Master Mindset Shifts for Life-Changing Success w/ Darius Ross

you have to adapt to a mindset that now you become a gorilla. Actually, like you're in the middle of a warfare position and everything from personal life to your friends, your families, everything changes because you are dedicated and committed to everything about your quest and your business becomes your lover if you want to call it that and no matter how you look at it, you either have to make it a go of it or not. Sometimes even the employees are going to be pissed.

Sometimes the wife is not going to be happy. Sometimes the girlfriend, sometimes the kids. So you have to position yourself to be prepared to deal with any and everything. So just like a guerrilla warfare, you just never know what's going to happen. Welcome to Super Entrepreneur's Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us Darius Ross. Darius is a pro arbitrager, business consultant, and motivational

speaker with 30 plus years of entrepreneurial experience behind him. He has also authored the upcoming book Dealing with the Entrepreneurial Mindset. Welcome to our show, my friend. It's a pleasure to be as I eat. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. No problem. So this book that you're about to launch, can you share some key mindset shifts that entrepreneurs should be adopting?

I actually dive off into situations where you have to adapt to a mindset that now you become a gorilla. Actually, like you're in the middle of a warfare position and everything from personal life to your friends, your families, everything changes because you are dedicated and committed to everything about your quest and your business becomes your lover if you want to call it that. And no matter how you look at it, you either have to make it a go of it or not.

Sometimes even the employees are going to be pissed. Sometimes the wife is not going to be happy. Sometimes the girlfriend, sometimes the kids. So you have to position yourself to be prepared to deal with everything. Any and everything. So just like a guerrilla warfare, you just never know what's going to happen. So you have to be positioned. So the three key things that the book is going to cover is dealing with the worst things, dealing with the best things.

And most importantly, speaking, being prepared for everything. Can you give us some tips to deal with Situations that may go against that journey, being able to actually take a moment and exhale and saving yourself the following. I guess I do 40 key things. 1, you have to be able to accept lack of acceleration. The business is going sideways and it's okay, why am I not hitting the mark? Why am I not hitting the mark? And you can't blame yourself. It might be conditions that you're not aware of.

It might be the personnel or whatever else you have to deep dive. Second thing as it is being able to understand that economically speaking. Not every business is going to succeed. So you have to be able to say, okay, at some point in time, maybe this is not for me. Okay. Your nine to five is the best thing because you're not solely heart into it. And the heart has to be into it. Truly. You have to be committed to what you're going to do.

The third thing of it is being able to appreciate the fact that you now have decided to take a journey. That nobody, like a parent, has any previous experience and there's no road manuals to the exact way to get to the destination. And the other thing of it is, sometimes you have to say to yourself that, mentally speaking, can you really be committed to this mentally?

Because it's going to be taxing, it's going to be frustrating, and most importantly speaking, it's going to take you down journeys that you never could have imagined. You're going to go down pathways that are just going to just go all over the place. And you had to be ready to like, whitewater rafting, ride the rapids. And any advice to individuals where, going on this quest initially may be hard on them financially, or just to get to that position where they can start

Having a good amount of cash flow in their life and business and for their family, that stress initially comes down on the family and they may tend not to support some entrepreneurs, any advice for an individual that may be in that type of situation the number one thing I say is all hands on deck from the littlest ones to the biggest ones. Everybody has to be committed financially to say that they're gonna make the sacrifice.

In my own personal example, the whole house is filled full of food for the whole year. We had food that was stale dating because I was like, you know what, we're going to be able to eat it for nothing else. And everything else stopped. So everybody had to be committed to it. And some folks that I was dealing with weren't committed either. But it was like, okay, I'm the breadwinner. I'm the one that makes the decision, so you have no other choice.

Line of it is, sometimes you have to put it down people's throats. And say, listen, it's all hands on. From the baby, the dad, before it was baby food. Now it's gonna be watered down baby food. Because it is what it is. If you think this is gonna work and you're committed to it, Sometimes everybody's gonna have a little bit of a problem, even the grandparents, your mother, father, whatever else. The wife is going to sit there and say, are you insane?

Yes. Yeah. So I say it's all hands on deck, everyone has the, has an opinion, but you have to make sure everybody's opinion counts, but you have to be very clear about, you're all going to make sacrifices because the common good is for the common goal. What do they say? The ends justify the means. Sometimes it's just, yeah, there's a bigger mission. Exactly. As an experienced arbitrager, what are some strategies that you use to go beyond

typically an arbitrager may deal with? And if you can share some pointers for entrepreneurs, how they can also use some techniques in their market, the two key things that I see is research. I get an average of a thousand magazines a week from every possible thing that affects my industry, things that even affect my industries, because I'm getting all the data, all the information. So it's like my subscription list of magazines is off the chain.

The mailman comes to the door and he's Oh, I got more of it. He's got a bag full of stuff because you've got to read. You've got to know what's going on. You need to stay in constant contact with the market, constant contact with reporters in constant contact with. Everything that affects your market from the logistics to the distribution to and including the storages to everything that's going on as well as the customers.

So you want to be on the upside of knowing what's going on and everything. The second point that is that being in a position where you're not afraid to actually look and see what's going on with your competition. Because one of the examples I use with Sears and Amazon had a chance to be in a situation where it would have been extinct. But what Sears thought was. I'm the biggest guy on the block, no problem. Sears could have bought Amazon, but they didn't think like that.

They figured, okay, our infrastructure is already in place, eh, what's Jeff Bezos gonna do? He's an upstart, no. Never count the upstart out. The guy can be next time eating your dinner. Same thing with Home Depot and True Value. Home Depot would have been nothing. But the fact of the matter of it is these guys are smarter and again, true value thought it had the market. No, never discount the market. Always look around and see what your competition's up to.

Sometimes they're up to things that you can't even imagine because you're not looking in deep diving and saying, I'm the dinosaur. Just the word dinosaur, ancient, dead, be aware of that, stay on top of everything that's going on with the information. Excellent. Now for business valuation, it's obviously very important for, emerging companies, any principles that entrepreneurs should understand when

it comes to valuing their business. Do not look at your business as simply your business. Look at your business as a clock in the wheel of a complete pipe chain. For example, let's say you are, we'll use the example of say a hardware store and you're looking around, you're looking at, okay, I provide the most important ingredients in this community. And so far your market value may be at the top of everything.

But the one problem you're not looking at it is that somebody out there is selling your same products. On another secondary market that you don't know of. So you have to be open to being exposed to say, okay, my market valuation might be wonderful in this community, but am I priced in such a way? Whereas, unfortunately speaking around the community, there's disgruntleism and people are saying, okay, I'm overpriced. And this is one of the things that entrepreneurs do.

They get so comfortable in their market evaluation saying that their business is doing so well. They don't think about an upstarts coming along the way. So you have to be smart enough to realize. That you might have a good market and your values might be good and you might be able to sell for top of the dollar, but you also have to be smart enough to realize that sometimes you're over evaluating the situation you've priced your products. You've priced your market so high that there's no room.

So you always want to maintain room for competition. Nothing wrong with competition. That'll keep you on your toes. So the bottom line of it is be wise enough and aware enough to understand that you need never to be at the top because it's always hard to stay at the top. Somebody is always chopping away at your feet. So keep your market evaluations in line. Make sure that from a financial perspective, you always have room to grow.

So when it comes to researching the market, any tips on how entrepreneurs can go about finding this information?

Again, one of the things that I use is like I said, the media one of the good things, in case in point where there's always some of the bad media, the not so good media information is readily available. For example, when you look at the various tabloids of various newspapers in your markets, right? Get a list of all of them, see what's going on, get to know the reporters. The information is readily available with the reporters, because this is what the job is research.

So get to know the reporters that are reporting on your market, the freelancers and so forth. Become friendly with them, get wise of what they're going on. They readily have all the information at their disposal.

For example, who's a top company in your market, who are the middle market entities, what's going on in your particular market, who has the market, segment, who has the largest shares who are the key points of interest, who are the key leaders, who are the not so key leaders, who are the middle market managers.

Get to know those reporters, get all those information on those magazines, know what magazines are hard hitting your market, because those reporters find out who's actually selling, who's actually moving things before you even know about it, because they have the inside track. A lot of times, owners will trust them or the. Managers will trust them with information. They won't even trust their own owners with, so you need to know what they know as they know her. That's good.

How did you first get into business initially? I'm just curious. I was an intern back in 1983 at a bank called first Chicago, which ultimately came bank one, which ultimately came chase.

So in that time period. I learned from internship. I started out in correct, rational relations, public relations, as they call it, or government relations. So the big thing about that was I was researching, always spending time in the bank's library. I was always spending time with the researchers there and the reporters to make sure that my principles there, that were my bosses were vice presidents of government relations.

They were spending time with all the government entities in Springfield at the time, Illinois and DC. So all the information was always with the reporters. So I spent my time with these reporters talking and so forth, and I found out so much stuff that they knew. So I started realizing, hey, this is the pipeline information. You don't have to do anything. For example, when the whole thing broke with Watergate, it was the reporters that broke it. It wasn't the fact that the government came out.

It was reporters. So this is what always happens. The news is driven by the reporters. Who are actually friends with, and these whistleblowers and that kind of thing, it's all media. So you utilize the media to your advantage. I'm all pro media because these are the guys that make and break your decisions.

But the media would only be focused on, the larger businesses, not for the small business, not necessarily keep in mind your regional medias are also available your local newspapers again The local paper is the same thing Somebody at that local newspaper knows exactly what's going on in your neighborhood in your city in your town point The information is still there. You've got the local we call them the busybody, right? It's a local guy. That's the end of the newspaper.

Guess who he's friends with everybody else in town He's friends with the guy, the chamber of commerce was the chamber of commerce knows before anything goes under, he knows where it goes under the upside of when something happens. Keep your eye on the reporters and the local people. They know what's going on. So you must have contacts throughout every state then? Absolutely. All the way down to, I'll give you an example, all the way down to the concierges at the hotels.

If you really want to find some information out, make friends with them too. Because again, they know who's coming in for meetings. They know who's going where. Never forget the support staff because even the chief officers, The chief officer has an administrative assistant.

You might say, okay, the administrative assistant is useless, but she knows everything from what he takes for his medication to what his wife needs for her gift, these gatekeepers are the gatekeepers to information and secrets. This is who you need to know. Make friends with them, connect with them, do not treat them as just service people. Anyone in the audience should be focused on just making you a friend and then they have all these contacts. It's appreciated. It's worthwhile.

You have to know what's going on. The key information, trust me, that's the key, when you even look at the political side of things, one of the first things that happens in politics, right? A secret comes out, right? Now, it was being kept quiet. Everybody knew until the right person got their hands on it and it got exposed. So it's not the fact that it wasn't known, it's the fact that the right person didn't get their hands on it.

Every great politician has been brought down by a media fact and so forth. That's it business the same way. Yeah. What's the first thing? Good point stuff. A business goes through the process of oops, PR people. What do you need to PR people for? If the media is not important, it's damage control. Before you control the damage, get the information and you don't have to control the damage.

Because of this information, it must have helped you in the real estate market because that's one of your expertise as well, can you speak about that?

And then also if there's any unconventional investment opportunities in today's marketplace that, fellow entrepreneurs, investors could capitalize on. The number one thing that I'm seeing now is what I've been saying and looking at the data is what I've been saying is probably for the last five or six years plus the real estate market and the stock market is going to take a bit of a tailspin between now and after the election.

Right now we're looking at, president Trump is going to ultimately be the new president by my, so we're looking at the markets, potentially speaking, crashing by, I believe by 50 to 75%. So we're looking at the markets returning to where they were back in say, 2006, 2007, seven, 8, 000 points. That's a lot of carnage. 26, 000 points. Now that's a lot of carnage. The real estate market, the same thing. It's going to be real estate on sale, not for sale.

You're starting to see it in the commercial markets. Now they're starting to take and crack. You're starting to see the keys given back by even the big guys, Blackstone, Blackrock, all these major companies giving back the keys, shopping center malls, you go down second Avenue in New York city, you go down third Avenue, you go down Lexington empty. What is that saying? Now, some of these owners can afford to sit on it, but some of them can't. They're turning back.

The banks are going to take a major hit. I'm predicting now a thousand banks. Just in the U S will disappear. So there are 4, 000 banks right now. That list is going to be down to a thousand. And turn of the century of the new decade, I suspect we're going to be down to about 500 banks. So I'm throwing the prediction out there. Now, entrepreneurs are people that have cash sitting on the sidelines right now.

There's over 20 trillion of powder sitting on the sidelines from sovereign wealth funds to private equity groups and so forth, it's sitting there because they realize the day of reckoning is coming. And I'm saying 2025 will be the day of reckoning. There will be four or five years of real estate. And if you're looking to get into the real estate market, focus on multifamily. People are never going to be able to buy houses again in this lifetime.

The alpha generation, say 2010 and 2020, that's going to be the new generation. 2 billion of them. There'll be the new movers and shakers in 2040, but the market's not going to return before 2020. 40, 20, 45, and at that point in time, Bitcoin will be off the chain and probably about 100, 000. The market will probably surge to maybe 125 and 125, 000 points. So that gives you an idea. But right now we're going to be the clean out system. To use that word, the swamp, this is not the swamp.

The market is going to be cleaned out. Finally you're going to get all this debt out of the way. The United States is almost 50 trillion in debt. What does that tell you? Credit card debt, 12 trillion. The numbers speak for themselves. We're in an unsustainable place where the real estate, the financial markets, stock bonds, securities are unsustainable. Even now I'm betting on catastrophe bonds. We're someplace we've never been before and it can't sustain itself.

Come across multifamily deals right now or what is your system for the next five years to get your hands involved with owning multifamily? Properties being able to look at secondary markets, you're looking at maybe the Akron Ohios, the Pittsburgh's, the smaller cities, Peoria, Illinois, you want to look at the smaller cities. I've got a book that I've done that talks again.

Very profit, yes, Michigan, correct, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois the Midwest down south, all these markets where people are heading to, because most of the major cities, they can't afford to stay. Okay. Real estate market has gotten so off the chain. You can't stay there. The average rent now, because New York investors are now heading to other markets, it's 4, 000. A one bedroom, how do you sustain a one bedroom, 4, 000 in Walmart in Michigan, you can't. So this is what's going to happen.

You're going to have the real estate market full of multifamily with 10 and 12 people in the apartment. They're going to be sharing by force, not by choice, but this is what's going to be happening. Nobody's going to be sitting outside of the closures. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I would predict probably in the multifamily market, you're looking at probably two or three million buildings and the residential market, 40 million houses I'm figuring are going to be auctioned off or returned back to the bank. So much so we're going to go back to the resolution trust of the 1980s and if folks remember what the resolution trust was, there were millions of properties that were given away because That was it. Same thing in the commercial side.

Resolution trusted people to look it up. They'll see how bad this was. And we're going back to that time period when the whole S& L industry disappeared. The banking industry is going to be revolutionized. It's going to be cannibalized. So do you see gold as being a currency, gold or silver instead of the dollar? I am throwing out there that the bricks is going to be the new position of currency.

The U S dollar is no longer going to be the leading dollar. Governments now are going to start trading a bundle. And having said that the U S dollar now is going to be jeopardized. Now, the problem with that is investors that don't understand that are going to be like how can they do? The Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians have all started capitalizing on gold and the Indians. Yeah, that's right. That's right. The United States no longer has anything backing up the dollar.

Nixon knocked that out in 72. So now the money is inflated. So for every 1 we print, we make 1, 000, but you can't sustain that. These governments have respectively speaking, done what they need to do. And interestingly speaking, when you mentioned India, the Indians have been so smart. As a strategy between the Indians and the Nigerians, those are going to be the next developing markets.

There's 2 billion plus Indian communities, brilliant scientists, brilliant medicine, brilliant manufacturing. They're creating with the Tata group. They're creating all these new things. The Nigerians. They're coming back on the sidelines, like the Chinese. So these two populations will be the next global powers, superpowers. Let me say it that way. So anybody interested in wanting to pursue head to Nigeria, can you share?

Or wherever you are, can you continue to, or start investing in the bricks? I have, and I absolutely recommend everybody to do it from Brazil, Russia, India, China, Pakistan. These areas are great. Completely on fire when it comes to economics. South America, Central America, these countries are going to be changing because just like China did when Nixon came there, these countries now have brilliant people just because they use this term immigration, right?

That's a wonderful thing to be said, but guess what? If they're not coming to America and you stay in your own country, you're going to develop your own country. So Americans are going to miss out on this wonderful opportunity of this whole new industrial and technology and information revolution. I'm an Indian scientist. You say I can't get here and get a permit or I can't get a visa. Oh I built up India. Now here you have India as a superpower.

You say the same thing in Brazil, you say the same thing in Russia, you say the same thing in Nigeria. Guess what? Before you know it, I'm eating your lunch. It's another one of those Amazon Sears things. These countries then begin buying companies in the United States. So as much as you want to say you want to put up this tariff thing and all these wonderful things, you can't do it if you're now cash resistant. Because these countries will end up buying your companies. So get on board, folks.

Yeah, get on board. Appreciate you, man. It was so great to talk to you. I can hear the knowledge and the experience. The passion in what you do. This one question came to mind before we end this episode today is that in the last 30 years in your experience, can you share a surprising lesson that you've learned?

That you have learned that influenced the success throughout your career. Never underestimate any situation that you encounter. The good example of that is when you're looking at globally speaking, right? If I were to look back global and say that, because here's example, when I went and visited Shanghai in 1990, it's not the same thing now. So who would have thought those rice patties will become modern towers. So the point of it is never underestimate.

Anything that you encounter, that's the key. The same thing with India, Mumbai now in new Delhi, whole nother world now. So I say to folks, never underestimate anything, go and visit and experience different cultures. Never underestimate these cultures and how they think learn the language. There's another thing that I hate it. I didn't learn the languages as fast as I should have. Now I've got all these translating devices and so forth. Understand the cultures and the languages.

Just because they're a little different does not mean that you underestimate them as stupid because they're far from that. So that's the one thing. Never underestimate your adversary and or your opponent. That's right. That's wonderful, Darius. Thank you so much for coming on our show, sharing your wisdom. Appreciate you. Looking forward to what else you're doing in the book when it comes out. When it does come out, just send us an email and we can update the show notes for the episode.

So people can know where to find it. Definitely. I appreciate it. so much. Definitely a pleasure