#136 - The 7 Stages of Entrepreneurship with Preston Brown

In this episode of the Morning Upgrade podcast I talk with Preston Brown about his morning routine, healing wounds, the 7 stages of entrepreneurship, love as the meaning of life and more.

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Announcer  

Hey, welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan cote, where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan 

Hey Preston, welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast. How's it going?

Preston  

Amazing, Ryan, thanks for having me, brother. Yeah, I'm

Ryan  

excited to talk to you. We've had a good conversation pre-record. So let's keep it going. Why don't you tell my audience of morning upgraders who you are, what you do for a living, and then something you're grateful for right now?

Preston  

Oh, gosh, Christmas and New Year's got to spend time with family. I'm grateful for the family brother. I'm grateful to have a life that affords me time and energy and the ability to spend time with my foreign six-year-old kid and my beautiful wife. And you want your morning routine to

Ryan  

what do you do? Give everyone a sneak peek into what you do for a living. Sure, yeah,

Preston   

I specialize. I'm I guess I'm an economist by trade. And I specialize in automating scaling companies, and now setting up investments. And I'm broken into the coaching world just last year. So I get to work with a lot of young entrepreneurs as well. But most of my businesses, grab disorganized, disenfranchised organizations and reorganize them.

Ryan   

What made you get into the coaching business? I noticed that a lot of men and women who become successful in business, they eventually get into some sort of coaching, is it living back? Is it something else? When you're in through your lens? Why? Why did you get into coaching, too,

Preston  

I wanted something to do that fulfilled me. Anytime that somebody turns a wound of their own into a field, you can help other people and I had several businesses. I mean, most people don't have a business. It's like having a child, right? And if you have a kid, you know, start having some success with that kid. And maybe you start here and there. The last thing you should do is go have another kid Don't be a shitty father and have like, six more kids to make it better, right? Well, I became that guy was seven businesses. And I was a crap parent to all of them. And I had different partnerships, different this different that and I built this formula, eventually mastered it over the years where I was automating them and getting myself out of this and starting to get time with my family again. And it was cool. It was fulfilling. So I bought this like distressed homebuilding company, and in a few years turned it from something that was losing money, they paid me to take it, it was that bad to something that was cranking out. I think this last year, we made 9 million net on it. And so it's a very healthy business at four years old. And I got bored, I got bored. I was like, wow, that was easy. And if you go to any insurance company worth their salt, they say, hey, when a man retires, that's two years from being dead. And so we need a purpose. And so I got into coaching, and I started playing on social media and started helping other people that had gone through what I've gone through, because I'm 40 years old, I'm not the 60 7080-year-old guy that's ready to go hit the rocking chair and push up daisies.

Ryan  

You still have the home remodeling business, just running it in parallel to the coaching.

Preston  

Oh, gotcha. I have 18 automated companies right now.

Ryan  

And had to learn how to do all that, like 18 companies automating it, did you learn from someone or is it was a mentorship or just an experience?

Preston  

I have to say both. I mean, look, I had some of the greatest mentors, I think on the planet, like bar none, and still have them. But at the same time, like there's no substitute for experience. Repetition is the mother of all excellence. So you have to continue, rinse and repeat every time that you get the data to show you right or wrong. Wrong is a great lesson and you got feedback, you learn something right, hey, let's repeat this over and over again. And so the experience coupled with the mentorship and the courage to take action, I built a formula. And it's a really simple formula. And anyone can have it like anybody that wants to formula, I've got a couple of documents, and go to my website, and I'll send them everything on that. And that'll save us a lot of time and spending the next hour or two going over that.

Ryan 

All right, well, yeah, well, definitely. Well, in it the end, we'll wrap up with, you know, sharing your website where they can get that. And I know we want to talk about the seven stages of entrepreneurship. Before we go that route. Let's talk about your morning. I know you don't have a morning routine because your schedule is very much in flux since you have more of a daily routine. Walk us through that. What are your what is your routine look

Preston  

like? My routine is built around what I call the four corners of the human experience, faith, family fitness, and finance. And a great way to use this analogy is if you hold up your hand, kind of tucking your thumb and you look at four fingers on your hand. Each finger is not the same as the other, but they're all tethered to one another. And if progress equals happiness, and you elevate that hand kind of lifting it up and up and up. Each of these things went up together even though they weren't the same thing. They were tethered by the hand. Well, a lot of times in life we get anchored somewhere we might get anchored in faith or self-confidence or family in our current relationships, fitness, our health, our energy like I don't care how much money you're making in finance, you got stage four cancer, you're not thinking about the money. And so the anchor in one becomes that point that you need to solve the problem for to elevate all of the others and the one that you're correcting. And so I go through and I do a morning routine or a daily routine basically where which every area of the world I'm in at that moment whether I'm in the Maldives or Armin rode also, New Mexico or El Paso tech CES, I sit there and I just a little meditation kind of go through the State family fitness finance and about an hour a day man. And you know you're doing some work and out doing some reading, doing some just plugging in. And you find where your weakest and you solve that problem and then whatever problem you find whatever is the largest problem in those four areas, solve that one. Beach frogs, early each frog often you don't do that they breed and then you have a lot more of them.

Ryan  

You're sharing your routine is spending an hour in those four areas family, family finance, fitness, and was the fourth one, faith,

Preston  

family fitness finance, Faith can be best described as a certainty in the way you show up, it's not necessarily a religious thing. It's how much you believe. I mean, if you look at the word belief, be as being and leave as love. So we love, like, like, are your beliefs healthy or negative? You know, and then family, it's your relationships, whether it's your wife, your kids, your friends, or peers people you don't even know yet. How are you looking at people? How are you judging? How are you blaming? I look at blame as an acronym, being lazy and making excuses. I mean, when you look at somebody, you put judgment on him, you don't know, man, you got a problem with the way you handle your family stuff. Then there's fitness fitnesses You know, I'm 40 years old, I got more ABS on me now than I had when I had a beer gun at 20. You know, like, I want to keep myself in shape. So like that our I'm doing something I'm moving like I've got like, either free weights or whatever. And then faith family fitness finance, like on the finance side. I might be like reading a book like looking at some mentor. That's no longer here. You can go read about John D. Rockefeller. You can read about Steve Jobs, and you can read about what made these men Great. Go find somebody you admire and learn about them. And whether you just contemplate what you need to do to solve problems or whether you go research something that can better you it doesn't matter. You hit all four cores in an hour.

Ryan 

I've never been I've always been this driven man. I know. I know what it was. Was there a catalyst that changed everything for you? I know you're I know your life changed when your dad passed away in 2018. But from what I understand you were driven way before then. So was it born into you? Was there something that happened that you just go to like a light bulb turning on anything come to mind?

Preston 

Yeah. Oh, it was Dad. My dad decided when I was seven years old, he was going to go and he was going to do the American Dream thing open a business and he was a genius man, a member of Mensa. He was six foot four big guy like tough, brilliant, awesome. He was a star football player. And he opened his business and worked countless hours and this little shed next door trailer and Paksas and didn't know what to build and how to collect and how to charge. And one day I got to be the charity piece when that fight happened and fights never happen in my house. But you know, you don't get paid. You don't collect you don't charge. Eventually, money gets scarce. If you're already living in a trailer. They're in a lot of savings. Right? And so yeah, Mom got mad. The cast iron frying pan flies across the room and I don't remember all the words, but I do remember saying this. A real man can feed his family, collect what you're owed, or don't come home. And I wrote up to this man's house this little pipsqueak man, my dad could have killed them with a napkin. I knew what was going to happen when he walked up and I knew he was gonna demand what we were owed. We're gonna collect our money we're gonna go get the groceries gonna go. Demanding went to asking went to begging and groveling, groveling went to compromise, and when you compromise your company promise, I watched my hero give up on his dreams of financial success and freedom, o that he can stay my mother's husband and stay my father. And I watched that sacrifice and I didn't care. IAtthat moment. If I had to be hated, feared, or loved. I knew I'd never compromise.

Ryan  

That's a powerful story. All right. Well, I want to talk about the seven stages of entrepreneurship that were a 15-20 minute show this does. So this might be the last question. But we'll see. We'll see how quickly we make it through the seven stages. I have a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs who listen to this podcast. So I want to get this information in their hands or their earbuds I should say. So why don't you take us through that? You know, what are the seven stages of entrepreneurship?

Preston   

Oh, this is so critical. Yeah. Okay. Some stages of entrepreneurship. Okay. And he premises for this, I think it helps anyone who uses it. So you want an extra million to $10 million a year, please pay attention to this and take notes, is you have to know what stage read most entrepreneurs are doing the right thing. They're just doing the right thing at the wrong stage, which is the right thing at the wrong stage is the wrong thing. Right. So your first stage is a non starter. There's a person with a mindset issue. And a mindset issue. They call it a mindset because you said no to everything. You set your watch, right? You have to go out you have to figure out what's holding you back emotionally as a faith, family fitness, finance, holding you back. What's crippling your mindset. that's stage one. Once you overcome mindset, the next area of behavior and entrepreneurship is the startup business. And you know, if you're in another, you can't do startup things. If you're a startup, you can't do the next level or the next level. The startup has to go out and customize everything. They have to find out who their customer is. Then in that stage where your revenue is somewhere between 100 grand a year and 3 million a year. You're figuring out who I serve? What do I need to do to serve them? How do I become the best in my industry and you have to become a credibly exceptional. And the problem with being exceptional is if the engine in your car made an exception, well guess what you'd never make the grocery store. That's a very optimized machine you have in the vehicle. And so to get past startup, you need to become very exceptional, and find out who are your target customers. And then rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, which gets you to the next stage, which is an operational entrepreneur. Now, operational entrepreneurs, these are the guys, they have a very different problem that they need to solve. They've gone through startup, they found the right customers, and they got rewarded by finding the right customers. So now they kept finding more customers, more customers, and they kept being exceptional. And we need to get them out of being exceptional, which was what rewarded them in startup and into optimization, we need to actually shrink them a little bit from the number of customers they have, and get them into, hey, you have these 234 target customers that you know exactly how to meet their needs. We're going to optimize your machine, and we're gonna get you rolling, operational entrepreneur, optimize this. Next week, get into the stage of entrepreneur, now everyone says the word entrepreneur, but they don't know what it means. entrepreneur means you're free. That means you've got a business that runs itself, you've gone out because of the optimizations you were doing, and the operational entrepreneur to shrink and regrow with the right customer, you now have gone and in the entrepreneur phase, you've added a team, it's no longer a spectator sport, it's no longer just you, you brought in, you know, maybe a secretary, maybe a salesman, maybe this that the other, you've got a team and your business is running itself. But the problem is generally the same revenue, generally the same income, but you have a lot of expenses, because your software and all your team, those things cost money. So operational entrepreneur to entrepreneur, he got the same revenue, but you took a pay cut, because now you have new costs. So you need to learn to scale, okay? And everybody tries to scale everything at once. And they fail. I mean, if you want to scale your brand, okay, scaling your brand, will scale your pricing. That's great. One leads to the other. But if you're in the operational entrepreneur going to entrepreneur, you probably don't need to scale your brand it you just need to scale sales, because you've increased capacity by increasing all the people on your team. It's no longer a spectator sport. It's not a team sport. So let's just scale sales. So you increase sales, then now you have money, you have revenue coming in. Now you increase brand. Now you increase pricing, that is increased margins, then you go back to Okay, well, let's scale it. So it's this kind of cycle of scaling. What do I scale now to get to the next scale point, after you've gone through entrepreneur, and you've learned scaling, you've become what's called an operationalmechanic. Because you've scaled, scaled, scaled, scaled, scaled, and now you're making a lot of money. But you're back to being a slave, only you're a slave, like, so I was a home flipper, and I became a home builder. That was one of the ways we scaled, there are pivots, when you go from operational entrepreneur to entrepreneur to operational mega printer, that's a lot easier to build a home to check the ground up. Whereas a flip home, it's an onion, you're peeling back layers, and then putting it back, right? So you've become more efficient, and this operational mega printer, but now you've scaled so big, you have more debt, you have all these things, and you're like, oh my gosh, I need to get people that are at my level. And this is where you really start bringing in your professional management team, generally, probably starting with the CFO, CEO, CEO, you know, I see all these businesses, they have 10 people and they go get a chief executive officer, wrong. A chief executive officer works with executives, go get your operations officer, maybe even hire a Director of Operations before you get that guy, get your CFO, and your financial officer and you go one at a time. And that gets you into the  mega printer. My printer has a new problem. It's called taxes. And you realize you have a new business partner that loves to regulate you and take 40% of your shit. Well, getting to this stage, you're like, wow, I built all this to give half that away. And I still maintain 100% of the risk, not fair. And that's where you learn the next stage, which is investor philanthropist, and that's where you learn about all of the different tax hedges and shelters and opportunities where you can take your revenue, your income invested the things the government needs to be done, make huge returns and not pay taxes anymore. It's why they say the rich don't pay their fair share. The fact is they do it legally. That is the seven stages brother. Wow.

Ryan  

Excellent. I think I think I got it all. So mindset, startup stage, operational optimization, becoming entrepreneur scaling, becoming operational mega printer and then tax optimization. I think those seven if I was getting them correctly, that's excellent. That the handout you have on your site that you mentioned before?

Preston 

Oh no, I give way I'll give way more than that. Go through the site and message us we give you the actual problem-solving formula. This sort of like the four apps like that faith family fitness, finance only in your business, you need to measure culture, clarity, capacity and cash. So finance literally has this business formula. And any problem you have is a gift I mean the biggest problem we have these days we think we shouldn't have any freaking problems. So what are the problems with gifts man they lead you to the solutions and what is the sale it's somebody paying you to solve their problems so I spent the whole formula every one of the documents buying culture clarity, capacity cash, we give it away free I mean if you want coaching on it like which I highly recommend our coaching systems could you get me and my mentors, affordable like two grand a year you can do it every Friday. Go to my website, and sign up for that you can get the documents and get coached on it. Or just like message me on social media. I'll send you the document

Ryan   

I'm going to ask you for your website. But I do have one last question for you like another minute left, and I really want to ask you this. I've been asking him, for most of my guests recently, it's a personalized question, you know, through your experience and through your 40 years on this planet through the lens of Preston Brown. What is the meaning of life?

Preston  

Oh, god, it's love, bro. Love is by far the meaning of life. 100,000% It is, it is love. In fact, if you go through my documents, you'll look at culture. And there's culture, culture documents, all about how to bring love into business without compromising cash flow or anything else. And we're here for a very short time, you need to have a purpose you need to go and he'll learn what you came here to learn. heal the wounds that you have, turn them into scars, help others, and just spread love and joy. Don't get bought into the narratives out there. There's too many of them and frankly, none of them that are outside of love have any value or purpose

Ryan  

like that, you know, and you know, I get to hear that answer a lot. And I've been hearing love as the answer to the meaning of life more and more lately. You know, 120 Something episodes in so I think there's something there for everyone listening. You know, think about that. And thanks for sharing Preston. Appreciate everything. If someone wants to connect with you, where should we send them?

Preston  

You can connect with me on any of my social medias. They're all up Preston Brown. And then my website is www dot Preston Brown and we'd love to hear from you. Perfect. Thank you.

Announcer  

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