.

Speaker 1: 18:13

I've met with physicians that make seven figures a year, that live paycheck to paycheck, and we've got clients we work with that have never made $100,000 in a year, that are multimillionaires and in everything in between. So this whole fake it till you make it thing, though, is so destructive on so many different levels. Because, number one, we end up making things the goal and it isn't. And if things is your goal, there will always be more to chase. There's always going to be a faster car. There's always going to be a bigger jet, there's always going to be a more expensive house, and if we're spending our money to buy the things we think impress other people, we're going to live in scarcity of mind for the rest of our life. That's a mental prison, and people need to find out what is deeply meaningful to them and pursue those things, and possessions might be a part of that, but it can't be the ultimate goal, and I think you're right, brendan.

Speaker 1: 19:09

Social media has made it so easy to see what everybody else is doing, and everybody else can put their best foot forward. What we don't see is that person with the big house, the fancy car, the nice clothes and realize that they're in massive debt. They're still living paycheck to paycheck, they're stressed out, they don't sleep at night and when it's entrepreneurs especially taking on debt, you make worse decisions in your job. You make worse decisions because you're coming from a fear, typically a fear-based standpoint. You're worried about paying down somebody else first rather than building your business. So again, this applies to everybody Entrepreneurs are not, but debt is especially destructive to entrepreneurs. It hamstrings you. You end up paying for your past instead of building your future. So there's a lot of people out there that drive cars that are way too expensive, that are in houses, that are drowning them in a mortgage payment, and I will tell you that the only reason my business exists right now is we started with no debt Because there were some lean times, brendan, where we were barely making it.

Speaker 1: 20:18

Had we been making debt payments, I think I would have had to go back to medicine, and not that that would have been a bad path, don't get me wrong. I don't think I would have this business if we had been strapped with debt when we started, because there were some times where things were so sparse, the income was so small that I mean we were trying to figure out how to pay for basic bills, like how to pay the electric bill, how to put food on the table for our kids and had we had a car payment, paying a big more things like that, we would have folded, and not having debt, not trying to keep up with the Joneses, was so important. And if people are willing to give up some of those things now, they're going to be able to have them in the future and pay with cash. So it isn't like you can't ever have a nice house. You can't ever drive a nice car. You can't ever wear nice clothes.

Speaker 1: 21:16

I was talking to a guy yesterday about he was trying to encourage me to buy these like $2,000 pair of boots for my wife and $2,000. That was more than my first car, buddy. But Maybe maybe that's your thing you like really expensive boots. You can do that someday, but not while you're building a business. Those are the things you do after you have wealth and it's such as putting pause. It's not telling yourself you can't ever have those things, just like somebody. Getting in shape doesn't mean you can't ever eat a pizza, but if you're a hundred pounds overweight, you're trying to lose it. That pizza's not gonna help you get where you want to go. You just need to get to the gym, move around a little bit. It's giving up some of those things temporarily that you see other people enjoying, and that's what's hard with social media. You see people enjoying those things. Now Just put pause on that and and tell yourself I can have those things later, but I'm gonna get to work first.

Speaker 2: 22:07

Yes, absolutely. I think that's great advice. Today, it's very easy to get caught up in Comparison. You start looking at everybody else's life and so you have no idea. It's all an illusion. Social media is a game. It really is just a business. That's at least the way I see it, you know. So everything I look at on social media, everybody's just trying to make it. We're all just trying to eat, we're all just trying to survive, make something of ourselves and that's kind of what I see. And, of course, we're only gonna show the world the best of ourselves, you know for the most part.

Speaker 2: 22:35

So I think it's important for entrepreneurs to just take a moment, slow down, relax, you know, do some learning and don't get too worried and stressed out about who's doing what and who's going where. Focus on your own Path and kind of where you're gonna go, what you're gonna do with your business, how you're gonna feed your family. When you start focusing on those things, I've learned just from my experience that I get a lot more done and I don't get as distracted as easily and I'm not scrolling as long. Scrolling is just death. It's death to productivity. What do you think about today's great depression and whatnot, and the recession, or are we in a recession? What do you think we're kind of going through today?

Speaker 1: 23:10

Well, the world is always an uncertain place. There's always a lot of fear and anxiety and unfortunately, there's a saying when it bleeds, it leads. It's very much true. Bad news travels a lot faster than good news. The bad news happens quickly. Good news happens very slowly and it's really hard to report on the things that didn't happen.

Speaker 1: 23:32

So there's nobody coming on the news to talk today about the 20,000 people that didn't die of heart disease because of medical advancement, or 10,000 kids who didn't starve to death because they have Access to to food, the thousand people who didn't die of hydrate, of dehydration, because they have access to clean water. So what we will hear about is All the bad things that happened during the night while you were sleeping and what you should do about them and how you should panic. And unfortunately we have. We have all of the, the negative influences. We have all of again the bad news, the tragic things that happened at our fingertips with our phones, with technology. So I don't think the world is necessarily a scarier place than it's ever been before. It's just we have, we're bombarded by that information in a way that we've never seen.

Speaker 1: 24:31

So the Stock market has always been volatile. The economy has always been unpredictable, completely unpredictable. There's always difficult things for folks to to overcome, and I think this time is no different. Do we face some unique challenges? Absolutely. Do we have some unique potential and ability and Processes that we've also never had access to? Absolutely so, while I do think, yeah, there's big challenges out there, there's also a huge opportunity.

Speaker 2: 25:02

How do you feel about the popular strategies of wealth creation like SMA, sma, e-commerce, a lot of the even only fans right flipping houses, affiliate marketing, a lot of the Modern-day wealth creations versus, you know, maybe outside of the S&P 500, maybe outside of mutual funds in the stock market, we're looking at more like traditional ways of, or not traditional ways on, more modern ways of investing and, you know, running businesses, whatever it might be. How do you feel about that stuff?

Speaker 1: 25:28

Well, I think it's. It's good to have a mix. So we really are strong proponents of what's always worked, rather than trying to figure out what might work best next. So there's really two different, two different Pathways there that might run parallel. So somebody might have a business owner that's on the, or something might be a business owner that's on the cutting edge of e-commerce or something, but this kind of goes back to this, this, the seven streets of income, right. So build that business up, but don't you, but don't rely solely on that business for your financial independence, whether it's real estate or mutual funds. You want to build around that so you can eventually step away from that business. And number one, it protects you from if something ever happens.

Speaker 1: 26:15

That business and I don't care how good of a business owner you are like nobody is bulletproof. We've all seen, like the blockbusters and the codex. I mean, when was the last time you checked your MySpace page? Right? So these things can blow up and be huge and you can have a very successful business, but then the industry shifts, you can't keep up and then you end up falling behind. So I think it's important once you get your business to a certain point and that's probably making at least six figures and maybe a million dollar valuation. Then you start spreading some things out a little bit. You start investing in other people's businesses through mutual funds or like real estate, other things that you mentioned.

Speaker 1: 26:57

But I think it's too easy to overlook the things that have always worked because they seem boring, like mutual funds have been around for a long time, but you know what, when treated properly, they've always worked. And that's the problem is people start misusing the tool. They try to time markets. They try to get in, they get out. That's not how the tool is designed. It's like somebody planting a tree and then digging it up every time that somebody on TV says bad weather is coming. No, you just got to leave it planted. Keep watering it, it'll grow. Just leave it alone, let us do its thing. Go run your business. That's the beauty of something like mutual funds is you don't get a call in the middle of the night. It says oh, the toilet's flooding or an employee didn't show up to work. Like somebody else deals with all that. You can go run your business while somebody else is running the companies that you own. So I do think that even for the entrepreneur, those things have their place. But I'll be honest for me personally, we weren't investing in other people's companies through mutual funds for the first seven or eight years of our business, because everything was going back into our business.

Speaker 1: 27:59

So you have to get enough momentum going, get the debts paid off, build up some distance between you and life, especially if you were in a newer industry. You're in an industry that has a lot of uncertainty, a lot of volatility, which is a lot of industries right now, not just newer ones, but the newer the industry is, the more of a pioneer you are. The more important is to eliminate debt and to have a nice cushion of cash so you can absorb the blows. They say the pioneers take the most arrows. That is definitely the case. So you have to be willing, as a pioneer, somebody who's trying something new and different to take the arrows. You're going to be the one making the mistakes that people coming behind you are going to learn from. Eliminating debt and having a nice chunk of cash to buffer, the blow is going to be really important.

Speaker 2: 28:51

Absolutely yes. What would you say is the best way to deal with failure along the way when running a business or investing, whatever it might be? I've learned that when it comes to money, you have to be so patient and, like you said earlier, delay instant gratification. And so could you expand a little bit more on that for our audience and just kind of remind them why that's so important?

Speaker 1: 29:14

Well, I think every decision we make is either serving the future versions of ourself or stealing from that person, and I think it's an important question to ask, especially in our business. Am I serving the future of my business or am I stealing from it? And a lot of times we make decisions in the present that steal from our future, and that's an important perspective to have Now, this idea of setbacks and failure, whatever you want to call them. I want to just share a couple of things on that. So we have to be optimistic as business owners. We would not have started our business, we would not have started our company. Whatever your company is or your business is, you would not have started it if you weren't optimistic.

Speaker 1: 29:56

But a lot of times we have this view of optimism that I think is unhealthy. It's this view that things get better all the time. That's not optimism, that's not life. That does not exist here on this planet. So a lot of people view optimism like this staircase, like every step brings you a little higher. And I would say a lot of people don't even want a staircase, they want an escalator. They just want to stand there while this thing takes them higher. They don't want to do the work. They just want to benefit from the trappings of somebody else's work. Life doesn't work that way.

Speaker 1: 30:26

I think business owners should look at optimism more like a mountain peak where you're going to have to cross some valleys. You're going to eventually get to this peak. You're going to eventually climb higher, but it's going to be a rocky road to get there. Sometimes you're going to step down into a valley before you can keep climbing. And I'm here in Alaska, so we have mountains all around us. You look at them, they're jagged, they're crooked. It isn't a nice, quick, easy step. There's a lot of ups and downs. Those downs bring you the walking through those valleys, walking through those crevasses in life. They bring you closer to your goal, but you have to step down in it before you can keep climbing. So when we look at setbacks or failures, however you want to call them, I think we should look at those things as experiments.

Speaker 1: 31:13

And again, I started my pathway in biochemistry. I have a degree in biochemistry. We did thousands of experiments. We always started an experiment with an idea of how we wanted this thing to turn out in the future, knowing that it probably wouldn't Now. We didn't go in there willy-nilly, just making stuff up. So I'm not saying you just go start a business, don't worry about planning it out, just fly off the seed of your pants and make it up. No, so we started our experiments with a lot of knowledge, a lot of insight, a lot of studying, a lot of planning, but we still knew there was a really good chance this thing would go sideways on us. And why we called it an experiment rather than a failure is because we went into the situation with a willingness to learn from it. So, even though we had an outcome we were hoping for, we were not married to the outcome. We were committed to the process, and that's what business owners need to do when they're trying something new, when they're executing a strategy Learn about it, plan it out, but don't be married to the outcome. Commit to the process and learn through the iterations.

Speaker 1: 32:19

There's a book, from Good to Great by Jim Collins and he talks about this idea of shooting musket balls before you shoot cannon balls. And the idea is you try little experiments, you try a small marketing strategy, you maybe hire somebody on a part-time basis rather than a six-figure salary, and you start small, a new product that you put out there. You don't put all of your money into it right at once. You get a beta version out there. You have the market, test it a little bit. You talk to your existing clients. Do they like it? What are they not like? What do they hate about it? Maybe they don't even want to use it.

Speaker 1: 32:58

And then, once you find something that hits, then you put more money into it. That's the cannon ball. So you already know your trajectory. You know your target, where you need to aim for, because you shot the musket balls. Then you shoot the cannon balls, and that's a process of experimentation. Experimentation means there's a lot of failure along the way. Some people are buried underneath their failure. Other people are standing on top of it. Every successful person has failure. They wouldn't be successful without it. But the biggest failure is the first time you fall down, staying down.

Speaker 2: 33:33

Absolutely, chad. It's been great. Unfortunately, I have to cut the interview short, but I'm actually working on a studio. I told Nick Hutchison the same thing our previous guest. We're going to have a great studio here and I can't wait to have you back. Definitely want to interview again. We'll go more in depth on a lot of this stuff and good luck in business, good luck in everything else. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 1: 33:51

Hey, it's my pleasure, Brandon. It's great to be here and to be able to talk to your audience.

Speaker 2: 33:55

Absolutely. God bless you, man. God bless you too.