TEA 77: Building Wealth & Playing The Infinite Game

Then he asked another question Did you see yourself doing that or did it just happen ? Like , did you see yourself investing in vacation properties Or do you see yourself getting to 100 ? Like , did that just happen Or did you always see yourself doing that and growing to that level ? And it was a really cool conversation because I got to .

I got to really share that . It wasn't just then . Like , some things happen in life , yes , but the reality is most things that I have at least observed in my experience don't just happen . You know , i had these visions 13 years ago .

I remember when my wife Kelsey and I have been together 13 years now And I remember when we first met , we would go on dates and we would go on drives and we would talk about life And we would talk about our goals and our visions , what that looked like .

And this is 13 years ago And I remember being on vacations with my family and then other times would be on vacation with her family And we'd be on beaches and in different places , and I remember walking those beaches every , every time we were ever at each home on vacation , and I would say I can't wait to we own 20 of these one day .

I just can't wait till this happens in the business that I just started And I started to envision the big picture , tried to understand like what do I want that to be ? like , what do I want to paint over the long haul ?

And , although while it may not end up 100% , how this picture I'm envisioning will look , if we can essentially build and outline what we generally desire and what we want our life to look like , then usually you'll land a lot closer to what that picture might look like . Then if you don't , so in this episode , i'm good , this is a selfish episode , all right .

This is something because that I want to talk about , because I'm so passionate about this , and I think that in the many conversations I have with a lot of entrepreneurs , like I , just I feel it's not talked about . I think that we don't really talk about the long , long play , like not just the .

What are we trying to acquire this year , how many millions in revenue we're trying to accomplish in the next 12 months and next month , and not now but like what is that big picture ? What does that really look like ?

And so I do want to say that when we talk about building wealth and I'm positioning as an entrepreneur , because we have a mechanism in a weapon that other people don't have And so , as an entrepreneur , these are my 11 years of finding .

So I just want to say I'm going to share a little bit of what my experience has been , because I have been through it all . Like many people listening to this , you've probably been through similar things . I remember my first business .

My first business business partner had some really major let's just call ethical Issues and stole from us , and our business died in less than 18 months . I started another business .

I then over hired a few years and I made a ton of bad financial decisions because we had an inflexic , inflexic cash , and so I got excited and then we ended up Over hiring and having to take out lines of credit , and we maxed out our lines of credits and our credit cards . I then moved across the country , started a third business on the side .

We had to close that down within a year . I started our fourth business on the side , had to close that within Three months because I couldn't do everything .

We then just lost almost everything that we had outside of our main Business and we had a dollar and six cents in our bank accounts , 25,000 dollars in lines of credit credit , not including the several thousand on high yield interest credit cards .

Then we changed business direction in our business , laid off half our staff and in the same year How , however , we were able we were creatively able to make this happen We bought our first investment property . Next year We crossed a hundred thousand dollars in cash position the bank . Next year We bought our commercial downtown building . We restored it .

We opened up what we call coffee space co-working . That's 90 to 95 percent occupied as a co-working space with collective 8,000 square feet . Then we bought our next investment property . We bought a residential property and we just recently bought our third vacation property .

In the all of that combined , as of last month And I tracked these , no , i tracked my wealth every single month has officially pushed our assets Just past the 1.7 million dollar mark , not including the valuation of our businesses , if we were to sell . Now I'm not saying all this to brag .

What I want to do is I want to show you like I've been through so much . I have been so diversified in my attention in starting Collectively four different businesses over a five , a ten year or an eleven year period of time . And there's another one that only lasted about a month I didn't mention but it would have made it six .

So I say this because I've been through so much of that , but in in spite of the suffering that we endured in those financial situations , in being so diversified , in business partners leaving and all of these Scary realities that we had to endure , we have prevailed .

We have prevailed through that and I know Maybe some of you listening right now You might say , josh , like 1.7 million , like I have whatever and you know what .

That's awesome And I'm sure one day you know I'm gonna be getting there and I want to share this for everyone that maybe Once some additional like perspective on how do we go build wealth as an entrepreneur , we we come in with Usually accomplished Trump , with the vision of accomplishing what I call the two goals of entrepreneurship .

The first goal is we want simply to to fall in love with the game . We want to fall in love with what we're doing . We often leave out of either desperation or painful experiences in the workplace and we're tired of it .

And we , instead , we want to have something that we can fall in love with fall in love with the building , fall Love with the breaking down , helping people , growing personally inside the business , growing the business itself .

And then the second goal is we usually start businesses to provide freedom freedom of our time , freedom to make choices when we want to make choices , freedom to Influence staff and in impact the world , freedom to have the finances and the money and the income and the wealth that we desire .

But a big part of all of that to make it all cohesive and actually work as entrepreneurs is financial . If we can't Manage our finances , we aren't gonna be able to make that .

We're not gonna be able to make it any longer , or only a certain point , until eventually it completely Implodes on itself and the challenge is , i think , that we , we , we get so caught up in the grind You know , we get caught up in the the grind of our business That we don't take a time to step back and say Where does this business fit in the big

picture , like if this is , if this is the the arena , or this is the player , this is the arena , what do I want the arena to look like with the players in it , and what do those players look like and what I want the crowd to Look like ?

and so if we kind of zoom out a little bit , it's gonna allow us to start to develop this big picture and that is what is required to build wealth . And and I think I think the reality is it's it's not our fault . I Just don't think that we were taught .

I remember in my junior year in high school , 11th grade , and We had a class called career seminar and it was an entire half-year class and At the time I'm 17 and I'm reading rich dad , poor dad , robert Kiyosaki , i'm like super into personal development and and Dave Ramsey , and like studying finance and building wealth And I'm like obsessed with this one .

I'm 17 years old and I remember being in this career seminar class and we're in this career seminar class and I was waiting for us to get to the module on budgeting , because I'm just a budgeting numbers nerd , and so I was like strictly using a budget since I was like 16 , working the job , and I'm like working on a budget , making decisions , and I'm just

waiting for it . And finally it gets to the week that was budget week , where we were gonna learn about budgeting as a bunch of 17 year olds , of which 82% didn't have jobs . So it's kind of funny there , but the thing was they didn't even teach it .

It was one day she talked for one class 40 minutes and never for the rest of the week did we do anything related to budgeting . We had one day we were taught how to manage our finances and do budgeting for one day . We never talked about entrepreneurship . We never talked about real estate . We never talked about building out assets and truly building wealth .

We never talked about eliminating and just annihilating unsecured bad debts . We never talked about . So like I don't fault people for not having this big picture , starting to think like that because we were never taught it And so we have to learn those things . I believe that's why we have these popcorn gurus that just kind of like blow up .

We all see them , they're probably in your industry , right , they blow up and they're the poster child of whatever , and then a year and a half later they end up imploding , and oftentimes it's because they're so short-sighted or they're so aggressive that they throw themselves in a bad position .

That's why some athletes can make $20 million over their working career , only to be broke within five years . But on the other hand , it's also why engineers can make $100,000 a year and end up with $20 million in net worth after their working years . And so there's a great saying that Robert Kiyosaki says . He says rich , and this always stuck with me .

Rich people buy assets . Poor people buy liabilities . So rich people buy assets things that produce income , things that appreciate And poor people buy liabilities things that are our expenses . They're nice to have , they're these fun things , and it's not that we , it's not that I believe we shouldn't have those . I have those , we all do , but to a fault .

When we start to have so many liabilities that we have no assets and all of our attention goes into just the next paycheck or the next payroll or the next buy or the next home improvement for all of us out there that have homes then we're gonna start to live like what we were at before we started the business .

You see , we get into business with all these big goals of what we wanna do , and the cool thing is , by doing that , you have taken that first step to that first asset . So all of this , i wanna get to three things here .

I don't wanna belabor this , but the thing is , most people , before we become entrepreneurs , we have jobs Just overbroke is what some people call it . We have jobs and then , as entrepreneurs , the cool thing is we have an asset .

If it's used right , your business can be an asset for a lot of things , but largely , in my opinion , it is for a mechanism to build wealth in other areas or to make it that the wealth building device . And you have tons of leverage in doing that . And so if we're not careful , then that business is not an asset .

It does not appreciate , it will not be able to be sold , and in reality , we're just working a job , but we have a ton of clients , a ton of customers , and we're not making much more , if more at all , than we would have been if we just worked a nine to five . And so what I wanna talk through is I wanna talk through three things .

These are three things that I believe are requirements for building wealth as an entrepreneur with that mechanism of your business that you can start to leverage for that wealth building compound effect . So first thing I think is required I believe we first need to dream bigger .

And if I asked you , if I asked you what's the big picture for your life , how would you paint that ? What would you say ? I know it's a very open question like what does the big picture actually look like ? Because we can't predict what's gonna happen in 42 and a half years or 21 and a half years or whatever that is .

But it's kind of scary because a lot of times I find in conversations when I start to ask like what's your big picture for life ? Like what do you want your life to look like ? The amount of nose and perplexed looks you'll get is pretty high .

I mean , if I were to put a stamp on like or a number on like , how many people actually know what they want , the general big picture of their life they want the big picture to look like ? it would be a small percentage of the amount of conversations I've had that people just simply don't know . And so what would you say ?

You know if you didn't , do you know what you want that entire picture to maybe look like ? so we at least have that direction . In my opinion , i think too many people just don't show big enough . It's really really small stuff , like I wanna have a business and I wanna help a lot of people Okay , great , that's so , that's cool .

But like , let's chunk up a little bit . How do we get a little bit bigger than that ? Okay , well , what do you want your family to look like ? What do you want your wealth to look like , your finances to look like ? How much do you want to give and be generous with every single year ?

Not that it's not good to focus on what we're building , but we need to dream bigger . Like challenges , have to say what is the big picture ? What do I think is just over that line of being possible that I'm like ah , that's not possible . Oh , having that second home on the beach in Barbados ? ah , it's not possible .

Having that Tesla that I really wanted the Model S is like $122,000 . Ah , it's just , it doesn't make sense . No one should have a car like that . Challenge yourself to say okay , well , how can it be possible ? How can I expand my mind to dream a little bit bigger outside of that ?

There's a great quote of scripture here in the Bible , and Luke is in 1428 to 30 , he says is there anyone here who , planning to build a new house , doesn't first sit down and figure out the cost so you'll know if you can complete it ? If you only get the foundation laid and then run out of money , you're gonna look pretty foolish .

Everyone passing by will poke fun at you , saying he started something he couldn't finish . Wow , how many people go into their businesses without a plan of how is this actually going to help me in the big picture ? How is am I gonna exit the business ? Do I wanna sell the business ? Do I wanna build in the business asset column ?

Do I want to go adjacent and just create big income so I can invest in real estate and invest in other things ? And how many people don't know that ? You know what if you run out of money ?

What if you start the foundation of your business but you're only ever focused on the day to day and you never really think of the big picture and what you want that to look like , that you run out of money .

And right now I believe we're all building that big picture , but whether we have a plan for it or not is up to us , and that motion is already in play . We're already painting the picture .

Wouldn't it be a great idea if we started penciling in what we think the rest of the picture should look like , regardless of how much we have remaining in that picture to still paint ? So that's the first thing . The first thing I believe we need to dream bigger . The second thing I think we need to get our house in order .

If your personal finances and you're managing a finances within your business isn't working , then start there , like you can't build wealth without the largest tool that you have at your disposal and that is your income . Because if we can have a big income , big incomes make big debts in debt and they acquire assets much , much faster .

And something that's always intrigued me and this is just , it's foreign to me , just because I'm just a numbers nerd .

I know not everybody is like that , to be fair here , but it has always intrigued me that when I talk to someone and I ask questions about , like their whether it's personal finance conversations or business finance I'm talking about P&Ls and balance sheets and I talk about some of these basic things and like , well , i don't know , i don't keep up on my books

at all or I'm just I'm too busy , i don't like talking about numbers . Like honestly , that's just my least favorite part of the business and I hear that so often in the realities like that's no excuse . Like , if you want to build wealth as an entrepreneur , you have to shift that mindset , because wealth is established in numbers .

At the end of the day , on paper , it is in numbers , and if you don't know how those numbers work and you don't know how they all came together , you're not gonna be able to get to large numbers . How many billionaires just got there and they don't know how to read a balance sheet ?

or they don't know how to budget , or they don't know how to read a P&L or a statement of cash flow ? Like those are things now . Those are things that I call getting your house in order . Like , we need to improve our skills . If you don't have the skills , go acquire them . If you're in business , read the book Profit First .

It'll change your life , change our life , help us get out a lot of debt and build a like really build a machine that is not eating all of our . It's not a monster cash eating machine And it's helped us get out of that . Go read Profit First . If you personally , if you , if you struggle with personal finance . Go read some day , rams and stuff .

He's a great start , really really warms you up to a ton of things like budgeting , eliminating death and building , eliminating debt and building wealth .

You know if you're not budgeting in your business , budget in your business , control your ad spend in your your your inventory planning and forecasting and making sure that you're not over leveraged on labor or in certain areas and make sure that you have profits that are being set aside for retained earnings , saving for that random day starting to stack cash within

the business . And , most importantly for all of us visionary entrepreneurs , don't go chase that shiny new business , because as you grow , you're always gonna have opportunities and they're only gonna come at you harder and they're only gonna be larger .

And so maintain the path , say , have that compounded focus within that , because if you wanna really build that wealth , you have to stay focused in that .

And another thing that I think is really probably one of the I love talking real estate , and so anytime I start talking with real estate , people start getting intrigued by it And I hear a lot of like hey , let me know when you're , when you're buying the next property , like I'd be really interested to go in with you And while some people yeah , i'd be like ,

hey , you'd be great to go in , we can buy some properties together , others , i just in the back of my mind . I think you're not ready yet . Like , if your business isn't thriving

and you're not stacking profits every month , you should not be going and trying to grow your net worth in these other areas When we can take all that focus and put it here and try to increase the success within that single area of your business .

Now , when we do these things , when we get our house in order , i believe that when we can get the house in order and grow a thriving business , then what's gonna happen is and you'll get to experience this really cool .

It's really cool like journey where flip switch , where you're living in a state of just kind of surviving and Then you start to get into this stage of thriving .

And when you start to , when you , when you get there , what what happens is you'll start noticing that that your cash is stacking faster , you're paying down debt faster and You're to the point of really being able to do damage .

And then , as you , as you start stacking cash inside your business , the question will become how do I start to utilize this cash And in that case we can go deep in our businesses . We can also go deep in the other assets , but the most important things , we're focusing in on these assets . The third thing is this so we get our house in order .

We , first of all , we dream bigger . Make sure we have this big picture . Like what do we want our , our actual lives to look like ? and then we get Our house in order . We can't go focus on building wealth if we're worried about trying to make payroll this week .

And then the third thing is I believe that if you really want to win , it is a requirement that you play the infinite game . You know , for me , the reason I told my friend like hey , 100 properties , that's just the warm-up is because I'm playing for the infinite game .

I'm not playing for today , i'm not just playing for tomorrow , i'm playing this for my life . And when you start to think from that perspective And you start to zoom out and you start to look 35 years ahead and you start to say , hey , i'm playing the infinite game now . While the game might look different in 35 years , i'm still playing it .

And when you can zoom out like that , it helps make the smaller Suffering moments , right now or right tomorrow , right this week , it starts to make them not as painful because we , we know I'm playing the infinite game .

I'm gonna get six punches to the face in a , in a , in a kick to the groin this week , but Next week I'm back , next week I'm on my feet and I'm gonna keep fighting .

And when you do that , when you stop becoming a Victim of every circumstance because you're playing the infinite game , then you're just gonna get up and you're gonna keep boxing , you're gonna keep fighting , you're gonna keep fighting forward and failing forward . In all of that .

There's a great story and I just read this yesterday , so I think this is a really perfect timing . There's a story of a girl named Julia Hill , and Julia lived in California and And one day she and some of her friends they were all , they were all tree activists .

They decided to go and occupy a 15 year old , a 1500 year old redwood tree named Luna , and they decided they were the , they're called a treeist And they and they would hoist people up and they put them in these trees so that that way , the , the Logging companies and the lumber companies were not able to chop down these , these going extinct redwood trees when

that , when 98% Had been eradicating there , a few left And so they would occupy these trees .

And so in December of 1997 , julia Hill , in the canopy , poise herself in the canopy of a 15 year old a redwood tree named Luna , and when she put herself there , her entire group was there for three weeks and After three weeks of being there , people started going down and as people started Lowering themselves from the trees , they had these little platform things .

You can go Google this , so they have these little platforms there that they were . They were living on basically for three weeks . People started going down after week one , week two , week three , week four . But Julia , after the third week , when the last person was going down , she climbed up .

And when she climbed up She ended up putting herself at the very top of the tree and building a spot there . And from December of 1997 to December of 1999 she occupied that tree for 738 days until it finally ended With an action and agreement from the Pacific Lumber Company to spare that tree and add a 200 foot buffer zone surrounding the tree .

And Julia was 23 years old . I When I want to hear this , whether or not you think it might be a little silly to go set in a tree for over two years to say To save a redwood , i'm . Her tenacity and her fortitude to play the infinite game is what caused her to win . She said I'm staying up here until this happens . I'm not in it just for a week .

I might see I'm coming for a week and then get out . That's not me . I'm in this

for the infinite game . It's adopting that , that mindset of if you want to build true and tremendous wealth , you have to have the attitude and the mindset and the perspective of I will not lose .

There's a saying that the coffees Kelsey and I I don't know about the rest of the coffees , maybe they say this , but Kelsey and I have developed this saying and things that we will tell each other .

When we are in and when we've been Backed against the corner , when we , when we've been in the worst First situations we ever could have imagined , when we're , when we're broke as can be and we're traveling And we don't have enough money to go do this , when we're in those moments we have a say You know , if the coffees are , if life has cornered the coffees

and there's nowhere behind us that we can go , and the only way is through , we fight . And so if you're in a season of life and in your business right now that you feel like that , play the infinite game , adopt the mindset of I will not lose , i will fight . The only way is through . I'm not going through this brick wall behind me .

I've set my limitations . I have decided I'm playing the infinite game . So it doesn't matter how hard you push me against this wall , i will push back a little bit harder and a little bit harder and a little bit harder , because I'm not playing this for today . I'm not gonna cower because of today . I'm going to push forward .

This podcast is number 70 something , but I'm 10 times better than I was when I did number one , when I we launched the first 10 episodes and we had less than 100 total downloads , and that was over 10 weeks , two and a half months , in less than 100 downloads of this podcast . We've done 70 something now . In every podcast we do , i become better .

I become a better communicator , a better interviewer . Some of the first ones were not very good . It was painful And there are moments when I'm like this is so much work . But I know that the long game is not ending today . I know that it's not episode 70 that I'm stopping .

I know that I'm gonna continue doing this as long as I need to , as long as it is in alignment with what I believe that big picture looks like . You know , if you wanna build a real estate empire , don't stop after two properties and one of the properties isn't doing so hot .

That's not playing the infinite game , that's playing the short game , and you have to exercise in doing this . The biggest thing is this delayed gratification . Stop saying yes to all the nice things today . Like it's so easy . I remember when we got our first office , i just wanted to fill it with literally everything . So I did .

I used all of our money , all of our cash , even took out some credit card stuff , and I decided to pay that off before the interest kicked in , right to buy furniture and buy glass desks and buy all these things that , at the end of the day , really aren't what produced profit inside our business , to create that lever that we can pool to really build wealth .

I'll end with this On the journey of building wealth , what I've observed is it can begin to feel lonely , which is why I think it's so valuable to surround yourself with like-minded people , people who celebrate your wealth , who celebrate your successes , who celebrate your hard work and see the hard work for what it is and what it took to get there .

Because so many just see so many people in your circle right now , in my circle right now , we see the before and they see the after , but they don't see that mundane , anxiety inducing , scary middle filled with heartache winds fails in loads of pain . We've experienced this in our journey . As you start to grow , the challenges it becomes well .

It's hard to connect with people . You know when you wanna talk about what you love and you wanna talk about what you're passionate about , it's just when it starts to get out of the realm of what other people believe are possible .

It's hard to connect on things outside of just general pleasantries And so understand , on this journey , you still love people , even though you might not have as much in common or you might not intentionally spend as much time with them . So my question to you is this in this , what is your big picture ? Do you know what that looks like ?

Have you vividly drawn out what do I want my wealth to look like , the general direction I wanna be going ? so I can actually paint that , because if you don't know , then take time to know . This episode was produced by Dylan Counts . If you would

leave us a rating on the Econversality Podcast , whatever platform you're on , we would be so grateful .

And if you wanna join a group of like-minded people Econvers owners who are experiencing similar things as you , who are in a similar growth journey as you before or after where you're at , then go to alleypodcastcom slash group , join the free group , and we'll see you in the next episode . I'll see you then .